The Centaur

by John Updike

  This minister is a tall and handsome man with a bony brown face and a crisp black mustache fastidiously shaped. The war made him. In 1939 he was a tender, small-boned graduate, not quite twenty-five, of a coal regions seminary. He felt effeminate and enfeebled by doubts. Theology had given his doubts shape and depth. In retrospect the religiosity that had prompted his vocation seemed, insofar as it was not sheerly his mother’s will, a sickly phosphorescence exuded by sexual uncertainty. His tinny voice mocked his prevaricating sermons with squeakings. He feared his deacons and despised his message. In 1941 war rescued him. He enlisted, not as a chaplain but as a fighting man. By this path he hoped to escape questions he could not answer. So it proved. He crossed water and the furies could not follow. They made him a lieutenant. In North Africa he kept himself and five others alive on three canteens of water for seven days. At Anzio a shell blasted a crater eight feet wide on the spot he had darted from thirty seconds before. In the hills above Rome, they made him a captain. Peace found him unscratched. His voice alone had resisted tempering. He returned, absurdly, to his mild vocation. Was it absurd? No! He discovered, scraping away the rubble, his mother’s faith, baked by the heat to an enduring hardness, strange of shape but undeniable, like a splash of cooled slag. He was alive. Life is a hell but a glorious hell. Give God this glory. Though March’s voice is still small his silences are grand. His eyes are black as coals set in the sharp brown cheekbones; he carries like a scar the mustache which he left of the beard of battle. With his sense of uniform he retains the Roman collar whenever he appears in public. To Vera, approaching secretly through the hall beyond the open doors, his backwards collar seems so romantic her breath is suspended: a knife of pure white, a slice of the absolute is dangerously poised at his throat.

  “Your prayers were not with me this afternoon,” she breathes, breathless.

  “Hello! Were your girls beaten?”

  “Mm.” Already she pretends, and indeed slightly feels, some boredom. She gazes toward the game and makes the golden leaves of her coat swirl with her hands in the pockets.

  “Do you always attend boys’ games?”

  “Shouldn’t I? To learn things? Did you play basketball?”

  “No, I was extremely inept as an adolescent. I was always picked last.”

  “It’s hard to believe.”

  “That’s the mark of a great truth.”

  She winces at this edge of evangelism in him, and sighs heavily, explaining, as if in response to an impatient insistence of his, “The fact is, if you teach here a while you get so you can’t stay out of the building. It’s an occupational disease. If the school is lit, you wander over.”

  “You live so close.”

  “Mm.” His voice disappoints her. She wonders if it is a natural law, that men the proper size must have inadequate voices. Must she always, in some tiny facet of every encounter, be disappointed? In revenge, she teases him with, “You’ve changed since you were always picked last.”

  He laughs curtly, baring his quick tobaccoish teeth in an instant, as if a longer laugh would betray his position: a captain’s laugh. “The last shall be first,” he says.

  This a little bewilders her, ignorant of the allusion yet aware, from the satisfied tension of his tan chiselled lips, that it is one. She gazes past his shoulder and, as always when threatened by the possibility that she is stupid, lets her eyes go out of focus, knowing that this renders more profound their sable beauty. “Why—?” She stops her lips. “I won’t ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “Never mind. I forgot who I was talking to.”

  “No, please. Ask, and ye shall receive.” He hopes that by sprinkling the salt of blasphemy on her tail he can hold her here, this golden dove, this sandy sparrow. He suspects she was going to ask him why he had not married. A difficult question; he has sometimes searched for the answer. Perhaps it was that war displays women unflatteringly. Their price goes down, and it is discovered that they will sell for any price—a candy bar, a night’s sleep. Their value is not present to themselves, but is given to them by men. Having been forced to perceive this makes one slow to buy. But this would not be an answer that could be spoken.

  In truth this was the question on her mind. Was he some kind of nance? She distrusts all ministers and men too well groomed. He is both. She asks, “Why are you here tonight? I’ve never seen you at a game before, you only ever come here to bless an assembly.”

  “I came,” he answers, “to shepherd forty pagan brutes from my Sunday school. For some reason I never understood, Zimmerman showered basketball tickets like manna all over them last Sunday.”

  She laughs. “But why?” Anything that diminishes Zimmerman makes her heart gush gratefully.

  “Why?” His raven eyebrows lift in two shapely arcs above his rounded eyes whose irises, full in the light, are not black but a fleckish dark gray, as if the jelly were veiling gunpowder. This sense of danger, of dreadful things he has seen, excites her. Her breasts seem to float on her ribs warmly; she suppresses an instinct to bring her hands to them. Her wet lips are framed to release laughter even before his jokes, indignant questions, are out. “Why does anything like this happen to me?” he sternly asks, slightly pop-eyed. “Why do all the ladies of my parish bake cupcakes once a month and sell them to each other? Why does the town drunk keep calling me on the telephone? Why do these people keep showing up in fancy hats on Sunday morning to hear me prattle about an old book?” Successful beyond his expectations, the warm swirl of her laughter lifting him deliciously, he goes on and on in this vein, much as a foolhardy full-blooded Sioux in his outfit used to war-dance around the spot where a land mine had been marked as buried. Though his faith is intact and as infrangible as metal, it is also like metal dead. Though he can go and pick it up and test its weight whenever he wishes, it has no arms with which to reach and restrain him. He mocks it.

  And Vera for her part is delighted to have elicited this; it seems like an accelerated sequence in an old silent movie, this sketch he draws of the church as an empty house where people keep calling and nodding politely and saying “Thank you” as if the host were there. The bubbles tumble from her stomach to her lungs and explode, iridescent, in her glad throat; truly, this is all she asks of a man, all she requires, that he have the power to make her laugh. In laughter her girlhood, her virginity is reborn. Her mouth, outlined in the cerise rim of lipstick that has not rubbed off, stretches to let her gladness out; her gums show, her face, flushed, becomes numbingly vivid, a Gorgon’s head of beauty, of life. A dungareed boy on top of the stack, riding on this rickety raft the ocean of tumult, looks over the edge to find the source of this new noise. He sees below him a head of red hair like a monstrous orange fish sink with a loose twist of one shimmering coil against the horizontal slats of stained wood. Weak with laughter, Vera has lurched and leans her limp weight back. The minister’s flecked eyes melt and his crisp lips pucker bashfully, puzzled. He leans back to join her; an irregularity in the stack makes a ledge the height of a mantel where with a remnant of his captain’s composure he props his elbows. His body thus shields her from the mass of the crowd; a bower has been made.

  … and he upon thy lap oft flings himself back, conquered by the eternal wound of love; and then pillowing his shapely neck (tereti cervice) upon thee and looking up he feeds with love his greedy eyes, gazing wistfully towards thee (inhians in te, dea), while, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon thy lips.

  The JV game is over. Though Mark Youngerman’s face is purple, his panting painful, and his body as slippery as an amphibian’s, Olinger lost. The buzz of the crowd changes pitch. Many leave their seats. Those who step outside discover that it is snowing. This discovery is ever surprising, that Heaven can so prettily condescend. Snow puts us with Jupiter Pluvius among the clouds. What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on
the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it. A trolley car gliding toward Alton appears to trail behind it a following of slowly falling fireflies. What an eloquent silence reigns! Olinger under the vast violet dome of the stormstruck night sky becomes yet one more Bethlehem. Behind a glowing window the infant God squalls. Out of zero all has come to birth. The panes, tinted by the straw of the crib within, hush its cries. The world goes on unhearing. The town of white roofs seems a colony of deserted temples; they feather together with distance and go gray, melt. Shale Hill is invisible. A yellowness broods low in the sky; above Alton in the west a ruby glow seeps upward. From the zenith a lavender luminosity hangs pulseless, as if the particular brilliance of the moon and stars had been dissolved and the solution shot through with a low electric voltage. The effect, of tenuous weight, of menace, is exhilarating. The air presses downward with an unstressed sibilance, a pedal note, the base C of the universal storm. The streetlights strung along the pike make a forestage of brightness where the snowfall, compressed and expanded by the faintest of winds, like an actor postures—pausing, plunging. Upward countercurrents suspend snow which then with the haste of love flies downward to gravity’s embrace; the alternations of density conjure an impression of striding legs stretching upward into infinity. The storm walks. The storm walks but does not move on.

  Those who remain inside the school are ignorant of the weather and yet like fish taken up by a swifter ocean current they sense some change. The atmosphere of the auditorium accelerates. Things are not merely seen but burst into vision. Voices carry further. Hearts wax bold. Peter leads Penny back up the aisle and into the hall. His head pounds with the promise he has made but she seems to have forgotten it. He is too young to know those points, those invisible intersections, on a woman’s face wherein expectation and permission may be detected. He buys her a Coke and himself a lemon-lime at the bin which the Student Council operates in the main hall. Its vicinity is busy; the couple is pushed to the wall. Here hang framed photographs of bygone track teams in a long chronological row. Penny tips the bottle with her little finger extended and licks her lips in the wake of the sip and looks at him with eyes whose green seems newly minted.

  Secret knowledge of his spots obsesses him; should he tell her? Would it, by making her share the shame, wed them inextricably; make her, by bondage of pity, his slave? Can he, so young, afford a slave? On fire with such cruel calculations, he turns his red back on the crowd shoving and sluggishly interweaving around the soft-drink bin. When an iron hand seizes his arm above the elbow and brutally squeezes, it might be one of a hundred idiots.

  But it is Mr. Zimmerman, the Supervising Principal. Simultaneously he has seized Penny’s arm, and he stands there smiling between them, not letting go. “Two prize students,” he says, as if of two netted birds.

  Peter angrily tugs his arm away from the grip. The grip tightens. “He begins to look like his father’s son,” Zimmerman says to Penny, and to Peter’s horror Penny echoes the principal’s smirk. Zimmerman is shorter than Peter but taller than Penny. Up close, his head, asymmetric, half-bald, and nodding, seems immense. His nose is bulbous, his eyes watery. An absolute rage against this fool wells up in the boy.

  “Mr. Zimmerman,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  “Full of questions like his father,” Zimmerman says to Penny, and drops his hold on Peter’s arm but not hers. She is wearing a pink angora sweater from whose very short sleeves her bare arms thrust like legs out of underpants. The old man’s broad fingers indent the cool fat; his thumb wanders back and forth across an inch of flesh.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Peter says, “what are the humanist values implicit in the sciences?”

  Penny titters nervously, her face gone purely stupid. Zimmerman asks, “Where did you hear such a phrase?”

  Peter has overreached. He blushes in consciousness of betrayal but in the momentum of pride cannot stop. “I saw it in a report you wrote on my father.”

  “He shows you those? Do you think he should?”

  “I don’t know. What affects him affects me.”

  “I am wondering if it doesn’t place too great a responsibility on you. Peter, I value your father enormously. But he does have, as of course you can see—you’re an intelligent boy—a tendency to be irresponsible.”

  Of all possible charges this seems to Peter the least applicable. His father, that blind blanched figure staggering down the steps in a debtor’s cardboard box …

  “It places,” Zimmerman goes on gently, “a greater responsibility on those around him.”

  “I think he’s awfully responsible,” Peter says, hypnotized by the meditative caressing action of Zimmerman’s thumb on Penny’s arm. She submits to it; this is a revelation. To think he was about to confide in this whore, this doll, his precious spots.

  Zimmerman’s smile stretches. “Of course, you see him from a different angle than I do. I saw my own father in the same way.”

  They see many things the same way, these two; they both see other people as an arena for self-assertion. There is a ground of kinship which makes their grappling possible. Peter feels this, feels a comradeship intertwined with antagonism and a confidence in the midst of his fear. The principal has blundered in seeking intimacy; distance and silence are always most powerful. Peter stares him in the face and, an instant short of irrevocable rudeness, glances away. He feels the side of his neck blushing in the manner of his mother. “He’s terribly responsible,” he says of his father. “He’s just had to have stomach X-rays but what he’s more worried about is a little strip of basketball tickets he can’t find.”

  Zimmerman quickly blurts, “Tickets?” To Peter’s surprise this seems to have scored. The principal’s wrinkles are shadowed forth at the new tilt of his head; he seems old. Triumphantly Peter feels descend upon him, his father’s avenger, this advantage over the antagonist: he has more years to live. Ignorant and impotent here and now, in the dimension of the future he is mighty. Zimmerman murmurs, seems in his mind to stumble. “I’ll have to speak to him about this,” he says, half to himself.

  Overreached. The possibility of a truly disastrous betrayal makes Peter’s stomach growl as it used to when he was a child and running tardy down the pike to elementary school. “Must you?” His voice thins in pleading, becomes infantile. “I mean, I don’t want to have gotten him into any trouble.”

  Again, the strengths have shifted. Zimmerman’s hand leaves Penny’s arm and, finger braced against the thumb to flick, comes toward Peter’s eye. It is a nightmare second; Peter blinks, his mind blank. He feels the breath being crushed from him. The hand glides past his face and softly snaps a face in the framed picture by Peter’s shoulder on the wall. “This is me,” Zimmerman says.

  It is a photograph of the O. H. S. track team in 1919. They are all wearing old-fashioned black undershirts and the manager wears white ducks and a straw hat. Even the trees in the background—which are the trees of the Poorhouse Lane, only smaller than they are now—look old-fashioned, like pressed flowers. A brownness hangs unsteadily beneath the surface of the photograph. Zimmerman’s finger, which with its glazed nail and crinkled knuckle is solid and luminous in the now, holds firm under the tiny face of then. Peter and Penny have to look. Though as a trackman he was slimmer and had a full head of black hair, Zimmerman is curiously recognizable. The heavy nose set at an uneasy angle to the gently twisted mouth whose plane is not strictly parallel to the line of the eyebrows gave his young face that air of muddled weight, of unfathomable expectation and reluctant cruelty, which renders him in his prime of age so irresistible a disciplinarian even to those who think they have found it within themselves to be defiant and mock. “It is you,” Peter says weakly.

  “We never lost a meet.” The finger, dense with existence, everpresent, drops away. Without another word to the young couple Zimmerman moves off dow
n the hall, huge-backed. Students jostle to clear him a path.

  The hall is emptying, the varsity game beginning. The pressure of Zimmerman’s fingers have left yellow ovals in Penny’s naked arm. She rubs the arm briskly and grimaces in disgust. “I feel I should take a bath,” she says. Peter realizes he does love her really. They had been equally helpless in Zimmerman’s grip. He takes her down the hall, as if to return to the auditorium; but at the hall’s end he bucks the double doors and leads her up the dark stairs. This is forbidden. Often at night functions a padlock is placed on these doors but this time the janitors forgot. Peter glances behind them nervously; all who might cry “Halt” have hastened to see the game commence.