The Afterlife

by John Updike

  She loved the old house; she loved the idea of it. For most of her life, except for the twenty years of exile in her young womanhood, when she went to normal school, then to college, and married a man she met there, and travelled with him until the Depression cost him his travelling job, and bore him a son, in the heart of the Depression, while they were all living with her parents in the brick city house—except for these twenty years, she happily inhabited an idea. The sandstone house had been built, her fond research discovered, in 1812. In that era teams of masons and stonelayers roamed the countryside, erecting these Pennsylvania farmhouses on principles of an elegant simplicity. Their ground-plan was square, set square to the compass. The south face basked in the maximum of sunshine; the east windows framed the sunrise, and the west the sunset. The cornerstones were cut at a slightly acute angle, to emphasize the edge. The stout scaffolding was rooted in holes in the thirty-inch walls as they rose, and these holes were plugged with stones four inches square when the masonry was pointed, and the scaffolding dismantled, from the top down. In the mortar, lime from the lime kiln was mixed with sand from creek beds, to match the stones. Though the size of the stones raised and fitted into place was prodigious, the real feats of leverage occurred in the quarrying. Sandstone exposed in an outcropping was rendered useless by weather, but underneath the earth the sound stone slept, to be painstakingly split by star drills and wedges and “feathers” of steel, and then hauled out by teams of horses, on wagons or sleds. Sometimes a wagon shattered under the load of a single great stone. But the vast hauling and lifting continued, a movement as tidal as that of the glaciers which here and there, in this area of the last ice age’s most southerly advance, had deposited huge moraines—acres frightening in their sheer stoniness; heaped-up depths of boulders in which no tree could take root, though forest surrounded them; lakes of barrenness fascinating and bewildering to nineteenth-century minds eager to perceive God’s hand everywhere.

  For sensitive, asthmatic Joey, removed from a brick semi-detached city house where he had felt snug—where he could hear through his bedroom walls the neighbors stirring as he awoke, and the milk being delivered on the porch, and the trolley cars clanging at the corner a block away—the silent thickness of stones just behind the old plaster and wallpaper, and the rough hearths and fireplaces visible within the country house, seemed to harbor nature’s damp and cold. A sullen held breath dwelled in the walls. The summer’s heat brought swarms of wasps, millipedes, carpenter ants, and silverfish out from the crannies. That first winter in the house, before an oil furnace was installed in the basement, a kerosene-burning stove in the living room provided the only heat. Joey remembered the stove clearly; it was painted chocolate-brown, and stood on little bent legs on an asbestos sheet papered with imitation wood grain. He spent days huddled in blankets next to this stove, on a grease-spotted sofa that had been brought close. With his chronic cold, he missed days of school, and hated to, for it was warm at school, and there was running water, and flush toilets. And girls in long pleated skirts and fuzzy sweaters and bobby socks, who belonged to the modern era, to civilization. He clung to civilization by reading; huddled in the brown stove’s aromatic aura of coal oil, he read anything—P. G. Wodehouse, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Thorne Smith—that savored of cities and took him out of this damp, cold little stone house.

  His mother remembered that first winter with rueful pleasure, as a set of tribulations blithely overcome. “It was really very hard, I suppose, on everybody—you were so sick, and your father had to struggle to get to work in that old Chevrolet that was all we could afford, and for my parents it was a terrible defeat, to come back to the farm after they had gotten away; they would hide together in the corner just like children—but I was so happy to be here I hardly noticed. The movers had broken the large pane of glass in the front door, and for some reason that whole first winter we never managed to replace it; we lived with a sheet of cardboard wedged over the hole. It’s incredible that we survived.” And she would laugh, remembering. “We tried to light fires in the living-room fireplace but all the wood the Schellenbargers had left us in the basement was moldy elm, and that fireplace never did draw well, even when the swifts’ nests weren’t plugging it up. Smoke leaks out into the room, I’ve never understood quite why. If you look up the flue with a flashlight, the stonework has a twist to it.”

  Joey seemed to remember, though, waking upstairs and putting his feet onto the bare wood floor and grabbing his school clothes and hurrying in his pajamas down the narrow stairs—the treads worn in two troughs by generations of footsteps, the nailheads protruding and shiny and dangerous—to dress in front of the fireplace, where logs were crackling. The freezing upstairs air would lick at his skin like flame, like the endless conversations between his mother and her parents, incessant flowing exchanges that would ripple into quarrel and chuckle back again into calm while he focused, when he was home, into the pages of a book. His grandfather had a beautiful, patient, elocutionary voice; his grandmother spoke little, in guttural responses. His mother, unlike most adults, hadn’t parted from her parents, and clung to them with old tales and grievances, like someone adding up the same set of figures day after day and forever expecting a different answer. While Joey, sick, huddled by the stove, heated conversations were in his ears as the smell of coal oil was in his nostrils, but always, those five years (only five!) that he lived in the sandstone house with four adults, his attention was aimed elsewhere—on schoolwork, on the future. He tried to ignore what was around him. The house, even when plumbing and central heating and a telephone were installed, and new wallpaper made the repainted rooms pretty, embarrassed him.

  He was never more embarrassed than in that summer before they moved in, before they owned even the erratic old Chevrolet. The war was still on, the Pacific part of it. Several times, his mother made him travel with her by bus out to the farm they already owned. She had a vision of a windbreak of pines rimming the big field, along the road, and she and Joey carried seedlings in boxes, and shovels, and pruners, and a watering can—all this humiliating apparatus dragged onto a city bus by a red-faced middle-aged woman and a skinny boy with ears that stuck out and dungarees that were too short. His mother wore a checked shirt like a man’s and a straw sun hat and a pair of light-blue overalls with a bib; she looked like a farmer in a Hollywood musical comedy. There was no space inside the bus for the shovels; the driver had to store them in the luggage compartment and then stop and get out in the middle of nowhere to hand the tools over. It was a relief when the bus, headed south toward Washington, D.C., disappeared around a bend in the highway.

  Joey and his mother walked down the dirt washboard road in the heat, carrying their equipment. He had never been so humiliated, and vowed never to be again. He couldn’t blame his mother, he still needed her too much, so he blamed the place—its hazy, buggy fields, its clouds of blowing pollen that made him sneeze and his eyes water, its little sandstone house like a cube of brown sugar melting in the heat, in a dip of hillside beneath an overgrown, half-dead apple orchard. All through noon and into the afternoon they cleared small spaces at the edge of the field, where the Schellenbargers’ last crop of field corn was pushing up in limp green rows, and cut away burdock and poison ivy and honeysuckle, and dug holes, and set in each hole a six-inch puff of pine seedling, and sprinkled water over the sandy red earth. Moving a few paces farther on to plant the next tree, Joey could no longer see the last one amid the weeds and wild grass. The work seemed hopeless. Yet, when the afternoon breeze came up, he heard a purity of silence that didn’t exist in his beloved street of semi-detached houses. Perhaps one car an hour passed, the people staring at this woman and boy dressed in clothes suitable for neither country nor city. And he felt a kind of heroism in his periodic trudge, with the empty sprinkling can, for the half-mile along the edge of the cornfields to the empty house, with its rusty iron pump on the back porch, and then the long haul back, the sloshing can as heavy now as a stone.
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  He felt heroic to himself. Space for heroism existed out here; his being had been transposed to a new scale. He was determined to impress his mother—to win her back, since here on this farm he for the first time encountered something she apparently loved as much as she loved him.

  At last, the weeds threw feathery long shadows upon one another and the tiny pines were all planted in the hopeless roadside jungle and it was time to walk back up the dusty washboard road to wait for the bus from Washington to round the corner. Having gone and come so far, the bus could be as much as an hour late, and their eyes would sting, staring down the gray highway for it, and his stomach would sink at the thought that they had missed it and were stranded. But not even this possibility daunted him, for he had forged a mood of defiant collusion in which he was numbed to embarrassment and played a role both stoic and comic, co-starring with his mother in her straw sun hat and their lanky, sharp-faced sidekicks, the clippers and the shovel. Years later, he could even laugh with her about it, the memory of those awkward hot trips to plant a line of trees most of which never thrived, choked by thistles and bindweed or severed in a year or two by a careless sweep of a scythe.

  Yet a few of the pines, perhaps six or seven, did live to tower along the roadbank—shaggy-headed apparitions taller than a ship’s mast, swaying in the wind. By this time, the dirt road was macadamized and hummed with traffic, and the bus route to Washington had long ago been abandoned as unprofitable.

  • • •

  Five years after the September when they had moved, Joey went to college. Essentially, he never returned. He married in his senior year, and after graduation moved to New York City. Another of his mother’s visions, along with that of the farm as paradise, was of him as a poet; he fulfilled this heroic task as best he could, by going to work for an ad agency and devoting himself to the search for the arresting phrase and image, on the edge of the indecent, that incites people to buy—that gives them permission, from the mythic world of fabricated symbols, to spend. The business was like poetry in that you needed only a few lucky hits, and he had his share, and couldn’t complain. He never again had to get on a bus with a shovel.

  The numbers attached to the years and decades slowly changed, and with them the numbers in his bank account and on his apartment building. His first marriage took place in three different apartments, his turbulent second in four, his short-lived third in only one, and now he wondered if women had been not quite his thing all along. He had always felt most at ease, come to think of it, in the company of men, especially those who reminded him of his quiet, uncomplaining father. But it was the AIDS-conscious Eighties by then, and his hair had passed through gray into virtual white, and he was content to share his life with his books, his CDs (compact discs, certificates of deposit), and his modest little art collection, mixed of watery commercialism and icy minimalism. On the other side of the white walls of his apartment he could hear the mumble and thump of his neighbors, and he liked that. He had come home, in the Fifties, to semi-detached living.

  Three hours away, his widowed mother lived alone in the sandstone house. Joey had been the first to depart. A few years later, his grandfather died, suddenly, with a stroke like a thunderclap, and then, after a bedridden year, his grandmother. This created an extra room upstairs, so Joey and his first wife and young children, when they came to visit in the Sixties, no longer had to camp out downstairs, on cots and the sofa spotted by the peanut-butter crackers he used to eat when condemned to reading the days away. The upstairs had two real bedrooms, to which the doors could be closed, and a kind of hallway beside the head of the stairs where he had slept for five years, listening to the four adults rustle and snore and creak while girls and prayers and the beginnings of poems all ran together in his brain. His grandfather, on his way downstairs in the early morning, would ruffle the hair on the sleeping boy’s head, and the gathering sounds of family breakfast, as Joey’s grandmother and parents followed, would rise under him with the smell of toast, a doughy warmth of life rising beneath the cold bare floorboards of soft old pine.

  There was a fourth room, a small room in the northwest corner, where his mother had once been born, in a long agony of labor—a rural calvary, as Joey imagined it, with flickering lamps and steaming kettles and ministering cousins arriving by horse and buggy—that shaped her relations with her own mother into, it seemed, a ferocious apology, a futile undying adhesion in an attempt to make amends. She nursed her mother in the old woman’s long paralysis of dying, but not always patiently, or tenderly, and when the ordeal at last was over she was left with additional cause for self-blame. “I spent my whole life,” she concluded, “trying to please my mother, and never did.”

  Joey would ask, irritated by these repeated surges of self-dramatization, “Did she ever say so?”

  “No, but you knew her. She never said anything.”

  “Unlike my mother,” he said, with an ironic pretense of gallantry.

  She heard the irony. “Yes, I inherited Pop’s gift of gab,” she admitted. “It’s been a curse, really. If you talk enough, you don’t feel you have to do anything.”

  This fourth room had become the bathroom, with a tub but no shower, a basin but no cabinet. Toothpaste, sun lotion, hand creams, razors, dental floss, slivers of soap thriftily stuck together all accumulated on the deep sill overlooking the blackening shingles of the back-porch roof. After his father died, in the early Seventies, the house gradually lost the power to purge itself of accumulation. The family’s occupancy, which had begun with removal of the porch, the inner wall, and the chimney stones, now silted the attic and cellar and windowsills full of souvenirs of his mother’s lengthening residence.

  On the theory that it would save the wild birds from being eaten, she had fed a stray cat that came to the back porch; this cat then became several, and the several became as many as forty. The kitchen became choked with stacked cases of cat food, and a site in the woods, at the end of a path overgrown with raspberry canes, became a mountain of empty cat-food cans. Tin Mountain, Joey’s children called it. Magazines and junk mail and church pamphlets sat around on tables and chairs waiting to be bundled and taken to the barn, to wait there for the Boy Scouts’ next paper drive. Photographs of Joey and his children and wives, Christmas cards and valentines from relations and neighbors piled up on available spaces like a kind of moss. Even the table where his mother ate had room eventually for only one plate and cup and saucer, her own. The house was clogging up, Joey felt, much as her heart—coronary angiography had revealed—was plugging with arteriosclerosis, and her weakly pumped lungs were filling with water.

  His arrivals, as the years went on, seemed to accumulate, one on top of another. He would park his car by the barn and pick his way across the line of stepping stones that in the decades since they were laid (even Granny, stiff and bent over, helping with the crowbar) had been silted over by the sandy soil and its crabgrass. On the back porch there would be a puddle of cats and kittens mewing to be fed. Entering the back door, he would try not to grimace at the stench of cat food and damp cardboard. His mother saved, in separate sections of the floor, the empty cans, and the plastic bags the supermarket bagged her groceries in, and slippery stacks of mail-order catalogues, and string and twine snarled in a galvanized bucket. Joey recognized in this accumulation a superstition he had to fight within himself—the belief that everything has value. The birds in the trees, the sunflower at the edge of the orchard, the clumsily pasted-up valentine received years ago from a distant grandchild—all have a worth which might, at any moment, be called into account. It was a way of advertising that one’s own life was infinitely precious.

  There would be a peck of a kiss at the door, and he would carry the suitcase upstairs, past the dog; the last of the series of dogs was a whirling, nipping mongrel bitch who was thrilled to have a man in the house. The guest room had been his parents’ bedroom. When she became a widow, his mother had moved into her parents’ old room, closer to the room in
which she had been born. The move was part, Joey felt, of an obscure religious system that had nothing to do with Christianity. He remembered how, in a surprising rite of that system, his parents on the day after his grandmother died took her stained, urine-soaked mattress outdoors and burned it, down near the stones he had dumped, darkening the sky all morning with the smoke.

  Here, in this guest room, at night, without a wife to distract and comfort him, he would begin to fight for his breath. The bed sagged so that his back hurt. The pillow felt heavy and dense. The sandstone hearth of the never-used fireplace in the room would emit an outdoor dampness. Birds and bats and mice would stir in the porous walls, and his mother’s motions would make her bed on the other side of the thin wall creak. Was she awake, or asleep? Which was he? He could truly relax only in the dawn light, when the dog would wake her, scrabbling on the bare boards with her claws, and the two females would slowly, noisily head downstairs, and the can-opener would rhythmically begin to chew through the first installment of cat-food cans.