by John Updike
It was the sort of foolish revelation he might have once shared with Thelma, in the soft-speaking unembarrassment that follows making love. Thelma was suddenly dead. Dead of kidney failure, thrombocytopenia, and endocarditis, toward the end of July, as the cool dawn of another hot blue-gray day broke on the ornamental roof-level brickwork opposite St. Joseph’s Hospital in Brewer. Poor Thelma, her body had just been plain worn out by her long struggle. Ronnie tried to keep her at home to the end, but that last week she was too much to handle. Hallucinations, raving, sarcastic anger. Quite a lot of anger, at Ron of all people, who had been so devoted a husband, after being such a scapegrace in his young unmarried days. She was only fifty-five -a year younger than Harry, two years older than Janice. She died the same week the DC-10 bringing people from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, trying to land at two hundred miles an hour, running on no controls but the thrust of the two remaining engines, cartwheeling on the runway, breaking up in a giant fireball, and yet well over a hundred surviving, some of them dangling upside down from the seat belts in a section of fuselage, some of them walking away and getting lost in the cornfields next to the runway. It seemed to Rabbit the first piece of news that summer that wasn’t a twentieth anniversary of something - of Woodstock, the Manson murders, Chappaquidick, the moon landing. The TV news has been full of resurrected footage.
The funeral service is in a sort of no-brand-name church about a mile beyond Arrowdale. Looking for it, Harry and Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs, where a six-theater cineplex advertised on its crammed display board HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. The lazy girl in the booth didn’t know where the church might be, nor did the pimply usher inside, in the big empty scarlet lobby smelling of buttered popcorn and melting M&Ms. Harry was angry with himself all those times he sneaked out to Arrowdale to visit Thelma, now he can’t find her goddamn church. When finally, hot, embarrassed, and furious at each other’s incompetence, the Angstroms arrive, the church is just a plain raw building, a warehouse with windows and a stump of an, anodized aluminum steeple, set in a treeless acre of red soil sown skimpily with grass and crisscrossed by car ruts. Inside, the walls are cinder-block, and the light through the tall clear windows bald and merciless. Folding chairs do instead of pews, and childish felt banners hang from the metal beams overhead, showing crosses, trumpets, crowns of thorns mixed in with Biblical verse numbers - Mark 15:32, Rev. 1:10, John 19:2. The minister wears a brown suit and necktie and shirt with an ordinary collar, and looks rather mussed, and breathless, like the plump young manager of an appliance store who sometimes has to help out in handling the heavy cartons. His voice is amplified by a tiny stalk of a microphone almost invisible at the oak lectern. He talks of Thelma as a model housewife, mother, churchgoer, sufferer. The description describes no one, it is like a dress with no one in it. The minister senses this, for he goes on to mention her “special” sense of humor, her particular way of regarding things which enabled her to bear herself so courageously throughout her long struggle with her physical affliction. During a pastoral visit to Thelma in her last tragic week in the hospital, the minister had ventured to speculate with her on the eternal mystery of why the Lord visits afflictions upon some and not upon others, and cures some and lets many remain uncured. Even in the divine Gospel, let us remind ourselves, this is so, for what of the many lepers and souls possessed who did not happen to be placed in Jesus’ path, or were not aggressive enough to press themselves forward in the vast crowds that flocked to Him on the Plain and on the Mount, at Capernaum and at Galilee? And what was Thelma’s reply? She said, there in that hospital bed of pain and suffering, that she guessed she deserved it as much as the next. This woman was truly humble, truly uncomplaining. On an earlier, less stressful occasion, the minister recalls with a quickening of his voice that indicates an anecdote is coming, he was visiting her in her immaculate home, and she had explained her physical affliction to him as a minor misunderstanding, as a matter of some tiny wires in her system being crossed. Then she had suggested, with that gentle humorous expression that all of us here who loved her remember - and yet in all grievous seriousness as well - that perhaps God was responsible only for what we ourselves could experience and see, and not responsible for anything at the microscopic level.
He looks up, uncertain of the effect this reminiscence has made, and the little congregation of mourners, perhaps hearing Thelma’s voice in the odd remark and thus enabled to conjure up the something schoolteacherish and sardonic and strict in her living manner, or perhaps sensing the minister’s need to be rescued from the spectre of unjustifiable suffering, politely titters. With relief, the brown-suited man, like a talk-show host wrapping up, rolls on to the rote assurances, the psalm about green pastures, the verses from Ecclesiastes about a time for everything, the hymn that says now the day is over.
Harry sits there beside snuffly Janice in her policeman’s outfit thinking of the wanton naked Thelma he knew, how little she had to do with the woman the minister described; but maybe the minister’s Thelma was as real as Harry’s. Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience. Her part with him was to adore him, to place her body at his service as if disposing of it. Her body was ill and sallow and held death within it like a silky black box. There was a faint insult, a kind of dismissal, in her attitude of helpless captivity to the awkward need to love. He could not love her as she did him, there was a satisfying self-punishment in his relative distraction, an irony she relished. Yet however often he left her she never wanted him to leave. The glazed ghost of her leans up against him when he stands for the blessing, stands close to his chest with sour-milk breath silently begging him not to go. Janice snuffles again but Harry keeps his own grief for Thelma tight against his heart, knowing Janice doesn’t want to see it.
Outside, in the embarrassing sunlight, Webb Murkett, his face smilingly creased more deeply than ever, a cigarette still dangling from his long upper lip like a camel’s, goes from group to group introducing his new wife, a shy girl in her twenties, younger than Nelson, younger than Annabelle, a fluffy small blonde dressed in dark ruffles and shaped like a seal, like a teenaged swimming champ, with no pronounced indentations. Webb does like them zaftig. Harry feels sorry for her, dragged up to this religious warehouse to bury the wife of an old golf partner of her husband’s. Cindy, Webb’s last wife, whom Harry adored not so many years ago, is also here, alone, looking dumpy and irritated and unsteady on black heels skimpy as sandals, as she takes a pose on the thickly grassed ruts of red earth that do for a church parking lot. While Janice sticks with Webb and his bride, Harry gallantly goes over to Cindy standing there like a lump, squinting in the hot hazed sun.
“Hi,” he says, wondering how she could let herself go so badly. She has taken on the standard Diamond County female build bosom like a shelf and ass like you’re carrying your own bench around with you. Her dear little precise-featured face, in the old days enigmatic in its boyish pertness, with its snub nose and wideapart eyes, is framed by fat and underlined by chins; she has no neck, like those Russian dolls that nest one inside the other. Her hair that used to be cut short has been teased and permed into that big-headed look young women favor now. It adds to her bulk.
“Harry. How are you?” Her voice has a funereal caution and she extends a soft hand, wide as a bear’s paw, for him to shake; he takes it in his but also under cover of the sad occasion bends down and plants a kiss on her damp and ample cheek. Her look of irritated lumpiness slightly eases. “Isn’t it awful about Thel?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “But it was coming a long time. She saw it coming.” He figures it’s all right to suggest he knew the dead woman’s mind; Cindy was there in the Caribbean the night they swapped. He had wanted Cindy and wound up with Thelma. Now both are beyond desiring.
“You know, don’t you?” Cindy says. “I mean, you sense when the time is near if you’re sic
k like that. You sense everything.” Rabbit remembers a little cross in the hollow of her throat you could see when she wore a bathing suit, and how, like a lot of people of her generation, she was into spookiness -astrology, premonitions - though not as bad as Buddy Inglefinger’s girlfriend Valerie, a real old-style hippie, six feet tall and dripping beads.
“Maybe women more than men,” he says to Cindy tactfully. He lurches a bit deeper into frankness. “I’ve had some physical problems lately and they give me the feeling I’ve walked through my entire life in a daze.”
This is too deep for her, too confessional. There was always in his relations with Cindy a wall, just behind her bright butterscotch-brown eyes, a barrier where the signals stopped. Silly Cindy, Thelma called her.
“Somebody told me,” he tells her, “you’re with a boutique over in that new mall near Oriole.”
“I’m thinking of quitting, actually. Whatever I earn is taken off Webb’s alimony so why should I bother? You can see how welfare mothers get that way.”
“Well,” he says, “a job gets you out in the world. Meet people.” Meet a guy, get married again, is his unspoken thought. But who would want to hitch up with such a slab of beef? She’d sink any Sunfish you’d try to sail with her now.
“I’m thinking of maybe becoming a physical therapist. Another girl at the boutique is learning to do holistic massage.”
“Sounds nice,” Harry says. “Which holes?”
This is crude enough that she dares begin, “You and Thelma -” But she stops and looks at the ground.
“Yeah?” That old barrier keeps him from encouraging her. She is not the audience for which he wants to play the part of Thelma’s bereft lover.
“You’ll miss her, I know,” Cindy says weakly.
He feigns innocence. “Frankly, Janice and I haven’t been seeing that much of the Harrisons lately - Ronnie’s resigned from the club, too much money he says, and I’ve hardly had a chance this summer to get over there myself. It’s not the same, the old gang is gone. A lot of young twerps. They hit the ball a mile and win all the weekend sweeps. My daughter-in-law uses the pool, with the kids.”
“I hear you’re back at the lot.”
“Yeah,” he says, in case she knows anyway, “Nelson screwed up. I’m just holding the fort.”
He wonders if he is saying too much, but she is looking past him. “I must go, Harry. I can’t stand another second of watching Webb cavort with that simpering ridiculous baby doll of his. He’s over sixty!”
The lucky stiff. He made it to sixty. In the little silence that her indignant remark imposes on the air, an airplane goes over, dragging its high dull roar behind it. With a smile not fully friendly he tells her, “You’ve all kept him young.” A woman you’ve endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can’t help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
A number of people are making their escapes and Harry thinks he should go over and say a word to Ronnie. His old nemesis is standing in a loose group with his three sons and their women. Alex, the computer whiz, has a close haircut and a nerdy nearsighted look. Georgie has a would-be actor’s long pampered hair and the coat and tie he put on for his mother’s funeral look like a costume. Ron junior has the pleasantest face - Thelma’s smile and the muscle and tan of an outdoor worker. Shaking their hands, Harry startles them by knowing their names. When you’re sexually involved with a woman, some of the magic spills down into her children, that she also spread her legs for.
“How’s Nelson doing?” Ron junior asks him, from the look on his face not trying to be nasty. It must have been this boy, around Brewer as he is, who told Thelma about Nelson’s habit.
Harry answers him man to man. “Good, Ron. He went through the detox treatment for a month and now he’s living with about twenty other, what do they say, substance abusers, at what they call a `concept house,’ a halfway house in North Philly. He’s got a volunteer job working with inner-city kids at a playground.”
“That’s great, Mr. Angstrom. Nelson’s a great guy, basically.”
“I don’t go visit him any more, I couldn’t stand this family therapy they try to give you, but his mother and Pru swear he loves it, working with these tough black kids.”
Georgie, the prettiest boy and Thelma’s favorite, has been overhearing and volunteers, “The only trouble with Nelson, he’s too sensitive. He lets things get to him. In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck’em. Otherwise you’d kill yourself.” He pats the back of his hairdo.
Alex, the oldest, adds in his nerdy prim way, “Well I tell you, the drugs out in California were getting to me, that’s why I was happy when this job in Fairfax came through. I mean, everybody does it. All weekend they do it, on the beaches, on the thruways; everybody’s stoned. How can you raise a family? Or save any money?”
Her boys are men now, with flecks of gray hair and little wise wrinkles around their mouths, with wives and small children, Thelma’s grandchildren, looking to their fathers for shelter in the weedy tangle of the world. Her boys look more mature in Harry’s eyes than Ronnie, in whom he must always see the obnoxious brat from Wenrich Alley, and the loud-mouthed locker-room showoff of high-school days. People he once loved slide from him but Ronnie is always there, like the smelly underside of his own body, like the jockey underpants that get dirty every day.
Ronnie is playing the grieving widower to a T; he looks like he’s been through a washer, his eyelashes poking white from his tear-reddened lids, his kinky brass-colored hair reduced to gray wisps above his droopy ears. Rabbit tries to overcome his old aversion, their old rivalry, by giving the other man’s hand an expressive squeeze and saying, “Really sorry.”
But the old hostile devil lights up in Harrison’s face, once meaty and now drawn and hollowed-out and stringy. With a glance at his sons and a small over-there jab of his head, he takes Harry’s arm in a grip purposely too hard and leads him out of earshot, a few steps away on the rutted dried mud. He says to him, in the hurried confidential voice of men together in an athletic huddle, “You think I don’t know you were banging Thel for years?”
“I - I’ve never much thought about what you know or don’t know, Ronnie.”
“You son of a bitch. That night we swapped down in the islands was just the beginning, wasn’t it? You kept seeing her up here.”
“Ron, I thought you said you knew. You should have asked Thelma if you were curious.”
“I didn’t want to hassle her. She was fighting to live and I loved her. Toward the end, we talked about it.”
“So you did hassle her?”
“She wanted to clear the slate. You son of a bitch. The Old Master. You’re the coldest most selfish bastard I ever met.”
“Why? What makes me so bad? Maybe she wanted me. Maybe the favors were mutual.” Over Ronnie’s shoulder, Harry sees mourners waiting to say goodbye, hesitant, conscious of the heat of this hurried conversation. Harrison has become pink in the face and perhaps Rabbit has too. He says, “Ronnie, people are watching. This isn’t the time.”
“There won’t be another time. I don’t ever want to see you again as long as I live. You disgust me.”
“Yeah, and you disgust me. You always have, Ron. You got a prick where your head ought to be. Who can blame her, if Thel gave herself a little vacation from eating your shit now and then?”
Ronnie’s face is quite pink and his eyes are watering; he has never let go of Harry’s forearm, as if this hold is his last warm contact with his dead wife. His voice lowers into a new intensity; Harry has to bend his head to hear. “I don’t give a fuck you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a shit. She was crazy for you and you just lapped it up. You narcissistic cocksucker. She wasted herself on you. She went against everything she wanted to believe in and you didn’t even appreciate it, you didn’t love her and she knew it, she told me herself. She told me in the hospital asking my forgiveness.” Ronnie takes breath to go on, but tears block
his throat.
Rabbit’s own throat aches, thinking of Thelma and Ronnie at the last, her betraying her lover when her body had no more love left in it. “Ronnie,” he whispers. “I did appreciate her. I did. She was a fantastic lay.”
“You cocksucker” is all Ronnie can get out, repetitively, and then they both turn to face the mourners waiting to pay their respects and climb into their cars and salvage what is left of this hot hazy Saturday, with lawns to mow and gardens to weed all across Diamond County. Janice and Webb are among those staring. They must guess what the conversation has been about; in fact, most of those here must guess, even the three sons. Though he had always been discreet on his visits to Arrowdale, hiding his Toyota in her garage and never getting caught in bed with her by a sick child returning early from school or a repairman letting himself in an unlocked door, these things have a way of getting out into the air. Like a tire, it needs only a pinhole of a leak. People sense it. Word has got around, or it will now. Well, fuck ‘em, like Georgie said. Fuck ‘em all, including Webb’s child bride, who from the shape of her might be pregnant. That Webb, what a character.
