The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  “No.” Mark mimicked Strunk’s whisper.

  “He got the pants kidded off him today.”

  “Oh dear.”

  Strunk started to laugh, as he often did before beginning a story. “You know what a goddamn ladies’ man he thinks he is?”

  “You bet,” Mark said, although Strunk said that about every male member of the faculty.

  “You have Gloria Andrews, don’t you?”

  “You bet.”

  “Well, this morning Murky intercepts a note she was writing, and the note says what a damn neat guy she thinks Murchison is and how she loves him!” Strunk waited for Mark to say something, and then, when he didn’t, continued, “You could see he was tickled pink. But—get this—it turns out at lunch that the same damn thing happened to Fryeburg in history yesterday!” Strunk laughed and, still getting no response, gave Mark a little push—a schoolyard push. “The girl’s too dumb to have thought it up herself. We all think it was Peter Forry’s idea.”

  “Probably was,” Mark agreed. Strunk followed him out to his locker, describing Murchison’s expression when Fryeburg (in all innocence, mind you) told what had happened to him.

  Mark turned the combination of his locker: 18, 24, 3. “Would you excuse me, Dave?” he said. “My wife may be out front waiting. She picks me up when it rains.”

  Strunk was too thick to catch Mark’s anger. “Help yourself,” he said. “I got to get over to the gym. Can’t take the little darlings outside in the rain; their mommies’ll write notes to Teacher.” He clattered down the hall and wheeled at the far end, shouting, “Now, don’t tell You-know-who! The ladies’ man!”

  Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself, and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that.

  The Christian Roommates

  Orson Ziegler came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor. Orson, at eighteen, was half an inch under six feet tall, with a weight of 164 and an IQ of 155. His eczematous cheeks and vaguely irritated squint—as if his face had been for too long transected by the sight of a level horizon—masked a definite self-confidence. As the doctor’s son, he had always mattered in the town. In his high school he had been class president, valedictorian, and captain of the football and baseball teams. (The captain of the basketball team had been Lester Spotted Elk, a full-blooded Chippewa with dirty fingernails and brilliant teeth, a smoker, a drinker, a discipline problem, and the only boy Orson ever had met who was better than he at anything that mattered.) Orson was the first native of his town to go to Harvard, and would probably be the last, at least until his son was of age. His future was firm in his mind: the pre-med course here, medical school either at Harvard, Penn, or Yale, and then back to South Dakota, where he had his wife already selected and claimed and primed to wait. Two nights before he left for Harvard, he had taken her virginity. She had cried, and he had felt foolish, having, somehow, failed. It had been his virginity, too. Orson was sane, sane enough to know that he had lots to learn, and to be, within limits, willing. Harvard processes thousands of such boys and restores them to the world with little apparent damage. Presumably because he was from west of the Mississippi and a Protestant Christian (Methodist), the authorities had given him as a freshman roommate a self-converted Episcopalian from Oregon.

  When Orson arrived at Harvard on the morning of Registration Day, bleary and stiff from the series of airplane rides that had begun fourteen hours before, his roommate was already installed. “H. Palamountain” was floridly inscribed in the upper of the two name slots on the door of Room 14. The bed by the window had been slept in, and the desk by the window was neatly loaded with books. Standing sleepless inside the door, inertly clinging to his two heavy suitcases, Orson was conscious of another presence in the room without being able to locate it; optically and mentally, he focused with a slight slowness.

  The roommate was sitting on the floor, barefoot, before a small spinning wheel. He jumped up nimbly. Orson’s first impression was of the wiry quickness that almost magically brought close to his face the thick-lipped, pop-eyed face of the other boy. He was a head shorter than Orson, and wore, above his bare feet, pegged sky-blue slacks, a lumberjack shirt whose throat was dashingly stuffed with a silk foulard, and a white cap such as Orson had seen before only in photographs of Pandit Nehru. Dropping a suitcase, Orson offered his hand. Instead of taking it, the roommate touched his palms together, bowed his head, and murmured something Orson didn’t catch. Then he gracefully swept off the white cap, revealing a narrow crest of curly blond hair that stood up like a rooster’s comb. “I am Henry Palamountain.” His voice, clear and colorless in the way of West Coast voices, suggested a radio announcer. His handshake was metallically firm and seemed to have a pinch of malice in it. Like Orson, he wore glasses. The thick lenses emphasized the hyperthyroid bulge of his eyes and their fishy, searching expression.

  “Orson Ziegler,” Orson said.

  “I know.”

  Orson felt a need to add something adequately solemn, standing as they were on the verge of a kind of marriage. “Well, Henry”—he lamely lowered the other suitcase to the floor—“I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

  “You may call me Hub,” the roommate said. “Most people do. However, call me Henry if you insist. I don’t wish to diminish your dreadful freedom. You may not wish to call me anything at all. Already I’ve made three hopeless enemies in the dormitory.”

  Every sentence in this smoothly enunciated speech bothered Orson, beginning with the first. He himself had never been given a nickname; it was the one honor his classmates had withheld from him. In his adolescence he had coined nicknames for himself—Orrie, Ziggy—and tried to insinuate them into popular usage, without success. And what was meant by “dreadful freedom”? It sounded sarcastic. And why might he not wish to call him anything at all? And how had the roommate had the time to make enemies? Orson asked irritably, “How long have you been here?”

  “Eight days.” Henry concluded every statement with a strange little pucker of his lips, a kind of satisfied silent click, as if to say, “And what do you think of that?”

  Orson felt that he had been sized up as someone easy to startle. But he slid helplessly into the straight-man role that, like the second-best bed, had been reserved for him. “That long?”

  “Yes. I was totally alone until the day before yesterday. You see, I hitchhiked.”

  “From Oregon?”

  “Yes. And I wished to allow time enough for any contingency. In case I was robbed, I had sewed a fifty-dollar bill inside my shirt. As it turned out, I made smooth connections all the way. I had painted a large cardboard sign saying ‘Harvard.’ You should try it sometime. One meets some very interesting Harvard graduates.”

  “Didn’t your parents worry?”

  “Of course. My parents are divorced. My father was furious. He wanted me to fly. I told him to give the plane fare to the Indian Relief Fund. He never gives a penny to charity. And, of course, I’m old. I’m twenty.”

  “You’ve been in the Army?”

  Henry lifted his hands and staggered back as if from a blow. He put the back of his hand to his brow, whimpered “Never,” shuddered, straightened up smartly, and saluted. “In fact, the Portland draft board is after me right now.” With a preening tug of his two agile hands—which did look, Orson realized, old: bony and veined and red-tipped, like a woman’s—he broadened his foulard. “They refuse to recognize any conscientious objectors except Quakers and Mennonites. My bishop agrees with them. They offered me an out if I’d say I was willing to work in a hospital, but I explained that this released a man for combat duty and if it came to that I’d just as soon carry a gun. I’m an excellent shot. I mind killing only on principle.
”

  The Korean War had begun that summer, and Orson, who had been nagged by a suspicion that his duty was to enlist, bristled at such blithe pacifism. He squinted and asked, “What have you been doing for two years, then?”

  “Working in a plywood mill. As a gluer. The actual gluing is done by machines, but they become swamped in their own glue now and then. It’s a kind of excessive introspection—you’ve read Hamlet?”

  “Just Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice.”

  “Yes. Anyway. They have to be cleaned with solvent. One wears long rubber gloves up to one’s elbows. It’s very soothing work. The inside of a gluer is an excellent place for revolving Greek quotations in your head. I memorized nearly the whole of the Phaedo that way.” He gestured toward his desk, and Orson saw that many of the books were green Loeb editions of Plato and Aristotle, in Greek. Their spines were worn; they looked read and reread. For the first time, the thought of being at Harvard frightened him. Orson had been standing between his suitcases and now he moved to unpack. “Have you left me a bureau?”

  “Of course. The better one.” Henry jumped on the bed that had not been slept in and bounced up and down as if it were a trampoline. “And I’ve given you the bed with the better mattress,” he said, still bouncing, “and the desk that doesn’t have the glare from the window.”

  “Thanks,” Orson said.

  Henry was quick to notice his tone. “Would you rather have my bed? My desk?” He jumped from the bed and dashed to his desk and scooped a stack of books from it.

  Orson had to touch him to stop him, and was startled by the tense muscularity of the arm he touched. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “They’re exactly alike.”

  Henry replaced his books. “I don’t want any bitterness,” he said, “or immature squabbling. As the older man, it’s my responsibility to yield. Here. I’ll give you the shirt off my back.” And he began to peel off his lumberjack shirt, leaving the foulard dramatically knotted around his naked throat. He wore no undershirt.

  Having won from Orson a facial expression that Orson himself could not see, Henry smiled and rebuttoned the shirt. “Do you mind my name being in the upper slot on the door? I’ll remove it. I apologize. I did it without realizing how sensitive you would be.”

  Perhaps it was all a kind of humor. Orson tried to make a joke. He pointed and asked, “Do I get a spinning wheel, too?”

  “Oh, that.” Henry hopped backward on one bare foot and became rather shy. “That’s an experiment. I ordered it from Calcutta. I spin for a half hour a day, after yoga.”

  “You do yoga, too?”

  “Just some of the elementary positions. My ankles can’t take more than five minutes of the Lotus yet.”

  “And you say you have a bishop.”

  The roommate glanced up with a glint of fresh interest. “Say. You listen, don’t you? Yes. I consider myself an Anglican Christian Platonist strongly influenced by Gandhi.” He touched his palms before his chest, bowed, straightened, and giggled. “My bishop hates me,” he said. “The one in Oregon, who wants me to be a soldier. I’ve introduced myself to the bishop here and I don’t think he likes me, either. For that matter, I’ve antagonized my adviser. I told him I had no intention of fulfilling the science requirement.”

  “For God’s sake, why not?”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  Orson felt this rebuff as a small test of strength. “Not really,” he agreed.

  “I consider science a demonic illusion of human hubris. Its phantasmal nature is proved by its constant revision. I asked him, ‘Why should I waste an entire fourth of my study time, time that could be spent with Plato, mastering a mass of hypotheses that will be obsolete by the time I graduate?’ ”

  “My Lord, Henry,” Orson exclaimed, indignantly defending the millions of lives saved by medical science, “you can’t be serious!”

  “Please. ‘Hub.’ I may be difficult for you, and I think it would help if you were to call me by my name. Now let’s talk about you. Your father is a doctor, you received all A’s in high school—I received rather mediocre grades myself—and you’ve come to Harvard because you believe it affords a cosmopolitan Eastern environment that will be valuable to you after spending your entire life in a small provincial town.”

  “Who the hell told you all this?” The recital of his application statement made Orson blush. He already felt older than the boy who had written it.

  “University Hall,” Henry said. “I went over and asked to see your folder. They didn’t want to let me at first, but I explained that if they were going to give me a roommate, after I had specifically requested to live alone, I had a right to information about you, so I could minimize possible friction.”

  “And they let you?”

  “Of course. People without convictions have no powers of resistance.” His mouth made its little satisfied click, and Orson was goaded to ask, “Why did you come to Harvard?”

  “Two reasons.” He ticked them off on two fingers. “Raphael Demos and Werner Jaeger.”

  Orson did not know these names, but he suspected that “Friends of yours?” was a stupid question, once it was out of his mouth.

  However, Henry nodded. “I’ve introduced myself to Demos. A charming old scholar, with a beautiful young wife.”

  “You mean you just went to his house and pushed yourself in?” Orson heard his own voice grow shrill; his voice, rather high and unstable, was one of the things about himself that he liked least.

  Henry blinked, and looked unexpectedly vulnerable, so slender and bravely dressed, his ugly, yellowish, flat-nailed feet naked on the floor, which was uncarpeted and painted black. “That isn’t how I would describe it. I went as a pilgrim. He seemed pleased to talk to me.” He spoke carefully, and his mouth abstained from clicking.

  That he could hurt his roommate’s feelings—that this jaunty apparition had feelings—disconcerted Orson more deeply than any of the surprises he had been deliberately offered. As quickly as he had popped up, Henry dropped to the floor, as if through a trapdoor in the plane of conversation. He resumed spinning. The method apparently called for a thread to be wound around the big toe of a foot and to be kept taut by a kind of absent-minded pedal motion. While engaged in this, he seemed hermetically sealed inside one of the gluing machines that had incubated his philosophy. Unpacking, Orson was slowed and snagged by a complicated mood of discomfort. He tried to remember how his mother had arranged his bureau drawers at home—socks and underwear in one, shirts and handkerchiefs in another. Home seemed infinitely far from him, and he was dizzily conscious of a great depth of space beneath his feet, as if the blackness of the floor were the color of an abyss. The spinning wheel steadily chuckled. Orson’s buzz of unease circled and settled on his roommate, who, it was clear, had thought earnestly about profound matters, matters that Orson, busy as he had been with the practical business of being a good student, had hardly considered. It was also clear that Henry had thought unintelligently. This unintelligence (“I received rather mediocre grades myself”) was more of a menace than a comfort. Bent above the bureau drawers, Orson felt cramped in his mind, able neither to stand erect in wholehearted contempt nor to lie down in honest admiration. His mood was complicated by the repugnance his roommate’s physical presence aroused in him. An almost morbidly clean boy, Orson was haunted by glue, and a tacky ambience resisted every motion of his unpacking.

  The silence between the roommates continued until a great bell rang ponderously. The sound was near and yet far, like a heartbeat within the bosom of time, and it seemed to bring with it into the room the muffling foliation of the trees in the Yard, which to Orson’s prairie-honed eyes had looked tropically tall and lush; the walls of the room vibrated with leaf shadows, and many minute presences—dust motes, traffic sounds, or angels of whom several could dance on the head of a pin—thronged the air and made it difficult to breathe. The stairways of the dormitory rumbled. Boys dressed in jackets and neckties crowded the doorway
and entered the room, laughing and calling “Hub. Hey, Hub.”

  “Get up off the floor, Dad.”

  “Jesus, Hub, put your shoes on.”

  “Pee-yew.”

  “And take off that bandanna around your neck. Coat and tie required.”

  “And that nurse’s cap.”

  “Consider the lilies, Hub. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

  “Amen, brothers!”

  “Fitch, you should be a preacher.”

  They were all strangers to Orson. Hub stood and smoothly performed introductions.

  In a few days, Orson had sorted them out. That jostling conglomerate, so apparently secure and homogeneous, broke down, under habitual exposure, into double individuals: roommates. There were Silverstein and Koshland, Dawson and Kern, Young and Carter, Petersen and Fitch.

  Silverstein and Koshland, who lived in the room overhead, were Jews from New York City. All Orson knew about non-Biblical Jews was that they were a sad race, full of music, shrewdness, and woe. But Silverstein and Koshland were always clowning, always wisecracking. They played bridge and poker and chess and Go and went to the movies in Boston and drank coffee in the luncheonettes around the Square. They came from the “gifted” high schools of the Bronx and Brooklyn respectively, and treated Cambridge as if it were another borough. Most of what the freshman year sought to teach them they seemed to know already. As winter approached, Koshland went out for basketball, and he and his teammates made the floor above bounce to the thump and rattle of scrimmages with a tennis ball and a wastebasket. One afternoon, a section of ceiling collapsed on Orson’s bed.

  Next door, in Room 12, Dawson and Kern wanted to be writers. Dawson was from Ohio and Kern from Pennsylvania. Dawson had a sulky, slouching bearing, a certain puppyish facial eagerness, and a terrible temper. He was a disciple of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway and himself wrote in a stern, plain style. He had been raised as an atheist, and no one in the dormitory rubbed his temper the wrong way more often than Hub. Orson, feeling that he and Dawson came from opposite edges of that great psychological realm called the Midwest, liked him. He felt less at ease with Kern, who seemed Eastern and subtly vicious. A farm boy bent on urban sophistication, riddled with nervous ailments ranging from conjunctivitis to hemorrhoids, Kern smoked and talked incessantly. He and Dawson maintained between them a battery of running jokes. At night Orson could hear them on the other side of the wall keeping each other awake with improvised parodies and musical comedies based on their teachers, their courses, or their fellow-freshmen. One midnight, Orson distinctly heard Dawson sing, “My name is Orson Ziegler, I come from South Dakota.” There was a pause, then Kern sang back, “I tend to be a niggler, and masturbate by quota.”