by John Updike
These houses are occupied by university faculty members in the main, or else the spinster daughters of late classics professors, or sickly offshoots of families whose fortunes had been made so long ago the money has become abstract, a mere matter of numbers and paper. There is a shady narcotic gentility to these blocks that becalms lives, instilling the notion that there is nowhere better to go, and my young man would be attracted and lulled by this quality, trying to imagine, as he walks along, from the glimpses of books and lamps and knickknacks that the curtained windows allow, the shape and taste of our lives, coveting our possessions before he passes out of the neighborhood. Perhaps Dale is not heading home but is going to visit my disreputable niece, Verna, in the prisonlike project where she and her eighteen-month-old daughter live. Grates on the lower windows. Graffiti in the entranceways and up the metallic, shuddering stairwell. Verna opens her door and greets Dale without enthusiasm. She knows him and knows what he can and cannot do (perhaps he is gay). But she acts pleased to see him. They talk, about me and my reaction to his plan to prove God by computer. I hear her say something like “Uncle Roger always was a prick. You should hear my mother talk about him.” She has a scratchy, wised-up voice almost still a child’s. Also Edna’s soft semi-fluid dull flesh, flesh with the pungent, sullen capacity to change the atmosphere throughout an entire house. Verna’s female tot, light brown in color, wobbles forward on darling little knobby-kneed legs and points at Dale, repeating the syllable “Da.” She does this until Verna screams, “That’s not Da, damn you!” and reaches down and with matter-of-fact brutality swats the child. Dale hangs there awkwardly, witnessing, planning his escape, into another part of the city, into his research.
Really, what a preposterous glib hope, his of extracting God from the statistics of high-energy physics and Big Bang cosmology. Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteenth century astronomy, in the seventeenth microbiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwin’s biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile. Barth had been right: totaliter aliter. Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured. The positivism of revelation, as Bonhoeffer described it. All else is mere philosophy, churning the void in the hope of making cheese, as it was put by the junior Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, he who left all of his worldly goods to the United States government: one of the saddest wills a sane man ever made.
My neighbor Mrs. Ellicott was tottering toward me in the gloom, her little Lhasa apso on a long red leash. With its flaxen hair falling into its eyes and down its sides so that its legs were entirely covered, the animal seemed to be moving along on tiny rapid wheels as it fussily sniffed at the bases of trees and fence pickets for a spot worthy of its urine. “Good evening, Professor,” the old dame croaked. In her prime she had had a peculiar knack of driving her husbands to suicide; at least two had done away with themselves, leaving her their real estate and furniture, so that her present holdings were like layers of sedimentary rock compacted by the pressure of the years, the shifts of the economy over the last decades all traceable in the composition of her portfolio. “Doesn’t look so good for our side, does it?” she added.
I slowly deduced she meant the coming election. I had expected a question about the weather. “Not so hot,” I said, still weather-minded. Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her. For all her exertions, it never was.
“Isn’t it terrible?” she called after me, pinned to her spot on the crumpling sidewalk by her pet’s sudden decision to confer its golden tinkle on a certain, already thoroughly browned bit of privet.
I hoped she would mistake my failure to answer for her own hardness of hearing. But, then, these Brahmins are so thickly armored in their own rudeness as to feel hardly any rudeness produced by others.
My high house and its warm lights loomed. I turned in at my yew hedge and with a householder’s satisfied grunt stooped and picked up several sales fliers scattered upon my brick walk and semicircular porch, with its four Ionic pillars and the charmingly carved curved fascia just under its copper roof. I loved this house, built early in our elderly century, when the working classes and the work ethic were still hand in hand and skilled labor was cheap, as shown by a quiet outpouring of refined details—the graceful tall many-paned side windows, for instance, through which, bending over to gain light with which to sort my front-door key out of the pound of metal one must carry these crooked days, I glimpsed my wife, her thin petite figure and fluffy upswept head of gingery red hair, moving with a preoccupied slouch, holding a tilting glass of what looked like blood or burgundy, from the living room across the hall to the dining room.
Secret glimpses, even as innocuous as this, of life proceeding unaware of my watching have always excited me. Of the days of my ministry I remember keenly the lit windows of my unsuspecting parishioners as I stealthily, in my burglarous black garb, approached up their front walks for an unannounced call, pouncing upon them in their evening disarray with the demands of the Absolute. Like eyes the windows seemed—defenseless, soft, and bright—and like the wadded curves of interior flesh the arcs of sofa back and armchair and lamp base within. Esther, spied upon unawares, looked like prey—someone to sneak up on and rape, another man’s precious wife to defile, as a kind of message to him, scrawled in semen. Her mouth moved indolently, forming words I could not hear but presumed to be addressed to our son, who must be in the kitchen, beyond the dining room, doing his homework at the table where we would later eat. Why, with a living room, a library, and his own good-size bedroom at his disposal, Richie insisted on doing his homework on the very surface where his mother was trying to arrange place mats and dinner plates, while a ten-inch Sony crackled and chattered not a foot from his face, I couldn’t imagine. Or so I said, in repeated admonition. Of course I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is—its irresistible charm—a fire. Entering an empty room, we turn it on, and a talking face flares into being: better than the burning bush. Compared to the warmth and bustle of the kitchen, the rest of the house would seem a wilderness to a twelve-year-old, and possibly haunted, if not by half-piously believed-in ghosts as in my benighted childhood then by those real-enough burglars, assailants, and doped-up home invaders against whom everyone in this respectable, inviting neighborhood carried a leather booklet of keys, crucial as a priest’s missal. For no part of the city was more than an hour’s bus or subway ride from any other, and the ideals of a democracy, and an actual, pragmatic democracy of costume, made access impossible to limit. In this era a preppy and a criminal dress very much alike, and on these tree-shaded streets a polyglot and idealistic African exchange student and a crazed avenger from the ghetto were cats of the very same shade. The thirty-year-old daughter, indeed, of Mrs. Ellicott had ten years ago been dragged from the sidewalk into a small and pretty park not two blocks away, where the rhododendrons were prodigiously in bloom, and had been raped and strangled while the neighbors confused her cries with traffic noise, or screams on television. Though the park has been renamed after her, her attacker has never been found.
I let myself into a hall foyer. The built-in benches meant to receive wraps and packages were laden with magazines and books. Since the commercial success of some rabbi’s recent querying of why good things happen to bad people (or was it the other way around?), clergymen seem to be cranking out books as rapidly as Southerners, and many are sent to me, as well as the latest gilt-edged, grant-underwritten treatise on Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers. I hung my scarf and bog hat (looks pompous, I know, but has saved me many a head cold since I impulsively snapped it up at the Shannon airport, a d
ay after a disappointing squint at the Book of Kells) on a swarthy oaken coat rack and carried my pipe in my teeth and my briefcase in my hand into my library, on my left. I have been happy in my library.
As I had known she would, Esther heard the door slam and came down the hall looking for me. Why do women’s footsteps always sound more aggressive than men’s? It can’t be just the high heels; it must be an energy, a pouncingness, in the gender. She came in to me, a hundred pounds of well-known woman, and all sense of her being another man’s precious wife instantly dissipated. Boredom wafted from her like the scent of stale sweat, boredom so intense as to be the cause of boredom in others; the hinges of my jaws ached as I sought to suppress a yawn of sympathy.
Esther, thirty-eight, is fourteen years younger than I—an age difference that has grown, not shrunk, in the fourteen years since we met and coupled and, after my divorce, wed. Though I was a parish minister at the time, she was not among my parishioners; indeed, one of her charms for me was her tranquil indifference, an indifference beyond scorn, to the things of religion. Being with her in her crisp disbelief was like a long drink of pure tonic water after too much sour wine. A friend of her aunt’s had brought her along to swell our Christmas choir. Esther, then a mere twenty-four and secretary to a tax lawyer, loved song, that opening of oneself to wind, that unnatural transformation of the body into a hollow pipe, a mechanism with muscular valves. Her own voice was a startlingly strong mezzo-soprano, a voice bigger than her tiny body and warmer than the expression on her face. Her mouth in repose looked pursed and wry and yet when she sang became a great, joyous hole. She had been filling the house, in my absence, with the sound of Luciano Pavarotti mooing and sobbing his way through some unintelligible chestnut of an aria. I pictured his tuxedo, his floppy white handkerchief, his loathsome little beard flecking the immensity of his trembling jowls. My parents, back in South Euclid, had every Saturday afternoon tuned in, on station WHK, the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and I had found this depressing. The voices had filled the big house with their pleading and protesting and even pursued me upstairs into my mystery novel, or down into the cellar, where my model airplane waited to be delicately assembled; the third-act climax shook the floor and pipes overhead so that dust drifted down into the wet airplane glue as, emitting that unforgettable ethereal smell, it tried to harden at the join of two balsa-wood ribs. My own musical taste runs toward muted string quartets, dainty Renaissance ensembles, almost inaudible oboe concertos, and small Mozartian orchestras with the old, brittle instruments. “A te, O cara,” Pavarotti bellowed, so the panes in my glass-fronted bookcases vibrated.
“Darling,” said Esther dryly, offering her face for a kiss. Though I am far from tall, she is shorter. This was not true of my first wife, though Lillian always wore flat shoes and even developed a little stoop for my sake. My sense of towering above Esther, in the dizzying days when we illicitly courted, had been reinforced by the shape of her face—her broad pure forehead and large green eyes dwindling to a short freckled bump of a nose, wryly pursed mouth, and small underslung jaw, so she seems to be, even when seen level, foreshortened. She is intelligent; a pressure of acuity bulges her eyes outward, with a look almost of alarm, which her sardonic mouth seeks to disown. Her upper lip looks puffy; her lower recedes beneath it. Her mouth is complex beyond words; at times a blur passes across it, a pressure of gladness or grief like mist on a mirror, and I feel, even now, late in our marriage as it is, that she is about to express something quite wonderful. “You’re so late.” The burgundy was a bit sour on her breath, mixed with cigarette smoke; I wondered how many glasses she had had, she and Pavarotti and his cara.
“A conference,” I told her. “Damn Corliss Henderson and her heroinic saints! She was trying to tell me today that Monica would be famous even if she hadn’t been Augustine’s mother. Now that she’s too deep into this thesis to back out it’s hit her, both these women’s claim to fame is that they had these sons and otherwise there isn’t much to know about them.”
“ ’Tis ever the way,” said the mother of my son.
“How’s Richie’s cold?”
“He thinks it’s settling into his chest. I don’t wonder, the way they make them run around after school on the soccer field.”
“Couldn’t he be excused?”
“He doesn’t want to be excused. He’d rather be sick. I think,” she went on, on a mocking, singing note, “he thinks he’s rather good at soccer.”
“And you’re saying he’s not?” Her distrust of men was extending to her son, now that he was nearing manhood.
She looked up at me, my dear feminist manqué, and there was a glaze: a big-eyed white fish had swum up close to the green aquarium glass and let escape a flash of her furious tedium at going around and around in this tank every day. “No, my dear Roger, I’m not saying that,” she pronounced in her lovely, lustrous woman’s voice, only slightly roughened by time and cigarettes. “I hope he is good at soccer. But I don’t know why he would be. I was always awful at games and I haven’t heard, my darling, that you were such great shakes either.”
“They didn’t have soccer when I was in school,” I said. “All they had was football, for the brutes. My father despised me for not playing, even though they would have killed me. If I had played soccer, I might have been good. Who knows?”
“Who knows anything?” Esther said.
“You seem depressed.”
“Fall,” she admitted. “I was out there today thinking we need some pine boughs to keep the oak leaves in place over the beds along the fence for the winter. Where in this city can you buy pine boughs? We go through this every year.”
“If you could wait until after Christmas we could chop up the tree.”
“You say that every year. And then what do I say?”
I pondered, and looked at my shelves, and remembered that I had wanted to look up something in Barth. “You say that’d be too late. The leaves will have blown all around the yard again.”
“That’s right. That’s very good, Rog.”
“And what do we do about the pine boughs every year? That I have forgotten.”
“We drive out into the country, and steal them from the evergreens in the woods around a truck stop. Except every year more and more of the lower ones are gone; we ought to take that long-handled pruning saw that sits gathering rust up above the garage rafters.”
“I think Richie broke it, trying to make a tree house.”
“You’re always blaming Richie.”
But in truth I blamed Richie for nothing; it was clear to me that without the boy Esther and I would have almost nothing to talk about, and the coldness between us would increase. I sought for something to mention, some sop to toss her as she looked up at me out of her bestial boredom. “I had another conference,” I told her. “Earlier. A really crazy kid, quite repulsive somehow, though he looked more or less normal physically, one of these computer types from the science end of the university. God only knows what brought him over to the Divinity School. I do know, actually. Apparently he’s good friends with awful Edna’s awful daughter Verna, remember, who had the illegitimate black child and lives over in some project in the slums—”
“Keep talking,” Esther said. “I have to run see if the broccoli’s boiling over.”
She darted down the hall, angling right through the dining-room arch, then on into the kitchen, and I watched, enjoying my favorite view of her, the rear view: erect small head, taut round butt, flicking ankles. It had not changed since I would longingly observe her swishing away from me down the church aisle after choir practice, shaking the dust of my church from her feet. In those days, the days of miniskirts and flower power, she wore her vivacious pale-red hair long and bouncing loose down her back; it seemed to equal the mass of her entire body. In the years since, some white strands have appeared, most thickly at the temples, and she twists and clips and pins her skull’s frizzy adornment in an illimitable variety of b
uns and tucked wings and more or less strict, prim, Frau-Professorish coils. At night, her hair let down is an even bolder sight than her still-effective nudity. Esther keeps her figure trim by a very simple procedure: she weighs herself on the scales every morning, and if she weighs more than a hundred pounds she eats only carrots and celery and water until the scales are brought into line with ideality. She is good at mathematics. She used to help that tax lawyer rig his figures.
Rather than follow her, I seized the moment to look up the Barth quote. It involved, I remembered, a series of vias, each discounted as a path to God. It was almost certainly from The Word of God and the Word of Man; I took down my old copy, a paperbound Torchbook read almost to pieces, its binding glue dried out and its margins marked again and again by the pencil of a young man who thought that here, definitively and forever, he had found the path, the voice, the style, and the method to save within himself and to present to others the Christian faith. Just glancing through the pages, I felt the superb iron of Barth’s paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this realm of prose—the specifically Christian—usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishonesty. “Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his universe, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a question.… The solution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need is the absolutely new event.… There is no way which leads to this event”: here I thought I had it, in “The Task of the Ministry,” but no, the passage, though ringing, did not have quite the ring impressed, three decades earlier, upon my agitated inner ear. Farther into the essay, I stumbled on a sentence, starred in the margin, that seemed to give Dale Kohler’s line of argument some justification: “In relation to the kingdom of God any pedagogy may be good and any may be bad; a stool may be high enough and the longest ladder too short to take the kingdom of heaven by force.” By force, of course: that was his blasphemy, as I had called it. The boy would treat God as an object, Who had no voice in His own revelation. I searched impatiently, at random; I could feel Esther’s boredom pulling at me, sucking at me, wanting me there with her in the kitchen, so we could be bored together. And at last, just as I had abandoned hope, the loose, scribbled pages opened to the page where, in triple pencil lines whose gouging depth indicated a strenuous spiritual clutching, my youthful self had marginally scored, in “The Problem of Ethics Today,” where one would least think to find it:
