by John Updike
They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them.
Eccles goes on, explanatorily, “This was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church.”
“I tell you, I know what it is.”
“What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?”
It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you-heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this frigging game, you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws his shoulder.
“The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice agonized by embarrassment, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.”
They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut pale buds. “I better go first,” Rabbit says. “Till you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this mess. He wishes it would rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the east. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes this hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!” he cries and, turning to Eccles with a smile of aggrandizement, repeats, “That’s it.”
2
SUN and moon, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith’s acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad-leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly make the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone-flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebud prunings that cling together in infuriating ankle-clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty-eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch on the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes.
Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails. He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him—nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias. He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.
Now, after the magnolias have lost their grip but before any but the leaves of the maple have the breadth to cast deep shade, the cherry trees and crabapples and, in a remote corner of the grounds, a solitary plum tree ball with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl away, so the reviving grass is bleached by an astonishing storm of confetti. Fragrant of gasoline, the power mower chews the petals; the lawn digests them. The lilac bushes bloom by the fallen tennis-court fences. Birds come to the birdbath. Busy one morning with a crescent-shape edger, Harry is caught in a tide of perfume, for behind him the breeze has turned and washes down through a thick sloping bank of acrid lily-of-the-valley leaves in which on that warm night a thousand bells have ripened, the high ones on the stem still the bitter sherbet green of cantaloupe rind. Apple trees and pear trees. Tulips. Those ugly purple tatters the iris. And at last, prefaced by azaleas, the rhododendrons themselves, with a profusion increasing through the last week of May. Rabbit had waited all spring for this crowning. The bushes had puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed spruces that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads, on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. Harry has often wanted and never had a girl like that, a little Catholic from a shabby house, dressed in flashy bargain clothes; in the swarthy leaves under the pert soft cap of five-petaled flowers he can imagine her face, with its plucked eyebrows, its little black nostrils round as buttons, its eyes made surly by nuns. He can almost smell her perfume as she passes him on the concrete cathedral steps, head bowed, her mincing legs tucked into her tailored suit. Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl’s sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time. Close, he can go so close to the petals. Each flower wears on the roof of its mouth two fans of freckles where the anthers tap. He can smell her.
At this climax of her late husband’s garden, Mrs. Smith comes out of the house and on Rabbit’s arm walks deep into the rhododendron plantation. A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. He feels her body jolt with every step, and every word twitches her head. Not that the effort of speaking is so great; it is the excitement of communication that seizes her, wrinkling the arch of her nose fiercely, making her lips snarl above her snaggle-teeth with a comic over-expressiveness that is self-conscious, like the funny faces made by a thirteen-year-old girl in constant confession of the fact that she is not beautiful. She sharply tips her head to look up at Harry, and in tiny brown sockets afflicted by creases like so many drawstrings, her crackled blue eyes bulge frantically with captive life as she speaks: “Oh, I don’t like Mrs. R. S. Holford; she always looks so washed-out and flossy to me. Harry loved those salmon colors so; I’d say to him, ‘If I want red, give me red; a fat red rose. And if I want white, give me white, a tall white lily; and don’t bother me with all these in-betweens and would-be-pinks and almost-purples that don’t know what their mind is. Rhody’s a mealy-mouthed plant,’ I’d say to Harry, ‘she doesn’t have a brain, so she gives you some of everything’ just to tease him. But in truth I meant it.” The thought seems to strike her. She stops dead on the path of grass and her eyes, the irises a kind of broken-glass white within rings of persisting blue, rol
l nervously, looking from one side of him to the other. “In truth I meant every word of it. I’m a farmer’s daughter Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I’d say to him, ‘Why don’t you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there’s a real crop. You raise the wheat, I’ll bake the bread.’ I would have, too. ‘What do we want with all these corsages that after they’re gone we have to look at their ugly leaves all the year round?’ I’d say to him, ‘What pretty girl are you growing these for?’ He was younger than I, that’s why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won’t say by how much. What are we standing here for? Old body like mine stand still in one place you’ll be rooted fast.” She jabs the cane into the grass his signal to extend his arm. They move on down the alley of bloom. “Never thought I’d outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden he’d be forever sitting. A farmer’s daughter never learns the meaning of sit.”
Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the giant spruces. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. “Ah. Now here is a plant.” They stop at a corner and she lifts her dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in pink of penetrating purity, a color through whose raw simplicity, as through stained glass, you seem to look into the ideal subsoil of reality. “Harry’s Bianchi” Mrs. Smith says. “The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It’s the only true pink there is. When Harry first got it he set it among the other so-called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them out and backed the Bianchi with crimsons. The crimsons are by, aren’t they? Is today June?” Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Memorial Day’s next Saturday.”
“Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile traffic through Jersey City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren’t any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six-hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don’t suppose when I say ‘the war’ you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war.”
“No I think of the war as World War Two.”
“So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?”
“Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school.”
“Our son was killed.”
“Gee. I’m sorry.”
“Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off.”
“Still—”
“I know. You think of only young men being killed.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“It was a good war. It wasn’t like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things but that one was satisfying to win.” She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. “The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn’t in flower that late in the summer so it looked like just foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a”—she realizes she is repeating herself, falters, but goes on—“like a prince of the realm.” In her almost transparent blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing she snaps roughly, “It’s the only one.”
“The only Bianchi?”
“Yes! Right! There’s not another in the United States. There’s not another good pink from the Golden Gate to—wherever. The Brooklyn Bridge, I suppose they say. All the truly good pink in the nation is right here under our eyes. A florist from Lancaster took some cuttings but they died. Probably smothered them in lime. Stupid man. A Greek.”
She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide of blossom, and a furtively bitter smell breaths from the fresh walls of green. Maples, birches, oaks, elms, and horse-chestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property-line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in oddly neat rows, along the edge of the grass paths. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down such a trench of overblown brilliance. “I appreciate the beauty but I’d rather see alfalfa. A woman—I don’t know why it should vex me so—Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down the hill in a little orange shack with a metal cat climbing up the shutters, used to invariably say, turn to me with lipstick halfway up to her nose and say”—she mimics a too-sweet voice with a spirited spite that shakes her frame—“ ‘My, Mrs. Smith, this must be what Heaven is like!’ One year I said to her, I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer, I said, ‘Well if I’m driving six miles back and forth to St. John’s Episcopal Church every Sunday just to get into another splash of rhodies, I might as well save the mileage because I don’t want to go.’ Now wasn’t that a dreadful thing for an old sinner to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“To this poor woman who was only trying to be civil? Hadn’t a bean of a brain in her head, of course; painting her face like a young fool. She’s passed on now, poor soul; Alma Foster passed on two or three winters back. Now she knows the truth and I don’t.”
“Well, maybe what looks like rhododendrons to her will look like alfalfa to you.”
“Heh! Eh-HA! Exactly! Exactly! You know, Mr. Angstrom, it’s such a pleasure—” She stops them in the walk and caresses his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling girlish flirtatiousness and the watery wander, there glitters the edge of an old acuteness, so that Rabbit standing there easily feels a stab of the unkind force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. “You and I, we think alike. Don’t we? Now don’t we?”
“You have it pretty good, don’t you?” Ruth asks him. They have gone on the afternoon of this Memorial Day to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. She was self-conscious about getting into a bathing suit but in fact she looks great, up to her thighs in turquoise water and soaked licks of red hair sneaking out of her bathing cap. She swims easily, her big legs kicking slowly and the water flowing in bubbling transparence over her shoulders and her clean arms lifting and her back and bottom shimmering black under the jiggled green. Sometimes, when she stops and floats a moment, putting her face down in the water in a motion that quickens his heart with its slight danger, her bottom of its own buoyance floats up and breaks the surface—nothing much, just a round black island glistening there, a clear image suddenly in the water wavering like a blooey television set, but the solid sight swells his heart with pride, makes him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she is his, he knows her as well as the water, like the water has been everywhere on her body. When she does the backstroke the water breaks and pours down her front into her breastcups, flooding her breasts with touch; the arch of her submerged body tightens, thrusting her breasts fitfully into air; she closes her eyes and moves blindly. Two skinny boys dabbling at the shallow end of the pool splash away from her headfirst approach. She brushes one with a backsweep of her arm, awakes, and squats smiling in the water;
her arms wave bonelessly to keep her balance in the nervous tides of the crowded pool. The air sparkles with the scent of chlorine. He rejoices in how clean she feels: clean, clean. What is it? Nothing touching you that is not yourself. Her in water, him in grass and air. Her head, bobbing like a hollow ball, makes a face at him. Himself, he is not a water animal. Wet is cold to him. Having got wet, he prefers to sit on the tile edge dangling his feet and imagining that high-school girls behind him are admiring the muscle-play of his broad back. He revolves his shoulders thoughtfully and feels the blades stretch his skin in the sun. Ruth wades to the end, through water so shallow the checker pattern of the pool floor is refracted to its surface. She climbs the little ladder, shedding water in great grape-bunches. He scrambles back to their blanket and lies down so that when she comes over he can see her standing above him as big as the sky, the black hair high on the inside of her thighs pasted into swirls by the water. She tears off her cap and shakes out her hair and bends over for the towel. Water on her back flows upwards down soft valleys of fat and drips over her shoulders. As he watches her rub her arms the smell of grass comes up through the blanket and shouts make the crystalline air vibrate. She lies down beside him and closes her eyes and submits to the sun. Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color by the sun, except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure ungrained stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. “You have it pretty good.”
“How so?”
“Oh”—her words seem slightly delayed in passage from her lips; he sees them move, and then hears—“look at all you’ve got. You’ve got Eccles to play golf with every week and to keep your wife from chasing you. You’ve got your flowers, and you’ve got Mrs. Smith in love with you. You’ve got me.”