by John Updike
They organize two tables of bridge afterwards, and, drunk as they know themselves to be now, this is droll also. “Double,” Lee Englehardt keeps saying solemnly, his shining brow furrowed, the long wisps of hair above his ears grayer than last year in the light of the paper-shaded bridge lamp that, like most of the furnishings of the house, will not be missed if ski tenants destroy it. “Four diamonds,” Andy Tyler says, hoping that Deborah Neusner will have the sense to put him back into spades. The Neusners, who spent their time at college less frivolously than the others, rarely play cards of any kind, and Deborah was pressed into service only because Marge pleaded a headache and has gone back into her bedroom. Husbands and wives cannot be partners, and should not be at the same table. “Double,” Lee Englehardt says. Take me out of diamonds, Andy Tyler thinks intensely, so intensely the message feels engraved on the smoke above his head. “Pass,” Deborah Neusner says, weakly. “Four hearts,” says Bernadette Maloney, feeling sorry for Deborah, knowing that being so close to Lee upsets her; the two had an affair years ago, a fling that ended up in the air, so in a sense it was never over. That is one of the Englehardts’ charms, their ability to leave things up in the air, like jugglers in a freeze-frame. “Four spades,” Andy pronounces with great relief, praying that Deborah will now have the wit to pass again. “Five diamonds?” she hesitantly says.
Josh Neusner reads a very old National Geographic he found in the woodbox beneath the stairs. It is so old that the photos are mostly black-and-white, and the type is different, and the cultural biases are overt. These bare-breasted women and woolly chiefs with bones through their noses are clearly, cheerfully being condescended to, anthropologically. This would never do now; isn’t it one of the tenets of our times that all cultural formations, even cannibalism and foot-binding, make equally good sense? Josh’s neck and shoulders ache from splitting his weight in wood. He has taken a glass of dinner wine away from the table and rests it on the broad arm of the corduroy-covered armchair by the dying fire that Ralph built. Suddenly the wine seems an odious, fermented substance, and the hilarious chatter from the bridge tables inane, poisonous. Above his head, on the swaybacked ceiling, footsteps scurry and rustle like those of giant rats. The children; he wants to go upstairs to check on the girls and tuck in the twins, but during these leaf-season weekends the children are invited to make their own society, and exist like a pack of shadows in the corners of the grownup fun. Strange places, strange customs; cannibalism, he reads, is almost never a matter of hunger but of ingesting the enemy’s spiritual virtues. He wonders why liquor is called spirits. The cheap wine tastes dead. The thumping and scurrying overhead slowly weakens, loses its grip. He himself, when at midnight both tables loudly announce another rubber, goes upstairs and puts himself into one of the upper bunk beds in the men’s dormitory. The window in the upstairs hall where Deborah and Bernadette met and talked this afternoon now displays white, scratchy, many-tentacled frost ferns above the radiator.
The bunk isn’t quite long enough for him to stretch out in. He thinks of Marge alone in her room below him, her sulky mystery, her beautiful dancer’s body. She was the queen of all this and now is trying to withdraw. He could sneak down the back stairs and they could spin together. Josh cannot sleep. The noise from below, the sound of rampant spirits, is too great. And when at last the bridge concludes and people begin to clatter up the stairs, he still cannot sleep. Andy underneath him, Lee and Bill across the room in the other double bunk, all fall asleep swiftly, and snore. Lee is the most spectacular—nasal arpeggios that encompass octaves, up and down the scale—but Bill plugs steadily away, his rhythmic wheeze like a rusty engine that will not die, and Andy demonstrates, a few feet below Josh’s face, the odd talent of coughing in his sleep, coughing prolongedly without waking himself. Josh feels trapped. A broadsword of light falls diagonally across the floor, and there are faint, halting footsteps. One of the Tremaynes’ cats has pushed open the door and is nosing about. Josh strains his eyes and sees it is the gray one with extra toes. He reaches out from the upper bunk with his foot and nudges the door shut again. The house’s huge content of protoplasm ebbs in little stages into quiet, into sleep: twenty-six other human beings—he counts them up, including the boys in the barn—soaking up restorative dreams, leaving him stranded, high and listening, his ears staring into the tense, circumambient wilderness. Never again. This is the last time he and his family are going to come for this weekend to Vermont. This is torture.
Bacon! The crisp, illicit, life-enhancing smell of it penetrates the room, his nostrils, his brain. Josh sees that the three other bunks are empty, the day is well advanced. He must have fallen asleep after all. He remembers, as the wee hours became larger and lighter, conducting mental negotiations, amid the brouhaha of the other men’s snoring, with the gray cat, who seemed to be here, and then there, in the room. Now the animal is nowhere to be seen, and Josh must have dropped off for an hour or two.
The house, like a ship under way, is shaking, trembling, with the passage of feet, with activity. A maul and wedge ring: Lee Englehardt is splitting his weight in wood. Car doors slam: the Maloneys, all seven of them, are going off to Mass. They’ll bring back Sunday papers and a whole list of staples—crackers, orange juice, cheddar cheese, tonic water—that Marge has pressed upon them. She seems in a better mood. She is wearing, instead of the sullen peasant skirt and sweater and shawl of last night, tight shiny red pants that make her legs look almost as thin and sexy as her daughter Milly’s. Her hair is done up in a fat blond-gray pigtail that bounces on her back as she friskily, bossily prepares breakfast, wave after wave, flipping six pieces of bacon at a time with a long aluminum spatula. “Three pieces per person, and that includes you, Fritz Tyler,” she says severely. “Those who like their scrambled eggs runny, come serve yourselves right now. Those who don’t, get at the end of the line. We don’t believe in Sugar Pops in this household, Seth Neusner. Up here in the mountains it’s all bran and granola and yucky fiber. Betsey, go out to the woodpile and tell your father the baby’s just spit up all over herself and your mother’s in the bathroom.”
Ralph comes sleepily into the kitchen, the first cigar of the day in his mouth, its lit end making a triangle with his two red eyes. He is barefoot—pathetic white feet, with ingrown yellow toenails and long toes crushed together—and is coming from the wrong direction, if we assume he slept in the master bedroom, at the front of the downstairs.
He hasn’t slept in the master bedroom. Beyond the kitchen lies a small room with a few cots in it, for an overflow ski crowd. Ralph slept in there. He did not sleep with Marge! The knowledge runs silently through the mingled families, chastening them. For this weekend Marge and Ralph are like the mother and father, even of the other adults. We want them to love each other. For if they do not love each other, how can they love and take care of us?
Marge seems intent on showing that she can do it all. She ruffles Ralph’s head as he sits groggily at the breakfast table. Grownups eat at the long dining-room table, where one of the bridge groups played last night, and children at the round butcher-block table in the center of the kitchen. “Achey, achey?” Marge asks, cooingly.
“T-too much grape juice, Mother,” Ralph says.
They are trying to make up. We all feel better, bolder. Josh Neusner describes his terrible night, quite comically as he relives his mental negotiations with the mysterious cat, but Lee Englehardt, having come in from wood-splitting to care for Dorothea, without smiling states, “Jews make poor campers.” We are shocked. It is the sort of thing that can be said only among intimate friends or confirmed enemies. And why would they be enemies?
Josh, remembering Lee’s aggressive unconscious arpeggios, and his position at the card table next to Deborah, chooses to accept the remark as a piece of ethnology, arrived at innocently: Lee is an insurance salesman whose father was a professor of history, and as if in compensation for a lesser career he collects such small pedantic conclusions as that Jews make poor camp
ers. Lee’s charm really rests on his insecurity. Josh chooses to keep playing the clown. He covers his forehead with one hand and moans, “I can’t sleep without a woman. Men are hideous.”
Deborah, a little later, when they meet on the stair landing, says, “Baby, I’m sorry you had such a poor night; you should have played bridge.”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“You didn’t want to be asked. I would have given you my seat. Andy Tyler kept wanting to kill me, I could tell.”
“The only person I like here is Linda,” Josh petulantly volunteers. “And Dorothea,” he adds, to soften it.
This reminds her: “Ruth didn’t sleep in the girls’ dormitory last night. Marge set her up in the living room with the baby after everybody else had gone to bed, in case Dorothea yelled. So the bunk above me is empty if you really want it. Linda and Bernadette wouldn’t care.”
“It would make me look like a sissy.” He goes on, “And then yesterday I kept nearly cutting off my foot splitting their idiotic wood.”
“Come on, honey, try to get into the spirit of things.”
“It’s all barbaric,” he says, so light-headed with lack of sleep that every perception has a translucent, revelatory quality. Suddenly, he is having a very good time. He goes down and has some more coffee and bacon and discusses Boston-area private schools with Linda and Lee, who are disenchanted with highly touted Brookline High.
The Maloneys return laden with the Sunday New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Burlington Free Press. The children fight over the funnies, the men over the sports and financial pages. The day proceeds with that unreality peculiar to Sunday; one hour seems as long as two, and the next goes by in ten minutes. A great deal of the conversation concerns where various other people are. Marge is in the car, with her son, Skip, and her dog, Wolf, performing some errands having to do with quantities of natural fleece—uncarded, greasy-wet with lanolin—to be found at a farm fifteen miles away. It turns out that Andy Tyler has gone along for the ride. Bernadette Maloney is in Marge’s garden salvaging tomatoes and zucchini from last night’s frost; Mark and Mary and Teddy are helping her, by holding the paper bags with bored expressions and then by throwing the rotten vegetables at one another. Linda Tyler, having been told that her husband has disappeared with Marge, announces that she will go on a mushrooming walk in the woods; her daughter, Audrey, and Betsey Englehardt and the two Neusner girls come with her, like a procession of little witches in training. Christine Tremayne—who has inherited Marge’s dull complexion and Ralph’s stocky build, unfortunately—is showing Teresa Maloney the barn, and the Neusner twins tag along. The interior is awesome; some high small windows and the gaps between the slats admit shafts of light as if in a cathedral. They have all seen slides of cathedrals at school. The light reveals an atmosphere glittering with dust, dust from the hay still stacked in staircases of bales at one end, a dust that thickens the air, that makes light visible while lessening it. The children feel deep in the sea of time. Elements of old farm machinery rust in corners here and there, with pieces of lumber, ten-gallon milk cans, strawberry boxes, and glass eggs. They find an old rope-quoit set, and the four of them play until a dispute between Seth and Zebulon makes it no fun.
Milly Tremayne and Fritz Tyler—who knows where they have gone to? Mary Maloney, having left the garden party in tearful disgust when Mark caught her right on the mouth with a rotten zucchini, has come into the house; the television set gets only one channel, and that one full of ghosts from the hills and valleys between here and the station, but she is happily watching some man with big eyebrows and a Southern accent give a sermon, and a lot of fat ladies in glitzy dresses sing hymns, until her father comes and tells her she should be outdoors in the sunshine.
What sunshine? A cloud has just passed across the sun, not a little cloud but a large dark one, with a wide leaden center and agitated, straggling edges—a cloud it seems the surrounding mountains have given birth to.
Bill Maloney and Lee Englehardt find a shovel and refresh the holes that take the posts for the volleyball net. Nature fills in the holes from one leaf season to the next. Then they find and unwind the two-by-fours and the net and the guy ropes and pegs where they have reposed all wound and tangled up in the barn since last October. As they move slowly, in the quickly moving cloud shadows, through the tedious ritual of setting up the net, Lee asks Bill, “How was Mass?”
Bill, who has a moonface and delicate pink Irish skin, looks at Lee cockeyed and says, “Like it always is. That’s the beauty of it, Mr. Eng.”
Lee makes a rueful nod, concluding to himself that this is the essence of male companionship: cards close to the chest.
Inside the kitchen, Bernadette and Deborah are making lunch—a cauldron of clam chowder Bernadette has lugged up from Boston; and a tuna salad Deborah is whipping up out of four cans plus chopped celery, scallions, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and a head of lettuce; and a tinned ham for those who, like most of the children, hate fish. As the two women slide and bump past each other between Marge’s old-fashioned black soapstone sink and the wooden countertops on either side, they quietly talk about the situation between Marge and Ralph, which seems far gone, and that between Andy and Linda, which seems to be heading for trouble.
Ruth Englehardt comes into the kitchen with her curly-headed toddler propped on her hip and a cigarette tilting at an opposite angle out of her mouth. “So the Queen of Sheba has eloped with the handyman,” she says, “the Queen of Sheba” referring to Marge and “the handyman” to Andy, not just because of his name but because of his tendency, well known to all the women, to reach out under the table and touch. “If you two were about to discuss Lee and me, I’ll leave,” she adds; then she begins to cough, and one eye cries from the smoke. She sets down the heavy child and watches her stagger across the worn linoleum to one of the low old mahogany counters, where Dorothea quicker than thought reaches up and flips a sharp knife down past her own ear. Ruth deftly retrieves the knife and her daughter; the little girl, as she feels herself being lifted, reflexively spreads her legs to sit astride her mother’s hip. The three women talk, touching their friends with their tongues not to harm them but to give themselves pleasure; little new can be offered, mere pinches or slivers added to the salad, tiny, almost meaningless remarks or glimpses that yet do enhance the flavor. The conversation, too, serves a purpose of location, of locating the others on a continuum of happiness or its opposite, of satisfying the speakers that the others are within hailing distance in this our dark passage through life, with its mating and birthing, its getting and spending, its gathering and scattering. Some, indeed, are even closer than hailing distance, for from underneath the floor there comes a sudden grumbling and scraping: their host wrapping more insulation.
Lunch is served, then volleyball. Let’s not do the volleyball. Let’s just say that once there were five on a side and now the children have grown so that three eight-person teams must be fielded, and some of the boys lunge and swagger and swat as lustily as their fathers. More lustily, since these powers are new to them. Matthew Maloney knocks Audrey Tyler flat on her back, and Fritz Tyler comes down from a spike right on Deborah Neusner’s toe, so that she thinks it might be broken. She thinks she heard it snap, at the still center of the swelling red cloud of pain. She hops off the court. “This hasn’t been their weekend,” Ruth Englehardt says sotto voce to Marge, who has returned from her drive to buy the wool.
“I just can’t get excited about any of it,” Marge confides to Ruth, under the net, while Bill Maloney, with much drolly elaborate ceremony, is winding up to serve. For all of his elaboration, the ball flies too high and sails out. The other side hoots. The sight of such a throng, in suburban shorts and halters and stencilled sweatshirts, is so unusual here in Vermont this time of year that cars and pickup trucks slow down on the little quiet unnumbered road. One truck (passing, everybody later agrees, for about the fourth time) fails to brake when the ball, hit wild by Eve Neusner, bounces under his
chassis and, with a sound as sickening as that of a box turtle being crushed beneath the wheels, bursts. Then the truck brakes. Ralph slightly knows the driver, and a pleasant and apologetic palaver takes place by the fence, though the red-bearded, red-hatted face of the truck driver doesn’t look apologetic. Mark Maloney has brought his soccer ball, and that is substituted, though it is enough heavier that a number of the females complain of stinging hands and sprained wrists.
So we have done the volleyball after all. The sun, momentarily appearing between the ridge of a mountain and the edge of another great cloud, throws the shadows of the poles right to the edge of the road. The smallest children—Teddy and Teri Maloney, Seth and Zebulon Neusner, even little Dorothea Englehardt, the knees of whose bib overalls are filthy and whose lips drool from sucking on a milkweed pod—scrimmage in the trampled grass and try to heave the heavy soccer ball, cunningly stitched together of pentagons, over the sagging net. The clouds have thickened and darkened so as to form a continuous ragged canopy. A cool wind blows as if through a hole in a tent.
The exercise has left the adults feeling contentious, vigorous, and thirsty. They rush to the bottles. They go upstairs one by one to take showers in the only bathroom on the second floor. Josh Neusner by now is feeling quite delirious with fatigue and is experiencing small, flashlike epiphanies of love for each of his friends as they move in and out of the living room, up the stairs, out of doors, and back in. They all look very tall to him, even the children, from where he lies on the plaid couch, fighting off the sleep that refused to come last night. He shuts his eyes a moment and when he opens them, Bill Maloney, his oldest son, Matthew, Lee Englehardt, and Josh’s own wife, Deborah, are over by the far wall, where the wallpaper has been scorched and curled by the pipes of an old woodstove that was taken away when Ralph installed the new heating system whose pipes he has been so desperately, patiently insulating. The four people over there are engaged in a contest of endurance—seeing how long each can sit against the wall, posed as if on a chair that is not there, before the muscle pain in their thighs forces them to surrender and stand. Bill Maloney times each contestant with a watch; his own son seems to be winning, until Lee Englehardt, exposing that something fanatic and needy he keeps hidden behind his mild eyes, continues to hold the pose—straight back flat on the wall, thighs at a ninety-degree angle—for the number of seconds needed to win. Bill counts off the seconds. Lee’s bald head fills with blood like the bulb of a thermometer. Deborah is visibly impressed, even moved, by Lee’s macho effort. Her long jaw has dropped as if she might swoon. In women, Josh thinks, admiration and pity are faces of one emotion.