The Centaurus

by John Updike

  “…the only one,” Deifendorf was saying to my father. His voice scratched. His voice was queerly feeble, disassociated from his emphatic, athletic body. I had often seen Deifendorf naked in the locker room. He had stumpy legs woolly with sandy fur and a huge rubbery torso and sloping shining shoulders and very long arms culminating in red scoop-shaped hands. He was a swimmer.

  “That’s right, you’re not, you’re not the only one,” my father told him. “But on the whole, Deifendorf, I’d say you’re the worst. I’d say you’re the itchiest kid I have on my hands this year.” He made this estimate dispassionately. There were things-itchiness, intelligence, athletic ability -that his years of teaching had given him absolute pitch in gauging.

  No Penny had popped up among the girls below. Behind me, the quality of Deifendorf’s silence seemed baffled and even hurt. He had a vulnerable side. He loved my father. It pains me to admit it, but there existed between this obscene animal and my father an actual affection. I resented it. I resented how lavishly my father outpoured himself before the boy, as if somewhere in all this nonsense there might be the healing drop. “The Founding Fathers,” he explained, “in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. I am a paid keeper of Society’s unusables-the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don’t buckle down and learn something, you’ll be as dumb as I am, and you’ll have to teach school to earn a living. When the Depression hit me in ‘31, I had nothing. I knew nothing. God had taken care of me all my life so I was unemployable. So out of the goodness of his heart my father-in-law’s nephew Al Hummel got me a job teaching. I don’t wish it on you, kid. Even though you’re my worst enemy I don’t wish it on you.”

  I was staring, ears warm, toward Mt. Alton. As if through an imperfection in the glass I looked around a corner of time and foresaw, fantastically, that Deifendorf would teach. And so it was to be. Fourteen years later, I went home and on an Alton side-street met Deifendorf in a saggy brown suit from whose breast pocket the pencils and pens thrust as from my father’s pocket in the old forgotten days. Deifendorf had gone fat and his hairline had receded, but it was he. He asked me, dared in all seriousness to ask me, an authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living in an East Twenty-third Street loft with a Negro mistress, me, if I was ever going to teach. I told him No. He told me, his pale dull eyes shelled in Seriousness, “Pete, I often think of what your Dad used to tell me about teaching. ‘It’s rough,’ he’d say, ‘but you can’t beat it for the satisfaction you get.’ Now I’m teaching myself, I see what he meant. A great man, your Dad. Did you know that?”

  And now in his weak and scratchy whine of a voice he be gan to tell my father something of the sort. “I ain’t no enemy, Mr. Caldwell. I like you. All the kids like you.”

  “That’s my trouble, Deifendorf. That’s the worst thing can happen to a public school teacher. I don’t want you to like me. All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week. When you walk into my room, Deifendorf, I want you to be stiff with fear. Caldwell the Kid-Killer; that’s how I want you to think of me. Brrouh!”

  I turned from the window and laughed, determined to interrupt. The two of them, the chipped yellow desk between, hunched toward each other like conspirators. My father looked sallow and nauseated, his temples glazed and hollow; the top of his desk was littered with papers and tin-jawed binders and paperweights like half-metamorphosed toads. Deifendorf had stolen his strength; teaching was sapping him. I saw this helplessly. I saw helplessly in the smirk on Deify’s face that from my father’s whirl of words he had gathered a sense of superiority, a sense of being, in comparison with this addled and vehement shipwreck of a man, young, clean, sleek, clear-headed, well-coordinated, and invincible.

  My father, embarrassed by my angry witnessing, changed the subject. “Be at the Y by 6:30,” he told Deifendorf curtly. There was a swimming meet this evening and Deifendorf was on the team.

  “We’ll dunk ‘em for ya, Mr. Caldwell,” Deifendorf promised. “They’ll be cocky and ripe for an upset.” Our swimming team had not won a meet all season: Olinger was a very land kind of town. It had no public pool, and the poorhouse dam’s bottom was lined with broken bottles. My father was, by one of those weird strokes whereby Zimmerman kept the faculty in a malleable flux of confusion, the team’s coach, though his hernia prevented him from ever going into the water.

  “Do your best is all we can do,” my father said. “You can’t walk on water.”

  I believe now that my father wanted this last statement to be contradicted, but none of the three others of us in the room saw the need.

  Judy Lengel was the third student in the room. My father’s view of her was that her father bullied her beyond the limit of her mental abilities. I doubted this; in my opinion Judy was just a girl who being neither pretty nor bright had spite fully developed a petty ambitiousness with which she tormented the gullible teachers like my father. She seized the silence to say, “Mr. Caldwell, I was wondering about that quiz tomorrow-”

  “Just a moment, Judy.” Deifendorf was attempting to leave, sated. He all but belched as he got up from his chair. My father asked him, “Deify, how are you and cigarettes? If anybody reports you smoking again you’re off the team.”

  The feeble primitive voice whined from the doorway. “I ain’t touched a weed since the beginning of season, Mr. Caldwell.”

  “Don’t lie to me, kid. Life’s too short to lie. About fifty-seven varieties of people have squealed to me about your smoking and if I’m caught protecting you Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

  “O.K., Mr. Caldwell. I got you.”

  “I want the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle from you tonight.”

  “You’ll get ‘em, Mr. Caldwell.”

  I shut my eyes. It agonized me to hear my father talk like a coach; it seemed so beneath us. This was unfair; for wasn’t it after all what I wanted to hear from him-the confident, ordinary, world-supporting accents of other men? Perhaps it hurt me that Deifendorf had something concrete to give my father-the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle-while I had nothing. Unwilling to expose my skin, I had never learned to swim. The world of water was closed to me, so I had fallen in love with the air, which I was able to seize in great thrilling condensations within me that I labelled the Future: it was in this realm that I hoped to reward my father for his suffering.

  “Now. Judy,” he said.

  “I don’t understand what the quiz will be about.”

  “Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten, as I said today in class.”

  “But that’s so much.”

  “Skim it, Judy. You’re no dope. You know how to study.” My father flipped open the book, the gray textbook with the microscope, the atom, and the dinosaur on the cover. “Look for italicized words,” he said. “Here. Magma. What is magma?”

  “Will that be one of the questions?”

  “I can’t tell you the questions, Judy. That wouldn’t be fair to the others. But for your own information, what is magma?”

  “Like comes from volcanoes?”

  “I’d accept that. Magma is igneous rock in its molten state. And here. Name the three types of rocks.”

  “Will you ask that?”

  “I can’t tell you, Judy. You understand that. But what are they?”

  “Sentimentary…”

  “Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Give me an example of each.”

  “Granite, limestone, and marble,” I said. Judy looked over at me in fright.

  “Or basalt, shale, and slate,” my father said. The dull girl looked from me to him to me as if we had ganged up on her. For the moment, we had. There were happy moments when my father and I became a unit, a little two-ply team. “You w
ant to know something interesting, Judy?” my father said. “The richest deposit of slate on the continent is right next door to us in Pennsylvania, in Lehigh and Northampton counties.” He tapped with his knuckles the blackboard behind him. “Every blackboard from coast to coast comes from around there,” he said.

  “We aren’t expected to know that, are we?”

  “It’s not in the book, no. But I thought you’d be interested. Try to get interested. Forget your grades; your father will survive. Don’t knock yourself out, Judy; when I was your age, I didn’t know what it was like to be young. And I’ve never learned since. Now Judy. Listen to me. Some have it and some don’t. But everybody has something, even if it’s just being alive. The good Lord didn’t put us here to worry about what we don’t have. The man with two talents didn’t get sore at the man with five. Look at me and Peter. I have no talents, he has ten; but I’m not mad at him. I like him. He’s my son.”

  She opened her mouth and I expected her to ask “Will that be on the quiz?” but nothing came out. My father ruffled the book. “Name some erosional agents,” he said.

  She ventured, “Time?”

  My father looked up and seemed to have taken a blow. His skin was underbelly-white beneath his eyes and an un natural ruddy flush scored his cheeks in distinct parallels like the marks of angry fingers. “I’d have to think about that,” he told her. “I was thinking of running water, glaciers, and wind.”

  She wrote these down on her tablet.

  “Diastrophism,” he said. “Isostasy. Explain them. Sketch a seismograph. What is a batholith?”

  “You wouldn’t ask all of those, would you?” she asked. “I might not ask any of them,” he said; “Don’t think about the quiz. Think about the earth. Don’t you love her? Don’t you want to know about her? Isostasy is like a great fat woman adjusting her girdle.”

  Judy’s face lacked ease. Her cheeks were packed too tautly against her nose, making the lines there deep and sharp; and there was a third vertical crease at the tip of her nose. Her mouth, too, had this look of too many folds, and when she spoke it worked tightly, up and down, like the mouth of a snapdragon. “Would you ask about the Protozone or whatever those things are?”

  “Proterozoic Era. Yes, ma’am. A question might be, List the six geologic eras in order, with rough dates. When was the Cenozoic?”

  “A billion years ago?”

  “You live in it, girl. We all do. It began seventy million years ago. Or I might do this, list some extinct forms of life, and ask that they be identified, with one point for the identification, one for the era, and one for the period. For instance, Brontops: mammal, Cenozoic, Tertiary. Eocene epoch, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. It may interest you for your own information that the brontops looked a lot like William Howard Taft, who was President when I was your age.”

  I saw her write “No Epocks” on her tablet and draw a box around it. As my father talked on, she began to ornament the box with triangles. “Or Lepidodendron,” he said. “Giant fern, Paleozoic, Pennsylvanian. Or Eryops. What would that be, Peter?”

  I really didn’t know. “A reptile,” I guessed. “Mesozoic.”

  “An amphibian,” he said. “Earlier. Or Archaeopteryx,” he said, his voice quickening, sure we would know it. “What’s that, Judy?”

  “Archy what?” she asked.

  “Archaeopteryx.” He sighed. “The first bird. It was about the size of a crow. Its feathers evolved from scales. Study the chart on pages two-oh-three to two-oh-nine. Don’t tense up. Study the chart, and memorize what you’ve written down, and you’ll do all right.”

  “I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight,” she blurted, and it seemed she might cry. Her face was a folded bud, but already in her life it had begun to wilt. She was pale and this pallor for a moment swam around the room whose shades of varnish were like shades of honey gathered in a sweetly rotten forest.

  “We all do,” my father said, and things became firm again. “Knowledge is a sickening thing. Just do the best you can, Judy, and don’t lose any beauty sleep. Don’t get buffaloed. After Wednesday you can forget all about it and in no time you’ll be married with six kids.” And it dawned on me, with some indignation, that my father out of pity had hinted away to her the entire quiz.

  When she left the room, he got up and closed the door and said to me, “That poor femme, her father’ll have an old maid on his hands.” We were alone together.

  I stopped leaning against the windowsill and said, “Maybe that’s what he wants.” I was very conscious of wearing a red shirt; its flicker on the floor of my vision as I moved about the room seemed to instill my words with an enigmatic urbanity.

  “Don’t you believe it,” my father said. “The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter. You won’t understand this, Peter, but your mother and I had a lot of fun together.”

  I doubted this, but the way he said it rendered me silent. One by one, it seemed to me, my father was saying good bye to all the things he had known in this world. He took a sheet of blue paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read it arid weep,” he said. My first thought was that it was a fatal medical report. My stomach sank. I wondered, How could he have gotten it so soon?

  But it was just one of Zimmerman’s monthly visitation reports.

  OLINGER PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  OFFICE OF THE SUPERVISING PRINCIPAL

  1/10/47

  teacher: G. W. Caldwell

  class: 10th grade Gen. Sci., sec. C

  period of visitation: 1/8/47 11:05 am.

  The teacher arrived in the classroom twelve minutes late. His surprise at finding the supervising principal in charge was evident and was remarked upon by the class. Ignoring his students, the teacher attempted to engage the supervising principal in conversation and was refused. The students and the teacher then discussed the age of the universe, the size of the stars, the origins of the earth, and the outline of organic evolution. No attempt was discernible on the teacher’s part to avoid offending religious conceptions on the students’ part. The humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences were not elicited. The teacher at one point stopped himself from pronouncing the word “hell.” Disorder and noise were present from the beginning and rose in volume. The students did not seem well-prepared and the teacher consequently resorted to the lecture method. A minute before the final bell, he struck one boy on the back with a steel rod. Such physical procedure of course violates Pennsylvania state law and in the event of parental protest could result in dismissal.

  However, the teacher’s knowledge of his subject matter seemed good and some of his illustrations relating subject matter to his students’ everyday lives were effective.

  Signed,

  Louis M. Zimmerman.

  My father was pulling the windowshades and the room had been jerked into dusk as I read. “Well,” I said, “he thinks you’re effective.”

  “Isn’t that the worst God-damn report was ever written? He must have stayed up all night with that masterpiece. If the school board gets ahold of that, I’m O-U-T out, tenure or no tenure.”

  “Who was the kid you hit?” I asked.

  “Deifendorf. That Davis bitch got the poor bastard all excited.”

  “What’s poor about him? He broke our Buick grille and now he’s going to get you fired. And two minutes ago he was in here and you were telling him the story of your life.”

  “He’s dumb, Peter. I feel sorry for him. It takes a rat to love a rat.” I swallowed a taste of envy and said, “Daddy, this isn’t such a bad report.”

  “It couldn’t be worse,” he said, striding down the aisle with the windowpole. “It’s murder. And I deserve it. Fifteen years of teaching, and it’s all right there. Fifteen years of hell.” He took a rag from the book closet and went out the door. I read the report over again, trying to get some picture of Zimmerman’s actual mind. I couldn’t. My father came back, ha
ving soaked the rag at the drinking fountain in the hall. With long rhythmic swipes shaped like sideways 8’s he washed the blackboard. His earnest swishing underlined the silence; high on the wall the clock, controlled by the master clock in Zimmerman’s office, clicked, jumping from 4:17 to 4:18. “What does he mean,” I asked, “the humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences?”

  “You ask him,” my father said. “Maybe he knows. Maybe down deep in the atom there’s a little man sitting in a rocking chair reading the evening paper.”

  “Do you really think the school board will see this?”

  “Pray not, kid. It’s on file. I have three enemies on that board, one friend, and one I don’t know. Mrs. Herzog I don’t know if she’s heads or tails. They’d love to get me out of there. Get rid of the dead wood. A lot of veterans on this GI Bill and they’re all gonna need jobs.” He was grunting as he washed.

  “Maybe you should get out of teaching,” I said. My mother and I had often discussed this, but our discussions were cramped, for we kept bumping our heads against the fact that my father’s teaching was what sheltered us and let us live.

  “Too late, too late,” my father said. “Too late, too late.” He looked at the clock and said, “Jesus, I’m not kidding- I’m late. I told Doc Appleton I’d be there at 4:30.”

  My face baked with fear. My father never went to doctors. For the first time, I had proof that his illness was not an illusion; it was spreading outward into the world like a stain. “Really? You’re really going?” I was begging him to deny it.

  He knew my thoughts, and as we confronted each other through the vibrating shadows of the room a locker slammed, a child whistled, the clock clicked. “I called him this noon,” my father said, as if he were confessing a sin to me. “I just want to go and hear him tell how smart he was at med school.” He hung the wet rag over the back of his chair to dry and went to the windowsill and untwisted the pencil sharpener case and poured a rosy stream of shavings into the wastebasket. The scent of cedar filled the room like the perfume of an offering.