The Centaur

by John Updike

  “But where do they get the energy?” I asked.

  “Good question,” my father said. “You’ve got your mother’s brains; I hope to hell you don’t get my ugly face. The energy needed for photosynthesis comes from the atomic energy of the sun. Every time we think, move, or breathe, we’re using up a bit of golden sunshine. When that gives out in five billion years or so, we can all lie down and rest.”

  “But why do you want to rest?” His face had gone quite bloodless; a film had been interposed between us; my father seemed flattened upon another plane and I strained my voice to reach him. He turned slowly, so slowly, and his forehead wobbled and elongated with refraction. His lips moved and seconds later the sound came to me.

  “Huh?” He was not looking at me, he seemed unable to find me.

  “Don’t rest!” I shouted, glad the tears had come, glad to hear my voice breaking on the spikes of grief; I hurled my words through with a kind of triumph, exulted in the sensations of the tears softly flailing my face like the torn ends of shattered ropes. “Daddy, don’t rest! What would you do? Can’t you forgive us and keep going?”

  The top half of him was bent by some warp in the plane he was caught in; his necktie and shirtfront and coat lapels looped upwards along the curve and his head at the end of the arc was pressed into the angle where the wall met the ceiling above the blackboard, a cobwebby place never touched by a broom. From up here his distorted face gazed down at me mournfully, preoccupied. Yet a microscopic pinch of interest in the corners of his eyes led me to keep calling. “Wait! Can’t you wait for me?”

  “Huh? Am I going too fast?”

  “I have something to tell you!”

  “Huh?”

  His voice was so muffled and far that I willed to be closer to him and found myself swimming upward, with expert strokes, my arms lifting high at the elbow, my feet fluttering like boneless fins. The sensations so excited me I almost forgot to speak. Coming up panting by his side, I told him, “I have hope.”

  “Do you? That makes me awfully proud to hear that, Peter. I never had any. You must get that from your mother, she’s a real femme.”

  “From you,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about me, Peter. Fifty years is a long time; if you don’t learn anything in fifty years you never will. My old man never knew what hit him; he left us a Bible and a bucketful of debts.”

  “Fifty years is not a long time,” I said. “It’s not enough.”

  “You really have hope, huh?”

  I closed my eyes; between the voiceless “I” inside my head and the trembling plane of darkness also there, there was a gap, of indeterminate distance but certainly not more than an inch. With a little lie I leaped it. “Yes,” I said. “Now stop being silly.”

  VII

  CALDWELL TURNS AND shuts the door behind him. Another day, another dollar. He is weary but does not sigh. The hour is late, after five. He has stayed in his room bringing the basketball books up to date and trying to unravel the tickets; there is a block of tickets missing and in rummaging through his drawers he came across Zimmerman’s report and reread it. It depressed him out of all proportion. It was on blue paper and looking at it was like falling upwards into the sky. Also he has corrected the exams he gave the fourth section today. Poor Judy Lengel: she doesn’t have it. She tries too hard and maybe that has been his trouble all his life. As he walks toward the stairwell the ache low in his body revives and enwraps him like a folded wing. Some have the five talents, some have the two, some have the one. But whether you’ve worked in the vineyard all day or just an hour, when they call you in your pay is the same. He hears his father’s voice in the memory of these parables and this depresses him further.

  “George.” A shadow is in the corner of his eye.

  “Huh? Oh. You. What are you doing here so late?”

  “Fussing. That’s what old maids do. Fuss.” Hester Appleton stands, arms folded across the ruffles of her virginal blouse, outside her doorway; her room is 202, just down the hall from Room 204. “Harry mentioned that you came to see him yesterday.”

  “I’m ashamed to admit I did. Did he say anything else? We’re waiting for the X-rays to come through or some damn thing.”

  “Don’t be worried.” The little step forward in her voice as she blurts this makes Caldwell tilt his long head.

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t do any good. Peter’s very worried, I could tell today in class.”

  “The poor kid, he didn’t get much sleep last night. Our car broke down in Alton.”

  Hester tucks a strand of her hair back and with an elegant touch of her middle finger pushes her pencil deeper into her bun. Her hair is glossy and not at all gray in the half-light. She is short, bosomy, broad in the beam and, seen from the front, dumpily thick-waisted. But seen sideways her waist is strikingly small, tucked in by her doughty upright posture; she seems from her stance to be always in the act of inhaling. Her blouse wears a gold clasp shaped like an arrow. “He wasn’t,” she says, after considering once more in her life the face of the man hulking above her in the gloom of the hall, a strange knobbed face whose mystery, in relation to herself, is permanent, “his usual self.”

  “He’s gonna come down with a cold before I’m through with him,” Caldwell says. “I know it and I can’t help it. I’m gonna get the kid sick and I can’t stop myself.”

  “He’s not such a fragile boy, George.” She pauses. “In some ways he’s tougher than his father.”

  Caldwell hears this slightly, enough to bend a bit what he was going to say anyway. “When I was a kid back in Passaic,” he says, “I never remember being laid up with a cold. You wiped your nose on a sleeve and if your throat itched you coughed. The first time in my life I went to bed with anything was with the flu in 1918; if that wasn’t a mess. Brrough!”

  Hester feels the pain in the man and she presses her fingers against the gold arrow to hush the disconcerting flutter that has erupted in her chest. She has been in the classroom adjacent to this man for so many years that in her heart it is as if she had often slept with him. It is as if they had been lovers when younger and for reasons never sufficiently examined they had long ago ceased to be.

  Caldwell feels this to the extent of being, in her presence, a shade more relaxed than anywhere else. They are both exactly fifty, a trick of birthdays that in their unthinking deeps does oddly matter. He is reluctant to leave her and go down the stairs; his illness, his son, his debts, the painful burden of land his wife has saddled him with—all these problems itch in his brain for expression. Hester wants him; she wants him to tell her everything. Her frame of manners strains to accommodate this desire; as if to empty herself of decades of lonely habit she exhales: sighs. Then says, “Peter’s like Cassie. He has that way of getting what he wants.”

  “I should have put her on the Burly-cue stage, she would have been happier there,” Caldwell tells Miss Appleton in a loud earnest rush. “I shouldn’t have married her, I should have just been her manager. But I didn’t have the guts. I was brought up so that as soon as you saw a woman you half-way liked the only thing you could think of to do was ask her to marry you.” This is to say, I should have married a woman like you. You.

  Though Hester has sought this, now that it arrives it disgusts and alarms her. The man’s shadow before her seems about to dilate with anxiety and to overwhelm her physically. It is too late; she is insufficiently elastic now. She laughs as if what he has said were meaningless. The sound of her laughter afflicts the diminishing perspective of green lockers with a look of terror. Their air-slits seem aghast at what they see on the opposite wall: framed pictures of vanished baseball and track teams.

  Hester straightens up, inhales, retucks the pencil into her bun, and asks, “What thought have you given to Peter’s education?”

  “No thought. My only thought is that it’s going to take more money than I’ve got.”

  “Is he going to attend an art school or a liberal arts college
?”

  “That’s up to him and his mother. They discuss this sort of thing between them; it scares the living daylights out of me. As far as I can tell, the kid knows even less than I did at his age what the score is. If I were to kick off now, he and his mother would sit out there in the sticks and try to eat the flowers off the wallpaper. I can’t afford to die.”

  “It is a luxury,” Hester says. The Appleton ill-humor has in her taken the form of an occasional unexpected tartness, or irony. She once more examines the mysterious face above her, frowns at the diseaselike murmur in her breast, and moves to turn, dismissing not so much Caldwell as her own secret.

  “Hester.”

  “What, George?” Her head with its taut round hairdo is caught like a crescent moon half in the light from her room. An unimpassioned observer would conclude, from the light, glad, regretful way she smiles up, that he had once been her lover.

  “Thanks for letting me rave on,” he says. He adds, “I want to confess something. Tomorrow it may be too late. There’ve been times in my years here when the kids have got me so down I’ve stepped out of the classroom and come here by the drinking fountain just to hear you in there pronouncing French. It’s been better than a drink of water for me, to hear you pronouncing French. It’s never failed to pick me up.”

  Delicately she asks, “Are you down now?”

  “Yep. I’m down. I’m in Old Man Winter’s belly.”

  “Shall I pronounce something?”

  “To tell you God’s honest truth, Hester, I’d appreciate it.”

  Her face goes into its Gallic animation—apple-cheeked, prune-lipped—and she pronounces, word by word, savoring the opening diphthong and closing nasal like two liqueurs, “Dieu est très fin.”

  A second of silence hovers.

  “Say it again,” Caldwell asks.

  “Dieu - est - très - fin. It’s the sentence I’ve lived by.”

  “God is very—very fine?”

  “Oui. Very fine, very elegant, very slender, very exquisite. Dieu est très fin.”

  “That’s right. He certainly is. He’s a wonderful old gentleman. I don’t know where the hell we’d be without Him.”

  As if by stated consent, both turn away.

  Caldwell turns back in time to check her. “You were good enough to recite for me,” he says, “I’d like to recite something for you. I don’t think I’ve thought of this for thirty years. It’s a poem we used to have to recite back in Passaic; I think I can still do the beginning. Shall I try it?”

  “Try it.”

  “I don’t know why the hell I’m bedevilling you like this.” Like a schoolchild Caldwell stands to attention, makes fists of concentration at his sides, squints to remember, and announces, “ ‘Song of the Passaic.’ By John Alleyne MacNab.” He clears his throat.

  “The great Jehovah wisely planned

  All things of Earth, divinely grand;

  And, in His way, all nature tends

  To laws divine, to serve His ends.

  “The rivers run, and none shall know

  How long their waters yet may flow;

  We read the record of the past,

  While time withholds the future cast.”

  He thinks, slumps, and smiles. “That’s all the further we go. I thought I’d remember more.”

  “Very few men would have remembered as much. It’s not a very happy poem, is it?”

  “It is for me, isn’t that funny? I guess you have to have been brought up beside the river.”

  “Mm. I suppose that is the way things are. Thank you, George, for reciting it.” And now she does turn back into her room. The gold arrow on her blouse seems for an instant to press against her larynx, threatening to smother her. She brushes vaguely at her brow, swallows, and the sensation passes.

  Caldwell heads for the stairs groggy with woes. Peter. His education is a riddle to which however it’s posed the answer is money of which there is not enough. Also his skin and his health. By correcting the exams now Caldwell can give the kid another ten minutes sleep in the morning tomorrow. He hates to pull the kid out of bed. It will be eleven before they get home tonight after the basketball game and this combined with that weird night in the flea-bag last night will ripen him up for another cold. A cold a month like clockwork, they say the skin doesn’t have anything to do with it but Caldwell doubts this. Everything interconnects. With Cassie, he had never noticed until they were married, just one spot on her belly, but with the kid it was a plague: arms, legs, chest, even on his face more than he realized, bits of crust in the ears like dried soap and the poor kid didn’t know it. Ignorance is bliss. In the Depression when he used to push the kid along on his Kiddy Kar with the forked stick, he had been frightened, he had come to the world’s cliff-edge, and his son’s small face turning around to look back, the freckles solid under his eyes, made the world seem solid. Now his son’s face, dappled, feminine in the lips and eyelashes, narrow like a hatchet, anxious and sneering, gnaws at Caldwell’s heart like a piece of unfinished business.

  If he had had any character he would have put on baggy pants and taken her onto the vaudeville stage. But then vaudeville folded just like the telephone company. All things fold. Who would have thought the Buick would give out like that just when they needed it to take them home? Things never fail to fail. On his deathbed his father’s religion: “eternally forgotten?”

  Nos. 18001 to 18145: these are the basketball tickets missing. Through his closets and his drawers and his papers and the only thing he had found the blue slip of Zimmerman’s report, slip of sky, making his stomach bind like a finger in a slammed door. Biff. Bang. Well, he hadn’t buried his talent in the ground; he had lifted the bushel from his light and showed everybody what a burnt-out candle looks like.

  A thought he had run his mind through in the last minute had pleased him. But what? He picks his way back through the brown pebbles of his brain to locate this jewel. There. Bliss. Ignorance is bliss.

  Amen.

  The steel mullions of the window of the landing halfway down the stairs, with their little black drifts of dirt by now as solid as steel itself, strike him strangely. As if the wall, in becoming a window, speaks in a loud voice a word of a foreign language. Since, five days ago, Caldwell grasped the possibility that he might die, took it into himself as you might swallow a butterfly, a curiously variable gravity has entered the fabric of things, that now makes all surfaces leadenly thick with heedless permanence and the next instant makes them dance with inconsequence, giddy as scarves. Nevertheless, among disintegrating surfaces he tries to hold his steadfast course.

  Hummel.

  Call Cassie.

  Go to the dentist.

  Be here for the game by 6:15.

  Get in the car and take Peter home.

  This is his program.

  He bucks the door of reinforced glass and walks down the empty corridor. See Hummel, call Cassie. At noon Hummel still hadn’t found a second-hand driveshaft to replace the one that snapped in the little odd-shaped lot between the cough-drop plant and the railroad tracks; he was searching by telephone through the junk yards and auto body shops of Alton and West Alton. He had estimated the bill would come to between $20–25, he would tell Cassie and she would somehow make this amount of money matter less, it was just a drop in the bucket as far as she was concerned, just one more drop more or less to pour into that thankless land of hers, eighty acres on his shoulders, land, dead cold land, his blood sunk like rain into that thankless land. And Pop Kramer can stick a whole slice of bread into his mouth at one swoop. Call Cassie. She would be worried; he foresees their worries intertwining over the phone like two spliced cables. Was Peter all right? Has Pop Kramer fallen down the stairs yet? What did the X-rays show? He doesn’t know. He has thought off and on all day of calling Doc Appleton but something in him resists giving the old braggart the satisfaction. Ignorance is bliss. Anyway he has to go to the dentist. Thinking of it makes him suck the tender tooth. By searching thr
ough his body he can uncover any color and shape of pain he wants: the saccharine needle of the toothache, the dull comfortable pinch of his truss, the restless poison shredding in his bowels, the remote irritation of a turned toenail gnawing the toe squeezed beside it in the shoe, the little throb above his nose from having used his eyes too hard in the last hour, and the associated but different ache along the top of his skull, like the soreness left by his old leather football helmet after a battering scrimmage down in the Lake Stadium. Cassie, Peter, Pop Kramer, Judy Lengel, Deifendorf: he has them all on his mind. See Hummel, call Cassie, go to the dentist, be here by 6:15. He foresees himself skinned of chores, purified. One thing he loved in his life: in splicing cables, the sight of the copper strands, naked and raw and gleaming and fanning when suddenly stripped of the dirty old rubber. The cable’s conductive heart. It used to frighten him to bury something so alive down in the ground. The shadow of the wing tightens so that his intestines wince: a spider lives there. Brrough. In the shuffle of his thoughts his own death keeps coming to the top. His face burns. His legs go watery, his heart and head become enormous with fear. Death that white width for him? His face is drenched with warmth; a blindness seizes his body; he silently begs a face to appear in the air. The long varnished hall, lit by spaced globes of sealed-in light, shimmers in tints of honey, amber, tallow. So familiar, so familiar it is surprising that his footsteps in fifteen years have not worn a path down these boards, yet it seems freshly strange, as strange as on the day when, a young husband and new father still with that soft New Jersey twang and blur in his voice, he had come in the heat of an Olinger summer afternoon for his first interview with Zimmerman. He had liked him. Caldwell had instantly liked Zimmerman, whose heavy uneasy allusive ways reminded him of a cryptic school friend, a seminary roommate, of his father’s who used to come visiting now and then on a Sunday and who always remembered to bring a little bag of licorice for “young Caldwell.” Licorice for George, and a hair ribbon for Alma. Always. So that in time the little stencilled casket Alma kept on her bureau overflowed with hair ribbons. He had liked Zimmerman and had felt liked in turn. They had shared a joke about Pop Kramer. He cannot remember the joke but smiles to remember that one was made, fifteen years ago. Caldwell walks with strengthening strides. Like an unpredictable eddy in the weather, a small breeze arises and cools his cheeks with the thought that a dying man would not have it in him to walk so upright.