by John Updike
He silently pondered, as if chastised. “The flow is slow,” he at last pointed out.
“I know,” she conceded. She had adapted her own forward motion to his stride. Then she startled them both with a sudden exclamation: she had thought she spotted a beaver. But it was only a detached piece of brown turf, jutting out in silhouette against the lake’s unreal, glacier-enriched blue.
“Is anything the matter?” he asked, gently alarmed.
“No. Sorry. I thought I saw a beaver. The guidebook said they were here. It promised. In abundance, it said.”
“In certain seasons, I believe.” His smooth, deferential tone was irritating her. Perhaps sensing this, he asked, “Of all we have seen, Alexandra, what has impressed you the most so far?”
It was a tough question. Throughout this trip she had been most conscious of all the isolating space around her. Jim’s absence formed a transparent shield over what she was seeing, like the sneeze guard at a salad bar. “I think, Willard,” she said, matching his cautious deliberation, “the antlers on the bull elk beside the highway yesterday, right after the stop at the Athabasca Falls. I had no idea how big they could be—the rack, Heidi called it. The rack seemed to stretch all the way down his back, and tipped his head way back, as if it might break his neck.” Ack—ack—ack—eck—her tongue was playing tricks. Perhaps this doppelganger was a wizard. He said nothing, so she added, prattling the way men’s silence forces women to do, “Imagine, carrying all that just so you can fend off other bulls and keep your harem. What did Heidi say—up to a hundred does?”
How much fucking does Nature need? The topic had excited Heidi, making her dimple; the shadows in her cheeks were visible from the middle of the bus, where Alexandra sat with another widow. Heidi had gone on, in her soothing stewardess manner, to describe how all that fighting and “servicing their ladies” wore the old bulls out and left them to face the winter exhausted and half-starved. They died, letting the young bachelor elks skulking on the edge of the harem move in. They died of Nature’s furious will to propagate.
The train of Alexandra’s thoughts, expressed and unexpressed, had led her companion into a parallel intimacy, for out of the blue Willard McHugh pronounced, “Alexandra, I was truly moved to hear of your recent sorrow.” So: he knew her name, and now her sorrow. He had been gossiping, in his solemn way, his long head cocked as if to favor a good ear.
“My sorrow?”
“Your husband’s recent passing. One of your lady friends confided that to me.”
Lady friends? Alexandra tried to remember whom she had talked to, among the boring, overfed human does herded onto this tour. She had tried to avoid conversations, and the other women sensed in her an electric aloofness—a negative charge of potential social disruption, a witch’s scorn of normal, tame order. “Whoever she was, she was right. Jim died three months ago.”
“I’m very sorry, Alexandra.”
“Thank you, Willard.”
But he had more to say. With a widow’s clumsiness, her thanks had interrupted him. He went on, in his sugary, melancholy voice, to tell her, “I know what you’re suffering. My partner passed last year. We’d been together for thirty-seven years.”
Partner. One of the new code words, usefully bland. Willard was one of those. She’d been fooled before. She felt some relief and some resentment. This fag had been wasting her time. But, then, what was her time worth? Less and less: she was an old lady, post-menopausal, on Nature’s trash-heap, having outlasted her Biblical span of seventy years. “That’s a long time,” Alexandra said. She did not add, for a pair of fairies. Who notoriously flit around, breaking each other’s hearts with their infidelities, their unchecked attraction to younger fairies.
“He was a beautiful person,” this intruder into her solitude solemnly avowed. He would have gone on, detailing the beauty, had not Alexandra curtly said, “I don’t doubt it. Thank you for your company, Willard. Don’t the hotel lights look cozy, now that it’s dark?”
“Shall we share a drink, inside the château?”
So, with his orientation out in the open, he felt free to be socially aggressive. “Thank you, Willard,” she said. “You’re kind. But I think I’d better go lie down before dinner. I’ve not been sleeping very well on this trip. It’s more work than I expected. The altitude, I suppose, and all the packing and unpacking. And so much Nature!” Hoping that whatever wound her refusal had given him was stanched by this wad of hurried words, she added more: “And it never lets up! Tomorrow, Heidi tells us, we must get up before dawn, to see the sunrise on Mount Victoria. They must think we’re all spring chickens! I might just skip it.”
But, betraying him, she asked the desk to call her room at five-thirty. The shrill ring shattered a dream she was having, about Eastwick—a misty morning, sea fog beaded in the window screens, the children off at school, she trying to do housework but tensely expecting Joe Marino to come calling. In the dream he had brought her a present of a chicken, a live chicken but wrapped, in stiff pink-striped wrapping paper. She had to thank him but was secretly appalled; what could she do with a chicken? Even if she could bear to wring its neck she didn’t know how to pluck its feathers. What was dear Joe thinking of? His ridiculous middle-class guilt lay behind this. Why can’t men just fuck you and not bother with useless presents? The bird’s angry eye, above its collar of wrapping paper, transfixed her. A scraping, terrible noise came from its throat: the telephone shrilling with her wake-up call. This was her chance, the day that has been given thee. Alexandra would never see Lake Louise again.
She threw on clothes and went out, unshowered and sleepy, into the dark, to join the tourist throngs already present on the paved tiers and hedged paths between the hotel and the lake. It was like a square in some European city, where the tourist, inconveniently awake early, is startled by the numbers of people hurrying diagonally to work, revealing the secret life of labor behind the stage scenery of palaces and cathedrals, museums and overpriced restaurants that have beguiled the days of vacation. The Asian couple was there, and the eight Australians, all taking one another’s pictures with the lake and mountain in the background, and jollily including Alexandra in shot after shot, which they promised to send her. Already a mood of farewell had infiltrated the tour, though two days in Banff and a day in Calgary remained.
Inch by inch, a rosy tinge on the snowbound upper edge of Mount Victoria enlarged, expanding down the surface of the peak. Its horizontal strata, underlying the snow, calibrated the descent. The rosy tinge slowly broadened and turned golden; daylight came to reign over the glassy surface of the uncannily blue lake, where the burning apparition of the dawn-struck peak hung suspended, upside down, like a chunk of gold in a New World’s cerulean Rhine.
The little male Asian, taking a stance beside her, asked with his unquenchable grin, “Worth earry gerring up?”
“The sunrise? Oh yes—beautiful.” A beautiful person. Though, against her own advice to herself, she glanced through the sunrise crowd for Willard, alert to spot his violet aura and coolly snub him. But he was evidently not a morning person. She felt, after all, rejected, which was unreasonable, since she, with Nature’s concurrence, had rejected him. More than thirty years ago, in Eastwick, she had been sucked into the orbit of a homosexual man, seduced by his love of fun and art—he made her laugh, he fed her pot, he loosened her up. He gave her, in his ridiculous mansion, a setting that flattered her fantasies of her own glamour. Then he had betrayed her, and Sukie and Jane as well. They had extracted a revenge. The memory of it all was shameful but invigorating, reviving a younger self with a healthy, anarchic appetite and arcane powers. Arriving, after a short bus trip, in Banff, she felt renewed.
Jasper had been an upland settlement, with lonely wide streets and a single business block; whereas Banff was a city, with an art museum and a First People museum and many coffee shops and a downtown bustle and hot springs and a conference center and, spreading downhill from the Banff Springs Hotel, curving neighborho
ods of expensive homes. She walked into the town, cruised the local watercolors and old photographs at the Whyte Museum, and had lunch in a coffee nook where the Australians were eating. They invited her to join them, at their two tables pushed together, but she declined and ate her turkey roll-up staring at a blank wall. The time had come, its blankness told her, to take stock, to gather herself for this last life stage, a sprint to the grave in widow’s weeds.
The tour had scheduled a gondola ride up Sulphur Mountain at two o’clock. The bus took them to the base, and then the gondola ascended. At the top, there were souvenirs and snacks and warm air inside and, outside, cold air and viewing telescopes that accepted Canadian dollar coins, called “loonies” for the waterfowl on them, on the side opposite from the profile of an aging queen. Two-dollar coins were called “toonies.” Alexandra wondered why the United States couldn’t come up with a dollar coin that people would use. The Canadians made it look so easy, such fun. American men hated to have heavy pockets, she supposed; they’re afraid of being dragged down. They love freedom.
Hundreds of meters down, two rivers met and a golf course had been fitted alongside one of them. Banff was a bent grid between a mountain and two lakes. A flight of wooden stairs descended from the viewing porch, and a boardwalk headed off toward another, slightly higher peak. Other tourists were coming back along this reverberating boardwalk, including some Australian couples.
“How was it?” Alexandra asked them.
“Wonderful, love. Worth the trek.”
Still she hesitated, dawdling in the gift shop, wondering which of her seven grandchildren might like a toy moose. But give to one, they all should get something of equal value, age-appropriate. Their ages varied from sixteen to one. It was too hard to calculate. In the corner of her eye she sensed a tall man approaching, a tall man with a mustache, and rather than cope with Willard any more she went out into the high cold and down the wooden steps.
The planks levelled and then, upheld above gray rocks on thick posts, they climbed to fit the ridge, several steps at a time. Other people were moving back and forth around her, yet Alexandra felt more and more alone as the walk beneath her feet changed direction and then again levelled into a straightaway. Treetops fell away around her, and all but a few rock outcroppings. She didn’t usually like heights but was determined to experience this. She felt she was treading air, as in all directions gray mountains, range upon range, slate and ash and dove in color, streaked with avalanches and littered with scraps of snow, opened under her. Alexandra was flying. She was above and among endless gentle mountains; they were her friends, a grand Other holding her in Its hand. Nature was within her and around her and infinite.
The boardwalk with its solid steps turned, and turned again, narrowing its purchase on Sanson Peak, and brought her up to a shack, a sturdy shack with a glass window through which she could see a desk and papers but no human being, no weatherman, for that is what this had been, a weather station to which—an explanatory signboard explained—Norman Sanson had climbed more than a thousand times, in the course of his life, to record weather observations. Having looked in and seen the shack as empty of Norman Sanson as her bed was of Jim Farlander, and feeling dizzy and fragile among the pushy young hikers, Japanese and Caucasian, crowding around to peer with her into this Canadian holy site, Alexandra retraced her steps, down and around, and down some more, and then on the echoing straight stretch, hurrying in a panic, fearing that the tour would leave her behind, in all those glorious, impassive gray mountains. But Willard McHugh was there, at the head of the last set of stairs, lanky and trim in a green-checked shirt. His studied lumberjack costumes seemed, in retrospect, faggy. “The others have pretty much gone down already,” he drawled.
His lugubrious, proprietary manner made her glad, for a second, that she had no husband. She turned to Heidi, their bright-eyed, frizzy-haired tour mother, who stood a few feet away. It was to her that Alexandra said, “I’m so sorry. Was I keeping everybody waiting?”
“Not at all,” Heidi said. Her smile was a stewardess’s; no jolt, no ominous rumble, no sudden drop in an air pocket could shake it. “How was the view up there?”
“Stupendous. Breathtaking,” Alexandra gasped, her heart still thumping from the last panicky stretch of boardwalk.
Heidi’s smile broadened, deepening her dimples. “I can see it was. Now, you get your breath back, Lexa, and we’ll all get on the bus together.”
. . .
Once they had abandoned the venerable coastal town where they had done their vile mischief, the three witches had hardly kept in touch, geographically scattered as they were, and busy concocting their new married lives. Dirty hands shouldn’t fold fresh linen. Early in the post-Eastwick years they did sometimes meet again, Sukie in Connecticut and Jane in Massachusetts managing more visits between them than Alexandra in far-off New Mexico. But conversation would run dry with their husbands sitting restlessly in the same room, and without the coven of all three there was no cone of power to lend them a strength beyond their own. In each awkward silence the prickings of conscience would trouble them and thicken their tongues. So the contacts were slowly reduced to telephone calls and then token notes of remembrance at Christmastime. The December of the year after her fall trip to the Canadian Rockies, Alexandra received a religiously neutral—pine cones, an elfin squirrel in red hat with white trim—holiday card from New England, the anodyne Season’s Greetings printed inside wreathed in a scrawled note that rather frantically spilled, sideways and even upside down, into available spaces. Jane Smart’s handwriting had always been vehement, gouging the paper, driving itself into slanting lines whose closeness caused loops to entwine and overlap.
Lexa darling—
You will be sorry to hear that my dear Nat died, after years of suffering, in and out of Mass. General—all these treatments—chemo, radiation, laser burns, platelet infusions, a hundred expensive drugs—what did they do but prolong everybody’s agony? Better to sit in the inglenook and waste away with an ague [a word that took Alexandra minutes to decipher] the way our ancestors did. Mass. General tormented him to give the residents practical experience and fatten up the Medicare payment. He was so docile, too, the sweet old thing, believing everything these white-coated con men with their beauty-parlor haircuts told him. The look on his face when the nurses found him dead in the bed finally was pure astonishment—he couldn’t believe they would let this happen to him. Death, I mean. Me, I’d rather be burned at the stake when the time comes and go out at least with a flare. I’ve read in one of the old books that the way to cope, which all the savvy so-called heretics used, was to inhale the smoke—it knocked you right out. Sorry to be so grim, on a Christmas card yet. He “passed,” as the ridiculous undertakers say now—as if life is a game of bridge—last month, and it’s been a lot of hours with the lawyers to settle that his mother—she’s still alive, at over a hundred, isn’t that pathetic?—will let me stay on in the house, this enormous brick ark they claim is by H. H. Richardson but was only by a younger partner, an imitator —“from the school of,” as they say in art museums, labelling their fakes. Everybody in Brookline is from the school of. Tweed skirts, square-toed shoes, and thinned bloodlines. Sorry you never knew Nat—the enclosed clipping tells you the meager basics but not how he talked, ate, slept, fucked, etc. Will we ever meet again? Call me, far beauty, sometime.
Yours ever, Jane
The enclosed obituary from the Boston Globe—Nathaniel Tinker III, 79, antiquarian, benefactor—was only four or five inches long and, even so, groped for things to say. His profession was given as investment adviser, which was a way, Alexandra surmised, of saying that he dabbled with his own money and that of some trusting friends. His memberships were many: the Somerset Club, the Country Club, the Harvard Club of Boston, the New England Historical Society, societies for the preservation of this and that, and boards of the New England Conservatory, the Museum of Fine Arts, Mount Auburn Hospital, McLean Hospital, the New England
Home for Little Wanderers, and the Pine Street Inn shelter. He had done everything right, everything his social and geographic circumstances dictated, and then, in his mid-forties, married Jane Pain, as Lexa and Sukie used to call her when she especially annoyed them. They had known her as Jane Smart, the divorced wife of Sam Smart, who had been hung up to dry in the basement of her ranch house in Eastwick and occasionally sprinkled into a magic philter, for piquancy. Jane had seemed emotionally attached to only two things—her cello, which she played with a frenzied concentration that was frightening to behold, a vortex that might suck you in, and her young Doberman pinscher, a hideous orange-spotted black drooler and rung-chewer named Randolph. The smallest and lightest of the three witches, and the only one to have mastered the art of flight, Jane had taken with some verve to the elevated life that Nat’s birth and wealth opened to her, the upper circles of Brookline and Boston and Cambridge. Her acid accent, her sharp-nosed profile, and her angry eyes the bright brown of tortoiseshell blended into these polite circles like the vein of brandy in a rich, sluggish gravy; and then there was, for piquancy as it were, her unseen underside, the darkness she sat on, the heat and dirtiness that roused dear androgynous Nat Tinker out of his mother-smothered torpor to marry a divorcée with children whose number local gossip lost track of, they were so quickly bundled off to proper boarding schools.
When Sukie, at first once or twice a year and then less and less, had visited Jane in the brick-and-exposed-timber ark on Clyde Street, she had been awed out of her usual sauciness by the height of the ceilings, the Gothic spikiness and wax-glazed redolence of the glass-fronted bookcases and near-churchly furniture, and the breadth of the dark stairs that led up—their flight accompanied, stair by stair, by murky small framed prints that ascended on the wall opposite the banister—to landings and bedrooms of a privacy so intense that trying to imagine it left her short of breath. Sukie, whose descriptive gifts had been developed by her stint as a reporter with the Eastwick Word, had amusingly planted, over the telephone, these images in Alexandra’s mind years ago, before this pair of friends, too, fell out of touch. When, accepting Jane’s invitation, Alexandra dialed the number alphabetized under “S” for “Smart” in her address book—a decades-old red booklet falling apart with its burden of undeleted dead, moved, and forgotten—the distant ring was like a glow of embers in an abandoned cave.
