The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  He is wonderful to watch, playing soccer. Smaller than the others, my son leaps, heads, dribbles, feints, passes. When a big boy knocks him down, he tumbles on the mud, in his green-and-black school uniform, in an ecstasy of falling. I am envious. Never for me the jaunty pride of the school uniform, the solemn ritual of the coach’s pep talk, the camaraderie of shook hands and slapped backsides, the shadow-striped hush of late afternoon and last quarter, the solemn vaulted universe of official combat, with its cheering mothers and referees striped like zebras and the bespectacled timekeeper alert with his claxon. When the boy scores a goal, he runs into the arms of his teammates with upraised arms and his face alight as if blinded by triumph. They lift him from the earth in a union of muddy hugs. What spirit! What valor! What skill! His father, watching from the sidelines, inwardly registers only one complaint: he feels the boy, with his talent, should be more aggressive.

  They drove across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to hear their son read in Pittsburgh. But when their presence was announced to the audience, they did not stand; the applause groped for them and died. My mother said afterwards she was afraid she might fall into the next row if she tried to stand in the dark. Next morning was sunny, and the three of us searched for the house where once they had lived. They had been happy there; it was said, indeed, that I had been conceived there, just before the temper of the Depression worsened and nipped my possible brothers and sisters in the bud. We found the library where she used to read Turgenev, and the little park where the bums slept close as paving stones in the summer night; but their old street kept eluding us, as we circled in the car. On foot, my mother found the tree. She claimed she recognized it, the sooty linden tree she would gaze into from their apartment windows. The branches, though thicker, had held their pattern. But the house itself, and the entire block, was gone. Stray bricks and rods of iron in the grass suggested that the demolition had been recent. We stood on the empty spot and laughed. They knew it was right, because the railroad tracks were the right distance away. In confirmation, a long freight train pulled itself east around the curve, its great weight gliding as if on a river current; then a silver passenger train came gliding as effortlessly in the other direction. The curve of the tracks tipped the cars slightly toward us. The Golden Triangle, gray and hazed, was off to our left, beyond a forest of bridges. We stood on the grassy rubble that morning, where something once had been, beside the tree still there, and were intensely happy. Why? Only we knew.

  “ ‘No,’ Dad said to me, ‘the Christian ministry isn’t a job you choose, it’s a vocation for which you got to receive a call.’ I could tell he wanted me to ask him. We never talked much, but we understood each other, we were both scared devils, not like you and the kid. I asked him, had he ever received the call? He said no. He said no, he never had. Received the call. That was a terrible thing, for him to admit. And I was the one he told. As far as I knew he never admitted it to anybody, but he admitted it to me. He felt like hell about it, I could tell. That was all we ever said about it. That was enough.”

  He has made his younger brother cry, and justice must be done. A father enforces justice. I corner the culprit in our bedroom; he is holding a cardboard mailing tube like a sword. The challenge flares white-hot; I roll my weight toward him like a rock down a mountain, and knock the weapon from his hand. He smiles. Smiles! Because my facial expression is silly? Because he is glad that he can still be overpowered, and hence is still protected? I do not hit him. We stand a second, father and son, and then as nimbly as on the soccer field he steps around me and out the door. He slams the door. He shouts obscenities in the hall, slams all the doors he can find on the way to his room. Our moment of smilingly shared silence was the moment of compression; now the explosion. The whole house rocks with it. Downstairs, his siblings and mother come to me and offer advice and psychological analysis. I was too aggressive. He is spoiled. What they can never know, mine alone to treasure, was that lucid many-sided second of his smiling and my relenting, before the world’s inelastic balances of power resumed their rule.

  As we huddle downstairs whispering, my son takes his revenge. In his room, he plays his guitar. He has greatly improved this winter; his hands getting bigger is the least of it. He has found in the guitar an escape. He plays the anonymous Romanza wherein repeated notes, with a sliding like the heart’s valves, let themselves fall along the scale:

  The notes fall, so gently he bombs us, drops feathery notes down upon us, our visitor, our prisoner.

  Daughter, Last Glimpses of

  Just before she went away to live with the red-bearded harpsichord-maker, our daughter asked us how to jitterbug. She had found these old Glenn Miller records in the closet. Eileen and I were embarrassed to tell her we didn’t know how; though the jitterbug had been of our era, it was an era of the survival of the fittest, and for every Jack and Jill triumphantly trucking and twirling on the gymnasium floor to the local version of the Big Band sound there was a clutch of Eileens and Geoffreys slumping enviously against the padded wall, or huddling in the bleachers, wondering how it was done, wondering if anyone who knew how would ever invite them to dance. How much kinder, we urged upon our daughter, of your own generation to invent dances that require no skill, that indeed cannot be done wrong, and that therefore do not create hurtful distinctions between the ins and the outs, the adroit and the gauche, the beautiful and the un-.

  Our daughter looked at us with wide eyes. Her face is mostly frontal, like a cat’s. As she turned eighteen her eyes were exchanging that staring look of childhood for something softer and more inward, with a margin of distrust to it, to cushion amazement. But how, she seemed now to be asking, amazed, could two people unable even to jitterbug manage to get together and have me? She had been our first child. In our simplicity we had called her Joy.

  There was dancing, in those last glimpses. My daughter had been taking ballet at school and would do backbends and cartwheels on the lawn, or slow, rolling splits and stretches in the front hall. For her birthday I had bought her an exercise barre, to use in her room, but she preferred the front hall, where the mailman sometimes showered letters in upon her. Her body, in black tights and leotard, was developing muscles and length; the front hall was too small, really, for these extensive exercises, which included resting her head—golden hair, platinum nape—between her knees, and then snapping it up, so that her eyes in her sudden face looked surprised at something discovered in my face. On her body the black cloth paled wherever it stretched around a bulge.

  Though we failed to teach her to jitterbug (the motions she improvised to go with “In the Mood” and “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” owed more to the African Dance Troupe than to the crisp, tart Forties), she taught her younger brother how to hold a girl and sway to James Taylor and Carole King. They did this in the study, where years ago the record-player had been mistakenly installed. Looking up from trying to read, I would see his face on her shoulder, chin high because she was taller, the angel face of my second son half lost in his sister’s hair and engulfed by bliss, his eyelashes extensions of the sparkle of his slitted eyes as he and she swayed like seaweeds in the waves of amplified music—their feet, as far as I could see, doing no steps at all.

  “Isn’t Joy nice to Ethan?” I asked Eileen later, somewhat rhetorically.

  “She’s nice to all of us these days,” she replied.

  It was true. She set the dinner table for her mother and did the dishes. She read her little sister bedtime stories. I would see them, the two girls, framed by the doorway into Katharine’s room, sitting on the bed beneath the tacked-up pictures of horses and dogs, Joy’s face as solemn as a Sunday-school teacher’s. The two profiles bent toward each other symmetrically, for all the six years between them, but that the younger girl’s forehead had an apprehensive outward curve whereas Joy’s brow was—is—flat and determined and square. Katharine at twelve was going through a troubled time. Joy would be talking to her about grades, or diets, or their grandmot
her. My mother was dying, that same spring, of cancer. The last time she came to the house (she knew it was the last time but disdained to admit it, as she disdained to admit she was dying; she had been a lifelong understater; her last words, to the attending nurse and me, were “Well, much obliged”), Joy did an adult thing: she hugged her at parting. A shy sideways hug, for the old lady had grown frail as sticks, her walk a precarious shuffle. “Hope you soon feel better,” Joy said, hesitating and coming to a blush over the “feel better,” knowing it would take a miracle. How big my daughter looked!—freckled, with sloping dancer’s shoulders, standing at the height of health beside the shrunken stoic wraith from whom she was descended. And for me it was as if, in one of those thrilling swift crossovers the good jitterbuggers could do, they had switched positions from the distant moment when my toddling infant daughter had fallen against a hot woodstove in Vermont and her grandmother, so calm the cigarette never left her mouth, applied ice and butter and soothing words to the scorched arm that must have felt, to the astonished, shrieking child, seized by Death itself.

  At the funeral, in our ancestral Unitarian church, Joy and Katharine not only prayed, they got up on their knees on the kneeling stool in upright Episcopalian style. And, their faces covered by their hands, they looked like twins, in dresses Joy had made for the ceremony, from the same dark, small-flowered cloth.

  Her sewing worried me. “All she ever does is hang around the house and sit in her room and sew. She acts like some little spinster. Why doesn’t she ever go out with boys? It isn’t as if she’s ugly. Is she?”

  “Are you asking seriously?” my wife asked.

  “I am. I can’t tell. She’s my daughter.”

  “You’re shocking. She’s gorgeous. Boys her own age just don’t turn her on.”

  “The reason you’re so complacent about it,” I told Eileen, “is she does all your housework for you.”

  “She enjoys doing it. She’s learning something.”

  “Yeah, how to be Cinderella.”

  “If that’s your analogy, relax.”

  Left to rust in her room, the sewing machine is no trouble; but the rooster is. My daughter insisted, with all the determination in her solid brow (as a baby she used to beat it against the bars of the crib until we would lift her out), on getting chickens. Chickens? In our little yard? She said they would take up no room. They would turn our garbage into fresh eggs. They would in themselves constitute a natural cycle. Compared with an automobile, they consumed almost nothing. They would be aesthetic and amusing. Chickens.

  Our bargain went that she would build the pen and little chicken house with me; but something about the hammering and sawing and the size of the nails and the roughness of my construction pained her, for she wandered away, and I built it alone. Mark, our older son, came out I thought to help, but he only intended to complain.

  “God, Dad, it’s homely.”

  “I’m making it the best I can.”

  “It’s not you, it’s the idea. Why should she have chickens? You won’t even let me have a .22. Think of the noise pollution. Think of the feathers, Dad.”

  “I agree, I agree. Could you hold this two-by-four steady while I nail it down?”

  “And another thing, I hate the way she drives the car. She’s going to kill somebody, Dad, and you’re going to have to pay for it.”

  Joy had consented to apply for her driver’s license just that winter, after holding out, for ecology’s sake, since the age of sixteen. It was true, when she drove the Ford the machine became loose-jointed and precarious in flight, like a flamingo. Beside her in the passenger’s seat, I felt she was brushing things—mailboxes, hydrants—from the side of the road. Whereas, when Mark, freshly sixteen and instantly equipped with a learner’s permit, drives, the automobile crouches low to the ground and noses rapidly along the highway like a tracking beagle, with nervous, sniffing jerks. “Not to mention the fact,” he continued, “she’s gotten Ethan all stirred up about sex.”

  “We learn by living,” I told him, and drove a nail to end the conversation. When the chicken house was done, Joy came out of hiding and admired it—the little sliding door, the roost hinged to swing upward so that the poultrykeeper (ahem) could sweep and change the straw. In fact she did, at first, do a conscientious job, sweeping, scattering grain, gathering eggs in the morning dew like some thick-waisted lass out of Hardy. I remember how, as I sat down to breakfast, she would push open the back door with her shoulder, her eyes starry above the wonder of the eggs still warm in her hands. It was my paternal duty to eat one. The yolks were unpleasantly orange, thanks to the richness of our garbage. And my daughter danced around my eating, celebrating this miraculous completion, this cycle, this food for the breadwinner, this chicken and egg. She doted on those dowdy birds. She painted ivy on their house, watched them like a scientist, discovered that “pecking order” wasn’t merely a phrase, papered the walls of her room with scratchy drawings of chickens, and even did poems; one line went, as I remember, peck scrawk scrabble peck. For all her mothering, the chickens gradually ceased to lay.

  The idea of a rooster was hatched without consultation with me.

  One Thursday after work I got out of the car and there he was, a little red-brown bird with absurdly long tail feathers and a dictatorial way of cocking his head. He was smaller than the hens, but already they followed him liquidly, bubbling in their throats and jostling for precedence, as he surveyed the pen and coop I had built, all unbeknownst for him. He had been brought in a psychedelic Volkswagen bus by a small bearded man with pink eyes and a mussed, unhappy air. Joy, Eileen, and Katharine were sitting with him at the kitchen table in the evening light. Strange thing, both Joy and Eileen had cigarettes in their hands. Eileen had quit when my mother’s cancer was diagnosed, and as far as I knew Joy had never started. The rooster-bringer had heard of our need from a boyfriend of Joy’s ecology instructor at school. Before I arrived, and though he mumbled, they had drawn a surprising mass of information from him: he was nearly thirty, his wife had left him a while ago, the “bunch of people” he was living with on this farm was breaking up, they were giving everything away—roosters, sheep, the Rototiller. Also, he had a cold, and couldn’t find a satisfactory kind of industrial glue for his harpsichords. Soon after I arrived, he left.

  “God, Dad, he was bogus,” Mark said.

  “I agree.”

  “I thought he was cute,” Joy called from the other room. This was new; she never eavesdropped. What other people said or did, her stance had been these past years, did not touch her. She had lived in a world of her own making, with a serenity that floated dishes onto the table without a click.

  Now, with a crash, her dependence on others, and ours on her, was declared. She begged or stole the Ford so often we have had to buy a second car, just as the gas shortage overtakes the world. Eileen is back to doing the dishes and smoking a pack a day. Katharine says that if Joy could have chickens she doesn’t see why she can’t have some sheep in the back yard. They would keep the grass short for me. Their wool would be worth money. They would look pretty. Mark has offered to shoot the chickens with his new .22. Ethan, his first partner fled, now goes to dances at the junior high, one of my neckties knotted loose, his hair combed without our nagging; he is so dolled up and beautiful we all have to laugh at him before he goes. As to Joy’s departure, it was hurried and at the time not very real to the rest of us. I retain no glimpses. What coat was she wearing? What suitcase did she take? Did she slam the door? She may have said “Much obliged,” but I didn’t hear it.

  The house seems bigger. The record-player, after its spell of Ralph Kirkpatrick, is back to Carole King, or silent. The front hall is clear to traffic. We come and go. Sometimes days pass before one of us remembers to bring in the eggs. Irregularly fed, the flock has pecked a gap beneath the chicken wire, and gets into the neighbor’s lettuce. During one such outing, another neighbor’s Labrador carried off the white hen with a toe missing—the lowest in the pe
cking order, uncannily. How did the dog know? He carried her in his mouth, white as fresh laundry in the dusk, up into the pines; the children heard her squawk and throbble until night fell.

  If all is not well with his world, the rooster never admits it. Every morning, he gets up on those Ruberoid self-sealing Slate Green asphalt shingles I hammered down to make him a roof, a midair hop and skip from my bedroom window, and he crows. Lying awake, I can hear him practicing his crow in the small hours, inside his house: a rather gentle, even wheezy, half-unfurling of the magic scroll inside his chest. Maybe he is dreaming of the dawn, maybe the streetlight fools him. But there is no mistaking the real thing: as the windowpanes brighten from purple to mauve to white, he flaps up on his roof with a slap like a newspaper hitting the porch and gives a crow as if to hoist with his own pure lungs that sleepy fat sun to the zenith of the sky. He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn as remarkable as all the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.

  THE TWO ISEULTS

  Solitaire

  The children were asleep, and his wife had gone out to a meeting; she was like his father in caring about the community. He found the deck of cards in the back of a desk drawer and sat down at the low round table. He had reached a juncture in his life where there was nothing to do but play solitaire. It was the perfect, final retreat—beyond solitaire, he imagined, there was madness. Only solitaire utterly eased the mind; only solitaire created that blankness into which a saving decision might flow. Conviviality demanded other people, with their fretful emanations of desire; reading imposed the author’s company; and one emerged from the anesthetic of drunkenness to find that the operation had not been performed. But in the rise and collapse of the alternately colored ranks of cards, in the grateful transpositions and orderly revelations and unexpected redemptions, the circuits of the mind found an occupation exactly congruent with their own secret structure. The mind was filled without being strained. The week after he graduated from college—already married, his brain worn to the point where a page of newspaper seemed a cruelly ramifying puzzle—he played solitaire night after night by the glow of a kerosene lamp on an old kitchen table in Vermont; and at the end of the week he had seen the way that his life must go in the appallingly wide world that had opened before him. He had drawn a straight line from that night to the night of his death, and began walking on it.