by John Updike
Until he was old enough to make the tub feel crowded, he took baths with his mother, to save hot water. More than sixty years later, he could still recall the sight of his legs receding in the narrow watery space beside her, his feet squeezed between one of her hips and the porcelain side of the tub. To rinse his shampooed hair she would hold his head under the faucet until he thought he must drown. His parents, he realized when he was old enough to grasp some social history, were cultural products of the progressive Twenties, conditioned to expect a socialist revolution and to be unashamed of their bodies. What was natural, his mother believed, was healthy and good, even though germs and parasites could be argued to come from Nature as surely as, say, spoonfuls of cod-liver oil. The horrible lasting aftertaste as the thick transparent liquid oozed down his esophagus: that was Nature to little Benjamin—that and hay fever and the cat catching robins at the birdbath. He would find their feathers splayed in the grass. He was drawn entirely to the unnatural: to the radio, the movies, the newspapers, the blimp or skywriting airplane that once in a while appeared in the skies over their small town.
When he was thirteen they moved to a farmhouse eleven miles away; in these smaller quarters their bodies were placed in closer proximity. His grandparents occupied one room upstairs, and Benjamin’s parents the other, leaving him a bed in a space next to the stairs; his grandfather would tug his toe in the morning on the way downstairs, if it stuck out from the blankets. The walls were thin, and he could hear his parents murmur, sigh, and turn over on their creaking bedsprings. There would be a patting noise and his father’s voice making a noise, “Ooo-ooh,” in appreciation, Benjamin gathered in the dark, of his mother’s bulk. “Your mother should have gone onto the burleycue stage,” he would tell his son, as they drove into town together, “instead of marrying me. She had the figure for it, but not the temperament. A better man than I would have talked her into it.”
It was under the permissive blanket, somehow, of their country intimacy that Benjamin began to masturbate. It happened one night that, because of the primitive laundry facilities in the basement, he had no clean pajamas, and had to go to bed in his underwear. The unaccustomed sensation of his skin on the sheets stirred him into discovery. A quite magical realm, tight and fresh, opened up; at the climax he would feel as if he were somersaulting, the witness inside his head turned upside down. The sensation, if it had been a sound, was shrill, piercing through this world into another: not a dirty world but clean, the saying went, as a whistle. He was too innocent to think about the stains he left on his sheets, and once his mother did mention them in a fit of temper, but the gap between his mother and those upside-down sensations was so vast that his mind couldn’t bridge it and went blank, so he made her no answer. He was never able, in later life, alone or within the body of a woman, to recover quite that initial, upending intensity—that experience of a sweetening, narrowing tightness yielding, as it were, a glimpse of icy, annihilating light beneath his feet.
Benjamin never doubted that his mother loved him better than she loved her husband. This knowledge gave him with his father the tolerant good humor with which one treats a defeated rival. When his father was dead, and Benjamin middle-aged, he tended to cut short, or turn his back on, his mother’s offered outpourings of marital resentment. Even the wealth of sympathy cards—Earl Foster had been a courthouse bureaucrat, a Sunday-school teacher, a man of good will and good works—had inflamed her sense of grievance, in the way that becoming at last rich aggravates the injustice of having been short-changed all the years before. She let the tinted envelopes pile up, many unopened, on an old brass tray on a side table, and in the days after the funeral made no move to answer them: “What can I say except agree he was a saint? If he was such a saint what does that make me?”
“A fellow saint?” Benjamin suggested, wary of what he had long ago learned to recognize as his mother in a dangerous mood.
“Not by a far cry. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Street angel, house devil’? That was your daddy.”
“What did he do devilish?”
“You don’t want to hear it. Or do you? Maybe you should.”
“No, you’re right, Mother, I don’t.”
Sitting stubbornly at the kitchen table in her black widow’s dress with its green jade brooch, she went on, “When we first met, at college, my dad still had his money, and dressed me in what was considered high style, in what to your father’s eyes looked like too broad a check, with too bright a bow at the neck. He was from New Jersey, and his people were terribly conservative, as you know—Presbyterians, down to the bone.”
“I know.” Though in fact his father all the while he knew him had been a Lutheran deacon; he had done his best to blend into his wife’s locale.
“That was why he laughed at me; he said I looked like a Ziegfeld girl at a barn dance. And then,” she went on, “the weekend we got married, the last day of August and terribly hot, Dad had come down a peg or two in the world, and for some reason the best thing I could find to put on was this wool suit that turned out to be suffocating—I nearly fainted on the train, and sweated big spots into it. My mother-in-law was reported to have said she thought only colored people got married in August. She was sick with diabetes already, the whole ceremony had been rushed together so she wouldn’t hear of it ahead of time, and when she did she fainted dead away. At least the other Fosters said she did. Your daddy was meant to be the one who didn’t get married and would support their mother in her decline. I realized when the others told me—it must have been my sister-in-law, she was always free with her news—I realized there were two kinds of women, the kind who really did faint and those who just nearly did, like me. When we got into our tiny stateroom in the Pullman, your father said I smelled like a pig.”
“Oh, no!” Benjamin felt obliged to protest, at the risk of tipping her into an even more menacing, unpredictable temper.
“He was right,” she said, “I was drenched, and ruined the dress. ‘Pig’ wasn’t the worst word he ever used. Our so-called honeymoon, that whole first year when I was following him around with the surveying crew, all through the coal regions, we kept staying in these cheap boarding-houses that were really cathouses. You’d meet the girls on the stairs dragging up customers almost too drunk to walk. In the daytime everybody except me was sleeping. I got a world of reading done—all the Russians, Balzac, Flaubert. I never could take to Dickens—too jokey. One of the madams told me that what you look for in a girl is a high arch to the foot. That tells you all you need to know. I had flat feet, though she was too polite to point it out. I couldn’t compete with your father’s ideas of those girls on the stairs—thank Heaven I got pregnant with you and could come home to my father’s house. I wish all these people scribbling how your father was such a saint could have heard his language when it was just the two of us stuck together, like dogs in rut.”
She gestured with disgust at the stack of sympathy notes in the brass tray, and when Benjamin left the next day they had vanished, unanswered.
He had hungered, through his childhood, for the signs of happy union that he saw in the parents of his friends, a secret physical prosperity that oozed into society as respectability’s hard-earned good cheer. His parents almost never went out to parties, and when they did his father was usually sick from the rich food and unaccustomed liquor. He had a Presbyterian stomach. But their old college friends the Mentzers held an annual New Year’s party, which included other couples mated at Agricola, and off his parents would go into the dark with what Benjamin imagined as their old collegiate gaiety. At other reunion occasions he had heard Mrs. Mentzer, the once-beautiful Ethel Spangler, call his father “Fossie” with a fond purr that almost materialized the unimaginable conqueror of “no fewer than a baker’s dozen of the fair sex.”
It was with a daughter of this crowd, not the Mentzers’ but the Reifsneiders’, that Benjamin had his first real date—his first parentally approved appointment with the fair sex. He was old e
nough to drive, by a few months, and went off in a sports jacket, necktie, and clean shirt carefully harmonized by his clothes-conscious mother. He and Ada Reifsneider went to the movies and afterwards to the West Alton all-night diner for hamburgers and ice-cream sodas. They attended different high schools and didn’t have much to talk about except their parents and the movie they had just seen, yet they managed well enough so that, parked in front of her dark house, he felt entitled to kiss her, which she seemed to expect. Her sallow face had regular features, but her lips were hard and cool, with a chill of prepared willingness he did not feel he had earned. He had felt clumsy, overdressed, and not quite right, and assumed that her sense of him agreed with his. He never called her again, though she was pretty enough. Whatever it was that must be discovered, the path was not through his parents’ college days.
His mother in all the years he knew her had never had a haircut or gone to a hairdresser. Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor, when he lived boyishly close to the carpet. When she was a girl, she more than once told him (she told him everything more than once), her own mother would do up her hair in braids wound so tight on the top of her head that she wanted to scream. It frightened Benjamin, at night, to see her take out her pins and let her hair down and walk around the upstairs in her slip, looking like a graying witch, just her nose and her eyes peeping out through the curtain of her hair. Years later, in the late Sixties, he picked up a plump young hooker in the bar of a Chicago hotel. When they were done, she put her silvery minidress back on and walked around his room combing out her hair, long and uncontained in the Sixties style, and it came to him that this was how a woman was supposed to look, like Eve or Mary Magdalene in an admonitory old woodcut.
There was a hint of admonition, too, in the underwear drawer of his mother’s bureau, its tumble of flesh-colored straps and intricate metal fastenings like a web of apparatus in a torture chamber. Her girdle and its stocking fasteners—flesh-colored buttons, and wire loops shaped like snowmen—left cruel dents in her flesh, and on one of her feet the little toe was quite bent over the others by years of tight, pointy shoes.
At night, upstairs in the country house, his father, describing the adventures of his day in the city world, would mumble, and she would begin to laugh, and he would mumble again, and her laughter would be goaded to a half-suppressed shriek, an escape like that of steam, ending in a whimper begging for mercy, and he would mumble once more, and then in the contagion of her renewed glee he, too, would laugh, a few reluctant chuckles that ended the story. In the morning, when Benjamin asked her what had been so funny, she would say, “It’s too hard to explain. It’s not so much what your daddy says as how he says it that sets me off sometimes. I don’t believe he even means to be funny at first; his life has been really a sad one.”
Yet his parents didn’t radiate sadness, though their misery and helplessness—their state of being trapped—was a frequent theme of their conversation. After Benjamin’s grandparents were both dead, a new bed was installed in the vacated room, but as far as Ben knew his parents rarely used it, staying in the too-high, noisy-springed one with the moon and stars stencilled onto the blue-gray headboard. When, summers, he visited with his growing family, there were too many bodies for the beds, and his parents would sleep on a flat farm wagon in the barn. They made so comical a sight there, uplifted on huge spoked wheels, surrounded by mounds of baled hay and rusted equipment, under motley layers of spare blankets and quilts, that his children would run out first thing in the morning, through the dew of the lawn, to catch their grandparents still thus abed, and cheer themselves with the hilarious, comforting sight. The old couple would sit up in greeting, both wearing black wool watch-caps, donned for warmth and to keep dust and dove droppings out of their hair. Pigeons cooed and thrashed in the upper reaches of the barn like left-over bits from their dreams.
As his mother’s widowhood stretched past a decade and into its fifteenth year, it was as if her son, who tried to visit her for a few days every month, had always been the only man in her life. When she spoke of her husband, it was in the tone of startled reminiscence with which she might suddenly recall the dark-eyed little Schlouck boy with whom she had walked to the one-room school down the sandy dirt road that passed along the edge of her parents’ farm and over the rise to the main road. “My mother thought his people were too dark,” she would say. Or, of her husband: “He was so hipped, after his heart began to act up, on paying in his extra thousand to the county retirement fund. He said he could see daylight for the first time in his life.”
“Daylight?”
“I don’t know how much daylight he thought he had left for himself. But he wanted to leave me set. Just like the driving. I hadn’t driven since my father sold their Biddle and moved into town. But he forced me to drive, he even had me take a course from a high-school instructor, and get my license. He knew that without it I couldn’t hang on out here.”
“So he was a saint,” said Benjamin, ironically.
She missed the irony. She said solemnly, “He wanted to be. His mother had been terribly religious, so full of good works she would forget to feed her own family. But he had these doubts. We all had, back then. We read Mencken, Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis. Nothing was sacred. We laughed at everything, even at school, where half the professors were ordained, and half the boys were aimed that way. Of course, we were young—we could afford to laugh. Your father was such a kidder, so good-humored around people who didn’t know him, it shocked me at first when he’d get these terrible bouts of depression. ‘The blues,’ he called them. He’d sit in a chair and not move. Everything disappointed him, especially me.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so!” The protest was courteous; Benjamin had grown up with the impression that his parents’ marriage had been a mistake, partially redeemed by his birth.
“Except my mother,” his mother went on, looking past him from within the tattered wing chair where she now spent most of her days, rousing herself only to feed the pets and change television channels. “He admired her. She had a quickness I didn’t; she could make money. It had been her management of the farm that had made my father rich, for a while, until he lost it on his friends’ stock tips. That was our tragedy, if your father and I had one: we didn’t know how to make money. And he was the only one of my suitors she ever approved of. The funny thing was, like Sammy Schlouck, he was dark. He could take a tan, your father, unlike you and me. We have the type of skin that can only burn.”
“Maybe that’s what the attraction was. Opposite skin types.”
She ignored the idea. “Was there an attraction? Or were we just looking for people who would maintain the suffering that we figured we deserved? We both felt embarrassed at having been born. My parents had wanted a boy, and Daddy was the youngest of four, he always felt he was ‘one more mouth to feed.’ We hadn’t had happy childhoods, either of us. Now you, you did. We were both amazed to see it. We didn’t understand how you did it.”
“I had loving parents,” Benjamin gallantly suggested. Parents, he didn’t say, who had no one else to love.
“No,” she argued, perversely, “it was something in you, you produced it out of yourself, in this miserable household. Ethel Spangler, after she married Howard Mentzer but before they had a child of their own, came to the house for an afternoon and when she left said to me, ‘I hope this child gets some love in his life some day.’ ”
Benjamin laughed, incredulous and gratified. “What a thing to say! And yet you and Daddy kept on with her all those years.”
“People used to hang on to each other,” said his mother, “for fear that was all there was. Now, they let go and latch on to somebody else just like the first.”
This was a dig—Benjamin had divorced and remarried twice—but he let it glide by. He saw his mother as the dispenser of more truth than he could bear. When he was seven or eight, and
graduated from the shared bathtub, he asked her, having been invited to satisfy his curiosity about the facts of life, if in a woman wee-wee came out of the same place as babies did. Gently, frankly, like the progressive spirit she was, she answered him, but his embarrassment was so intense it quite blotted out her answer, leaving his question to hang in his memory as a perpetual humiliation.
When she died, a long lifetime welled up through its leavings. In a small cedar chest opened by a key in her desk drawer, he found, wrapped in a ribbon faded from red to pink, a bundle of letters his father had written to her in the three years between college graduation and their marriage. They were ardent, stiff, earnest. Phrases swam up from the thin creased paper, scented not only with cedar but with, Benjamin imagined, the salt air of Florida, where his father had spent eighteen months: want to do right by everybody concerned… certain you are the mate the good Lord meant me to have… Ma has her ups and downs and is brave as Hell… Ed says the business climate here is bound to turn around, people always pull in their horns after a hurricane… miss you every day and especially after work… if, God forbid, she takes a turn for the worse… be with you on the old cane-back sofa in Olinger and kick back my heels and share a good laugh… almost chuck it all up and head north on the next freight train but… the docs say she has the determination of a saint or a mule… can hear your voice as sure as shooting… the sunsets come on so quick because of the latitude… I’m still your Sheik and you my Agnes Ayres… ninety-eight in the shade over by Arcadia… or die trying… Benjamin could not bear to read continuously, it was like his mother’s too-detailed answer to that childish question of his; his mind shied away. His father’s handwriting even then, before he got his master’s degree and a teaching job, had a schoolteacher’s patient legibility; he formed each letter carefully, lifing his pen in the middle of a word. When his mother had at last died, he had already come back up north. The salmon upstream: or die trying.