In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  This seemed very urbane and progressive, that he would be using a German product, so soon after our hating them so. Each roll of thirty-six shots she thought would be the last—Daddy used to stretch a roll of twelve exposures over a whole week’s vacation at Wildwood, and Christmas pictures would still be in the old Kodak on her birthday in February—but Doug kept saying, “One more roll of color, then you can go. But the light—God, it’s just getting lovely.” He provided a dusty-pink sweater that was tight in the waist but with a loose wide neck. Bolder now, even with Momma watching, he tugged it off one shoulder, à la Jane Russell. He came closer, closer with his lens, and said to her in a softer voice, so Momma couldn’t hear, “Make love to the camera. Look right into it and think of something you want, something you want very much.”

  Momma called across the pool sharply, “Essie, it’s way after two. Tell Mr. Germaine his time is up.” Doug Germaine, his card had read. That seemed such an impressive name she wondered if he had invented it.

  “Your face is just beginning to relax,” he whispered to her.

  Essie called, “Momma, just ten more minutes. Go up to the room and freshen up or something. You’re making me anxious and worried and Doug says it’s showing in my face. Let us alone for ten minutes and then we’ll hop into the car.”

  “We’ll finish up faster, Mrs. Wilmot,” Doug said, “if Essie’s not distracted.”

  Momma limped back into the hotel, and Essie made love to the camera. She looked into the glass hole of its lens, tinged with lavender, and thought of heaps of dollar bills, and of all the lovely clothes those dollars could buy. She thought of a white Cadillac with the top down. She thought of flying wherever she wanted, up into the blue square at the top of the courtyard and away. She thought of unbuttoning and unzipping Doug’s beat-up suntans and giving him what the boys back in Basingstoke called a blow job, right there on the tiles beside the littered pool with its slip-sloppy reflections, the wavelets saying, Tuck. Sluck. “Great,” Doug was saying. “Melt. Wet your lips with your tongue. Nice. Chin down. Chin down, but push it forward a little. Puff out your upper lip, if you can, without looking tense. Give us a half-smile. A quarter-smile. Beautiful. Beautiful.” She could see through the lens the leaves of the shutter snapping open and shut like a delicate mouth of an underwater predator. Doug lowered the camera and made the busy little motion of rewinding. “O.K. That’s it, Essie. Your eyes are glazing over.”

  But she was still unsatisfied. There was something mystical in the way the camera lapped up her inner states through the thin skin of her face. She had known as a child she was the center of the universe and now proof was accumulating, click by click.

  He said, “Listen. Essie. I’d love to do another shoot in my digs, where I can set up lights and have some background drapes. Think you could ever get to Philadelphia?”

  “Oh, sure. Easy,” she told him. But now Momma had reappeared, and Doug said goodbye to them both very politely. Less than an hour later, Momma burst into tears on Route 113, outside of Milford. “There isn’t time to get to Lewes! Turn around.”

  “We can make it, Momma. Once we get past Milford, I’ll floor it. We can do it.”

  Her mother brushed a wind-blown strand away from her sweaty brow. The September day had grown hot, and seemed hotter south of Dover, even with the Studebaker windows open. She said bravely, making Essie feel terrible, “Oh, no. No sense in risking an accident. You’re the reason we’ve come all this way and you should be poised onstage tonight. There’s a diner; turn around in the lot. No, let’s go in and have a piece of pie. We have plenty of time now.” Getting into the car afterwards, soothed by food, Momma said, “It would just have made me sad to see the old place, about to be torn down. Better to keep it in my mind’s eye the way it was.”

  But Essie felt that she had failed: this was the first time she would see her career, such as it was, displace the personal needs of those around her. On the stage that night, though her gown was lovely—strapless peach-colored satin, with long white gloves, three petticoats, and an intricate silk rose above one breast—and had cost Daddy more than he could afford, nothing went quite right, as if a ratchet kept slipping in the projector. She felt stiff and unreal moving across the stage in her gown, instead of triumphantly elastic and lithe as when she paraded about in her bathing suit. The cloth rose and the crinoline petticoats scratching her skin in various places made her feel confined; it was all she could do not to fidget. The lights the first night had encased her in a heavenly sense of herself but now they seemed an acid bath, searching out her flaws, making her feel brittle. The aria she had chosen for her talent offering, “Oh, del mio dolce amor,” from Gluck’s Paris and Helen, did not crack her voice on the high notes as she had feared, but neither did its icy pure sound warm the audience up; the applause sounded wary, stingy. The redhead did better with a throaty rendition of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” from Show Boat and the movie Till the Clouds Roll By, sung by Lena Horne. The Deanna Durbin sound had become old-fashioned, along with the word “wolf” and big bands. Some day Essie would show them, but tonight she could not quite shake her nervousness; she could not get behind her face, exactly, so her selves were all lined up. When the time came to say, in no more than fifty words, how to make the world a better place, and then be interviewed for a minute by the master of ceremonies, she could not remember the first of the words she had memorized, and so her statement came out harsher than she had meant it: “I think the world would be a better place if R-Representative J. Parnell Thomas would stop going out to Hollywood trying to f-find Communists where there aren’t any. The Hollywood film industry is the most patriotic industry in the country and did everything it could to cheer on America in the war, when R-Russia, don’t forget, was our ally.”

  The m.c., with his orange make-up and obvious toupee and breath smelling like Jamie Ingraham’s when he’d taken a swig from his father’s old hip flask, leaned in closer and said into the microphone with his mellifluous voice that never snagged on anything, “Do I understand you to say, Esther, that you don’t believe there is a Communist threat?”

  “There is,” she said, knowing she had overstepped but seeing no way through it, through the blinding lights, her voice sailing out through the microphone over the globbed-together heads of the shocked-still audience, “but it’s b-being exaggerated, and b-being used by politicians to get themselves p-p-publicity. The stars and writers and directors are the people who tell us what freedom means, not the p-politicians.”

  “Well, Esther, you’re a real original,” said the m.c., almost in his human voice instead of his stagey, mechanical one, and the audience took his cue and in relief gave her a warm, forgiving hand. But in the final judging she came in the second runner-up, the winner being a little peroxide blonde with pushed-up tits from the Seaford area who said the world would be a better place if the Hindus and Muslims in India would stop killing each other and learn the great lesson of religion, which is love. The first runner-up was the redhead, who came from du Pont country north of Wilmington and who said the world would be a better place if all of Europe accepted the Marshall Plan; full stomachs are freedom’s best defense. At the end of the torture of the winner’s being announced, which was like an elimination dance, with Essie and the other girl smiling and clapping as if they were the pushy little peroxide slut instead of themselves, they embraced again, but Essie was trying so hard not to cry and look ugly and envious onstage that she felt nothing. For flesh to feel like something good, your spirit has to be up.

  “Essie, you did us all proud,” Daddy told her the next day, when she and Momma came home bedraggled and even physically aching, like football players after a loss. She didn’t want to show her face in high school tomorrow, though she knew she must: that was show business. “You spoke up braver than Harry Truman, who has us all taking this fool loyalty oath. Hell, if I was disloyal, I’d be the first one to take it.” Daddy rarely swore; it showed the strength of his wish to console her.


  “It’s as bad as it was back in Paterson in 1913,” Ama said. “The violent words they called these poor Italian millworkers, who only wanted to take back a decent wage to their loved ones. They shot one right on his front stoop over by Weidmann Dyeing; I do believe it helped sink Clarence into his grave.”

  “I hate Communists,” Danny said. “They don’t play fair. They steal elections. They put everybody who disagrees with them into concentration camps.”

  “Pooh, big shot,” Essie said, “what do you know about anything? Who do you think beat Hitler’s armies, smarty? If it wasn’t for C-Communists there could never have been a D-Day.” But Danny at fourteen, though undersized and still whiskerless, was wiry and clever, cleverer than Essie at school. There was talk of sending him to a private school like St. Andrew’s or Tatnall for his last two years of secondary education, though Basingstoke High was good enough for Essie. She didn’t really mean to defend Communists. She couldn’t even picture one, or imagine why anybody would want to overthrow the American way of life, with its football and cheerleaders and hollyhocks and soda fountains and new Studebakers without front fenders, just sleek green sides.

  Perhaps because it was a Sunday and his one day off work, or because his daughter’s being second runner-up as Miss Delaware Peach had slightly inflated his sense of himself, Daddy was playing the patriarch. “The Wilmots were all born and bred Republicans,” he told his assembled family, “and I was named after old TR, but by the time FDR came along, I could see that Hoover and those others were just sitting on their fat fannies protecting the interests of the rich.”

  “Dearest, it was my idea to name you Theodore,” Ama said. “I picked the name out of the air in desperation, because your father was talking of naming you Cornelius after his best friend at Princeton.”

  “Corny Wheelwright,” Daddy remembered. “He never came to the house but what he gave me a dime. He could make Dad laugh, which you didn’t often see. Once he took all three of us to a professional ballgame down in Newark, the Newark Indians, at Wiedenmayer’s Park, in the old International League, playing the Jersey City Skeeters; they called them the Pests. I got so excited I began my baseball-card collection the very next day.”

  Momma interrupted with fresh news: “An arrogant young photographer from the Philadelphia Bulletin came up to Esther when she had her defenses down and got her to promise to pose for some pictures and then took up so much of our time there in the hotel courtyard we never did get to Lewes and see the old place once more before they tear it down.”

  For a disgusted moment Esther thought her mother might burst into tears; she said, “Momma, he wasn’t arrogant and I’ll drive you down next weekend since you care so much. He was a perfectly respectable bona-fide photographer; he had a printed card and everything. He didn’t even ask me to pose in my bathing suit, though the pool was right there.”

  “No,” her mother flashed out, “but he asked you to come up to Philadelphia to his studio, his studio, where I daresay the lights and the background drapes aren’t the only furniture.”

  Essie had to laugh out loud, at her plump mother’s mix of innocence and its opposite.

  “Oh, it all sounds too racy for this old head,” Ama intervened. She had turned eighty this year. It seemed to Essie she played her old age as a “character part,” to dilute conflict within the ongoing family drama.

  Daddy offered, “Em, we know ourselves the people in Philadelphia don’t all treat you bad, necessarily.”

  “The Communists just stole Hungary out from under our nose,” Danny was going on. He had had to get glasses for astigmatism when he was in the third grade, and they made him look, along with his pimples, like the sissy ugly boy next door in a Hardy Family picture.

  “No daughter of ours,” Momma was telling Daddy in her clearest diction, “is going to go whoring off to Philadelphia.”

  Essie felt so pent-up—still so humiliated by her interview with the master of ceremonies in Dover, still hearing the stunned silence of the audience—that she had to get out of the room, this claustrophobic kitchen with its new white Frigidaire refrigerator and black old gas stove, its dangling spiral of yellow flypaper and its greasy calendar from Diamond State Insurance showing for every month Scottie dogs dressed up as witches or pilgrims or Santa Claus or something stupid. She stood and told the worried white faces clustered there by the kitchen table, where the old worn oilcloth had been replaced by a pale-blue synthetic fabric that looked like a shower curtain, “Don’t anybody fret. I’ll never hear again from Douglas Germaine, after the way I messed up. Now could you all excuse me? I have a history paper due tomorrow, and I promised Frankie Sturgis I’d go with him to the matinee at the Roxie.”

  The Sunday matinee had been begun, against objections from some church people, during the war, when everyone was working all hours and needed entertainment when they could get it. Then, with movie attendance climbing higher and higher, it had been kept. There was even talk of another movie house being opened, in a town of less than four thousand.

  “I didn’t know Frankie Sturgis was one of your beaux,” Momma said, unable to keep silent, though for a second she had been visibly trying.

  “He’s not a beau. He just asked to take me to the movies. Isn’t that all right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Oh, Mother. Mr. Sturgis teaches in the Methodist Sunday school. You trust him to fix your cars. Frankie’s going to take over the garage some day.”

  “But isn’t the movie—”

  “Forever Amber? Yes. I know the book made a scandal but Loretta Whaley says the movie is very tame. The only reason I want to see it is George Sanders plays the king. I love George Sanders.”

  At this moment it seemed that George Sanders was the only person she did love.

  Momma in her agitation, trying to be tactful, had stood up and was limping around, which made her more irritating. “Essie, I would think after all the excitement and lack of sleep—”

  Essie cut her short, trying not to scream. “Daddy. Make her stop.”

  “Your mother is tired,” he said. “Em, let’s let her go, she needs to unwind.” To Essie he said, trying to be stern, “Once you finish your history paper. And come right back home.”

  “He may want to t-take me to the B-Blue Hen for a soda.” Maybe it was lying that made her stutter.

  “Home by five-thirty. Six at the latest.”

  In the midst of her tame family she felt her power, her irresistible fire; these pale faces around the blue tablecloth were falling away from her like rocket supports in the newsreels. If only they knew what she knew about boys, what was behind their flies, hard as a bone, and how they would hide their hot squirming faces at the base of her panty girdle, so she could smell the something like wet muskrat when they came up and kissed her lips. She had let only Jamie and Tod Middleton, who was off at college this year, go all the way; Tod showed her what a Trojan was and after worrying all one month last summer she made Jamie use them too.

  “You watch,” Danny was going on in her face as she turned to go upstairs. “Iran and Turkey and Greece will be next.”

  “Drop dead,” she pronounced. Walter Winchell had invented the phrase and the hep kids at school were using it. She loved the way Frankie Sturgis let his hair grow long; a dark forelock tumbled down and there were little curls at the back of the neck. She tickled them when the movie got boring. She was beginning to see that Linda Darnell and those other heavy-mouthed women such as Lana Turner and Betty Grable, with their sculptured swooping hair that would never hold its shape an hour in real life, were like statues—there was something missing, some nervous spark that was in the air now, and in her, an energy dying to burst out. Not that—she reflected sadly when Frankie brought her home, in his father’s souped-up rebuilt pre-war De Soto Airflow, after a dishevelling side-trip to a petting grove by the Canal that kids knew about—Basingstoke offered many ways out.

  It was easy to forget Doug. She was on the cheerleadin
g squad and the girls’ hockey team, and rehearsals were beginning for the senior play in December, Meet Me in Saint Louis, in which she played the mother instead of the role Judy Garland had in the movie. Doug’s letter came in a big envelope with a row of three-cent stamps outside and, inside, eight photographs of her there in the hotel courtyard—shiny prints of her face and shoulders that could have been of a movie star, except the autograph hadn’t been put on yet. She kept studying her own mouth, all the little shadowed ins and outs and shapes of its flesh. Her upper lip seemed a little thin and rabbity and her nose a bit widespread and with that bothersome little bump she inherited from Momma but the honey-brown eyes were quite lovely, gazing daydreamily off at nothing the way he had told her to, the way Ginger Rogers’ eyes stared over Fred Astaire’s shoulder at nothing, while the music surged and her feet began to glide effortlessly after his, matching step for step—eyes shaped like her mother’s, with big clear whites fitted into the lower lids like eggs snug into eggcups, and the lids’ sensitive edges feathery with lashes, eyes that took the world in and then gave the world back. Just as she had had the impulse to kneel and blow Doug she now wanted to lean over and kiss the shiny photographic stock. His letter was on Bulletin stationery, written in that kind of very soft dark pencil newspapers have, and said,

  Hello Essie,

  These are the best of the bunch. You look good I think. I showed them to my editor and he couldn’t use them since the competition is an old story but if I had some full figures posed with studio lights I’d like to send them to a model agency in New York where I know a guy. Could you come up to Philly some Saturday or Sunday in the next month, the sooner the better? Give me a call at the number here, extension 403.

  Friendly regards to you and your Mom,

  Doug

  As it turned out, it was not so hard to get away. The family was distracted that October, the October when Chuck Yaeger in a Bell X-1 rocket plane broke the sound barrier and a black man, Jackie Robinson, played in the World Series. Jeb Horley was retiring as postmaster in Basingstoke and the kitchen table was animated every suppertime by discussions of whether or not Daddy should be the next postmaster. Jeb said the job was his for the asking, there was no reason it couldn’t be a carrier who got the promotion instead of a clerk, according to regulations he had to live in the delivery district and not be the spouse of a rural carrier, and he did and he wasn’t and all he had to do was post a bond and take an oath and the President himself would appoint him. But Daddy—stubborn, shy Daddy—said he didn’t want to be cooped up day after day with all that paperwork and politicking and making idle conversation with the town loafers and half-crazy gossips; he liked getting out and walking the town. Jeb Horley’s pipe smoke had stunk up the air in there for forty years past and forty years to come. Let Lyle Dresham have the job. Lyle had come back from the South Pacific with a case of malaria and a bellyful of parasites and was delivering on the edges of town in the Willys station wagon that had replaced the Jeep; he had a young family and was ambitious. This seemed to Essie and Danny much too cautious of their father, and rather selfish and unkind to deny them and Momma (though they couldn’t exactly say this) the advantages that would come with a raise in his pay and status; but Ama took her son’s side, saying to them privately, “It keeps him fit, and it’s something he can handle. Your daddy has a certain temperament. They used to say in Missouri, ‘Don’t race a plow horse, and don’t eat a laying chicken.’ ”