In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  God was in all the different churches in Basingstoke. Momma used to go to the Methodists but seeing Ama go off to the Presbyterians every Sunday she had decided to go there too. That made it much nicer, the two of them setting off at quarter to ten on Sunday morning with Essie between them, in patent-leather shoes she could see the pale blob of her face in if she bent down close, with a little strap across, and white kneesocks that stayed up until some rude boy like Benjy Whaley pushed her during the singing march-around toward the end. Except for Benjy the children who went to the Presbyterian Sunday school weren’t so rough, though, as those who went to the Methodists and Baptists and the Church of the True Word, which didn’t even have a steeple. Even the church for the colored folk out along Beaver Road had a steeple. Of all of them the Presbyterians were the best. Grandpa in Heaven had been a minister, entitled to wear a robe and bless the Communion bread, the little cut squares of it she was too young to eat yet. It was passed along the aisles in low silver dishes by the ushers and one very bad boy once put his chewed chewing gum on the dish as it went by. Ama taught a class of older girls in the Sunday school, and Mr. Horley, so important in town he was even more important than Daddy, taught a class of older boys. Mr. Phillips, who owned the bank and always wore a suit even on Saturdays, was the superintendent. The Methodists for teachers had only Mr. Pursey, who ran the notions store, across from the drug store where Daddy worked when he met Momma. Pursey’s sold pointy wax teeth at Halloween and tablets with Irene Dunne on the cover or Dolores del Rio, who had dark hair like Essie, or Jeanette MacDonald, who sang in a voice so high the movie sound track would skip. The Methodist older boys were taught by Shorty Sturgis, who ran Sturgis’s Garage and always had black rings around his fingernails, which just went to show. The Presbyterian Sunday school was in the basement, with little low frosted-glass windows at the top of the walls, so even on sunny days the lights had to be on. Jesus came down to earth and went about healing blind men by pressing mud against their eyes and before that Joseph’s brothers were so jealous of the coat of many colors they left him in a ditch for dead. The Biblical people were sheepherders and wore purple capes. They wore sandals and would wash each other’s feet. When Momma or Ama washed her feet, especially the bottoms, it was so ticklish she squirmed and giggled and sometimes had to pee.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Danny was squalling and squawking over something—the crybaby, probably his morning cod-liver oil, which just took a second to swallow down and protected you all day against germs. He was always fighting and protesting things it was easier to accept, since the world knew what was best for you and was anyway too big to fight. Who would want to be him?—always with a runny nose and scraggly hair and wanting to fight everybody and coming home blubbering because some bigger boy beat him up. Served him right. After Momma had brought him home from the hospital Essie, who was three then, sneaked a look under his diapers and his pee-pee was like a little doorbell only fatter than that, on a fat pink cushion with a line down the middle like the seam on a sock. Who would want one of those? She much preferred her own sleek shape, with everything nasty hidden.

  Though by her Mickey Mouse clock on the walnut bureau it was eight o’clock, the whistle at the bottle-cap factory didn’t blow. Today was Saturday. No school and no Lowell Thomas, who Daddy liked to listen to, on the radio and, right after it, to Amos ’n’ Andy, which Ama liked for some reason—it made her laugh, she said, and in these hard times, a third of the grown men in the country out of work, what else does?—and (the bad thing on Saturdays) piano lessons and then tap-dancing class. Miss Reeves came to the house at nine with her sheaf of music and her swollen blue nose that Momma said she had fallen on on her icy porch steps when a girl and had ruined her life by making her too ugly to marry, and she would put a gold star on the page if Essie had practiced her Minuet in G from Beethoven or ballet music in F sharp from Gluck and take a cup of coffee and a cornbread muffin from Ama before rushing on to the next pupil, Marvin Gordy, who she said was gifted but nothing like as diligent as Essie. Then she and Momma would themselves rush on to the studio above Krauthammer’s Hardware and Seeds, where Mr. Josephs who used to be in something called vaudeville would make the class do shuffle-one, shuffle-two, tap, tap, tap, and twirl. He told them how to hold their heads and hands, as if on strings being pulled from above, so you looked like you weighed nothing and lifted the hearts of the audience. He was a sad man with a raspy voice, when he talked about lifting the hearts of the audience. He had orange hair that didn’t go with his face, and the hall had a sad dusty smell, just one big room you came up to on linoleum stairs and with the toilet out in the hall for boys and girls both so you had to be careful who was in there and with chairs along the walls for the mothers while they waited. But Essie had gotten to like it, the game of pretending that there was an audience in front of her, out there somewhere under the tap-scarred boards, and the fact that she was the best, of the eight or so children who showed up for this beginners’ class. She could feel she was the best when she twirled, for sooner than any of the others she was back facing Mr. Josephs, her weight on the right foot and her left knee touching the floor and her arms out in a “howdy” motion the way he had showed them. Momma said even if she never tap-danced a minute of her life it would be good for her poise and muscle control and bodily grace. Essie even at seven could sense that Momma wanted her to miss nothing of all that she had missed, being raised on a farm and with her bad foot, that kept her from having “bodily grace.” Essie loved her own body, the way it was so taut and flexible, and how the front of her ankle rippled when she twisted her foot this way and that to see it work; some mornings she just lay in bed for minutes holding her hand up into the sunlight and seeing how the red shone through her fingertips and spreading the toes at the end of her legs with their tiny shining hairs on the straight white shins. When she got older, she promised herself, she would paint her toenails so she could wear open-toed shoes with slinky slacks like Marlene Dietrich and Dolores Del Rio.

  On the walk home, they passed the Roxie, where ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL STARRING DEANNA DURBIN was spelled out on the marquee. “Please, Momma,” Essie begged. “I want to go.”

  “But Daddy and I can’t take you,” her mother told her, in that singing, spaced-out, too-clear voice she used when being a mother. “I have to help Grandpa and Grandma in the greenhouse this afternoon, and Daddy and I are going to play cards with Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter this evening while Ama takes care of you and Danny.”

  Essie was silent, thinking of how when her parents came back from Aunt Esther’s they stayed in bed later, and Momma had to hurry to get her church clothes on, while Daddy hid under the covers some more. He never went to church, except for the Christmas-carol service when she had been a shepherd. For a girl only in the second grade Essie had been to the movies a lot: since before the first grade her parents would take her to the seven o’clock show when there was no school the next day. This year she had already seen The Good Earth, about how poor Chinese people are, with a plague of locusts in the sky, and Lost Horizon, where the pretty woman’s face very frighteningly crumbles into old age when they take her out of their magic valley in the mountains, and The Prince and the Pauper, with Errol Flynn, where the dirty boy in the street switches place with the little prince. There were poor people and very rich people in the movies, and not so many like the Wilmots and the Siffords who were quiet in the middle. Being in the middle like that was another reason for Essie to be so happy. Bums came to the back door, some of them with skins darker even than their dirty clothes, and Ama always made up a little paper bag for them—a sandwich, an apple, a piece of shortbread—and gave them a cheerful word and blessed them on their way. They said they wanted work but what work could there be in their little house and yard, where Daddy did all the work? Even Ama was having trouble finding sewing work, with women more and more buying their clothes readymade. Some of these drifting men smelled sour and looked funny at her, but Ama said we were all
God’s children, and never went to the movies, as if there was something wicked in the dark of the movie theatres. One Hundred Men and a Girl was about a girl who sang thrillingly, Essie knew from what Loretta Whaley was saying in school the day before yesterday. Her parents had taken her even though it was a school night. “I’ll go see it alone,” Essie said defiantly. As she and Momma passed the Roxie doors they were open enough for her to see a boy who was the older brother of a boy in her class, Eddie Bacheller, sweeping up the purple carpet with a vacuum cleaner with its little headlight getting ready for that day’s matinee at two. “I’ll walk down past the greenhouse and stay on this side of the street,” she promised. “I’ll tidy up my room before I go and, and everything. I’ll do the l-lunch d-d-dishes. Oh please please please.”

  She blushed, having stuttered. She didn’t know why it happened, sometimes it didn’t happen for days, and then suddenly she couldn’t get her words around something like a ball of air in her mouth. It happened when she got excited because she was pushing out the words too fast; it happened when she overstepped, or felt in the wrong. Not really in the wrong, but when things were hard to explain without a lot of words and nobody would listen, nobody was paying enough attention and there wasn’t enough time to get it all in.

  “You are too young to go to the movies yourself,” Momma said, very slowly and calmly, as if to show her how to talk. She had a lovely smooth voice. You could spell every word from how Momma said it.

  “B-boys go,” Essie burst out. “Boys go much younger than me.”

  “Boys can go places and do things girls cannot,” Momma said.

  “Why is that, why? That’s not fair and you know it!”

  “Women and men are not the same and perhaps that’s not fair,” Momma said, looking down at her with a heavy smiling expression. “But that’s how it is, Esther. Girls are vulnerable in ways that boys are not.”

  “What’s vul-vul-vul—?”

  Momma looked away, pained by Essie’s inability to get the word out. The pain in her face was the nearest she ever came to scolding. Momma’s face had a double chin that didn’t use to be so ugly when Essie looked up. “Open to injury,” she said, like a prim dictionary, and added, “Boys can run faster.”

  Essie never had trouble talking around Ama and Daddy. They were Wilmots, she thought secretly, like her. When Daddy came home for lunch at noon, before going back to deliver the mail that came in on the noon train, she told them all at the table how she wanted to go to the movie matinee, how a lot of other second-graders went to the movies by themselves. Daddy smiled. “You’ve only been a second-grader for a couple of weeks,” he said.

  “Four weeks, Daddy. Loretta Whaley has already seen it, she’s already seen it or I’d ask her to go, it’s about a girl who saves a whole b-bandful of musicians j-j-just by her singing.”

  Daddy shifted his slow careful weight in his chair and after chewing said to Momma softly, “I don’t see much harm in it. At her age back in Paterson—”

  Momma interrupted him. “You were a boy. You were citysmart.”

  Momma had come from the real country, way south of the Canal, and Daddy was from a big city up in New Jersey, within sight of New York. It was wonderful how they had managed ever to meet, in the drug store. If they hadn’t, Essie often thought, she herself wouldn’t exist, and this was impossible. The world without her in it seeing the sun and trees and clouds and hearing all the birds and cars and voices was impossible.

  “Oh, no,” Ama said, in that lovely big sweet voice of hers that just poured friendliness over everything, “Teddy was a tender soul, always hiding in his room with his baseball cards and a book. Or maybe they came later. At Essie’s age, it would have been 1910—oh dear, what nice times they were, before the big strike and then the war and Clarence … Clarence took to the motion pictures so, I bet that’s where Essie gets it from. She has his way of dreaming off, into another world.”

  Essie could see Momma’s plump lips falter, with the Wilmots against her, and the ghostly grandfather backing them up. Daddy looked across the table at his daughter, so she could see his full broad face, tan and crinkled around the eyes from being out in all weathers, his pale eyebrows with a few dark hairs making the boundary with the forehead dead white from the hat he always wore, and his mouth changed, like a tiny crack in a blank plate. Out of his manly blankness she felt something like rain you can just begin to feel prickling on your face, walking along the street. He would let her go. He had taken off his gray-blue jacket with the brass buttons, so he sat among them in his shirt and official suspenders. The shirt was gray and even the suspenders were a regulation black. He turned and touched the back of Momma’s hand and said to her mildly, “Why not let her go, Em, this once? This is as safe a town as there is. She can’t take a step without somebody’s eye on her that knows she’s our daughter.”

  “Yes, and everybody knew who the Lindberghs’ baby was, too.”

  “Em, you can’t keep her under glass like at the greenhouse,” Daddy said, his voice lifting into that soft hardness of warning that men have. “This little bud has to grow outdoors.”

  “Clarence used to say, ‘We learn by doing,’ ” Ama said. “ ‘God made us free, Stella,’ he would say, ‘so we could make our own mistakes.’ Now our Esther used to walk a half-mile each way to the Clark Street Elementary, through neighborhoods packed with every color and creed, and some of the fathers reputed to be out-and-out anarchists.”

  “I don’t want to keep her under glass,” Momma argued against Daddy, in a steady way that showed she was planning to lose, “but I don’t want to set her out in the frost either.” When Momma smiled, even a little bit, her cheeks lifted like little square pads under the skin, making the shadow of a dimple just under them.

  Bratty Danny could tell the way the tide was running. His sissyish quick eyes went from one grown-up face to another and he began to whine. “Me, too. I can go with Essie, too.”

  Ama said, protecting what they all had won from Momma, “Now, don’t you be silly, young man. You’re going to stay home with me, and we’re going to have a wonderful time making a molasses-and-raisin pie. You can help Ama roll the crust, and sprinkle on the brown sugar.”

  So Daddy went back to the post office to do his afternoon sorting, and when the lunch dishes were washed and stacked Momma walked her as far as the greenhouse, and by way of expressing love pressed an extra nickel in her hand for a candy bar. Essie felt her mother watching as she carefully crossed Fishery Way, which had recently been tarred and steamrollered like the other streets, instead of being left in dirt and pebbles that would dig into your knees if you fell. Once Essie was on that side, there were no more streets to cross, just the cement walk between the Oddfellows’ building and the mysterious brick building with its side windows painted a green-black inside, and a clicking sound inside that was pool balls hitting each other—sharp flurries of them run together like birdsong, and then heavy silences in which she could hear men breathe and say words little girls weren’t meant to hear. The light that had felt its way in under her window shade forever ago had turned grayish, with a rainy warmth to it. She imagined that it might be raining when she came out of the movies, the sidewalk dry under the marquee but wet all around, the puddles jumping up with drops and the black street shining; she foresaw how she would have to run from doorway to doorway since Momma had forgotten to make her take an umbrella, and how tomorrow morning if it rained all night the first yellow leaves of fall would be lying on the lawn and pasted to the tarpaper porch roof outside her bedroom window: at these inner pictures happiness squeezed her chest and waistband so tightly Essie almost yelped with the sheer stretching feeling of it, as she stepped out from the edge of the brick building where men played pool behind painted windows, into the safety of Rodney Street.

  Today, without a grown-up beside her, the street looked perilously long—a chain of rectangles tapering to nothing. So many shops, awnings, parked cars, people she didn’t know walking alo
ng like all those Chinese fleeing from famine and enemy armies in The Good Earth. Holding her head very still like Mr. Josephs said, and staring straight ahead even when a Scottie with a plaid collar strained at his leash as if to bite her bare leg, she passed business doorways painted various dark colors and with signs she didn’t understand exactly, REALTOR and CHIROPRACTOR and PODIATRIST and DIAMOND STATE INSURANCE and BUNDY AND MCREADY ASSOCIATES ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW, which had some connection with her family, a shadow, something about Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter, who drank too much, Momma said. Then there was the Kresge’s with the little green-and-yellow birds chirping in cages above the orange boxes of birdfeed and the powerful smell of coconut cookies just inside the front doors, and Mr. Phillips’ bank with its two white pillars grooved sort of like coconut cookies, and the Blue Hen Ice Cream parlor where the big kids looked out the window—they were the most frightening, because though they were the size of grown-ups, and smoked cigarettes like crazy and some even drove cars, they didn’t pay attention to any grown-up rules, they were as rough as second-graders and would just as soon pull up your skirt and push you into the river as not; in their eyes Essie was no bigger than a bug to be squashed. From just the way their mouths moved and eyes flashed on the other side of the plate-glass window with the little blue hen on it you could see they cared about nothing but themselves, not their teachers or parents or the Lord above or anybody.