“Tell me.”
“Your clothes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the way you leave your dirty clothes around in order to express your subconscious hatred of me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean your dirty socks and your dirty pajamas and your dirty underwear and your dirty shirts!” She rose from kneeling by the suitcase and faced him, her eyes blazing and her voice ringing with emotion. “I’m talking about the fact that you’ve never learned to hang up anything. You just leave your clothes all over the floor where they drop, in order to humiliate me. You do it on purpose!” She fell on the bed, sobbing.
“Julia, darling!” he said, but when she felt his hand on her shoulder she got up.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I have to go.” She brushed past him to the closet and came back with a dress. “I’m not taking any of the things you’ve given me,” she said. “I’m leaving my pearls and the fur jacket.”
“Oh, Julia!” Her figure, so helpless in its self-deceptions, bent over the suitcase made him nearly sick with pity. She did not understand how desolate her life would be without him. She didn’t understand the hours that working women have to keep. She didn’t understand that most of her friendships existed within the framework of their marriage, and that without this she would find herself alone. She didn’t understand about travel, about hotels, about money. “Julia, I can’t let you go! What you don’t understand, Julia, is that you’ve come to be dependent on me.”
She tossed her head back and covered her face with her hands. “Did you say that I was dependent on you?” she asked. “Is that what you said? And who is it that tells you what time to get up in the morning and when to go to bed at night? Who is it that prepares your meals and picks up your dirty closet and invites your friends to dinner? If it weren’t for me, your neckties would be greasy and your clothing would be full of moth holes. You were alone when I met you, Francis Weed, and you’ll be alone when I leave. When Mother asked you for a list to send out invitations to our wedding, how many names did you have to give her? Fourteen!”
“Cleveland wasn’t my home, Julia.”
“And how many of your friends came to the church? Two!”
“Cleveland wasn’t my home, Julia.”
“Since I’m not taking the fur jacket,” she said quietly, “you’d better put it back into storage. There’s an insurance policy on the pearls that comes due in January. The name of the laundry and the maid’s telephone number—all those things are in my desk. I hope you won’t drink too much, Francis. I hope that nothing bad will happen to you. If you do get into serious trouble, you can call me.”
“Oh my darling, I can’t let you go!” Francis said. “I can’t let you go, Julia!” He took her in his arms.
“I guess I’d better stay and take care of you for a little while longer,” she said.
· · ·
Riding to work in the morning, Francis saw the girl walk down the aisle of the coach. He was surprised; he hadn’t realized that the school she went to was in the city, but she was carrying books, she seemed to be going to school. His surprise delayed his reaction, but then he got up clumsily and stepped into the aisle. Several people had come between them, but he could see her ahead of him, waiting for someone to open the car door, and then, as the train swerved, putting out her hand to support herself as she crossed the platform into the next car. He followed her through that car and halfway through another before calling her name—“Anne! Anne!”—but she didn’t turn. He followed her into still another car, and she sat down in an aisle seat. Coming up to her, all his feelings warm and bent in her direction, he put his hand on the back of her seat—even this touch warmed him—and, leaning down to speak to her, he saw that it was not Anne. It was an older woman wearing glasses. He went on deliberately into another car, his face red with embarrassment and the much deeper feeling of having his good sense challenged; for if he couldn’t tell one person from another, what evidence was there that his life with Julia and the children had as much reality as his dreams of iniquity in Paris or the litter, the grass smell, and the cave-shaped trees in Lovers’ Lane.
Late that afternoon, Julia called to remind Francis that they were going out for dinner. A few minutes later, Trace Bearden called. “Look, fellar,” Trace said. “I’m calling for Mrs. Thomas. You know? Clayton, that boy of hers, doesn’t seem able to get a job, and I wondered if you could help. If you’d call Charlie Bell—I know he’s indebted to you—and say a good word for the kid, I think Charlie would—”
“Trace, I hate to say this,” Francis said, “but I don’t feel that I can do anything for that boy. The kid’s worthless. I know it’s a harsh thing to say, but it’s a fact. Any kindness done for him would backfire in everybody’s face. He’s just a worthless kid, Trace, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Even if we got him a job, he wouldn’t be able to keep it for a week. I know that to be a fact. It’s an awful thing, Trace, and I know it is, but instead of recommending that kid, I’d feel obliged to warn people against him—people who knew his father and would naturally want to step in and do something. I’d feel obliged to warn them. He’s a thief…”
The moment this conversation was finished, Miss Rainey came in and stood by his desk. “I’m not going to be able to work for you any more, Mr. Weed,” she said. “I can stay until the seventeenth if you need me, but I’ve been offered a whirlwind of a job, and I’d like to leave as soon as possible.”
She went out, leaving him to face alone the wickedness of what he had done to the Thomas boy. His children in their photograph laughed and laughed, glazed with all the bright colors of summer, and he remembered that they had met a bagpiper on the beach that day and he had paid the piper a dollar to play them a battle song of the Black Watch. The girl would be at the house when he got home. He would spend another evening among his kind neighbors, picking and choosing dead-end streets, cart tracks, and the driveways of abandoned houses. There was nothing to mitigate his feeling—nothing that laughter or a game of softball with the children would change—and, thinking back over the plane crash, the Farquarsons’ new maid, and Anne Murchison’s difficulties with her drunken father, he wondered how he could have avoided arriving at just where he was. He was in trouble. He had been lost once in his life, coming back from a trout stream in the north woods, and he had now the same bleak realization that no amount of cheerfulness or hopefulness or valor or perseverance could help him find, in the gathering dark, the path that he’d lost. He smelled the forest. The feeling of bleakness was intolerable, and he saw clearly that he had reached the point where he would have to make a choice.
He could go to a psychiatrist, like Miss Rainey; he could go to church and confess his lusts; he could go to a Danish massage parlor in the West Seventies that had been recommended by a salesman; he could rape the girl or trust that he would somehow be prevented from doing this; or he could get drunk. It was his life, his boat, and, like every other man, he was made to be the father of thousands, and what harm could there be in a tryst that would make them both feel more kindly toward the world? This was the wrong train of thought, and he came back to the first, the psychiatrist. He had the telephone number of Miss Rainey’s doctor, and he called and asked for an immediate appointment. He was insistent with the doctor’s secretary—it was his manner in business—and when she said that the doctor’s schedule was full for the next few weeks, Francis demanded an appointment that day and was told to come at five.
The psychiatrist’s office was in a building that was used mostly by doctors and dentists, and the hallways were filled with the candy smell of mouthwash and memories of pain. Francis’ character had been formed upon a series of private resolves—resolves about cleanliness, about going off the high diving board or repeating any other feat that challenged his courage, about punctuality, honesty, and virtue. To abdicate the perfect loneliness in which he had made his most vital decisions shattered his concept of chara
cter and left him now in a condition that felt like shock. He was stupefied. The scene for his miserere mei Deus was, like the waiting room of so many doctors’ offices, a crude token gesture toward the sweets of domestic bliss: a place arranged with antiques, coffee tables, potted plants, and etchings of snow-covered bridges and geese in flight, although there were no children, no marriage bed, no stove, even, in this travesty of a house, where no one had ever spent the night and where the curtained windows looked straight onto a dark air shaft. Francis gave his name and address to a secretary and then saw, at the side of the room, a policeman moving toward him. “Hold it, hold it,” the policeman said. “Don’t move. Keep your hands where they are.”
“I think it’s all right, Officer,” the secretary began. “I think it will be—”
“Let’s make sure,” the policeman said, and he began to slap Francis’ clothes, looking for what—pistols, knives, an icepick? Finding nothing, he went off, and the secretary began a nervous apology: “When you called on the telephone, Mr. Weed, you seemed very excited, and one of the doctor’s patients has been threatening his life, and we have to be careful. If you want to go in now?” Francis pushed open a door connected to an electrical chime, and in the doctor’s lair sat down heavily, blew his nose into a handkerchief, searched in his pockets for cigarettes, for matches, for something, and said hoarsely, with tears in his eyes, “I’m in love, Dr. Herzog.”
· · ·
It is a week or ten days later in Shady Hill. The seven-fourteen has come and gone, and here and there dinner is finished and the dishes are in the dishwashing machine. The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light. Donald Goslin has begun to worry the Moonlight Sonata again. Marcato ma sempre pianissimo! He seems to be wringing out a wet bath towel, but the housemaid does not heed him. She is writing a letter to Arthur Godfrey. In the cellar of his house, Francis Weed is building a coffee table. Dr. Herzog recommended woodwork as a therapy, and Francis finds some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood. Francis is happy. Upstairs, little Toby is crying, because he is tired. He puts off his cowboy hat, gloves, and fringed jacket, unbuckles the belt studded with gold and rubies, the silver bullets and holsters, slips off his suspenders, his checked shirt, and Levis, and sits on the edge of his bed to pull off his high boots. Leaving this equipment in a heap, he goes to the closet and takes his space suit off a nail. It is a struggle for him to get into the long tights, but he succeeds. He loops the magic cape over his shoulders and, climbing onto the footboard of his bed, he spreads his arms and flies the short distance to the floor, landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.
“Go home, Gertrude, go home,” Mrs. Masterson says. “I told you to go home an hour ago, Gertrude. It’s way past your suppertime, and your mother will be worried. Go home!” A door on the Babcocks’ terrace flies open, and out comes Mrs. Babcock without any clothes on, pursued by her naked husband. (Their children are away at boarding school, and their terrace is screened by a hedge.) Over the terrace they go and in at the kitchen door, as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice. Cutting the last of the roses in her garden, Julia hears old Mr. Nixon shouting at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. “Rapscallions! Varmits! Avaunt and quit my sight!” A miserable cat wanders into the garden, sunk in spiritual and physical discomfort. Tied to its head is a small straw hat—a doll’s hat—and it is securely buttoned into a doll’s dress, from the skirts of which protrudes its long, hairy tail. As it walks, it shakes its feet, as if it had fallen into water.
“Here, pussy, pussy, pussy!” Julia calls.
“Here, pussy, here, poor pussy!” But the cat gives her a skeptical look and stumbles away in its skirts. The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
November 20, 1954
John Updike
EIL HOVEY CAME for me wearing a good suit. He parked his father’s blue Chrysler on the dirt ramp by our barn and got out and stood by the open car door in a double-breasted tan gabardine suit, his hands in his pockets and his hair combed with water, squinting up at a lightning rod an old hurricane had knocked crooked. We were driving to Chicago, so I had packed my good clothes and dressed in worn-out slacks and an outgrown corduroy shirt. But Neil, though not my closest friend, was the one I had always been most relaxed with, so I wasn’t very disturbed. My parents and I walked out from the house, across the low stretch of lawn that was mostly mud after the thaw that had come on Christmas Day, and my grandmother, though I had kissed her goodbye inside the house, came out onto the porch, stooped and rather angry-looking, her head haloed by wild old woman’s white hair and the hand more severely afflicted by arthritis waggling at her breast in a worried way. It was growing dark, and my grandfather had gone to bed. “Nev-er trust the man who wears the red necktie and parts his hair in the middle” had been his final advice to me.
We had expected Neil since the middle of the afternoon. Nineteen almost twenty, I was a college sophomore home on vacation; that fall I had met in a fine-arts course a girl I had decided I loved, and she had invited me to the New Year’s party her parents always gave and to stay at her house a few days. She lived in Chicago and so did Neil now, though he had gone to our high school. His father did something—sold steel was my impression, a huge man opening a briefcase and saying “The I-beams are very good this year”—that required him to be always on the move, so that at about thirteen Neil had been left with Mrs. Hovey’s parents. They had lived in Olinger since the town was incorporated; indeed, old Jesse Lancaster, whose sick larynx whistled when he breathed to us boys his shocking and uproarious thoughts on the girls that walked by his porch all day long, had twice been burgess. Meanwhile Neil’s father got a stationary job, in Chicago, but he let Neil stay in Olinger until he finished high school. From Chicago to this part of Pennsylvania was a drive of seventeen hours. In the twenty months Neil had been gone, he had come east fairly often; he loved driving, and Olinger was the one thing he had that was close to a childhood home. In Chicago he was working in a garage and getting his teeth straightened by the Army so they could draft him. The Korean War was on. He had to go back, and I wanted to go to Chicago, so it was a happy arrangement. “You’re all dressed up,” I accused him immediately.
“I’ve been saying goodbye.”
The knot of his necktie was low and the corners of his mouth were rubbed with pink. Years later my mother recalled how that evening his breath stank so strongly of beer she was frightened to let me go with him. “Your grandfather always thought his grandfather was a very dubious character,” she said.
My father and Neil put my suitcases into the trunk; they contained all the clothes I had brought with me from school, for the girl and I were going back to college on the train together, and I would not see my home again until spring.
“Well, goodbye, boys,” my mother said. “I think you’re both very brave.” In regard to me she meant the girl as much as the roads.
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Nordholm,” Neil told her quickly. “He’ll be safer than in his own bed. I bet he sleeps from here to Indiana.” He looked at me with an irritating imitation of her own fond gaze. When they shook hands goodbye it was with an equality established on the base of my helplessness. His being so slick startled me, but you can have a friend for years and never see how he operates with adults.
I embraced my mother and over her shoulder with the camera of my head tried to take a snapshot I could keep of the house, the woods behind it and the sunset behind them, the bench beneath the walnut tree where my grandfather cut apples into skinless bits and fed them to himself, and the ruts the bakery truck had made in the soft lawn that morning.
We started down the half mile of dirt road to the highway
that, one way, went through Olinger to the city of Alton and, the other way, led through farmland to the Turnpike. It was luxurious after the stress of farewell to finger a cigarette out of the pack squaring my shirt pocket. My family knew I smoked but I didn’t do it in front of them; we were all too sensitive to bear the awkwardness. I lit mine and held the match for Hovey. It was a relaxed friendship. We were about the same height and had the same degree of athletic incompetence and the same curious lack of whatever force it was that aroused loyalty and compliance in beautiful girls. There was his bad teeth and my skin allergy; these were being remedied now, when they mattered less. But it seemed to me that the most important thing—about both our friendship and our failures to become, for all the love we felt for women, actual lovers—was that he and I lived with grandparents. This improved both our backward and forward vistas; we knew about the midnight coughing fits and bedside commodes that awaited most men, and we had a sense of childhoods before 1900, when the farmer ruled the land and America faced west. We had gained a humane dimension that made us gentle and humorous among peers but diffident at dances and hesitant in cars. Girls hate boys’ doubts; they amount to insults. Gentleness is for married women to appreciate. (This is my thinking then.) A girl who has received out of nowhere a gift worth all Africa’s ivory and Asia’s gold wants more than just humanity to bestow it on.
When he came to the highway Neil turned right, toward Olinger, instead of left, toward the Turnpike. My reaction was to twist and assure myself through the rear window that, though a pink triangle of sandstone stared through the bare treetops, nobody at my house could possibly see.
When he was again in third gear, Neil asked, “Are you in a hurry?”
“No. Not especially.”
“Schuman’s having his New Year’s party two days early so we can go. I thought we’d go for a couple hours and miss the Friday-night stuff on the Pike.” His mouth moved and closed carefully over the dull, silver, painful braces.
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