by John Updike
Talkative as always when a guest was leaving, James asked, “Now, do you know how to get back? For Heaven’s sake, don’t take a taxi again. Take a bus and then the subway. Where is your place?”
“Aaaah … right near where that Lexington Avenue is.”
“Where on Lexington? What cross street?”
“Beg pardon, mister? I’m sorry, I don’t make sense I’m so thrilled.”
“What cross street? How far up on Lexington?”
“The, ah, Hundred Twenty-nine.”
As James, with an outlander’s simple pride in “knowing” New York, gave detailed instructions about where to board the Fourteenth Street bus, where to find the subway kiosk, and how to put the token in the turnstile, the words seemed to bounce back, as if they were finding identical information already lodged in the Negro’s brain. He concluded, “Just try to resist the temptation to jump in a taxicab. That would have cost us two thirty if we’d been home. Now, here, I’ll even give you bus fare and a token.” Dredging a handful of silver from his coat pocket, he placed a nickel and a dime and a token in the svelte little palm and, since the hand did not move, put two more dimes in it, then thought, Oh, hell, and poured all the coins in—over a dollar’s worth.
“Now I’m penniless,” he told the colored man.
“Thank eh, you too Missis, so much, and you, miss.”
They wished him luck. He shook hands all around, hoisted the bag with difficulty into his arms, and walked murmuring through the door James held open for him.
“Four blocks up, to Fourteenth Street,” James called after him, adding in a normal voice, “I know damn well he’ll take a taxi.”
“It’s awfully good-hearted of you,” Janice said, “but about giving all that money, I—don’t—know.”
“Ah, well, money is dross,” said James, doing a small dance step, he was so relieved the Negro was out the door.
Liz said, “I was surprised, darley, that you gave him two bills.”
“You were? These are times of inflation. You can’t buy seven air-conditioned Beautyrest mattresses for ten dollars. He’s shown a great gift for spending; he ran through your ten like a little jackrabbit. We never did find out where it went to.”
Janice, Irishly strict, still grappled with the moral issue. She spoke more to Liz than to him. “I don’t doubt he needs the money—Oh, you should have heard the things that cabby said, or maybe you shouldn’t. But then who doesn’t need money? You and I need money, too.”
“Which reminds me,” James said. He looked at the electric clock in the kitchen: 11:20. “We came home, didn’t we, around ten? Seven-thirty to ten—two and a half. Two and a half dollars. You can’t change a ten, can you?”
The girl’s face fell. “Honestly, I never remember to bring my purse. But you could owe me to next time.…”
“I hate to do that. You need the money.” He couldn’t believe the girl would take a surplus of $7.50 from him.
“That—I—do,” Janice admitted cheerfully, gathering up her coat and a limp black book stamped simply with a cross. Her mother, James thought, and felt the night’s prayers still circling the room.
“Wait,” Liz said. “I think in my purse. I lied to him when I said I had nothing in the house but the ten.” They found the purse and were indeed able to piece together, out of paper and silver, the fee.
Spited, Janice said, “For your sakes, I sure hope he doesn’t bother you again. This little island has more different kinds of crooks on it than you or I could imagine existed. Some of them could out-act old Larry Olivier himself.”
“I really don’t see how he can do this laboring job,” Liz said, with a tactful appearance of agreeing. “Why, just that little bag I gave him almost knocked him over.” When Janice was gone, she asked, “Do you think she expected us to pay her for the hour and a half she stayed to watch the Negro?”
“Heaven knows. I feel vile.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. I feel like a vile person.”
“Why? You were fine. Jim, you were awfully, awfully good.”
From her hasty kiss on his cheek he gathered that, surprisingly, she meant it.
Sunday, husk among days, was full of fear. Even in happy times James felt on this day like a nameless statue on an empty plaza. Now he dared not go out, either to church or to the newsstand. Last night’s episode had the color of a public disgrace. James holed up in his inadequate cave. The walls seemed transparent, the floors sounding boards. The Negro’s threat to return had smashed the windows and broken the burglar locks. Never on a morning had he wished so intensely to be back in his home town, in Minnesota. The town had over seven thousand residents now, and a city manager instead of a mayor, and since the war its main drag had been robbed of its Indian name and called Douglas MacArthur Avenue; but the cars still parked at will on the elm-shaded streets, and he would still have a place, his father’s son.
On West Tenth Street, Liz and James lived four doors down from an Episcopal church. There was not an inch of air between the masonry of any of the buildings. When the church bells rang, their apartment quivered. Enveloped in this huge dead hum, he fought the picture of seven woolly-haired children squeezed into the cab of a truck, roadside lights flickering in their faces, the dark of the Carolina fields slipping away, great whoring cities bristling and then falling back, too, and then the children dozing, except for the oldest, a boy of ten, who remained awake to stare unblinking at the bent-necked blue lights of the Jersey Turnpike, the jet carpet carrying them to the sorcerer’s palace, where Harlem was choked with Cadillacs, and white men on subways yielded their seats to colored ladies. James hated the Negro chiefly because he was tactless. Janice’s mother, the scores of street beggars—this was misery, too, but misery that knew its limits, that kept an orbit and observed manners. But in his perfect ignorance the Negro was like one of those babies born with their hearts in front of their ribs. He gave no protection. You touched him and you killed him. Now that he had found this Northern man—the promised man—so free with money, he would be back today, and again tomorrow, with an even greater gift of mumbled debts. Why not? Thirty was nothing to James. He could give away a flat three thousand, and then thirty every week—more than thirty, fifty—and he and Liz would still be comfortable. Between him and the Negro the ground was unimpeded, and only a sin, a lack of charity, could be placed there as barrier.
By afternoon the focus of James’s discomfort had shifted from the possibility that the Negro had told the truth to the possibility that he had not. Reliving his behavior in this light was agonizing. He shuddered above the depths of fatuity the Negro must have seen in his clumsy kindness. If the story had been a fraud, the impatience of James’s charity was its one saving grace. The bits of abruptness, the gibes about the taxi shone in memory like jewels among refuse. The more he thought, the more he raged, aloud and privately. And the angrier he grew at the Negro, the less he wanted to see him, the more he dreaded him, an opponent invincibly armed with the weapon of having seen him as a fool. And those seven clambering children, and the wife bullying Liz while pretending to clean the apartment.
He only wanted to hide his head in the haven of the Bridgeses’ scheduled visit. They saw him as others saw him and knew his value. He would bask in their lucid external view.
Then, mercifully, it was dark, and his friends had come.
Rudy Bridges was also from Ontauk, Minnesota. He had been two classes ahead of James in the high school, a scholastic wonder, the more so because his father was a no-account who died of tuberculosis the year Rudy graduated. In the nine years since, Rudy’s fair hair had thinned severely, but the spherical head and the chubby lips of the prig had remained constant. His great hopes had been boiled down to instructing three sections of Barnard girls in American history. His wife came from Maryland. Augustina was a pale and handsome woman with an uncompromising, uptilted nose that displayed its nostrils. She wore her abundant chestnut hair strictly parted in the middle—a madonn
a for the Piston Age. They had no children, and, with elaborate managing, just enough money. James loved them as guests. In their own home, Rudy talked too much about his special field, U.S. domestic fiscal policy between Grant and Wilson, a desert of dullness where the lowliest scholar could be king. And Augustina, careful of the budget, went hungry and thirsty and inhibited everyone. Away from home she drank and ate beautifully, like the Rockville belle she was.
James tiptoed into the bedroom with their heavy coats. Martha was cased in her crib like a piece of apparatus manufacturing sleep. He heard Liz talking and, returning, asked, “Is she telling you about how we’re running the Underground Railway?”
“Why, no, James,” Augustina said slowly.
“I was telling them the accident Martha had in the park,” Liz said.
“Yeah, the poor kid just ran right into the swings,” he said, no doubt duplicating the story.
“Now, James,” Rudy said, “what is this mad tale about the Underground Railroad?” Years of teaching had perfected his speech habit of pronouncing everything, clichés and all, with artificial distinctness. Throughout James’s recital of the Negro story he kept saying “Ah, yes,” and when it was over and, like Janice the night before, James seemed to have reached an insufficient conclusion, Rudy felt compelled to clarify: “So the chances are these seven children are going to show up in the middle of supper.”
“Oh dear,” Augustina said with mock alarm. “Do you have enough food?”
Rudy, beside her on the sofa, attacked the tale pedantically. “Now. You say he was well dressed?”
“Sort of. But after all it was Saturday night.” James didn’t get the smile he expected.
“Did you look at his shoes?”
“Not much.”
“Would you say his accent was Southern or neutral?”
“Well, your wife’s the only Southerner I know. His speech was so peculiar and high, I couldn’t tell. Certainly he didn’t talk like you. Or me.”
“And at one point he used the word ‘thrilled.’ ”
“Yeah, that got me, too. But look: there were odd things, but when a man is in such a dither anyway—”
Augustina broke in, addressing Liz. “Did James really just hand him twenty dollars?”
“Twenty-one and a token,” James corrected.
Rudy laughed excessively—he had no sense of humor, so when he laughed it was too hard—and lifted his golden glass in toast. Augustina, to back him up, gripped hers, which was already empty. “James,” Rudy said, “you’re the soul of generosity.”
It was flattering, of course, but it wasn’t the way he thought they should take it. The point really wasn’t the twenty dollars at all; hard as it was to explain without seeming to ridicule Rudy’s salary, twenty dollars was not much.
“It doesn’t seem to me,” he said, “that he would have such an unlikely story, with so many authentic overtones, unless it were true. He didn’t look at all like a Harlem Negro—his head was uncanny—and he seemed to know about North Carolina and the relief agencies—”
“Nonsense, James. There are a hundred—a thousand—ways of obtaining such information. For instance: he quoted thirty-five cents an hour as his old wage. Well, you could research that. Is thirty-five cents an hour standard pay in the cotton belt? To be frank, it sounds low to me.”
“That was the thing,” Liz said, “that made me begin to wonder.”
James turned on her, surprised and stung. “Damn it, the trouble with people like you, who are passed from one happy breadwinner to the next without missing a damn meal, is you refuse to admit that outside your own bubble anybody can be dirt-poor. Of course people starve. Of course a man will pay a quarter an hour if nobody makes him pay more. Jesus.”
In the shocked hush, Augustina softly offered, “In the Deep South, I know, black people can just show up and attach themselves to you. It’s a leftover from slavery.”
“However,” Rudy went doggedly on, “mere dollar-and-cents quotations mean very little; the relative value, purchasewise, of, for instance, ten cents, ‘a thin dime’—”
James’s harangue had agitated Augustina; her nostrils darted this way and that, and when she heard her husband’s voice drone, she turned those marvellous staring apertures directly on him. Not totally insensitive, he slowly climbed out of his brain, sensed the heat in the room, and, the worst thing possible, fell silent.
The silence went on. Liz was blushing. James held his tongue, by way of apology to her. Rudy’s brittle gears shifted, his mouth flipped open, and he considerately said, “No, joke about it as we will, a problem in sheer currency can very seriously affect real people. To take an example, in the states of the Confederacy in the decade after the surrender of Appomattox—that is, from the year eighteen sixty-five to the year eighteen seventy-four …”
On Monday, James’s office was waiting for him. The white-headed tacks made his personal constellation on the cork. The wastebasket had been emptied. A blue envelope lay on the steel desk. Otherwise, not so much as a pen nib had been disturbed; the sketch he had been working on when Liz called still lay by the telephone, its random placement preserved like the handiwork of a superbly precious being.
He did his work all day with great precision, answering letters, making order. His office encouraged the illusion that each episode of life occupied a separate sheet, and could be dropped into the wastebasket, and destroyed by someone else in the night. One job that he gave his mind was to keep the phone from ringing. Whether the Negro came or not, with his tattered children or not, from ten to six let the problem belong to Liz. It was of her making, after all. There should be, in a man’s life, hours when he has never married, and his wife walks in magic circles she herself draws. It was little enough to ask; he had sold his talent for her sake. The phone did not ring, except once: Dudevant, effusive. The envelope contained a bonus.
As James made his way home, through indifferent crowds, the conviction grew that Liz had wanted to call and had been balked by the cold pressure he had applied at the other end of the line. He would find her clubbed, and Martha hacked in two. He wondered if he would be able to give a good enough description of the Negro to the police. He saw himself in the station stammering, blushing, despised by the policemen; had it been their families, they would have been there, knotting their fists, baring their teeth. Through this daydream ran the cowardly hope that the killer would not still be there, lingering stupidly, so that James would have to struggle with him, and be himself injured.
Liz waited until he was in the apartment and his coat was off before she communicated her news. Her tone was apprehensive. “He came again, when Martha was having her nap. I went to the stairs—I was terribly busy cleaning up. He said the man who promised to sell him the furniture wouldn’t give him the beds if he didn’t give him ten dollars more, and I asked him why he wasn’t at his job, and he said something about Wednesday, I don’t know. I told him we had given him all we could, and I didn’t have a dollar—which was true; you went off with the money and we have nothing for supper. Anyway, he seemed to have expected it, and was really very nice. So I guess he was a crook.”
“Thank God,” he said, and they never saw the Negro again, and their happiness returned.
Walter Briggs
Coming back from Boston, Jack drove, his baby son slept in a Carry-Cot on the front seat beside him, and in the back seat Claire sang to their girl, Jo, age two.
“When the pie was open, the birds began to—?”
“King,” the child said.
“Wasn’t that a dainty dish, to set before the—?”
“King!”
“That’s right.”
“Sing birdy nose song.”
“Sing birdy nose song? I don’t know the birdy nose song. You sing the birdy nose song. How does it go?”
“How does go?”
“I’m asking you. Who sings you the birdy nose song? Did Miss Duni do that?”
Jo laughed at the old joke; “Miss Du
ni” was a phrase that had popped magically from her mouth one day. “Who’s Miss Duni?” she asked now.
“I don’t know who Miss Duni is. You’re the one who knows Miss Duni. When did she teach you the birdy nose song?”
“Birdy nose, birdy nose, knock knock knock,” the little girl chanted lightly.
“What a good song! I wish Miss Duni would teach it to me.”
“It’s the second stanza of the blackbird song,” Jack said. “Down came a blackbird and picked off her nose.”
“I’ve never sung it to her,” Claire vowed.
“But you know it. It’s in your genes.”
In ten minutes—the trip took fifty—the child fell asleep, and Claire eased this weight off her lap. Then, turning from a mother into a wife, she rested her chin on the back of the front seat, near Jack’s shoulder, and breathed on the right side of his neck.
“Who did you like best at the party?” he asked.
“I don’t know, really. It’s hard. I’ll say Langmuir, because he saw what I meant about Sherman Adams.”
“Everybody saw what you meant; it’s just that everybody saw it was beside the point.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Who’s best,” he asked her, “Langmuir or Behnie?” This game, Who’s Best?, was one of their few devices for whiling away enforced time together. A poor game, it lacked the minimal element of competition needed to excite Jack.
“I suppose Langmuir,” Claire said, after taking thought.
“Knifing poor old Behnie in the back. And he loves you so.”
“He is kind; I hate myself. Uh—who’s best, Behnie, or the boy with the cleft chin and the help-me eyes?”
“The boy with the help-me eyes,” he promptly answered. “Oh, he’s awful. What is his name?”
“Crowley? Cra—Crackers?”
“Something like that. Graham Crackers. What was the name of the girl he was with with the big ears who was so lovely?”
