by John Updike
Returning, frantic and dazed, to our room at the Potts’, we were able to place the application blank and the annotated Arnold beside our first trophy, the Oxfordshire weekly. I lay down on the bed beside my wife and read through the lead article, a militant lament on the deterioration of the Norman church at Iffley. When I had regained some purpose in my legs, I walked over to Keble and found it was much as I had been warned. The patterns of paternalism did not include those students tasteless enough to have taken a wife. Flats were to be had, though, the underling asserted, absurdly scratching away with a dip pen in his tiny nook with its one Gothic window overlooking a quad; his desk suggested the Tenniel illustration of all the cards flying out of the pack.
I was newly enough married not to expect that my wife, once I was totally drained of hope, would supply some. She had decided in my absence that we must stop being polite to Mr. Robinson. Indeed, this did seem the one way out of the maze. I should have thought of it myself. We dressed up and ate a heartily expensive meal at a pseudo-French restaurant that Mr. Robinson had told us never, never to patronize, because they were brigands. Then we went to an American movie to give us brute strength and in the morning came down to breakfast braced. Mr. Robinson was not there.
This was to be, it turned out, our last breakfast at the Potts’. Already we had become somewhat acclimatized. We no longer, for example, glanced around for Mrs. Pott; we had accepted that she existed, if she existed at all, on a plane invisible to us. The other boarders greeted us by name now. There were two new faces among them—young students’ faces, full of bewilderingly pertinent and respectful questions about the United States. The States, their opinion was, had already gone the way that all countries must eventually go. To be American, we were made to feel, was to be lucky. Mr. Pott told us that Karam had written he would be needing his room by the weekend and pushed across the table a piece of paper containing several addresses. “There’s a three-room basement asking four pounds ten off Banbury Road,” he said, “and if you want to go to five guineas, Mrs. Shipley still has her second floor over toward St. Hilda’s.”
It took us a moment to realize what this meant; then our startled thanks gushed. “Mr. Robinson,” I blurted in conclusion, groping for some idiom suitable to Mr. Pott and not quite coming up with it, “has been leading us all around the Maypole.”
“Poor Robbie,” said Mr. Pott. “Daft as a daisy.” He tapped the bony side of his lean dark head.
My wife asked, “Is he always—like that?”
“Only as when he finds an innocent or two to sink his choppers in; they find him out soon enough, poor Robbie.”
“Does he really have a niece in Michigan?”
“Ah yes, he’s not all fancy. He was a learned man before his trouble, but the university never quite took him on.”
“ ‘So poetry, which is in Oxford made an art,’ ” a familiar voice sweetly insisted behind us, “ ‘in London only is a trade.’ Dryden. Not a true Oxonian, but an excellent poet and amateur scholar nevertheless. If you enjoy his jingling style. Mr. Pott. Can that egg be mine?” He sat down and smashed it neatly with his spoon and turned to us jubilantly. Perhaps the delay in his appearance had been caused by an effort of grooming, for he looked remarkably spruce, his long hair brushed to a tallowish lustre, his tie knotted tightly, his denture snug under his lips, and a plaid scarf draped around his shoulders. “Today,” he said, “I will devote myself to your cause wholeheartedly, without intermissions, interruptions, or intercessions. I have spent the last hour preparing a wonderful surprise, mirabile dictu, as faithful Aeneas said to his natural mother, Aphrodite.”
“I think,” I said, in a voice constrained by the presence of others around the table, “we really must do other things today. Mr. Pott says that Karam—”
“Wait, wait,” he cried, becoming agitated and rising in his chair. “You do not understand. You are innocents—charming, yes, vastly potential, yes, but innocents, you see. You must know the way, the ins, the outs—”
“No, honestly—”
“Wait. Come with me now. I will show you my surprise instanter, if you insist.” And he bustled up from the table, the egg uneaten, and back up the stairs toward his room. My wife and I followed, relieved that what must be done could now be done unwitnessed.
Mr. Robinson was already coming out of his room as we met him on the second-floor landing. In his haste he had left the door open behind him. Over his shoulder I glimpsed a chaos of tumbled books and old magazines and and worn clothes. He held in his hands a sheet of paper on which he had made a list. “I have spent the last hour preparing,” he said, “with a care not incomparable to that of—ih-ih-humm—St. Jerome transcribing the Vulgate, a list; these are the people that today we will see.” I read the list he held up. The offices and titles and names at the top meant nothing to me, but halfway down, where the handwriting began to get big and its slant to become inconstant, there was the word “Chancellor” followed by a huge colon and the name “Lord Halifax.”
Something in my face made the paper begin to tremble. Mr. Robinson took it away and held it at his side. With the other hand he fumbled with his lapel. “You’re terribly kind,” I said. “You’ve given us a wonderful introduction to Oxford. But today, really, we must go out on our own. Absolutely.”
“No, no, you don’t seem to comprehend; the circum—”
“Please,” my wife said sharply.
He looked at her, then at me, and an unexpected calm entered his features. The twinkle faded, the jaw relaxed, and his face might have been that of any tired old man as he sighed, “Very well, very well. No shame.”
“Thank you so much,” my wife said, and made to touch, but did not quite touch, the limp hand that had curled defensively against the breast of his coat.
Knees bent, he stood apparently immobilized on the landing before the door of his room. Yet, as we went down the stairs, he did one more gratuitous thing; he came to the banister, lifted his hand, and pronounced, as we quickened our steps to dodge his words, “God bless. God bless.”
Still Life
Leonard Hartz, a slender and earnest American with a rather comically round head, came to the Constable School because it was one of three British art schools approved by the Veterans Administration under the new, pruned GI Bill. He could not imagine what the VA had seen in the place. Constable—“Connie” to the bird-tongued, red-legged girls who composed half its student body—was at once pedantic and frivolous. The vast university museum which, with a gesture perhaps less motherly than absent-mindedly inclusive, sheltered the school in its left wing, was primarily archaeological in interest. Upstairs, room after room was packed with glass cases of Anglo-Saxon rubble; downstairs, a remarkably complete set of plaster casts taken from classical statuary swarmed down corridors and gestured under high archways in a kind of petrified riot. This counterfeit wealth of statues, many of them still decorated with the seams of the casting process and quite swarthy with dust, was only roughly ordered. Beginning in the East with wasp-waisted kouroi whose Asiatic faces wore the first faint smile of the Attic dawn, one passed through the jumbled poignance and grandeur of Greece’s golden age and ended in a neglected, westerly room where some large, coarse monuments of the Roman-Christian degeneracy rested their hypnotized stares in the shadows. Masterpieces lurked like spies in this mob. His first week, Leonard spent a morning and two afternoons sketching a blackened Amazon leaning half clad from a dark corner, and only at the end of the second day, struck by a resemblance between his sketch and the trademark of an American pencil manufacturer, did he realize that his silent companion had been the Venus de Milo.
For freshmen at the Constable School were to start off banished from the school itself, with its bright chatter and gay smocks, and sent into these dim galleries to “draw from the antique.” The newcomers—Leonard and four other resentful American veterans and one wispy English boy and a dozen sturdy English teen-age girls—straggled each morning into the museum, gripping a drawi
ng board under one arm and a bench called a “horse” under the other, and at dusk, which came early to the interior of the museum, returned with their burdens, increased by the weight of a deity pinned to their boards, in time to see the advanced students jostle at the brush-cleaning sink and the nude model, incongruously dressed in street clothes, emerge from her closet. The school always smelled of turpentine at this hour.
Its disconsolate scent lingering in his head, Leonard left the school alone, hurrying down the three ranks of shallow steps just in time to miss his bus. Everywhere he turned, those first weeks, he had this sensation of things evading him. When he did board his bus, and climbed to the second deck, the store fronts below sped backwards as if from pursuit—the chemist’s shops that were not exactly drugstores, the tea parlors that were by no means luncheonettes. The walls of the college buildings, crusty and impregnable, swept past like an armada of great gray sails, and the little river sung by Drayton and Milton and Matthew Arnold slipped from under him, and, at right angles to the curving road, red suburban streets plunged down steep perspectives, bristling with hedges and spiked walls and padlocked chains. Sometimes, suspended between the retreating brick rows like puffs of flak, a flock of six or so birds was turning and flying, invariably away. The melancholy of the late English afternoon was seldom qualified for Leonard by any expectation of the night. Of the four other Americans, three were married, and although each of these couples in turn had him over for supper and Scrabble, these meals quickly vanished within his evenings’ recurrent, thankless appetite. The American movies so readily available reaffirmed rather than relieved his fear that he was out of contact with anything that might give him strength. Even at the school, where he had decided to place himself at least provisionally under the influence of Professor Seabright’s musty aesthetic, he began to feel that indeed there was, in the precise contour of a shoulder and the unique shape of space framed between Apollo’s legs, something intensely important, which, too—though he erased until the paper tore and squinted till his eyes burned—evaded him.
Seabright tried to visit the students among the casts once a day. Footsteps would sound briskly, marking the instructor off from any of the rare sightseers, often a pair of nuns, who wandered, with whispers and a soft slithering step, into this section of the museum. Seabright’s voice, its lisp buried in the general indistinctness, would rumble from far away, as if the gods were thinking of thundering. In stages of five minutes each, it would draw nearer, and eventually addressed distinctly the student on the other side of the pedestals, a tall English girl named, with a pertness that sat somewhat askew on her mature body, Robin.
“Here, here,” Seabright said. “We’re not doing silhouettes.”
“I thought, you know,” Robin replied in an eager voice that to Leonard’s American ears sounded also haughty, “if the outline came right, the rest could be fitted in.”
“Oh no. Oh no. We don’t fit in; we build across the large form. Otherwise all the little pieces will never read. You see, there, we don’t even know where the center of your chest is. Ah—may I?” From the grunts and sighs Leonard pictured Robin rising from straddling her horse and Seabright seating himself. “Dear me,” he said, “you’ve got the outlines so black they rather take my eye. However …”
To Leonard it was one of Seabright’s charms that, faced with any problem of drawing, he became so engrossed he forgot to teach. He had had to train himself to keep glancing at his watch; else he would sit the whole afternoon attacking a beginner’s exercise, frowning like a cat at a mouse hole, while the forgotten student stood by on aching legs.
“There,” Seabright sighed reluctantly. “I’m afraid I’ve spent my time with you. It’s just one passage, but you can see here, across the thorax, how the little elements already are turning the large surface. And then, as you’d pass into the rib cage, with these two shadows just touched in at first, you see … Perhaps I should do a bit more.… There, you see. And then we could pass on to the throat.… It’s a good idea, actually, on these figgers to start with the pit of the throat, and then work the shoulders outwards and go up for the head.…”
“Yes, sir,” Robin said, a shade impatiently.
“The whole thrust of the pose is in those angles, you see? Do you see?”
“Yes, sir, I hope so.”
But her hopes were not enough for him; he came around the pedestals and his plump, solemn, slightly feline figure was in Leonard’s view when he turned and said apprehensively to the hidden girl, “You understand to use the pencil as lightly as you can? Work up the whole form gradually?”
“Oh, yes. Quite,” Robin’s pert voice insisted.
Seabright twitched his head and came and stood behind Leonard. “I don’t think,” he said at last, “we need draw in the casting seams; we can idealize to that extent.”
“It seemed to help in getting the intervals,” Leonard explained.
“Even though these are exercises, you know, there’s no advantage in having them, uh, positively ugly.” Leonard glanced around at his teacher, who was not usually sarcastic, and Seabright continued with some embarrassment; his speech impediment was less audible than visible, a fitful effortfulness of the lips. “I must confess you’re not given much help by your subject matter.” His eyes had lifted to the statue Leonard had chosen to draw, for the reason that it had all four limbs. Completeness was the crude token by which Leonard preferred one statue to another; he was puzzled by Seabright’s offended murmur of “Wretched thing.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Look here, Hartz,” Seabright exclaimed, and with startling aggressiveness trotted forward, stretched up on tiptoe, and slapped the plaster giant’s side. “The Roman who copied this didn’t even understand how the side here is constricted by this leg taking the weight!” Seabright himself constricted, then blinked abashedly and returned to Leonard’s side with a more cautious voice. “Nevertheless, you’ve carried out parts of it with admirable intensity. Per, uh, perhaps you’ve been rather too intense; relax a bit at first and aim for the swing of the figger—how that little curve here, you see, sets up against this long lean one.” Leonard expected him to ask for the pencil, but instead he asked, “Why don’t you get yourself a new statue? That charming girl Miss Cox is doing—Diana, really, I suppose she is. At least there you do get some echoes of the Greek grace. I should think you’ve done your duty by this one.”
“O.K. It was starting to feel like mechanical drawing.” To dramatize his obedience, Leonard began prying out his thumbtacks, but Seabright, his five minutes not used up, lingered.
“You do see some sense in drawing these at the outset, don’t you?” Seabright was troubled by his American students; of the five, Leonard knew he must seem the least rebellious.
“Sure. It’s quite challenging, once you get into one.”
The Englishman was not totally reassured. He hovered apologetically, and confided this anecdote: “Picasso, you know, had a woman come to him for advice about learning to draw, and he told her right off, ‘Dessinez antiques.’ Draw from the antique. There’s nothing like it, for getting the big forms.”
Then Seabright left, pattering past threatening athletes and emperors, through the archway, out of the section altogether, into the brighter room where medieval armor, spurs, rings, spoons, and chalices were displayed. The sound of his shoes died. From behind the hedge of pedestals, quite close to Leonard’s ear, Robin’s clear voice piped, “Well, isn’t Puss in a snorty mood?”
• • •
To attack the statue Seabright assigned him, Leonard moved his horse several yards forward, without abandoning the precious light that filtered through a window high behind him. From this new position Robin was in part visible. A plinth still concealed her bulk, but around the plinth’s corner her propped drawing board showed, and her hand when it stabbed at the paper, and even her whole head, massive with floppy fair hair, when she bent forward into a detail. He was at first too shy to risk meeting her eyes,
so her foot, cut off at the ankle and thus isolated in its blue ballet slipper on the shadowy marble floor, received the brunt of his attention. It was a long foot, with the division of the toes just beginning at the rim of the slipper’s blue arc, and the smooth pallor of the exposed oval yielding, above the instep, to the mist-reddened roughness of an Englishwoman’s leg. These national legs, thick at the ankles and glazed up to the knees with a kind of weatherproofing, on Robin were not homely; like a piece of fine pink ceramic her ankle kept taking, in Seabright’s phrase, his eye.
After an hour Leonard brought out, “Aren’t your feet cold, in just those slippers?”
“Rather,” she promptly responded and, with the quick skip that proved to be her custom, went beyond the question: “Gives me the shivers all over, being in this rotten place.”
It was too quick for him. “You mean the school?”
“Oh, the school’s all right; it’s these wretched antiques.”
“Don’t you like them? Don’t you find them sort of stable, and timeless?”
“If these old things are timeless, I’d rather be timely by a long shot.”
“No, seriously. Think of them as angels.”
“Seriously my foot. You Americans are never serious. Everything you say’s a variety of joke; honestly, it’s like conversing in a monkey-house.”
On this severe note Leonard feared they had concluded; but a minute later she showed him his silence was too careful by lucidly announcing, “I have a friend who’s an atheist and hopes World War Three blows everything to bits. He doesn’t care. He’s an atheist.”
Their subsequent conversations sustained this discouraging quality, of two creatures thrown together in the same language exchanging, across a distance wider than it seemed, miscalculated signals. He felt she quite misjudged his seriousness and would have been astonished to learn how deeply and solidly she had been placed in his heart, affording a fulcrum by which he lifted the great dead mass of his spare time, which now seemed almost lighter than air, a haze of quixotic expectations, imagined murmurs, easy undressings, and tourist delights. He believed he was coming to love England. He went to a tailor and bought for four guineas a typical jacket of stiff green wool, only to discover, before the smeary mirror in his digs, that it made his head look absurdly small, like one berry on top of a bush; and he kept wearing his little zippered khaki windbreaker to the Constable School.
