The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The floor of the bedroom was covered with a carpet of red that was probably crimson but that, against the scarlet of the bed, looked purple. On the walls on either side of the bed hung Turkish carpets whose background was an opulently dull, more ancient red—almost black where the canopy cast its shade.

  I was moved by the sight.

  The girl called Mitzi was observing me as I stood in the kitchen doorway. “Coffee?” she said.

  “Whose room is that?”

  “It’s Frau Chef’s room. She sleeps there.”

  Now another girl, tall, lanky Gertha, with her humorous face and slightly comic answer to everything, skipped over to the bedroom door and said, “We are instructed to keep the door closed,” and for a moment before closing it she drew open the door quite wide for me to see some more of the room. I caught sight of a tiled stove constructed of mosaic tiles that were not a local type; they were lustrous—ochre and green—resembling the tiles on the floors of Byzantine ruins. The stove looked like a temple. I saw a black lacquered cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and just before Gertha closed the door, I noticed, standing upon the cabinet, a large ornamental clock, its case enamelled rosily with miniature inset pastel paintings; each curve and twirl in the case of this clock was overlaid with the gilded-bronze alloy that is known as ormolu. The clock twinkled in the early sunlight, which slanted between the window hangings.

  I went into the polished dining room, and Mitzi brought my coffee there. From the window I could see Frau Lublonitsch in her dark dress, her black boots, and wool stockings. She was plucking a chicken over a bucketful of feathers. Beyond her I could see the sulky figure of Herr Stroh standing collarless, fat and unshaven, in the open door of his hotel across the path. He seemed to be meditating upon Frau Lublonitsch.

  · · ·

  It was that very day that the nuisance occurred. The double windows of my bedroom were directly opposite the bedroom windows of the Hotel Stroh, with no more than twenty feet between—the width of the narrow path that led up to the frontier.

  It was a cool but sunny day. I sat in my room writing letters. I glanced out of the window. In the window directly opposite me stood Herr Stroh, gazing blatantly upon me. I was annoyed at his interest. I pulled down the blind and switched on the light to continue my writing. I wondered if Herr Stroh had seen me doing anything peculiar before I had noticed him, such as tapping my head with the end of my pen or scratching my nose or pulling faces—any of the things one might do while writing a letter. The drawn blind and the artificial light irritated me, and suddenly I didn’t see why I shouldn’t write my letters by daylight without being stared at. I switched off the light and released the blind. Herr Stroh had gone. I concluded that he had taken my action as a signal of disapproval, and I settled back to write.

  I looked up a few moments later, and this time Herr Stroh was seated on a chair a little way back from the window. He was facing me squarely and holding to his eyes a pair of field glasses.

  I left my room and went down to complain to Frau Lublonitsch.

  “She’s gone to the market,” Gertha said. “She’ll be back in half an hour.”

  So I lodged my complaint with Gertha.

  “I shall tell Frau Chef,” she said.

  Something in her manner made me ask, “Has this ever happened before?”

  “Once or twice this year,” she said. “I’ll speak to Frau Chef.” And she added, with her music-hall grimace, “He was probably counting your eyelashes.”

  I returned to my room. Herr Stroh still sat in position, the field glasses in his hands resting on his knees. As soon as I came within view, he raised the glasses to his eyes. I decided to stare him out until such time as Frau Lublonitsch should return and take the matter in hand.

  For nearly an hour, I sat patiently at the window. Herr Stroh rested his arms now and again, but he did not leave his seat. I could see him clearly, although I think I imagined the grin on his face as, from time to time, he raised the glasses to his eyes. There was no doubt that he could see, as if it were within an inch of his face, the fury on mine. It was too late now for one of us to give in, and I kept glancing down at the entrances to the Hotel Stroh, expecting to see Frau Lublonitsch or perhaps one of her sons or the yard hands going across to deliver a protest. But no one from our side approached the Stroh premises, from either the front or the back of the house. I continued to stare, and Herr Stroh continued to goggle through his glasses.

  Then he dropped them. It was as if they had been jerked out of his hand by an invisible nudge. He approached close to the window and gazed, but now he was gazing at a point above and slightly to the left of my room. After about two minutes, he turned and disappeared.

  Just then Gertha knocked at my door. “Frau Chef has protested, and you won’t have any more trouble,” she said.

  “Did she telephone to him?”

  “No, Frau Chef doesn’t use the phone; it mixes her up.”

  “Who protested, then?”

  “Frau Chef.”

  “But she hasn’t been across to see him. I’ve been watching the house.”

  “No, Frau Chef doesn’t visit with him. But don’t worry, he knows all right that he mustn’t annoy our guests.”

  When I looked out of the window again, I saw that the blind of Herr Stroh’s room had been pulled down, and so it remained for the rest of my stay.

  Meantime, I went out to post my letters in the box opposite our hotel, across the path. The sun had come out more strongly, and Herr Stroh stood in his doorway blinking up at the roof of the Guesthouse Lublonitsch. He was engrossed; he did not notice me at all.

  I didn’t want to draw his attention by following the line of his gaze, but I was curious as to what held him staring so trancelike up at our roof. On my way back from the postbox, I saw what it was.

  Like most of the roofs in that province, the Lublonitsch roof had a railed ledge running several inches above the eaves, for the purpose of preventing the snow from falling in heavy thumps during the winter. On this ledge, just below an attic window, stood the gold-and-rose ormolu clock that I had seen in Frau Lublonitsch’s splendid bedroom.

  I turned the corner just as Herr Stroh gave up his gazing; he went indoors, sullen and bent. Two carloads of people who had moved into the hotel that morning were now moving out, shifting their baggage with speed and the signs of a glad departure. I knew that his house was nearly empty.

  Before supper, I walked past the Hotel Stroh and down across the bridge to the café. There were no other customers in the place. The proprietor brought the harsh gin that was the local specialty over to my usual table and I sipped it while I waited for someone to come. I did not have to wait long, for two local women came in and ordered ices, as many of them did on their way home from work in the village. Mostly, they were shop assistants. They held the long spoons in their rough, knobbly hands and talked, while the owner of the café came and sat with them to exchange the news of the day.

  “Herr Stroh has been defying Frau Lublonitsch,” one of the women said.

  “Not again?”

  “He’s been offending her tourists.”

  “Dirty old Peeping Tom.”

  “He only does it to annoy Frau Lublonitsch.”

  “I saw the clock on the roof. I saw—”

  “Stroh is finished, he—”

  “Which clock?”

  “What she bought from him last winter when he was hard up. All red and gold, like an altarpiece. A beautiful clock—it was his grandfather’s when things were different.”

  “Stroh is finished. She’ll have his hotel. She’ll have—”

  “She’ll have the pants off him.”

  “He’ll have to go. She’ll get the place at her price. Then she’ll build down to the bridge. I’ve always said so, just wait and see. Next winter, she’ll have the Hotel Stroh. Last winter, she had the clock. It’s two years ago since she gave him the mortgage.”

  “It’s only Stroh’s old place that’s stan
ding in her way. She’ll pull it down.”

  The faces of the two women and the man nearly met across the café table, self-hypnotized by the central idea of their talk. The women’s spoons rose to their mouths and returned to their ices while the man clasped his hands on the table in front of him. Their voices went on like a litany.

  “She’ll expand down to the bridge.”

  “Perhaps beyond the bridge.”

  “No, no, the bridge will be enough. She’s not so young.”

  “Poor old Stroh!”

  “Why doesn’t she expand in the other direction?”

  “Because there isn’t so much trade in the other direction.”

  “The business is down here, this side of the river.”

  “Old Stroh is upset.”

  “She’ll build down to the bridge. She’ll pull down his place and build.”

  “Beyond the bridge.”

  “Old Stroh. His clock stuck up there for everyone to see.”

  “What does he expect, the lazy old pig?”

  “What does he expect to see with his field glasses?”

  “The tourists.”

  “I wish him joy of the tourists.”

  They giggled, then noticed me sitting within earshot, and came out of their trance.

  How delicately Frau Lublonitsch had sent her deadly message! The ormolu clock was still there on the roof ledge when I returned. It was thus she had told him that time was passing and the end of summer was near, and that his hotel, like his clock, would soon be hers. As I passed, Herr Stroh shuffled out to his front door, rather drunk. He did not see me. He was looking at the clock, where it hung in the sunset; he looked up at it as the quaking enemies of the Lord must have looked upon the head of Holofernes. I wondered if the poor man would even live another winter; certainly he had taken his last feeble stand against Frau Lublonitsch.

  As for her, she would probably live till she was ninety—perhaps more. The general estimate of her age was fifty-three, fifty-four, five, six: a healthy woman.

  · · ·

  Next day, the clock was gone. Enough was enough. It had gone back to that glamorous room behind the kitchen, to which Frau Lublonitsch retired in the early hours of the morning to think up her high conceptions, not lying supine like a defeated creature but propped up on the white pillows, surrounded by her crimson, her scarlet, her gold-and-rosy tints, which, like a religious discipline, disturbed her spirit out of its sloth. It was here she must have got the inspiration to plant the palm tree and build the shops.

  When, next morning, I saw her scouring the pots in the yard and plodding about in her boots among the vegetables, I was somewhat terrified. She could have adorned her own person in scarlet and gold; she could have lived in a turreted mansion rivalling that of the apothecary in the village. But like one averting the evil eye, or like one practicing a pure, disinterested art, she had stuck to her brown apron and her boots. And she would, without a doubt, have her reward. She would take the Hotel Stroh. She would march on the bridge, and beyond it. The café would be hers, the swimming pool, the cinema—all the market place would be hers before she died in the scarlet bed under the gold-fringed canopy, facing her ormolu clock, her deed boxes, and her ineffectual bottle of medicine.

  Almost as if they knew it, the three tourists remaining in the Hotel Stroh came over that very afternoon to inquire of Frau Lublonitsch if there were any rooms available and what her terms were. Her terms were modest, and she found room for two of them. The third left on his motorcycle that night.

  Everyone likes to be on the winning side. I saw the two new arrivals from the Hotel Stroh sitting secure under the Lublonitsch chestnut trees, taking breakfast, next morning. Herr Stroh, more sober than before, stood watching the scene from his doorway. I thought, Why doesn’t he spit on us—he’s got nothing to lose. I saw again, in my mind’s eye, the ormolu clock set high in the sunset. But I had not yet got over my fury with him for spying into my room, and was moved, all in one stroke, with high contempt and deep pity, feverish triumph and chilly fear.

  John Updike

  JULY 22, 1961

  IN WALKS THESE three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad backside with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

  By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)—there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long—you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and “attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much—and then the third one, that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

  She had on a kind of dirty-pink—beige maybe, I don’t know—bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal hanging in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

  She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

  She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and then they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-break
fast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft-drinks-crackers-and-cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the package back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

  You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubbertile floor.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint.”

  “Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” Stokesie’s married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that’s the only difference. He’s twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

  “Is it done?” he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he’s going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.