by John Updike
Consulting with my parents, I asked that the lamps of welcome in our house be snuffed. I have not slept, and write you now by morning light. This instance of your neglect, though not, it might be said, grievous by itself, confirms in an unignorable manner the many intimations of indifference I have this fall received from you. When I sought to express my feelings of abandonment, you pled preoccupation with the quantity of new legal business occasioned by the national distress, and I composed myself to be, for this interval, accessory to your ambition. Undoubtingly I scorned those voices close to me insisting that the object of your regard was not my welfare but my riches.
Your earnestness, your industry, your reticence, even your intervals of melancholy and self-distrust—such seemed to me the proper costume of a man’s soul, a soul that might merge with mine, providing shelter to my frailty and substance to my longings. I opened to you as to none other—for each bud flowereth but once. With what dreadful fatality, then, with what terror and shame, have these autumnal months borne in upon me the conclusion that my warmth accosts in you a deceptive coolness as unalterable as the mask of death. Had my affection been received by you as a treasure confided, and not as an adornment bestowed, you would not be flaunting your new prestige before the sisters Hubley nor flirting about Lancaster in the dozens of sprightly incidents obliging gossip reports to me. Did you truly love me, your bones of their gravity would have torn you from such unfaithful lightness!
I foresee your protestations, your skillful arguments. I hear your voice plead circumstance and good intentions. Believe me, the barrier to our united happiness lies fixed. Our engagement is broken. I shall return to your rooms on King Street all the effects, epistolary and material, of our attachment, and will look for the mutual return of mine, to my home but a few steps away. I do not wish, nor, since you claim to be a gentleman, do I expect, to meet you, as more than a nodding acquaintance, again.
In sincere sorrow,
Ann Caroline Coleman
Her full name, to add to the insult of claim to be a gentleman. Yet on a separate, smaller piece of paper, tinted rose, as keepsake or partial retraction, a few lines of poetry copied in her hand:
“How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.”
“My soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find”
“Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom,
On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
But on thy turf shall roses rear
Their leaves, the earliest of the year;
And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom.”
“For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.”
Thanks to this last, much-quoted stanza Buchanan was able to recognize these fragments as from the profane works of that aristocratic scribbler Lord Byron, who had inclined so many susceptible young hearts to apostasy and melancholy posing. Of Ann’s wayward habits, her weakness for the candied poison of this satirical and corrupt acolyte of the tyrant Napoleon had struck him as the least charming, and the most needful to be discouraged once she had been his lawful wife. The United States were no place for foppish anarchy. When he thought of his mother’s hard life at Stony Batter—the laundry-boiling, the chicken-gutting, the eye-stinging stenches of woodsmoke and lye and the carrion of drying pelts, the tumult of horses and hound dogs outside the open cabin door, the thump and skidding of barrels and crates and the drovers’ foul language from which neither her ears nor his as a child could be shielded, and the pious poetry of Milton and measured lines of Pope with which she exercised her sweet voice in a moment of evening quiet, by the flutter of a kindle-light stuck between the stones of the fireplace—when he thought of this in contrast with Ann’s pampered and pettish existence he had to suppress a certain indignation, it was true. Yet now these verses were offered to him as a last thin bridge across an abyss of separation, and had something plaintive and adhesive about them inviting him, even as she decreed his abolition, to resume pursuit. Well, he would give her flouncing anger a few days to cool, and the tongues of Lancaster to cease wagging, and then see about crossing this bridge. Buchanan was a proud man. He had not marched to Baltimore in 1812 and in a downpour seized horses for the Third Cavalry—he had not as a lone rider made his way through Kentucky’s dark and bloody ground and back—he had not three times outwitted the Democrat enemies of Judge Franklin in the state legislature to go begging forgiveness from this ironmaster’s daughter. He had excited her affection, he was certain, and the female soul, conservative by nature, does not quickly turn from an established love. A few days’ delay in response could do him no harm. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, his mother had more than once quoted to soothe his youthful hurts.
All this, in a few seconds’ reaction, on the level of conscious estimation and calculation. But underneath, a sickening sliding. His color was the pallor of a man who had consumed a bad oyster an hour before, or who had just been summoned to a deadly duel. The humiliation. The shame. How could they not meet and he not be cut off from all the bright circles of Lancaster society? All around him, through the rectilinear streets of a town without privacy, there were ears anxious to hear, lips ready to crow. His reputation was destroyed by this repudiation. A gloomy acid taste, a hatred for all the iron Colemans, rose at the back of his throat and had to be swallowed back, there amid the library shelves, the splayed books, the slowly resumed activity, as his pallor ebbed. Why would God give him this slap? It felt in his heart like the thud of a keg of cut nails falling from the back of a Conestoga wagon, splitting the staves and leaving a dent in the earth as deep as a tin water dipper. God had not struck him so hard since 1808, when his father opened the letter from Dickinson. Then, too, a terrible taste and disbelief had arisen in the back of his throat. Before that, there had been the death of baby Elizabeth. That was in 1801. They had moved to Mercersburg by then, and his father had a farm as well as a store. His new sister—he already had three—slept in a rocking cradle in a corner of his mother’s room. Looking down at her day by day, wondering why her bed always smelled like the straw when the stable hadn’t been cleaned, little Jamie watched his sister fight for breath within the cradle. Her bright blue eyes looked angry, sinking into her face, in their orbits of bone, as her cheeks grew lean and creased. She looked less and less like a baby and more like an old person, or an old angry monkey. Her hands curled on her chest and her eyes got dull as drops of candlewax, and there came a morning when she was waxy all over, and the spark of life had gone to Heaven to join the soul of his sister Mary, who had died the year he was born as if to give him room. Elizabeth was his mother’s name, as his name was his father’s. Elizabeth’s angry blue mouth, with its dry squawks and yellow spit-up, had become triangular, a sharp hole leading downward to nothing, and something terrible—the adamant No that God could pronounce—entered her brother’s stomach like a stone, like the fall of a keg of nails. That very day, it seemed in his faulty memory, his mother in her sorrow had baked buttery sweet corn cakes, as if to reward the other of her children—Jamie and Jane and Maria and Sarah—for continuing to live.
I remember, or seem to, a moment—it must have been at least a year into the Ford Administration, since it bespeaks an advanced state of domestic rearrangement—when Genevieve and I tucked her two little girls into bed on a futon spread on the living-room floor of my apartment in Adams. The girls, Laura and Susan, were nine and six. The Perfect Wife and I had cooked them a perfect children’s dinner—well-done hamburgers, unfrozen peas and French fries, and popsicles for dessert, let’s say—in my closet of a kitchen, with its hidden troops of roaches that would parade forth at night. We all played some sort of board game—I forget the details, it was based on the fuzzy zoömorphs of Sesame Street, and involved spinning a dial that kept sticking at the same slice of directive pie—and put the
girls to bed and then went to bed ourselves. Just as if we were really married and formed a legitimate family.
Tears start up at so pretty and perilous a memory. The girls gravely stared up at us, their glossy bangs brushed to a glow—Laura had her father’s sandy-brown hair, Susan her mother’s straight pure black, almost Chinese in luster—and their eyes shared the wide-awake look of the little pet dolls and stuffed animals tucked beneath the L. L. Bean puff with them. Laura clutched a plastic glamour-girl with spun-glass hair and long stiff pink plastic legs, and Susan a limp lamb with dirty wool. Matter in the wrong place. Their being there, on my floor, blew, as a phrase of the era went, my mind. Simultaneously host and interloper, destroyer and nurturer, I fussed over technicalities. Would they be too warm, with the radiator I couldn’t turn off? I’d leave the window open a crack. Should I leave the bathroom light on, so they could find it in the dark? I would, but I’d close the door all but a crack, so the light wouldn’t shine in their faces. Would the sound of city traffic and the flickering neon sign of the restaurant keep them awake? I’d lower the shade and maybe close the window entirely, then. “Your mommy and I will be right in that other room, in case you need us for anything.”
“You can close your door,” Laura told me, with what I imagined was precocious understanding of our need for privacy. Perhaps in retrospect it was her need to stop my fussing.
I laughed in complicity. “Thanks, Laura, but there is no door, funnily enough. There isn’t room to swing a door, the bed takes up all of the bedroom, and there’s the radiator on this side, so somebody who lived here before me took the door off the hinges and threw it away.”
“Wasn’t that against the law?” little Susan asked.
“You mean,” I said, “like taking the little ticket off a pillow?”
The two girls stared up at me in silence, not seeing the joke. But I was a new factor in their lives, and they wanted to be careful, respectful.
Where was their real, their validated, father? It comes to me: he was up in the mountains, skiing. The faculty couples had taken pity on him, and he was always being invited places—sailing, skiing, three days of tennis camp. He was Mr. Popular. On this occasion, while we mice played, he was with, I am almost certain, the Wadleighs. They had gotten back together, after a year of outside skirmishes and consultation with financial advisers; her money had worked its way into their marital interstices like a tenacious glue; he had too many pianos to move out. In addition to their modernist house above the river they owned a condo in a postmodern complex above Conway, near Wildcat. So Brent was tearing up the slopes with the Wadleighs while his perfect wife and I were playing house in the slums of Adams. Not slums, exactly, since the entire city, some would say, was a slum. Only the boldest of our Wayward girls ever crossed the bridge alone, to buy snowboots or have her typewriter repaired, and it was a roguish date indeed who took one of them barhopping through the string of ethnic cafés threaded among the all-but-abandoned mills.
From the teetering height of my corrupt adulthood I gazed down at the staring small girls. Laura, with Brent’s coarse beige hair, had more of Genevieve’s delicacy of feature—the sloe eyes, the starry eyelashes, the high-arched nose with its pinched nostrils—and Susan’s black hair, silkier even than her mother’s, framed a brow and jaw prominent and squared off like Brent’s. But, then, Genevieve’s jaw did not recede, either; her chin was spade-shaped [Eds.: Have I said this?], with a delicious kissable flat spot, almost a dent, smaller than a dime, in the center. In fact the girls were still unformed and traces of their parents eddied within a pure potentiality that confronted me with a strong sense of separate identity, of genetic synthesis hurled forward into a world that would eventually leave me behind. But for now I towered over them. The girls had always been friendly, if shy, with me; to them I was a man who had come to comfort and entertain their mother in the vacuum their father had left. I was taken for the cure where in truth I was the malady. This deception, which I could not practice on my own, older children, saddened yet gratified me; in this embarrassing time of transition the only unblaming eyes turned upon me belonged to the two persons I had most injured. More guilty-making still, they were charming preadolescent miniatures of my mistress and lacked any of the awkward hormonal overdrive and overweight beginning to afflict my Daphne, who had turned twelve since I had left.
“Sweet dreams, guys,” I said to my tiny guests, my future stepdaughters, and, villain though I was, I didn’t quite have the effrontery, or the physical elasticity, to bend down and kiss them good night. I retired to the kitchen’s penitential space to wash the dishes while the Perfect Mother kneeled on the futon between the girls and murmured to them the day’s last reassurances, ending with a sweet, wispy lullaby and prayer. She said prayers with them, a fact I found as exciting as the breadth of her spread derrière as she bowed low, mingling her hair with her daughters’.
How far I had moved into a new self! My own children a mile distant going to bed without prayers, in a hollow cold house made huge by its lack of a resident man, and I posing as a paternal angel here in my overheated lair, my male fulfillment purchased at the cost of a blighting blow to all these budding lives. It gave my stomach abrasive butterflies that had rubbed its lining raw. The round white dishes, coming clean one by one in the watery suds of the porcelain sink, where in a few hours the cockroaches would hold their nocturnal rally, belonged to a different universe from myself; I could never come clean.
And yet … domestic/erotic rearrangements like this happened all the time. The Queen of Disorder was no saint. With Ben Wadleigh stuffed back for the while into his marriage with Wendy, my own wife disappeared into the night on the arm of a variety of beaux, including, the children told me in scandalized tones, a lunk much younger than herself, who claimed to be a carpenter, and we all knew what that meant in the Ford era—it meant dropout, it meant hippie, it meant upper-class kid who had fried his brain on drugs. Norma had agreed in principle to a divorce, but in her disorderly way was languidly slow about taking legal steps, and I didn’t have the heart to hurry her. It was enough that, living with the children, she looked worse in their eyes than I did, a prodigal out of sight over in Adams, showing up at the house now and then to devour the fatted calf.
When the plates were all stacked in the rubber-coated rack like ceramic baleen, behind a shark’s grin of washed silver, I stepped stealthily back into the dimmed living room and met Genevieve’s image halfway. Her slightly wide face, her slender hands to which her wedding ring still clung, the triangle of white wool turtleneck in the V of her black cashmere sweater floated in the jagged shadows of the room like dry spots in an overinked newspaper halftone. [Retrospect eds.: if too many similes, delete some, much as the heartless mother birds of some species allow the weaker chicks to be pushed from the nest by the stronger.] Embracing Genevieve, I was always slightly shocked by how real she was—the bony plates of her back, the muscular volume of her thorax, the ovoid solid of her head with its volatile, vulnerable, avid facial components. We kissed always as if erasing some regret that might otherwise be spoken. We kissed at this moment lightly, since her girls were presumably still awake and watching. We had a third of a bottle of white wine left over from dinner; we took it and the two wineglasses drying in the rack into the bedroom. Since there was no other furniture in the room, we sat together on the bed; since there was no door, we kept our voices low. City lights, including the flickering neon up the street, below sill level, filled the narrow room with swatches of overheard (as it were) luminosity, doubled in complexity by the half-drawn shade.
“What’s the matter, Alf?” she asked softly. “You seem so sad.”
“I’m not sad,” I lied, knowing the truth would eventually out, just as our underpants would come off, “just being quiet. Your girls were so sweet, tonight. They trust me.” Speaking in husky lowered voices changed the quality of our statements, gave them urgency; we were uttering passwords in a film noir.
Her smile added i
ts glimmer to the room, beneath her eyeball whites with their highlights. I could never imagine how people could, with their naked thumbs, gouge out others’ eyeballs, though the event has ample historical verification. “Why wouldn’t they? You’re very trustworthy.”
She was often a little in advance with her assertions; she meant that I would become trustworthy, when I was their legal stepfather. “Ask my own children about that,” I blurted.
Her smile glimmered out, but not dangerously. She had been here before. “You’re supporting them,” she argued. “You visit them. You visit them a lot, and I never complain.” Her recitation had a lilt to it, like the lullaby she sang the girls, night after night. She stepped up the tempo. “You give them nearly all your money, and you’re being very patient with their mother. You’re being saintly, Alf.”
I had to laugh at this last, though the shadow-pits of her eye sockets, the bone cups holding their vulnerable plums, were brimmingly solemn. The soreness in my stomach was easing. The good old talking cure. “My children are sweet, too,” I said. “They never accuse me, or ask me how come.” This was not quite true: lately Daphne, the baby of the three but a woman in bud, had begun to probe the issues that the two boys stoically ignored.
Genevieve took a fresh tack, in a voce no longer so sotto. Her mother’s instinct told her her girls were asleep. “They don’t have to ask, Alf. They could see the way their mother treated you. You were lower than the cats in that household hierarchy. Everybody at Wayward could see it; it was one of the first things people on the faculty gossipped with us about when we came here, how disempowering of you Norma was.”
