by John Updike
“Nothing.” She smiled. “A tiny pain.”
“Where?” he asked, monosyllabic as if just awakened. The news at that moment showed an interview with a young Iranian revolutionary who spoke fluent, Midwestern-accented English, and Jeanette’s exact answer escaped Brad. If in the course of their marriage there was one act for which he blamed himself—could identify as a sin for which he deserved to be punished—it was this moment of inattention, when Jeanette first, after weeks of hugging her discomforts to herself, began to confide, in her delicate voice, what she would rather have kept hidden.
The days that followed, full of doctors and their equipment, lifted all secrecy from the disease and its course. It was cancer, metastasizing from the liver, though she had never been a drinker. For Brad these days were busy ones; after the five years of retirement, of not knowing quite what to do with himself, he was suddenly housekeeper, cook, chauffeur, switchboard operator, nurse. Isolated in their big house, while their three children anxiously visited and then hurried back to their own problems, and their friends and neighbors tried to tread the thin line between kindness and interference, the couple that winter had a kind of honeymoon. An air of adventure, of the exotic, tinged their excursions to clinics and specialists tucked into sections of Boston they had never visited before. They spent all their hours together, and became more than ever one. His own scalp itched as her soft hair fell away under the barrage of chemotherapy; his own stomach ached when she would not eat. She would greet with a bright smile the warmth and aroma of the food he brought to the table or her bed, and she would take one forkful, so she could tell him how good it was; then, with a magical slowness meant to make the gesture invisible, Jeanette would let the fork slowly sink back to the plate, keeping her fingers on the silver handle as if at any moment she might decide to use it again. In this position she sometimes even dozed off, under the sway of medication. Brad learned to treat her not eating as a rebuff he must overlook. If he urged the food upon her, sternly or playfully, real anger, of the petulant and surprisingly bitter kind that a child harbors, would break through her stoical, drugged calm.
The other irritant, strangely, seemed to be the visits of the young Episcopal clergyman. He had come to the church this year, after the long reign of a hearty, facetious man no one had had to take seriously. The new rector possessed a self-conscious, honey-smooth voice, and curly pale hair already receding from his temples, young as he was. Brad, who had been privy to the infighting among the search-committee members that had preceded his selection, admired his melodious sermons and his conservative demeanor; ten years ago a clergyman his age would have been trying to radicalize everybody. But Jeanette complained that his visits to the house—though they rarely extended for more than fifteen minutes—tired her. When she became too frail, too emaciated and constantly drowsy, to leave her bedroom, and the young man proposed that he bring Communion to her, she asked Brad to tell him, “Another time.”
The room at Mass. General Hospital to which she was eventually moved overlooked, across a great air well, a concrete wall of steel-rimmed windows. The wing was modern, built on the rubble of the old West End. It was late March, the first spring of a new decade. Though on sunny days a few giggling nurses and hardy patients took their lunches on cardboard trays out to the patio at the base of the air well, the sky was usually an agitated gray and the hospital heat was turned way up. During his visits Brad often removed his suit coat, it was so hot in Jeanette’s room.
Dressed in a white hospital johnny and a pink quilted bed jacket with ribbons, she looked pretty against her pillows, though on a smaller scale than the woman he had known so long. Her cheeks still had some plumpness, and her fine straight nose and clear eyes and narrow arched brows—old-fashioned eyebrows, which looked plucked though they weren’t—still made the compact, highly finished impression that had aways excited him, that kindled a fire within him. Her hair was growing back, a cap of soft brown bristle, since chemotherapy had been abandoned. Only her hands, laid inert and fleshless on the blanket, betrayed that something terrible was happening to her.
One day she told him, with a touch of mischief, “Our young parson was in from Newton this morning, and I told him not to bother anymore.”
“You sent the priest away?” Brad’s aged voice seemed to rumble and crackle in his ears, in contrast to Jeanette’s, which sounded crystalline and distant.
“ ‘Priest,’ for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Why can’t you just call him a minister?” It had been a joke of sorts between them, how High Church he had become. When on occasion they visited the Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street, she had ridiculed the incense, the robed teams of acolytes. “He makes me tired,” she said now.
“But don’t you want to keep up with Communion?” It was his favorite sacrament; he harbored an inner image, a kind of religious fantasy, of the wafer and wine turning, with a muffled explosion, to pure light in the digestive system.
“Like ‘keeping up’ an insurance policy,” she sighed, and did sound tired, tired to death. “It seems so pointless.”
“But you must,” Brad said, panicked.
“I must? Why must I? Who says I must?” The blue of her challenging eyes and the fevered flush of her cheeks made a garish contrast.
“Why, because … you know why. Because of the salvation of your soul. That’s what you used to talk about when I first met you.”
She looked toward the window with a faint smile. “When I used to go alone to Copley Methodist. I loved that church; it was so bizarre, with its minaret. Dear old Doctor Stidger, on and on. Now it’s just a parking lot. Salvation of the soul.” Her gaunt chest twitched—a laugh that didn’t reach her lips.
He lowered his eyes, feeling mocked. His own hands, an old man’s gnarled, spotted claws, were folded together between his knees. “You mean you don’t believe?” In his inner ear he felt all the height of space concealed beneath the floor, down and down.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “Doesn’t it just seem an awful lot of bother?”
“Not a bit?” he persisted.
Jeanette sighed again and didn’t answer.
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. No,” she said, “that’s not being honest. We should start being honest. I do know. Since you took it from me. You moved right in. It didn’t seem necessary, for the two of us to keep it up.”
“But …” He couldn’t say, so late, how fondly he had intended it, enlisting at her side.
She offered to console him. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” When he remained silent, feeling blackness all about him, to every point on the horizon, as on those nights in the Pacific, she shifted to a teasing note: “Honey, why does it matter?”
She knew. Because his death was also close. He lifted his eyes and saw her as enviably serene, having wrought this vengeance. A nurse rustled at the door, her syringe clinking in its aluminum tray, and across the air well in the blue spring twilight the lights had come on, rectangles of gold. It had begun, a few dry flakes, to spit snow.
Though she had asked that there be absolutely no religious service, Brad and the young minister arranged one, following the oldest-fashioned, wholly impersonal rite. Jeanette would have been seventy-one in May, and Brad was three years older. He continued to go to the ten o’clock service, his erect figure carrying his white hair like a flag. But it was sheer inert motion; there were no falcon flights of his mind anymore, no small, true voice at his side. There was nothing. He wished he could think otherwise, but he had believed in her all those years and could not stop now.
Getting into the Set
FOR THE FIRST YEARS that Nick and Katie Higginson lived in the little New England town, they were preoccupied with their house, an early-eighteenth-century saltbox that had been allowed to drift perilously close to complete dilapidation. The beams in the dirt cellar were powdery with dry rot; the lovely old fireplaces, with their wrought-iron spits and inset bake ovens, had been bricked and boarded over. The flo
ors—the irreplaceable broad pine floorboards—had been painted dark hard colors and, in the room that became the Higginsons’ dining room, covered with several layers of linoleum. The house, though not large, had been divided; to accommodate the families that lived in both halves, upstairs rooms had been partitioned, downstairs doors had been removed, and makeshift arrangements of plumbing and wiring had been pushed and cut through the precious old woodwork. Some raised-field panelling had been, incredibly, wallpapered over, and layers of poisonous green paint had all but obscured the beauty of the exquisite shell cupboard to the left of the fireplace in the living room—the house’s gem, with its serpentine shelves and curved back panels, all framed in bolection-molded trim and stop-fluted pilasters. Nick and Katie scraped and refinished, and what they could not do paid others to do. The floors, worn in visible troughs near the doorways and along the central hall, were pried up board by board and relaid and sanded level. A downstairs bathroom was built into the space of an abandoned stairway. Unobtrusive baseboard hot-water heating replaced the ponderous cast-iron radiators, whose paint had been peeled by their own steam; dainty twelve-over-twelve sash windows were restored where a previous owner had barbarously installed casemented Thermopane.
Through her new windows Katie would gaze out at the street, one of the town’s main streets; a block away, the shops began, and people shopping downtown often had to park in front of the Higginsons’. There was, she realized those first years, a set of people in town about her and Nick’s age, who saluted one another on the sidewalk and even embraced, as if a jovial reunion were constantly in progress. They wore, these young adults in their early thirties, a ramshackle and reckless yet well-heeled air; they seemed, in winter sunshine or summer shade, in quilted parkas or cotton shorts, to be always between parties. She and Nick had joined the available organizations, the conservation group and the Congregational church and the historical society, and yet no parties forth-came. She learned the names of some of the set—Brick Matthews and his wife, Felicia; Tory Riddle and her husband, Trevor; the Ledyards, Joan and Kenneth—but not the way in.
Katie was a tall woman with a high glossy forehead that made her seem somewhat brittle and prim. Yet her figure was good, and her spirit unsatisfied. She had married Nick when she was only twenty, not finishing college, and two children, a boy and a girl, had arrived rapidly, exhausting her breeding instinct. Now that both children were in school, her days stretched long; she had taken to doing household tasks better suited to an elderly spinster. Nick’s parents had died rather prematurely, leaving the young couple a great deal of handsome antique furniture, including a mahogany double-pedestal-base dining table and six Chippendale dining chairs whose old crewelwork seats had over the years become threadbare and stained. Katie picked six harmonizing but not identical floral needlepoint patterns and set about the long task of executing them—as if she needed some endless chore to fill the time between now and the grave. Nick had found such a chore for himself: he was paving the old cellar, mixing a few bags of sand and cement at a time, often descending after dinner and coming up, begrimed and blinking, well after Katie, wearied by the nightly rituals of putting the children to bed, had herself fallen asleep. The needlepointing hurt her eyes after an hour, but at her tender age she was resisting getting close-distance glasses.
The children made possible the first step, on the beach. Katie’s confidence was enhanced in a bathing suit; furthermore, there was a kind of emboldening democracy at the beach, so sunstruck and broad and murmurous. The tame tumult of its surf merged in the ear with the hum of bathers, the hundreds of exclamations and conversations all testifying to some central treasure, some hidden honey. Her eight-year-old, Chris, had joined another boy in building a sand castle; this boy, when the castle was undermined by a lunge of the tide, joined a group of children and mothers that included Felicia Matthews and Joan Ledyard. Chris followed his new friend into their midst, and Katie hesitantly trailed after him, in case he was being a nuisance. “Not at all,” the elegantly brown Matthews woman told her, staring upwards with eyes scrunched small as diamonds in the sun.
There were several young mothers Katie didn’t know by sight, and she felt ungainly, standing. She was putting the others in her shadow. “Sit down if you’d like,” the Ledyard woman said, after a pause in which, Katie imagined, a silent debate had been held in the air. Katie sat inelegantly on the damp sand and listened as the other women chattered. Chris soon got bored; the boy whose castle he had helped build ignored him in favor of the more familiar playmates who clustered in this nest of beach chairs and reclining women. When Chris rejoined his sister, on a distant blanket, his mother had to follow. Katie tried to express in her goodbyes how grateful she was for these ten minutes of shared company; the responding farewells sounded faint and perfunctory, like wind chimes.
But a step had been made. She described, that evening, the encounter to Nick. “They seemed just terribly nice, and quite funny, really, their way of putting things.”
“For example.”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember. A lot of it has to do with the tone of voice. The way Felicia called her husband ‘the old man,’ and spoke of her children as ‘the littles.’ It doesn’t sound so funny when I say it, but in the context …”
“O.K.,” Nick said, anxious to get to his basement. Though fearful of rats, she had more than once gone down the cellar steps with him and tried to share his delight and sense of gradual triumph, each day’s gobs hardened by next day into an adamant gray chunk of floor. It was like an army—his army of particles, consolidating, spreading to all the dark, cobwebbed corners. The foundation of the house had been made of fieldstones, laid up without mortar, and after the floor was finished Nick intended to cement and point all these stones, fixing them in place rigidly.
Now at the beach Katie sometimes dared sit with one or two of the wives of the set, if there were not too many. A group bigger than three she declined to join, imagining that she was winning points with her tact. Even when there were just two or three, she was aware of worlds of allusion that her presence was suppressing, allusions to scandals brewing or brewed, to gatherings that had taken place or would take place. The set in season played tennis and paddle tennis, went sailing and skiing and picnicking. In the late spring, Katie had gathered, there was an annual canoe trip down the river as far as the factory and the falls, and on Sundays in the autumn, the men played touch football in somebody’s field. “Oh, Nick played football in high school!” she volunteered one August day, when the subject had slipped into conversation; over these summer weeks Felicia and Tory and Joan had become a bit careless of their gossip in her presence. Katie had once regaled them with a word-picture of Nick and his basement and, since a comic husband seemed to be a ticket to acceptance by these women, she offered it again. “He played a floating end, or whatever they call those people who aren’t very strong and can’t throw the ball, either.”
There was a silence, washed across by the desultory sounds of the dying summer—the waves becalmed, the crowds thinned. “They may not be doing it this year,” Joan Ledyard at last said. “They’re all a year older.”
“But if they do and need somebody,” Katie persisted, blushing at her own shamelessness, “they should call Nick; it would be so good for him.”
When, a month later, the call did come, Katie was startled, even frightened, by the gravelly, barking man’s voice at the other end of the line. He didn’t identify himself and asked for Nick; she called her husband up from the cellar. Nick spoke to the man in grudging monosyllables. “Who on earth was it?” Katie asked when he had hung up.
His eyes, she thought, looked fishy behind the plastic goggles he wore to protect them from cement dust. “Some guy called Trevor Riddle. He’d heard I’d like to play touch football. I don’t know where he got that idea; I hate the damn game. I nearly got my neck broken playing football in high school.”
“You didn’t say no!”
“You heard
me talking. I thanked him and said I’d keep it in mind. That’s as good as saying no.”
Katie was determined not to cry, though she felt as if a door had been slammed in her face. Nick lifted his goggles to see her better; she flounced away. That night, she dressed for bed not in the sheer persimmon-colored shortie that he liked and that was something of a Saturday-night tradition for them, but in the long-sleeved flannel nightgown he said made her look like an old lady.
The next day turned out to be an invitingly brisk September Sunday, with the smell of apples and hay in the air. After lunch, though he had promised the children a bicycle ride, Nick put on some old corduroys and a sweatshirt and his jogging shoes, and went off to play touch football. When he came back, he was limping; he had sprained his ankle. Also, his speech was slightly loud and slurred. There had been drinks, afterwards, at someone’s house. Again, Katie resisted tears; she had not been invited. He explained, “Only some of the wives came, and others weren’t there; I couldn’t figure out the system, and figured I’d have a quick sip and be right home. Then I got to talking to some guy called Leadman, Leadbelly …”
“Ken Ledyard.”
“Right. About siding. He says they have a new Fiberglas clapboard now that breathes just like wood.”
“Nick, you’re drunk, and you’re not going to ruin this lovely old house with Fiberglas siding! It’s bad enough what you’ve done in the basement, smothering all the nice old dirt!” She dashed from the room as if to hide tears; but in truth she had remembered that she had turned down the lamb in the oven when Nick was so late coming home. It needed to be turned up again. And Katie needed to be alone with her new information, and to contemplate her next step.