by John Updike
“What am I getting out of it, Nelson?” Melanie asks with that maddening insistent singingness.
“Kicks,” he tells her. “Safe kicks, too, the kind you like. Controlling me, more or less. Charming the old folks.”
Her voice relaxes and she sounds sad. “I think that’s wearing thin. Maybe I’ve talked too much to your grandmother.”
“Could be.” As he stands there he feels some advantage return to him. This is his house, his town, his inheritance. Melanie is an outsider here.
“Well, I liked her,” she says, strangely using the past tense. “I’m always drawn to older people.”
“She makes more sense at least than Mom and Dad.”
“What do you want me to tell Pru if I write?”
“I don’t know.” His shoulders shiver in his jacket as if the taut little coat is an electric contact; he feels his face cloud, even his breath grow hot. Those white envelopes, the white of the crash helmet she put on, the white of her belly. Space would open up immensely under you after you launched but was not menacing somehow, the harness holding you tight and the trees falling away smaller along the grassy ski trails and tilted meadows below and the great nylon wing responsive to every tug on the control bar. “Tell her to hold on.”
Melanie says, “She’s been holding on, Nelson, she can’t keep holding on forever. I mean, it shows. And I can’t stay on here much longer either. I have to visit my mother before I go back to Kent.”
Everything seems to complicate, physically, in front of his mouth, so he is conscious of the effort of breathing. “And I gotta get to the Laid-Back before everybody leaves.”
“Oh, go. Just go. But tomorrow I want you to help me start tidying up. They’ll be back Sunday and you haven’t once weeded the garden or mowed the lawn.”
Driving Ma Springer’s cushy old Newport up Jackson to where Joseph Street intersects, the first thing Harry sees is his tomato-red Corona parked in front, looking spandy-new and just washed besides. They had got it fixed at last. It was cute of the kid to have had it washed. Loving, even. A surge of remorse for all the ill will he has been bearing Nelson gives a quickening countercurrent to the happiness he feels at being back in Mt. Judge, on a sparkling Sunday noon late in August with the dry-grass smell of football in the air and the maples thinking of turning gold. The front lawn, even that awkward little section up by the azalea bushes and the strip between the sidewalk and the curb where roots are coming to the surface and hand-clippers have to be used, has been mowed. Harry knows how those hand-clippers begin to chafe in the palm. When the boy comes out on the porch and down to the street to help with the bags, Harry shakes Nelson’s hand. He thinks of kissing him but the start of a frown scares him off his impulse to be extra friendly flounders and drowns amidst the clutter of greetings. Janice embraces Nelson and, more lightly, Melanie. Ma Springer, overheated from the car ride, allows herself to be kissed on the cheek by both young people. Both are dressed up, Melanie in a peach-colored linen suit Harry didn’t know she owned and Nelson in a gray sharkskin he knows the boy didn’t have before. A new suit to be a salesman in. The effect is touchingly trimmer; -in the tilt of the child’s combed head his father is startled to see a touch of the dead Fred Springer, con artist.
Melanie looks taller than he remembers: high heels. In her pleased croon of a voice she explains, “We went to church,” turning toward Ma Springer. “You had said over the phone you might try to make the service and we thought we’d surprise you in case you did.”
“Melanie, I couldn’t get them up in time,” Bessie says. “They were just a pair of lovebirds up there.”
“The mountain air, nothing personal,” Rabbit says, handing Nelson a duffel bag full of dirty sheets. “It was supposed to be a vacation and I wasn’t going to get up at dawn the last day we were there just so Ma could come make cow eyes at that fag.”
“He didn’t seem that faggy, Dad. That’s just how ministers talk.”
“To me he seemed pretty radical,” Melanie says. “He went on about how the rich have to go through a camel’s eye.” To Harry she says, “You look thinner.”
“He’s been running, like an idiot,” Janice says.
“Also not having to eat lunch at a restaurant every day,” he says. “They give you too much. It’s a racket.”
“Mother, be careful of the curb,” Janice says sharply. “Do you want an arm?”
“I’ve been managing this curb for thirty years, you don’t need to tell me it’s here.”
“Nelson, help Mother up the steps,” Janice nevertheless says.
“The Corona looks great,” Harry tells the boy. “Better than new.” He suspects, though, that that annoying bias in the steering will still be there.
“I really got on ‘em abut it, Dad. Manny kept giving it bottom priority because it was yours and you weren’t here. I told him by the time you were here I wanted that car done, period.”
“Take care of the paying customers first,” Harry says, vaguely obliged to defend his service chief.
“Manny’s a jerk,” the boy calls over his shoulder as he steers his grandmother and the duffel bag through the front door, under the stained-glass fanlight that holds among leaded foliate shapes the number 89.
Toting suitcases, Harry follows them in. This house had faded in his mind. “Oh boy,” he breathes. “Like an old shoe.”
Ma is dutifully admiring the neatness, the flowers from the border beds arranged in vases on the sideboard and dining-room table, the vacuumed rugs and the laundered antimacassars on the nappy gray sofa and matching easy chair. She touches the tufted chenille. “These pieces haven’t looked so good since Fred fought with the cleaning woman, old Elsie Lord, and we had to let her go.”
Melanie explains, “If you use a damp brush, with just a dab of rug cleaner -“
“Melanie, you know how to do a job,” Harry says. “The only trouble with you, you should have been a man.” This comes out rougher than he had intended, but a sudden small vexation had thrown him off balance when he stepped into the house. His house, yet not his. These stairs, those knickknacks. He lives here like a boarder, a rummy old boarder in his undershirt, too fuddled to move. Even Ruth has her space. He wonders how his roundfaced girl is doing, out in that overgrown terrain, in her sandstone house with its scabby green door.
Ma Springer is sniffing the air. “Something smells sweet,” she says. “It must be the rug cleaner you used.”
Nelson is at Harry’s elbow, closer than he usually gets. “Dad, speaking of jobs, I have something I want to show you.”
“Don’t show me anything till I get these bags upstairs. It’s amazing how much crap you need just to walk around in sneakers in the Poconos.”
Janice bangs the kitchen door, coming in from the outside. “Harry, you should see the garden, it’s all beautifully weeded! The lettuce comes up to my knees, the kohlrabi has gotten enormous!”
Harry says to the young people, “You should have eaten some, the kohlrabi gets pulpy if you let it grow too big.”
“It never has any taste, Dad,” Nelson says.
“Yeah. I guess nobody much likes it except me.” He likes to nibble, is one reason he’s fat. While growing up he had many sensitive cavities and now that he has his molars crowned eating has become perhaps too much of a pleasure. No more twinges, just everlasting gold.
“Kohlrabi,” Melanie is saying dreamily, “I wondered what it was, Nelson kept telling me turnips. Kohlrabi is rich in vitamin C. “
“How’re the crepes cooking these days?” Harry asks her, trying to make up for having told the girl she should have been a man. He may have hit on something, though; in her a man’s normal bossiness has had to turn too sweet.
“Fine. I’ve given them my notice and the other waitresses are going to give me a party.”
Nelson says, “She’s turned into a real party girl, Dad. I hardly ever saw her when we were here together. Your pal Charlie Stavros keeps taking her out, he’s even coming for her this
afternoon.”
You poor little shnook, Rabbit thinks. Why is the kid standing so close? He can hear the boy’s worried breath.
“He’s taking me to Valley Forge,” Melanie explains, brighteyed, those bright eyes concealing what mischief, Rabbit may never know now. The girl is pulling out. “I’m about to leave Pennsylvania and I really haven’t seen any of the sights, so Charlie’s being nice enough to take me to some of the places. Last weekend we went into Amish country and saw all the buggies.”
“Depressing damn things, aren’t they?” Harry says, going on, “Those Amish are mean bastards - mean to their kids, to their animals, to each other.”
“Dad
“If you’re going as far as Valley Forge you might as well go look at the Liberty Bell, see if it still has a crack in it.”
“We weren’t sure it was open Sundays.”
“Philly in August is a sight to see anyhow. One big swamp of miserable humanity. They cut your throat for a laugh down there.”
“Melanie, I’m so sorry to hear you’re leaving,” Janice intervenes smoothly. It sometimes startles Harry, how smooth Janice can be in her middle age. Looking back, he and Jan were pretty rough customers - kids with a grudge, and not much style. No style, in fact. A little dough does wonders.
“Yeah,” the guest of their summer says, “I should visit my family. My mother and sisters, I mean, in Carmel. I don’t know if I’ll go up to see my father or not, he’s gotten so strange. And then back to college. It’s been wonderful staying here, you were all so kind. I mean, considering that you didn’t even know me.”
“No problem,” Harry says, wondering about her sisters, if they all have such eyes and ruby lips. “You did it yourself; you paid your way.” Lame, lame. Never could talk to her.
“I know Mother will really miss your company,” Janice says, and calls over, “Isn’t that right, Mother?”
But Ma Springer is examining the china in her breakfront, to see if anything has been stolen, and doesn’t seem to hear.
Harry asks Nelson abruptly, “So what did you want to show me in such a hurry?”
“It’s over at the lot,” the boy says. “I thought we could drive over when you came back.”
“Can’t I even have lunch first? I hardly had any breakfast, with all this talk of making church. Just a couple of Pecan Sandies that the ants hadn’t gotten to.” His stomach hurts to think of it.
“I don’t think there is that much for lunch,” Janice says.
Melanie offers, “There’s some wheat germ and yogurt in the fridge, and some Chinese vegetables in the freezer.”
“I have no appetite,” Ma Springer announces. “And I want to try my own bed. Without exaggerating I don’t believe I had more than three hours’ sleep in a row all that time up there. I kept hearing the raccoons.”
“She’s just sore about missing church,” Rabbit tells the others. He feels trapped by all this fuss of return. There is a tension here that wasn’t here before. You never return to the same place. Think of the dead coming back on Resurrection Day. He goes out through the kitchen into his garden and eats a kohlrabi raw, tearing off the leaves with his hands and stripping the skin from the bland crisp bulb with his front teeth. The butch women up the street are still hammering away - what can they be building? How did that poem used to go? Build thee more stately something O my soul. Lofty Bingaman would have known, waving her hand in the air. The air feels nice. A flatter noon than earlier, the summer settling to its dust. The trees have dulled down from the liquid green of June and the undertone of insect hum has deepened to a constant dry rasp, if you listen. The lettuce is tall and seedy, the beans are by, a carrot he pulls up is stubby as a fat man’s prick, all its push gone upwards into greens. Back in the kitchen Janice has found some salami not too dried-out to eat and has made sandwiches for him and Nelson. This excursion to the lot seems bound to happen, when Harry had hoped to get over to the club this afternoon and see if the gang has missed him. He can see them gathered by the shuddering bright pool of chlorinated aqua, laughing, Buddy and his dog of the month, the Harrisons, foxy old Webb and his little Cindy. Little Cindy Blackbottom Babytoes. Real sunlight people, not these shadows in the corners of Ma’s glum house. Charlie honks out front but doesn’t come in. Embarrassed, and he should be, the babysnatcher. Harry looks at Janice to see how she takes it when the front door slams. Not a flicker. Women are tough. He asks her, “So what’re you going to do this afternoon?”
“I was going to tidy up the house, but Melanie seems to have done it all. Maybe I’ll go over to the club and see if I can get into a game. At least I could swim.” She swam at Hourglass Lake, and in truth does look more supple through the middle, longer from hips to breasts. Not a bad little bride, he sometimes thinks, surprised by their connivance in this murky world of old blood and dark strangers.
“How’d you like that, about Charlie and Melanie?” he asks.
She shrugs, imitating Charlie. “I like it fine, why not? More power to him. You only live once. They say.”
“Whyn’t you go over and Nellie and I’ll come join you after I look at this thing of his, whatever it is?”
Nelson comes into the kitchen, mouth ajar, eyes suspicious.
Janice says, “Or I could come with you and Nelson to the lot and then we all three could go to the club together and save gas by using only the one car.”
“Mom, it’s business,” Nelson protests, and from the way his face clouds both parents see that they had better let him have his way. His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.
So Nelson and Harry, behind the wheel of his Corona for the first time in a month, drive through the Sunday traffic the route they both know better than the lines in their palms, down Joseph to Jackson to Central and around the side of the mountain. Harry says, “Car feels a little different, doesn’t it?” This is a bad start; he tries to patch it with, “Guess a car never feels the same after it’s been banged up.”
Nelson bridles. “It was just a dent, it didn’t have anything to do with the front end, that’s where you’d feel the difference if there was any.”
Harry holds his breath and then concedes, “Probably imagining it.”
They pass the view of the viaduct and then the shopping center where the four-theater complex advertises AGATHA MANHATTAN MEATBALLS AMITYVILLE HORROR. Nelson asks, “Did you read the book, Dad?”
“What book?”
“Amityville Horror. The kids at Kent were all passing it around.”
Kids at Kent. Lucky stiffs. What he could have done with an education. Been a college coach somewhere. “It’s about a haunted house, isn’t it?”
“Dad, it’s about Satanism. The idea is some previous occupant of the house had conjured up the Devil and then he wouldn’t go away. Just an ordinary-looking house on Long Island.”
“You believe this stuff?”
“Well - there’s evidence that’s pretty hard to get around.”
Rabbit grunts. Spineless generation, no grit, nothing solid to tell a fact from a spook with. Satanism, pot, drugs, vegetarianism. Pathetic. Everything handed to them on a platter, think life’s one big TV, full of ghosts.
Nelson reads his thoughts and accuses: “Well you believe all that stuff they say in church and that’s really sick. You should have seen it, they were giving out communion today and it was incredible, all these people sort of patting their mouths and looking serious when they come back from the altar rail. It was like something out of anthropology.”
“At least,” Harry says, “it makes people like your grandmother feel better. Who does this Amityville horror make feel better?”
“It’s not supposed to, it’s just something that happened. The people in the house didn’t want it to happen either, it just did.” From the pitch of his voice the kid is feeling more in a corner than Rabbit had intended. He doesn’t want to think about the invisible anyway; every t
ime in his life he’s made a move toward it somebody has gotten killed.
