by John Updike
Other than the obituaries, newspapers had less and less in them that pertained to Fairchild—crucial sports contests, burning social issues, international crises all took place over a certain horizon. A curvature of concern left him out of it; he was islanded. Even his doctors and financial advisers, the caretakers of his old age, were increasingly difficult to reach, hiding behind a screen of recorded messages and secretaries whose hurried, immigrant accents were difficult for Fairchild to decipher. If a heart attack or a catastrophic downturn in the market were to overtake him, he would be left clutching the telephone while shimmering streams of Vivaldi or, even more insultingly, soupy instrumental arrangements of old Beatles standards filled the interminable wait for the next available service representative.
As opposed to this, there had been the Spanish doctor, his firm velvet touch on Fairchild’s brow, and the member of the policía providing in stoical silence a tour of the real Seville, and the swarthy young mugger, not necessarily a Gypsy but distinctly dark, with shiny black hair en brosse, his face inches away and touchingly contorted in the work of retaining his loot. Everything in Spain had felt closer. There had been contact.
Mrs. Fairchild, meanwhile, led an ever busier American life, with her committees and bridge groups and book clubs and manicure appointments. She had joined the universal dispersion of which Fairchild felt himself at the center. As she went off one day, she assigned him a small task which, she patiently explained, “even he” could do. Last summer she had decided, against his advice, to have the two heavy tall doors opening into the living room removed. “I hate stuffy rooms,” she told him, unstoppably. “Air! Light!” It made the house airier but (he pointed out in vain) harder to heat.
Too heavy for him to lift, the doors had been carried down to the barn by two young men and wrapped in a tarpaulin and leaned in a corner, against the remote possibility of their reinstallation some day, if not by the Fairchilds by the next owners—even the house, as his time in it dwindled, was flying from him. One of the doors had a blue doorknob, rare old cobalt glass, which Carol wanted to see installed where they could enjoy the sight of it. Could he possibly go down and take the knob off? “Really, Marty, a child could do it,” she said.
The day was a clear one in February, with a chilly breeze. The barn was a relic of the horse-and-buggy era, with several stalls and mangers and a large central space the Fairchilds had slowly filled with things the couple didn’t have the heart or the imagination to throw away. Their children had left bulky deposits of schoolbooks, flat-tired bicycles, defunct toys, unplayable 33⅓ rpm records. Dead ancestors persisted in the form of framed diplomas, garden tools, and musty trunks stuffed with clothes and letters more ancient than the barn itself.
After a frightening moment of senile blankness, Fairchild recalled the padlock combination. The creosoted barn doors creaked open. The interior, lit by high windows of dirty glass, held the expectant hush of an abandoned church. The two living-room doors leaned in their beige tarpaulin against a wall six feet behind an antique cherrywood corner cupboard that Fairchild had inherited when his mother died.
The imposing three-sided cupboard had been a presence in his childhood, a choice piece of Philadelphia cabinet-making and a looming proof of his family’s pretensions to respectability. In a child’s view it had emanated the grave mystery of ownership. To buy things, and then to have them all yours, and to place them safely on shelves, and to have the government with its laws and enforcers keep others from taking them, had struck him as a solemn privilege of grownup life. He could still hardly bear to part with anything that was his. Even the oldest clothes might be used as cleaning rags, or an outfit for a very dirty job, dirtier than this one.
A section of the corner cupboard with two panelled doors formed the lower portion; upon it rested, with no attachment but gravity, a similar-sized unit whose single large door held nine panes of wavery old glass. The shelves behind the glass used to be loaded with rarely used family china, its gleaming ranks changelessly presiding in the dining room while Fairchild as a child played on the carpet and executed crayon drawings, much admired by his elders, at the dining table. When, after a long widowhood, his mother had died, the cupboard had seemed the most precious part of his inheritance, and he had saved it from auction and in a rented truck brought it up to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania. But none of his children had wanted it, or had room for it, and Carol, whose sense of décor, formed in hospitals, favored a clean and uncluttered look, didn’t see that their house, a stately neo-colonial with more than its share of windows and radiators, had any place for it either. And so it had come to rest in the barn, waiting for someone to cherish it as Fairchild did and come take it away.
Fairchild loved it because its subtly irregular old panes reflected into his mind the wobbly ghosts of his grandparents and his mother and father and Uncle Wilbur, a New Jersey dairy farmer who once had taken out his penknife and jimmied open the corner cupboard’s door during a summer visit. Uncle Wilbur had had an accent that Fairchild never heard any more, a soft mild wheeze formed, possibly, in patient conversation with animals. Fairchild’s mother on that long-ago summer day (the air heavy with promise of a thunderstorm) had complained of being unable to retrieve something from the cupboard—the big porcelain soup tureen, perhaps, or the dessert dishes with scalloped edges, like glossy thick doilies. The door was stuck, swollen by the humidity. The New Jersey cousin’s clever patience with his penknife had opened it and saved the day—that distant day—so that joyous exclamations arose from the visiting relatives seated expectantly around the table. It was a trivial incident magnified by family feeling; it touched Fairchild to realize that in the level run of his childhood days so small a thing would stick up and stay in his memory. Uncle Wilbur’s knife-marks could still be seen on the edge of the beaded cherrywood. In New England’s drier climate, the door swung open easily.
With the enshrined china auctioned off, along with most of the rest of the family possessions, Fairchild had sentimentally filled the cupboard with his mother’s remaining treasures—a heavy pottery vase wearing a purplish-brown glaze, a thinner tubular one with a matte marbled pattern like that of endpapers in a de luxe book, several baskets woven of multicolored straw, a collection of possible arrowheads she had collected as a young farm girl, her father’s hand-painted shaving mug with his name in gilt, porcelain figurines (an elf with polka-dot wings, a baby robin in its tinted nest), some sandstone “rose stones” acquired as souvenirs of her one trip west, with her husband, a year before she became a widow. In a small flat box, from the days when department stores packaged even small gifts in substantial boxes, she had saved the Sunday-school attendance badges and field-day ribbons that her only child had once been awarded.
Fairchild had even put into the cupboard her last pocketbook, a plump black one with its catch on the top. Its leather had mildewed since her death. A pocket inside it, he knew, still held her driver’s license, her Social Security and Medicare cards, and a computer-generated reminder of a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the week after she had, abruptly, died, rendering all these accoutrements of her existence useless. Souvenirs of a life of which Fairchild was the last caring witness, these remnants that he lacked the will to discard depressed him, deepening the depression from which even so modest a task as removing a blue doorknob from a disused door loomed like a mountain almost impossible to climb. Why bother? Everything decays and sinks and fails under the dominion of time and entropy.
Moving the tarpaulin to one side was difficult. The husky workmen—dos hombres jovenes—had wrapped the two living-room doors together and then leaned them so their weight pinned the covering top and bottom. The blue knob was on the inside, toward the wall. Fairchild had left his reading glasses up at the house, so he could not make out the head of the little screw that held the knob in place. The light, falling through the dirty high windows, was poor. He lifted the doors toward him, closer to what light there was. He seemed to make out, shifting his hea
d to gain a clearer spot of vision, that there was no screw; in the hole where one should have been was something like a nailhead, that would have to be pulled with a needle-nosed pliers. He hadn’t brought pliers.
Why was everything in life so difficult?
To see a little better, to get the blue knob a few inches farther into the open, he shifted the doors, in their encumbering wrap, toward him, so that they were precariously balanced in a vertical position, against his shoulder.
Suddenly he was being pressed, as he had been on that street in Seville, downward irresistibly, by a force he could not at first understand. Then he did understand: the doors were falling on him. Together the two substantial doors of oak pressed him flat, face-down, onto a pile of old pine boards that he, with thrift’s absurd inertia, was saving. His knees scraped on the rough edges. Splinters gouged the side of his right hand. As his brain registered these injuries he felt the weight of the doors continue to fall, past him, over him; in the split second before it happened he knew what was going to happen: they would slam into the top half of the corner cupboard, and it would topple from its perch on the lower half, and all would be smashed and scattered—arrowheads and badges and vases and baskets and figurines and the nine panes of irreplaceable old wavery glass.
The crashing successive tumult, as he lay with shut eyes and stinging knees on the useless saved lumber, came in stages, bad followed by worse, worse by worst, and then by silence. Winter wind whispered in a high corner of the barn. A splinter of glass tardily let go and tinkled to the floor. All was destroyed, shattered, dispersed. Fairchild’s brain, working as fast as a knitting machine, had in a split second seen it all coming. For that split second, he had not been depressed.
German Lessons
BOSTON had a patchy, disconsolate feel in those years, the mid-Seventies. Girls with long hair and long skirts still walked along Charles Street with bare feet, but the Sixties bloom was off; you found yourself worrying that these flower children would step on broken glass, or that parasites would penetrate their dirty soles, which were stained green from wandering on the grassy Common. The cultural revolution had become unclean.
Ed Trimble felt unclean and guilty. He had moved to the city alone, having left a family behind in New Hampshire. His wife and he ran a small real-estate firm in Peterborough, and Arlene made most of the sales. She had more gusto and social grace; she didn’t let her real feelings about a property sour her pitch, as he did. He resented her superior success, and knew she could hold things together if he pulled out for a time. He needed space; things were up in the air. In this interim, with the begrimed conveniences of a city all about him, he saw a chance to fill some of his gaps. Guided by the Yellow Pages, he enlisted in German lessons, at a so-called Language Institute in Cambridge.
The Institute turned out to be an ordinary wooden house north of Central Square, and the class a ragged handful of other gap-fillers, some of them not much younger than he, and the classroom a small basement room where an excess of fluorescent lighting blazed as if to overcome the smallness with brightness. Their teacher was Frau Mueller—Müller in Germany—and their textbook was Deutsch als Fremdsprache, a slender blue tome designed, as the multilingual cover announced, for speakers of any other language. It was illustrated with photographs that Ed found alienating—the people in them could have been Americans but for an edge of formality and the ubiquity of Mercedes cars. The men, even the auto mechanics, wore neckties, and the young women sported slightly outdated miniskirts and Jackie Kennedy hairdos, teased into glossy bulk. Ed’s older brother had acquired a shrapnel wound and a lifelong limp in the Ardennes counteroffensive, and Ed rather resented the prim, bloodless prosperity revealed in these lesson illustrations. Now, while the U.S. was risking troops and going broke protecting what was left of the Deutschland from the Russians, these defeated Huns, sleek and smug, were wallowing in a picture-book capitalism.
Frau Mueller did not look like the well-groomed women in the photographs. Her hair, straw color fading to gray, had been pulled back into a streaky ponytail; stray strands fell untidily around her face. She dressed in the absent-minded Cambridge manner, adding woolly layers as the summer waned and autumn deepened into winter. To Ed she seemed much older than he, but perhaps the difference was as little as five years: she had just suffered more. Her nose came to a sharp tip reddened by perpetual sniffles; her thick spectacles magnified pale-lashed eyes that twinkled sometimes as if remembering a joke it would be too much trouble to explain.
Though Deutsch als Fremdsprache contained no English, Frau Mueller’s accompanying guidance contained plenty of it, much of it focused on fine points of English grammar. Ed knew this was wrong; he had taken enough language courses—French, Spanish, both mostly forgotten—to know that the modern method, proven over and over, was immersion, no matter how painful at first for the students and the native speaker leading them. When they came to the German subjunctive, she informed the class, “Your English subjunctive fascinates me. It does not seem—how can I say this?—quite serious. When does one employ it? Give me examples.”
“If I were king,” Ed hesitantly offered.
“If any man sin,” timidly chimed in a student called Andrea—quoting, Ed realized, the Book of Common Prayer.
Frau Mueller’s eyes, twinkling, darted around her mostly silent little flock. “Ah,” she triumphantly told them, “you must think for examples. If the subjunctive in English did not exist—if it exist not, would it be correct to say?—no one would miss it! No one would notice! That is not the case in German. We use it all the time. Not to use it would be a serious discourtesy. It would sound—can I use the word?—pushy. Germans are always being described as pushy, yes? I think it is fascinating, the looseness of English.”
“Aber—Englisch hat Regeln,” Ed protested, hoping that that was the plural of Regel, and the accusative. The rest of the class looked at him as if he were crazy, trying to communicate in German.
“Ein Satz Regeln,” Frau Mueller smiled. “Aber es ist nur eine Kleinigkeit.”
Ed found German disagreeable and opaque; its closeness to English addled his mind. Reading, in the lesson “Im Restaurant,” the fictional Herr Weber’s polite request, “Vielleicht haben Sie einen Tisch am Fenster?,” he had to fight the impulse to make Tisch into “dish” and Fenster into “fender.” He might have quit the class but for Andrea. In this disordered period of his life, she radiated, though well advanced into her thirties, a healing innocence. She was on the small side, with the wide-eyed, washed-out face of an aging child, her lips the same color as her cheeks and clear brow. As winter closed in, her delicate lips cracked and she kept applying a lip balm that made them, under the harsh fluorescent lights, gleam.
Frau Mueller not only spoke too much English, but when it came time for the class to examine the assigned German texts, she waved them aside as if their meaning was obvious to all. Little was obvious to Ed, including the differences between noch and doch. Doch seemed to be untranslatable, sheer padding, like the English word “well”—but the utility and sense of “well” were inexpressibly apparent. Andrea was less indignant than he, coming up against the language barrier. He and she began to sit side by side in class, and to arrive with lessons they had worked up together, either in the underfurnished two rooms he rented in the South End, or on the sofa or bed of Andrea’s apartment, the third floor of a stately Cambridge house on Fayerweather Street. The genteel landlady was a professor’s widow, hanging on beyond her means. Andrea shared the third floor with a female cellist who was often away, performing. She herself was a part-time librarian, on duty evenings at an East Cambridge branch of the city system. Her immurement in books, and her acquired skill at aurally deciphering what the library’s minority patrons wanted, enabled her to see through the opacity of the German texts into a sphere of human meaning. He even once caught her, as they coped side by side with a set passage from Brecht, laughing at a joke that had leaped out at her. Feminine intuition: Arlene back in New Ha
mpshire had possessed it also, but had used it less and less to anticipate his desires. When he and this new woman, an aging flower-child, a vegetarian, and a peacenik, made love, Andrea seemed a filmy extension of his wishes. Her gentle shyness merged with a knowingness, an experience of other partners, that slightly unnerved Ed. She had been, in a way that worked to his benefit, corrupted.
His and Andrea’s becoming a kind of couple in German class, and their being somewhat older than the other students, won them an unlooked-for honor; before Christmas, as the first term was ending, Frau Mueller invited them to tea. “Only if you like,” she said.
“You’ve used the subjunctive!” Ed told her.
She half-smiled—her smile was rarely more than half, diluted by a nagging wariness—and said, “I think it was merely the conditional.”
She lived in one of three squat brick apartment buildings built on an old Kenmore Square industrial site; the complex had the small-windowed look of a modern prison, but lacked the barbed wire and guard towers. Ed and Andrea would not have gone, except that they did not know how to decline an invitation that clumsily crossed the American line between paid instruction and social friendship. “What do you say? Nein, danke?” Ed asked.
“You don’t want to hurt her feelings,” Andrea said. This excursion was a step for them, too, venturing forth for the first time to be entertained as a couple. For a present they took something that they considered, after much deliberation, to be uniquely American—a tin log cabin full of maple syrup. Though, without pancakes, did maple syrup make any sense?