Villages

by John Updike

  Vanessa, meeting him downtown at noon, outside The Ugly Duckling, said simply, unsmiling, “Good for you, dear,” but kept walking. Alissa, crossing Branch Street to the elementary school with little Nina in tow, asked the child, “Want to show Mr. Mackenzie where your tooth came out?” Karen Jazinski had knocked once, that summer, on the door of Owen’s cell at E-O; since Julia was with him on the couch, looking with her decisive brunette coloring less like Manet’s Olympia than Goya’s Naked Maja, he couldn’t open the door, and Karen, perhaps sensing the pair of held breaths within, didn’t come knocking again. Trish Oglethorpe, for some odd reason, led the local forces of indignation, and passed by Julia in the supermarket as if she had been a wilting head of lettuce. Roscoe and Imogene Bisbee snubbed the new couple at the Silver Spoon, an overpriced candlelit restaurant in Upper Falls, where Owen and Julia had thought they were safe from recognition, among the faceless tract-dwellers.

  This interim of disjunction dragged on for a year, and then there was worse. You don’t want to know. The papers and news hours are full of family breakdowns and intramural murder. Within the broken marriages there were grieving, backwards-looking interviews, not without their exhilarations of drunken truth-telling and wry hilarity. At a later, more legal stage, there were bitter differences over the division of property—especially bitter for the Mackenzies, who had stumbled into prosperity and been quick to turn it into cultural artifacts. Each Oriental carpet, abstract painting, and fifty-dollar art book had been jointly selected or, in the case of the books, bestowed with loving inscriptions as birthday or Christmas presents. A copy of Finnegans Wake from Phyllis to Owen for his twenty-fifth birthday—a tall square-spined volume, the front and back of the jacket identical, with Joyce’s fifteen-page list of typographical errors appended to the 1939 text—prompted an especially bitter dispute, though neither of them had made his or her way through more than five pages of it. They had both thought it would be more mathematical than it was, the author being one of the few whose brain could rank with that of the great mathematicians; but the holy text was all music, the music of phonetically misspelled speech, in a broad Irish accent and all of Europe peeping through the puns. In the era of their courtship and marriage, this book had represented the epitome of culture—fanatically wrought, monolithically aloof.

  For the Larsons, there was the problem of the parsonage. She and the children needed it, yet the church owned it, and part of Larson’s pay was the occupation of it. Christmas, most inconveniently, approached with its spate of holiday entertainments, from youth groups to Golden Agers, at which the minister’s wife traditionally presides. Part of a minister’s obligation, in those benighted days, was to provide a presentable wife, willing and able to second his social services to the parish. Julia fulfilled her duty so smoothly that not a punch cup was dropped or a single member of the junior choir cheated of his or her share of eggnog and ginger cookies, even as Owen and his bed in his dishevelled rooms on Covenant Street awaited her. When at last she arrived, still in the chaste gray knit dress of the parsonage hostess, she breezily explained to him, “A woman is used to living on several levels. Compartmentalizing is part of her biology. It’s not hypocrisy; it’s just plain decency not to show all of yourself at any one time. What a fussy, jealous boyfriend you are, Owen! It’s thrilling for me, to be associated with anyone so innocent.”

  “After Arthur, you mean?”

  “Well—don’t let this hurt your feelings, precious, but a clergyman is hard to shock. He hears the worst sort of thing, every day of the week. People love telling him, for some reason.”

  To this period, perhaps, as Julia continued a show of cohabitation with her illusionless husband, could be traced the dreams that afflicted Owen even twenty-five years later, of her slipping away beneath the social web of the town, of his simply being misplaced by her as she went through the familiar motions of being a clergyman’s loyal wife.

  It was the church itself, in its wisdom, that brought the awkwardness of the situation to the parson’s attention, and that came up with a solution: the head of the vestry, a retired and widowed former Providence banker, occupied a needlessly large mansion facing the Middle Falls Common; Reverend Larson was most welcome to stay with him until Mrs. Larson and the children could find suitable housing, preferably in some other town. When school finally ended, in June of the bicentennial summer, Julia and little Tommy and Rachel went to live with Julia’s sister in Old Lyme. This season of separation, during which Owen’s plighted mistress managed under her sister’s reproachful eye only a few hurried letters, may also have contributed to his persisting nightmares of losing her, of their connection simply breaking and falling silent as did those first delicate telegraph cables laid on the craggy bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Her letters, impeccably typed on blue stationery with an electric typewriter, worried him in their sunniness and ease; there were no second thoughts or confessed regrets, no careful ambiguities. She loved being back in sight of the sea. The river and its falls had been put behind her. Rachel was taking riding lessons and loving it; Tommy, always so timid of the water, was now able to swim the full length of the swimming pool at the funky little beach club. Arthur, who often came to visit, wasn’t sure, after this, he was going to continue in the ministry. Epiphany, though too polite to say so, was counting the days until he left. Despite Saint Paul’s advice against marriage, divorced ministers, at this stage of church custom, were hard to place, even in an inner-city parish. One of the vestrymen, a retired businessman, had told Arthur of wonderful opportunities, if he was willing to move closer to Manhattan, for former clergymen in public relations or company personnel management.

  The Mackenzies, adrift on their wrecked marriage, marvelled at the way the sea parted for Julia: she was walking to the other shore on miraculously dry land. Even in separate residences, Owen and Phyllis shared the same mental space, a collegiate kind of space inherited from a big house on a small lot on a Cambridge street used as a short-cut between Garden Street and Mass. Avenue. A genteel-bohemian decency, extending to the end of life the student quest for knowledge, had been the communicated ideal. Colin Goodhue had become a professor of Romance languages at Cornell. He had married a Frenchwoman, and they spent every August in Provence. Phyllis’s mother and father had both died recently—only months apart, as sometimes happens with long-attached couples—and being gentle with Phyllis in her newly orphaned state had been part of Owen’s rationale for not hurrying the divorce process, with its distasteful facilitators: lawyers, furniture movers, child psychologists.

  A fog of deferred intention had descended upon his mind. Of the long interim while he shuttled back and forth between the headless household on Partridgeberry Road and his unkempt semi-bachelor pad on the other side of the Chunkaunkabaug, in a four-story firetrap populated by elderly Polish widowers and overweight single mothers, he remembered little. With a numbed mind he met the surly feigned indifference of his two older, collegiate children, and the eager, round-eyed, yet subtly stilted affability of his two younger when he descended, in his now distinctly scuffed and rattling red Stingray, to glance over their homework or carry them off to a movie. Though his upbringing had been only perfunctorily religious, he could hear the prayers of his two younger children for his return rustling above him like the wingbeats of swifts trapped in the old farmhouse chimney. Phyllis was alternately despondent and jauntily brave in her abandoned state, sharing his sensation of an unreal interim. She had never quite fit in in Middle Falls, disdaining the middlebrow society with the offhand politesse of a professor’s daughter, but some of the local women now rallied to her, and not all of them the ones he had slept with, though these were the most companionably scornful of Julia. “She utterly just doesn’t get it, as if she’s from outer space … Those eyes of hers, they give me the absolute shivers … Parading around in the Acme as if she dared me not to look at her … That poor husband of hers, she must be setting him up for sainthood, Roscoe talked to him the longest time and could
n’t get him to say a word against her”: Phyllis relayed fragments like this to Owen, as if such cattiness, which had once been a kind of music to him, a murmur of initiation, would bring him back. True, he would awake in his squalid room—the odors of other people’s hot plates seeping through the walls, and the squalling of fatherless infants—with the same homesick gnawing in his stomach that he had felt those freshman months at MIT, hung in space by the implacable laws of growth, of aging. But then, as now, he had a mission: then, to survive, to not go back to Pennsylvania, to gain a degree and a career and, as things developed, the willowy girl he glimpsed in the hall. Now, as then, his mission was not purely selfish, and had to do with Phyllis; he wanted to free her of him, as well as himself of her. Their life together, Julia had explained to him, had become a mutual degradation. Staying with her was not doing her any favor. There was sense in this, he supposed, for people who had high standards bred of habitual rectitude; but it left out of account the plea for mercy that goes with human softness. He and Phyllis shared a ’fifties drift, a gliding carelessness. Between them, he felt there had been something off from the start. He had been ambitious and raw, and had used her. Now he wanted to undo his presumption in carrying off this princess; he wanted to give her time to see it his way and to help him divorce her, so it became as much her idea as their marriage had somehow been. At least she had consented to start seeing a lawyer in Hartford, a short dapper rapid talker she was amused by—both Roscoe Bisbee and Henry Slade had recommended him. Named Jerry Halloran, he talked to her in a mathematical language of dollars and cents.

  In this delaying period Owen’s children invented a mode of protest, an automotive caricature of adult disorder. Floyd, just turned sixteen and freshly equipped with a driver’s license, took his mother’s Volvo station wagon out onto Partridgeberry Road and, in his inexperience veering too far to the right to avoid an oncoming pickup truck pulling a horse van, ran into a snow-filled ditch. The Volvo lurched over on its side into a stone wall, at fair speed. The boy was unhurt but the Volvo was totalled. With the insurance money, the Mackenzies settled for a second-hand Ford Falcon station wagon, serviceable although lighter on its wheels than the solid Swedish import.

  Gregory, home from Brown for spring break, asked to borrow his father’s Corvette Stingray for a date with a girl he intended to impress, which that “tinny old Falcon” would not do. Though he didn’t like his son’s demanding tone, and regarded even in its old age his lipstick-red convertible as a treasure, Owen felt too guilty to deny the boy. He was wakened at one in the morning by a hysterical call from Phyllis. On the back road leading away from the far side of Heron Pond, where there was a well-known necking-and-make-out spot—one which years ago he and Faye in their innocence had resorted to—the Stingray had somehow veered and taken down four or five aluminum rail posts before coming to a stop. The engine had been moved halfway into the front seat, but neither Gregory nor his passenger was hurt. He manfully took the blame, claiming he had been trying to adjust the unfamiliar radio, but confided to his brother, who confided it to his mother, who told Owen, that in fact the girl, a wild one from Eastern Connecticut State University, had been driving, or at least had her hands on the wheel while pressed against Gregory. No doubt the controlled substance that had enhanced their spooning session at Heron Pond had been still in their systems. Owen, thinking of how not many years before he had sped through the Nevada desert with Mirabella’s bleached curls bobbing in his lap, and years before that had hastily backed out of a perilous wood while Elsie hurried into her clothes beside him, could not find it in himself to be indignant. He deserved these assaults on his hardware.

  He was more angered, at his distance, by the difficulties Iris was having in Massachusetts with the little cream-colored AMC Pacer coupe he had bought for her to take to Smith: repeated fender-benders while jockeying in the college parking lots, and weekly traffic tickets from the Northhampton police. It began to feel like a taunting, which hurt the more because Iris, the only one of his children with his mother’s auburn hair, had been the child whom he felt most himself with, the least unconvincingly paternal. Iris had effortlessly, it seemed, entrusted him with the wry, teasing respect that is a father’s due from a daughter.

  During this accident-prone interregnum, Ed began to talk to him, at their weekly lunch, about E-O Data designing a PC for a company in New Hampshire to manufacture and market. “PCs are not just the future, they’re here,” Ed urged him. “There’ll be one in every home in ten years. It’s television sets all over again. There’s billions to be made. Think Apple.”

  “Ed, we do software, not hardware.”

  “What’s the big diff? You’re talking eggs and chickens. If you can cook one you can cook the other. What the hell was your MIT degree in? Electrical engineering. Well, Christ, let’s start engineering. We got a whole empty floor up there, for the prototypes and logic analyzers, once we get past the design stage. Look at Apple. The 141 had to be connected to a television set; a year later the 169 had color and sound and could do games. Thousands of these rigs are out there now, soaking up other people’s software.”

  “Ed, I’m too fucking old for these new tricks you want. Let the smart kids you’ve hired out of Rensselaer or wherever do it. They’re hardwired for it all, it’s second nature to them. To me it was adventure, to them it’s just appliances.”

  “You’re not fucking old, you’re too fucking distracted, is what you are. You can’t figure out if you have two wives or no wives. Shape up, O.; your brain will turn to mush.”

  “It has turned, actually. Sorry about that, Ed. I know you had great hopes for me. I guess I got sidetracked.”

  Bad conscience, bad memory. But Owen would never forget—he remembered it every day—the sparkling late-October morning when, to deliver an update of his income figures for Phyllis to take to an appointment with her lawyer in Hartford at ten a.m., he drove straight from his Covenant Street pad to his former home on Partridgeberry Road. Halloween was impending; stoops and porchlets sported pumpkins, and some front lawns held straw-stuffed dummies, headless horsemen and sheeted ghosts, arranged in studied tableaux. In Owen’s childhood there hadn’t been such an elaborate pagan fuss at Halloween, just a little frowned-upon mischief. The holiday, as the major religious holidays lost credibility, had gone from being an excuse for childish mischief and blackmail to being an inoffensive pseudo-Christmas.

  There had been rain overnight, giving the roads a shine and the world a washed look. Leaves were coming down, making a wet pulp here and there beneath the wheels. The Stingray had been totalled and the Ford Mustang he had bought with the insurance money never felt right; it didn’t like to start on damp days and didn’t hug the road like the Corvette had. The seats were covered with some black matte vinyl stamped with a hokey pattern of cattle brands; looking at it made him feel cheesily middle-aged.

  Floyd and Eve were off at school. Daisy the yellow Labrador greeted him at the kitchen door with a thumping tail. The two cats rubbed around his ankles purring. Phyllis was up and dressed in a navy-blue suit and a plain white blouse and medium-height heels; she looked uneasy, like a modern nun not used to being out of the bulky old habit. Her color was high. She regarded her fast-talking lawyer as a kind of tutor in the legal facts of life; her face wore a student blush of anticipation, as if before a test. Phyllis was still slender, still erect in posture. She had not attempted to dye the gray that had come into her temples, blending into the sand color like traces of snow at the beach. Except for the animals, and the non-migratory birds chirping outside, they were alone with the house, with its jointly bought furniture, most of it old and showing signs of the economies they had once practiced, a medley of antique and modern now crowded, he could see from the kitchen, by her inheritance from her parents’ two homes, the late-Victorian Cambridge one and the lighter-hearted, rickety summer place on the Cape.

  “It’s horrible,” she said, following his eye. “My brother says he doesn’t have any space
in Ithaca for his share. We know what that means—Francine doesn’t want it. You scrimp and save to buy furniture,” she generalized, “and then, when you’ve got your house full, your parents die and dump all their stuff on you. Except,” she added quickly, as if she had been tactless, “for your mother. She’s still alive.”

  “Overweight, high blood pressure, and all,” he comically admitted. “That tough old farming stock.” He would lose, he saw, a wife who knew his problematical mother—over twenty years of difficult acquaintance, for better or worse. Julia had of course not yet been to Pennsylvania to meet the prickly old woman. “Most of that stuff she has,” he went on, “nobody would want anyway. When we moved from Willow, for some reason, our porch furniture came into the living room and never left.” Is this what he was here for, to discuss furniture? “The main trouble with stuff,” he volunteered, to consort with her generalizing mood, “is that it outlasts people.” These interviews with Phyllis now that they were estranged gave him a pasty, humming sensation, a kind of return to his helpless love-stricken feelings before he got to know her at all—the other side of the bell curve.

  She felt his longing to linger in these familiar rooms, amid repairs and readjustments he had once made, and asked, glancing away, “You have time for coffee? In the living room? I guess there’s still space to sit down in.”

  “No, thanks, really, Phyllis. I must run and you must too. Just give Halloran these figures, they’re what he asked for. Davis and he can discuss them and come up with a new figure.” Davis was his lawyer, a cynic and, it seemed to Owen, a hard bargainer; he had to impress on Owen that, even where the woman was not at fault and did not seek the divorce, the man was the breadwinner and must not be financially crippled. Phyllis would become, as it were, Owen’s employee, on a fixed monthly salary, with an annual cost-of-living adjustment. Her duties were to raise their children and stay out of his private life. The house would become hers, but his capital, and the ability to generate more, should be his. Wanting to apologize for this inequity, yet not wanting to give his lawyer’s game away, he hung there in the center of his old kitchen, beside the drop-leaf curly-maple table that they had bought in New York, impulsively, on Seventh Avenue in the Village, and that in Middle Falls had been too small when all four children were home, so that they never all sat around it together at breakfast or lunch, taking turns instead, or bolting a sandwich at the kitchen counter. He thought of this regretfully now. For over a year he had not been in this house so early in the day. The rising sun shot a broad ray of light in through the nearly leafless lilacs, blinding the plastic face of the electric clock on the wall. When he moved his head he saw the time to be twenty of nine. Below the clock Phyllis had Scotch-taped new color photographs of Floyd and Eve, portraits taken at school; they looked like those hyper-realistic sculptures sardonically executed in enamelled Fiberglas.