The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  He might, at another time, lambaste modern housing—the outskirts of Topeka covered with ugly pastel boxes arranged on phony curving streets; the supermarkets, the widening highways, the land going under all over. This was more like George: he advanced his intellect negatively, by extending his contempt. All movies were lousy, all politicians were crooked, public education in America was the world’s worst, most novels were a waste of time, everybody on television was out for your money. George was proud of these perceptions; he had not discovered that at the “good” colleges (he was eager to admit that his own college had been no good) one liked everything—Western movies, corny music, trashy books, crooked politicos—and reserved distaste for great men.

  A friend looking through the Chandlers’ library (mostly old political-science textbooks, and paperback mysteries, which Rosalind chain-read) might pull down, because it alone suggested Arabia, Hashish, by Henri de Monfreid, and find underlined—the underlining, thick soft pencil, was unmistakably George—the sentence The heat of the day breathed out from the walls and ground like an immense sigh of relief. But, facing a preoccupied executive across a glass-topped desk, George could only say, with a compromising snicker, “I guess it is silly, but ever since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by those places.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s silly,” would be the answer.

  A month after the Irvas’ fight, Rosalind stood outside their door and greeted George at his homecoming with, “The most wonderful thing has happened!”

  “I bet.” He was coming up the stairs; a woman who lived on the third floor had stepped into the elevator with him, and since the machine tended to return to the ground floor after one stop, he had got out with her and walked up two flights. His day had been frustrating. The most promising possibility, working with the United States delegation to a trade fair in Basra, appeared to have fallen through. It had taken him three-quarters of an hour to see Mr. Guerin again, and then he was told nothing but that funds were limited. He was so depressed that he had gone into a thirty-eight-cent movie, but it was something old with Barbara Stanwyck and so bad he had to leave, feeling sick. In a luncheonette on East Thirty-third Street he was charged $1.10 for a turkey sandwich, a glass of milk, and a cup of coffee. When he gave the cashier a five-dollar bill, she insisted that he also produce a dime and three pennies for tax, and then dealt the four dollars change not into his waiting hand but, rudely, onto the counter. As if he were covered with germs. On his way home, the mobs choking the subways, clustering at intersections, dodging, shoving, avoiding eye contact, seemed one huge contamination. It was his eleventh week of hunting. Rosalind’s department-store job, which was for only six hours a day now that the Easter rush had subsided, did not quite take care of rent and food. The Chandlers were eating into their savings at the rate of fifty dollars a month.

  Rosalind stood between him and their door. This annoyed George; he was tired. “Wait,” Rosalind said. Holding up a palm, she prolonged her own delight. “Have you seen either of the Irvas lately? Think.”

  “I never see him. Once in a while Mrs. and I get caught in the elevator together.” After his first conversation, he had not tried to sound Mrs. Irva out on the incident, and there seemed to be so little connection between the crazed and half-naked sufferer of that night and this compact little woman, with her hair going white in stripes and black buttons down the front of her blouse and an orange mouth painted up over the natural edge of her upper lip, that it was easy for George to discuss with her the weather and the poor way the building was run, as if they had nothing more important between them.

  “What is this routine?” George asked after Rosalind had stood silent for a moment, on her face a great, loving smile.

  “Behold, effendi,” she said, opening the door.

  Inside the room George saw flowers everywhere, white, pink, yellow, tall flowers, motionless, in vases, pitchers, and wastebaskets, lying in bundles on tables and chairs and on the floor. George never knew the names of flowers, but these were a public sort, big and hardy. Benevolence breathed from their long, ignorant, complex faces. The air in the room had a flower-shop coolness.

  “They came in a station wagon. Mrs. Irva said they were used to decorate a banquet last night, and the man in charge said the chef should have them. Mr. Irva thought it would be nice to give them to us. To show that everything was right between our families, Mrs. Irva said.”

  George was puzzled, stopped. His mind, swept clean of assertion, knew nothing but the flowers; they poured through his eyes. Later, in the stink and strangeness of Basra, whenever the homesick couple tried to recall America, the image that first and most vividly came to George was that of those massed idiot beauties.

  A Trillion Feet of Gas

  Old man Fraelich, as soon as they entered his room, rose in his pearl-pale suit and intoned flatulently, “John, let’s you and I go downstairs.” Another man, in black, got to his feet.

  “That would be rude,” Mrs. Fraelich stated, more as a simple fact than as a reprimand, though it might have been her influence—it was hard to guess how much power she had over her husband—that induced Fraelich to shake hands with his three young guests, listening to their names and gazing above their heads while his puffy, beringed hand, apparently cut off from his brain and acting on its own decent instincts, floated forward from his vest. Under those averted eyes Luke felt like a rich pastry mistakenly offered to an ill man. Had Fraelich forgotten the several times they had met before?

  Kathy, introducing her guests to her father-in-law with the angular exaggerations of a girl whose beauty is her sole defense, also implied they were strangers. “Father, this is Elizabeth Forrest, and Luther Forrest.”

  “You remember Luke from school,” Tim told him.

  “Of course I have,” Fraelich said evenly, changing his son’s verb and tilting back his head, as if into a pillow, so that he looked sicker than ever; his complexion had the sheen of a skin sweating out a fever. Luke suddenly got the idea that Liz’s being pregnant had offended him.

  “And Mr. Boyce-King from England,” Kathy continued.

  “Just King,” Donald corrected, blushing quickly. “Don King. Bryce is the middle name.”

  “Not a hyphen!” Kathy cried, insisting, in the midst of her in-laws and her husband’s friends, on her right to be natural and gay. Fatigue added to her lean charm all the romantic suggestions of exhaustion. Luke had been told she was undergoing analysis. “Pardon me. I only heard your name once over the phone.”

  “It’s awfully good of you to have me,” Donald said mechanically.

  “He looks like a hyphen person, doesn’t he?” Liz said, helping the other girl out, and unwittingly reflecting the ironic discussions she and Luke had had about their English guest in the few hours since Monday when Donald had not been with them. “I think it’s his eyebrows.”

  In the background Mrs. Fraelich had got to her feet, swinging her arms in boredom or exasperation. As she did so, the décolletage of her dress—a tube of soft blue cloth with big holes cut for the throat and arms, as in old copies of Vanity Fair—wandered alarmingly over her gaunt, freckled chest. She offered her second fact to the group. “Here is Mr. Born.”

  For the first time Fraelich showed animation. “Yes,” he announced, and his voice ballooned, “we can’t forget John Born.” The man in black, stout but solid, gave each of the young people a firm handshake and a grunt of pleasure. His suit and mustache were identically dark. Luke was delighted that Donald was meeting, even wordlessly, an authentic specimen of the Manhattan rich. Fraelich was rich but scarcely authentic.

  The old people scattered to other quarters of the duplex, and the young people were left alone with the bulwark-style leather furniture, Mrs. Fraelich’s Japanese watercolors, and the parabolic sub-ceiling suspended and glowing à la restaurant.

  “Please forgive the hyphen; it’s a fantasy of mine that all Englishmen have double names,” Kathy said to Donald, who, with the abrupt ease of the Britis
h, was examining, his head atilt, the spines of the books on the shelves.

  “Not at all. I enjoyed it.”

  The smug inappropriateness of the remark tipped them into a difficult silence. An awkward evening seemed foreshadowed. Most of the strands of acquaintance between the five were tenuous. Luke had known Tim at college, and had met Donald in England, and the two wives were, considering the slightness of their acquaintance, fond of each other. They made the best of it, chatting and sipping alcoholic drinks just like grownups. Luke kept wanting to suggest that they play Monopoly. Fraelich must have a set, and it would be a good American game for Donald to learn. Dinner evidently would be quite late. A new factor, hunger, was added to the nervous unrest in Luke’s stomach.

  He talked to Tim of common friends. Neither had heard anything from Irv. Preston Wentworth, Tim thought, was on the West Coast. Leo Bailley had been in town. It was strange how completely you could lose sight of men you saw every day in college. Our generation just doesn’t write letters, Luke offered.

  Donald said he thought that Americans phoned everywhere, or had little boys in wingèd boots carrying singing messages.

  Kathy asked Liz how she felt. Liz said that she felt just the same, but clumsier; that it was surprising how much you felt like your old self; and that she was looking forward to the contented-cow stage mentioned in the motherhood books. Donald laughed at “motherhood books.” Luke saw Kathy send Liz, by wingèd facial expression, a message that probably read, “We’re thinking about babies, too, but Timothy …” “How nice or sad,” Liz’s face sent back. Donald, trapped near the intersection of these baby-looks, experienced another flash of discomfiture and blushed stuffily. He had the oval slant eyes and full-fleshed lips of the British intellectual, and the raw sloping forehead.

  Tim Fraelich, sensing that his three guests had been together so much that in relation to each other they were speechless, assumed the role of topic starter. He mentioned the Olympic Games. Luke joined in gratefully. Since his interceding with, “You remember Luke from school,” Luke loved Tim, his slow considerate mind and his ugly laborer’s face. The blessing of money, in combination with modest endowments otherwise, had made Tim very gentle. In the Areté Club—he had been president when Luke was a sophomore—he had hated that anyone must be blackballed, whereas Luke, who knew that his own election had been close, proudly and recklessly wielded the veto.

  The Olympic discussion died soon. Luke couldn’t think of any stars except Parry O’Brien, and the vaulting preacher Richards, and the young Negro—what was his name?—who jumped seven feet.

  Swift and strong Americans, Donald said, appeared on the scene like waves of industrial produce.

  But it was the Commonwealth, they hastened to assure him, that demolished the four-minute mile. The Forrests, their year in Oxford, had lived a block away from the Iffley track, where Bannister had run the first one. Donald had been at Oxford at the time but naturally hadn’t bothered to attend the meet. He seemed to feel a certain distinction lay in this.

  Tim asked his English guest what he had seen of New York so far—if he had seen such-and-such an interesting place. Lamentably, nothing Tim named had Donald seen. The Forrests had been poor guides, though they had worked hard. Preceded by a radiogram, Donald had arrived on a Dutch liner, penniless and in the show-me mood of a cultural delegation. With the politico-literary precocity of Oxford youth, he had already been published in one of the British liberal weeklies, and he seemed to imagine that visiting the transatlantic land mass would constitute a scoop, Mrs. Trollope alone preceding him. Cruelly harried by their sense of official responsibility, the Forrests, after displaying to him their own selves—typical of the rising generation, he with a job in media and she with Scandinavian tastes, favoring natural wood and natural childbirth—had arranged parties and suppers where the allegorical figures of Graduate Student, Unwed Secretary, Struggling Abstract Painter, Intellectual Catholic, Jewish Would-Be Actress, and Fledgling Corporation Lawyer filed across the stage of their visitor’s preconceptions. Luke described in sociological detail his childhood in a small Ohio town, and Liz contributed what she knew of the caste system in Massachusetts. Donald, though polite, was rarely moved. Luke and Liz whispered guiltily in bed at night if, when the guests were gone, Donald did not withdraw his notebook from his coat pocket and take it to the sofa with a pencil and his final drink of the day. He drank steadily and soberly. In the daytime, Liz, saying that pregnant women should walk lots anyway, took Donald hunting for useful sights. She led him through Chinatown, the Village, Wall Street, the Lower East Side, and at Luke’s evening homecoming complained, as Donald sat sipping joylessly, his silence lending assent, that everything is just buildings and cars, that she felt so sorry for Donald, being stuck with them.

  Their guest claimed he did plan to leave. He wanted to see the “Southland,” and especially “your plains.” But no trip could begin until a money order arrived from somewhere—Canada, they thought he said. The Forrests had nicknamed it “the packet from France.” In the close company the three kept, the joke had come into the open. For several breakfasts, Luke had asked, “The packet from France arrive?” Liz, noting Donald’s diminishing response, warned her husband that he gave the impression of hinting. Luke said it wasn’t a hint, it was a pleasantry, and anyway, it didn’t look to him as if Donald was very sensitive to hints or indeed to anything.

  It was true, the Englishman’s calm—so cheering in Oxford, so strong that, even meeting him on High Street, against a background of steel-workers on bicycles and whey-faced bus queues, you smelled pipe smoke, and felt the safety of his room in Magdalen, with the old novels in many thin volumes and the window giving onto the deer park and the drab London magazines stacked like dolls’ newspapers on the mantel—in America had become a maddening quiescence, as if the thicker sunlight of this more southern country were a physical weight on his limbs. He had protested the bother of being included in this dinner engagement, but he had not suggested, as they had hoped, that he could manage a night on his own.

  “No,” he was saying to Tim, “they haven’t taken me to Louie’s. You say it’s an interesting place. Does it have lots of ethos? You Americans are always talking about ethos. Margaret Mead is something of your White Goddess over here, isn’t she?”

  “Mamie is,” Kathy suddenly said, thrusting her fingers into the hair at her temples and laughing when the others did.

  Donald said that once again the American people had proven themselves idiots in the eyes of the world. Luke said it would be a different story in 1960. “Wait till ’sixty, wait till ’sixty,” Donald said. “That’s all you people think about. The 1960 model of Plymouth car; the population in 1960. You’re in love with the future.” He touched, in an unconscious gesture, the breast of his coat, to make sure the stiffness of the notebook was there. Luke smiled and saw them all through Donald’s eyes: the mild, homely heir; his fretful, leggy wife; Liz with her half-formed baby; Luke himself with his half-baked success—pale, pale. Poor Americans, these, for the New Statesman & Nation. What Donald couldn’t see that Luke could was how well he, Donald, his sensible English shoes cracked and his wool clothes frazzled, blended into their pastel frieze.

  The man introduced to them as Mr. Born walked into the room. “Looks like Ah’ll be getting a ride,” he said to Tim. “With your pa and ma.” His voice, as Luke had expected, was rich and grainy, but the accent forced a slight revision of his first idea of the man. He was not a New Yorker. In the black suit, Born’s body, solid as a barrel, stood out with peculiar force against the linen-covered wall, where Mrs. Fraelich’s Japanese prints made patches of vague color.

  “Would you like a Scotch-and-water, John?” Tim asked. “Or cognac?” Mr. Born shook his massive head—severed from his body, it might have weighed forty pounds—and held up his square, exquisitely clean hand to halt all liquor traffic. In the other he gripped a heavy cigar, freshly lighted.

  “We’ve been chewing over the election,”
Tim said.

  “You desahd who won it?”

  The young people made a fragile noise of laughter.

  “We’ve been deciding who should have won it,” Donald said, cross spots appearing on his cheekbones and forehead.

  “Yeass,” Mr. Born said, simultaneous with the hissing of the cushions as he settled into a leather armchair. “There was never any doubt about the way it would go in Texas. The betting in Houston wasn’t on who”—his lips pushed forward on the prolonged “who”—“would get it but at what taam the other fella would concede.” He rotated the cigar a half-circle, so the burning end was toward himself. “A lotta money was lost in Houston while Adlai was making that speech so good. They thought, you see, it would be sooner.”

  “How did you do?” Donald asked tactlessly, as if this were an exhibit they had arranged for him.

  “Noo.” The Texan scratched his ear fastidiously and beamed. “I had no money on it.”

  “What is the situation out there? Politically? One reads the Democrats are in bad shape,” Donald said.