The Centaurus

by John Updike

  My father said to the hitchhiker, “There it is. The grand and glorious city of Alton. If anybody had ever come to me when I was a kid and told me I’d die in Alton, PA, I would have laughed in his face. I’d never heard of it.”

  “It’s a dirty town,” the hitchhiker said.

  To me it looked so beautiful.

  My father stopped the car at the intersection of 122 and the Lancaster Pike; the light was red. The pike to the right became a concrete bridge, the Running Horse Bridge, on whose other side Alton began in earnest. To the left it was three miles to Olinger and another two miles to Ely. “This is it,” my father said. “We got to put you out into the cold.”

  The hitchhiker opened his door. Since my father had announced my skin, the flirtatious emanations in the car had weakened. Nevertheless, perhaps by accident, the back of my neck was touched. In the open air the hobo hugged the paper tight against his chest. The liquid face turned stiff. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” my father called to him.

  The hitchhiker sneered. “Nnnnyeah.” The door slammed. The light turned green. My heart slowed its beating. We nosed onto the pike and drove against the current of the Alton-bound traffic. Through the dusty rear window I watched our guest, looking like a messenger with his undisclosed bundle, dwindle. The hitchhiker became a brown wisp at the mouth of the bridge, flew upwards, vanished. My father said to me in the most matter-of-fact tone, “That man was a gentleman.”

  There was a tantrum rich and bristling within me; I coldly intended to berate him all the way to school. “This is really great,” I said. “Really great. You’re in such a hurry you won’t let me eat a rotten bite of breakfast and then you pick up some rotten bum and go three miles out of your way for him and he doesn’t even thank you. Now we will be late for school. I can just see Zimmerman, looking at his watch, stamping up and down in the halls, wondering where you are. Really, Daddy, I’d think you’d have more sense once in a while. What do you see in these bums? Is it my fault I was born so you couldn’t be a bum? Florida. And then telling him about my skin. That was very nice, I thank you very much. Whyncha make me take off my shirt while you’re at it? Maybe I should have showed him my crusty legs. Whydya keep telling everybody every damn thing there is to tell? Who cares, nobody cares, all that moron cared about was killing dogs and breathing on the back of my neck. The white stoops of Baltimore, for Heaven’s sake. Really, Daddy, what do you think about when you babble like that?”

  But you can’t keep scolding when the other person says nothing. For the second mile to Olinger we were silent together. He was pressing, panicked now at being late, passing entire rows of cars and hogging the center of the pike. The steering wheel slithered in his hands when our tires got caught in the trolley tracks. He was lucky; we made good time. As we passed the billboard on which the Lions and Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks all welcomed us to Olinger, my father said, “Don’t worry about him knowing about your skin, Peter. He’ll forget. That’s the one thing you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell ‘em. I look at those dumb blank faces every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace. I remember, when my old man knew he was dying, he opened his eyes on the bed and looked up at Mom and Alma and me and said, ‘Do you think I’ll be eternally for gotten?’ I often think about that. Eternally forgotten. That was a terrible thing for a minister to say. It scared the living daylights out of me.”

  The last children were crowding into the doors when we pulled into the high school lot. The bell must just have rung. In turning to get out of the car and scoop up my books, I glanced into the back seat. “Daddy!” I called.”Your gloves are gone!”

  He was already some paces away from the car. He turned and swept his wart-freckled hand across his skull and re moved his blue cap. His hair stood up with static electricity. “Huh? Did that bastard take ‘em?”

  “He must have. They’re not there. Just the rope and the map.”

  He spared this revelation the space of a blink. “Well,” he said, “he needs ‘em more than I did. That poor devil never knew what hit him.” And he was on his way again, consuming the cement walk with generous strides. Grappling with my books, I could not catch up, and as I followed at an increasing distance behind him, the loss of the gloves, the way he permitted my expensive and painstakingly deliberated gift to sift through him generated a clumsy weight where my books were clasped against my abdomen. My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

  III

  CHIRON hurried, a little late, down the corridors of tamarisk, yew, bay, and kermes oak. Beneath the cedars and silver firs, whose hushed heads were shadows permeated with Olympian blue, a vigorous underwood of arbutus, wild pear, cornel, box, and andrachne filled with scents of flower and sap and new twig the middle air of the forest. Branches of bloom here and there dashed color across the shifting caverns of forest space that enclosed the haste of his canter. He slowed. The ragged and muted attendants of air escorting his high head slowed also. These intervals of free space-touched by the arching search of fresh shoots and threaded by the quick dripdrop of birdsong released as if from a laden ceiling rich in elements (some songs were water, some copper, some silver, some burnished rods of wood, some cold and corrugated fire)-were reminiscent for him of caverns and soothed and suited his nature. His student’s eyes-for what is a teacher but a student grown old?-retrieved, from their seclusion in the undergrowth, basil, hellebore, feverwort, spurge, polypody, bryony, wolfs-bane, and squill. Ixine, cinquefoil, sweet marjoram and gilliflower he lifted, by the shape of their petals, leaves, stems, and thorns, from their anonymity in indiscriminate green. Recognized, the plants seemed to lift crisply in salute, hailing the passage of a hero. Black hellebore is fatal to horses. Crocuses thrive for being trod upon. Without his willing it, Chiron’s brain rehearsed his anciently acquired druggist’s knowledge. Of the plants called strykhnos, one induces sleep, the other madness. The root of the former, white when dug, turns blood-red while drying. The other some call thryoron and some peritton; three-twentieths of an ounce make the patient sportive, twice this dose induces delusions, thrice the dose will make him permanently insane. And more will kill him.

  Thyme does not grow where a sea-breeze cannot reach. In cutting some roots one must stand to windward. The old gatherers maintained the peony root must be dug at night, for if a woodpecker observes you, you will suffer prolapsus ani. Chiron had scorned this superstition; he had meant to bring men out of the darkness. Apollo and Diana had promised to guide him. One should draw three circles around mandrake with a sword, and, at the cutting, face west. Chiron’s white lips smiled within the bronze fleece of his beard as he remembered the intricate scruples he had scorned in his quest for actual cures. What mattered about mandrake was that, mixed with meal, it assuaged gout, insomnia, erysipelas, and impotence. Of wild cucumber the root palliates white leprosy and mange in sheep. Of germander the leaves, pounded in olive oil, dress fractures and spreading sores; the fruit purges bile. Polypody purges downwards; the driver-which retains its virtue for two hundred years- both upwards and downwards. The best drugs come from places that are wintry, face the north, and are dry-in Euboea, the drugs of Aigai and Telethrion have most virtue. All perfumes save iris come from Asia: cassia, cinnamon, cardamon, spikenard, storax, myrrh, dill. The poisons are native: hellebore, hemlock, meadow-saffron, poppy, wolfs-bane. Chamaeleon is fatal to dogs and pigs; and if one wishes to discover whether a man that is sick will live, he should be washed with a paste of chamaeleon mixed with oil and water for three days. If he survives the experience, he will live.

  A bird above him released a swift metallic song that seemed to be a signal. “Chiron! Chiron!”: the call sprang up behind him and overtook him and, skimming past his ears, outraced him in its bodiless
speed of joy to the ragged cave-mouth of sunstruck air that waited at the end of the forest path. He came into the clearing and his students were already there: Jason, Achilles, Asclepios, his daughter Ocyrhoe, and the dozen other princely children of Olympus abandoned to his care. It had been their voices. Seated in a semi-circle on the warm orchard grass, all hailed him gladly. Achilles looked up from sucking the marrow from the bone of a faun; his chin was smeared with crumbs of wax from a honeycomb. The boy’s fine body had in it a hint of fat. Across those broad blond shoulders lay like a transparent mantle a suggestion of feminine roundness that gave his developed mass a slightly passive weight, and weakened his eyes. Their blue was too beryline; their gaze both questioned and evaded. Of all Chiron’s students, Achilles gave his teacher the most trouble yet seemed most needful of his approval and loved him least bashfully. Jason, less favored, slightly built and younger-appearing than his years, yet had the angular assurance of independence, and his dark eyes declared a calm intention to survive. Asclepios, the best student, was quiet and determinedly composed; in many respects he had already surpassed his master. Torn from the womb of faithless Coronis slain, he too had known an unmothered childhood and the distant protection of a divine father; Chiron treated him less as a pupil than as a colleague, and while the others romped at recess the two of them, old at heart, side by side delved deeper into the arcana of research.

  But Chiron’s eyes rested most fondly on the reddish-gold hair of his daughter. How rich with life this girl was! Her hair waved and interweaved: herds of horses, seen from above. His life, seen from above. It was in her that his plasm was immortal. His gaze foundered on her head, already a woman’s head, wantonly crowned: his own seed-he saw down through her into the stamping, angry child, long-legged, wide-browed, who had arisen from the infant that Chariclo had nursed beside him on the moss, in the days when stars spoke at the mouth of the cave. The girl had been too intelligent to take her childhood easily; her tantrums had grieved their pride in her. More keenly than her father, Ocyrhoe was tormented with prescience, a torment of which not all his drugs, not even all-heal uprooted at midnight of the shortest night from the rocky ground about Psophis, could relieve her; so when she taunted him, however shrilly and cruelly, he felt no rage, and submitted meekly, hoping to earn her forgiveness for his inability to work her cure.

  In the chorus of greeting, each child’s cry was an individual tint known to him. In sum the polyphony formed a rainbow. His eyes wavered on the warm edge of tears. The children opened each day’s session with a hymn to Zeus. When they stood, their bodies, clad lightly, were not yet differentiated into wedges and vases, attacking and containing, tools for Ares and Hestia, but were the same in silhouette, though of various heights: slim pale reeds of a single pipe harmoniously hymning the god of existence pure.

  “Lord of the sky,

  Wielder of weather.

  Brightness of brightness,

  Zeus, hear our song!

  “Fill us with glory,

  Crest of the thunderhead,

  Shape us with gradualness,

  Source of the rain!”

  The light and fitful breeze swayed and scattered the song much as young girls toss scarves.

  “Radiance beyond itself,

  Sun above Apollo,

  Earth below Hades,

  Sea upon sea,

  “Grant us proportion,

  Arc of the firmament,

  Curve of the gilliflower;

  Zeus, let us thrive!”

  The centaur’s grave voice, uncertain in song, joined in the final petition:

  “Brightness of brightness,

  Sky of our mortality,

  Home of our hopes,

  Height of our fear,

  “Send us a sign,

  A sign of benevolence,

  Show forth thy government:

  Answer our song!”

  They fell silent and above the treetops on the left of the clearing a black eagle arrowed across the sun. Chiron feared for a moment, then realized that though it was on his left, it was on the children’s right. On their right, and ascending: doubly propitious. (But on his left). The class sighed in awe and, after the eagle vanished on the iridescent edge of the solar halo, chattered excitedly. Even Ocyrhoe, it pleased her father to see, was impressed. Worry in this interval slid from her brow; her glittering hair merged with her shining eyes and she became any gay, thoughtless girl. By no means instinctively reverent, she claimed to foresee a day when Zeus would be taken by men as a poor toy they had themselves invented, and be terribly taunted, be banished from Olympus, sent scrambling down the shingle, and branded a criminal.

  The Arcadian sun was growing warmer. Birdsong encircling the clearing turned sluggish. Chiron felt in his blood the olive trees on the plain rejoice. In the cities, worshippers mounting the white temple steps would feel the marble hot on their unsandalled feet. He took his class for their lesson to the shade of a great chestnut tree that it was said Pelasgus himself had planted. The trunk was as thick around as a shepherd’s cottage. The boys arranged themselves swaggeringly among the roots as if among the bodies of slain enemies; the girls more demurely sought postures of ease on areas of moss. Chiron inhaled; air like honey expanded the spaces of his chest; his students completed the centaur. They fleshed his wisdom with expectation. The wintry chaos of information within him, elicited into sunlight, was struck though with the young colors of optimism. Winter turned vernal. “Our subject today,” he began, and the faces, scattered in the deep green shade like petals after rain, were unanimously hushed and attentive, “is the Genesis of All Things. In the beginning,” the centaur said, “black-winged Night was courted by the wind, and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness. From this egg hatched Eros, which means-?”

  “Love,” a child’s voice answered from the grass.

  “And Love set the Universe in motion. All things that exist are her children-sun, moon, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures. Now Eros was double-sexed and golden-winged and, having four heads, sometimes roared like a bull or a lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram; beneath her rule the world was as harmonious as a beehive. Men lived without cares or labor, eating only acorns, wild fruit, and honey that dripped from trees, drinking the milk of sheep and goats, never growing old, dancing, and laughing much. Death, to them, was no more terrible than sleep. Then her scepter passed to Uranus…”

  IV

  AFTER SCHOOL I went up to my father’s room, Room

  204. Two students were in there with him. I glared at them both and in my haughty red shirt crossed to the window and looked toward Alton. I had made a vow during the day to protect my father, and these two students consuming his time were the first enemies I had encountered. One was Deifendorf, the other was Judy Lengel. Deifendorf was speaking.

  “I can see shop and typing and like that, Mr. Caldwell,” he said, “but for somebody like me who’s not going on to college or anything, I don’t see the point of memorizing lists of animals that’ve been dead a million years.”

  “There is no point,” my father said. “You are two hundred per cent right: who cares about dead animals? If they’re dead, let ‘em lie; that’s my motto. They depress the hell out of me. But that’s what they give me to teach and I’m going to teach it to you until it kills me. It’s either you or me, Deifendorf, and if you don’t get rid of those jitters I’ll do my best to kill you before you kill me; I’ll strangle you with my bare hands if I have to. I’m up here fighting for my life. I have a wife and a kid and an old man to feed. I’m just like you are; I’d rather be out walking the streets. I feel sorry for you; I know how you’re suffering.”

  I laughed by the window; it was my way of attacking Deifendorf. I felt him clinging to my father, sucking the strength from him. That was the way of the cruel children. An hour after they had goaded him to the point of frenzy (flecks of foam would actually appear in the corners of his mouth and his ey
es would become like tiny raw diamonds), they would show up in his room, anxious to seek advice, make confessions, be reassured. And the instant they had left his company they would mock him again. I kept my back turned on the sickening duet.

  From my father’s windows I overlooked the school’s side lawn, where in the autumn the band and cheerleaders rehearsed, and the tennis courts and the line of horsechestnut trees marking the poorhouse lane and, beyond everything, Mt. Alton, a humped blue horizon scarred by a gravel pit. A trolley car stuffed with Alton shoppers came sparking and swaying up the line. Some of the students who lived toward Alton were bunched at the stop, waiting for this trolley’s mate to come down the pike. Down on the cement walks leading from the girls’ exit along the side of the building- I had to touch my nose to the icy glass to see this sharply down-girls, foreshortened into patches of plaid, fur, books, and wool, walked in pairs and trios home together. Frozen breath flew from their mouths. What they said I could not hear. I looked for Penny among them. I had avoided her all day, because to draw near to her seemed a desertion of my parents, whose need for me had mysteriously, solemnly deepened.