by John Updike
The children spent the morning gorging on television and at lunchtime little Tod handed Fulham his wallet. He said, “Did you want this, Grandpa? It was all folded up in the blanket.”
His fat, worn wallet. His own.
“Oh, dear,” Diane said, putting her hand to her cheek in a choreographic gesture that seemed to Fulham to parody dismay. “When Silk Stockings ended I tidied up and must have folded your wallet in without realizing it. Remember, we put the blanket over our laps because of the draft?”
That made sense. The nights were getting cooler. Now Fulham recovered a dim memory of being annoyed, on the hard Windsor settee, by the lump in his back pocket. He must have removed it, while gazing at Cyd Charisse. As if in another scene from the movie, he saw himself, close up, hold the wallet in his hand, where it vanished like a snowflake.
“Grandpa has lots of wallets,” Tod’s shiny-haired little sister chimed in. “He doesn’t care.”
“Oh, now, that’s not quite true,” Fulham told her, squeezing the beloved bent book of leather between his two palms and feeling very grandpaternal, fragile and wise and ready to die.
Leaf Season
OFF WE GO! Saturday morning, into our cars, children and dogs and all, driving north to Vermont in leaf season, to the Tremaynes’ house on the Columbus Day weekend. It’s become a custom, one of the things we all do, the four or five families, a process that can’t be stopped without running the risk of breaking a spell. Threading out of greater Boston on its crowded, potholed highways, then smoothly north on 93, and over on 89, across the Connecticut River, into Vermont. At once, there is a difference: things look cleaner, sparser than in New Hampshire. When we leave 89, the villages on the winding state roads, with their white churches and irregular, casually mowed greens and red-painted country stores advertising FUDGE FACTORY or PUMPKIN OUTLET, show a sharp-edged charm, a stagy, calendar-art prettiness that wears at the eyes, after a while, as relentlessly as industrial ugliness. And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them—the strident pinks and scarlets of the maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise after rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite. We arrive feeling battered by natural glory, by the rush of wind and of small gasoline explosions incessantly hurried one into the next. The dirt driveway—really just ruts that the old wagons and carts wore into the lawn and that modern times have given a dusting of gravel—comes in at right angles off an unmarked macadam road, which came off a numbered state route, which in turn came off a federal highway; so we feel, at last arriving, that we have removed the innermost tissue covering from an ornately wrapped present, or reduced a mathematical problem to its final remainder, or climbed a mountain, or cracked a safe.
The gravel grinds and pops beneath our tires. Marge Tremayne is standing on the porch. She looks pretty good. A little older, a shade overweight, but good.
She and Ralph bought the big wheat-yellow farmhouse with its barn and twenty acres one winter when he had made a killing in oil stocks, the year of the first gas lines, and when their three children were all excited about skiing. Ralph, too, was excited—he grew a Pancho Villa mustache in imitation of the ski instructors and, with his fat cigar in the center of his mouth and his rose-colored goggles and butter-yellow racing suit and clumpy orange step-in boots, was quite a sight on the slopes. Marge, in her tight stretch pants and silver parka and Kelly-green headband and with her hair flying behind, looked rather wonderful, too; her sense of style and her old dance training enabled her to mime the basic moves gracefully enough, and down she would slide, but she wasn’t a skier at heart. “I’m too much of a coward,” she would say. Or, in another mood, to another listener: “I’m too much of an earth mother.” She took to using the Vermont place in the summer (when Ralph had hoped to rent it) and raised vegetables by the bushel and went into canning in a big way, and into spinning wool and mushrooming, and she even began to show a talent for dowsing, serving her apprenticeship with some old mountain man from beyond Montpelier. Ralph was still working in town, and except for Augusts would drive up to his wife on weekends, five hours each way, carting children and their friends back and forth and keeping house in Brookline by himself. So this leaf-season weekend has become a visit to Marge, our chance to see what is going on with her.
Marge and the newly arrived Neusners are standing on the side porch when the Maloneys pull up. The Maloney children bound or self-consciously uncoil, depending upon their ages, out of automotive confinement. There is pleasant confusion and loudly proclaimed exhaustion, a swirling of people back and forth; the joy of an adventure survived animates the families as they piecemeal unload their baggage and collapse into Marge’s care. She has a weary, slangy, factual voice, slightly nasal as if she has caught a cold. “It’s girls’ and boys’ dormitories again this year. Men at the head of the stairs turn right, women left. Boys thirteen and older out in the barn, younger than that upstairs with the girls. The Tylers are already here; Linda’s taken some littles for a leaf walk and Andy’s helping Ralph load up the woodboxes. Ralph says each man’s supposed to split his weight in wood. Each woman is responsible for one lunch or dinner. Breakfasts, it’s a free-for-all as usual, and don’t put syrupy knives and forks straight into the dishwasher, anybody. That means you, Teddy Maloney.”
The nine-year-old boy, so suddenly singled out, laughs in nervous fright; he had been preoccupied with trying to coax the family dog, Ginger, a red-haired setter bitch, out of the car, in spite of the menacing curiosity of Wolf, the Tremaynes’ grizzled chow, and Toby Neusner, an undersized black retriever.
Bernadette Maloney, embracing Marge and kissing her cheek and thinking how broad her body feels, backs off and asks her, a touch too solemnly, “How are you doing?”
Marge gazes back as solemnly, her slate-blue eyes muddied by elements of yellow. “The summer’s been bliss,” she confides, and averts her gaze with a stoic small shrug. “I don’t know. I can’t handle people anymore.”
Her headband today is maroon. Her thick long dirty-blond hair over the years has become indistinguishably mixed with gray, this subtle dullness intensifying her odd Indian look, not that of blood Indians but of a paleface maiden captured and raised in their smoky tepees, in their casually cruel customs; her face up here has turned harder and more chiselled, her unpainted lips thinner, her eyes more opaque. She has not so much a tan as a glow, a healthy matte colorlessness rubbed deep into her skin. Her body has grown wider, but with her old sense of style she carries the new weight well, in her hip-hugging jeans and a man’s checked lumberjack shirt that hangs over her belt like a maternity blouse. Belly, gray hair, and all, she is still our beauty, and Ralph, when he appears—having evidently been hurried from his car straight into service, for his Brooks Brothers shirt is creased and dirtied by the logs he has been lugging and his city shoes are powdered with sawdust—is still a friendly ogre; he exudes fatherly fumes, he emits barks and guffaws of welcome. His eyes are reddened by cigar smoke, he stammers and spits in his greedy hurry to get his jokes out, he laughs aloud before the punch line is quite reached. He appears to have lost some weight. “My d-daughters’ awful cooking,” he explains. “Th-they’re trying to, ha, poison the old guy.”
How old are we? Scarcely into our forties. Lots of life left to live. The air here is delicious, crisper and drier than air around Boston. We start to breathe it now, and to take in where we are. The sounds are fewer, and those few are different—individual noises: a single car passing on the road, a lone crow scolding above the stubbled side field, a single window sash clicking back and forth in the gentle wind we hadn’t noticed when outside unpacking the cars. The smells of the house are country smells—linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor, where we see the children and their sleeping bags settled in the tan
gle of middle rooms. The house, like most Vermont farmhouses, has suffered many revisions over the years; they thought nothing, in the old days, of lifting out a staircase and turning it around or of walling in a fireplace to vent a Franklin stove. With our suitcases as claim markers, we stake out bunks in the two large front bedrooms that the Tremaynes, when they were most excited about skiing, had set up as single-sex dormitories.
Deborah Neusner stands by the upstairs-hall window, gazing out at the empty road, at the field across the road, at the woods beyond the field, with all their leaves. Bernadette Maloney joins her, standing so close that the two women feel each other’s body warmth as well as the heat from the radiator beneath the window. “The Englehardts are coming, but late. Little Kenneth has a football game.”
“Not so little, then,” Deborah says dryly, not turning her thoughtful profile, with its long chin and high-bridged nose. When she does face Bernadette, her brown eyes, in the sharp Vermont light, shine on the edge of panic. The Englehardts mean different things to different people, but to all of us they—Lee so bald and earnest and droll, Ruth so skinny and frizzy and nimble and quick-tongued—make things all right, make the whole thing go. Until they arrive, there will be an uneasy question of why we are here, at the top of the map, in this chilly big wheat-yellow farmhouse surrounded by almost vulgarly gorgeous, red-and-gold nature.
The host is under the house! All afternoon, Ralph lies on the cold ground beneath the kitchen wing, wrapping yellow Fiberglas insulation around his pipes. Already there have been frosts, and last winter, when the Tremaynes were renting to skiers, the pipes froze and the people moved to a motel and later sued. He keeps the cigar in his mouth while stretched out grunting in the crawl space; Bill Maloney hopes aloud to Andy Tyler that there is no gas leak under the kitchen. Both men—Bill burly and placid, Andy skinny and slightly hyper—hang there as if to be helpful, now and then passing more insulation, or another roll of duct tape, in to their supine host. Josh Neusner is splitting his weight in wood, an unfamiliar and thus to him somewhat romantic task. The romance intensifies whenever the splitting maul bounces from an especially awkward piece of wood and digs deep into the earth inches from his feet. He is wearing thin black loafers, with tassels. Wood chips and twigs litter the barnyard around him, and white dried dung from the days when Marge tried raising chickens. The barn overhang is loosely battened; upstanding spears of light make sliding patterns as you move your head. It is like an Op Art sculpture in a gallery, but bigger, Josh thinks, and the effect has that coarse broad authority of the actual, of the unintended. This whole milieu and the business of woodchopping is so exotic to him that his awareness flickers like a bad lightbulb. Minutes of blankness—rural idiocy, Marx had called it—are abruptly illumined by the flash of danger when the maul again sinks its murderous edge close to the tips of his city shoes; then the pebbles, the grit, the twigs are superillumined, vivid as the granules of paint in a Dubuffet, and something of this startled radiance is transferred, if he lifts his head quickly enough, to the sky, the fields, the gaudy woods.
Linda Tyler returns from her leaf walk with the children she collected and makes them as a reward for being good some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Other children, late arrivals and adolescents too jaded for the walk, slouch in from the long living room, where a fire of green wood is smoking and where they have been dabbling with decks of greasy cards and old board games with pennies and buttons substituted over the years for the correct counters. Though they have been here on other Columbus Day weekends, they are shy of the kitchen. Other years, Mrs. Tremayne was cheerfully in charge, but this year she has withdrawn to her downstairs bedroom and shut the door; from behind it comes the whir and soft clatter of a spinning wheel. At the sound of food being prepared in the kitchen, the children gather like birds at a tray of seeds, and Linda hands out cookies, apples, pretzel sticks. She is petite, with pale freckled skin and kind green eyes, and wears baggy clothes that conceal her oddly good figure. As not only her husband here knows, her body on its modest scale has that voluptuous harmony, that curve of shoulder and swing of hip, which spells urgency to the male eye. She caters to the assembled children, warning them to leave room for the traditional big hot-dog-and-chili dinner tonight, after the Englehardts have arrived.
The children present for this weekend are: Milly, Skip, and Christine Tremayne; Matthew, Mark, Mary, Teddy, and Teresa Maloney; Fritz and Audrey Tyler; and Rebecca, Eve, and Seth and Zebulon (twins) Neusner. The Englehardts will bring Kenneth, Betsey, and their unplanned one-and-a-half-year-old, named in a jocular mood Dorothea—gift of God. The fanciful name would have been a curse had not the child lived up to it—an ethereal little girl with her mother’s agility and that milky, abstracted blue-eyed gaze of her father’s, set beneath not his bald dome but a head of angelic curls. The pets present are Toby Neusner, Ginger Maloney, Wolf Tremayne, and two cats, a sleepy, vain, long-haired white and a short-haired gray with extra toes who appears throughout the house at the strangest places, in locked rooms and bureau drawers, like an apparition. It is all too much, as the children get bigger. The oldest, Milly Tremayne and Fritz Tyler, are both seventeen, and embarrassed to be here. They were embarrassed last year as well, but not so keenly.
Ralph emerges at last from underneath the house and announces, spitting smoke and amiably sputtering, that it’s way past time for the softball game. “Wh-what are all you young br-bruisers lounging inside for on a gorgeous Saturday like this? Let’s c-compete!” He gets down in a football lineman’s crouch and, with the cigar stub in the center of his mouth like a rhinoceros horn, looks truly angry.
Softball is organized in the side field. Everyone plays, even Deborah Neusner and Bernadette Maloney, who had been murmuring upstairs for hours. What about? The absent, the present, the recent past, the near future—a liquid soft discourse that leaves, afterward, a scarcely perceptible residue of new information, which yet enhances their sense of who and where they are.
Fritz Tyler bowls Milly Tremayne over, rushing across from shortstop for a pop fly. “You bastard, didn’t you hear me calling you off?” she asks him, sprawling in the long dry grass, red-faced and tousled, her upraised legs in their tight jeans looking elegant and thin. Her hair is dark like Ralph’s but though not blond has the shape of Marge’s, abundant and wiry and loose in a tent shape, before Marge began to braid it and pin it up like a nineteenth-century farmer’s wife. Bill Maloney hits a home run, over the heads of Seth and Zebulon—they have been put in right field together, as if two little eight-year-old boys will make one good grownup fielder. Their black, loping dog, Toby, helps them hunt for the ball in the burdock over by the split-rail fence. The sky in the west, above mountains whose blush is turning blue, has begun to develop slant stripes tinged with pink, and the battered hay in the outfield is growing damp, each bent strand throwing a longer and longer shadow. Though the children are encouraged to continue the game until darkness, the grownups drift away, and in the long, narrow living room, with its plaster ceiling drooping in the center like the underside of an old bed, a fresh fire is built, of dry and seasoned logs from the woodbox beneath the stairs (the children had tried to burn freshly split wood, from beneath the barn overhang), and an impressive array of bottles is assembled on the sideboard. Bring your own, the rule is.
Marge, ostentatiously drinking unfermented cider, sits on the sofa, which is faded and plaid and has wide wooden arms, and knits a sweater of undyed wool she has carded and spun herself. Toward seven o’clock Linda and Bernadette go into the kitchen to feed the starving younger children. The older have scattered to their rooms upstairs, or out to the barn. By the time the Englehardts at last arrive, the adults not only are drunk but have gone through two boxes of crackers and a wedge of Vermont cheddar that was bought to last the weekend.
Cheers go up. Roly-poly, sleepy-looking Lee doffs his hunter’s cap and reveals the polished dome of his perfectly smooth skull. Tall, frizzy-haired Ruth stands there and surveys the scene thro
ugh her huge glasses, taking it all in. The temples of her glasses have the shape of a lightning bolt, and the bridge rides so low on her nose as to reduce it to a tiny round tip, a baby’s nose. Kenneth and Betsey are lugging knapsacks and suitcases in from the car and up the stairs, including a plastic basket containing little Dorothea. “Who-who won the football game?” the host eagerly asks.
“We won,” Ruth tells him, in the complex, challenging tone of a joke on herself, “but Kenny didn’t play.” The weariness of the long drive is still in her voice. Ruth’s words are like glass sandwiches that reflect back an obvious meaning on the first level, a less obvious one on the second, and so on, as deep as you want to look. “The poor child sat on the bench,” she adds.
“Oh.” Ralph blinks, having evidently been tactless. His eyes slide over to Marge on the sofa, as if to seek support. Her eyes are lowered to the knitting. Wolf, who in his old age has been known to snap, sleeps at her feet. Upstairs, Kenneth and Betsey seek the company and comfort of the other children, as the Englehardts are meshed into the adult group beneath them and the hilarity, the shouting, swells by that increment.
It is hard, afterwards, to remember what was so funny. Their all being here in Vermont, in this old farmhouse with its smells from another century, is in itself funny, and the Saturday-night meal of something so hearty and Western as chili and hot dogs is funny, and the half-gallons of cheap wine that replace themselves at the table, like successive generations of bulbous green dwarfs, are part of the delicate, hallucinatory joke.