by John Updike
The twins bring down from the barn the horseshoes and the quoits. Uncle Jesse drives the stakes and pegs in the places that, after three summers, still show as spots of depressed sparseness in the grass. The sun, reaching toward noon, domineers over the meadow; the shade of the walnut tree grows smaller and more noticeably cool. By noon, all have arrived, including the Dodge station wagon from central Pennsylvania, the young pregnant Wilmington cousin who married an airline pilot, and the White Plains people, who climb from their car looking like clowns, wearing red-striped shorts and rhinestone-studded sunglasses. Handshakes are exchanged that feel to one man like a knobbed wood carving and to the other like a cow’s slippery, unresisting teat. Women kiss, kiss stickily, with little overlapping patches of adhesive cheek and clicking conflicts of spectacle rims, under the white unslanting sun. The very insects shrink toward the shade.
The eating begins. Clams steam, corn steams, salad wilts, butter runs, hot dogs turn, torn chicken shines in the savage light. Iced tea, brewed in forty-quart milk cans, chuckles when sloshed. Paper plates buckle on broad laps. Plastic butter knives, asked to cut cold ham, refuse. Children underfoot in the pleased frenzy eat only potato chips. Somehow, as the first wave of appetite subsides, the long tables turn musical, and a murmur rises to the blank sky, a cackle rendered harmonious by a remote singleness of ancestor; a kind of fabric is woven and hung, a tapestry of the family fortunes, the threads of which include milkmen, ministers, mailmen, bankruptcy, death by war, death by automobile, insanity—a strangely prevalent thread, the thread of insanity. Never far from a farm or the memory of a farm, the family has hovered in honorable obscurity, between poverty and wealth, between jail and high office. Real-estate dealers, schoolteachers, veterinarians are its noblemen; butchers, electricians, door-to-door salesmen its yeomen. Protestant and teetotalling, ironically virtuous and mildly proud, it has added to America’s statistics without altering their meaning. Whence, then, this strange joy?
Watermelons smelling of childhood cellars are produced and massively sliced. The sun passes noon and the shadows relax in the intimate grass of this antique meadow. To the music of reminiscence is added the rhythmic chunking of thrown quoits. They are held curiously, between a straight thumb and four fingers curled as a unit, close to the chest, and thrown with a soft constrained motion that implies realms of unused strength. The twins and the children, as if superstitiously, have yielded the game to the older men, Fritz and Claude, Fred and Jesse, who, in pairs, after due estimation and measurement of the fall, pick up their four quoits, clink them together to clean them, and alternately send them back through the air on a high arc, floating with a spin-held slant like that of gyroscopes. The other pair measures, decides, and stoops. When they tap their quoits together, decades fall away. Even their competitive crowing has something measured about it, something patient, like the studied way their shirtsleeves are rolled up above their elbows. The backs of their shirts are ageless. Generations have sweated in just this style, under the arms, across the shoulder blades, and wherever the suspenders rub. The younger men and the teen-age girls play a softball game along the base paths that Jesse has scythed. The children discover the rowboat and, using the oars as poles, bump from bank to bank. When they dip their hands into the calm brown water, where no fish lives, a mother watching from beneath the walnut tree shrieks, “Keep your hands inside the boat! Uncle Jesse says the creek’s polluted!”
And there is a stagnant fragrance the lengthening afternoon strains from the happy meadow. Aunt Eula nods herself asleep, and her false teeth slip down, so her face seems mummified and the children giggle in terror. Flies, an exploding population, discover the remains of the picnic and skate giddily on its odors. The softball game grows boring, except to the airline pilot, a rather fancy gloveman excited by the admiration of Cousin Karen in her tight white Levi’s. The Pennsylvania and New York people begin to pack their cars. The time has come for the photograph. Their history is kept by these photographs of timeless people in changing costumes standing linked and flushed in a moment of midsummer heat. All line up, from resurrected Aunt Eula, twitching and snapping like a mud turtle, to the unborn baby in the belly of the Delaware cousin. To get them all in, Jesse has to squat, but in doing so he brings the houses into his viewfinder. He does not want them in the picture, he does not want them there at all. They surround his meadow on three sides, raw ranch shacks built from one bastard design but painted in a patchwork of pastel shades. Their back yards, each holding an aluminum clothes tree, come right to the far bank of the creek, polluting it, and though a tall link fence holds back the children who have gathered in these yards to watch the picnic as if it were a circus or a zoo, the stare of the houses—mismatched kitchen windows squinting above the gaping mouth of a two-door garage—cannot be held back. Not only do they stare, they speak, so that Jesse can hear them even at night. Sell, they say. Sell.
The Hermit
HE HAD HAD BROTHERS—two older than he, and one younger. He remembered his childhood as a tussle, a noisy competition for food, for clothes that fit, for attention. Now, in the woods, there was no noise. There was sound, but not noise. In the beginning, during the first nights, the scrabbling and travelling of animals—the house apparently adjoined a confluence of paths—felt loud and harsh to him, a crackling and rustling that overflowed his consciousness, which was held cupped for sleep. Now he no longer heard these sounds, as a mechanic is deaf to a machine that is working smoothly. As he settled in, as March yielded to April and April to May, everything in his sudden environment sank into invisibility, into the utter transparency of perfect order.
And yet never in his life had he seen so well, seen so much. He had never excelled at school or in the competition within the family; something he could not quite believe was as simple as stupidity clouded his apprehension. Something numbed his grip at the moment of grasping, unfocused his wits at the demand for concentration, scattered his purpose when it needed to be single. It was as if his mind, or that set of switches and levers that translated his mind into the motions of the outer world, was too finely adjusted to bear the jostle of others, to function in the heavy damp climate human activity bred. The climate of humanity, he saw now, had never been congenial to him.
He had found the house while hunting, deep in the tract of second- or third-growth forest owned by a steel company. The steel company was at the other end of the state, in Pittsburgh. Fifteen years ago it had bought local land wholesale, on the speculation that it contained low-grade iron ore. The company had not yet mined it and perhaps never would. In the meantime, these hundreds of acres grew wild, submerging their interior demarcations—old boundary stones and tumbling dry walls and rusting barbed-wire fences like strands of a forgotten debate.
The house frightened him when he first saw it. A roofless sandstone shell with some cedar shingles still clinging to a lean-to, it had no business being there. Its ghostly presence turned the wilderness menacing. How old was it? The trees around it were tall but not thick, and a vestigial farmyard remained, earth too packed to encourage roots. Perhaps the land had been cleared a century ago, perhaps it had been farmed as recently as before the war. He saw no sign of a fire in the ruin. Not only the roof but the floor had been carried away by weather; the cellar hole, brimming with tumbled rocks and matted brambles, gaped between the floor beams, which were still solid enough to support his weight. They were spaced a stride apart, and when he looked up, the blue sky showing between the naked rafters exhilarated him, as if, a little dizzily, he had taken flight in a skeletal basket attached to a great blue balloon. With necessarily rhythmic motions he stepped from beam to beam, remembering an uncle of his who played the organ in the Lutheran church, and how precisely this uncle’s feet would dance on the pedal keyboard.
Part of the house was still sheltered. What must have been the kitchen, the lean-to, still held its roof and its floor. There was even part of an interior wall—papered pine boarding rather than plaster-and-lath—and a doorf
rame from which the door had long vanished. Another doorless rectangle straddled a sandstone threshold bearing two damp depressions—puddles smaller than saucers—and a patch of parallel grooves left by the mason’s serrated chisel. The stone was intact, and the timbering that boxed in the shattered windows seemed, though pitted and warped, sound enough. With doors, fresh sashes, some reboarding and shingling, the room could be made weathertight. He wondered why no one else had thought of it. The site seemed ignored even by vandals. The initials gouged here and there were as gray as the wood. The cola cans scattered in the cellar hole had rotted with rust, and the empty shotgun shells below one sill seemed older than last hunting season. Perhaps, he thought, the steel company had discouraged trespassers and then lost interest, in the lordly way of giants. Certainly the house seemed to be waiting for no one but him, not even for lovers.
His younger brother, the schoolteacher, was the first to visit him. He had not been here a week and was still engaged in carpentry. A factory-puttied window sash, each pane labelled with the purple emblem of the glass company, was leaning against a birch, giving the bits of moss and grass around the roots the refracted, pampered look of greenhouse shoots. It was March, and the undergrowth was still simple and precious. Each mottled spear of skunk cabbage nosing its way up through the leaf mold had an air of arrival. A smothered spring made the ground on this side of the house very damp.
“It’s not your land, Stanley,” his brother told him. “It’s not even government land.”
“Well, they can kick me off, then. All I can lose is the lumber and nails.”
“How much do you want to use it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Is there a woman you’re going to bring up?” Morris’s delicate skin registered a blush; Stanley had to laugh. Morris was younger even than his years. He was now in his late twenties, and had grown a mustache; it was as if a child had painted a male doll with the delicate pink of a girl and then, realizing its mistake, had solemnly dabbed black beneath the nose.
Stanley said, “Couldn’t I use my room for a woman?” It was an unkind joke, for Morris had complained about such use. Their rooms were side by side on the third floor of the parental house. There all of the brothers lived except Tom, who had moved to California. Their parents were dead. Bernard, the oldest brother, a contractor, with his wife and two sons occupied most of the house, though by the terms of the will they all owned it equally. Stanley’s right to live there had never been questioned.
Morris winced, and spoke rapidly. “I guess,” he said. “You have before. Anyway, none of your whores could hike this far.” To emphasize his sharpness and coldness of voice he kicked a clump of skunk cabbage, smashing it, so that its scent of carrion flooded the air. “You’ll make a fool of the family,” he added, and Stanley was struck by how loud, for all of Morris’s rosy delicacy, how loud his presence was—how he seemed to fill, with the speed of a spreading odor, so much of the bowl-shaped greening space around the house.
Stanley felt pressed, defensive. “Nobody need know.”
“Will you work?”
Stanley could not quite grasp the essence of this question. He had two jobs: he was a custodian—a janitor—at the school where Morris taught, and in the summer he worked for Bernard, as a common laborer, digging trenches, mixing cement, knocking together forms, since he had some skill as a carpenter. Though he had always seemed to himself on the verge of a decisive inner graduation, Stanley had not finished the eleventh grade; there was a light above him he could not rise to out of the surrounding confusion, a din that infected his head.
“Well, why not?” he answered, and Morris grunted, satisfied.
But it had been a good question, for in fact the trek through the mile of woods to the town seemed to lengthen rather than, as do most distances, shorten with use. Each piece of furniture fetched from his room to the old kitchen added weight to each departure. It was especially unnatural to set out at dawn, in the moist brown muddle before the slanting light had sorted out the tree trunks, when the twigs were heavy with clouded drops that seemed congelations of the starry night; Stanley felt, pushing out from his clearing, as if he were tearing a skin, forcing a ripeness. His house had grown tight around him. He liked especially the contrast between the weathered lumber, seeming to seek through wind and rain its original twisted, branching state, and his patches of fresh pine, trim and young-smelling. Patchwork, with its sensation of thrift, had always pleased him. He had preferred, once past the stylishness of adolescence, to wear old clothes skillfully held back from the rag pile, in this way frustrating time—though the presence of these mended rents and barely visible patches had given him, for all their skill, a forlorn and crazy aura. And this same instinctive hatred of waste, a conservative desire for postponement, led him to prolong the periods between haircuts and to shave only on alternate days, doubling the life of the blades. So that his passionate inward neatness was expressed in outward dishevelment—an inversion typical of his telescopic relations with society. He found himself increasingly unwilling to enter this society, even by way of the subterranean passages of the high-school basement. The students, he knew, mocked his stoop, his considerate slowness. Tentatively, expecting, as in his early experiments with sex, to be rebuked and instead emptying his sin into a strange indifference, he stayed away from work an odd day now and then, and then an entire week. He let himself grow a beard. To his surprise it came out red, though the rest of his hair was black. His oldest brother came to see him.
Bernard’s presence, though less anxious than Morris’s, was bigger; his voice, to ears accustomed to nothing more declamatory than birdsong and nocturnal animals’ rustle, seemed huge, a massive rupture in the web of life. Bernard was wearing a dark suit in the green glade; it was Sunday. He was sweating, angry. “I had Hell’s own time finding you.”
“There’s a stone wall you must keep on your left. I used to get lost myself.” Stanley’s voice sounded strange to him, a dry crackling; he had not used it for days except, in a vague way, to sing.
“Tell me one thing. Are you as crazy as you look?”
“I can shave when I go to town.”
“I didn’t mean just the beard—but, speaking of that, do you know it’s come out orange?”
“I know. I have a mirror.”
“My boys ask, ‘Where’s Uncle Stan?’ ”
“Bring them out. They can spend the night if they’d like. But just them, not their friends. I couldn’t put up too many.”
“Then in your mind this is camping out?”
Stanley wanted to understand; so much importance seemed attached to his understanding. “Camping out?”
“You know what they’re saying in town?”
“About me?”
“They say you’ve become a hermit.”
An odd joy, the tepid blow of morning light, touched Stanley. Dignity and certainty were assigned to the vague thing he had been doing. He had been becoming a hermit. One brother was a contractor, another taught school, another lived in California, and he was a hermit. It was better than a diploma; but he hadn’t earned it. He said cautiously, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Bernard in turn seemed pleased. He shifted his feet as if he had at last found sockets solid enough for their intense weight. “How had you thought of it exactly? Does this have to do with Loretta, or Leinbach, or who?”
Stanley remembered these names. Leinbach was the head custodian and Loretta was a woman who lived alone in a trailer. Leinbach was slender and fussy, with sunken temples and bright broken veins in his nose. Each day he wore a freshly laundered gray shirt to work, carrying his wife on his back in the sheen of her ironing. He demonstrated such jealous concern for the school’s three great boilers that it seemed their heat kept his own blood warm. Loretta was pink and white and smooth, and loved her beer, and laughed when she thought of how life had unhitched her trailer and stranded her on the edge of a cornfield. Morning glories twined up the cinder-block su
pports that had replaced the trailer’s wheels. Stanley was always delighted by how thriftily the bathroom and kitchen fixtures, unfolding on nickel-coated hinges, were fitted into their envelopes of space. But at times Loretta was frantic and bitter; a coarse grief and sourceless storm of outrage would cancel out her smoothness and shake the trailer’s dainty compartments. He gathered that somehow even he, Stanley, was wronging her. Once, on the last day before Christmas vacation, he had accidentally smothered the fire in the third boiler with too great a draught of pea coal. Leinbach, his face grim, his veins livid, had rushed to revive the flames with such fierce haste and spat such vile language that Stanley wondered if it had been a quadrant of Leinbach’s own heart he had mistakenly allowed to flicker and choke. This possible confusion cooled, strangely, his feelings for Loretta. There was a passion loose in the world that might burn him. He told Bernard, “No, it’s nobody in particular.”