by John Updike
“It’s only twenty minutes away, Mother.”
Harry can’t stop studying, in the cold kitchen light, the old woman’s skin. The dark life of veins underneath that gave her her flushed swarthy look that Janice inherited has been overlaid with a kind of dust of fine gray threads, wrinkles etched on the lightstruck flat of the cheek nearest him like rows and rows of indecipherable writing scratched on a far clay cliff. He feels himself towering, giddy, and all of his poor ashamed words strike across a great distance, a terrible widening as Ma listens motionless to her doom. “Virtually next door,” he says to her, “and with three bedrooms upstairs, I mean there’s a little room that the kids who lived there had used as a kind of clubhouse, two bedrooms though absolutely, and we’d be happy to put you up any time if it came to that, for as long as needs be.” He feels he is blundering: already he has the old lady living with them again, her TV set muttering on the other side of the wall.
Janice breaks in: “Really, Mother, it makes much more sense for Harry and me at this point of our lives.”
“But I had to talk her into it, Ma; it was my idea. When you and Fred very kindly took us in after we got back together I never thought of it as for forever. I thought of it as more of a stop-gap thing, until we got our feet back under us.”
What he had liked about it, he sees now, was that it would have made it easy for him to leave Janice: just walk out under the streetlights and leave her with her parents. But he hadn’t left her, and now cannot. She is his fortune.
She is trying to soften her mother’s silence. “Also as an investment, Mother. Every couple we know owns their own house, even this bachelor we were with last night, and a lot of the men earn less than Harry. Property’s the only place to put money ifyou have any, what with inflation and all.”
Ma Springer at last does speak, in a voice that keeps rising in spite of herself. “You’ll have this place when I’m gone, if you could just wait. Why can’t you wait a little yet?”
“Mother, that’s ghoulish when you talk like that. We don’t want to wait for your house; Harry and I want our house now.” Janice lights a cigarette, and has to press her elbow onto the tabletop to hold the match steady.
Harry assures the old lady, “Bessie, you’re going to live forever.” But having seen what’s happening to her skin he knows this isn’t true.
Wide-eyed suddenly, she asks, “What’s going to happen to this house then?”
Rabbit nearly laughs, the old lady’s expression is so childlike, taken with the pitch of her voice. “It’ll be fine,” he tells her. “When they built places like this they built ‘em to last. Not like the shacks they slap up now.”
“Fred always wanted Janice to have this house,” Ma Springer states, staring with eyes narrowed again at a place just between Harry’s and Janice’s heads. “For her security.”
Janice laughs now. “Mother, I have plenty of security. We told you about the gold and silver.”
“Playing with money like that is a good way to lose it,” Ma says. “I don’t want to leave this house to be auctioned off to some Brewer Jew. They’re heading out this way, you know, now that the blacks and Puerto Ricans are trickling into the north side of town.”
“Come on, Bessie,” Harry says, “what do you care? Like I said, you got a lot of life ahead of you, but when you’re gone, you’re gone. Let go, you got to let some things go for other people to worry about. The Bible tells you that, it says it on every page. Let -go; the Lord knows best.”
Janice from her twitchy manner thinks he is saying too much. “Mother, we might come back to the house -“
“When the old crow is dead. Why didn’t you and Harry tell me my presence was such a burden? I tried to stay in my room as much as I could. I went into the kitchen only when it looked like nobody else was going to make the meal -“
“Mother, stop it. You’ve been lovely. We both love you.”
“Grace Stuhl would have taken me in, many’s the times she offered. Though her house isn’t half the size of this and has all those front steps.” She sniffs, so loudly it seems a cry for help.
Nelson shouts in from the living room, “Mom-mom, when’s lunch?”
Janice says urgently, “See, Mother. You’re forgetting Nelson. He’ll be here, with his family.”
The old lady sniffs again, less tragically, and replies with pinched lips and a level red-rimmed gaze, “He may be or he may not be. The young can’t be depended on.”
Harry tells her, “You’re right about that all right. They won’t fight and they won’t learn, just sit on their asses and get stoned.”
Nelson comes into the kitchen holding a newspaper, today’s Brewer Standard. He looks cheerful for once, on his good night’s sleep. He has folded the paper to a quiz on Seventies trivia and asks them all, “How many of these people can you identify? Renée Richards, Stephen Weed, Megan Marshack, Marjoe Gortner, Greta Rideout, Spider Sabich, D. B. Cooper. I got six out of seven, Pru got only four.”
“Renée Richards was Patty Hearst’s boyfriend,” Rabbit begins.
Nelson sees the state his grandmother’s face is in and asks, “What’s happening here?”
Janice says, “We’ll explain later, sweetie.”
Harry tells him, “Your mother and I have found a house we’re going to move to.”
Nelson stares from one to the other of his parents and it seems he might scream, the way he goes white around the gills. But instead he pronounces quietly, “What a copout. What a fucking pair of copout artists. Well screw you both. Mom, Dad. Screw you.”
And he returns to the living room where the rumble of drums and trombones merges with the mumble of unheard words as he and Pru confer within the tunnel of their young marriage. The kid had felt frightened. He felt left. Things are getting too big for him. Rabbit knows the feeling. For all that is wrong between them there are moments when his heart and Nelson’s might be opposite ends of a single short steel bar, he knows so exactly what the kid is feeling. Still, just because people are frightened of being alone doesn’t mean he has to sit still and be everybody’s big fat patsy like Mim said.
Janice and her mother are holding hands, tears blurring both faces. When Janice cries, her face loses shape, dissolves to the ugly child she was. Her mother is saying, moaning as if to herself, “Oh I knew you were looking but I guess I didn’t believe you’d actually go ahead and buy one when you have this free. Isn’t there any adjustment we could make here so you could change your minds or at least let me get adjusted first? I’m too old, is the thing, too old to take on responsibility. The boy means well in his way but he’s all ferhuddled for now, and the girl, I don’t know. She wants to do it all but I’m not sure she can. To be honest, I’ve been dreading the baby, I’ve been trying to remember how it was with you and Nelson, and for the life of me I can’t. I remember the milk didn’t come the way they thought it should, and the doctor was so ride to you about it Fred had to step in and have a word.”
Janice is nodding, nodding, tears making the side of her nose shine, the cords on her throat jumping out with every sob. “Maybe we could wait, though we said we’d pass papers, if you feel that way at least wait until the baby comes.”
There is a rhythm the two of them are rocking to, hands clasped on the table, heads touching. “Do what you must, for your own happiness,” Ma Springer is saying, “the ones left behind will manage. It can’t do worse than kill me, and that might be a blessing.”
She is turning Janice into a mess: face blubbery and melting, the pockets beneath her eyes liverish with guilt, Janice is leaning hard into her mother, giving in on the house, begging for forgiveness, “Mother we thought, Harry was certain, you’d feel less alone, with -“
“With a worry like Nelson in the house?”
Tough old turkey. Harry better step in before Janice gives it all away. His throat hardens. “Listen, Bessie. You asked for him, you got him.”
Free! Macadam falls away beneath the wheels, a tawny old fort can be glimp
sed as they lift off the runway beneath the rounded riveted edge of one great wing, the gas tanks of South Philadelphia are reduced to a set of white checkers. The wheels thump, retracted, and cruel photons glitter on the aluminum motionless beside the window. The swift ascent of the plane makes their blood weighty; Janice’s hand sweats in his. She had wanted him to have the window seat, so she wouldn’t have to look. There is marsh below, withered tan and blue with saltwater. Harry marvels at the industrial buildings beyond the Delaware: flat gravel roofs vast as parking lots and parking lots all inlaid with glittering automobile roofs like bathroom floors tiled with jewels. And in junkyards of cars the effect is almost as brilliant. The NO SMOKING sign goes off. Behind the Angstroms the voices of the Murketts and the Harrisons begin to chatter. They all had a drink at an airport bar, though the hour was eleven in the morning. Harry has flown before, but to Texas with the Army and dealers’ conferences in Cleveland and Albany: never aloft on vacation like this, due east into the sun.
How quickly, how silently, the 747 eats up the toy miles below! Sun glare travels with the plane across lakes and rivers in a second’s glinting. The winter has been eerily mild thus far, to spite the Ayatollah; on golf courses the greens show as living discs and ovals amid the white beans of the traps and on the fairways he can spot moving specks, men playing. Composition tennis courts are dominoes from this height, drive-in movies have the shape of a fan, baseball diamonds seem a species of tattered money. Cars move very slowly and with an odd perfection, as if the roads hold tracks. The houses of the Camden area scatter, relenting to disclose a plowed field or an estate with its prickly mansion and its eye of a swimming pool tucked into mist-colored woods; and then within another minute, still climbing, Harry is above the dark carpet of the Jersey Pines, scored with yellow roads and patches of scraping but much of it still unmarred, veins of paler unleafed trees following the slope of land and flow of water among the darker evergreens, the tints of competition on earth made clear to the eye so hugely lifted. Janice lets go of his hand and gives signs of having swallowed her terror.
“What do you see?” she asks.
“The Shore.”
It is true, in another silent stride the engines had inched them to the edge of the ocean of trees and placed underneath them a sandy strip, separated from the mainland by a band of flashing water and filled to a precarious fullness with linear summer cities, etched there by builders who could not see, as Harry can, how easily the great shining shoulder of the ocean could shrug and immerse and erase all traces of men. Where the sea impinges on the white sand a frill of surf slowly waves, a lacy snake pinned in place. Then this flight heads over the Atlantic at an altitude from which no whitecaps can be detected in the bluish hemisphere below, and immensity becomes nothingness. The plane, its earnest droning without and its party mutter and tinkle within, becomes all of the world there is.
An enamelled stewardess brings them lunch, sealed on a tray of blond plastic. Though her makeup is thickly applied Harry thinks he detects beneath it, as she bends close with a smile to ask what beverage he would prefer, shadowy traces of a hectic night. They fuck on every layover, he has read in Club or Oui, a separate boyfriend in every city, twenty or thirty men, these women the fabulous horny sailors of our time. Ever since the airport he has been amazed by other people: the carpeted corridors seemed thronged with freaks, people in crazy sizes and clothes, girls with dead-white complexions and giant eyeglasses and hair frizzed out to fill a bushel basket, black men swaggering along in long fur coats and hip-hugging velvet suits, a tall pale boy in a turban and a down vest, a dwarf in a plaid tam-o’-shanter, a woman so obese she couldn’t sit in the molded plastic chairs of the waiting areas and had to stand propping herself on a three-legged aluminum cane. Life outside Brewer was gaudy, wild. Everyone was a clown in costume. Rabbit and his five companions were in costume too, flimsy summer clothes under winter overcoats. Cindy Murkett is wearing high-heeled slides on naked ankles; Thelma Harrison pads along in woolly socks and tennis sneakers. They all keep laughing among themselves, in that betraying Diamond County way. Harry doesn’t mind getting a little high, but he doesn’t want to sacrifice awareness of the colors around him, of the revelation that outside Brewer there is a planet without ruts worn into it. In such moments of adventure he is impatient with his body, that its five windows aren’t enough, he can’t get the world all in. Joy makes his heart pound. God, having shrunk in Harry’s middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind. Free: the dead and the living alike have been left five miles below in the haze that has annulled the earth like breath on a mirror.
Harry turns from the little double-paned airplane window of some tinted soft substance that has been scratched again and again horizontally as by a hail of meteorites. Janice is leafing through the airline magazine. He asks her, “How do you think they’ll do?”
“Your mother and Nelson and Pru, who else?”
She flips a glossy page. Her mother is in that set of the lips, as if they have just pronounced a mournful truth and will not take it back. “I expect better than when we’re there.”
“They say anything to you about the house?”
Harry and Janice passed papers two days ago, a Tuesday. The day before, Monday the seventh, they had sold their silver back to Fiscal Alternatives. The metal, its value driven up by panic buying in the wake of Afghanistan by heavy holders of petrodollars, stood at $36.70 that day, making each of the silver dollars, bought for $16.50 including sales tax, worth $23.37, according to the calculations of the platinum-haired young woman. Janice, who had not worked all these years off and on at her father’s lot for nothing, slid the hand computer toward herself and after some punching politely pointed out that if silver stood at $36.70 a troy ounce, then seventy-five per cent of that would give a melt value of $27.52. Well, the young woman pointed out, you couldn’t expect Fiscal Alternatives to sell at less than melt value and not buy back for less too. She was less soignée than formerly; the tiny imperfection at one comer of her lips had bloomed into something that needed to be covered with a little circular BandAid. But after a phone call to some office deeper than hers, hidden by more than a sheet of thin Venetian blinds, she conceded that they could go to $24 even. Times 888 came to $21,312, or a profit in less than a month of $6,660. Harry wanted to keep eight of the handsome old cartwheels as souvenirs and this reduced the check to $21,120, a more magical number anyway. From the Brewer Trust safe-deposit box and the safe at Springer Motors they retrieved their cumbersome riches, taking care this time to minimize portage by double-parking the Corona on Weiser Street. The next day, while silver was dropping to $31.75 an ounce, they signed, at this same Brewer Trust, a twenty-year mortgage for $62,400 at 13’h per cent, 1 %z per cent below the current prime rate, with a one-point fee of $624 and a three-year renegotiation proviso. The little stone house, once a gardener’s cottage, in Penn Park cost $78,000. Janice wanted to put down $25,000, but Harry pointed out to her that in inflationary times debt is a good thing to have, that mortgage interest is taxdeductible, and that six-month $10,000-minimum money market certificates are paying close to 12 per cent these days. So they opted for the 20 per cent minimum of equity, or $15,600, which the bank, considering the excellent credit standing in the community of Mr. Angstrom and his family, was pleased to allow. Stepping out between the monumental pillars into the winter daylight blinking, Janice and Harry owned a house, and the day after tomorrow would fly into summer. For years nothing happens; then everything happens. Water boils, the cactus blooms, cancer declares itself.
Janice replies, “Mother seems resigned. She told me a long story about how her parents, who were better regarded, you know, in the county than the Springers, offered to have her and Daddy come stay with them while he was still studying accountancy and he said, No, if he couldn’t put a roof over a wife he shouldn’t have taken a wife.”
“She should tell that story to Nelson.”
“I don’t push at him, he’s pushing me. He’s pushed me right out of the house.”
“It may be our going off has frightened him. Made it more real, that he has these responsibilities.”
“About time the kid woke up. What do you think poor Pru makes of all this?”
Janice sighs, a sound lost in the giant whispering that upholds them. Little dull nozzles above their heads hiss oxygen. Harry wants to hear that Pru hates Nelson, that she is sorry she has married him, that the father has made the son look sick. “Oh, I don’t think she knows what to make,” Janice says. “We have these talks sometimes and she knows Nelson is unhappy but still has this faith in him. The fact of it is Teresa was so anxious to get away from her own people in Ohio she can’t afford to be too picky about the people she’s gotten in with.”
