by John Updike
Fogel had been talked to, in the course of his life, by a woman in a voice exactly like this. It had been a bath, her voice, in which he grew weightless, an iridescent bubbly uplifting in which floated always a question, the lilting teasing female question, to which his maleness, clumsy and slow to comprehend though it was, was the only answer. He and this woman, Fogel further remembered, had come, twenty-some years ago, to an unhappy end, which had seemed tragic and hard to swallow at the time but which now, to this elderly man sitting above the clouds while the engines droned and the stewardesses struggled to distribute drinks and the girl across the aisle deliciously prattled and her naked hands flickered against the deepening darkness of the airplane window, appeared merely inevitable, since all things end. One small side-effect still rankled: their affair ended in the springtime, and his former mistress declined to invite him and his family to an Easter-egg hunt she and her husband annually gave. His children’s feelings were hurt, and for consolation they were taken out, after church, to eat at the local International House of Pancakes. Heaps of pancakes, Fogel remembered—buckwheat, buttermilk, blueberry—that seemed, soaked in syrup, almost unswallowably sweet.
And yet, when the plane landed and the scramble to retrieve things from the overhead rack took over, Fogel forgot to look, as he had been intending, at the young woman, to check out her height, her hips, her face full on, her lovely long lively hands, to see if they were truly ringless. While his attention was elsewhere or nowhere she must have stood and brushed her backside past his and out of his life forever. She remained with him only as a voice, the perennial voice of flirtation.
Fogel’s absent-mindedness was becoming alarming. On this strangely short Easter, as bells prodded the air in the town below the hill where he lived, he walked to his mailbox to retrieve the morning Globe, and his old gray-muzzled dog, a Labrador retriever, flushed the six or so mourning doves that gathered on a warm open slope, amid scrub brush, above the curving driveway. Every weekend morning, Saturday and Sunday, this happened, the dog ponderously charging forward and the mourning doves thrashing into the air with an abrupt whistle and merged beating of wings, and yet Fogel always forgot it would happen and was startled, so that his heart raced, his blood leaping like another dove. His heart would keep thumping as he walked back up the hill with the many-sectioned, pretentious, intimidating Sunday newspaper in his arms. The thumping felt dangerous, and he felt endangered when his wife, at breakfast, proposed that he help her with the spring raking. “We were unforgivably sloppy last fall,” she said. “We left leaves under all the bushes and over by the rocks, and now they’ll smother the new growth if we don’t dig them out.” She was a native of these Northern parts, and knew the ways of its weather. “You can’t trust the lawn boys to do it; it was their stupid useless blower that put the leaves there in the first place. They didn’t have these leaf-blowers when I was a girl; my father’s gardeners raked.”
Unlike those of the girl on the plane, this woman’s powers were long established, and she felt no need to test them. She moved back and forth between kitchen island and sink, between sink and refrigerator and stove, with an insatiable silver-haired energy. As Fogel sat at the breakfast table with the newspaper, trying to remember which sections he had already read, he felt pushed from behind, tailgated. How did she know he hadn’t, sentimentally, decided to go to church? “I’ll never forget,” she went on, “the year we went to Morocco and didn’t get the leaves off the front beds until May and the poor tulips had all grown inches under the mulch—horrible, these pathetic white snaky stems growing sideways! Once the sun got to them they straightened up but all summer until they died back were shaped like the letter L. They all had elbows!” This monologue, he recognized, was a matured version, hardened into jagged edges and points that prodded and hurt, of the young woman’s feathery, immersing discourse across the airplane aisle—a version of that female insistence upon getting male attention, a force as irresistible as the ability of freezing water to split rocks.
“I’m trying to read the paper,” Fogel pointed out.
“I think it’s grotesque, it’s absolutely doddery,” she said, “the way you’ve taken to dawdling over the paper, even the real-estate section, even the cooking tips! It’s a bad habit you’ve gotten into from killing time on the train. Nobody expects you to read everything—they just want you to glance at the ads.”
“Isn’t it rather cold and dismal outdoors?” he asked.
“No more so than it ever is this time of year. The longer we work, the warmer it will get. If you think about it, darling, the sun this time of year is as strong as an August sun, though it doesn’t feel that way. Don’t be a doddery dawdler; come on—one hour of good stiff yard work and then the Allisons’ brunch and you can watch the football playoffs.”
“They’re over.”
“Are they honestly? I thought they were endless.”
“You were confused by the Hula Bowl. It’s hockey and basketball now.”
“How can you tell? It’s all just ugly brutes bashing into each other. It’s horrible, the way television has turned violence into a joke.” She had suddenly left the kitchen.
Meekly, draggingly, Fogel followed. Pulling moist compacted oak leaves from underneath the forsythia and lilacs, careful not to let a budding twig poke his eye, Fogel was reminded of an Easter-egg hunt, and in his reverie, while his wife swooped back and forth with sheets of last year’s leaves and bundles of brisk directives, his brooding mind warmed his old indignation at not having been invited to that party given by his then recently forsaken inamorata. She could have trusted him. He would have stood off to one side and been distant and discreet while his children hunted and his wife mixed it up socially. Insult was added to injury when, some months later, at a third family’s house, he was shown home movies of the day—the scampering children, their faces in close-up smeared with chocolate and anxiety at not getting their share; the men in business suits and pastel shirts, standing on the brown lawn in little conferences of three or four, holding wine glasses and pâté-laden crackers; and the women, all in mini-skirts in that era, swooping about after their children with brown paper bags and discarded sweaters. It was a familiar scene, year after year, except that this year he was not in it; no matter how the camera panned and skidded from group to group, Fogel was invisible. His former mistress wore a glistening purple dress, he seemed to remember, that just barely covered her bustling hindquarters, and she clowned for the camera when it came her way, her lips moving to frame a gay feathery voice that was inaudible.
How tenacious, really, forsythia is of last fall’s leaves! And the English ivy was worse yet, more clingy and snaggy. The teeth of Fogel’s little bamboo bush rake kept snapping in the struggle with hostile vegetation. One of his fantasies was a kind of ray gun that, directed at a plant or tree, would not only kill it but instantly vaporize it into a fine, fertilizing ash. Agricultural labor, this endless plucking of weeds and replowing of fields, had always seemed to him the essence of futility; after sixty years he was coming to realize that all work, legal or medical or, like his own, financial, was also a Sisyphean matter of recycling, of pushing inert and thankless matter back and forth, of turning over (in his case) the profoundly rich compost of corporate debt. All labor was tied to human life, life as pointless as that of any new little jade-green weed already joyously sprouting beneath the damp-blackened leaves.
The Allisons’ brunch was also pointless—the same dozen aging couples, with three widows and a bachelor, that they saw every weekend. Throughout the gathering Fogel kept trying to glimpse, out of the corners of his eyes, the shoulders of his navy-blue blazer, and brushing at the white hairs that kept appearing there; he was shedding. To get himself through a strenuous conversation on the future of yachting after this winter’s debacle in San Diego, he accepted a second Bloody Mary. Then he prudently switched to the faintly sour, platinum-colored champagne punch. One widow told him he should take his cholesterol count very seriously;
if her husband had, she wouldn’t be a widow now. Tears suddenly troubled her eyes, with their cobalt-blue contact lenses. Another woman, in a purplish dress, came up to Fogel and pressed her wrinkled face upward toward him as if straining to see through a besmirched skylight, and launched her voice into an insistent sweet sing-song. He regretted that no movie camera—a video camera was what they used now, with a built-in sound track—was at work recording the fact that he was here, at this party: that he had been invited. He and his wife left at two-thirty, which felt nearer noon than that. Because the clocks had been jumped ahead, the day kept feeling in retard of where it actually was. It was later than he thought. The cold drizzle intensified, and discouraged returning to the yard work; the bursitis in his shoulders ached from all that reaching with the rake. He found some golf on television. The tour had moved east from the desert events, with lavender mountains in the background and emerald fairways imposed upon sand and cactus and with ancient Hollywood comedians as tournament sponsors, to courses in the American South, with trees in tender first leaf and azaleas in lurid bloom. Young blond men putted, over and over, for birdies. A tremendous drowsiness seized Fogel as he watched within his easy chair. The fresh air and yard work, the gin and tomato juice, the champagne and the effort to be sociable all added up to a crushing accumulation.
Stealthily, avoiding his own bedroom, where his wife could be heard chattering on the telephone to one of her myriad of woman friends, he took a section of the newspaper that perhaps he had not already read and lay down on the bed in their younger son’s old room. Posters of European cars and American rock stars were still on the walls, though the boy had left for college over ten years ago. His mother liked to keep the room as he had left it, as some fanatical religious sects keep a room ready in case Jesus returns and asks to be a guest. A pipe rattled—fresh steam hitting condensation in an iron elbow. Fogel had become sensitive to his house, identifying with its creaks, its corners of decay, its irreversible expenditures of energy. He tried to study the section, the financial section. “THE DEFICIT PROBLEM—IS IT ALL IN OUR MINDS?” one headline read. Interest rates, restructuring, soft markets, debt, debt …
He rested the paper on the floor beside his son’s narrow bed and fell headlong asleep, while drizzle flecked the windowpanes and steam ticked in the radiators. He dreamed, in the deep colors of true weariness. Electricity wandered through his brain, activating now one set of memory cells and now another. A wash of buried emotion rounded these phantoms into light and shadow, and called up tears and outcries of indignation from Fogel’s phantom self; he presided above the busy lit stage of his subconscious as prompter and playwright, audience and deus ex machina as well as hero. His parents hove into view—his father a coarse man, who worked with his hands, and his mother a virgin in her simplicity of mind, her narrow passion to defend as if sacred the little space her family had borrowed from the world. He hugged his pet teddy bear, Bruno. Bruno had a glass eye, on a long wire stem, like a toy flower. His parents were talking above him, urgently to each other, in a language he didn’t know. In their vicinity, Fogel became heavy in every cell, so dense that he fell through into wakefulness, though the dream world tried to cling to his warm body, amid that unnatural ache of resurrection—the weight, the atrocious weight, of coming again to life!
His mouth felt parched, and a dribble from the downward corner of his lips had moistened the pillow. The air of the room was dusky. He did not at first know what room it was, of the many his long life had occupied. A fur of shadow had grown on every surface, even that of the sleek posters. The hour was indeterminate; yet Fogel knew at once that the day was still Easter. How long had he slept, so solidly? Naps were not something he liked to do. Better to store up sleep, at his age, for the night. He listened for his wife’s voice from their bedroom and heard nothing. He was frightened. He lay half curled up on the narrow bed like a fetus that has lost flexibility. A curve of terror chilled his abdomen, silvery and sore; had he been the phantom self of his dreams, he would have cried out aloud with the sensation. His eyes checked the items of the room—shiny posters, vacant fireplace, light plug, bookcase of abandoned schoolbooks, rack of obsolete cassettes, stolen NO PARKING sign, stuffed rabbit wearing a vest—one by one. Everything seemed still in place, yet something was immensely missing.
A Sandstone Farmhouse
Joey’s first glimpse of the house was cloudy in his memory, like an old photo mottled by mildew. During World War Two, his family owned no car, and renting one, for their infrequent excursions out of the compact brick city where his father worked, so embarrassed the twelve-year-old boy that he didn’t see clearly through the windows, and wasn’t conscious of much beyond his internal struggle not to be car-sick. He fought the swaying, jiggling motion, which was mixed with the warm confluent smells of rubber floormat and petroleum combustion and the patient pale veiny look of his father’s hand on the gearshift knob. Farm country, miles of it, poured past. Depressing, monotonous fields moved up and down beneath their hazy burden of crops. A winding asphalt highway climbed a hill, passed a lumpy stone church, then settled into a flat stretch where they slowed to turn left down a dirt washboard road that shook the car sickeningly. Not a building in sight. No sign of civilization but telephone poles carrying a single wire. Another turn, right this time, down an even smaller dirt road, and they stopped, and in the sudden flood of fresh air as Joey opened the car door the green of the grass rose waxy and bright to greet his giddiness, his nausea. In his cloudy memory, they went up to the house and there were people in it, farm people, wearing workclothes and muddy shoes, shyly trying to get out of their way, like animals. There was a front porch, he remembered that much. With a bannister upheld by boards jigsawed into an ornamental shape, and a secret space underneath, of weeds and pebbly dirt. A space where chickens could scratch, and dogs could lie and pant during hot weather, the kind of space that is friendly and inviting to a boy of the age he was just outgrowing.
By the time they had bought the house with its surrounding eighty acres and moved in, he was thirteen, and the front porch had vanished, leaving a space between the front of the house and the cement walk where they eventually planted croci and tulips and erected a grape arbor. Joey as an adult could not remember how or when it had happened, their tearing down the rotten old porch. Pieces of it remained in the barn—segments of bannister, and ornamental balusters cut of inch-thick pine. Once he even took a baluster home with him, back to New York City, as some kind of memento, or sample of folk art. The pattern held a circle in the center, a circle with a hole, between two shapes jigsawed into the wood, one like an arrow and one like a fish. Different-colored flakes fell dryly from it, brittle layers of old-time lead paint. The object, not quite of art, rested sideways on the black-marble mantel of his apartment for a while, then found its way to the back of a closet, with broken squash rackets and college textbooks and table lamps that might some day be made to glow again. Like his mother, he had trouble throwing anything away.
If he and his father and grandfather had torn the porch down themselves, he would have remembered so heroic a labor, as he did the smashing of the lath-and-plaster partition that separated the two small parlors downstairs, making one big living room, or the tearing out of the big stone kitchen fireplace and its chimney, right up into the attic. He remembered swinging the great stones out the attic window, he and his grandfather pushing, trying not to pinch their fingers, while his father, his face white with the effort, held the rope of a makeshift pulley rigged over a rafter. Once clear of the sill, the heavy stones fell with a strange slowness, seen from above, and accumulated into a kind of mountain it became Joey’s summer job to clear away. He learned a valuable lesson that first summer on the farm, while he turned fourteen: even if you manage to wrestle only one stone into the wheelbarrow and sweatily, staggeringly trundle it down to the swampy area this side of the springhouse, eventually the entire mountain will be taken away. On the same principle, an invisible giant, removing only one
day at a time, will eventually dispose of an entire life.
When, over forty years after that summer of 1946, his mother died, and the at last uninhabited house yielded up its long-buried treasures, he came upon a photograph of her at the age of ten, posing in front of the porch. Someone in pencil, in a flowing handwriting not his mother’s—hers was tiny, and cramped, and backslanted—had marked on the back, Taken August 1914. Enlarged August 1917. Someone had loved this snapshot enough to have it enlarged and mounted on thick gray cardboard: who?
His mother, wearing a low-waisted dress, dark stockings, and black shoes with big, thick heels, her hair done up in a long braid that hangs over one shoulder, is holding the collar of a young medium-sized dog, part collie. Both the child and the dog are looking straight into the camera with similar half-smiles and wide-spaced, trusting eyes. They are standing on a cement walk that is still there, uncracked; behind them the porch balusters repeat their simple, artful pattern and a small rose bush blooms. The long-dead dog and the recently dead human female look identically happy. Joey would hardly have recognized his mother but for the thick abundance of her hair—a cheerful chestless little girl in old woman’s shoes. Beyond the edge of the barn to her right, ghostly in the enlargement, are fences and trees of which no trace remains and, just barely visible, an entire building that has vanished—a tobacco shed, perhaps. The lawn is edged around the walk, and the fences look trim. This was the private paradise, then, to which she attempted to return, buying back the old sandstone farmhouse that her parents, feeling full enough of tobacco profits to retire, had sold while she was innocently off at normal school. Precocious, she had been skipped up through the local schools, and was sent away at the age of twelve, and hated it, hated it all, including the hour-long trolley ride to Kutztown. The swaying, the ozone, the drunk men who sat down beside her made her sick.