The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  “You were such a hopeful good boy,” my mother said, and I did not look at her face for fear of seeing her crying.

  I wondered aloud if a certain girl in my high-school class was still a nurse here.

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said. “Here I thought you came all this way to see your poor old father and all you care about is seeing—” And she used the girl’s maiden name, though the girl had been married as long as I had.

  Within the hospital, she surprised me by knowing the way. Usually, wherever we went, it was my father or I who knew the way. As I followed her through the linoleum maze, my mother’s shoulders seemed already to have received the responsible shawl of widowhood. Like the halls of a palace, the hospital corridors were lined with petitioners, waiting for a verdict. Negro girls electrically dramatic in their starched white uniforms folded bales of cotton sheets; gray men pushed wrung mops. We went past an exit sign, down a stairway, into a realm where gaunt convalescents in bathrobes shuffled in and out of doorways. I saw my father diagonally through a doorway before we entered his room. He was sitting up in bed, supported sultanlike by a wealth of pillows and clad in red-striped pajamas.

  I had never seen him in pajamas before; a great man for the shortest distance between two points, he slept in his underclothes. But, having been at last captured in pajamas, like a big-hearted lion he did not try to minimize his subdual, but lay fully exposed, without a sheet covering even his feet. Bare, they looked pale, thin-skinned, and oddly unused.

  Except for a sullen lymphatic glow under his cheeks, his face was totally familiar. I had been afraid that his loss of faith would show, like the altered shape of his mouth after he had had all his teeth pulled. With grins we exchanged the shy handshake that my going off to college had forced upon us. I sat on the windowsill by his bed, my mother took the chair at the foot of the bed, and my father’s roommate, a fortyish man flat on his back with a ruptured disc, sighed and blew smoke toward the ceiling and tried, I suppose, not to hear us. Our conversation, though things were radically changed, followed old patterns. Quite quickly the talk shifted from him to me. “I don’t know how you do it, David,” he said. “I couldn’t do what you’re doing if you paid me a million dollars a day.” Embarrassed and flattered, as usual, I tried to shush him, and he disobediently turned to his roommate and called loudly, “I don’t know where the kid gets his ideas. Not from his old man, I know that. I never gave the poor kid an idea in my life.”

  “Sure you did,” I said softly, trying to take pressure off the man with the hurting back. “You taught me two things. One, always butter bread toward the edges because enough gets in the middle anyway; and, two, no matter what happens to you, it’ll be a new experience.”

  To my dismay, this seemed to make him melancholy. “That’s right, David,” he said. “No matter what happens to you, it’ll be a new experience. The only thing that worries me is that she”—he pointed at my mother—“will crack up the car. I don’t want anything to happen to your mother.”

  “The car, you mean,” my mother said, and to me she added, “It’s a sin, the way he worships that car.”

  My father didn’t deny it. “Jesus, I love that car,” he said. “It’s the first car I’ve ever owned that didn’t go bad on me. Remember all those heaps we used to ride back and forth in?”

  The old Chevy was always getting dirt in the fuel pump and refusing to start. Once, going down Firetown Hill, the left front wheel had broken off the axle; my father wrestled with the steering wheel while the tires screamed and the white posts of the guard fence floated toward my eyes. When the car slid sideways to a stop just short of the embankment, my father’s face was stunned and the corners of his mouth dribbled saliva. I was surprised; it had not occurred to me to be frightened. The ’36 Buick had drunk oil, a quart every fifty miles, and liked to have flat tires after midnight, when I would be sailing home with a scrubbed brain and the smell of lipstick in my nose. Once, when we had both gone into town and I had dropped him off and taken the car, I had absent-mindedly driven home alone. I came in the door and my mother said, “Why, where’s your father?”

  My stomach sank. “My Lord,” I said, “I forgot I had him!”

  As, smiling, I took in breath and prepared to dip with him into reminiscence of these adventures, my father, staring stonily into the air above his pale and motionless toes, said, “I love this place. There are a lot of wonderful gentlemen in here. The only thing that worries me is that Mother will crack up the car.”

  My mother was leaning forward pink-faced in the chair at the foot of the bed, trying to smile. He glanced at her and said to me, “It’s a funny feeling. The night before we went to see the doctor, I woke up and couldn’t get my breath and realized I wasn’t ready to die. I had always thought I would be. It’s a funny feeling.”

  “Luckily for your dad,” “all his faith,” “wonderful gentlemen”: these phrases were borne in on me, and my tongue seemed pressed flat on the floor of its grave. The pajama stripes under my eyes stirred and streamed, real blood. I wanted to speak, to say how I still needed him and to beg him not to leave me, but there were no words, no form of words available in our tradition. A pillar of smoke poured upward from the sighing man in the other bed.

  Into this pit hesitantly walked a plain, painfully clean girl with a pad and pencil. She had yellow hair, thick lips, and, behind pink-rimmed glasses, large eyes that looked as if they had been corrected from being crossed. They flicked across our faces and focused straight ahead in that tunnel-vision gaze of those who know perfectly well they are figures of fun; the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to the door wear that guarded expression. She approached the bed where my father lay barefoot and, suppressing a stammer, explained that she was from Lutheran Home Missions and that they kept accounts of all hospitalized Lutherans and notified the appropriate pastors to make visitations. Perhaps she had measured my father for a rebuff. Perhaps her eyes, more practiced in this respect than mine, spotted the external signs of loss of faith that I couldn’t see. At any rate my father was a Lutheran by adoption; he had been born and raised a Presbyterian and still looked like one.

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” he told the girl. “I don’t see how you people do it on the little money we give you.”

  Puzzled, she dimpled and moved ahead with her routine. “Your church is—?”

  He told her, pronouncing every syllable meticulously and consulting my mother and me as to whether the word “Evangelical” figured in the official title.

  “That would make your pastor Reverend—”

  “Yeah. He’ll be in, don’t worry about it. Wild horses couldn’t keep him away. Nothing he likes better than to get out of the sticks and drive into Alton. I didn’t mean to confuse you a minute ago; what I meant was, just last week in church council we were talking about you people. We couldn’t figure out how you do anything on the little money we give you. After we’ve got done feeding the furnace and converting the benighted Hindu there isn’t anything left over for you people that are trying to help the poor devils in our own back yard.”

  The grinning girl was lost in this onslaught of praise and clung to the shreds of her routine. “In the meantime,” she recited, “here is a pamphlet you might like to read.”

  My father took it from her with a swooping gesture so expansive I got down from the windowsill to restrain him physically, if necessary. That he must lie still was my one lever, my one certainty about his situation. “That’s awfully nice of you,” he told the girl. “I don’t know where the hell you get the money to print these things.”

  “We hope your stay in the hospital is pleasant and would like to wish you a speedy recovery to full health.”

  “Thank you; I know you’re sincere when you say it. As I was telling my son David here, if I can do what the doctors tell me I’ll be all right. First time in my life I’ve ever tried to do what anybody ever told me to do. The kid was just telling me, ‘No matter what happens to you, Pop, it’ll be a new expe
rience.’ ”

  “Now, if you will excuse me, I have other calls to pay.”

  “Of course. You go right ahead, sick Lutherans are a dime a dozen. You’re a wonderful woman to be doing what you’re doing.”

  And she left the room transformed into just that. As a star shines in our Heaven though it has vanished from the universe, so my father continued to shed faith upon others. For the remainder of my visit with him his simple presence so reassured me, filled me with such a buoyant humor, that my mother surprised me, when we had left the hospital, by remarking that we had tired him.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

  “And it worries me,” she went on, “the way he talks about the movies all the time. You know he never liked them.” When I had offered to stay another night so I could visit him again, he had said, “No, instead of that why don’t you take your mother tomorrow to the movies?” Rather than do that, I said, I would drive home. It took him a moment, it seemed, to realize that by my home I meant a far place, where I had a wife and children, dental appointments and work obligations. Though at the time I was impatient to have his consent to leave, it has since occurred to me that during that instant when his face was blank he was swallowing the realization that he could die and my life would go on. Having swallowed, he told me how good I had been to come all this way to see him. He told me I was a good son and a good father; he clasped my hand. I felt I would ascend straight north from his touch.

  I drove my mother back to her farm and got my bag and said goodbye on the lawn. The little sandstone house was pink in the declining sunlight; the lawn was a tinkling clutter of shy rivulets. Standing beside the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign with its companion of a crocus, she smiled and said, “This is like when you were born. Your father drove through a snowstorm all the way from Wheeling in our old Model A.” He had been working with the telephone company then; the story of his all-night ride was the oldest narrative in which I was a character.

  Darkness did not fall until New Jersey. The hour of countryside I saw from the Pennsylvania Turnpike looked enchanted—the branches of the trees underpainted with budding russet, the meadows nubbled like new carpets, the bronze sun slanting on Valley Forge and Levittown alike. I do not know what it is that is so welcome to me in the Pennsylvania landscape, but it is the same quality—perhaps of reposing in the certainty that the truth is good—that exists in Pennsylvania faces. It seemed to me for this sunset hour that the world is our bride, given to us to love, and the terror and joy of the marriage is that we bring to it a nature not our bride’s.

  There was no sailor to help me drive the nine hours back. New Jersey began in twilight and ended in darkness, and Manhattan made its gossamer splash at show-time hour, eight o’clock. The rest of the trip was more and more steeply uphill. The Merritt Parkway seemed meaninglessly coquettish, the light-controlled stretch below Hartford maddeningly obstinate, and the hour above that frighteningly empty. Distance grew thicker and thicker; the intricate and effortful mechanics of the engine, the stellar infinity of explosive sparks needed to drive it, passed into my body, and wearied me. Repeatedly I stopped for coffee and the hallucinatory comfort of human faces, and after every stop my waiting car, companion and haven and willing steed, responded to my pressure. It began to seem a miracle that the car could gather speed from my numb foot; the very music on the radio seemed a drag on our effort, and I turned it off, obliterating earthly time. We climbed through a space fretted by scattered brilliance and bathed in a monotonous wind. I had been driving forever; houses, furniture, churches, women were all things I had innocently dreamed. And through those aeons my car, beginning as a mechanical assembly of molecules, evolved into something soft and organic and consciously brave. I lost first heart, then head, and finally any sense of my body. In the last hour of the trip I ceased to care or feel or in any real sense see, but the car, though its soul the driver had died, maintained steady forward motion, and completed the journey safely. Above my back yard the stars were frozen in place, and the shapes of my neighbors’ houses wore the wonder that children induce by whirling.

  Any day now we will trade it in; we are just waiting for the phone to ring. I know how it will be. My father traded in many cars. It happens so cleanly, before you expect it. He would drive off in the old car up the dirt road exactly as usual, and when he returned the car would be new to us, and the old was gone, gone, utterly dissolved back into the mineral world from which it was conjured, dismissed without a blessing, a kiss, a testament, or any ceremony of farewell. We in America need ceremonies, is I suppose, sailor, the point of what I have written.

  In Football Season

  Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

  “We”—we the school. A suburban school, we rented for some of our home games the stadium of a college in the city of Alton three miles away. My father, a teacher, was active in the Olinger High athletic department, and I, waiting for him beside half-open doors of varnished wood and frosted glass, overheard arguments and felt the wind of the worries that accompanied this bold and at that time unprecedented decision. Later, many of the other county high schools followed our lead; for the decision was vindicated. The stadium each Friday night when we played was filled. Not only students and parents came but spectators unconnected with either school, and the money left over when the stadium rent was paid supported our entire athletic program. I remember the smell of the grass crushed by footsteps behind the end zones. The smell was more vivid than that of a meadow, and in the blue electric glare the green vibrated as if excited, like a child, by being allowed up late. I remember my father taking tickets at the far corner of the wall, wedged into a tiny wooden booth that made him seem somewhat magical, like a troll. And of course I remember the way we, the students, with all of our jealousies and antipathies and deformities, would be—beauty and boob, sexpot and grind—crushed together like flowers pressed to yield to the black sky a concentrated homage, an incense, of cosmetics, cigarette smoke, warmed wool, hot dogs, and the tang, both animal and metallic, of clean hair. In a hoarse olfactory shout, these odors ascended. A dense haze gathered along the ceiling of brightness at the upper limit of the arc lights, whose glare blotted out the stars and made the sky seem romantically void and intimately near, like the death that now and then stooped and plucked one of us out of a crumpled automobile. If we went to the back row and stood on the bench there, we could look over the stone lip of the stadium down into the houses of the city, and feel the cold November air like the black presence of the ocean beyond the rail of a ship; and when we left after the game and from the hushed residential streets of this part of the city saw behind us a great vessel steaming with light, the arches of the colonnades blazing like portholes, the stadium seemed a great ship sinking and we the survivors of a celebrated disaster.

  To keep our courage up, we sang songs, usually the same song, the one whose primal verse runs,

  Oh, you can’t get to Heaven

  (Oh, you can’t get to Heaven)

  In a rocking chair

  (In a rocking chair),

  ’Cause the Lord don’t want

  (’Cause the Lord don’t want)

  No lazy people there!

  (No lazy people there!)

  And then repeated, double time. It was a so
ng for eternity; when we ran out of verses, I would make them up:

  Oh, you can’t get to Heaven

  (Oh, you can’t get to Heaven)

  In Smokey’s Ford

  (In Smokey’s Ford)

  ’Cause the cylinders

  (’Cause the cylinders)

  Have to be rebored.

  (Have to be rebored.)

  Down through the nice residential section, on through the not-so-nice and the shopping district, past dark churches where stained-glass windows, facing inward, warned us with left-handed blessings, down Warren Avenue to the Running Horse Bridge, and across the bridge we walked, then two miles up the Alton Pike to Olinger, following the trolley tracks. My invention would become reckless:

  Oh, you can’t get to Heaven

  (Oh, you can’t get to Heaven)

  In a motel bed

  (In a motel bed)

  ’Cause the sky is blue

  (’Cause the sky is blue)

  And the sheets are red.

  (And the sheets are red.)

  Few of us had a license to drive, and fewer still had visited a motel. We were at that innocent age, on the borderline of sixteen, when damnation seems a delicious promise. There was Mary Louise Hornberger, who was tall and held herself with such upright and defiant poise that she was Mother in both our class plays, and Alma Bidding, with her hook nose and her smug smile caricatured in cerise lipstick, and Joanne Hardt, whose father was a typesetter, and Marilyn Wenrich, who had a gray front tooth and in study hall liked to have the small of her back scratched, and Nanette Seifert, with her button nose and black wet eyes and peach-down cheeks framed in the white fur frilling the blue hood of her parka. And there were boys—Henny Gring, Leo Horst, Hawley Peters, Jack Lillijedahl, myself. Sometimes these, sometimes less or more. Once there was Billy Trupp on crutches. Billy played football and, though only a sophomore, had made the varsity that year, until he broke his ankle. He was dull and dogged and liked Alma, and she with her painted smile led him on lovingly. We offered for his sake to take the trolley, but he had already refused a car ride back to Olinger and obstinately walked with us, loping his heavy body along on the crutches, his lifted foot a boulder of plaster. His heroism infected us all; we taunted the cold stars with song, one mile, two miles, three miles. How slowly we went! With what a luxurious sense of waste did we abuse this stretch of time! For as children we had lived in a tight world of ticking clocks and punctual bells, where every minute was an admonition to thrift and where tardiness, to a child running late down a street with his panicked stomach burning, seemed the most mysterious and awful of sins. Now, turning the corner into adulthood, we found time to be instead a black immensity endlessly supplied, like the wind.