by John Updike
Normally, he liked lots of cover; here, a light blanket was enough. Normally, he could never sleep on his back; here, of necessity, he could sleep no other way, his body slightly turned to ease the vertical ache in his abdomen, his left arm at his side receiving all night long the nurturing liquids of the I.V. tube. Lights always burned; voices always murmured in the hall; this world no more rested than the parental world beyond the sides of a crib.
In the depths of the same night when the home run was struck, a touch on his upper right arm woke Carson. He opened his eyes and there, in the quadrant of space where the rectangle of television had been, a queenly smooth black face smiled down upon him. She was a nurse taking his blood pressure; she had not switched on the overhead light in his room and so the oval of her face was illumined only indirectly, from afar, as had been the pieces of furniture in his hotel room. Without looking at the luminous dial of his wristwatch on the bedside table, he knew this was one of those abysmal hours when despair visits men, when insomniacs writhe in an ocean of silence, when the jobless and the bankrupt want to scream in order to break their circular calculations, when spurned lovers roll from an amorous dream onto empty sheets, and soldiers abruptly awake to the metallic taste of coming battle. In this hour of final privacy she had awakened him with her touch. No more than a thin blanket covered his body in the warm, dim room. I forgive you, her presence said. She pumped up a balloon around his arm, relaxed it, pumped it up again. She put into Carson’s mouth one of those rocket-shaped instruments of textured plastic that have come to replace glass thermometers, and while waiting for his temperature to register in electronic numbers on a gadget at her waist she hummed a little tune, as if humorously to disavow her beauty, that beauty which women have now come to regard as an enemy, a burden and cause for harassment. Carson thought of his daughter.
Although many nurses administered to him—as he gained strength he managed to make small talk with them even at four in the morning—this particular one, her perfectly black and symmetrical face outlined like an eclipsed sun with its corona, never came again.
“Walk,” the surgeon urged Carson. “Get up and walk as soon as you can. Get that body moving. It turns out it wasn’t the disease used to kill a lot of people in hospitals, it was lying in bed and letting the lungs fill up with fluid.”
Walking meant, at first, pushing the spindly, rattling I.V. pole along with him. There was a certain jaunty knack to it—easing the wheels over the raised metal sills here and there in the linoleum corridor, placing the left hand at the balance point he thought of as the pole’s waist, swinging “her” out of the way of another patient promenading with his own gangling chrome partner. From observing other patients Carson learned the trick of removing the I.V. bag and threading it through his bathrobe sleeve and rehanging it, so he could close his bathrobe neatly. His first steps, in the moss-green sponge slippers the hospital provided, were timid and brittle, but as the days passed the length of his walks increased: to the end of the corridor, where the windows of a waiting room overlooked the distant center of the city; around the corner, past a rarely open snack bar, and into an area of children’s diseases; still farther, to an elevator bank and a carpeted lounge where pregnant women and young husbands drank Tab and held hands. The attendants at various desks in the halls came to know him, and to nod as he passed, with his lengthening stride and more erect posture. His handling of the I.V. pole became so expert as to feel debonair.
His curiosity about the city revived. What he saw from the window of his own room was merely the wall of another wing of the hospital, with gift plants on the windowsills and here and there thoughtful bathrobed figures gazing outward toward the wall of which his own bathrobed figure was a part. From the windows of the waiting room, the heart of the city with its clump of brown and blue skyscrapers and ribbonlike swirls of highway seemed often to be in sunlight, while clouds shadowed the hospital grounds and parking lots and the snarl of taxis around the entrance. Carson was unable to spot the hotel where he had stayed, or the industrial district where he had hoped to sell his systems, or the art museum that contained, he remembered reading, some exemplary Renoirs and a priceless Hieronymus Bosch. He could see at the base of the blue-brown mass of far buildings a suspension bridge, and imagined the dirty river it must cross, and the eighteenth-century fort that had been built here to hold the river against the Indians, and the nineteenth-century barge traffic that had fed the settlement and then its industries, which attracted immigrants, who thrust the grid of city streets deep into the surrounding farmland.
This was still a region of farmland; thick, slow, patient, pious voices drawled and twanged around Carson as he stood there gazing outward and eavesdropping. Laconic, semi-religious phrases of resignation fell into place amid the standardized furniture and slippered feet and pieces of jigsaw puzzles half assembled on card tables here. Fat women in styleless print dresses and low-heeled shoes had been called in from their kitchens, and in from the fields men with crosshatched necks and hands that had the lumpy, rounded look of used tools.
Illness and injury are great democrats, and had achieved a colorful cross section. Carson came to know by sight a lean man with cigar-dark skin and taut Oriental features; his glossy shaved head had been split by a Y-shaped gash now held together by stitches. He sat in a luxurious light-brown, almost golden robe, his wounded head propped by a hand heavy with rings, in the room with the pregnant women and the silver elevator doors. When Carson nodded once in cautious greeting, this apparition said loudly, “Hey, man,” as if they shared a surprising secret. Through the open doorways of the rooms along the corridors, Carson glimpsed prodigies—men with beaks of white bandage and plastic tubing, like those drinking birds many fads ago; old ladies shrivelling to nothing in a forest of flowers and giant facetious get-well cards; and an immensely plump mocha-colored woman wearing silk pantaloons and a scarlet Hindu dot in the center of her forehead. She entertained streams of visitors—wispy, dusky men and great-eyed children. Like Carson, she was an honorary member of the city, and she would acknowledge his passing with a languid lifting of her fat fingers, tapered as decidedly as the incense cones on her night table.
The third day, he was put on solid food and disconnected from the intravenous tubing. With his faithful I.V. pole removed from the room, he was free to use both arms and to climb stairs. His surgeon at his last appearance (dressed in lumberjack shirt and chinos, merrily about to “take off,” for it had become the weekend) had urged stair climbing upon his patient as the best possible exercise. There was, at the end of the corridor in the other direction from the waiting room from whose windows the heart of the city could be viewed, an exit giving on a cement-and-steel staircase almost never used. Here, down four flights to the basement, then up six to the locked rooftop door, and back down two to his own floor, Carson obediently trod in his bathrobe and his by now disintegrating green sponge slippers.
His happiness was purest out here, in this deserted and echoing sector, where he was invisible and anonymous. In his room, the telephone had begun to ring. The head of his company back in New Jersey called repeatedly, at first to commiserate and then to engineer a way in which Carson’s missed appointments could be patched without the expense of an additional trip. So Carson, sitting up on his adaptable mattress, placed calls to the appropriate personnel and gave an enfeebled version of his pitch; the white-noise company expressed interest in digital color-graphics imaging, and Carson mailed them his firm’s shiny brochure on its newest system (resolutions to 640 pixels per line, 65,536 simultaneous colors, image memory up to 256K bytes). The secretary from the other company, who had sounded sympathetic on the phone five days ago, showed up in person; she turned out to be comely in a coarse way, with bleached, frizzed hair, the remnant of a swimming-pool tan, and active legs she kept crossing and re-crossing as she described her own divorce—the money, the children, the return to work after years of being a pampered suburbanite. “I could be one again, let me tell you. Thes
e women singing the joys of being in the work force, they can have it.” This woman smoked a great deal, exhaling noisily and crushing each cerise-stained butt into a jar lid she had brought in her pocketbook. Carson had planned his afternoon in careful half-hour blocks—the staircase, thrice up and down; a visit to the waiting room, where he had begun to work on one of the jigsaw puzzles; a visit to his bathroom if his handled bowels were willing; finally, a luxurious immersion in last month’s Byte and the late innings of this Saturday’s playoff game. His visitor crushed these plans along with her many cigarettes. Then his own ex-wife telephoned, kittenish the way she had become, remarried yet with something plaintive still shining through and with a note of mockery in her voice, as if his descending into a strange city with a bursting appendix was another piece of willful folly, like his leaving her and his ceasing to teach mathematics at the business school—all those tedious spread sheets. His son called collect from Mexico on Sunday, sounding ominously close at hand, and spacy, as long awkward silences between father and son ate up the dollars. His daughter never called, which seemed considerate and loving of her. She and Carson knew there was no disguising our essential solitude.
He found that after an hour in his room and bed he became homesick for the stairs. At first, all the flights had seemed identical, but by now he had discovered subtle differences among them—old evidence of spilled paint on one set of treads, a set of numbers chalked by a workman on the wall of one landing, water stains and cracks affecting one stretch of rough yellow plaster and not another. At the bottom, there were plastic trash cans and a red door heavily marked with warnings to push the crash bar only in case of emergency. At the top, a plain steel door, without handle or window, defied penetration. The doors at the landings in between each gave on a strange outdoor space, a kind of platform hung outside the door leading into the hospital proper; pre-poured cement grids prevented leaping or falling or a clear outlook but admitted cool fresh air and allowed a fractional view of the city below.
The neighborhood here was flat and plain—quarter-acrelot tract houses built long enough ago for the bloom of newness to have wilted and for dilapidation to be setting in. The hospital wall, extending beyond the projecting staircase, blocked all but a slice of downward vision containing some threadbare front yards, one of them with a tricycle on its side and another with a painted statue of the Virgin, and walls of pastel siding in need of repainting, and stretches of low-pitched composition-shingled roof—a shabby, sort of small-town vista to Carson’s eyes, but here well within the city limits. He never saw a person walking on the broad sidewalks, and few cars moved along the street even at homecoming hour. Nearest and most vivid, a heap of worn planking and rusting scaffold pipes and a dumpster coated with white dust and loaded with plaster and lathing testified to a new phase of construction as the hospital continued to expand. Young men sometimes came and added to the rubbish, or loudly threw the planking around. These efforts seemed unorganized, and ceased on the weekend.
The drab housing and assembled rubble that he saw through the grid of the cement barrier, which permitted no broader view, nevertheless seemed to Carson brilliantly real, moist and deep-toned and full. Life, this was life. This was the world. When—still unable to climb stairs, the I.V. pole at his side—he had first come to this landing, just shoving open the door had been an effort. The raw outdoor air had raked through his still-drugged system like a sweeping rough kiss, early-fall air mixing summer and winter, football and baseball, stiff with chill yet damp and not quite purged of growth. Once, he heard the distant agitation of a lawn mower. Until the morning when he was released, he would come here even in the dark and lean his forehead against the cement and breathe, trying to take again into himself the miracle of the world, reprogramming himself, as it were, to live—the air cold on his bare ankles, his breath a visible vapor, his bowels resettling around the ache of their healing.
The taxi took him straight to the airport; Carson saw nothing of the city but the silhouettes beside the highway and the highway’s scarred center strip. For an instant after takeoff, a kind of map spread itself underneath him, and then was gone. Yet afterwards, thinking back upon the farm voices, the distant skyscrapers, the night visits of the nurses, the doctors with their unseen, unsullied homes, the dozens of faces risen to the surface of his pain, he seemed to have come to know the city intimately; it was like, on other of his trips, a woman who, encountered in a bar and paid at the end, turns ceremony inside out, and bestows herself without small talk.
The Lovely Troubled
Daughters of Our Old Crowd
WHY DON’T THEY GET MARRIED? You see them around town, getting older, little spinsters already, pedalling bicycles to their local jobs or walking up the hill by the rocks with books in their arms. Annie Langhorne, Betsey Clay, Damaris Wilcombe, Mary Jo Addison: we’ve known them all since they were two or three, and now they’ve reached their mid-twenties, back from college, back from Year Abroad, grown women but not going anywhere, not New York or San Francisco or even Boston, just hanging around here in this little town letting the seasons wash over them, walking the same streets where they grew up, hanging in the shadows of their safe old homes.
On the edge of a Wilcombe lawn party, their pale brushed heads like candles burning in the summer sunlight, a ribbon or a plastic barrette attached for the occasion—I can see them still, their sweet pastel party dresses and their feet bare in the grass, those slender little-girl feet, with bony tan toes, that you feel would leave rabbit tracks in the dew. Damaris and Annie, best friends then and now, had been coaxed into carrying hors d’oeuvres around; they carried the tray cockeyed, their wrists were so weak, the devilled eggs slipping, their big eyes with their pale-blue whites staring upward so solemnly at your grinning grown-up face as you took your devilled egg and smiled to be encouraging. We were in our late twenties then, young at being old—the best of times. The summer smells of bug spray on the lawn and fresh mint in the gin; the young wives healthy and brown in their sundresses, their skin glowing warm through the cotton; the children still small and making a flock in the uncut grass beyond the lawn, running and tumbling, their pastel dresses getting stained with green, their noise coming and going in the field as a kind of higher-pitched echo of ours, creating their own world underfoot as the liquor and the sunlight soaked in and the sky filled with love.
I can still see Betsey and my own daughter the night we first met the Clays. They had just moved to town. A cousin of Maureen’s had gone to school with my wife and sent us a note. We dropped by to give them the name of our dentist and doctor and happened to hit it off. April, it must have been, or May. Cocktails dragged on into dark and Maureen brought a pickup dinner out to the patio table. The two baby girls that had never met before—not much more than two years old, they must have been—were put to sleep in the same bed. Down they came into the dark, down into the cool air outdoors, hand in hand out of this house strange to the two of them, Betsey a white ghost in her nightie, her voice so eerie and thin but distinct. “See moon?” she said. Unable to sleep, they had seen the moon from the bed. The Clays had moved from the city, where maybe the moon was not so noticeable. “See moon?”: her voice thin and distinct as a distant owl’s call. And of course they were right, there the moon was, lopsided and sad-faced above the trees just beginning to blur into leaf. Time (at last) to go home.
Now Betsey works at the paint-and-linoleum store on Second Street and gives guitar lessons on the side. She fell in love with her elderly married music teacher at Smith and went about as far as she could go with classical guitar, even to Spain for a year. When the Episcopal church sponsored a refugee Cuban family last winter, they called in Betsey for her Spanish. She lives with her mother, in that same house where she saw the moon, a gloomy place now that Maureen has closed off half the rooms to save on heat. The Clays broke up it must be all of ten years ago. There were some lovely times had on that patio.
Betsey sings in the Congregational choir alongside Mar
y Jo Addison, who after that bad spell of anorexia in her teens has gotten quite plump again. She has those dark eyebrows of her mother’s, strange in a freckled fair face—shaped flat across and almost meeting in the middle. Both the Addisons have remarried and left town, but Mary Jo rents two rooms above the Rites of Passage travel agency and collects antiques and reads books of history, mostly medieval. My daughter invited her over for Christmas dinner but she said no, she’d rather just sit cozy by her own fire, surrounded by her things. “Her nice old things,” was how it was reported.
Evelyn Addison liked nice things, too, but in her case they had to be modern—D.R. sofas covered in Haitian cotton, Danish end tables with rounded edges, butterfly chairs. Where are they, I wonder, all those heavy iron frames for the worn-out canvas slings of those butterfly chairs we used to sit on? A man could straddle one of the corners, but a woman just had to dump herself in, backside first, and hope that when the time came to go her husband would be around to pull her out. They had an authentic 1690 house, the Addisons, on Salem Street, and curiously enough their modern furniture fit right into those plain old rooms with the exposed beams and the walk-in fireplaces with the big wrought-iron spits and dark brick nooks the Puritans used to bake bread in. It may be that’s what Mary Jo is trying to get back to with her antiques. She dresses that way, too: dusty-looking and prim, her hair pulled into a tight roll held by a tortoiseshell pin. Her mother’s auburn hair, but without the spark rinsed into it. None of these girls, the daughters of our old crowd, seem to wear makeup.