The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  We would arrive in Olinger after the drugstores, which had kept open for the first waves of people returning from the game, were shut. Except for the streetlights, the town was dark; it was betranced, like a town in a fable. We scattered, each escorting a girl to her door; and there, perhaps, for a moment, you bowed your face into that silent crescent of fragrance, and tasted it, and let it bite into you indelibly. The other day, in a town far from Olinger, I passed on the sidewalk two girls utterly unknown to me and half my age, and sensed, very faintly, that flavor from far off carried in their bent arms like a bouquet. And, continuing to walk, I felt myself sink into a chasm deeper than the one inverted above us on those Friday nights during football season.

  After seeing the girl home, I would stride through the hushed streets, where the rustling leaves seemed torn scraps scattered in the wake of the game, and go to Mr. Lloyd Stephens’ house. There, looking in the little square window of his front storm door, I could see down a dark hall into the lit kitchen where Mr. Stephens and my father and Mr. Jesse Honneger were counting money around a worn porcelain table. Stephens, a local contractor, was the school-board treasurer, and Honneger, who taught social science, was chairman of the high-school athletic department. They were still counting; the silver stacks slipped and glinted among their fingers, and the gold of beer stood in cylinders beside their hairy wrists. Their sleeves were rolled up. Smoke, like a fourth presence, wings spread, hung over their heads. They were still counting, so it was all right. I was not late. We lived ten miles away, and I could not go home until my father was ready. Some nights it took until midnight. I would knock and pull open the storm door and push open the real door and it would be warm in the contractor’s hall. I would accept a glass of ginger ale and sit in the kitchen with the men until they were done. It was late, very late, but I was not blamed; it was permitted. Silently counting and expertly tamping the coins into little cylindrical wrappers of colored paper, the men ordered and consecrated this realm of night into which my days had never extended before. The hour or more behind me, which I had spent so wastefully, in walking when a trolley would have been swifter, and so wickedly, in blasphemy and lust, was past and forgiven me; it had been necessary; it was permitted.

  Now I peek into windows and open doors and do not find that air of permission. It has fled the world. Girls walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace, and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a hearse, and remembers what pierces him.

  OUT IN THE WORLD

  The Lucid Eye in Silver Town

  The first time I visited New York City, I was thirteen and went with my father. I went to meet my Uncle Quin and to buy a book about Vermeer. The Vermeer book was my idea, and my mother’s; meeting Uncle Quin was my father’s. A generation ago, my uncle had vanished in the direction of Chicago and become, apparently, rich; in the last week he had come east on business and I had graduated from the eighth grade with high marks. My father claimed that I and his brother were the smartest people he had ever met—“go-getters,” he called us, with perhaps more irony than at the time I gave him credit for—and in his visionary way he suddenly, irresistibly felt that now was the time for us to meet. New York in those days was seven dollars away; we measured everything, distance and time, in money then. World War II was over, but we were still living in the Depression. My father and I set off with the return tickets and a five-dollar bill in his pocket. The five dollars was for the book.

  My mother, on the railway platform, suddenly exclaimed, “I hate the Augusts.” This surprised me, because we were all Augusts—I was an August, my father was an August, Uncle Quincy was an August, and she, I had thought, was an August.

  My father gazed serenely over her head and said, “You have every reason to. I wouldn’t blame you if you took a gun and shot us all. Except for Quin and your son. They’re the only ones of us ever had any get up and git.” Nothing was more infuriating about my father than his way of agreeing.

  Uncle Quin didn’t meet us at Pennsylvania Station. If my father was disappointed, he didn’t reveal it to me. It was after one o’clock and all we had for lunch were two candy bars. By walking what seemed to me a very long way on pavements only a little broader than those of my home town, and not so clean, we reached the hotel, which sprouted somehow from the caramel-colored tunnels under Grand Central Station. The lobby smelled of perfume. After the clerk had phoned Quincy August that a man who said he was his brother was at the desk, an elevator took us to the twentieth floor. Inside the room sat three men, each in a gray or blue suit with freshly pressed pants and garters peeping from under the cuffs when they crossed their legs. The men were not quite interchangeable. One had a caterpillar-shaped mustache, one had tangled blond eyebrows like my father’s, and the third had a drink in his hand—the others had drinks, too, but were not gripping them so tightly.

  “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet my brother Marty and his young son,” Uncle Quin said.

  “The kid’s name is Jay,” my father added, shaking hands with each of the two men, staring them in the eye. I imitated my father, and the mustached man, not expecting my firm handshake and stare, said, “Why, hello there, Jay!”

  “Marty, would you and the boy like to freshen up? The facilities are through the door and to the left.”

  “Thank you, Quin. I believe we will. Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Certainly.”

  My father and I went into the bedroom of the suite. The furniture was square and new and all the same shade of maroon. On the bed was an opened suitcase, also new. The clean, expensive smells of leather and lotion were beautiful to me. Uncle Quin’s underwear looked silk and was full of fleurs-de-lis. When I was through in the lavatory, I made for the living room, to rejoin Uncle Quin and his friends.

  “Hold it,” my father said. “Let’s wait in here.”

  “Won’t that look rude?”

  “No. It’s what Quin wants.”

  “Now, Daddy, don’t be ridiculous. He’ll think we’ve died in here.”

  “No, he won’t, not my brother. He’s working some deal. He doesn’t want to be bothered. I know how my brother works; he got us in here so we’d stay in here.”

  “Really, Pop. You’re such a schemer.” But I did not want to go in there without him. I looked around the room for something to read. There was nothing, not even a newspaper, except a shiny little pamphlet about the hotel itself. I wondered when we would get a chance to look for the Vermeer book, and what the men in the next room were talking about. I wondered why Uncle Quin was so short, when my father was so tall. By leaning out of the window, I could see taxicabs maneuvering like windup toys.

  My father came and stood beside me. “Don’t lean out too far.”

  I edged out inches farther and took a big bite of the high cold air spiced by the distant street noises. “Look at the green cab cut in front of the yellow,” I said. “Should they be making U-turns on that street?”

  “In New York it’s O.K. Survival of the fittest is the only law here.”

  “Isn’t that the Chrysler Building?”

  “Yes, isn’t it graceful, though? It always reminds me of the queen of the chessboard.”

  “What’s the one beside it?”

  “I don’t know. Some big gravestone. The one deep in back, from this window, is the Woolworth Building. For years it was the tallest building in the world.”

  As, side by side at the window, we talked, I was surprised that my father could answer so many of my questions. As a young man, before I was born, he had travelled, looking for work; this was not his first trip to New York. Excited by my new respect, I longed to say something to remold that calm, beaten face.

  “Do you really think he meant for us to stay out here?” I asked.

  “Quin is a go-getter,” he said, gazing over my head. “I admire him. Anything he wanted, from little on up, he went after it. Slam. Bang. His thinking is
miles ahead of mine—just like your mother’s. You can feel them pull out ahead of you.” He moved his hands, palms down, like two taxis, the left quickly pulling ahead of the right. “You’re the same way.”

  “Sure, sure.” My impatience was not merely embarrassment at being praised; I was irritated that he considered Uncle Quin as smart as myself. At that point in my life I was sure that only stupid people took an interest in money.

  When Uncle Quin finally entered the bedroom, he said, “Martin, I hoped you and the boy would come out and join us.”

  “Hell, I didn’t want to butt in. You and those men were talking business.”

  “Lucas and Roebuck and I? Now, Marty, it was nothing that my own brother couldn’t hear. Just a minor matter of adjustment. Both those men are fine men. Very important in their own fields. I’m disappointed that you couldn’t see more of them. Believe me, I hadn’t meant for you to hide in here. Now, what kind of drink would you like?”

  “I don’t care. I drink very little any more.”

  “Scotch-and-water, Marty?”

  “Swell.”

  “And the boy? What about some ginger ale, young man? Or would you like milk?”

  “The ginger ale,” I said.

  “There was a day, you know, when your father could drink any two men under the table.”

  As I remember it, a waiter brought the drinks to the room, and while we were drinking them I asked if we were going to spend all afternoon in this room. Uncle Quin didn’t seem to hear, but five minutes later he suggested that the boy might like to take a look around the city—Gotham, he called it, Baghdad-on-the-Subway. My father said that that would be a once-in-a-lifetime treat for the kid. He always called me “the kid” when I was sick or had lost at something or was angry—when he felt sorry for me, in short. The three of us went down in the elevator and took a taxi ride down Broadway, or up Broadway—I wasn’t sure. “This is what they call the Great White Way,” Uncle Quin said several times. Once he apologized, “In daytime it’s just another street.” The trip didn’t seem so much designed for sightseeing as for getting Uncle Quin to the Pickernut Club, a little restaurant set in a block of similar canopied places. I remember we stepped down into it and it was dark inside. A piano was playing “There’s a Small Hotel.”

  “He shouldn’t do that,” Uncle Quin said. Then he waved to the man behind the piano. “How are you, Freddie? How are the kids?”

  “Fine, Mr. August, fine,” Freddie said, bobbing his head and smiling and not missing a note.

  “That’s Quin’s song,” my father said to me as we wriggled our way into a slippery curved seat at a round table.

  I didn’t say anything, but Uncle Quin, overhearing some disapproval in my silence, said, “Freddie’s a first-rate man. He has a boy going to Colgate this autumn.”

  I asked, “Is that really your song?”

  Uncle Quin grinned and put his warm broad hand on my shoulder; I hated, at that age, being touched. “I let them think it is,” he said, oddly purring. “To me, songs are like young girls. They’re all pretty.”

  A waiter in a red coat scurried up. “Mr. August! Back from the West? How are you, Mr. August?”

  “Getting by, Jerome, getting by. Jerome, I’d like you to meet my kid brother, Martin.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Martin. Are you paying New York a visit? Or do you live here?”

  My father quickly shook hands with Jerome, somewhat to Jerome’s surprise. “I’m just up for the afternoon, thank you. I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.”

  “I see, sir. A quick visit.”

  “This is the first time in six years that I’ve had a chance to see my brother.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen very little of him these past years. He’s a man we can never see too much of, isn’t that right?”

  Uncle Quin interrupted. “This is my nephew Jay.”

  “How do you like the big city, Jay?”

  “Fine.” I didn’t duplicate my father’s mistake of offering to shake hands.

  “Why, Jerome,” Uncle Quin said, “my brother and I would like to have a Scotch-on-the-rocks. The boy would like a ginger ale.”

  “No, wait,” I said. “What kinds of ice cream do you have?”

  “Vanilla and chocolate, sir.”

  I hesitated. I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.

  “I’m afraid it’s not a very big selection,” Jerome said.

  “I guess vanilla.”

  “Yes, sir. One plate of vanilla.”

  When my ice cream came it was a golf ball in a flat silver dish; it kept spinning away as I dug at it with my spoon. Uncle Quin watched me and asked, “Is there anything especially Jay would like to do?”

  “The kid’d like to get into a bookstore,” my father said.

  “A bookstore. What sort of book, Jay?”

  I said, “I’d like to look for a good book of Vermeer.”

  “Vermeer,” Uncle Quin pronounced slowly, relishing the r’s, pretending to give the matter thought. “Dutch school.”

  “He’s Dutch, yes.”

  “For my own money, Jay, the French are the people to beat. We have four Degas ballet dancers in our living room in Chicago, and I could sit and look at one of them for hours. I think it’s wonderful, the feeling for balance the man had.”

  “Yeah, but don’t Degas’s paintings always remind you of colored drawings? For actually looking at things in terms of paint, for the lucid eye, I think Vermeer makes Degas look sick.”

  Uncle Quin said nothing, and my father, after an anxious glance across the table, said, “That’s the way he and his mother talk all the time. It’s all beyond me. I can’t understand a thing they say.”

  “Your mother is encouraging you to be a painter, is she, Jay?” Uncle Quin’s smile was very wide, and his cheeks were pushed out as if each held a candy.

  “Sure, I suppose she is.”

  “Your mother is a very wonderful woman, Jay,” Uncle Quin said.

  It was such an embarrassing remark, and so much depended upon your definition of “wonderful,” that I dug at my ice cream, and my father asked Uncle Quin about his own wife, Edna. When we left, Uncle Quin signed the check with his name and the name of some company. It was close to five o’clock.

  My uncle didn’t know much about the location of bookstores in New York—his last twenty years had been spent in Chicago—but he thought that if we went to Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue we should find something. The cab driver let us out beside a park that acted as kind of a back yard for the Public Library. It looked so inviting, so agreeably dusty, with the pigeons and the men nodding on the benches and the office girls in their taut summer dresses, that, without thinking, I led the two men into it. Shimmering buildings arrowed upward and glinted through the treetops. This was New York, I told myself: the silver town. Towers of ambition rose, crystalline, within me. “If you stand here,” my father said, “you can see the Empire State.” I went and stood beneath my father’s arm and followed with my eyes the direction of it. Something sharp and hard fell into my right eye. I ducked my head and blinked; it was painful.

  “What’s the trouble?” Uncle Quin’s voice asked.

  My father said, “The poor kid’s got something into his eye. He has the worst luck that way of anybody I ever knew.”

  The thing seemed to have life. It bit. “Ow,” I said, angry enough to cry.

  “If we can get him out of the wind,” my father’s voice said, “maybe I can see it.”

  “No, now, Marty, use your head. Never fool with the eyes or ears. The hotel is within two blocks. Can you walk two blocks, Jay?”

  “I’m blind, not lame,” I snapped.

  “He has a ready wit,” Uncle Quin said.

  Between the two men, shielding my eye with a hand, I walked to the hotel. From time to time, one of them would take my other hand, or put one of theirs on my shoulder, but I would walk faster, and the hands would drop awa
y. I hoped our entrance into the hotel lobby would not be too conspicuous; I took my hand from my eye and walked erect, defying the impulse to stoop. Except for the one lid being shut and possibly my face being red, I imagined I looked passably suave. However, my guardians lost no time betraying me. Not only did they walk at my heels, as if I might topple any instant, but my father told one old bum sitting in the lobby, “Poor kid got something in his eye,” and Uncle Quin, passing the desk, called, “Send up a doctor to Twenty-eleven.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Quin,” my father said in the elevator. “I can get it out, now that he’s out of the wind. This is happening all the time. The kid’s eyes are too far front in his head.”

  “Never fool with the eyes, Martin. They are your most precious tool in life.”

  “It’ll work out,” I said, though I didn’t believe it would. It felt like a steel chip, deeply embedded.

  Up in the room, Uncle Quin made me lie down on the bed. My father, a handkerchief wadded in his hand so that one corner stuck out, approached me, but it hurt so much to open the eye that I repulsed him. “Don’t torment me,” I said, twisting my face away. “What good does it do? The doctor’ll be up.”