by John Updike
Our city, it should be explained, is two cities, or more—an urban mass or congeries divided by the river whose dirty waters disembogue into the harbor that gave the colonial settlement its raison d’être. From the time when villages clustered here and there in the land, which the Indians had already partially cleared, there grew up municipalities each with its own city hall and power-jealous boards of administrators; but automobiles and their highways in this century have welded the whole area into one. We skim past boundary signs too quickly to read them. Bridges, some of painted steel, some of arched stone, connect the river’s two sides. Lifted up suddenly out of a subway tunnel on one of the bridges—an old bridge, say, of sandstone hacked into big rough blocks and set there as if by a race of Titans, with buttresses and quaint conical towers and floriate lamp standards—the metropolitan transit passengers wince at the splendor of the sudden view, of the hotels and emporia of glass and anodized metal which glitter at the city’s commercial center, of the roseate and powder-blue skyscrapers of the financial district that hover above the brick silhouette of the old residential neighborhoods built on rubble-filled marsh a century ago, of the recently condominiumized warehouses and deserted churches, of the ribbon of Olmstead park along the riverbank and the bandshell and planetarium and the rented sailboats tilting on the river’s sparkling plane, all these man-created wonders thrown into brilliant visibility by the impassive slant of our local star, the sun.
The university is situated on the duller, shabbier side of the river. Having walked a few blocks from the Divinity School, through the shady enclave of tall turn-of-the-century houses each of which, including mine, has doubled in value several times in the last decade, I came to the avenue called Sumner Boulevard in honor of that fanatic Yankee abolitionist now best remembered for having been beaten on his bald head by an equally self-righteous, if oppositely persuaded, Congressman; this unlovely broad way marks the end of university precincts. A big young man in a dirty loden coat, with a wide head of uncut curly sawdust-colored hair and a Mormon-style beard that left the area around his mouth clean of whiskers, stood stock still, as if signalling a boundary; he could have been an aging divinity student, or a TV repairman waiting for his partner to park the van or a madman about to strangle me in order to silence the voices in his head. Just the way this ambiguous stout fellow stood, unbudging in the center of the sidewalk, introduced a touch of menace to the neighborhood.
Sumner Boulevard stretched straight a mile, heading diagonally toward the river. A supermarket had boarded up the lower portions of its plate-glass windows, making it harder to break them. A drugstore advertised itself with a dead neon sign. Vinyl siding replaced honest clapboard; the houses took on that teetering three-decker look. Malvin Lane’s lush back-yard beeches and oaks gave way to tougher city trees, scabby-barked sycamores and primeval ginkgos spaced as evenly along the sidewalk as telephone poles; instead of plump plastic pillows of raked leaves nicely set out by the picket fences for the trash collector, here dog-torn bags of garbage and stacks of flattened cartons were heaped up along the curb. There were no more Volvos and Hondas, just Chevies and Plymouths and Mercurys, rusted and nicked, Detroit’s old big boats being kept afloat by the poor. Trans Am. Gran Torino. Sunoco. Amoco. Colonial Cleansers. Boulevard Bottle. Professional Podiatry. A triangular intersection was marked with the Italian name of a soldier killed in Vietnam. Imitation stone, oddly painterly in its mixture of artificial tints, wrapped around the little windows of a corner grocery store. On the asphalt of a gasoline station a puddle of an astonishingly pure green color meant that here a car had been bled of antifreeze; but I sensed that to Dale such utter viridity would have been a marvel, a signifier of another sort, a sign from above. To a believer of his elemental sort glory would have been in the air: the very width of this crass commercial avenue, and some lots where buildings had been torn down, flooded the eyes with light. Above the many intervening flat roofs and weathered chimney pots, against the backdrop of tormented clouds, the silver and emerald hems stitched at the tops of skyscrapers gleamed, marking the city’s steely heart across the river.
A plumbing-supply store, advertising not Kohler but Crane fixtures, held in its dusty window a tree of toilet seats, padded or plain, white or pastel, and the lowest of them showing a pattern of nude Japanese women, drawn, disappointingly, without pubic hair or nipples. As the avenue gradually slanted downward toward the river, its tone worsened, its liveliness increased. Kung-Fu. Locks: Master Protection. Santo Cristo Center. Todo Para Casa. The Irish and Italians in this section had been supplanted by Portuguese and Hispanics, who now were yielding to Vietnamese, who were taking over the little food marts and had opened up several restaurants offering their spicy, insinuating cuisine. The Vietnamese women were no bigger than children, and the men had unlikable squarish heads on slender necks, and snaky wisps of mustache growing out above the corners of their mouths, and black hair of a dullness not quite Chinese or Japanese or Indian. We had dabbled overseas and in extracting ourselves had pulled up these immigrants like paint on a stirring stick. There was something about them distasteful and erotic, these remnants of an old adventure, yet something grand also in the global mixingness, the living anthropology of so many tints of skin jostling here, on this tough thoroughfare, the world’s people partaking of and amplifying the energy of our American shopfronts and tenements, our cinder yards and body shops. Here came a couple, unmarried no doubt but indubitably matched: a tall pale black man and a Latino girl friend almost his coffee color, exactly his height, both of them in tight long-legged jeans and short black leather jackets, both with hair teased into tall oiled crests and wearing tiny earrings, kicking along in stride, one, two, arms locked, a stirring sight. Election Day was at hand and red-white-and-blue stickers were everywhere, on mailboxes and car bumpers and the plywood sheets closing off abandoned doorways and shattered windows. An old lady was trundling along a supermarket cart loaded with what seemed to be her possessions, including an ivory plastic radio; with her pink face and blue crocheted cap and raw white sneakers, she seemed a huge baby, toddling along. I was taking this walk in the steps of another and I felt his spirit invading mine, that greedy blind bliss of youth, when the world appears to be arranged by our impulses and full of convenient omens, of encouraging signs. A gaunt drunk in a Russian-style cap with fur earflaps muttered resentfully as I went by, at the alien innocence in my face and the blunt joy younger than my years.
The blocks here were broken into narrow old-fashioned shops. A flower shop, a beauty parlor, a laundromat, and a store proclaiming BAIT & TACKLE, the window full of lures and hooks that could not be cast into water for many miles around. In wobbly red letters a haberdasher was GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. A small dress shop on the corner advertised Halloween Costumes for Playful Adults: the faces of animals—pigs, a tusked boar, a snarling wolf—lay amid lingerie and lace underwear like slabs of meat on chips of shining ice. LARGE EGGS—49¢ a Dozen! With Any, $10 Purchase 1 Doz Per Customer. The poverty all about me was being appealed to with the warning that dozens and dozens of eggs could not be appropriated by this come-on scheme. M E G A B U C K S You Could Be Our Next Millionaire! And yet those that did win, I had noticed, in their newspaper interviews seemed bewildered by the sudden burden of money, and some hesitated for days before claiming the loot, which would dwarf and mock the lives they had led hitherto.
The shops ceased and there was a blank in the boulevard while railroad tracks crossed it, the disused speckled tracks of some spur line that vanished into a region of large blank-sided buildings, a gypsum-colored pocket of hard industry not yet transformed into artists’ lofts or high-tech labs. The newer university science buildings lay beyond this industrial tract. The university and its money permeate the city; the city’s buildings and quadrangles are embedded in tracts of university-owned tenements, and there is even, many miles away, a hilltop preserve, bequeathed in the previous century, where forestry students in hard hats and leather leggings study and chop and
thoughtfully chew twigs to earn their degrees.
I was seeing with Dale’s still-religious eyes. Across the tracks, I saw on the renewed sidewalk a dog turd of extraordinary blackness, a coiled turd black as tar. A certain breed, or an unusual meal? Or an unvarnished wonder, an auspice, like the intensely green puddle? And then I passed a tombstone store, a glass-fronted office beside a gravel lot crowded with carved and polished marble. A rose-colored headstone held, in a niche between bas-relief pillars, an open book of just six words chiselled into its two pages.
ONE
MY PRAY
JESUS FOR
MERCY US
There was a typographic elegance to it, for the lefthand words got longer and the ones on the right dwindled. Dale Kohler, having left my office, would certainly have paused and mused here, grappling in his mind to make the connection between the frozen plea cut mechanically into this metamorphic stone and the cosmic furnace of the Big Bang amid whose grotesque and towering statistics irrefutable proof of divine supervision was locked. The spontaneous irregularities of the mottled texture of the marble were not unlike those minute but indispensable departures from homogeneity within the primeval cosmos, when all matter now installed between here and the farthermost quasars was squeezed smaller than a basketball and so hot the quarks themselves were still unglued, and monopoles were more than hypothetical and matter and antimatter engaged from nanosecond to nanosecond in a fury of mutual annihilation that by some mysterious slim margin of preponderance left matter enough to form our attenuated old universe.
The irrepressible combinations of the real! A very tall, willowy young black, with a shaved head and upon its baldness a many-colored skullcap, was carrying balanced across this spectacular head like a fantastic turban one of those padded semi-chairs, having a back and arms but no legs, with which people prop themselves up in bed; the thing was bright peach in color and wrapped in a transparent plastic that crackled as we passed, while crossing in opposite directions the sunken, tarred-over railroad tracks. Was this exotic black man, demographic studies to the contrary, a compulsive nighttime reader? Or was he dutifully taking this prop to an aged grandmother or great-uncle? The black family, though statistically in shambles, still has its sinews of connection; facts in summary never quite match facts in the concrete; every new generation gives America a chance to renew its promises. These hopeful, patriotic thoughts entered my mind straight from Dale’s naïve soul.
A brick fire station, built at an angle to the street, bore high on its side a painted mural of George Washington receiving, without visible pleasure, what seemed to be an extension of credit from a delegation of similarly knickered and deadpan establishment men. Next to the station stood a huge old civic building, built in two-tone brownstone on the model of a Venetian palazzo; its deep Byzantine entrances were plastered with election posters, its soft steps had been worn into troughs by the feet of a century of petitioners. In the vicinity of these public buildings the street underwent a tiny surge of gentrification: a row of three-deckers painted in bohemian colors such as lavender and lemon housed a boutique, a health-food store, and, most venturesomely, a shop called ADULT PASTRIES, which advertised in the window Erotic Cakes and Droll Candies. What shapes this drollery might take I felt Dale’s mind but lightly play with. The shape and mucilaginous infolded structure of our wrinkly human genitals did not, evidently, amid many phenomena that did, strike him as an argument for God’s existence. I pictured his waxy face, breaking out in a masturbator’s pimples. I felt superior to him, being sexually healthy ever since Esther took over from ungainly, barren Lillian. My second wife when unmarried had been a flexible marvel in bed, her underparts in the sunlight of our illicit afternoons fed to my eyes like tidbits of rosy marzipan.
After its jocular grab at prosperity, Sumner Boulevard slumped downhill and its pedestrians took on a refugee desperation of appearance. On one curb paused an addled man so fat he looked like clothes hung out to air, swollen on the line by wind. In passing close to him I saw the skin of his enormous and preoccupied face to be afflicted with some foul eczema, layered like peeling wallpaper. On this same corner a building, its lower floor reshingled in stylishly irregular shades, had survived a fire in its top floors, which had left charred window frames empty of sashes; but the bar downstairs continued open, and sounds from within—the synthetic concussions of a video game, a muted, mixed-sex laughter—indicated a thriving business, well before the Happy Hour though it was. The view down the thoroughfare now included steel girders blotchily painted in anti-rust orange: a lead-in ramp to one of the bridges that cross the river, in whose polluted eddies, I now had reason to suspect, fish awaited local fishermen.
Prospect Street. Named for a view long since eclipsed. Here I turned, for Verna’s telephone-book address was on this prospectless street, a few blocks farther along. Some of the houses still had pretensions to being homes, with mowed little front lawns and painted religious statuary (the Virgin’s robe skyey blue, the Baby’s face clayey beige) and flower beds still bright with the round hot button-heads of red and yellow mums. Most of the houses had given up pretensions: the yards were weedy to the height of a man’s knees, and bottles and cans had been tossed into them as if into a repository. The façades were unpainted even where curtains or a tended flower box at an upstairs window indicated habitation. The owners had slipped away, whether through misfortune or an accountant’s unscrupulous calculations, leaving the buildings on their own, like mumbling mental patients turned out on the street. Some had progressed deeper into dilapidation, and were plainly abandoned and no doubt trashed within, their doors and windows plywooded over though there must be back doors and basement windows whereby drug addicts and the homeless could force access. Even the trees here, weed ailanthus between the houses and a few spindly locusts staked along the curb, looked frightened, their lower branches broken and their bark aimlessly slashed.
I walked along, and in five minutes came to the project where Verna lived. I had driven past here perhaps a dozen times in the ten years we have lived in this city. Four blocks of run-down working-class neighborhood had been demolished in the JFK era to make a yellow-brick Camelot of low-cost housing. The architectural rigor of the interlocked complexes—U-shapes set back to back, each U enclosing a parking lot or a playground for the young or a small green space with benches for the elderly—had remained, but the sanitary vision of the planners had in many details surrendered to human erosion. Rude paths had been worn in shortcuts across sweeps of grass; hedges had been battered and benches hacked; some basketball stanchions had been bent to the ground as if by malicious giants. One received an impression of overpopulation, of random human energy too fierce to contain in any structure. Slowly the playgrounds, originally equipped with relatively fragile seesaws and roundabouts, had evolved into wastelands of the indestructible, their chief features now old rubber truck tires and concrete drain pipes assembled into a semblance of jungle gyms. A glittering sleet of broken glass fringed the asphalt curbs, the cement foundations. SE PROHIBE ESTACIONAR. Another sign warned that Owners of ABANDONED OR UNREGISTERED AUTOMOBILES Will Be Prosecuted. No one seemed to be about, at this hour of mid-afternoon. As if under an enchantment I passed unobserved into the entryway whose number, 606, corresponded to Verna’s address in the telephone book. Inside the building, locks had been smashed or disassembled and replaced by padlocked chains threaded through the holes. The stairwells ascended through a complex cave odor of urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint, paint repeatedly applied and repeatedly defaced. TEX GIVES BEST HEAD, one fresh spray-can motto ran, signed with flourishes, MARJORIE. On the next landing, the same spray can, in an identical style of script, boasted MARJORIE SUCKS, signed TEX, with an elaborate X that somehow bespoke the signer’s brave hopes for his future.
I had seen the name Ekelof pencilled on slot 311 inside the door down below, beside the tarnished mailboxes. On the third floor I walked down a long corridor. It was bare, though holes and irregularities i
n the walls remembered where things—decorations, amenities—had once been fastened to it. First I went the wrong way; the numbers mounted in even increments. I reversed myself and came to a door where the numbers 311 existed as faint ghosts, pierced by old nail-holes, in the celery-green paint. My hand was lifted to knock when on the other side of the door a small child babbled, babbled on the gleeful moist verge of language. My hand froze, then descended, not too solidly. Also from within I could hear music, a piping, brassy female singer. She sang rapidly, indignantly. I knocked again.
Something scraped, there was a slap, the babbling stopped, and I could feel eyes looking at me through the tiny peephole. It had been a number of years since I had seen little Verna. “Who is it?” Her voice was croaky and tense and faintly honking, as if a metal tube were involved in its production.
I cleared my own throat and announced, “Roger Lambert. Your uncle.”
The door’s smooth painted surface had a look of holding much evidence, were homicide detectives to come and dust it for fingerprints. Verna opened the door, and the draft of warm air this released carried a scent with it, a musty odor as of peanuts or stale spice, a sullen, familiar, Midwestern smell. I was stunned. This was my sister, Edna, when we were both young.
But no, Verna was an inch or so shorter than Edna, and had a coarse shapeless nose inherited from her blond fool of a father. Edna’s had been rather fine, with sculpted nostril-wings that flared when she was being provocative and that sunburned all summer long. I sensed in Verna a dangerous edge that in my half-sister had been sheathed by middle-class caution. Edna had talked a tough and naughty game but ended by obeying the rules. This girl had been pushed beyond the rules. Her eyes looked lashless and had a curious slant. She stared at me for a long glazed second, and then quite disarmingly smiled. Her smile was childish, showing many small round teeth and bringing up a dimple in one pale cheek. “Hi, Nunc,” she said, very slowly, as if my long-awaited arrival were obscurely delicious.
