In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  He began to worry that Mother and Aunt Esther would be anxious about him. They liked to eat dinner earlier and earlier, and had their radio programs they listened to without fail, beginning with something called dinner music, with featured musicale singers, at six o’clock from WEAF in New York, followed by baseball scores at 6:55, which only he cared about. This year Babe Ruth was obeying doctor’s orders and the Yankees looked like a shoo-in for the pennant, except that Tris Speaker’s Indians were closing in; in the National League, Rogers Hornsby’s Cardinals looked likely to beat out the Cincinnati Reds. Teddy cared but not as much as he used to. As he was about to turn and run home Emily came out of the greenhouse door, which was so low she ducked her head. Her hair was covered in a checked blue bandana. The oval of her face turned right away to his, as if by some electricity-carrying ether in the air she had sensed his gaze. She took a halt step or two toward him but to spare her walking he swiftly—too swiftly?—trotted across the alley to face her, there on a white path that had been refreshed with new crushed oyster shells. “Who are you spying on?” she asked him, with her defensive edge of pugnacity, which he knew she didn’t mean; it was just her way to compensate. In the softening light of a September six o’clock, her face, wrapped in the bandana, was plain, perhaps, but each feature had its electricity—her rounded eyes with their wet gleam, the inquisitively lifted brows, her small nose with her bump at the bridge and pink nostrils smudged where she had wiped one with a dirty hand, and her rather full lips, all their curves nestled into one another with a complacent, challenging precision.

  “Nobody,” he lied. “Just walking home at six o’clock, minding my own business.”

  “Walking home the long way.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I have some business up there”—he gestured toward the end of Fishery Way, which in a quarter-mile gave out in the weeds along the river, where a few tarred shreds of a long-abandoned dock were rotting among goldenrod and blue mussel shells that gulls had broken.

  “You want to see the greenhouse?” she asked, seeing him at a loss for further words.

  “Oh sure. Sure.”

  “Be careful. You step down a step.” Inside, the spattering on the glass smoothed the light to an even gloom, in which Mr. Sifford—his bulk magnified amid so many tiny potted seedlings, under this tilted artificial sky—moved with a silent watchfulness, having given Teddy a brief, suspicious greeting. One colored boy was lugging flats of potted seedlings around, and the other was painting white the wood of the newly built raised beds, which were crude tables. Everything was painted white that could be. “It reflects light,” Emily explained. “Plants need four things to grow—light, warmth, water, and carbon dioxide.”

  “I know about carbon dioxide,” he said, thinking not just of making sodas but of biology class back in Paterson.

  “You breathe it out,” Emily said, “and plants breathe it in. That’s why greenhouses like to have people in them.” Her voice quickening, she explained what they were setting out, poinsettias in time for the Christmas trade, and gladiolas and chrysanthemums and long-stemmed roses. She showed him a big icebox where the harvested flowers would wait for their buyers, and the steam pipes running all along the walls and under the tables, fitted to a new coal furnace at the far end. There were fans to move the air around, and levers and chains to open sections of the glass overhead, but he was hardly listening, thinking of the awkward position this unplanned visit placed him in. He had been host of a sort to her at the drug store, and now she was playing hostess to him in her place of business; then it would be his turn to do something. What? Awareness that his mother and Aunt Esther were impatiently waiting supper for him tugged at his stomach; he made several nervous motions toward leaving while she was still talking on, excited and fluent, in her element. The sheltered bright stillness brought to an animated focus the life in her; the heavy fragrant atmosphere within the glass walls dragged at his limbs.

  At the end, back outdoors, sorry in a way he had come, he said impulsively, to put an end to the encounter, “You ever go to the movies?”

  Her satiny face, with its touch of a double chin, took on a tension, as of an oval raindrop about to break and run. He felt he was frightening her. Her voice had turned careful and slow. “Why, no, I don’t, not often,” she said. “Father doesn’t believe in such things. We’re Methodists, did you know that? But once years ago when we were visiting over in Cambridge, Maryland, a girl cousin and I peeked into this dark lobby and could see people doing things on the screen until an usher came and told us to pay up or get out.” She trailed off and, Teddy failing to speak up in the opportunity she had given him, went on more brightly, “But I can, now. Our branch of Methodism has lifted the ban on theatre-going and dancing—going with the times, I suppose. Now it’s just smoking and cardplaying and of course drinking we can’t do.” She added, when he again failed to speak, “But, then, it’s all rather silly, isn’t it? All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.”

  He cleared his stuck throat and said, “Well, let me look and see what’s coming to the Roxie the next couple of weeks.” And he discovered himself, with a little glide into the receptive, glowing presence opposite him, able to tease: “Some of these foreign pictures are pretty strong stuff, we wouldn’t want anything shocking for a nice Methodist girl.”

  He ran home to Willow Street; his mother said, “My goodness, child, where have you been? The pork chops are so overdone it will be like chewing shoe leather, and the mashed potatoes are cold as mud.”

  “Sorry—he kept me a little late.”

  “Well, that is strange, because your Aunt Esther telephoned the drug store and Charlie Wainwright said you had left an hour ago.”

  “Say, don’t I get any freedom around here? Holy smokes, I’m twenty-three years old.”

  “Don’t tell me, dear, I was there the day you were born. You can be any age and it doesn’t absolve you from common courtesy to those you live with. Now, you let us know henceforth if you’re going to be delayed by these mysterious person or persons.”

  “It wasn’t persons, it’s just a—”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said, rather girlishly, clapping her hands over her ears so a wooden serving spoon between her fingers became a tall horn sticking out of one side of her head. “You said it, you’re twenty-three, Heaven forbid your mother be guilty of intruding! Now you sit down and chew slowly while I bolt my food in five minutes to catch what’s left of this lovely contralto, Roxanna Erb. I’ve already served your aunt in her room, up and down the stairs. And to think I went to the trouble to make your favorite, peach pie all crusty with sugar on top. You’ll have to do without your baseball scores.”

  As he hurriedly sat down to the meal, its heavy sweet smell rose around him possessively; but compared to the spicier, more uniform fragrance of the greenhouse, it seemed faintly disgusting—dead cooked plants as opposed to plants living and growing.

  It began his pattern, those days when he didn’t work until nine, to come home for dinner a little later than he used to, or if he came home on time to wander out afterwards, into the late-summer dusk, and return in the dark, when all the downstairs lights but the porch light were switched off. He could feel his mother and aunt curbing their curiosity, giving him the privacy due a man, but the night he had arranged to take Emily to the movies and was trying to sneak out quietly they couldn’t restrain themselves. “A fresh white shirt!” his mother cried. “It’s as if you never sat and watched me starch and iron a shirt and didn’t know the labor that goes into it.”

  “I had to come downstairs,” Aunt Esther announced, rather erect and elegant in her Chinese bathrobe. “The smell in the house was so strong I thought the oil stove might be about to explode. But I guess it’s just the amount of hair oil Theodore has poured on himself. What an aroma! Just don’t you stand too close to any open flame!”

  Being teased, like teasing, was not as yet
a comfortable sensation for Teddy. “Take it easy,” he said helplessly. “I’m just going out.”

  “That we can see,” said Aunt Esther.

  iii. Essie/Alma

  Light had felt its way in under the dry green window shade above the spines of the radiator and was standing beside her bed when the unhappy tangle of her dream fell away and she dared open her eyes. Like a leak in a great tank of darkness the light had seeped into all the familiar things of her room—varnished pine bureau, painted straight chair, staring doll sitting on the chair with the oval soles of her cardboard shoes showing, radiator (which under its flaking silver paint had ivylike designs in a low raised pattern like a kind of secret), dark-green window shade with its pinholes of light, shelf Daddy had put up with hammer and nails and hitting his thumb so the nail turned blue, framed pictures of Jack and Jill falling downhill in stiff surprise and a lady in white with pink ribbons taking a step toward you. Essie’s eyes touched each of them, and then the four corners of the ceiling. The world was intact, it had not been torn apart by her dream, full of yelling and fire and spilled things. The world is like stones: dreams and thoughts flow over them. She looked at the four corners of the ceiling again, in the reverse direction, holding Mr. Bear so his glass eyes with the loose black disk (like a little tiddlywink) in each could look in parallel with her. He was a Teddy Bear but her Daddy was called Teddy and so she called her toy Mr. Bear. She drew a diagonal with her eyes in one direction and then in the other. The air seemed to vibrate, to have something in it that was moving, finer than any rain. If she didn’t do the diagonal in both directions things would be unbalanced and God might be upset. The joy of being herself flooded seven-year-old Essie’s skin; it felt so tight she wanted to scream or laugh out loud. Almost the first feeling she could ever remember was this joy at being herself instead of somebody else—one of those millions and millions unfortunate enough to have been born somebody other than Esther Sifford Wilmot of 27 Locust Street, Basingstoke, Delaware.

  Oh, she knew there were girls richer and famouser than she, like Shirley Temple and the Dionne quintuplets and those two little English princesses, but fame and riches were things she could always have in the future, which was endless and tremendously large. For now here she was in what she was sure was the nicest and prettiest town in the whole wide country, in the happiest home, that just fit the five of them like a glove for five fingers. She felt such pride seeing her father out in the town in his blue uniform; everybody knew him and said hello, he was like the king of Basingstoke visiting his subjects. And Momma was like a queen in her house and in the greenhouse down and across the street, gliding through all that light, with her chrysanthemums and gloxinias and other such wonderful words, her stray single hairs glowing like electric-light filaments as she wiped her eyebrow with the back of her wrist. Sometimes Momma was tired and her weak leg hurt and once when she was ironing Essie remembered seeing her hand jump to her face because her tooth suddenly gave off a spark of pain, but every morning she was up when Essie was still untangling herself from the sticky dark sweetness of sleep and moving about downstairs making things tidy and cozy and bringing them to life. That was a woman’s duty—to keep the house and to be pretty. Momma knew all about how to make Essie feel pretty, brushing her hair seven times seven strokes at night so that it shone as bright as Aunt Esther’s blond hair even though it was dark, silky black, not black exactly but a rich shimmering brown, the color his own mother’s hair had been when she was young, Daddy said. Though her other grandmother had dark hair, too, nobody mentioned that as much. And then you must brush your teeth and rinse afterwards with yellow Listerine and use the Q-tips dipped in warm water on the folds of your ears but not in the hole where the wax is, you could go deaf puncturing an eardrum. To bring out the rosy cells on the cheeks Momma could be quite rough with the washcloth on her face, and it also felt scrapy down below, where girls were different from boys. When Daddy was the one to put Essie to bed he didn’t wash her down there at all.

  Next to the greenhouse lived Momma’s mother and daddy. He wore old loose clothes that smelled like a flowerpot and tobacco juice and always had in one of his pockets a wrapped nougat or caramel or Hershey’s kiss, with the little paper tag you pulled to undo the tinfoil. His face and neck were loose, too, with the whole back of his neck all in X’s. In snowstorms and cold snaps he slept in the greenhouse, getting up every three hours to stoke the big coal furnace. He did it himself because the colored boys he paid good money to sometimes didn’t wake up even so, and if the furnace went out all the flowers would freeze. Grandma Sifford was quiet and shy with missing teeth so she covered her mouth with her hand but she knew lots of secret things. Whenever Essie was sick she would come over to the house and hold her knobby hand on Essie’s hot forehead and make a hot pale-green broth of boiled leaves and twiggy stuff that usually wasn’t too bitter and scummy to drink at least some spoonfuls of, to make her better. Then Essie could spend the day in her parents’ big bed and listen to the radio right from Lorenzo Jones up to Lum and Abner and have her dolls and paper dolls and Mr. Bear all in bed with her, her crayons and colored pencils getting lost in the wrinkles of the blanket and trying to hide behind the mountain her knees made. It was important to stay in bed, with the curtains drawn all the way down that time she had measles. And to stay away from the children who lived at the tannery end of town, because they didn’t wash and carried germs. And in the summer not swim in the river or go to the movies, because that was how people got polio and were crippled even worse than Momma. Some poor children had to live their whole lives in iron lungs, you saw them in the newsreels before the ushers went around with the cardboard boxes you were supposed to put a dime in. She was so lucky to be herself and not them she sometimes felt dizzy with it; being who she was was like a steep shining cliff she stood on the edge of looking out over everything like a fair-haired girl in a storybook she had about Scotland.

  She loved her greenhouse grandparents but even more she loved Ama. She was called that because Essie when she first tried it couldn’t say “Grandma.” She lived with them and was even busier than Momma, who liked to spend quiet time with books and records on the gramophone sometimes. Ama never wasted time like that but sewed and baked cakes and pies and talked over the telephone to people in the church. She was so important in the church that people were always telephoning her for advice as to what to do. She wore old-fashioned dark rustly dresses and her heap of iron-gray hair was held on the top of her head by a lot of combs and wiggly U-shaped pins made of turtle shells. When Essie was smaller she had let her play with the hairpins at bedtime, after she let her hair down. And she had shown her from the bottom of her bureau ugly long tapered pads of other people’s hair that Ama said were called “rats” and she used to roll her own hair around when styles were different. She had silver-backed hairbrushes and an ivory-handled buttonhook and long smooth slivers of ivory she said were corset stays and kept her tummy in. When she was little Essie had thought these things were just for her to play with, like clothespins and spools empty of thread and those red rubber rings Momma and Ama used when they put lots of cut-up peaches and pears in jars and boiled them, filling the whole kitchen with steam. Now she knew that almost everything has a grown-up purpose. Ama had shown her how to hold the big thick knitting needles but it was too hard still, the loops of yarn kept slipping off and unravelling. Even the little loops of cloth in the rag rug in the bathroom had this grown-up purpose attached to them, though as she sat on the toidy waiting for it to come they looked like the tops of the heads of a great crowd of people jammed together way far down below to hear her give a speech, their wonderful princess. Sometimes the world just made her wild, there was so much of it, and all so exciting. Now that she was in the second grade they were letting her walk different places by herself, if she always looked both ways and crossed mostly at the corners. After she told Momma where she was going she could cross Locust Street on a Saturday and all by herself walk down past the dif
ferent front lawns and the empty weedy lot that Grandpa Sifford owned and then the crunchy stretch of crushed oyster shells and enter the greenhouse, full of sunshine and flowers and leaves and the smell of summer even with snow stacked against the glass outside, with all those cranks and pulleys to regulate the windows and those snaky, rusty steam-pipes breathing out heat down by her ankles, down in the straw-speckled dirt where twice she had found money, once a nickel and then a whole quarter. They had fans that blew air around all the time so the plants wouldn’t suffocate or get stem rot and the tables where the plants sat in pots weren’t solid wood but of thick rusty grids so the air came through from underneath. Other times Daddy let her come to the post office with its bright new mural of men with blue coats and pigtails that had to do with why Rodney Street was called that and watch him and Mr. Horley sort the day’s mail at the end of the day, tossing the letters into different sacks held up on some big pipe frames, for different parts of the country. Mr. Horley could toss letters, twirling them by the edge, so far he could even get it in the sack for California, and never miss. It was all so exciting to wake to every day she couldn’t blame the other children for being jealous of her and calling her “stuck-up.” She wasn’t stuck-up, she just was perfect and so glad of it.

  Ama lived with them because her husband, Essie’s other grandfather, had died. That was a small flaw in her world, a corner missing. She always looked at all four corners and did every diagonal with her eyes twice, because the other grandpa’s absence showed that terrible things could happen. Yet Ama said he was an angel in Heaven looking down and loving them, especially his little raven-haired granddaughter in Delaware. Essie tried to think of having a member of her family in Heaven, just like Aunt Esther lived in an expensive house in Red Lion with Uncle Peter and two rude boys, Peter Junior and Jefferson, and Uncle Jared owned a big piece of a mountain way out in Colorado and mined copper, though Daddy would shake his head as though there was something sad about it. The Wilmots were a very special family even though people in Delaware were always talking about the du Ponts. The du Ponts lived in hills far to the north and were less real to her than God. God was in the clouds and had sent Jesus to earth to make Christmas and Easter, and His love pressed down from Heaven and fit her whole body like bathwater in the tub. The fact that Jesus came down meant that God wasn’t just up there but was all around them, invisible, not like a ghost, who would be scary, but like blood in your veins that you can sometimes hear when your ear is against the pillow and that the doctor can feel when he puts his cold fat fingers smelling of antiseptic on your wrist. Dr. Hedger was so old that his tongue drooped out onto his lower lip when he was listening to your chest and thought you weren’t looking.