The Early Stories

by John Updike

  He dropped to one knee beside the sofa where the boy, his upper lip fuzzy and his eyebrows manly dark, stoically gazed into the transcendent flickering; Richard’s own voice nearly cracked, asking, “Would it be less boring if Dad still lived here?”

  “No-oh”: the answer was instantaneous and impatient, as if the question had been anticipated. Did the boy mean it? His eyes did not for an instant glance sideways, perhaps out of fear of betraying himself, perhaps out of genuine boredom with grownups and their gestures. On television, satisfyingly, gestures killed. Richard rose from his supplicant position, relieved to hear Joan coming down the stairs. She was dressed to go out, in the snug black dress with the scalloped neckline, and a collar of Mexican silver. He was wary. He must be wary. They had had it. They must have had it.

  Yet the cocktails, and the seafood, and the wine displaced his wariness; he heard himself saying, to the so familiar and so strange face across the table, “She’s lovely, and loves me, you know”—he felt embarrassed, like a son suddenly aware that his mother, though politely attentive, is indifferent to the urgency of an athletic contest being described—“but she does spell everything out, and wants everything spelled out to her. It’s like being back in the second grade. And the worst thing is, for all this explaining, for all this glorious fucking, she’s still not real to me, the way—you are.” His voice did break; he had gone too far.

  Joan put her left hand, still bearing their wedding ring, flat on the tablecloth in a sensible, level gesture. “She will be,” she promised. “It’s a matter of time.”

  The old pattern was still the one visible to the world. The waitress, who had taught their children in Sunday school, greeted them as if their marriage were unbroken; they ate in this restaurant three or four times a year, and were on schedule. They had known the ginger-haired contractor who had built it, this mock-antique wing, a dozen years ago, and then left town, bankrupt but oddly cheerful. His memory hovered between the beams. Another couple, older than the Maples—the husband had once worked with Richard on a town committee—came up to their booth beaming, jollying, in that obligatory American way. Did they know? It didn’t much matter, in this nation of temporary arrangements. The Maples jollied back as one, and tumbled loose only when the older couple moved away. Joan gazed after their backs. “I wonder what they have,” she asked, “that we didn’t.”

  “Maybe they had less,” Richard said, “so they didn’t expect more.”

  “That’s too easy.” She was a shade resistant to his veiled compliments; he was grateful. Please resist.

  He asked, “How do you think the kids are doing? John seemed withdrawn.”

  “That’s how he is. Stop picking at him.”

  “I just don’t want him to think he has to be your little husband. That house feels huge now.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was; he put his hands palms up on the table.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Joan said, “how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?”

  “Should I order another bottle?” He was dismayed, secretly: the waste.

  She saw this, and said, “No. Just give me half of what’s in your glass.”

  “You can have it all.” He poured.

  She said, “So your fucking is really glorious?”

  He was embarrassed by the remark now, and feared it set a distasteful trend. As with Ruth there was an etiquette of independent adultery, so with Joan some code of separation must be maintained. “It usually is,” he told her, “between people who aren’t married.”

  “Is dat right, white man?” A swallow of his wine inside her, Joan began to swell with impending hilarity. She leaned as close as the table would permit. “You must promise”—a gesture went with “promise,” a protesting little splaying of her hands—“never to tell this to anybody, not even Ruth.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me. In fact, don’t.” He understood why she had been laconic up to now; she had been wanting to talk about her lover, holding him warm within her like a baby. She was going to betray him. “Please don’t,” Richard said.

  “Don’t be such a prig. You’re the only person I can talk to, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “That’s what you said about our going to bed in my apartment.”

  “Did she mind?”

  “Incredibly.”

  Joan laughed, and Richard was struck, for the thousandth time, by the perfection of her teeth, even and rounded and white, bared by her lips as if in proof of a perfect skull, an immaculate soul. Her glee whirled her to a kind of heaven as she confided stories about herself and Andy—how he and a motel manageress had quarrelled over the lack of towels in a room taken for the afternoon, how he fell asleep for exactly seven minutes each time after making love. Richard had known Andy for years, a slender swarthy specialist in corporation law, himself divorced, though professionally engaged in the finicking arrangement of giant mergers. A fussy dresser, a churchman, he brought to many occasions an undue dignity and perhaps had been more attracted to Joan’s surface glaze, her New England cool, than the mischievous imps underneath. “My psychiatrist thinks Andy was symbiotic with you, and now that you’re gone, I can see him as absurd.”

  “He’s not absurd. He’s good, loyal, handsome, prosperous. He tithes. He has a twelve handicap. He loves you.”

  “He protects you from me, you mean. His buttons!—we have to allow a half-hour afterwards for him to do up all his buttons. If they made four-piece suits, he’d wear them. And he washes—he washes everything, every time.”

  “Stop,” Richard begged. “Stop telling me all this.”

  But she was giddy amid the spinning mirrors of her betrayals, her face so flushed and aquiver the waitress sympathetically giggled, pouring the Maples their coffee. Joan’s face was pink as a peony, her eyes a blue pale as ice, almost transparent. He saw through her words to what she was saying—that these lovers, however we love them, are not us, are not sacred as reality is sacred. We are reality. We have made children. We gave each other our young bodies. We promised to grow old together.

  Joan described an incident in her house, once theirs, when the plumber unexpectedly arrived. Richard had to laugh with her; that house’s plumbing problems were an old joke, an ongoing saga. “The back-door bell rang, Mr. Kelly stomped right in, you know how the kitchen echoes in the bedroom, we had had it.” She looked, to see if her meaning was clear. He nodded. Her eyes sparkled. She emphasized, of the knock, “Just at the very moment,” and, with a gesture akin to the gentle clap in the car a world ago, drew with one fingertip a v in the air, as if beginning to write “very.” The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.

  Killing

  Lynne’s father’s hand felt warm and even strong, though he lay unconscious, dying. In this expensive pastel room of the nursing home, he was starving, he was dying of thirst, as surely as if he had been abandoned in a desert. His breath stank. The smell from the parched hole that had been his mouth was like nothing else bodily she had ever smelled—foul but in no way fertile, an acid ultimate of carnality. Yet the presence was still his; in his unconscious struggle for breath, his gray face flitted, soundlessly muttering, into expressions she knew—the helpless raised eyebrows that preceded an attempt at the dinner table to be droll, or a sudden stiffening of the upper lip that warned of one of his rare, pained, carefully phrased reprimands. A lawyer, lost to his family in the machinations of cities and corporations, he had been a distant father, reluctant to chastise, the dinnertime joke his most comfortable approach to affection. He had spent his free time out of the house, puttering at tasks he lacked a son to share. In New Hampshire, over many summers, he had built a quarter-mile of stone wall with his own hands; in Boston, there had been the brick terrace to level and weed; in the suburb of his r
etirement, compost heaps to tend and broken fences to repair and redesign. In the year past, his hand had lost its workman’s roughness. There was no task his failing brain could direct his hand to seize. Unthinkingly, Lynne had asked him, this past summer, to help one of the children to build a bird-house; manfully, chuckling with energy, he had assembled the tools, the wood, the nails. His pipe clenched in his teeth as jauntily as ever, he had gone through the familiar motions while his grandson gazed in gathering disbelief at the hammered-together jumble of wood. The old man stood back at last, gazed with the child, saw clearly for a moment, and abandoned such jobs forever. Dry and uncallused, his hand rested warm in his daughter’s.

  Sometimes it returned her squeeze, or the agitation that passed across his face caused his shallow pulse to race. “Just relax,” she would chant to him then, bending close, into his caustic breath. “Re-lax. It’s all right. I’m right here, Daddy. I won’t go away.”

  Lynne was reminded, in these hours of holding and waiting, of a childhood episode scarcely remembered for thirty years. It had been so strange, so out of both their characters. She had been a cheerful child—what they called in those years “well adjusted.” At the age of thirteen or so, the first of three daughters to be entering womanhood, she was visited by insomnia, an inexplicable wakefulness that made sleep a magic kingdom impossible to reach and that turned the silhouetted furniture of her room into presences that might, if left unwatched, come horribly to life. Her mother dismissed the terror with the same lightness with which she had explained menstruation, as an untidiness connected with “the aging process”; it was her father, surprisingly, who took the development seriously. As Lynne remembered it, he would come home pale from one of his innumerable meetings—the cold of the Common on his face, the weight of City Hall on his shoulders—and, if he found her awake, would sit by her bed for hours, holding her hand and talking enough to be “company.” Perhaps what had seemed hours to her had been a few minutes, perhaps her recollection had expanded a few incidents into a lengthy episode. In her memory, his voice had been not merely paternal but amused, leisurely, enjoying itself, as if this visiting were less a duty than an occasion to be relished, in the manner of the country world where he had been a boy, where sitting and talking had been a principal recreation. He had not begrudged her his time, and she wanted not to begrudge him her company now. She would put him to sleep.

  Yet she hated the nursing home, hated and fled it—its cloaked odors, its incessant television, its expensive false order and hypocrisy of false cheer, its stifling vulgarity. These common dying and their coarse nurses were the very people her father had raised her to avoid, to rise above. “Well, aren’t you the handsome boy!” the supervisor had exclaimed to him upon admittance, and tapped him on the arm like a brash girlfriend.

  His body, tempered by the chores he had always assigned himself, had stubbornly outlasted his judicious brain; then, suddenly, it began to surrender. A succession of little strokes had brought him, who a week earlier could shuffle down the hall between Lynne and a male nurse, to the point where he could not swallow. A decision arose. “The decision is yours,” the doctor said. His face was heavy, kindly, self-protective, formal. The decision was whether or not to move her father to a hospital, where he could be fed intravenously and his life could be prolonged. She had decided not. The fear that the ambulance ride would compromise her father’s dignity had been uppermost in her mind. But from the way the doctor seized her hand and pronounced with a solemn, artificial clarity, “You have made a wise decision,” Lynne realized that her decision had been to kill her father. He could not swallow. He could not drink. Abandoned, he must die.

  Her voice took flight over the telephone, seeking escape from this responsibility. Why had the doctors given it to her? Couldn’t they do it themselves? What would her mother have done? Lynne called her sisters, one in Chicago, one in Texas. Of course, they agreed, she had made the right decision. The only decision. Their common inheritance, their mother’s common sense, spoke through them so firmly that she almost forgave her sisters the safe distance from which they spoke. Yet their assurances evaporated within an hour. She called her minister; he came and had tea and told her that her decision was right, even holy. He seemed hard-boiled and unctuous both. After he left, she sat and held in her palms, votively, a teacup that had been her mother’s. Her mother had died two years ago, leaving her daughters her china, her common sense, and a stately old man disintegrating from the head down. The cup, with its rim of gold and its band of cinnamon-red arabesques, had become sacred in this extremity; Lynne closed her eyes and waited for her mother to speak through the fragile cool shape in her hands. Sensing nothing but a widening abyss, she opened her eyes and telephoned her husband, who was estranged from her and living in Boston. He had lodged himself in the grid of Back Bay, a few blocks from where she had grown up.

  “Of course, dear,” Martin said, his voice grave and paternal, as it had become. “You’ve made the only possible decision.”

  “Oh, you can say that, you can all say that,” Lynne cried into the hard receiver, heavier than the cup had been. “But I’m the one who had to do it. I’m killing him, and I’m the one who has to go watch it happen. It’s incredible. His mouth wants water. He’s drying up!”

  “Why visit him?” Martin asked. “Isn’t he unconscious?”

  “He might wake up and be frightened,” she said, and the image sprang a sobbing so great she had to hang up.

  Martin called back a judicious while later. Lynne was touched, thinking that he had telepathically given her time to cry herself out, go to the bathroom, and heat some coffee. But it seemed he had spent the time discussing her with his mistress. “Harriet says,” he said, authoritatively, “the other decision would be downright neurotic, to cart him to the hospital and torture him with a lot of tubes. Not to mention the money.”

  “Tell Harriet I certainly don’t want to do anything that would seem neurotic to her. She can relax about the money, though; she is not one of his heirs.”

  Martin sounded hurt. “She was very sympathetic with you. She started to cry herself.”

  “Tell her thanks a lot for her sympathy. Why doesn’t she show it by letting you come back?”

  “I don’t want to come back,” Martin said, in his new, grave, paternal voice.

  “Oh, shit to you.” Hanging up, Lynne wondered at her sensation of joy, of release; then realized that, in her anger with this man and his presumptuous mistress, she had for the first time in days thought of something other than the nursing home, and her father’s dying, and her guilt.

  She could not make herself stay. She would hold his hand for minutes that seemed hours, having announced her presence in his deaf ear, having settled herself to wait by his side. His face as it dried was sinking in upon itself, with that startled expression mummies have; the distance between his raised eyebrows and lowered eyelashes seemed enormous. His hand would twitch, or her hand, wandering, would come upon his pulse, and the sign of life would horrify her, like the sight of roaches scuttling in the sink when, in the middle of the night, the kitchen light is suddenly turned on. “Daddy, I must leave for a minute,” she would say, and flee.

  Her step seemed miraculously elastic to herself as she strode down the hall. The heads of the dying bobbed about her amid white sheets. There was a little gauzy-haired, red-faced lady who, locked into a geriatric chair, kept crying “Help” and clapping her hands. She paused as Lynne passed, then resumed. “Help.” Clap clap. “Help.” The barred door. Air. Life. Barberry and pachysandra had been planted in square beds around the entrance. The parking lot was newly paved. This mundane earth and asphalt amazed Lynne. The sun burned like a silver sore place low in the gray November sky. She slid into her car; its engine came alive.

  The neighborhood of the nursing home was unfamiliar. She bought dinner for herself and the children in the innocent carnival of a supermarket where she had never shopped before. She let herself be fed a sandwich and a Co
ke in a diner full of strange men. She inhaled the fragrances of a gasoline station where a chunky attendant in green coveralls filled her tank so matter-of-factly that it seemed impossible the life of another man, whose sperm had become her life, was draining away, by her decision, beneath this chalky cold sky in a city of utter strangers.

  Dying, her father had become sexual. Her mother no longer intervening, his manhood was revealed. For a time, after she died, Lynne and Martin had thought to have him live with them. But, the first night of his trial visit, he had woken them, clearing his throat in the hall outside their bedroom. When Lynne had opened the door, he told her, his face pale with fury, the top and bottom of his pajamas mismatched, that no one had ever hurt him as she had this night. At first she didn’t understand. Then she blushed. “But, Daddy, he’s my husband. You’re my father. I’m not Mother, I’m Lynne.” She added, desperate to clarify, “Mother died, don’t you remember?”

  The anger was slow to leave his face, though the point seemed taken. His eyes narrowed with a legal canniness. “Allegedly,” he said.

  Martin had laughed at that, and the two of them led him back to his bed. But they were as little able to get back to sleep as if they had, indeed, been lovers and the man thrashing in the adjacent bedroom was the wronged husband. She perceived only later an irony of that night: the man who was with her didn’t want to be. Martin’s affair with Harriet had begun, and his willingness to try living with her father was his last husbandly kindness. She remembered later his great relief when she announced it wouldn’t work. While her father, back in his own house, grew more puzzled and rebellious, passing from a succession of housekeepers to a live-in couple to a burly male nurse, her husband confessed more and more, and asked to separate. Once the old man was safely placed in a nursing home, Martin left. Then, abandoned, Lynne perceived the gallantry of her father’s refusal to submit to dying. As his reason fell away, he who had been so mild and legal had become violent and lawless; his lifelong habit of commanding respect was now twisted into a tyrannical rage, a defiant incontinence, a hitting of nurses with his fists, a struggle against a locked geriatric chair until both toppled. In his pugnacity and ferocity Lynne saw the force, now naked, that had carved from the hard world a shelter for his four dependent females. With Martin’s leaving, she, too, was naked. Herself helpless, she at last loved her father in his helplessness. Her love made all the more shameful her inability to stay with him, to lull his panic at the passage facing him as he had once lulled her panic at entering womanhood.