by John Updike
“You don’t hear the talk I do. You don’t see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can’t keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, ‘A man has duty too. It isn’t all one way.’ It’s women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world’s just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half-believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?”
She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and scratches at Eccles’ face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his notes dissolve into nonsense. He fumbles through his memory and manages to bring out, “I feel Harry is in some respects a special case.”
“The only thing special about him is he doesn’t care who he hurts or how much. Now I mean no offense Reverend Eccles and I’m sure you’ve done your best considering how busy you are but to be honest I wish that first night I had called the police like I wanted to.”
He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest him. Why not? With his white collar he forges God’s name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life. When he asks her, “What can the police do?” he seems to himself to mean what can they do to him.
“Well I don’t know but more than play golf I expect.”
“I’m quite sure he will come back.”
“You’ve been saying that for two months.”
“I still believe it.” But he doesn’t, he doesn’t believe anything. Silence.
“Could you”—her voice is changed; it beseeches—“bring me over that stool there in the corner? I have to get my legs up.”
When he blinks, his eyelids scratch. He rouses from his daze and gets the stool and takes it to her. Her broad shins in their green childlike socks lift meekly, and as he places the stool under the heels, his bending, with its echo of religious-pamphlet paintings of Christ washing the feet of beggars, fits his body to receive a new flow of force. He straightens up and towers above her. She plucks at her skirt at the knees, tugging it down.
“Thank you,” she says. “That’s a real relief for me.”
“I’m afraid it’s the only sort of relief I’ve given you,” he confesses with a simplicity that he finds, and mocks himself for finding, admirable.
“Ah,” she sighs. “There’s not much anybody can do I guess.”
“No, there are things to do. Perhaps you’re right about the police. The law provides protection for wives; why not use it?”
“Fred’s against it.”
“Mr. Springer has good reasons. I don’t mean merely business reasons. All the law can extract from Harry is financial support; and I don’t think, in this case, that money is really the point. In fact I’m not sure money is ever really the point.”
“That’s easy to say if you’ve always had enough.” He doesn’t mind. It seemed to slip from her automatically, with less malice than lassitude; he is certain she wants to listen.
“That may be. I don’t know. But at any rate my concern—everyone’s concern for that matter, I’m sure—is with the general health of the situation. And if there’s to be a true healing, it must be Harry and Janice who act. Really, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we try to do on the fringes, we’re outside.” In imitation of his father he has clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on his auditor; through the screen he watches the one other who, perhaps, is not outside, Nelson, lead the Fosnacht boy across the lawn in pursuit of a neighbor’s dog. Nelson’s laughter spills from his head as his clumsy tottering steps jar his body. The dog is old, reddish, small, and slow; the Fosnacht boy is puzzled yet pleased by his friend’s cry of “Lion! Lion!” It interests Eccles to see that under conditions of peace Angstrom’s boy leads the other. The green air seen through the muzzy screen seems to vibrate with Nelson’s noise. Eccles feels the situation: this constant translucent outpour of selfish excitement must naturally now and then dam in the duller boy’s narrower passages and produce a sullen backflow, a stubborn bullying act. He pities Nelson, who will be stranded in innocent surprise many times before he locates in himself the source of this strange reverse tide. It seems to Eccles that he himself was this way as a boy, always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped. The old dog’s tail wags as the boys approach. It stops wagging and droops in an uncertain wary arc when they surround it like hunters, crowing. Nelson reaches out and beats the dog’s back with both hands. Eccles wants to shout; the dog might bite; he can’t bear to watch.
“Yes but he drifts further away,” Mrs. Springer is whining. “He’s well off. He has no reason to come back if we don’t give him one.”
Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. “No. He’ll come back for the same reason he left. He’s fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he’s in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won’t continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I’ve noticed a change.”
“Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says she hears he’s leading the life of Riley. I don’t know how many women he has.”
“Just one, I’m sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he’s by nature a domestic creature. Oh dear.”
There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched large by fright.
Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, “Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more.”
Eccles jumps up—his chair collapses behind him—and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. “Did the dog bite?”
The boy’s sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.
“Did Elsie bite you?”
The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.
Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles’ arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.
Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child’s cheek. “Like that? Did the dog do that?”
The boy’s face goes rapt at the pantomime. “Like dis,” he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.
“No bite?” Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.
The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness, as if this tells the whole delightful story. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry’s. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.
As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct. The kitten’s instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.
He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their exposed breadth and pallor, undesired, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy expose
d for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong—as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could purge the dust and rubble from every corner of the world—he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, “If he doesn’t come back when she has the baby, then we’ll get the law after him. There are laws, of course; quite a few.”
“Elsie snaps,” Mrs. Springer says, “because you and Billy tease her.”
“Naughty Elsie,” Nelson says.
“Naughty Nelson,” Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, “Yes well she’s a week due now and I don’t see him running in.”
His moment of fondness for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer’s voice carries after him into the house, “Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you’re going to get a whipping from your grandmom.”
“No, Mom-mom,” the child begs coyly, fright gone.
Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumbled rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms’ address.
Mrs. Angstrom has four-cornered nostrils. Lozenge-shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra-anatomical; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day; their home is the dark side of a two-family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer’s fat, soft, aching excess, had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a girl like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom’s is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry’s size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small.
“I don’t know why you come to me,” she says. “Harold’s one and twenty. I have no control over him.”
“He hasn’t been to see you?”
“No sir.” She displays her profile above her left shoulder. “You’ve made him so ashamed I suppose he’s embarrassed to.”
“He should be ashamed, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she’s two-thirds crazy.”
“Oh now, that’s not true, is it?”
“Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was Why don’t I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life.”
“Surely you don’t think she meant anything?”
“No, she didn’t mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run-down half-house when she came from a great big barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and Wasn’t I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well-equipped little trick? I never liked that girl’s eyes. They never met your face full-on.” She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles—an old-fashioned type, circles of steel-rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light—her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that’s it, it’s the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn’t really see him at all. Her confrontation is with the whole world, and secure under the breadth of her satire, he can say what he pleases.
He bluntly defends Janice. “The girl is shy.”
“Shy! She wasn’t too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirttail in.”
“He was one and twenty, as you say.”
“Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”
Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn’t acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. “About as shy as a snake,” she says, “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc.”
He laughs again; but isn’t she? “Well uh, what does Mr. Angstrom think Harry should do?”
“Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He’s just like his father underneath. All soft heart. I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.”
“That’s an unusual view.”
“Is it? It’s what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don’t know who’s supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.”
He smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps—overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Deep fundamental hopelessness in such a mind. Hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he’s forgotten much theology. It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.
Mrs. Angstrom picks up a dropped thread. “Now my daughter Miriam is as old as the hills and always was; I’ve never worried about her. I remember, on Sundays long ago when we’d walk out by the quarry Harold was so afraid-he wasn’t more than twelve then—he was so afraid she’d fall over the edge. I knew she wouldn’t. You watch her. She won’t marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out.”
“I don’t think the world has jumped on him. The girl’s mother and I were just discussing that it seemed quite the contrary.”
“Don’t you think it. That girl gets no sympathy from me. She has everybody on her side from Eisenhower down. They’ll talk him around. You’ll talk him around. And there’s another.”
The front door has opened with a softness she alone hears. Her husband comes into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and a tie but with his fingernails ringed in black; he’s a printer. He’s as tall as his wife but seems shorter. His mouth works self-deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth. His nose is Harry’s, a neat smooth button. “How do you do, Father,” he says; either he was raised as a Catholic or among Catholics.
“Mr. Angstrom, it’s very nice to meet you.” The man’s hand has tough ridges but a soft, dry palm. “We’ve been discussing your son.”
“I feel terrible about that.” Eccles believes him. Earl Angstrom has a gray, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips over his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.
“He goes on and on about that girl as if she was the mother of Christ,” Mrs. Angstrom says.
“That’s not true,” Angstrom says mildly, and sits down in his white shirt at the porcelain kitchen table. Four settings, year after year, have worn black blurs through the enamel. “I just don’t see how Harry could make such a mess. As a boy he was always so trim. He wasn’t like other boys, sloppy. He was a neat worker.”<
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With raw sudsy hands Mrs. Angstrom has set about heating coffee for her husband. This small act of service seems to bring her into harmony with him; they begin, in the sudden way of old couples apparently at odds, to speak as one. “It was the Army,” she says. “When he came back from Texas he was a different boy.”
“He didn’t want to come into the shop,” Angstrom says. “He didn’t want to get dirty.”
“Reverend Eccles, would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Angstrom asks.
At last, his chance. “No, thank you. What I would love, though, is a glass of water.”
“Just water? With ice?”
“Any way. Any way would be lovely.”
“Yes, Earl is right,” she says. “People now say how lazy Hassy is, but he’s not. He never was. When you’d be proud of his basketball in high school you know, people would say, ‘Yes well but he’s so tall, it’s easy for him.’ But they didn’t know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see.”
“From about twelve years old on,” Angstrom says, “he was at that night and day. I put a pole up for him out back; the garage wasn’t high enough.”
“When he set his mind to something,” Mrs. Angstrom says, “there was no stopping him.” She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice-cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose. “He wanted to be best at that and I honestly believe he was.”
“I know what you mean,” Eccles says. “I play a little golf with him and already he’s been better than I am.”
She puts the cubes in a glass and holds the glass under a spigot and brings it to him. He tilts it at his lips and Earl Angstrom’s palely vehement voice wavers through the liquid. “Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass. He won’t come work in the print shop because it’ll get his fingernails dirty.” Eccles lowers the glass and Angstrom says full in his face across the table, “He’s become the worst kind of Brewer bum. If I could get my hands on him, Father, I’d try to thrash him if he killed me in the process.” His ashen face bunches defiantly at the mouth; his colorless eyes swarm with glitter.
