by John Updike
“I don’t want to go to engineering school. I’ve had enough school.” His face had heated; she was making him blush.
“Maybe Jared could chip in. He seems to be doing all right, from the way he dresses and that Maxwell he drives, though he’s darn mysterious about it.”
“I said, I don’t want to go. I like it here.”
“I’ll be swiggered, frankly, if I know why—it’s been three years and you don’t seem to know a soul.”
“Basingstoke kids are all snobs and rubes.”
“You got to learn to get out there and mix it up, buddy. Even if you get your knees skinned, mix it up. You’re as bad as Pop, wanting to hide in his office all day. Scared of life, happy to die.”
But they were all, all four residents of this house, scared of life, it seemed to Ted. Aunt Esther years ago, after Horace had left her, had hung out an Overnight Visitors sign and fixed up two bedrooms with a bathroom between them at the back of the second floor, but few people came, and when they did come they tended to be noisy and unsavory—couples up to no good, a gimcrack wedding ring on the girlie’s finger, or old travelling salesmen smelling of whisky and weariness. They wouldn’t have stopped if they weren’t looking for a bargain or a hiding place. Once there were two pairs of dark-suited men who had to be bootleggers, scouting the territory for a smuggling point. The world beyond Basingstoke was becoming faster and more hellbent on city pleasures and at the same time more desperate. Gangsters were killing each other, and people were doing dance marathons, and the German mark was worth four trillion to the dollar. Wilson must have been right: the Allies should have been nicer to the Germans.
“If you don’t know anybody, they’ll only hire you to be a slave,” Teddy told his sister. “I’m beginning to understand what the workers in Paterson were so sore about.”
She laughed. “And you’ve learned without even having to go to work yourself!”
This wasn’t fair; she had forgotten his paper route, and the way it had cost him a chance to be on the baseball team. After a version of their conversation was relayed to the two older women, Mother told him, at the supper table one night when Esther was out on a rendez-vous, “Teddy, you should begin to go to church again. That’s where all the respectable people are, the ones who might have jobs to give. Thanks to our friends in Avon Presbyterian I have more sewing and mending to do than I can rightly keep up with. It’s almost getting to be a curse; I have to keep getting stronger prescriptions in my glasses. And there are some very pretty young ladies in our choir, too. The good people in Basingstoke don’t know you, Teddy. I can’t tell you how often people ask about you—they see you out walking, you see, but you never come to gatherings. You seem stand-offish. To them you’re a bit of a mystery man. The young ladies, especially, ask after you.”
This sweetly intoned speech had been long pent-up, with its several plaintive elements. “Mother,” he said, having rehearsed firmness on this score, “I’m sorry, but I will not go to the Presbyterian church. Or any church.”
Stella sighingly turned to her sister-in-law, explaining, not for the first time, “That’s his way of being loyal to Clarence. But I know your father”—turning back to her son—“never meant those who could gain comfort to stay away. He had just reached a point in his life when he couldn’t carry the torch for a whole congregation. If he hadn’t been stricken down, I’m sure he would have recovered his beliefs. There were signs, in some of the last conversations we had. When I talked about the Heaven to come, he listened real sharp. He as good as said to me, ‘Don’t let the children fall away. Especially Teddy; he’s the one that needs it most. He’s such a sensitive, fearful child.’ ”
“Mother, please. You’re fantasizing.” It was a word he had just learned, in a book called The Mind in the Making, by James Harvey Robinson. “I was the one who used to go in and read the paper to him, and he never said anything of the sort to me.”
“Well, he wouldn’t. That wasn’t Clarence’s way, to be bossy like that. And his voice was entirely gone, there at the end.”
“I love you dearly, all three of you,” Teddy managed to bring out, “but you’re not going to get me to go sing the praises of God, after what He did to Father.”
Aunt Esther said primly, “Some would say God did nothing to Clarence. If there was any doing, it was the other way around. My brother turned and ran from the Light, is the sad truth of it.”
“The sad truth of it is,” Teddy said, with a surge of manly spirit that won his opponents’ approval, even as he sought to vanquish them, “you two are a hundred years behind the times. Read some Mencken. Read some Shaw. Read some Bertrand Russell, even.” In his room on the third floor, alone night after night, he read, preferring the briskly rational, amusing English to the American authors, who wrote about self-help and mental health and dreary Main Streets.
Aunt Esther said, “We once went to a Shaw play up at the old Lyceum in Wilmington, before they changed its name to the Empire and it burned down. I couldn’t exactly follow all the ins and outs of it, but it seemed to come down square on the side of the Salvation Army. He used to read Mencken now and then in the Baltimore Sun, and it would make him boil for days.” They all knew that by “he” she meant the unmentionable Horace, who had also been half of the “we.”
“He calls us all the booboisie,” Aunt Esther said, now meaning Mencken. “Well, for all of me he’s welcome to his smart set. Let alone what comes after, those folks aren’t even happy now—you can tell by the way they poison themselves with rotgut liquor.”
Teddy felt sorry for Mother, her loving intentions being swept aside. “Mother,” he said, “I love church people,” and touched her hand, lying plump and defeated on the lace tablecloth, a wrinkled widow’s hand, with one fingertip whitened and shrunk from always wearing a thimble. “They’re the salt of the earth. It’s just after what Father went through …”
“What he put us through,” she amended, in listless accusation.
“Like it or not, we all must belong somewheres,” his aunt said, “or a person’s not a person. Nobody makes it alone.”
Teddy had a taste of the floating sensation Father must have had when he realized there was nowhere in mankind where he any longer fit—all around him, smooth surfaces without a niche or handhold. And yet Teddy liked people, even the dumb fat girls on the bottle-cap line and the ferret-faced little Wilmington student stenographers. He was happiest among people, if they weren’t crowding him. He loved them but he had to have the right distance.
“Last night at Bible study I heard tell Seth Addison down at the drug store’s looking for a young man,” Aunt Esther said, out of the blue, but with the smirk of a timely release. “Wouldn’t hurt if the fellow knew a bit about keeping records, though the main thing would be the soda fountain. Seth’s had trouble: if the boy’s too young, all his friends pile in and expect to sneak free sodas, and all the fancy concoctions they can dish up now from behind the counter—it gets to be a party. Somebody a little older and not too popular might just fit the bill. No harm in presenting yourself, Theodore, if you don’t think you want to keep riding the trolley car back up to O’Connell this fall. Tell Seth you’re Esther Truitt’s nephew; he and his wife Amy and Horace and I used to go out crabbing when we first moved here, back in ought-eight, in old Noah Watson’s orange dory. Mention old Noah to him—only one I ever knew who could get Seth to loosen up.”
Addison’s Drug Store—Tobacco, Perfumes, and Sundries—was at the center of town, where Rodney Street, curving a bit to parallel the river’s curve, made a T with Elm. Across the street stood the slate-shingled business block in two-tone brick, four doorways long and four stories high, that held Pursey’s Notions and Variety Store and Krauthammer’s Hardware and Seeds, with a barber shop and a dry cleaner in between. The drug store’s big plate window displayed above a pyramid of sun-faded goods two ornamental suspended globes, one holding iodine-red fluid and the other a blue liquid like watered-down ink. Entered by a door
cut into the corner, the store had a magazine rack to the left of the door and on the two sides to the right a series of five-foot slant-faced display cases; attached to the case holding cigars and snuffs and cigarettes, a little flaming gas jet was cupped in chrome; the flame was lit at seven-thirty in the morning, when the store opened, and turned off at nine at night, when it closed. There was also, screwed into the wood like a pencil sharpener, a cigar cutter—a miniature guillotine where children were always wanting to insert their fingers. The cases at a right angle, across from the soda-fountain counter with its revolving stools, held candies and boxes of chocolates and also perfumes, which were kept in large glass-stoppered bottles usually dispensed, into little vials, by Mrs. Amy Addison; she, a wispy, iron-haired woman of non-committal comportment, was in and out of the store all day, as her domestic duties permitted, since women coming into a drug store on a matter of delicacy would rather consult another woman. The soda fountain was a new thing, installed in 1919; the therapeutic effects of soda water had been long advertised, but with the enactment of Prohibition there arose a need in towns all across the country for a place where law-abiding people could come in and sit on a stool and put their elbows up.
At the back, beyond an area of the floor given over to round tables and wire chairs, up one step on a kind of platform, was the pharmacy itself; here Seth Addison and his assistant pharmacist, Charlie Wainwright, performed their mysteries of measurement and dispensation, pulverization and tincture, rolling as many as six or seven powdered herbs and chemicals into pills or dissolving them in diluted alcohol to become “tonics,” behind a high counter that hid all but their faces—the top of Mr. Addison’s head bald and gleaming and that of his young black-haired assistant shining with brilliantine as they nodded and bobbed at their tasks. Behind them receded into shadows three sets of shelves crowded with potions new and old, some of them as ancient as Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters, Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine, and Dr. Kilmer’s Oceanweed Perfect Blood Purifier Heart Remedy. Beyond the shelves, Teddy in his capacity as employee soon discovered, lay a small room with a worn leather couch and cupboards full of mysterious metal harness where Mr. Addison fitted people with trusses, and a larger room where empty cartons were kept and full ones waited to be unpacked and their contents marked with price labels. Down a brief hall lit by the dimmest and dustiest of bulbs was a tiny brown-stained washbasin and toilet with a wobbly seat for the employees’ use and a back door exiting into the glare of a small dirt parking lot, where Seth Addison parked his Packard and Charlie Wainwright his Ford flivver, and the pebble-strewn back street called Fishery Way, though nobody knew quite where the fishery had once been, back in colonial times. The drug store was comforting in its abundance, its stocks of head anointments from Tulepo Hair Restorer and Dandruff Cure (with a haunting insignia, of a profiled woman whose long hair was twisted to form the horns of a crescent moon) to Wildroot Cream Oil and Fitch’s Shampoo, its foot-soothers from Fairyfoot (Stops Bunion Pain) to Dr. Scholl’s variously shaped pads mounted on yellow cardboard, and its solemn ministering to the nether parts with Ex-Lax and sanitary napkins and belts and red rubber douche syringes, anti-itch powders and—a new thing—Trojan prophylactics, made in New Jersey and stored well out of sight, in their little tins like those that housed Zymole Trochees. They were available only to those men of a sufficiently adult age who, gathering up their courage, murmuringly requested them. The customers blushed but Teddy soon learned not to; his face as he waited to hear their requests remained as astutely blank as a lawyer’s.
Whatever physical puritanism he had inherited was worn away by the passage of enough creams and palliatives, pastes and plasters through his hands. He was allowed sometimes to make the suppositories, in a black-painted cast-iron machine whose handle you turned like a vise while the suppository wax, based on cocoa butter and mixed by Mr. Addison, was forced into bullet-shaped chambers; when summer temperatures rose to body heat, however, the wax melted, as it was supposed to, and could be firmed up enough to shape only by holding a bag of cracked ice to the top of the machine, as if the machine had a headache. The poor hot, semi-liquid, ailment-prone human body stood exposed, scattered and flayed, all about Teddy in these walls of multicolored packages that in sum would erase every blemish, ease every pain, satisfy every need, cleanse every cavity. Olivilo Soap 7¢, Marrow’s Boudoir Talc 52¢, Sodiphene 21¢, Terra-Derma Laxative 89¢, Ever Ready Shaving Brush 49¢, Ovaltine 42¢. There was much here, too, for the healthy: cigars behind glass with all their pomp of label and gilt and tinted views of Cuba and Spain; candy and chewing gum, Life Savers and Black Jack and Chiclets and Baby Ruths and Whitman’s Sampler’s boxes of chocolates; soaps from Ivory, which was 9944/100% pure, to Lava, which scoured away grease with a stony abrasion, to the ferocious 29-Mule Team Borax; and magazines, on a rack just beside the diagonal entrance, Liberty and Collier’s and the Post and Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s with their eager female faces glistening on the covers, all piling in from New York and Philadelphia in glossy slip-knotted bundles heavier than any he had had to shoulder in the days of delivering the Paterson Morning Call. These magazines had the fresh smell of slick quality paper, and in the idle troughs of the day, mid-morning and mid-afternoon before school let out, he would take one behind the soda fountain and leaf through the pages, admiring the advertisements for fancy electrical appliances and looking at the illustrations of ideal families—ideal except for the one small, never irremediable mishap which the story described—and the cartoons, most of which he “got.” These magazines emanated from a remote height of human sophistication and glamour, from those aspiring Manhattan towers you could see in silhouette from Garrett Mountain, and there was something wonderfully gracious and kind about their descending upon a town like Basingstoke, where otherwise people would know nothing except what the local parsons and county politicians told them. The movies were like that, too, showing up at the little local Bijou upstairs in the Oddfellows’ building, and now there was the radio, which broadcast mostly music in the evenings—dance music by the orchestras of Meyer Davis and Elmer Grosso, harmonica players and birdsong imitators—but also baseball scores and market reports and weather forecasts and nature stories by Thornton W. Burgess read aloud. He had been begging Aunt Esther and Mother to get a crystal set. Mr. Addison had one in the back room he used as an office, and when Teddy worked to nine o’clock three times a week he could hear its crackling musical whisper as he moved around in the store, much as he used to hear the neighbors’ phonographs back on Twenty-seventh Street. “Indian Love Call,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” “I Want to Be Happy”: those were the hits, sung by men with reedy, solemn, bleating voices and women with tiny, bouncy voices squeezed out through the nose, like they were deep in some smoky speakeasy. How did those glowing tubes pick them out of the air like that? How come you didn’t feel these invisible radio waves pass through you? The Basingstoke post office, a narrow half of a small brick building in the block of Rodney beyond Elm, also had a radio in it, somewhere on the other side of the grated window where Mr. Horley sat. The postmaster had a hunched, buckled, grimy look, a pencil behind his ear and lots of nostril hair, and he wore old-fashioned striped shirts with sleeve garters, under a gray-blue vest that seemed to be, winter and summer, his uniform. He kept his radio turned to staticky, inaudible ships out in the ocean or the two great bays that surrounded the Delmarva Peninsula. Until late afternoon, that was all that was on. Still, Teddy, doing the daily mail run for the drug store, liked to linger and listen, in case a ship suddenly started to sink like the Titanic or the Lusitania, with an SOS sent out by a brave radio operator up to his knees in sloshing bile-green water.
There was a tranced rhythm to the day that ate up the years. Mornings in Addison’s were a rushed time, with the papers from Wilmington and Baltimore having arrived and working people of Basingstoke settling at all the stools for a hurried coffee and fresh doughnut or raisin bun from Mrs. Brindley’s
Bakery down the street, and then there was a slackening off, the customers mostly female shoppers doing their rounds of the downtown, and then a lunch flurry, when the schoolkids stoked up on candy bars and ice-cream cones, and then, until school let out, a long lull, in which Teddy sometimes felt his entire life draining from him, without any raise or change of prospect. The ice slowly melting in the cold chests that kept the ice cream firm audibly dripped away into the pans underneath, next to the canisters of pressurized carbon dioxide for the sodas and nitrous oxide for the whipped cream.
When Charlie Wainwright went off to be the head druggist for a new Rexall’s in Dover, Mr. Addison asked Teddy if he had ever thought of going to pharmaceutical school, but Teddy couldn’t face another spell of riding the interurban electric cars up to Wilmington, or of begging the tuition from the women he lived with. Aunt Esther had been having some problems with her health—nervous complaints, Doc Hedger called them, though they kept her up all night, going to the bathroom. Mother could only do so much sewing without blinding herself, and her attempts to train an assistant ended when the girl got pregnant or proved hopelessly unable to absorb the meticulous ethics of dressmaking—“I declare,” she once said, “they just don’t make girls as conscientious as they used to; all they want is to get off work and dance and drink and ride in roadsters. Whatever happened to old-fashioned right”—raaaht—“from wrong?” In turning Mr. Addison down, Teddy had forever diminished, he knew, his value in his eyes, just as he had with the baseball coach at Paterson High. Teddy wondered if his entire life was to consist of guarded refusals. In America opportunity doesn’t keep knocking. His sister, who never did leave Pulsifer, McReady, and Bundy, since her quitting would have seemed to confirm the rumors about her and Mr. Bundy, pulled a surprise in 1925, the summer when everybody was interested in the Scopes trial down in Tennessee. She and Peter Pulsifer—not Bundy, who hadn’t been ready, or McReady—were going to get married, as soon as he could divorce his wife. In the meantime, to get away from the scandal, she was moving to New York, to stay with Jared and his wife, Lucille, the pert slim platinum-blonde daughter of the man he used to collect rents for, who was now very big in the realty and investment businesses. She had come down to Basingstoke to meet the family but the newlyweds hadn’t been able to stay the night. “Blonde with black-Irish roots,” had been Aunt Esther’s dry remark after they had left.