The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  Judith sat on the porch, a princess returned from exile. She regaled them with stories of fuel shortages, of bomb scares in the Underground, of Pakistani workmen loudly lusting after her as she walked past on her way to dance school. Joan came and went, in and out of the house, calmer than she should have been, praising his struggles with the lock as if this were one more and not the last of their long succession of shared chores. The younger of his sons, John, now at fifteen suddenly, unwittingly handsome, for a few minutes held the rickety screen door while his father clumsily hammered and chiselled, each blow a kind of sob in Richard’s ears. His younger daughter, having been at a slumber party the night before, slept on the porch hammock through all the noise—heavy and pink, trusting and forsaken. Time, like the sunlight, continued relentlessly; the sunlight slowly slanted. Today was one of the longest days, but not long enough. The lock clicked, worked. He was through. He had a drink; he drank it on the porch, listening to his daughter. “It was so sweet,” she was saying, “during the worst of it, how all the butchers and bakery shops kept open by candlelight. They’re all so plucky and cute. From the papers, things sounded so much worse here—people shooting people in gas lines, and everybody freezing.”

  Richard asked her, “Do you still want to live in England forever?” Forever: the concept, now a reality upon him, pressed and scratched at the back of his throat.

  “No,” Judith confessed, turning her oval face to him, its eyes still childishly far apart, but the lips set as over something succulent and satisfactory. “I was anxious to come home. I’m an American.” She was a woman. They had raised her; he and Joan had endured together to raise her, alone of the four. The others had still some raising left in them. Yet it was the thought of telling Judith—the image of her, their first baby, walking between them arm in arm to the bridge—that broke him.

  The partition between his face and tears broke. Richard sat down to the celebratory meal with the back of his throat aching; the champagne, the lobster seemed phases of sunshine; he saw them and tasted them through tears. He blinked, swallowed, croakily joked about hay fever. The tears would not stop leaking through; they came not through a hole that could be plugged but through a permeable spot in a membrane, steadily, purely, endlessly, fruitfully. They became, his tears, a shield for himself against these others—their faces, the fact of their assembly, a last time as innocents, at a table where he sat the last time as head. Tears dropped from his nose as he broke his lobster’s back; salt flavored his champagne as he sipped it; the raw clench at the back of his throat was delicious. He could not help himself.

  His children tried to ignore his tears. Judith, on his right, lit a cigarette, gazed upward in the direction of her too-energetic, too-sophisticated exhalation; on her other side, John earnestly bent his face to the extraction of the last morsels—legs, tail segments—from the scarlet corpse. Joan, at the opposite end of the table, glanced at him surprised, her reproach displaced by a quick grimace, of forgiveness, or of salute to his superior gift of strategy. Between them, Margaret, no longer called Bean, thirteen and large for her age, gazed from the other side of his pane of tears as if into a shopwindow at something she coveted—at her father, a crystalline heap of splinters and memories. It was not she, however, but John who, in the kitchen, as they cleared the plates and carapaces away, asked Joan the question: “Why is Daddy crying?”

  Richard heard the question but not the murmured answer. Then he heard Bean cry, “Oh, no-oh!”—the faintly dramatized exclamation of one who had long expected it.

  John returned to the table carrying a bowl of salad. He nodded tersely at his father and his lips shaped the conspiratorial words “She told.”

  “Told what?” Richard asked aloud, insanely.

  The boy sat down as if to rebuke his father’s distraction with the example of his own good manners. He said quietly, “The separation.”

  Joan and Margaret returned; the child, in Richard’s twisted vision, seemed diminished in size, and relieved, relieved to have had the bogeyman at last proved real. He called out to her—the distances at the table had grown immense—“You knew, you always knew,” but the clenching at the back of his throat prevented him from making sense of it. From afar he heard Joan talking, levelly, sensibly, reciting what they had prepared: it was a separation for the summer, an experiment. She and Daddy both agreed it would be good for them; they needed space and time to think; they liked each other but did not make each other happy enough, somehow.

  Judith, imitating her mother’s factual tone, but in her youth off-key, too cool, said, “I think it’s silly. You should either live together or get divorced.”

  Richard’s crying, like a wave that has crested and crashed, had become tumultuous; but it was overtopped by another tumult, for John, who had been so reserved, now grew larger and larger at the table. Perhaps his younger sister’s being credited with knowing set him off. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked, in a large round voice quite unlike his own. “You should have told us you weren’t getting along.”

  Richard was startled into attempting to force words through his tears. “We do get along, that’s the trouble, so it doesn’t show even to us—” That we do not love each other was the rest of the sentence; he couldn’t finish it.

  Joan finished for him, in her style. “And we’ve always, especially, loved our children.”

  John was not mollified. “What do you care about us?” he boomed. “We’re just little things you had.” His sisters’ laughing forced a laugh from him, which he turned hard and parodistic: “Ha ha ha.” Richard and Joan realized simultaneously that the child was drunk, on Judith’s homecoming champagne. Feeling bound to keep the center of the stage, John took a cigarette from Judith’s pack, poked it into his mouth, let it hang from his lower lip, and squinted like a gangster.

  “You’re not little things we had,” Richard called to him. “You’re the whole point. But you’re grown. Or almost.”

  The boy was lighting matches. Instead of holding them to his cigarette (for they had never seen him smoke; being “good” had been his way of setting himself apart), he held them to his mother’s face, closer and closer, for her to blow out. He lit the whole folder—a hiss and then a torch, held against his mother’s face. The flame, prismed by tears, filled Richard’s vision; he didn’t know how it was extinguished. He heard Margaret say, “Oh, stop showing off,” and saw John, in response, break the cigarette in two and put the halves entirely into his mouth and chew, sticking out his tongue to display the shreds to his sister.

  Joan talked to him, reasoning—a fountain of reason, unintelligible. “Talked about it for years … our children must help us … Daddy and I both want …” As the boy listened, he wadded a paper napkin into the leaves of his salad, fashioned a ball of paper and lettuce, and popped it into his mouth, looking around the table for the expected laughter. None came. Judith said, “Be mature,” and dismissed a plume of smoke.

  Richard got up from this stifling table and led the boy outside. Though the house was in twilight, the outdoors still brimmed with light, the lovely waste light of high summer. Both laughing, he supervised John’s spitting out the lettuce and paper and tobacco into the pachysandra. He took him by the hand—a square gritty hand, despite its softness a man’s. Yet it held on. They ran together up into the field, past the tennis court. The raw banking left by the bulldozers was dotted with daisies. Past the court and a flat stretch where they used to play family baseball stood a soft green rise glorious in the sun, each weed and species of grass as distinct as illumination on parchment. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Richard cried. “You were the only one who ever tried to help me with all the goddamn jobs around this place.”

  Sobbing, safe within his tears and the champagne, John explained, “It’s not just the separation, it’s the whole crummy year, I hate that school, you can’t make any friends, the history teacher’s a scud.”

  They sat on the crest of the rise, shaking and warm from their tears but
easier in their voices, and Richard tried to focus on the child’s sad year—the weekdays long with homework, the weekends spent in his room with model airplanes, while his parents murmured down below, nursing their separation. How selfish, how blind, Richard thought; his eyes felt scoured. He told his son, “We’ll think about getting you transferred. Life’s too short to be miserable.”

  They had said what they could, but did not want the moment to heal shut, and talked on, about the school, about the tennis court, whether it would ever again be as good as it had been that first summer. They walked to inspect it and pressed a few more tapes more firmly down. A little stiltedly, perhaps trying now to make too much of the moment, Richard led the boy to the spot in the field where the view was best, of the metallic blue river, the emerald marsh, the scattered islands velvety with shadow in the low light, the white bits of beach far away. “See,” he said. “It goes on being beautiful. It’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “I know,” John answered, impatiently. The moment had closed.

  Back in the house, the others had opened some white wine, the champagne being drunk, and still sat at the table, the three females, gossiping. Where Joan sat had become the head. She turned, showing him a tearless face, and asked, “All right?”

  “We’re fine,” he said, resenting it, though relieved, that the party went on without him.

  In bed she explained, “I couldn’t cry I guess because I cried so much all spring. It really wasn’t fair. It’s your idea, and you made it look as though I was kicking you out.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop. I wanted to but couldn’t.”

  “You didn’t want to. You loved it. You were having your way, making a general announcement.”

  “I love having it over,” he admitted. “God, those kids were great. So brave and funny.” John, returned to the house, had settled to a model airplane in his room, and kept shouting down to them, “I’m O.K. No sweat.”

  “And the way,” Richard went on, cozy in his relief, “they never questioned the reasons we gave. No thought of a third person. Not even Judith.”

  “That was touching,” Joan said.

  He gave her a hug. “You were great too. Very reassuring to everybody. Thank you.” Guiltily, he realized he did not feel separated.

  “You still have Dickie to do,” she told him. These words set before him a black mountain in the darkness; its cold breath, its near weight affected his chest. Of the four children, his elder son was closest to his conscience. Joan did not need to add, “That’s one piece of your dirty work I won’t do for you.”

  “I know. I’ll do it. You go to sleep.”

  Within minutes, her breathing slowed, became oblivious and deep. It was quarter to midnight. Dickie’s train from the concert would come in at one-fourteen. Richard set the alarm for one. He had slept atrociously for weeks. But whenever he closed his lids some glimpse of the last hours scorched them—Judith exhaling toward the ceiling in a kind of aversion, Bean’s mute staring, the sunstruck growth in the field where he and John had rested. The mountain before him moved closer, moved within him; he was huge, momentous. The ache at the back of his throat felt stale. His wife slept as if slain beside him. When, exasperated by his hot lids, his crowded heart, he rose from bed and dressed, she awoke enough to turn over. He told her then, “Joan, if I could undo it all, I would.”

  “Where would you begin?” she asked. There was no place. Giving him courage, she was always giving him courage. He put on shoes without socks in the dark. The children were breathing in their rooms, the downstairs was hollow. In their confusion they had left lights burning. He turned off all but one, the kitchen overhead. The car started. He had hoped it wouldn’t. He met only moonlight on the road; it seemed a diaphanous companion, flickering in the leaves along the roadside, haunting his rearview mirror like a pursuer, melting under his headlights. The center of town, not quite deserted, was eerie at this hour. A young cop in uniform kept company with a gang of T-shirted kids on the steps of the bank. Across from the railroad station, several bars kept open. Customers, mostly young, passed in and out of the warm night, savoring summer’s novelty. Voices shouted from cars as they passed; an immense conversation seemed in progress. Richard parked and in his weariness put his head on the passenger seat, out of the commotion and wheeling lights. It was as when, in the movies, an assassin grimly carries his mission through the jostle of a carnival—except the movies cannot show the precipitous, palpable slope you cling to within. You cannot climb back down; you can only fall. The synthetic fabric of the car seat, warmed by his cheek, confided to him an ancient, distant scent of vanilla.

  A train whistle caused him to lift his head. It was on time; he had hoped it would be late. The slender drawgates descended. The bell of approach tingled happily. The great metal body, horizontally fluted, rocked to a stop, and sleepy teen-agers disembarked, his son among them. Dickie did not show surprise that his father was meeting him at this terrible hour. He sauntered to the car with two friends, both taller than he. He said “Hi” to his father and took the passenger’s seat with an exhausted promptness that expressed gratitude. The friends got in the back, and Richard was grateful; a few more minutes’ postponement would be won by driving them home.

  He asked, “How was the concert?”

  “Groovy,” one boy said from the back seat.

  “It bit,” the other said.

  “It was O.K.,” Dickie said, moderate by nature, so reasonable that in his childhood the unreason of the world had given him headaches, stomach aches, nausea. When the second friend had been dropped off at his dark house, the boy blurted, “Dad, my eyes are killing me with hay fever! I’m out there cutting that mothering grass all day!”

  “Do we still have those drops?”

  “They didn’t do any good last summer.”

  “They might this.” Richard swung a U-turn on the empty street. The drive home took a few minutes. The mountain was here, in his throat. “Richard,” he said, and felt the boy, slumped and rubbing his eyes, go tense at his tone, “I didn’t come to meet you just to make your life easier. I came because your mother and I have some news for you, and you’re a hard man to get a hold of these days. It’s sad news.”

  “That’s O.K.” The reassurance came out soft, but quick, as if released from the tip of a spring.

  Richard had feared that his tears would return and choke him, but the boy’s manliness set an example, and his voice issued forth steady and dry. “It’s sad news, but it needn’t be tragic news, at least for you. It should have no practical effect on your life, though it’s bound to have an emotional effect. You’ll work at your job, and go back to school in September. Your mother and I are really proud of what you’re making of your life; we don’t want that to change at all.”

  “Yeah,” the boy said lightly, on the intake of his breath, holding himself up. They turned the corner; the church they erratically attended loomed like a gutted fort. The home of the woman Richard hoped to marry stood across the green. Her bedroom light burned.

  “Your mother and I,” he said, “have decided to separate. For the summer. Nothing legal, no divorce yet. We want to see how it feels. For some years now, we haven’t been doing enough for each other, making each other as happy as we should be. Have you sensed that?”

  “No,” the boy said. It was an honest, unemotional answer: true or false in a quiz.

  Glad for the factual basis, Richard pursued, even garrulously, the details. His apartment across town, his utter accessibility, the split vacation arrangements, the advantages to the children, the added mobility and variety of the summer. Dickie listened, absorbing. “Do the others know?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did they take it?”

  “The girls pretty calmly. John flipped out; he shouted and ate a cigarette and made a salad out of his napkin and told us how much he hated school.”

  His brother chuckled. “He did?”

  “Yeah. The school issue was more u
psetting for him than Mom and me. He seemed to feel better for having exploded.”

  “He did?” The repetition was the first sign that he was stunned.

  “Yes. Dickie, I want to tell you something. This last hour, waiting for your train to get in, has been about the worst of my life. I hate this. Hate it. My father would have died before doing it to me.” He felt immensely lighter, saying this. He had dumped the mountain on the boy. They were home. Moving swiftly as a shadow, Dickie was out of the car, through the bright kitchen. Richard called after him, “Want a glass of milk or anything?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Want us to call the course tomorrow and say you’re too sick to work?”

  “No, that’s all right.” The answer was faint, delivered at the door to his room; Richard listened for the slam that went with a tantrum. The door closed normally, gently. The sound was sickening.

  Joan had sunk into that first deep trough of sleep and was slow to awake. Richard had to repeat, “I told him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing much. Could you go say good night to him? Please.”

  She left their room, without putting on a bathrobe. He sluggishly changed back into his pajamas and walked down the hall. Dickie was already in bed, Joan was sitting beside him, and the boy’s bedside clock radio was murmuring music. When she stood to go, an inexplicable light—the moon?—outlined her body through the nightie. Richard sat on the warm place she had indented on the boy’s narrow mattress. He asked him, “Do you want the radio on like that?”

  “It always is.”

  “Doesn’t it keep you awake? It would me.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sleepy?”