The Centaur

by John Updike

“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to atone for my rudeness before.

  Doc Appleton seemed pleased. He relaxed into his creaking chair so deeply his creased high-top shoes dangled, just touching their toes to the threadbare carpet. “Now Louis M. Zimmerman,” he went on, “was a month older than myself, and a great hand with the girls and the old women. Mrs. Mettzler, that was our teacher in the first and second grade, a woman not an inch under six feet tall and with legs like the siding slats of a tobacco shed, took a shine to Louis, and for that matter so did Miss Leet and Mrs. Mabry that followed her; all his way through school Louis had the best of attention, while of course nobody thought a second thought about an ugly duckling like Harry Appleton. Louis always had that edge. You see: he was quick.”

  “You said a mouthful,” my father said. “He’s always a jump ahead of me, I’ll tell you that.”

  “He never had, you see,” Doc Appleton continued, making curious ambiguous motions with his plump scrubbed hands, pressing the palms together, lightly chopping the knuckles of one hand with the edge of the other, “the adversity. He always knew success and never developed the character. So he spreads, you see,” and his white fingers crabbed through the air, “like a cancer. He’s not a man to trust, though he gives the Bible lesson every Sunday up at the Reformed. Tcha. If he was a tumor, George, I’d take a knife”—he shifted his hand and held up his thumb and it did seem very stiff and sharp—“and cut him out.” And his thumb, sickle-shaped backwards with pressure, scooped a curt divot out of the air.

  “I appreciate your being frank with me, Doc,” my father said, “but me and those other poor devils up at the high school are stuck with him forever as far as I can see. Three out of four people in this town swear by him—they worship that man.”

  “People are foolish,” Doc Appleton said, and lurched forward in his chair so that his feet softly plopped on the carpet. “That’s one thing you learn in the practice of medicine. People are by and large very foolish.” He tapped my father’s knee once, twice, three times before continuing. His voice assumed a confidential wheeze. “Now when I went to medical school down at Penn,” he said, “they thought, you know, a country boy, dumb. After that first year they weren’t saying so dumb any more. It might be I was a little slower than some but I had the character. I took my time and learned the books. When the class graduated, who do you think was at the head? Heh, Peter—you’re a bright boy. Who do you think?”

  “You,” I said. I didn’t want to say it but the word was forced from me. That’s how those Olinger bigwigs were.

  Doc Appleton looked at me without nodding or smiling or in any way showing that he had heard. Then he looked into my father’s face, nodded, and said, “I wasn’t at the head, but I was up there pretty well. I did all right for a country boy supposed to be dumb. George, have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?” And without warning, in that strange way monologuists have of ending a conversation as if their time has been wasted, he got up and went into his inner sanctum and made tinkling noises out of sight. He returned with a small bottle of cherry-colored fluid that from the way it danced and gleamed seemed more mercurial than liquid. He pressed the bottle into my father’s wart-freckled hand and said, “A tablespoon every three hours. Until we have the X-rays we won’t know any more than we know now. Get rest and don’t think. Without death, now, there couldn’t be life. Health,” he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, “is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places—the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body.” He angrily strode toward me and roughly pressed my hair back from my forehead and stared intensely at my brow. “You’re not as bad on your scalp as your mother,” he said, and released me. I flattened my hair forward again, humiliated and dazed.

  “Do you hear from Skippy?” my father asked.

  All fierceness and shimmer left the doctor; he became a heavy old man in a vest and fastened shirtsleeves. “He’s on a staff in St. Louis,” he said.

  “You’re too modest to say it,” my father told him, “but I bet you’re prouder than hell of him. I know I am; next to my own son he was the best student I ever had and not too much of my thickheadedness seemed to rub off on him, thank God.”

  “He has his mother’s graces,” Doc Appleton said after a pause, and a pall had fallen. The waiting-room seemed long deserted and the black leather furniture depressed and dented by the shadows of mourners. Our voices and footsteps felt lost in dust and I felt viewed from thousands of years in the future. My father offered to pay. The doctor waved his dollars aside, saying, “We’ll wait till the end of the story.”

  “You’re a straight-shooter and I’m grateful,” my father said.

  Outside, in the gnashing, black, brilliantly alive cold, my father said to me, “See, Peter? He didn’t tell me what I want to know. They never do.”

  “What happened before I came?”

  “He put me through the mill and made an X-ray appointment at Homeopathic in Alton for six o’clock tonight.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You never know with Doc Appleton what he means. That’s how he keeps his reputation.”

  “He doesn’t seem to like Zimmerman but I couldn’t make out exactly why.”

  “The story there, Peter, is that Zimmerman—I guess you’re old enough to say this to—Zimmerman’s supposed to have made love to Doc Appleton’s wife. It happened if it happened at all before you were born. There was even supposed to be some doubt as to who Skippy’s father was.”

  “But where’s Mrs. Appleton now?”

  “Nobody knows where she went. She’s either alive or dead.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Corinna.”

  Alive or dead, made love, before you were born—these phrases, each rich with mystery, rendered the night brimming around us terribly deep, and from beyond the far rim like an encircling serpent my father’s death seemed to tighten its coil. The darkness that above the heads of the houses swept past the stars and enclosed them like flecks of mica in an ocean seemed great enough to contain even this most mighty of impossible events. I chased him, his profile pale and grim in streetlight, and like a ghost he kept always a step ahead of me. He put on his cap and my head was cold.

  “What are we going to do?” I called after him.

  “We’ll drive into Alton,” he said. “I’ll get my X-ray at the Homeopathic and then I’ll go across the street to the Y. M. C. A. I want you to go to the movies. Get in where it’s warm and come up to the Y afterwards. That should be about seven-thirty or quarter to eight. The meet should be over by eight. It’s about quarter after five now. Do you have enough money for a hamburg?”

  “Sure, I guess. Hey. Daddy. How are your aches and pains?”

  “Better, Peter. Don’t worry about me. One nice thing about having a simple mind, you can only think about one pain at a time.”

  “There ought to be some way,” I said, “to make you healthy.”

  “Kill me,” my father said. The sentence sounded strange, outdoors, in the dark and cold, coming from above, as his face and body hurried forward. “That’s the cure-all,” he said. “Kill me.”

  We walked west to where the car had been left on the school parking lot and got into it and drove into Alton. Lights, there were lights on both sides solidly supporting us for the full three miles, except for the void on the right that was the poorhouse corn fields and for the interval in which we crossed the Running Horse River over the bridge where the hitchhiker had seemed to lift into the air on his long-heeled shoes. We cut through the gaudy heart of the city, across Riverside Drive, up Pechawnee Avenue, into Weiser Street and Conrad Weiser Square, up Sixth, across the railroad station parking lot, and down an alley only my father seemed to know about. The alley led us to where the railroad embankment widened into a black shoulder sparkling with c
inders, near the Essick’s coughdrop plant, which flooded the whole sinister area with its sickly-sweet fumes. The Essick’s employees used this leftover sloping bit of railroad property as a parking lot, and so my father used it now. We got out. The slams of our doors echoed. The shape of our car sat on its shadow like a frog looking into a mirror. It was alone on the lot. A blue light overhead kept watch like a cold angel.

  My father and I parted by the railroad station. He walked left, toward the hospital. I walked on, to Weiser Street, where five movie theatres advertised their shows. The downtown crowds were streaming home. The matinees were dismissed; the stores, their windows proclaiming January White Sales and drifted deep with cotton sheets, were stringing padlocked chains across their doors; the restaurants were in the lull of setting up the tables for dinner; the old men with the soft-pretzel carts draped them with tarpaulins and pushed them away. The city excited me most at this hour, when my father abandoned me and I, a single cross-current in the tidal exodus, strolled homeless, free to gaze into jewellers’ windows, to eavesdrop at the mouths of cigar stores, to inhale the breath of pastry shops where fat ladies in rimless spectacles and white smocks sighed behind bright trays of bear-claws, sticky buns, glazed doughnuts, pecan rolls, and shoo-fly pies. At this hour when the workers and shoppers of the city were hurrying by foot, bus, car, and trolley home to their duties, I was for a time released from mine, not merely permitted but positively instructed by my father to go to a movie and spend two hours out of this world. The world, my world with all its oppressive detail of pain and inconsequence was behind me; I wandered among caskets of jewels which would someday be mine. Frequently at this moment, my luxurious space of freedom all before me, I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control me or protect me, my mother with her farm, her father, her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal, my mother whose blood I was polluting in the gritty inebriation of Alton’s downtown. Then I would seem smothered in a rotten brilliance and become very frightened. But my guilt could not be eased, I could not go to her, for of her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me vengeful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.

  The five movie palaces of Weiser Street in Alton were Loew’s, the Embassy, the Warner, the Astor, and the Ritz. I went to the Warner and saw “Young Man with a Horn,” starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall. As my father had promised, it was warm inside. My best piece of luck for the day, I came in on the cartoon. The day was the thirteenth of the month so I did not expect it to be lucky. The cartoon was, of course, a Bugs Bunny. Loew’s had Tom and Jerry, the Embassy Popeye, the Astor either Disney, the best, or Paul Terry, the worst. I bought a box of popcorn and a box of Jordan Almonds, though both were bad for my skin. The sidelights were soft yellow and time melted. At the end, when the hero, the trumpeter who was based upon Bix Beiderbecke, had finally fought free of the rich woman who with her insinuating crooked smile (Lauren Bacall) had been corrupting his art, and the good artistic woman (Doris Day), her lover restored to her, sang, and behind her own transparent voice Harry James’s trumpet pretending to be Kirk Douglas’s lifted like a silver fountain higher and higher into “With a Song in My Heart”—only here, on the last note, an absolutely level ecstasy attained, did I remember my father. An urgent sense of being late caught me up.

  The sidelights turned bright. I fled from my seat. In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the sloping glaring lobby I saw myself full-length, flushed, pink-eyed, the shoulders of my flaming shirt drenched with the white flakes I had scratched from my scalp in the dark. It was a habit of mine to scratch when unseen. I brushed my shoulders wildly and on the cold street was startled by the real faces, which seemed meagre and phantasmal after the great glowing planetary visions I had been watching slowly collide, merge, part, and recombine. I ran toward the Y. M. C. A. It was two blocks up from Weiser Street, at Perkiomen and Beech. I ran along the railroad tracks. The narrow pavement was lined with small bars and shut barber parlors. The sky was an unsteady yellow above the tenements and even at the zenith paleness drained stars from the night. The smell of coughdrops coming from a distance mocked my panic. The perfect city, the city of the future, seemed remote and irrelevant and conceived in cruelty.

  The Y. M. C. A. smelled of sneakers and the floor was scuffed gray. At the center desk a Negro boy sat reading a comic book underneath a bulletin board shingled with obsolete posters and bygone tournament results. Far away down a strangely green hall, green as if lit by bulbs shining through grape arbor leaves, a game of billiards studiously muttered. From the other direction drifted the patient ga-glokka, ga-glokka of a ping-pong game. The boy behind the desk looked up from his comic book and frightened me; there were no Negroes in Olinger and I was superstitiously timid of them. They seemed to me wizards, possessing the black secrets of love and song. But his face was all innocence, all innocence and the shade of malted milk. “Hi,” I said and, holding my breath, swiftly walked to the passageway that led to the downward flight of concrete that in turn led, through the locker room, to the pool. As I descended, the odors of water and chlorine and a third, as of skin, grew upon me.

  In the great tiled chamber where the pool lived, a barking resonance broke everything into fragments. On the little wooden bleachers at the poolside my father sat with a wet and naked boy, Deifendorf. Deifendorf wore only the skimpy black official trunks; the droop of his genitals was limply defined between his spread thighs. Hair flowed down his chest and forearms and legs and a stream of water was running across the wood where his bare feet rested. The curves and flats of his hunched white body were harmonious but for his horny red hands. He and my father greeted me with grins that looked much the same: snaggled, ignorant, conspiratorial. To annoy Deifendorf I asked him, “Ja win the breast stroke and the two-twenty?”

  “I won more than you did,” he answered.

  “He won the breast stroke,” my father said. “I’m proud of you, Deify. You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.”

  “Shit if I’d seen that guy in the far lane I’d’ve taken the two-twenty too. Bastard he sneaked in on me, I thought I’d won it, I was just gliding in.”

  “That kid swam a good race,” my father said. “He won it honestly. He paced himself. Foley’s a good coach. If I was any kind of a coach, Deify, you’d be king of the county; you’re a natural. If I was any kind of a coach and you’d give up cigarettes.”

  “Fuck I can hold my breath eighty seconds as it is,” Deifendorf said.

  There was in their talk a mutual flattery that annoyed me. I sat on the other side of my father and concentrated on the pool: it was the hero here. It filled its great underground cage with staccato glitter and the eye-flagellating stink of chlorine. The reflection of the bleachers across the pool, where the opposing team and the judges sat, made on the rattled water a figment that for split seconds seemed a bearded face. Shattered again and again, the water yet sought with the quickness of crystalline reaction to recompose itself. Shouts and splashes broken by echoes and countersplashes made in collision new words, words of no language I knew, garbled barks that seemed to be answers to a question I had unknowingly asked. CECROPS! INACHUS! DA! No, it was not me who had asked the question, but my father beside me.

  “What does it feel like to win?” he had asked aloud, speaking straight ahead and thus equally to Deifendorf and me. “Jesus, I’ll never know.”

  Flecks and blobs skidded back and forth across the volatile aqua skin. The lines of lane demarcation on the pool bottom looped and wavered, refracted, toward the surface; the bearded face seemed about to constitute itself when, each time, another boy dived. Everything was over but the diving. One of our divers, Danny Horst, a runty senior with a huge mane of black hair that for diving he did up in a hairband like a Greek girl, came f
orward on the board, muscles swirling, and executed a running forward somersault, knees tucked, toes taut, so perfectly, uncoiling into the water through a soft splash as symmetrical as the handles of a vase, that one of the judges flashed the 10 card.

  “In fifteen years,” my father said, “I’ve never seen the ten used before. It’s like saying God has come down to earth. There is no such thing as perfection.”

  “Thatta baby Danny boy,” Deifendorf yelled, and a patter of applause from both teams greeted the diver as he surfaced, tossed his loosened hair with a proud flick, and swam the few strokes to the pool edge. But on his next dive Danny, aware we were all expecting another miracle, tensed up, lost the rhythm of the approach, came out of the one-and-a-half twist a moment too soon, and slapped the water with his back. One judge gave him a 3. The other two gave him 4s. “Well,” my father said, “the poor kid gave it all he had.” And when Danny surfaced this time, my father, and only my father, clapped.

  The final score of the meet was West Alton 37½ Olinger 18. My father stood at the pool edge and said to his team, “I’m proud of you. You’re damn good sports to come out for this at all—you get no glory and you get no pay. For a town without even an outdoor pool, I don’t see how you do as well as you do. If the high school had its own pool like West Alton does—and I don’t want to take any credit away from them—you’d all be Johnny Weismuellers. In my book, you are already. Danny, that was one beautiful dive. I don’t expect to see a dive like that again as long as I live.”

  My father looked strange making this speech, standing so erect in his suit and necktie among the naked torsos; the vibrating turquoise water and beaded cream tiling framed his dark and earnest head as I saw it from the bleachers. Across the listening skin of the shoulders and chests of the team a nervous flicker now and then passed, swiftly as a gust across water, or a tic in the flank of a horse. Though they had lost, the team was boisterous and proud in their flesh, and we left them in the shower room carousing and lathering like a small herd joyfully caught in a squall.