The Early Stories

by John Updike

  Presuming his daughter asleep, he lifted himself on one elbow. She kicked his belly, rolled onto her back, and said in a voice loud with drowsiness, “Baaiy Mouff.”

  Stroking her strange hair, he began again, “Once upon a time, in the deep, deep woods, there lived a little creature …” This time, he seemed to succeed.

  As he lowered her into her crib, her eyes opened. He said, “O.K.?”

  She pronounced beautifully, “O.K.”

  “Gee, she’s practically epileptic with energy,” he said, blinded by the brilliant light of the room where his wife had remained.

  “She’s a good child,” Jane affirmed, speaking out of her thoughts while left alone rather than in answer to his remark. “Your dessert is on the table.” She had kept hers intact on the sofa beside her, so they could eat their raspberry whip together. She also had beside her an orange-juice glass half full of vermouth.

  When the clock said seven-fifty, he said, “Why don’t you run off to the movie? You never have any fun.”

  “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Go.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean you should go.” Still, he smiled.

  “You can go as a reward for putting her to sleep.”

  “Venus, I don’t want to go,” he said, without great emphasis, since at that moment he was rustling through the paper. He had difficulty finding the theatre section, and decided. “No, if you’re too tired, no one will. I can’t leave you. You need me too much.”

  “If you want to, go; don’t torment me about it,” she said, drawing on her vermouth and staring into The New Republic.

  “Do you think,” he asked, “when Jane is sixteen, she’ll go around in the back seat of Chevrolets and leave her poor old daddy?”

  “I hope so,” Jane said.

  “Will she have your bosom?”

  “She’ll think it’s her own.”

  He earnestly tried to visualize his daughter matured, and saw little but a charm bracelet on a slim, fair wrist. The forearms of teen-age girls tapered amazingly, toward little cages of bird bones. Charm bracelets were démodé already, he supposed.

  Lee, committed to a long leisured evening at home, of the type that seemed precious on the nights when they had to go out, was unnerved by its wide opportunities. He nibbled at the reading matter closest to hand—an article, “Is the Individual a Thing of the Past?,” and last Sunday’s comic section. At Alley Oop he checked himself and went into the kitchen. Thinking of the oatmeal cookies habitual in his parents’ home, he opened the cupboard and found four kinds of sugar and seven of cereal, five infants’ and two adults’. Jane was always buying some esoteric grind of sugar for a pastrymaking project, then discovering she couldn’t use it. He smiled at this foible and carried his smile like an egg on a spoon into the living room, where his wife saw it but of course not the point of it, that it was a smile generated by love of her. He leaned his forehead against the bookcase, by the anthology shelf, and considered all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea.

  As he stood there, his father floated from behind and possessed him, occupying specifically the curved area of the jawbone. He understood perfectly why that tall stoical man was a Mason, church-council member, and Scout-troop leader, always with an excuse for leaving the house.

  Jane, concentrating all the pleasures her day had withheld into the hour remaining before she became too drowsy to think, put Bach on the record-player. As she did so, her back and arms made angles reminding him of her more angular, less drowsy college self.

  When she returned to the sofa, he asked, “What makes you so pretty?” Then, having to answer it himself, he said, “Childbearing.”

  Preoccupied with some dim speckled thinker in her magazine, she fondled the remark briefly and set it aside, mistakenly judging it to be a piece of an obscure, ill-tempered substance—him “getting at” her. He poured a little vermouth for himself and struck a pose by the mantel, trying to find with his legs and shoulders angles equivalent in effect to those she had made putting on the record. As she sat there, studious, he circumscribed her, every detail, with the tidal thought Mine, mine. She wasn’t watching. She thought she knew what to expect from him, tonight at least.

  Later, he resolved, and, in a mood of resolution, read straight through the Jones Very section of F. O. Matthiessen’s anthology of American poetry. The poet’s stubborn sensibility aroused a readerly stubbornness; when Lee had finished, it was too late, the hour had slipped by. By the clock it was ten-thirty; for his wife, having risen with little Jane, it was after one. Her lids were pink. This was one of those days when you sow and not reap.

  Two hissing, clattering elves working a minor fairy-tale transposition, together they lifted the crib containing the sleeping girl and carried it into the living room, and shut the doors. Instead of undressing, Jane picked up odds and ends of his—spare shoes and the socks he had worn yesterday and the tie he had worn today. Next she went into the bathroom and emerged wearing a cotton nightie. In bed beside him she read a page of Swann’s Way and fell asleep under the harsh light. He turned it off and thought furiously, the family’s second insomniac. The heat of Jane’s body made the bed stuffy. He hated these low beds; he lay miles below the ceiling, deep in the pit. The radiator, hidden in the windowsill by his head, breathed lavishly. High above, through a net of crosses, a few stars strove where the brownish glow of New York’s night sky gave out. The child cried once, but, thank God, in her sleep.

  He recalled what he always forgot in the interval of day, his insomnia game. Last night he had finished D in a burst of glory: Yvonne Dionne, Zuleika Dobson. He let the new letter be G. Senator Albert Gore. Benny Goodman, Constance Garnett, David Garnett, Edvard Grieg. Goethe was Wolfgang and Gorki was Maxim. Farley Granger, Graham Greene (or Greta Garbo, or George Gobel), Henry Green. I was always difficult. You kept thinking of Ilka Chase. He wrestled and turned and cursed his wife, her heedless rump way on his side. To ward off the temptation to nudge her awake, he padded after a glass of water, grimacing into the mirror. As he returned his head to the cooled pillow, it came to him, first name and surname both at once: Ira Gershwin. Ira Gershwin: he savored it before proceeding. John Galsworthy, Kathryn Grayson … Lou Gehrig, poor devil …

  He and Jane walked along a dirt road, in high, open-field country, like the farm owned by Mark, his mother’s brother. He was glad that Jane was seeing the place, because while he was growing up it had given him a sense of wealth to have an uncle attached to a hundred such well-kept acres. His relationship with Jane seemed to be at that stage when it was important for each side of the betrothal to produce external signs of respectability. “But I am even richer,” he abruptly announced. She appeared not to notice. They walked companionably but in silence, and seemed responsible for the person with them, a female their height. Lee gathered the impression, despite a veil against his eyes, that this extra girl was blonde and sturdy and docile. His sense of her sullenness may have been nothing but his anxiety to win her approval, reflected. Though her features were hard to make out, the emotion he bore her was precise: the coppery, gratified, somewhat adrift feeling he would get when physically near girls he admired in high school. The wind had darkened and grown purposeful.

  Jane went back, though the countryside remained the same, and he was dousing, with a lawn hose attached to the side of the house, the body of this third person. Her head rested on the ground; he held her ankles and slowly, easily turned the light, stiff mass, to wet every area. It was important that water wash over every bit of skin. He was careful; the task, like rinsing the suds off of an automobile, was absorbing, rather than pleasant or unpleasant.

  A Gift from the City

  Like most happy people, they came from well inland. Amid this city’s mysteries, they had grown very close. When the phone on his desk rang, he knew it was she. “Jim? Say. Something awful has happened.”

  “What?” His voice had contracted and sounded smaller. He pictured his wife and sma
ll daughter attacked by teen-agers, derelicts, coal men, beneath the slender sparse trees of Tenth Street; oh, if only love were not immaterial! If only there were such a thing as enchantment, and he could draw, with a stick, a circle of safety around them that would hold, though they were on Tenth near Sixth and he forty blocks north.

  “I guess it shouldn’t be awful but it’s so upsetting. Martha and I were in the apartment, we had just come back from the park, and I was making tea for her tea party—”

  “Nnn. And?”

  “And the doorbell rang. And I didn’t know who could be calling, but I pressed the buzzer and went to the stairs, and there was this young Negro. It seemed strange, but then he looked awfully frightened and really smaller than I am. So I stood at the banister and he stood on the middle of the stairs, and he told me this story about how he had brought his family up from North Carolina in somebody else’s truck and they had found a landlord who was giving them a room but they had no furniture or food. I couldn’t understand half of what he said.” Her voice broke here.

  “Poor Liz. It’s all right, he didn’t expect you to.”

  “He kept saying something about his wife, and I couldn’t understand it.”

  “You’re O.K. now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m O.K., let me finish.”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Well, it was awfully strange.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. He was very nice. He just wanted to know if there were any odd jobs I could let him do. He’d been all up and down Tenth Street just ringing doorbells, and nobody was home.”

  “We don’t have any odd jobs.”

  “That’s what I said. But I gave him ten dollars and said I was sorry but this was all I had in the house. It’s all I did have.”

  “Good. That was just the right thing.”

  “Was it all right?”

  “Sure. You say the poor devil came up in a truck?” James was relieved: the shadow of the coal man had passed; the enchantment had worked. It had seemed for a moment, from her voice, that the young Negro was right there in the apartment, squeezing Martha on the sofa.

  “The point is, though,” Liz said, “now we don’t have any money for the weekend, and Janice is coming tomorrow night so we can go to the movies, and then the Bridgeses on Sunday. You know how she eats. Did you go to the bank?”

  “Damn it, no. I forgot.”

  “Well, darling.”

  “I keep thinking we have lots of money.” It was true; they did. “Never mind, maybe they’ll cash a check here.”

  “You think? He was really awfully pathetic, and I couldn’t tell if he was a crook or not.”

  “Well, even if he was he must have needed the money; crooks need money, too.”

  “You think they will cash a check?”

  “Sure. They love me.”

  “The really awful thing I haven’t told you. When I gave him the ten dollars he said he wanted to thank you—he seemed awfully interested in you—and I said, Well, fine, but on Saturdays we were in and out all day, so he said he’d come in the evening. He really wants to thank you.”

  “He does.”

  “I told him we were going to the movies and he said he’d come around before we went.”

  “Isn’t he rather aggressive? Why didn’t he let you thank me for him?”

  “Darley, I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Then it’s not the Bridgeses we need the money for; it’s him.”

  “No, I don’t think so. You made me forget the crucial part: he said he has gotten a job that starts Monday, so it’s just this weekend he needs furniture.”

  “Why doesn’t he sleep on the floor?” James could imagine himself, in needful circumstances, doing that. In the Army he had done worse.

  “He has this family, Jim. Did you want me not to give him anything—to run inside and lock the door? It would have been easy to do, you know.”

  “No, no, you were a wonderful Christian. I’m proud of you. Anyway, if he comes before the movie he can’t very well stay all night.”

  This pleasant logic seemed firm enough to conclude on, yet, when she had hung up and her voice was gone, the affair seemed ominous again. It was as if, with the click of the receiver, she had sunk beneath an ocean. His own perch, twelve stories above Madison Avenue, swayed slightly, with the roll of too many cigarettes. He ground his present one into a turquoise ashtray, and looked about him, but his beige office at Dudevant & Smith, Industrial and Package Design, offered an inappropriate kind of comfort. His youth’s high hopes—he had thought he was going to be a painter—had been distilled into a few practical solids: a steel desk, an adjustable office chair, a drawing board the size of a dining table, infinitely adjustable lighting fixtures, abundant draftsman’s equipment, and a bulletin board so fresh it gave off a scent of cork. Oversized white tacks fixed on the cork several flattering memos from Dudevant, a snapshot, a studio portrait of Liz, and a four-color ad for the Raydo shaver, a shaver that James had designed, though an asterisk next to the object dropped the eye to the right-hand corner, to the firm’s name, in modest sans-serif. This was all right; it was in the bargain. James’s anonymity had been honestly purchased. Indeed, it seemed they couldn’t give him enough; there was always some bonus or adjustment or employee benefit or Christmas present appearing on his desk, in one of those long blue envelopes that spelled “money” to his mind as surely as green engravings.

  His recent fortunes had been so good, James had for months felt that some harsh blow was due. Cautious, he gave Providence few opportunities to instruct him. Its last chance, except for trips in the car, had been childbirth, and Liz had managed that twenty months ago, one Thursday at dawn, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As the months passed harmlessly, James’s suspicion increased that the city itself, with its aging Art Deco surfaces, its black noon shadows, its godless millions, was poised to strike. He placated the circumambient menace the only way he knew—by giving to beggars. He distributed between one and two dollars a day to Salvation Army bell ringers, sidewalk violinists, husky blind men standing in the center of the pavement with their beautiful German shepherds, men on crutches offering yellow pencils, mumbling drunks anxious to shake his hand and show him the gash beneath their hats, men noncommittally displaying their metal legs in subway tunnels. Ambulatory ones, given the pick of a large crowd, would approach him; to their vision, though he dressed and looked like anyone else, he must wear, with Byzantine distinctness, the aureole of the soft touch.

  Saturday was tense. James awoke feeling the exact shape of his stomach, a disagreeable tuber. The night before, he had tried to draw from Liz more information about her young Negro. “How was he dressed?”

  “Not badly.”

  “Not badly!”

  “A kind of sport coat with a red wool shirt open at the neck, I think.”

  “Well, why is he all dolled up if he has no money? He dresses better than I do.”

  “It didn’t seem terribly strange. He would have one good outfit.”

  “And he brought his wife and seven children up here in the cab of a truck?”

  “I said seven? I just have the feeling it’s seven.”

  “Sure. Seven dwarfs, seven lively arts, seven levels of Purgatory …”

  “It couldn’t have been in the cab, though. It must have been in the truck part. He said they had no furniture or anything except what they wore.”

  “Just the rags on their backs. Son of a bitch.”

  “This is so unlike you, darling. You’re always sending checks to Father Flanagan.”

  “He only asks me once a year, and at least he doesn’t come crawling up the stairs after my wife.”

  James was indignant. The whole tribe of charity seekers, to whom he had been so good, had betrayed him. On Saturday morning, down on Eighth Street buying a book, he deliberately veered away, off the curb and into the gutter, to avoid a bum hopefully eyeing him. At lunch the f
ood lacked taste. The interval between the plate and his face exasperated him; he ate too fast, greedily. In the afternoon, all the way to the park, he maintained a repellent frown. When Liz seemed to dawdle, he took over the pushing of the carriage himself. A young colored man in Levi’s descended the steps of a brick four-story and peered up and down the street uncertainly. James’s heart tripped. “There he is.”

  “Where?”

  “Right ahead, looking at you.”

  “Aren’t you scary? That’s not him. Mine was really short.”

  At the park his daughter played in the damp sand by herself. No one seemed to love her; the other children romped at selfish games. The slatted shadow of the fence lengthened as the sun drew closer to the tops of the NYU buildings. Beneath this orange dying ball on an asphalt court, a yelping white played tennis with a tall, smooth-stroking black man with a Caribbean accent. Martha tottered from the sandbox to the seesaw to the swings, in her element and fearless. Strange, the fruit of his seed was a native New Yorker; she had been born in a hospital on West Eleventh Street. He rescued her at the entry to the swing section, lifted her into one, and pushed her from the front. Her face dwindled and loomed, dwindled and loomed; she laughed, but none of the other parents or children gave a sign of hearing her. The metal of the swing was icy. This was September; a chill, end-of-summer breeze weighed on the backs of his hands.

  When they returned to the apartment, after four, safe, and the Negro was not there, and Liz set about making tea as on any other day, his fears were confounded, and he irrationally ceased expecting anything bad to happen. They gave Martha her bath and ate their dinner in peace; by pure will he was keeping the hateful doorbell smothered. And when it did ring, it was only Janice their baby-sitter, coming up the stairs with her grandmotherly slowness.

  He warned her, “There’s a slight chance a young Negro will be coming here to find us,” and told her, more or less, the story.