by John Updike
The Reverend Mr. Trussel asked if he might attempt to elucidate the question asked by the good Mrs. MacMillan. He said that at first the Committee had met in the expectation that the Director would reappear and then, in later sessions, as a board of inquiry into where the Director had gone. Finally, they had continued to meet because, in his opinion, they had come to love and need one another.
Miss Beame said she thought that was a touching and true description.
Mrs. Hepple said she didn’t see where any of it mattered at this point because not only were most of the Founders in attendance but many new members as well. That the membership had grown instead of withering away as one would suppose if the Committee were entirely dependent upon the Director, who for that matter she had quite forgotten what he looked like.
Mr. de Muth volunteered that he had come onto the Committee in his capacity as a social-science teacher because he understood at that time there had been under consideration a program to arrange a lecture series or series of happenings on the theme of betterment of resources at the public schools.
Mr. Tjadel said he had come on in his capacity as a tree surgeon because of the “ecology angle.”
Mrs. MacMillan said she had been given the impression her interest in oral contraception might be applied by the Committee to the town drinking water.
The Chairman stated that it was all a muddle and again offered his resignation.
The Secretary pointed out that all of these projects had been under consideration and as far as she was concerned still were.
Mr. Langbehn began to speak.
The Treasurer interrupted to compliment Mrs. Landis on the quality of her refreshments.
Mr. Langbehn thanked all present for bearing with him and filling him in so thoroughly. He said that though none of the projects described had apparently come to fruition he nevertheless did not feel that the members of the Committee including himself should entertain the fear that their efforts were in vain. That on the contrary they had created much talk and interest in the wider community, and that just the fact that they continued to attract to membership such distinguished and personable citizens as those present negated any idea of failure. [Several sentences missed here due to accident spilling glass.—SEC.] That what was needed was not any long-term narrowing of the horizons established by the Director but a momentary closer focus upon some doubtless limited but feasible short-term goal within the immediate community.
Mrs. Hepple suggested that a dance or rummage sale be held to raise funds so such a goal might be attacked.
Miss Beame thought that a square dance would be better than a blacktie dance so as to attract young people, who hate to dress up.
The Chairman moved that the bylaws be amended so as to permit the Committee to disband.
No one seconded.
Mr. Tjadel said he didn’t see why there was all this worrying about human resources, in his opinion they had fine human resources right here in this room. If the trunk is solid, he said, the branches will flourish. There was laughter and applause.
The Treasurer volunteered that in his opinion this was the best meeting yet and that to make itself more effective the Committee should meet more often.
Miss Beame said her heart went out to the Chairman and she thought his wishes should be respected.
Reverend Mr. Trussel moved that the board of officers as presented by the Nominating Sub-Committee be accepted with the proviso that the Chairman be nominated as Chairman pro tem and that to assist his labors further a Sub-Committee on Goals and Purposes be created, with Mr. Langbehn and Miss Beame as co-chairpersons.
Mrs. Hepple and others seconded.
The affirmative vote was unanimous, the Chairman abstaining.
Believers
The woman next to him at the party is sipping ginger ale, though he knows her to be a devoted drinker of vodka martinis. He points at the sparkling beverage and says, “Lent?” She nods. Her eyes are calm as a statue’s. He knows her to be a believer. So is he. Let us christen him Credo.
Credo is in the basement of a church. He is on the church Church Heritage Committee, along with four old ladies. Their problem is, they are going to move to a new church, of white plastic, and what shall they do with all this old religious furniture? It has been accumulating for centuries: box-pew doors and tin footwarmers from the edifice of 1736; carpeted kneeling stools and velvet collection bags from the edifice of 1812; a gargantuan Gothic deacon’s bench, of pinnacled oak, from the edifice of 1885. It would sorely test and strain seventeen contemporary laymen to lift and move it; there must have been giants in those days, giants of faith.
One of the old ladies mounts up onto its padded arms. Puffs of dust sprout beneath her feet. She retrieves something—a kind of jewel—from the pinnacle of the ornate bench back. They pass it around. It is a little brown photograph embedded in cracked glass, of a Victorian child wearing a paper crown. “Maybe some church just starting up would like to buy it all,” the first lady says.
“One of those new California sects,” the second amplifies.
“Never,” says Credo. “Nobody wants this junk.”
“At least,” the third lady begs, “let’s get an antique dealer to appraise the picture frames.” Behind an old spinet and cartons of warped hymnals they have uncovered perhaps forty picture frames, all empty. “People will pay a fortune for such things nowadays.”
“What people?” Credo asks. He cannot believe it. The basement seems airless; he cannot breathe. The ancient furnace comes on. Its awakening shudder shakes loose flakes of asbestos wrapping from the pipes; like snow the flakes drift down onto old hymnals, picture frames, piano stools, broken little chairs from the Sunday-school, attendance charts with pasted-on gold stars coming unstuck, old men’s-club bowling-league bowling shoes, kneeling stools worn like ox yokes, tin footwarmers perforated like cabbage graters. God, it is depressing. God.
The fourth old lady has brought a paper shopping bag. Out of it she pulls dust rags, a bottle of Windex, a rainbow of Magic Markers, some shipping tags in two colors—green for preserve, red for destroy. “Let’s make some decisions,” she says briskly. “Let’s separate the sheep from the goats.”
Credo is visiting with his minister. The minister is very well informed. He says, “The Dow Jones was off two-point-three today, that’s one less soprano pipe on our new Fiberglas organ.” The minister’s wife brings them in tea and honey. The jar of honey glows in a shaft of dusty parsonage sunlight. The minister’s wife’s hair is up in a towering beehive; she is a voluptuous blonde. Credo’s wife is a mousy brunette. Buy now, pay later, he thinks, piously sipping.
Credo surveys the new church. The glistening bubble-shaped shell of white plastic holds a multitude of pastel rooms. He served on the New Creation Committee, which worked with the team of architects; the endless meetings and countless blueprints have become reality. There are many petty disappointments. The altar spot has been rheostatted in sync with the pulpit spot. The pre-fab steeple weeps in a storm. The Sunday-school room dividers scrape and buckle when pulled into place. The organ sounds like Fiberglas. The duct blower blows down the wrong duct and keeps extinguishing the pilot light in the wall oven. The proportions of the boiler room do not uplift the heart. The foundation slab is already cracking. Credo follows the sinuous crack with his eyes. The earth, of course, slumps and shrugs; the continental plates are sliding. And yet, somehow one expects that it will hold firm beneath a church. And yet, by this pattern miracles would become everyday and a tyranny. And yet, it would have been nice had the Lisbon earthquake not occurred, and not given Voltaire a laughingpoint.
• • •
He reads St. Augustine. It is too hot, too radiant, blinding, and wild. Is there indeed, O Lord my God, aught in me that can contain Thee? do then heaven and earth, which Thou hast made, and wherein Thou hast made me, contain Thee? or, because nothing which exists could exist without Thee, doth therefore whatever exists contain Thee? Since, then, I too exist, w
hy do I seek that Thou shouldest enter into me, who were not, wert Thou not in me? Why? It is too serious, frightening, and exciting; Credo has to get up and dull himself with a drink so he can continue reading. Augustine scribbles on a dizzying verge: he nearly indicts God for his helplessly damned infancy, for his schoolboy whippings; then pulls back, blames himself, and exonerates the Lord. Let not my soul faint under Thy discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto Thee all Thy mercies, whereby Thou hast drawn me out of all my most evil ways, that Thou mightest become a delight to me above all the allurements which I once pursued.
It is too terrific, there is no relenting; Credo makes another drink, stares out the window, lets in the cat, asks a child how his day went at school, anything for relief from this whirlwind. Is not all this smoke and wind? and was there nothing else whereon to exercise my wit and tongue? Thy praises, Lord, Thy praises might have stayed the yet tender shoot of my heart by the prop of Thy Scriptures; so had it not trailed away amid these empty trifles, a defiled prey for the fowls of the air. For in more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels. Credo cannot go on, he has waited four decades to read this, his heart cannot withstand it. It is too strict and searing, fierce and judicious; nothing alloyed can survive within it. He reads the New York Times Sunday Magazine instead. “China: Old Hands and New.” “The Black Bourgeoisie Flees the Ghetto.” “I Was a Marigold Head.” He flips through Sports Illustrated, Art News, Rolling Stone. He puts St. Augustine back on the shelf, between Marcus Aurelius and Boethius. The book is safe there. He will take it down again, when he is sixty-five, and ready. These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. Wilt Thou hold Thy peace for ever?
Credo is in a motel. He has brought a shaker of vodka and vermouth and ice, and a can of ginger ale, just in case. The woman with him cannot be tempted. It is still Lent. She sips from the can, and he from the shaker; they take off each other’s clothes. Her body is radiant, blinding, strict, serious, exciting. They admire each other, they make of one another an occasion for joy. Because they are believers, their acts possess dimensions of glory and of risk; they are flirting with being damned, though they do not say this. They say only gracious things, commensurate with the gratitude and exaltation they feel. To arouse her again, he quotes St. Augustine: If bodies please thee, praise God in occasion of them, and turn back thy love upon their Maker lest in these things which please thee, thou displease.
Credo is in a hospital. He has had an accident, playing touch football, and then an operation, reattaching with a screw his tibial tuberosity. As the drugs in his blood ebb, pain rises beneath him like a poisonous squid rising beneath a bather floating gently in the ocean. It seizes his knee. It will not let go. By the luminescent watch on the night table it is two hours before he can ring the nurse and receive his next allotment of Demerol. A single window shows a dead town, lit by streetlights. Credo prays. Aloud. It is a long conversational prayer, neither apologetic nor dubious; his pain has won him a new status. He speaks aloud as if on television, giving the dead-of-the-night news. Abruptly, his chest breaks out in a sharp sweet copious sweat. He miraculously relaxes. The squid lets go, falls back, into unknowable depths. The nurse when she comes finds Credo asleep. It is morning. Up and down the hall, rosary beads click.
He is sitting on the Boston–Cambridge subway, jiggling and swaying opposite other men jiggling and swaying. Back to work, though he limps now. He will always limp. The body does not forgive; only God forgives. Between two stops, the subway surfaces over a bridge, into the light. Below, a river sparkles as if not polluted; sailboats tilt in the shining wind. Credo is reminded of that passage in the Venerable Bede when, arguing for conversion to Christianity, an ealdorman likens our life to the flight of a sparrow through the bright mead-hall. Such appears to me, king, this present life of man on earth in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though you were sitting at the banquet with your leaders and thanes in winter and the fire was lighted and your hall warmed, and it rained and snowed and stormed outside; and there should come a sparrow and quickly fly through the house, come in through one door and go out through the other.… So this life of men appears save for but a little while; what goes before or what follows after we do not know.
In this interval of brightness Credo notices a particular man opposite him, a commonplace, weary-looking man, of average height and weight, costumed unaggressively, yet with something profoundly uncongenial and settled about his mouth, and an overall look of perfect integration with the heartless machine of the world. Credo takes him for an atheist. He thinks, Between this innocuous fellow and myself yawns an eternal abyss, because I am a believer.
The subway, rattling, plunges back underground. Or, it may be, as some extreme saints have implied, that, crushed beneath the majesty of the Infinite, believers and non-believers are exactly alike.
Eclipse
I went out into the back yard and the usually roundish spots of dappled sunlight underneath the trees were all shaped like feathers, crescent in the same direction, from left to right. Though it was five o’clock on a summer afternoon, the birds were singing goodbye to the day, and their merged song seemed to soak the strange air in an additional strangeness. A kind of silence prevailed. Few cars were moving on the streets of the town. Of my children only the baby dared come into the yard with me. She wore just underpants, and as she stood beneath a tree, bulging her belly toward me in the mood of jolly flirtation she has grown into at the age of two, her bare skin was awash with pale crescents. It crossed my mind that she might be harmed, but I couldn’t think how. Cancer?
The eclipse was to be over ninety percent in our latitude, and the newspapers and television for days had been warning us not to look at it. I looked up, a split-second Prometheus, and looked away. The bitten silhouette of the sun lingered redly on my retinas. The day was half cloudy, and my impression had been of the sun struggling, amid a furious knotted huddle of black-and-silver clouds, with an enemy too dreadful to be seen, with an eater as ghostly and hungry as time. Every blade of grass cast a long bluish-brown shadow, as at dawn.
My wife shouted from behind the kitchen screen door that as long as I was out there I might as well burn the wastepaper. She darted from the house, eyes downcast, with the wastebasket, and darted back again, leaving the naked baby and me to wander up through the strained sunlight to the wire trash barrel. After my forbidden peek at the sun, the flames dancing transparently from the blackening paper—yesterday’s Boston Globe, a milk carton, a Hi Ho cracker box—seemed dimmer than shadows, and in the teeth of all the warnings I looked up again. The clouds seemed bunched and twirled as if to plug a hole in the sky, and the burning afterimage was the shape of a near-new moon, horns pointed down. It was gigantically unnatural, and I lingered in the yard under the vague apprehension that in some future life I might be called before a cosmic court to testify to this assault. I seemed to be the sole witness. The town around my yard was hushed, all but the singing of the birds, who were invisible. The feathers under the trees had changed direction, and curved from right to left.
Then I saw my neighbor sitting on her porch. My neighbor is a widow, with white hair and brown skin; she has in her yard an aluminum-and-nylon-net chaise longue on which she lies at every opportunity, head back, arms spread, prostrate under the sun. Now she hunched dismally on her porch steps in the shade, which was scarcely darker than the light. I walked toward her and hailed her as a visitor to the moon might salute a survivor of a previous expedition. “How do you like the eclipse?” I called over the fence that distinguished our holdings on this suddenly insubstantial and lunar earth.
“I don’t like it,” she answered, shading her face with a hand. “They say you shouldn’t go out in it.”
“I thought it was just you shouldn’t look at it.”
“There’s something in the rays,” she explained, in a voice far louder than it needed to be, for silence framed us. “I shut a
ll the windows on that side of the house and had to come out for some air.”
“I think it’ll pass,” I told her.
“Don’t let the baby look up,” she warned, and turned away from talking to me, as if the open use of her voice exposed her more fatally to the rays.
Superstition, I thought, walking back through my yard, clutching my child’s hand as tightly as a good-luck token. There was no question in her touch. Day, night, twilight, noon were all wonders to her, unscheduled, free from all bondage of prediction. The sun was being restored to itself and soon would radiate influence as brazenly as ever—and in this sense my daughter’s blind trust was vindicated. Nevertheless, I was glad that the eclipse had passed, as it were, over her head; for in my own life I felt a certain assurance evaporate forever under the reality of the sun’s disgrace.
FAR OUT
Archangel
Onyx and split cedar and bronze vessels lowered into still water: these things I offer. Porphyry, teakwood, jasmine, and myrrh: these gifts I bring. The sheen of my sandals is dulled by the dust of cloves. My wings are waxed with nectar. My eyes are diamonds in whose facets red gold is mirrored. My face is a mask of ivory: Love me. Listen to my promises:
Cold water will drip from the intricately chased designs of the bronze vessels. Thick-lipped urns will sweat in the fragrant cellars. The orchards never weary of bearing on my islands. The very leaves give nourishment. The banked branches never crowd the paths. The grape vines will grow unattended. The very seeds of the berries are sweet nuts. Why do you smile? Have you never been hungry?
The workmanship of the bowers will be immaculate. Where the elements are joined, a sword of the thinnest whisper will find its point excluded. Where the beams have been tapered, each swipe of the plane is continuous. Where the wood needed locking, pegs of a counter grain have been driven. The ceilings are high, for coolness, and the spaced shingles seal at the first breath of mist. Though the windows are open, the eaves of the roof are so wide that nothing of the rain comes into the rooms but its scent. Mats of perfect cleanness cover the floor. The fire is cupped in black rock and sustained on a smooth breast of ash. Have you never lacked shelter?
