In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  Ever since his revelation three years ago of God’s non-existence, he had carried around with him a crusty, stunned feeling—a clinging sense of lostness, as if within a series of ill-furnished, run-down classrooms he found himself in the wrong one, with an urgent appointment elsewhere, for which he was growing every minute a minute more tardy, incurring the growing wrath of some faceless, dimensionless disciplinarian. The sight of his poor family—Stella visibly aged and thinned by their fall, Jared and Esther coming and going with the secretive cockiness of children thrust too early upon their own resources, Teddy at ten growing a shell of deep reserve and plodding stoicism amid the debris of his father’s infidelity—was as painful to him as the sight of a sunstruck row of houses on whose doors he was condemned to knock in vain. Within the movie theatre, amid the other scarcely seen slumped bodies, he felt released from accusation. The moving pictures’ flutter of agitation and gesticulated emotion from women of a luminous and ideal pallor licked at his fevered brain soothingly. Images of other shadows in peril and torment lifted his soul out of him on curious wings, wings of self-forgetfulness that had not functioned in former days when he and Stella in sober evening finery would attend a Metropolitan production at the Lyceum Theatre, or a Verdi straight from Milan at the Opera House, or a musical play at the Orpheum. Over two decades in the past, he and his Princeton fellow postulates had stolen a holiday from their vows by travelling on trolley cars to Trenton and its vaudeville theatres, but it would have ill become his Paterson role as a man of the cloth to visit even the Empire, which advertised “refined burlesque” and “ladies’ matinees.” His former station did not now debar him from the nickelodeon turnstile and the space of infinite possibility beyond. Before the lights were lowered there was a murmur of indolent conversation and a crackle of paper bags holding sweets and sugar buns and Polish sausages and cups of ice chips; then came a hush of expectation when the projectionist could be heard moving in his cubicle behind them; his little square windows emitted unscheduled blue flashes and whiffs of smoke that testified to the dangerous spark at the root of his sorcery. Then the projector, turned by hand, began to spin overhead its chuckling whir. There were splinters of daylight at the back of the building which Clarence ceased to see once the great screen came alive. This was a church with its mysteries looming brilliantly, undeniably above the expectant rows. The projectionist slowed or speeded up the reel like a conductor regulating a symphony’s tempo, and the piano player in the corner, huddled beneath his sallow lamp like a monk at his candlelit prayers, sought to inscribe the silent images with thunders and tinklings that channelled the unified emotions of the audience into surging indignation, distress, suspense, and a relief that verged upon the comic in the violence of its discharge.

  The pictures transported the audience everywhere but to workaday places like Paterson: the Wild West, Manhattan slums, lumber camps in the far Canadian north, Chinese opium dens, English castles, deserts of the Holy Land, and the Roman amphitheatres of the first Christian centuries. There were kidnappings foiled by faithful dogs, and brawls amid furniture that smashed like pastry, and chases in which one was miraculously present first with the chased and then with the pursuers. For the female apparitions there were delicious and languid descents into sexual temptation that ended in abject wantonness and a welcomed death, and for the indestructible male spectres the camaraderie of battle, the thrill of vows redeemed and triumphant rescuings achieved, with the new art’s dazzling nimbleness, in the very nick of time.

  There was still much vaudeville in the cinematic art; magic and illusionism that once depended upon physical sleight-of-hand now could be managed by manipulation of the camera. Two men serenely ate dinner on the ceiling, while their discarded jackets were pulled upward by invisible wires. Strange and marvellous confections of satin and papier-mâché cavorted before backdrops painted as carefully as pages from a children’s book, in Méliès’ copious fantasy factory. Freed from the barriers of language, silent films arrived from France, Italy, Denmark, and Germany, their influx bringing with it the first recognizable stars, Max Linder and Asta Nielsen. At first, stage plays and music-hall routines were filmed as if through the eyes of a rigid front-row theatre-goer, but from year to year the camera had grown in cunning and flexibility, finding its vocabulary of cut, dissolve, close-up, tracking and dolly shot. Eyes had never before seen in this manner; impossibilities of connection and disjunction formed a magic, glittering sequence that left real time and its three rigid dimensions behind. Books rose up like radiant thunderheads out of the gray flatness of the printed page: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ivanhoe, A Tale of Two Cities, with breaks between the reels, where the audience could take relief from the burden of enchantment. The world was being created anew, Clarence saw: last year’s sinking of the Titanic, sounding the absence of God to its very bottom, was recast as a flaming disaster in a Danish film, and Queen Elizabeth was reborn as an aging Sarah Bernhardt. One young swooning, black-browed young woman after another was kidnapped into white slavery—a trade controlled by evil, pigtailed Chinamen in robes and boxy hats. Clarence’s companions in the afternoon theatre were by and large of the humbler classes, furtive exiles from the day’s work or, like himself, from the disgrace of joblessness, and he suffered with them the perils, temptations, and passing joys of elemental humanity; the films lifted the skirts of the supposedly safe, chaste, and eventless world to reveal an anatomy of passion and cruel inequity. Men in top hats were invariably villains or clowns; a girl attracted to a man from a superior class was usually ruined. Agreeable middle-aged women were courted by slick young men in checked suits, with inevitably unfortunate results. A young pioneer woman loved and married an Indian, with similar results. A Mexican girl was rejected by an American lover and tried to gas him. An impoverished boy was spurned by his sweetheart’s wealthy family and finally won her when by the ironies of capitalism their financial situations were reversed. Vile and treacherous Indians attacked covered wagons and kidnapped an infant who survived the flames and tomahawks. A station-master’s daughter saved a train from sabotage. These one- or two-reelers unwound their stories with a dizzying speed, and when laid end to end for the length of an hour left Clarence blinking and slightly headachy as he stepped out into the daylight of Main Street, beneath the glaring pewter sky of a New Jersey August. Watching the “movies” took no strength, but recovering from them did—climbing again out of their scintillating bath into the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal. He felt himself fading away, but for the hour when the incandescent power of these manufactured visions filled him. Those black-lipped heart-shaped faces, those shapely and agitated eye-whites ringed in kohl, those imperilled round-limbed actresses in glittering pagan undress. Those Babylonian temples, their papier-mâché façades blending into painted images of their rear porticos and extensions. Those rough men combative and ready to die in their shaggy chaps and ornately stitched boots. Those exotic places where life occurred and where he would never go. When the film was over, and the pale lights of the world came back on, he stood and looked kindly upon the dazed and sated faces of the others in the audience, who had been motionlessly pursuing the same adventures as he, and who now awoke from the same dream.

  Feeling faint in the stale late-summer heat, beneath a white sky like a blank screen, Clarence carried his briefcase down from Main along Market into the Riverside district, where the houses were thickest, on the remote chance of salvaging the afternoon with a sale. Now that the strike was over, another noise had replaced that of policemen’s whistles and defiant shouting and singing in the streets: the insistent rhythmic clatter of the reactivated mills, along Van Houten and Ellison, Prince and McBride, hundreds of unravelling shuttles slapped back and forth in their wooden boats by the snapping levers, hundreds of harplike reeds beating in the weft, beating in, beating in, as the heddles lifted and lowered the alternating halves of the warp, lifted and lowered, twenty picks to the minute as the silk cloth accumulated thread by th
read, yard by yard. Clarence struggled to breathe in the day’s stagnant heat. Though he still walked erect, with a touch of the Wilmot panache, his sandy mustache was so whitened as to scarcely show in his face—the drained face of an addict enduring his days for the one hour in which he could forget, in a trance as infallible as opium’s, his fall, his failure, his disgrace, his immediate responsibilities, his ultimate nullity. Have mercy.

  ii. Teddy

  What he could never stop remembering was his father coming home to the house on Twenty-seventh Street after a day of treading the sidewalks for nothing, not having sold a single subscription to the encyclopedia and looking drained, as if humiliation were a worm inside, a parasite growing larger and larger, drinking Father’s blood. Thirstily taking the tea that Mother would set before him in the little narrow kitchen at the back of the house, his father in his huddled humiliated body would convey the impression of a terrible storm blowing outdoors, a chaos of pressure and motion which might bear in upon the dirty-green house’s wooden walls and sweep them all away. Unlike the solid brick parsonage they had left, with its spiky dark woodwork inside and a feeling of everything polished and tight as on a ship, this wooden house they owned, or that the bank owned thanks to Mr. Dearholt, was leaky and frail; Teddy could see daylight along the attic eaves when he explored up there, and hear squirrels or rats scrabbling in the walls by his ear at night, and feel the cold whispering and pressing in along the edges of the loose rattling window sash in the winter, when he sat in his room trying to study or to arrange the baseball cards (they came in Tip Top Bread and Cracker Jack and cigarette packs) or foreign stamps in one of the little sheltering worlds of papery order he tried to make, though he got up so early for his paper route that he was often too tired to make much sense of anything and more than once fell asleep in his clothes, surrounded by the little tinted faces of Ty Cobb and Simon Bolívar and Christy Mathewson and King George V and Frank Baker and Prince Albert of Monaco and Jake Daubert, slugging first baseman for the Brooklyn Robins. Noises from the Wilmots’ neighbors—families quarrelling and slamming doors, a pleading child being beaten, a burst of laughter that yet had something skiddy and out of control about it meaning there was liquor involved, men’s and women’s voices falling away to a self-engrossed murmur, or a song like “Peg o’ My Heart” or “There’s a Long, Long Trail” or “You Made Me Love You” being sung by two or three to the jangling notes of a hesitant piano or “The Aba Daba Honeymoon” in a scratchy voice on somebody’s cranked-up Victrola—came in through the walls, in this cheap neighborhood where a lot of the people hadn’t even been born in this country, let alone going back to near the beginning like the Wilmots. Mother said the people were common but good-hearted, yet the impression Teddy received from the noises he could hear through his walls was of lives at the mercy of passions, people who shouted or sang or cried aloud or fought with each other for no reason, as senselessly and suddenly as accidents and murders happened in the newspapers. He delivered his papers to the stoops and porches of these people when they were still safely asleep, but his father went out into the daylight wilderness of their appetites and rages and tried to sell them books, books that weren’t even adventures but dry and nothing but facts, in two columns, with spidery illustrations, and Teddy knew it was hopeless and that his father would die of it. Die of it or of the bloodthirsty worm that was eating him from within.

  The worm got a name, eventually: tuberculosis. His father had tuberculosis. It was the year a ship called the Lusitania was sunk in big headlines. Teddy always glanced at the headlines on the bundle of papers, the Paterson Morning Calls, that awaited him on the corner of Market and Madison, rain or snow, sleet or shine, in the freezing dark of winter or the misty dawn of summer while all the little lawns and their cobwebs were iridescent with dew. The news—news of the European war, in those days—rubbed off on him as he made his way back and forth along the numbered streets that led off Market diagonally. For years he walked on foot, delivering seventy papers for half a penny apiece, and then, he remembered, there was a long family discussion as to whether he should be allowed to buy himself a bicycle so he could skim through his route in half the time. His mother really didn’t see how they could afford it—the important thing was not to skimp on food, to keep their strengths up, already there was this dreadful shortage of sugar and bananas thanks to the war and the danger to shipping; but his father said the boy was exhausted from rising so early, he was getting to be a man and needed his sleep, and Esther came through with a couple of dollars from her job as a secretary. The bicycle, a Pierce, cost eleven dollars second-hand; it had some rust on the spokes and a rattling chain guard and had lost some red paint and was stiff pedalling uphill, but Teddy loved it as if it were a loyal pet. In the mornings, getting the Pierce out of the shed in their little backyard, he talked to it; in his mind it was, with its mottled red fenders, a faithful pinto pony. “Faster, faster, the Comanches are right behind us!” It had coaster brakes that could make it skid and a bell he could ring with his thumb and a wire-handle basket he could load his papers in. He got so he could steer without his hands, leaving them free to take the paper from the basket, fold it, and toss it, sometimes a little wild of the porches. He liked tossing the folded paper right where the person opening the front door would see it, and then pedalling on, his sack getting lighter with each toss and behind him the columns of print dropping down through the eyes of the customers into their brains. Always he loved this sensation, hard to describe, of delivering, and then moving on. It satisfied the same side of him as arranging stamps on the album page or trading cards to get all three Detroit outfielders, or the full Pittsburgh infield, not just Honus Wagner. Delivering the Morning Call was an orderly procedure that ended with an empty sack and another thirty-five cents to his credit with the distributing agent, Mr. Larsen. Six days times thirty-five was two dollars ten and some of the people gave him a dime extra when he went around to collect on Saturday mornings. The bike meant he could sleep a half-hour longer in the morning, until quarter of six, when Mother stirred and poked him awake, teasing the way she did. His getting to be bigger and stronger and needier embarrassed him. He sensed his mother and sister holding off at the table so he could have seconds. Teddy felt heavy at home but out in Paterson, delivering papers with the morning dew and the rows of houses just stirring and showing their upstairs lights, he felt weightless, free, happy, a little significant cog in the works, spinning and whirring along.

  The doctor—who had been a member of their old parish at Fourth Presbyterian—said Father had tuberculosis of the esophagus and the only cure was to stay in bed utterly still and quiet and let the body fight the disease. So there was no more encyclopedia-selling, though his commission on the few sets he had sold kept coming in for a while, in envelopes from St. Louis whose toasted pale brown Teddy associated with the flakes of falling manna in the Bible. Teddy no longer went to Sunday school, it somehow would have been disgraceful for him to go, and he remembered some of the lessons and stories with a kind of horror, as if back there in ancient Hebrew times, those strange Elijahs and Elishas and Joshuas and Judases in their crayon-colored robes, lay the gnarled roots of his family’s present trouble. The money had dried up, but he helped with his three-fifty or so a week, and his mother did sewing piece-work, since before meeting Dad she had attended a school for young ladies back in Missouri that had left her clever with a needle and thread, and Esther was a secretary in the offices of the great Weidmann plant down along the river. She could type without looking at the keyboard and write Gregg shorthand, and still lived at home and gave her salary in, half of it, keeping the other half for her clothes and what she called “mad money”—movies and ice-cream sundaes and the little luxuries that women need, unlike men. Jared was at Rutgers, down in New Brunswick, and Mother said his duty was to stay there and get an education, but then in Teddy’s impression everything mysteriously darkened; there was some trouble with a girl who thought Jared should marry her, he ha
d abused her trust somehow. Suddenly Jared wasn’t in New Brunswick, he was in New York City, and he didn’t come home for months. Dad lay in his room quiet all day. When Teddy looked in, after school, there was his father’s back, with no way of knowing if the man’s eyes were open or shut or if he was alive or dead. When his curiosity got too much and Teddy went in and around the bed, the mahogany fourposter both his parents used to sleep in, his father would wink at him with his head still flat on the white pillow.

  “Well, I hope your day has been more interesting than mine,” he would say, in that soft voice that seemed to be sifted through some kind of mesh. He would lift his head and hold it there until Teddy took the other pillow and put it under. His father’s breath had the faint brown sweetness of soothing syrup.

  “It was O.K.”