My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by John Updike

  But once a parent, always a parent. Guilty habit drove him forth. His younger daughter lived in a sprawling old farmhouse that had lost most of its acres but kept its barn and long side porch. She and her husband, in what seemed to Fleischer a precarious arrangement with the real world, ran a riding stable in the barn, and an advertising firm out of their basement—rural bohemians plugged into the World Wide Web. Once his shyest, plumpest child, Gretchen had acquired in her thirties a lean, sun-hardened horsewoman’s confidence, and a hearty, not always welcome frankness to go with it. “Dad,” she greeted him, “what happened to your face? It’s so red. Does it hurt?”

  “It did. It doesn’t now. You should have seen me five days ago. I looked monstrous. Not just red but all swollen, as if I’d been punched.”

  Gretchen blinked, but did not contradict him. How could she? She hadn’t been there, in the room of merciless blue light. Nevertheless, he felt nettled, entitled to more sympathy than he was getting. He went on, “I’ve been trying to hide, but I remembered Tommy’s birthday was yesterday, and I didn’t want him to think I’d forgotten. Here. I got him that electronic King Kong game I think he said he wanted from seeing it advertised on television. The kid who waited on me in Circuit City thought this must be the one I meant, but he didn’t seem to know much, and he kept staring at my poor red face.”

  “Poor Dad. Actually, Tommy’s birthday was last week. But he’ll be thrilled. I’ll call him in from the barn. He was helping Greg.”

  “Don’t bother, if he’s doing useful work. I’ll just leave King Kong here.”

  “Don’t be silly, Father. Tommy’s always asking, ‘When is Grandpa coming to visit?’ ”

  Grandpa—Fleischer couldn’t identify with the name, but on the other hand couldn’t think of a better. It was what he had called his own grandfather, with whom he had lived until the dear old man died. Tipping back his head to see through thick bifocals, his grandfather had read the newspaper and the Bible in his favorite armchair and smoked cigars on the porch and taken a nip of whiskey in his bedroom, which smelled wonderfully of bygone mores and medicines. For every day of Fritz’s young life he awoke to the sounds of his grandfather coughing his tenacious tobacco cough, muttering to Grandma, walking up and down stairs in his squeaky high-top shoes, and shaking down the clinkers in the coal furnace in the basement. When the Depression had hit, his pregnant daughter and out-of-work son-in-law had taken refuge with him, and they had gratefully named their baby for him. Fritz, a solid old German name. One of the Katzenjammer Kids in the Sunday comic strip had been called Fritz.

  None of Fritz’s grandsons was named Fritz. Tommy, trailing his little brother, Teddy, came in from the side porch. The nine-year-old, his bare chest slick with sweat, looked disturbingly pudgy. Teddy, at six, was still wiry, but his hair, blond with bits of barn straw in it, hung uncut to his shoulders, so that only Fleischer’s having seen the child being bathed at the hospital told him that this was not a girl. The boys came up to him to be hugged yet did nothing to help the embrace, standing there limply and refusing to lift their faces to give his lips access to more than their ears. “I hope this is something you don’t already have,” he told Tommy weakly, handing him the long flat package. It had cost him several hours in the shopping and the wrapping, plus sifting through the rack at the local drugstore for a suitably jocose but not obscene or hostile birthday card.

  In a flash the boy ripped off the paper and confronted the raging gorilla on the box, its giant jaws wide open to engulf an entire lime-colored automobile. “Yippee!” he cried, in what seemed to Fleischer faked rapture. “This is just the one I asked Mom for and she didn’t get me.”

  “It looked pretty violent,” his grandfather warily observed. “Why would even a monster chew lumps of metal?” To himself he thought that fewer computer games might take some pounds from the boy’s soft, aggressively bare torso.

  Gretchen, hearing the critical edge in her father’s voice, maternally intervened: “Dad, the latest thinking on that seems to be that the violence, however awful, does children good. It gives their fantasies a form and carries them off. Isn’t that Aristotle’s old theory of catharsis all over again?”

  “I didn’t know you read Aristotle. I didn’t know anybody still did.” To his grandson he said, “Enjoy, Tommy. Teddy, make him give you a turn now and then.”

  But the boys were no longer listening. The older was whining to his mother, “I gotta go back to helping Dad,” and the younger had given up gazing expectantly at his grandfather. “Next time, Teddy,” Fleischer told him brusquely. “Today’s not your birthday.” Still, the boy’s unspoken disappointment pained him. The girlish child reminded him not of Gretchen at that age but of the bottomless well of hopefulness he had felt within him at the age of six, against all reason, surrounded as he had been by the Depression. Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, however little he deserved it. He sat with Gretchen over cups of herbal tea, marvelling that his baby girl, who had hated her own thighs, should have become not only a woman but a leathery one in jodhpurs, practiced in the ways of equestrianism and advertising and motherhood and, he dismally supposed, sex.

  Her good-bye kiss when his time came to leave startled him, considering their relation, by being aimed at the center of his mouth. In backing away, though, she gave him a quick sideways glance, checking on her effect, looking, for this moment, remarkably—piercingly—like her mother. Corinne had been the youngest of his wives and the least philosophical about his leaving her. She had not wanted to be left; she doubted, more than her two predecessors, her ability to enjoy freedom and create a new attachment. Her insecurity, with her watchfully qualified kisses, had been one of the initial fascinations. After his two rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women his own age, Corinne brought out his protective instinct. But then her streak of panic, of fearing she could not cope, excited his capacity for impatience and, in the end, cruelty. He had grown stony under her siege, the last year, of pleas and tears.

  Gretchen had been only seven, a wide-eyed innocent bystander. Corinne had, in a fashion, eventually coped, moving to the South Shore and making one of those postmodern living-together arrangements with a somewhat younger man. Fleischer was secretly offended and felt cuckolded. If only she had not shyly held back, giving kisses but then undermining them with a questioning irony—self-protective behavior touching in a daughter but hard to forgive in a wife—Corinne might still be his, a quarter of a century later. He had loved the infantile, trusting way she had slept, her bare toes sneaking out of the covers and a soft round arm wrapped around her face, its pink elbow up in the air.

  Fleischer and Gretchen parted on the long side porch, tidily stacked with wood for the coming winter. His face felt hot; the oblique flash of resemblance to her mother had warmed a sore spot within him.

  His second wife, Tracy, had taken a good deep tan. They had spent a lot of the days of their brief marriage at the beach together, even though Fleischer burned while she turned the color of a Polynesian. He had hoped some of her melanin would rub off on him, but she kept it all to herself. Quick to marry, once their divorces from other people came through, they had been quick to have a child—a son, Geoffrey. They took him to the beach early, in his cream-colored oilcloth bassinet, under a layer of muslin to keep off the sand flies and to soften the noontime sun. By the time he was two it became clear that his skin took after his mother’s. No sun damage had been inflicted.

  Or so it seemed: Fleischer observed that even in his teens, when his parents had been long divorced, the boy kept an indoor complexion, a sallow refusal of gratuitous exposure. He became as sober and cautious a man as his mother had been reckless and dazzling as a woman. At the beach, when she and Fleischer were still married to other people, Tracy’s white smile in her brown face had signalled to him from far away, a beacon on the horizon.
Then, when she came and stood next to him where he lay dozing, fuzzily hungover, on a blanket beside his first wife, Tracy’s long naked legs had stretched, it seemed, almost to the sky. Ah, those scintillating afternoons on the sand in the sun-loving, fun-loving Sixties! People used baby oil and Bain de Soleil back then, instead of number-rated sunscreen. Tracy’s long-toed bare feet beside Fleischer’s groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the scandal this would have caused, and the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

  Geoffrey, forty-two, and less than nine at the time of his parents’ divorce, lived alone in a Boston apartment whose only disorder came when his teen-age boys visited. Their mother, Eileen, lived a few miles away, in Brighton. They had been separated for three years, with plenty of counselling but no perceptible legal action. Fleischer often wanted to ask his son why the divorce wasn’t happening; but he feared the answer, which might have been that his father’s impulsive behavior had set a cautionary example. In Fleischer’s mind at the time, he was doing Tracy a favor, once the extent of her infidelities—ski instructors, local workmen—had become clear, freeing her to find another husband. No such considerate thoughts, apparently, urged Geoffrey forward, though Eileen was younger than he, and still beautiful. He had been, like many of his generation, slow to marry, close to thirty. The bride was twenty-two, with raven hair, edgy but demure, perfect and spectacular at the wedding, with her china-white skin. Her dark eyes and thick lashes had made smoldering spots of shadow through the veil. The father-inlaw had beamed with pride, gloating, as if over an unexpected inheritance, over the genes she was bringing into the family line. The Fleischers for generations, back to Teutonic hunters and gatherers, had been a homely, knobby, unevenly ruddy race; Fritz guessed he wasn’t the first psoriatic. Now Eileen’s older son, Jonathan, showed her delicacy and precision of feature to rakish effect in a thirteen-year-old’s lengthening frame. In his younger, blonder brother, Martin, those qualities were wed to his father’s phlegmatic stolidity to achieve a gentler and more angelic handsomeness. Fritz tried to fulfill a grandfather’s duty by visiting his son on the weekends when the boys were visiting.

  “How’s school?” he would ask them.

  “O.K.,” Martin would answer.

  “Sucks,” Jonathan would say.

  Martin’s silence had the innocent purity of there simply being no more he could think to say, but Jonathan’s had a deliberately withheld quality. He would not even turn his head for a second to acknowledge the presence of his grandfather, concentrating instead on the television program, or book of science fiction, or piece of drawing (he was artistic) that was engaging him. Fleischer remembered very well the intensity of a child’s need to concentrate down into the comic book, the model airplane, the stamp collection—deep into the miniature world that sheltered you from the larger, adult, out-of-your-control world—but his empathy was hard to express. Even Jonathan’s blue-black hair, glossily brushed and eccentrically parted in the middle, emanated a desire to repulse. He and his younger brother were enduring a parental separation that must seem endless, a kind of disease eating their adolescence away, and they suspected their grandfather and his obscure sins to be behind it all. Perhaps the boy felt protective of the mother he strikingly resembled; he feared that any friendliness toward his grandfather would lead to an invasion and a betrayal of that large half of his life where she ruled. So Fleischer imagined; he imagined that his sins were as evident as the scorched, mottled look of his face.

  Martin was more mechanical in his interests than artistic, and his elaborate Lego constructions and his increasingly polished ventures into carpentry gave his grandfather some slight opportunity to admire and even, through helpful practical questions, to share. But playing with blocks and tools was decades behind Fleischer, and the child’s interest, kindled, flickered out as he felt his elder’s momentarily roused attention wander away. Grandchildren were raised in an alien technology, an electronic one of amplified noises and simulated violence too quick and coded for an elderly eye and hand. Although he recognized his grandsons as further extensions of himself, it was Fleischer’s own, enigmatically wounded son who fascinated him.

  “How’s it going?” he would ask Geoffrey, letting the question mean whatever his son chose it to mean.

  “O.K.,” he would say. “She’s still fussy, but improving.” The pronoun “she” inevitably referred to Eileen. “The last counsellor helped,” he added.

  It was apparent to anyone, even to his father and his sons, that nothing would help enough, that the marriage was over for everyone but its two principals. Perhaps it was a family failing, Fritz speculated—not knowing how to let go. In his heart he felt still married to all three of his wives: the marriages continued underground, through tunnels of fondness and mutual understanding. Sometimes it took one or another of his wives to remind him, when he overstayed or over-stepped, that their connections were broken. Women, who must give more thought to their survival than men, are in the end less sentimental.

  “It’s hard,” was all Fleischer could think to say, sitting with his only son, seeing his own features in the stubbornly sorrowing, aging face, and hearing from the next room the muffled clutter of his grandsons killing time until they were no longer children and could escape this limbo. A helpless, guilty, wordless silence between the two grown men stretched and burned. To break the silence, Fleischer asked, “Does my face look red?”

  Geoffrey, after a quick glance, answered, “I guess. But it always looks sort of red.”

  “Really? It got blasted at the hospital two weeks ago. I felt like a sun-dried tomato.”

  “Nothing much shows now. You don’t look that bad, Dad.”

  Fleischer felt exasperation. “Geoffrey, you’re not looking. You’re thinking of something else.”

  “You sound like my wife. That’s what she always says.”

  Together, in silence, the two men contemplated the unfathomable pleasure it gave the younger to still be able to say “my wife.”

  “Dad, what did you do to your face? It looks beautiful!” So spoke his eldest child, Aurora, four weeks after his session with Sheela.

  He blushed, his skin remembering the heat of the blue light. “Really? It was horrible at first—swollen, all red. I stopped looking in the mirror when it calmed down a little.”

  “Oh, no,” his daughter said, beaming. “More than a little. Dad, I’ve never seen your face so smooth. You look ten years younger.”

  He laughed, greedily. “Ten years? That’s more than I deserve.”

  “Why say that? Go for it, I say.” Aurora was breezier than Gretchen, happier in her body. Perhaps because of her prematurely New Age name, bestowed by her young parents in the first flush of the power and joy of engendering life, Aurora took thought concerning her health and her rapport with the physical world: she jogged and did yoga, cooked along macrobiotic principles, and would have turned vegetarian but for her husband, a tradition-minded Kenyan who believed his two sons should be fed meat. She was over fifty, a fact amazing to her father, who more clearly than with his later children remembered her newborn weight in his arms, so perilously light, the tiny person so indisputably alive, that his knees had begun to tremble. For fear he would pass out and drop her, he had had to sit down on Maureen’s firm, narrow bed, there in the base hospital at Fort Bliss, Texas. In those days most young males went into the Army, though there was more peace then than there is now.

  Wonderingly, those first two years, as he made the passage from Fort Bliss to the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, he had observed the minute daily extensions of Aurora’s grip, with her slowly focusing slate-colored eyes and grasping little lavender-tinged fists, on the world. She had crawled and then walked and then talked with a growing vocabulary that slowly shed her dear, irrecoverable toddler solecisms. She had been, he and Maureen had joked, an “industrial-strength” child, rarely ill and never injured, the
perfect one to practice on. They had intended to have more, but the Fifties consensus was breaking up around them, as easy contraception and a new hedonism swept in. Tracy loomed on the shimmering beach, and by the time John Kennedy was shot Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet, with their tan insteps and cherry-red toenails.

  Aurora must have been touched by radicalism in her crib, because after her parents divorced and she entered puberty, she manifested a wide variety of erotic attachments, from other girls to college instructors twice her age to musical drug addicts and dark lovers from the Third World. Out of this shadowy mass of unsuitable mates Hector Kanogori emerged as a savior: Aurora and he met in a pottery class. He was interested in the arts only as a hobby, a holiday from his serious work as an assistant professor of economics at a state-university campus south of Boston.

  Mr. and Mrs. Kanogori travel. When Fleischer, by then in the last days of his marriage to Tracy, and Maureen, herself remarried, had consulted a counselling service about their daughter’s heedless, impractical involvements, the therapist, removing the pencil from her Cambridge bun, had asked them what Aurora seemed interested in, and Maureen surprised her former husband by responding without hesitation, “Travel.” How do women know these things about one another? Yes, their industrial-strength baby’s romances had been modes of travelling, and Hector, every other year, took Aurora to Africa and Asia on his academic investigation of developing economies. Their house in Milton brimmed with masks and beadwork and statuettes, souvenirs of their trips.