My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by John Updike

  All very well, Fleischer thought, for them: one more charming black-white couple easing the West’s racial conscience. But what about their two boys? Alfred and Daniel, as their grandfather called them—he had trouble pronouncing the Kikuyu names also bestowed upon them, in ceremonies both Christian and pagan—had inherited strands of their mother’s blithe sturdiness and their father’s prim dignity, but these qualities dangled, their grandfather felt, in air. Called black in America, they lacked, as they entered manhood, a black American’s street smarts and defenses. On their trips to Africa they had been teased by other boys as wa-zungu— whites. In the polite society around them, once the enforced tolerance and diversity of school had been left behind, they had no tribal roots, no matter-of-fact acceptance. Bryant Gumbel had managed it, and Ralph Bunche and Tiger Woods, but how many others? Fleischer blamed himself, with his diseased white skin and reflexive liberalism, for allowing the seeds of daring in Aurora to flourish unchallenged and to bear such tender, imperilled fruit.

  “The skin remembers,” Fleischer’s old dermatologist had said more than once, closing his eyes as he visualized the phenomenon. Sunburn your bottom once at a nudist beach, fry your nose on an all-day sail, and the insulted epidermis never forgets. Time’s blue light flushes out everything immature, ill-considered, or not considered at all. The world was being populated by his mistakes. It was possible that his adventurous daughter, having seen her mother deserted for a woman who took a better tan, had presented to her father, and to the string of Fleischer ancestors bleached white in Europe’s fogs, a gift of melanin fetched straight from mankind’s African homeland.

  Aurora’s boys had been his first grandchildren. Enthusiastically he had tackled the role of grandfather. He had asked to babysit for them, insisting on it, determined “to get to know them,” pushing himself in, sending Aurora and Hector out to a movie they hardly wanted to see. He would share milk and cookies with the boys, read them ethnically suitable stories from the household’s large collection, and, as their parents were about to come home, demand they go to sleep. They were accustomed to sleeping in a heap, in the African manner, in their parents’ bed. As an exasperated concession Fleischer would let them share the lower of their bunk beds. There they would fall asleep like bookends, their bottoms touching, bits of bare skin exposed by skimpy pajamas tugged in their final struggle against sleep—soft brown skin, a smooth latte, half and half.

  Last June, having invited the Kanogoris to the Swampscott beach his condo overlooked, he watched the two boys, both taller and broader now than he, strip down to bathing suits worn beneath their jeans and, in the unison of a mutual challenge, race to the still-wintry water and dive in. He was amazed by the sight: the breadth of their backs, the flare of the shoulder blades, the oval muscles of their long legs, the erect strength of their necks’ tapered columns and their tensed Achilles tendons, the flash and flicker of their naked pale soles as their feet thrashed in the icy blue water. They were grown men—magnificent, potent. If Fleischer had encountered them in a shadowy alley, he would have been frightened. Yet they were his blood. Daniel wore on his broad nose a spattering of the freckles that Fleischer had worn as a child and that Aurora had inherited.

  Between his two glimpses—his mulatto grandsons in pajamas and then in bathing suits—there was almost nothing; he had not gotten to know them. Their heads were full of lore and survival strategies that had nothing to do with him. They were creatures seen at a distance, under the sea’s dark horizon. When they came out of the water, shivering, towelling themselves furiously, they seemed to surround Fleischer with chilly saltwater spray and the warmth of healthy flesh.

  He told them, “Boys, that was heroic. How could you stand it, for more than a second?”

  “It was no big deal,” Alfred reassured him. “Once you’re in.” He was the taller of the two, and the more quiet and solemn.

  Daniel’s face held a spark of mischief, to go with his freckles. “You should have tried it, Grandpa. It gets your blood moving.”

  “Next time,” Fleischer promised.

  But life runs out of next times, at least for non-Hindus. Today, as her father visited, Aurora’s cheerful manner hid a sorrow: her boys were gone, Alfred a sophomore at the University of Arizona and Daniel a senior at Deerfield. “How are they doing?” Fleischer asked her.

  “Well enough, but not well enough for Hector. I tell him, ‘You were exceptional. Always first in your class at mission school, scholarships abroad—all that. I wasn’t. Blame me,’ I tell him.”

  “You had another agenda.”

  This made her laugh; she saw through this remark to the image her father retained of her, of a girl out of control. Her laugh was cut in half as she turned her head aside. Like her mother and father, she had turned gray early. She is over fifty, Fleischer thought. She knows her life has been mostly lived.

  Fathering children, Fleischer had never pictured their gray hairs or their own children. He had just selfishly wanted to create little beings who would look up to him, despite his bad skin, and brighten his life with their sunny innocence. But he had abandoned them all, with their mothers, when their innocence gave out. And now each had created another generation, extending rootlets into the world’s hard substance. He could not imagine what his grandchildren would do in the world, how they would earn their keep. They were immature cells, centers of potential pain.

  Outage

  THE JOLLY WEATHERPERSONS on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Evan Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Camilla, managed a boutique on Boston’s Newbury Street, glanced out of his windows now and then at the swaying trees—oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red—but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half-hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over when, in mid-afternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.

  The lines bringing the Morrises’ house electricity and telephone service and cable television came up, on three poles, through two acres of woods. Evan stepped outside in the storm’s lull, in the strangely luminous air, to see if he could spot any branches fallen on his lines. He saw none, and no lit windows in the nearest house, barely visible through the woods whose leaves in summer hid it entirely. The tops of the tallest trees were heaving in a wind he barely felt. A spatter of thick cold drops sent him back into the house, where drifts of shadow were sifting into the corners and the furnace ticked in the basement as its metal cooled. Without electricity, what was there to do?

  He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming inner light. The fireplace in the den emitted a sour scent of damp wood ash. Wind whistled in crevices he had not known existed, under the eaves and at the edges of the storm windows. He felt impotent, and amused by his impotence, in this emergency. He remembered some letters he had planned to mail at the post office in his suburb’s little downtown, and a check he had intended to deposit at the bank. So he did have something to do: he collected these pieces of paper, and put on a tan water-resistant zippered jacket and a Red Sox cap. The burglar alarm by the front door was peeping and blinking, softly, as if to itself. Evan punched the reset button; the device fell silent, and he went out the door.

  It seemed eerie that his car started as usual. Wet leaves were plastered over the driveway and the narrow macad
am roads of this development; the neighborhood had been built all at once, twenty years ago, on the land of an unprofitable farm. He drove cautiously, especially around the duck pond, beside a vanished barn, where, in a snowstorm ten years ago, a teen-ager had slid through a rail fence and sunk his parents’ Mercedes up to its hubcaps. The downtown—two churches, a drugstore, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a pizza shop, a mostly Italian restaurant, two beauty parlors, a dress shop, a bridal shop, a few more stores that came and went in the same chronically vacated premises, an insurance agent and a lawyer on the floor above a realty office, a dentist, a bank branch, and a post office—was without electricity but busier than usual, its sidewalk full of pedestrians in this gleaming gray lull.

  Evan saw two young women embracing, before they began to converse as if renewing a long-neglected acquaintance. People stood talking, discussing their fate in small groups. Shop windows usually bright were dark, and it occurred to him that, of course, people had been flushed onto the sidewalk by the outage. The health-food store, its crammed shelves of bagged nuts and bottled vitamins and refrigerated tofu sandwiches, and the fruit store, its rival in healthy nutrition across the street, were both caves of forbidding darkness behind their display windows.

  But it did not occur to him that the bank, usually so receptive to his deposits, would have a taped notice on its glass doors declaring the location of the nearest other branch, and that, although he could see the tellers chatting on the padded bench where applicants for mortgages and perpetrators of overdrafts customarily languished, he could no more access his money than he could have laid hands on the fish in an aquarium. The bank manager, a bustling small woman in a severe suit, was actually patrolling the sidewalk; she told Evan breathlessly, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Morris. Our ATM, alarms, everything is down. I was just checking to see if the hardware store had any power.”

  “Myra, I think we’re all in the same boat,” Evan reassured her; yet he understood her incredulity. He himself did not expect that the little post office, though open to box users and seekers of the inside mail slots, would be also closed to transactions; everything had been computerized by a United States Postal Service zealous to modernize, and now not a single letter could be weighed or a single stamp sold, even had there been enough light to see. The afternoon was darkening. In danger of completing no errands at all, he tested the door of the health-food store. The latch released, and he heard a giggle in the shadows. “Are you open?” he called.

  “To you, sure,” answered the voice of the young proprietress, curly-haired, perpetually tan Olivia. Evan groped toward the back, where a single squat perfumed candle illuminated bins of little plastic bags; they shimmered with blobby reflections. He brought to the counter a bag of what he hoped were unsalted but roasted cashews. “The register’s out. All contributions accepted,” Olivia joked, and made change out of her own purse for what he, holding it close to his eyes, verified was a five-dollar bill.

  The transaction had felt flirtatious to him, and the atmosphere of the downtown, beneath its drooping festoon of useless cables, seemed festive. Automobiles paraded past with their burning headlights. The ominous thickening in the air stirred the pedestrians to take shelter again. There was a brimming, an overflow of good nature, and a transparency: something occluding had been removed, baring neglected possibilities. Hurrying back into the shelter of his car, Evan laughed with an irrational pleasure.

  . . .

  Fresh drops speckled his windshield as he turned into his neighborhood, through a break in the stone wall that had once marked the bounds of the farm. PRIVATE WAY, a painted sign said. A woman in white—a shiny vinyl raincoat and swollen-looking white running shoes—was walking in the middle of the narrow road. With fluttering gestures she motioned him to stop. He recognized a newish neighbor, a wispy blonde who had moved a few years ago, with her husband and two growing boys, into a house invisible from the Morrises’. They only met a few times a year, at cocktail parties or zoning-appeals-board hearings. She looked like a ghost, beckoning him. He braked, and lowered the car window. “Oh, Evan,” she said with breathy relief. “It’s you. What’s happening?” she asked. “All my electricity went out, even the telephones.”

  “Mine, too,” he said, to reassure her. “Everybody’s. A tree must have fallen on a power line somewhere, in this wind. It happens, Lynne.” He was pleased to have fished her name up from his memory: Lynne Willard.

  She came close enough to his open window for him to see that she was actually trembling, her lips groping like those of a child near tears. Her eyes stared above his car roof as if scanning the treetops for rescue. She brought her eyes down to his face and shakily explained, “Willy’s away. In Chicago, all week. I’m up there all alone, now the boys are both off to boarding school. I didn’t know what I should do, so I put on my sneakers and set off walking.”

  Evan remembered those boys as noisy and sly, waiting in their little blazers for the day-school bus at the end of the road, just outside the tumbled-down fieldstone wall. If they were now old enough for boarding school, then this woman was not as young as she seemed. Her face, narrowed by a knotted head scarf, was pale, except for the tip of her nose, which was pink like a rabbit’s. Her eyelids also were pink; they looked rubbed, and her eyes watered. He wondered if she was a daytime tippler. “I like your hat,” she said, to fill the lengthening silence. “Are you a fan?”

  “No more than normal.”

  “They won the World Series.”

  “That is true. Get in the car, Lynne,” he said, his powers of reassurance deepening. “I’ll drive you home. There’s nothing downtown. Nobody knows how long the outage will be. Even the bank and post office didn’t know. The only thing open was the health-food store.”

  “I was taking a walk,” she said, as if this hadn’t been quite established. “I can keep going.”

  “Don’t you notice? The rain is starting up again. The skies are about to let loose.”

  Blinking, pressing her lips together to suppress their tremor—the lower had a trick of twitching sideways—she walked around in front of his headlights. He leaned across the car seats to tug at the door handle and push open the passenger door for her, as if she couldn’t do it for herself. Sliding in, with a slither of white vinyl, she confessed, “There was a beeping in the house I had to get away from. Willy’s not even in Boston, where I could call him.”

  “I think that’s your burglar alarm,” Evan told her. “Or some other alarm that doesn’t like losing current. I’ll come inside, if I may, and look at the problem.”

  She had brought a pleasant smell with her into the car, a smell from his childhood—cough drops or licorice. “You may,” she said, settling back on his leather car seat. “I got so afraid,” she went on, with a wry twist to her mouth, as if to laugh at herself, or at the memory of a long-ago self.

  He had never been to the Willards’ place. Their driveway was fringed with more elaborate plantings than the Morrises’—gnarly little azaleas, already bare of leaf, and euonymus still blaring forth that surreal autumnal magenta. Their parking area was covered in larger, whiter stones than the brown half-inch pebbles that Camilla had insisted on despite their tendency (which Evan had pointed out) to scatter into the lawn during winter snowplowing. But the basic house, a good-sized clapboarded neo-colonial twenty years old, with a gratuitous swath of first-floor brick façade, looked much like his. Lynne hadn’t locked the front door, just walked out in her panic. Trailing behind her, Evan was surprised by the lithe swiftness with which she climbed the steps of the flagstone porch and let herself back in, holding the storm door for him as she opened the other.

  Inside, the beeping was distinct and insistent, but not the urgent, ever-louder bleating of alarm mode. He turned the wrong way at first; the floor plan of this house was different from his, with the family room on the left instead of the right, and the kitchen beyond it, not beside it. The furnishings, though, looked much the same—the modern taste of twenty years ago, boxy and stuffe
d, bare wood and monochrome wool, coffee tables of thick glass on cruciform legs of stainless steel, promiscuously mixed with Orientals and family antiques. These possessions looked slightly smarter and less tired than those in his home; but Evan tended to glamorize what other people had.

  “Over here,” Lynne said, “next to the closet”—the very front-hall closet in which she was hanging up her raincoat of white vinyl. The snug knit gray dress she wore beneath it looked to him as if she had come from a ladies’ luncheon that noon. Using her toes, she pried off her bulky sneakers without bothering to unlace them—perhaps to avoid bending over, ass up, beneath his eyes—and kicked them onto the closet floor.

  “Yes,” he said, moving to the panel in stocking feet. “It’s just like mine.” He lifted his hand to touch it, then took thought to ask, “May I?”

  “Help yourself,” she said. Her voice, in her own house, had become almost slangy, shedding its quaver. “Be my guest.”

  He pushed the little rectangular button labelled Reset. The beeping stopped, sharply. Coming close up behind him, she marvelled. “That’s all it takes?”

  “Apparently,” he said. “That tells it the current shut-off wasn’t a home invasion. Not that I’m much of a hand with technology.”

  She giggled in obscure delight. What he had smelled in the car, he realized, had had alcohol in it, mixed with a licorice scent from long ago. “Willy’s such a prick,” she told Evan. “He knows all this stuff but never shares it. Tell me,” Lynne said, “as a man. Do you think he really has to spend all this time in Chicago?”

  Cautiously, he offered, “Business can be very demanding. At a certain level men—and women in business, too, of course—have to look each other in the eye. I used to be on planes all the time and have meetings and all that myself, but I found working at home was more efficient. With all this electronic communication everywhere there’s really no need to get out that much. But, then, I don’t know Will—Mr. Willard’s business.” His words, nervously excessive, seemed to have an echo in the unfamiliar house—or, rather, felt absorbed by its partial strangeness, the sounds falling into the many little differences between this house and his own. The rain, as he had foretold, had returned, whispering and drumming outside, and bringing inside a deeper shade of afternoon. The wind whipped bursts of wet pellets across the windows.