by John Updike
“I think that’s lovely,” he told her.
By Lententime they were going together to church. It was his idea, to accompany her; he liked seeing her in new settings, in the new light each placed her in. At work she was drab and brisk, a bit aloof from the other “girls,” and dressed in a way that made her look older than she was. At her ancestral home in Framingham, with her parents and brothers, she became girlish and slightly drunk on family atmosphere, as she had been on punch; Brad greedily inhaled the spicy air of this old house, with its worn Orientals and sofas of leather and horsehair, knowing that this was the aroma of her childhood. On the streets and in restaurants, Jeanette was perfectly the lady, like a figure etched on a city scene, making him, in their scenic anonymity, a gentleman, an escort, a gallant. Her smiling face gleamed, and the satin lapels of her melton-cloth coat, and the pointed tips of her patent-leather boots. Involuntarily his arm encircled her waist at crossings, and he could not let go even when they had safely crossed the street. Her bearing was so nicely honed in every move—the pulling off, for instance, finger by finger, of her doeskin gloves in Locke-Ober’s—that Brad would sometimes clown or feign clumsiness just to crack her composed expression with a blush or a disapproving frown.
It did not occur to him, when, during a rapt pianissimo moment in Symphony Hall, he nudged her and whispered a joke, that he was rending something precious to her, invading a fragile feminine space. In church, he loved standing tall at her side and hearing her frail, crystalline voice lift up the words of the hymns. He basked in her gravity, which had something shy about it, and even uncertain, as if she feared an excess of feeling might leap from the musty old forms and overwhelm her. He knew the forms; he had been raised as a Presbyterian, though only his mother attended services, and then only on those Sundays when she wasn’t needed in the fields or at the barn. Jeanette had resisted, at first, his accompanying her. It would be, she murmured, distracting. And it was true; her shy, uncertain reverence made him, perversely, want to turn and hug her and lift her up with a shout of pride and animal gladness.
He was twenty-eight, and she was twenty-five—old enough that marriage might have slipped her by. Her composure, the finished neatness of her figure, already seemed a touch old-maidenly. She shared rooms with another young woman on Marlborough Street; he lived on Joy, on the dark, Cambridge Street side of Beacon Hill. She had been going to church at the brick Copley Methodist over on Newbury Street, with its tall domed bell tower and its Byzantine gold-leaf ceiling. Brad found within an easy walk of his own apartment—down Chambers Street as it curved, and then up a little court opposite the Mayhew School—a precious oddity, a Greek Revival clapboard church tucked among the brick tenements of the West End. Built by the Unitarians in the 1830s and taken over by the Wesleyans during their post–Civil War resurgence, the little building had box pews, small leaded panes of gray glass, and an oak pulpit shaped somewhat like a bass viol. Brad was to recall fondly all of his life coming here with Jeanette for the Wednesday-night Lenten services, on raw spring nights when the east wind was bringing the smell of brine in from the harbor. The narrow dim streets bent and resounded as he imagined old quarters in Europe did; the young courting couple walked through the babble and the cooking odors of Jewish and Italian and Lithuanian families, and then came to this closet of Protestantism, this hushed, vacant space—scarcely a dozen heads in the pews, and the church so chilly that overcoats were left on. There was no choir, and each shift of weight on a pew seat rang out like a cough. Perhaps Brad was still an unbeliever at that point, for he relished (as if he were whispering a joke to Jeanette) the emptiness, the chill, the pathos of the aged minister’s trite and halting sermon as once again the old clergyman, set down to die in this dying parish, led his listeners along the worn path to the Crucifixion and the bafflement beyond. During these pathetic sermons Brad’s mind would range wonderfully far, a falcon scouting his future, while Jeanette sat at his side, compact and still and exquisite. She would lift him up, he felt. In the virtual vacancy of this old meetinghouse she seemed most intimately his.
Roosevelt was newly President then, and Curley was still mayor; their boasts came true, the country survived. The precious little hollow church, with its wooden Ionic columns and viol-shaped pulpit, was swept away in the Fifties along with the tenements of the West End. By this time Brad and Jeanette had moved with their children to Newton and become Episcopalians.
On their wedding night, hoping to please her, he had held her body in his arms and prayed aloud. He thanked God for bringing them together, and asked that they be allowed to live fruitful and useful lives together. The prayer in time was answered, though on this occasion it did little to relax Jeanette. Always his love of her, when distinctly professed, made her a bit reserved and tense, as if a certain threat was being masked, and a trap might be sprung.
Their four children were all born healthy, and Brad’s four years as a naval officer passed with no more injury to him than the devastating impression the black firmament of spattered stars made when seen from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, in the middle of the Pacific. How little, little to the point of nothingness, he was beneath those stars! Even the great ship, the Enterprise, that held him a tall building’s height above the all-swallowing ocean was reduced to the size of a pinpoint in such a perspective. And yet it was he who was witnessing the stars; they knew nothing of themselves, so in this dimension he was greater than they. As far as he could reason, religion begins with this strangeness, this standstill; faith tips the balance in favor of the pinpoint. So, though he had never had Jeanette’s smiling intuitions or sensations of certainty, he became in his mind a believer.
Ten years later, in the mid-Fifties, he suggested they become Episcopalians, because the church was handier to the Newton house—a shingled ark full of corridors for vanished servants and with even a cupola. Narrow stairs wound up to a small round room that became Jeanette’s “retreat.” She installed rugs and pillowed furniture, did crocheting and water-colors. From its curved windows one could see to the east the red warning light topping the spire of the John Hancock Building. Brad did not need to say that his associates and clients tended to be Episcopalians, and that this church held more of the sort of people they should get to know. Although he never quite grew accustomed to the droning wordiness of the service, and the awkward and repetitive kneeling, he did love the look of the congregation—the ruddy men with their blue blazers and ever-fresh haircuts, the sleek Episcopal women with their furs in winter and in summer their wide pastel garden hats that allowed a peek of the backs of their necks when they bowed their heads. He loved Jeanette among them, in her black silk dress and the strand of real pearls, each costing as much as a refrigerator, with which he had paid tribute to their twentieth anniversary. Money gently glimmered on her fingers and ears. All capitalism had needed, it had turned out, was an infusion of war. The postwar stock market climbed; even plumbers and grocers needed a stockbroker now. Shares Brad had picked up for peanuts in the Depression doubled and redoubled and doubled again in value.
Jeanette never took quite so active a role in the life of the church as he had expected. He himself taught Sunday school, passed the plate, sat on the vestry, read the lesson. It was like an extension of his business life; he felt at home in the committee room, in the linoleum-floored offices and robing rooms that mere worshippers never saw. There was always some practical reason for him to be at the church Sunday mornings, whereas in growing season Jeanette often stayed home to garden, much as Brad’s mother had worked in the fields. Her body had added a mature plumpness to that polished, glossy quality that had first enchanted him. Her Christianity, as he imagined it, was, like water sealed into an underground cistern, unchangingly pure. Standing beside her in church, hearing her small, true voice lifted in song, he still felt empowered by her fineness, her faith; in the jostle after the service his arm involuntarily crept around her waist, and he would let go only to shake the minister’s overworked hand.<
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“I wish you wouldn’t paw me in church,” she said one Sunday as they drove home. “We’re too middle-aged.”
“I wasn’t so much pawing you as steering you through the mob,” he offered, embarrassed.
“I don’t need to be steered,” Jeanette said. She tried to stamp her foot, but the gesture was ineffectual on the carpeted car floor.
Here we are, Brad thought, in our beige Mercedes, coming home from church, having a quarrel; and he had no idea why. He saw them from afar, with the eyes of aspiration, like a handsome mature couple in a four-color ad. “If I can’t help touching you,” he said, “it’s because I still love you. Isn’t that nice?”
“It is,” she said sulkily, then added, “Are you sure it’s me you love or just some idea you have of me?”
This seemed to Brad a finicking distinction. She was positing a “real” her, a person apart from the one he was married to. But who would this be, unless it was the woman who took a cup of tea and went up the winding stairs to her cupola at odd hours? This woman disappeared. And no sooner did she disappear, when he was home, than two children began fighting, or the dry cleaner’s delivery truck pulled into the driveway, and she had to be called down again.
“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked now, “that you love me because it suits you? That for you it’s an exercise in male power?”
“My God,” he said indignantly, “who have you been reading? Would you rather I loved you because it didn’t suit me?”
After a pause for thought, she admitted, in her smallest, tidiest voice, “That would be more romantic.” He took this for a conciliatory joke, and believed their mysterious lapse of harmony to have been caused by her “change of life.”
He became head of the vestry, and spent hours at the church, politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers. After the last of the children had been confirmed and excused from faithful attendance, Jeanette began to go to the eight o’clock service, before Brad was fully awake. She would return, shiny-faced, just as he was settling, a bit foggily, to a second cup of coffee and the sheaves of the Sunday Globe. She loved the lack of a sermon, she said, and the absence of that oppressive choir with those Fred Waring–like arrangements. She did not say that she enjoyed being by herself in church, as she had been in Boston many years ago. At the ten o’clock service, he missed her, the thin sweet piping of her singing beside him. He felt naked, as when alone on the deck of the imperilled Enterprise. He explained to Jeanette that he would happily push himself out of bed and go with her to the eight o’clock, but the committee people he had to talk to expected him to be at the ten o’clock. She relented, gradually, and resumed her place at his side. But she complained about the length of the sermon, and winced when the choir came on too strong. Brad wondered if their sons, who had become more or less anti-establishment, and incidentally anti-church, had infected her with their rebellion.
Ike was President, and then JFK. Joseph Kennedy, when Brad was young, had been a man to gossip about in Boston financial circles—a cocky mick with the bad taste not only to make a pot of money but then to leave Boston and head up the SEC under Roosevelt and his raving liberals. The nuances of the regional Irish-Yankee feud escaped Brad, since to his Midwestern eyes the two inimical camps were very similar—thin-skinned, clubby men from damp green islands, fond of a nip and long malicious stories. Brad never could catch the New England accent, never bring himself to force his “a”s and to say “Cuber” and “idear” the way the young President did so ringingly on television.
With their own young, the Schaeffers were lucky—the boys were a bit too old to fall into the heart of the drugs craze, and the girls were safely married before just living together became fashionable. One boy didn’t finish college and became a carpenter in Vermont; the other did finish, at Amherst, but then moved to the West Coast to live. The two girls, however, stayed in the area, and provided new grandchildren at regular intervals. Brad’s wedding-night prayer was, to all appearances, still being answered, decade after decade.
But as the Sixties wore into the Seventies, some misfortunes befell the Schaeffers as well as the nation. Both daughters went through messy divorces, involving countersuing husbands, scandalous depositions, and odd fits of nocturnal violence on the weedless lawns and in the neo-colonial bedrooms of Lynnfield and Dover. Freddy, the son on the West Coast, kept failing to get what could be called a job; he was always “in” things—in real estate, in public relations, in investments—without ever drawing a salary or making, as far as Brad could determine, a profit. Like Brad, Freddy had turned gray early, and suddenly there he was, well over thirty, a gray-haired boy, sweet-natured and with gracious, expensive tastes, who had never found his way into the economy. It worried Jeanette that to keep him going out there they were robbing the other children, especially the carpenter son, who by now had become a condo contractor and part-owner of a ski resort. They were grieved but at some level not surprised when poor Freddy was found dead in Glendale, of what was called an accidental drug overdose. A cocaine habit had backed him, financially, to the wall. He was found neatly dressed in a blue blazer and linen slacks—to the end, a gentleman, something Brad, in his own mind, had never become.
The Newton house huge and empty around them, the couple talked of moving to an apartment, but it seemed easier to turn off the radiators in a few rooms and stay where they were. Amid the ramparts of familiar furniture were propped and hung photographs of the children at happy turning-points—graduations, marriages, trips abroad. This grinning, tinted population extended now into the third generation, and was realer, more present, than the intermittent notes and phone calls from the children themselves. Brad knew in the abstract that he had changed diapers, driven boys to hockey and girls to ballet, supervised bedtime prayers, paternally stood by while tears were being shed and games were being played and the traumas of maturation endured; yet he could not muster much actual sensation of parenthood—those years were like a television sitcom during which he sat sleepily watching himself play the father. More vivid, returning in such unexpected detail that his eyes watered and the utter lostness of it all made him gasp, were moments of his and Jeanette’s Boston days in the L-shaped apartment on Saint Botolph Street and then in the fifth-floor Commonwealth Avenue place—its leaky skylight, its peek at the Charles between chimney pots, its birdcage elevator—and of old times at the firm, before it moved from the walnut-panelled offices on Milk Street to a flimsy, flashy new skyscraper over on State. Certain business epiphanies—workday afternoons when an educated guess paid off in spades or a carefully cultivated friendship produced a big commission—could still put the taste of triumph into his mouth. Fun like that had fled the business when the Sixties’ bull market collapsed. The people he had looked up to, the crusty Yankee money managers with names like Loring and Batchelder, were all retired. Brad himself retired at the age of sixty-eight, the same summer that Nixon resigned. In his loneliness those first months, in his guilty unease at being out of business uniform, he would visit Jeanette in her cupola.
She did not say she minded, but everything seemed to halt when he climbed the last, pie-slice-shaped steps, so the room had the burnished silence of a clock that has just stopped ticking. She sat lit from all sides, surrounded by windows, her soft brown hair scarcely touched by gray and the wrinkles of her face none of them deep, so that her head seemed her youthful head softened by a webbed veil. The rug she had been hooking was set in its frame at the side of her armchair, and a magazine lay in her lap, but she did not seem to be doing anything—so deeply engaged in gazing out a window through the tops of the beeches that she did not even turn her head at his entrance. Her motionlessness slightly frightened him. He stood a second, getting his breath. Where once just the tip of the old Hancock Building had showed above the treetops, in the distance, now a silvery cluster of tall glass boxes reflected the sun. He had always been nervous in high places, and as his eyes plunged down, parallel with her gaze, through the bare winter branches towar
d the dead lawn three stories below, his thighs tightened and he shuffled self-protectively toward the center of the room.
Since she said nothing, he asked, “Do you feel all right?”
“Of course,” Jeanette answered, firmly. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know, my dear. You seem so quiet.”
“I like being quiet. I always have. You know that.”
“Oh yes.” He felt challenged, and slightly dazed. “I know that.”
“So let’s think of something for you to do,” she said, at last turning, with one of her usual neat motions, to give him her attention. And she would send him back down, down to the basement, say, to repair a framed photograph that had fallen from its nail one night, when no one was looking, and broken its glass. It was strange, Brad reflected, that in this room of her own Jeanette had hung no pictures of the children, or of him. But, then, there was little wall space between the many windows, and the cushioned window seats, two-thirds of the way around the room, were littered with old paintings, crocheted cushions, and books whose cloth covers the circling sun had bleached. He thought of it as her meditation room, though he had no clear idea of what meditation was; in even the silent seconds inserted between rote petitions at church, his own brain skidded off into that exultant plotting which divine service stimulated in him.
Her illness came on imperceptibly at first, and then with cruel speed. They were watching television one night—the hostages had been taken in Iran, and every day it seemed something had to happen on the news. Suddenly Jeanette put her hand on his wrist. They were sitting side by side on the red upholstered Hepplewhite-style love seat that they had impulsively bought at Paine’s in the late Forties, during a blizzard, before the move to Newton. Because of the storm, the vast store was nearly empty, and it seemed they must do something to justify their presence, and to celebrate the weather. His love for her always returned full force when it snowed. “What?” he asked now, startled by her unaccustomed gesture.
