by John Updike
Now the coolness of air off the dammed lake and the swans’ vulgar brackish cries would touch us, and up high through a gap in a mythic black-leaved beech a pale ochre cornice of the museum would show, and a sunstruck section of the raised skylight with its pistachio-green leading. We would pass through the parking lot that made me covetous and ashamed, for at that time we had no car; pass along the gravel pedestrian path among children bringing bags of breadcrumbs to feed the swans; pass up the wide stairs where a few people in clean summer clothes would be snapping cameras and unwrapping sandwiches from waxpaper; and pass into the high religious hall of the museum itself. Admission was free. In the basement, indeed, free classes in “nature appreciation” were held in the summer months. At my mother’s suggestion I once enrolled. The first lesson was to watch a snake in a glass cage swallow a chattering field mouse whole. I did not go for the second lesson. The main floor was given over to scientific exhibits for the benefit of schoolchildren, stiff stuffed creatures and Eskimo and Chinese and Polynesian artifacts, case after case, categorized, dustproof. There was a noseless mummy, with always a small crowd around him. As a child this floor filled me with dread. So much death; who would dream there could be such a quantity of death? The second floor was devoted to art, mostly local paintings that, however clumsy and quaint and mistaken, nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas. There were also bronze statuettes of Indians and deities, and in the center of the large oval room at the head of the stairs a naked green lady, life size, stood in the center of a circular black-lipped pool. She was a fountain. She held to her lips a scallop shell of bronze and her fine face was pursed to drink, but the mechanics of the fountain dictated that water should spill forever from the edge of the shell away from her lips. Eternally expectant—with slight breasts, a loosely swirled cast glory of verdigrant hair, and one foot lightly resting on its toes—she held the shell an inch away from the face that seemed with its lowered lids and parted lips asleep. As a child I was troubled by her imagined thirst, and I would place myself so I could see the enduring inch that held her mouth from contact with the water. The water fell as a thin varying ribbon, pearlish green, spiralling as it left the scalloped edge, splaying before it struck the surface of the pond with a ceaseless gentle impact whose splash was sometimes flung by the subtle variations of accident as far away as the rim of the pond, deckling with a tiny cold prick, like the touch of a snowflake, my hand resting there on the black marble. The patience of her wait, the mildness of its denial, seemed unbearable to me then, and I told myself that when darkness came, and the mummy and the Polynesian masks and the glass-eyed eagles below were sealed in shadow, then her slim bronze hand made the very little motion needed, and she drank. In this great oval room, which I conceived as lit by the moon through the skylight above, the fall of water would for a moment cease. In that sense, then—in the sense that the coming of night enwrapped the luminous ribbon of downfalling water and staunched its flow—my story is coming to its close.
The irritable traffic pecks soothingly at the windows of our loft, those windows whose thin glass has so long needed dusting that their delicate graphitic grayness seems internal, a shade of cathedral glass. The cafeteria neon two stories below rhythmically stains them rose. My vast canvases—so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless transmuted into art—with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim bruised mouth whose corners compress morally when you are awake and scolding me, love your burnt skin ceaselessly forgiving mine, love the centuries of being humbled held in the lilac patina of your palms. I love the tulip-stem stance of your throat. When you stand before the stove you make, all unconscious, undulant motions with the upper half of your body like a drinking hen. When you walk naked toward the bed your feet toe in as if your ankles were manacled to those of someone behind you. When we make love sometimes you sigh my name and I feel radically confirmed. I am glad I have met you, glad, proud, glad; I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoons, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous-making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs. But I cannot, quite. I cannot quite make that scene. A final membrane restrains me. I am my father’s son. In the late afternoons while the day hangs in distending light waiting to be punctured by the darkness that in arrows of shadow rides out from the tall buildings across the grid of streets, I remember my father and even picture—eyes milky with doubts, mustache indecisive and pale—his father before him, whom I never knew. Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.
Forgive me, for I do love you, we fit. Like a Tibetan lama I rise out of myself above the bed and see how we make, yin and yang, a person between us. But at the hour in the afternoon when my father and I would be heading home in the car, I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer’s map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am beginning to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. I consider the life we have made together, with its days spent without relation to the days the sun keeps and its baroque arabesques of increasingly attenuated emotion and its furnishings like a scattering of worn-out Braques and its rather wistful half-Freudian half-Oriental sex-mysticism, and I wonder, Was it for this that my father gave up his life?
Lying awake beside you in the rose-touched dark, I wake on a morning long ago, in Vera Hummel’s guest bedroom. Her room shone in the aftermath of the storm. My dreams had been a bent extension, like that of a stick thrust into water, of the last waking events—the final mile staggering through the unwinding storm; my father’s beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and whinnying and rubbing his hands together in desperation yet his importunity no longer seeming absurd or berserk to me but necessary, absolutely in my blind numbness necessary; then Vera Hummel yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her unbound hair fanning over the shoulders of her blue bathrobe and her hands tucked in the sleeves and her arms hugging herself as she yawned; and the limping clump of her husband descending the stairs to receive my father’s outpour of explanation and gratitude. They put us in their guest bedroom, in a four-postered sway-backed bed inherited from Mr. Hummel’s mother, my grandfather’s sister Hannah. It smelled of feathers and starch and was so like a hammock that my father and I, in underclothes, had to cling to the edges to keep from sliding together in the middle. For some minutes I kept tense. I seemed stuffed with the jiggling atoms of the storm. Then I heard the first rasp of my father’s snuffly little snore. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond me seemed to explain everything, and I relaxed.
The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. I thought, This morning has never occurred before, and I jubilantly felt myself to be on the prow of a ship cleaving the skyey ocean of time. I looked around the room for my father; he was gone. I had sunk into the center of the bed. I looked for a clock; there was none. I looked to my left to see how the sun lay on the road and field and mailbox, and my gaze met inst
ead a window giving on the luncheonette’s brick wall. Next to the window, its chipping veneer somehow grimacing, was an old-fashioned bureau with fluted glass knobs, a wavy-faced top drawer, and ponderous scroll feet like the toeless feet of a cartoon bear. The radiance beyond the house picked out the silver glints in the stems and leaves of the wallpaper. I closed my eyes to listen for voices, heard a vacuum cleaner humming at some distance, and must have slipped back into sleep.
When I awoke again the strangeness of it all—the house, the day so fair and sane in the wake of madness, the silence, inside and out (why had I not been wakened? what had happened to the school? wasn’t it Wednesday?)—held me from falling back, and I arose and dressed as much as I could. My shoes and socks, set to dry on a radiator in the room, were still damp. The strange walls and hallways, demanding thought and courage at every turn, seemed to suck strength from my limbs. I located the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and ran my wet finger back and forth across my teeth. In bare feet I went down the Hummels’ stairs. They were carpeted with a fresh-napped beige strip held in place by a brass rod at the base of each riser. This was the kind of Olinger home, solid and square and orthodox, that I wished my family lived in. I felt dirty and unworthy in my weary red shirt and three-day underwear.
Mrs. Hummel came in from the front room wearing a pinned-up bandana and an apron patterned with starlike anemones. She held a dainty straw wastebasket in her hand and, grinning so her gums flashed, hailed me with, “Good morning, Peter Caldwell!” Her pronouncing my name in full somehow made me completely welcome. She led me into the kitchen and in walking behind her I felt myself, to my surprise, her height, or even an inch taller. She was tall as local women went and I still thought of her as the goddess-size she had appeared to me when I first arrived at the high school, a runty seventh-grader, my waist no higher than the blackboard chalk-troughs. Now I seemed to fill her eyes. I sat at the little porcelain-topped kitchen table and she served me like a wife. She set before me a thick tumbler of orange juice whose translucence cast on the porcelain in sunlight an orange shadow like a thin slice of the anticipated taste. It was delicious for me to sit and sip and watch her move. She glided in blue slippers from cupboard to refrigerator to sink as if these intervals had been laid out after measuring her strides; her whole spacious and amply equipped kitchen contrasted with the cramped and improvised corner where my mother made our meals. I wondered why some people could solve at least the mechanical problems of living while others, my people, seemed destined for lifetimes of malfunctioning cars and underheated toiletless homes. In Olinger, we had never had a refrigerator, but instead a humiliating old walnut icebox, and my grandmother never sat down with us at the table but ate standing up, off the stove with her fingers, her face wincing in the steam. Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family’s central member, my father, had never rid himself of the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.
“Where’s my father?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly, Peter,” she said. “Which would you prefer—Wheaties or Rice Krispies or an egg some way?”
“Rice Krispies.” An oval ivory-colored clock below the lacquered cabinets said 11:10. I asked, “What happened to school?”
“Have you looked outdoors?”
“Sort of. It’s stopped.”
“Sixteen inches, the radio said. All the schools in the county have cancelled. Even the parochial schools in Alton.”
“I wonder if they’re going to have swimming practice tonight.”
“I’m sure not. You must be dying to get to your home.”
“I suppose so. It seems forever since I was home.”
“Your father was very funny this morning, telling us your adventures. Do you want a banana with the cereal?”
“Oh, gee. Sure, if you have it.” That surely was the difference between these Olinger homes and my own; they were able to keep bananas on hand. In Firetown, on the rare times my father thought to buy them, they went from green to rotten without a skip. The banana she set beside my bowl was perfect. Its golden skin was flecked evenly all over just as in the four-color magazine ads. As I sliced it with my spoon, each segment in dropping into the cereal displayed that ideal little star of seeds at the center.
“Do you drink coffee?”
“I try to every morning but there’s never any time. I’m being an awful lot of trouble.”
“Hush. You sound like your father.”
Her “hush,” emerging from an intimacy that someone else had created for me, evoked a curious sense of past time, of the few mysterious hours ago when, while I was sound asleep in my great-aunt Hannah’s bed, my father had told of his adventures and they had listened to the radio. I wondered if Mr. Hummel had been here also; I wondered what event had spread through the house this aftermath of peaceful, reconciled radiance.
I made bold to ask, “Where is Mr. Hummel?”
“He’s out with the plow. Poor Al, he’s been up since five. He has a contract with the town to help clear the streets after a storm.”
“Oh. I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill.”
“Your father said. When Al comes home, he’ll drive you out in the truck to it.”
“These Rice Krispies are awfully good.”
She looked around from the sink in surprise and smiled. “They’re just the ones that come out of the box.” Her kitchen seemed to bring out a Dutchness in her intonation. I had always vaguely associated Mrs. Hummel with sophistication, New York, and the rest of it, she shone to such advantage among the other teachers, and sometimes wore mascara. But in her house she was, plainly, of this county.
“How did you like the game last night?” I asked her. I felt awkwardly constrained to keep a conversation up. My father’s absence challenged me to put into practice my notions of civilized behavior, which he customarily frustrated. I kept tugging up the wrists of my shirt to keep spots from showing. She brought me two slices of glinting toast and a dopple of amber crabapple jelly on a black plate.
“I didn’t pay that much attention.” She laughed in memory. “Really, that Reverend March amuses me so. He’s half a boy and half an old man and you never know which you’re talking to.”
“He has some medals, doesn’t he?”
“I suppose. He went all up through Italy.”
“It’s interesting, I think, that after all that he could return to the ministry.”
Her eyebrows arched. Did she pluck them? Seeing them close, I doubted it. They were naturally fine. “I think it’s good; don’t you?”
“Oh, it’s good, sure. I mean, after all the horrors he must have seen.”
“Well—they say there’s some fighting even in the Bible.”
Not knowing what she wanted, I laughed nevertheless. It seemed to please her. She asked me playfully, “How much attention did you pay to the game? Didn’t I see you sitting with the little Fogleman girl?”
I shrugged. “I had to sit next to somebody.”
“Now, Peter, you watch out. She has the look in her eye.”
“Ha. I doubt if I’m much of a catch.”
She held up a finger, gay-making in the county fashion. “Ahhh. You have the possibilities.”
The interposed “the” was so like my grandfather’s manner of speech that I blushed as if blessed. I spread the bright jelly on my toast and she continued about the business of the house.
The next two hours were unlike any previous in my life. I shared a house with a woman, a woman tall in time, so tall I could not estimate her height in years, which at the least was twice mine. A woman of overarching fame; legends concerning her lovelife circulated like dirty coins in the student underworld. A woman fully grown and extended in terms of property and authority; her presence branched into every corner of the house. Her touch on the thermostat stirred the furnace under me. Her footsteps above me tri
pped the vacuum cleaner into a throaty, swarming hum. Here and there in the house she laughed to herself, or made a piece of furniture cry as she moved it; sounds of her flitted across the upstairs floor as a bird flits unseen and sporadic through the high reaches of a forest. Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.
I heavily sat in the dark front parlor reading from a little varnished rack Reader’s Digests one after another. I read until I felt sick from reading. I eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: “Miracle Cure For Cancer?” and “Ten Proofs That There Is a God.” I read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed—for the pang of hope roused fears that had been lulled. The demons of dread injected their iron into my blood. It was clear, clear for all the smart rattle of the prose and the encyclopedic pretense of the trim double columns, that there were no proofs, there was no miracle cure. In my terror of words I experienced a panicked hunger for things and I took up, from the center of the lace doily on the small table by my elbow, and squeezed in my hand a painted china figurine of a smiling elf with chunky polka-dot wings. The quick blue slippers sounded on the carpeted stairs and Mrs. Hummel made lunch for the two of us. In the brightness of the kitchen I was embarrassed for my complexion. I wondered if it would be manners to offer to leave, but I had no strength to leave this house, felt unable even to look out the window; and if I did leave, where would I look, and for what? My father’s mysterious absence from me seemed permanent. I was lost. The woman talked to me; her words were trivial but they served to make horror habitable. Into the shining plane of the table-top between our faces I surfaced; I made her laugh. She had taken off her bandana and clipped her hair into a horsetail. As I helped her clear the table and took the dishes to the sink, our bodies once or twice brushed. And so, half-sunk in fear and half alive and alight with love, I passed the two hours of time.