The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  The broad healthy face bunched as he pleasantly studied the boy. “What they say, Lyndon didn’t show up too good at the convention. We aren’t all that proud of him. As I heard it expressed, the feeling was, Let those two run and get killed and get rid of ’em that way. That’s the way I’ve heard it expressed: Run those two, and let ’em get killed.”

  “Really!” Kathy exclaimed. Then, surprised at herself, she bit her lower lip coquettishly and crossed her legs, calling attention to them. Luke liked her legs because above the lean and urban ankles the calves swelled to a country plumpness.

  “The American scramble,” Donald murmured.

  Luke, afraid Mr. Born would feel hostility in the air, asked why the South hadn’t pushed someone like Gore instead of Kennedy.

  “Gore’s not popular. The answer’s very simple: The South doesn’t have anyone big enough. ’Cept Lyndon. And he’s sick. Heart attack. No, they’re in a bad way down there. They got the leaders of both houses, and they’re in a bad way.”

  “Wouldn’t there be a certain amount of anti-Catholic sentiment stirred up if Kennedy were to run?” Tim asked. His mother, for a period in her youth, had been a convert to the Church.

  Mr. Born puffed his cigar and squinted at his friend’s son through the smoke. “I think we’ve outgrown that. I think we’ve outgrown that.”

  The rough bulge of Donald’s forehead burned with political antagonism. He blurted, “You’re pleased with the way things went?”

  “Well. I voted for Aahk. Not particularly proud of it, though. Not particularly proud of it. He vetoed our gas bill.” Everyone laughed, for no clear reason. “If he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t do it.”

  “You think so?” Donald asked.

  “I know it for a faact. He’s said so. He wants the bill. And Adlai, he wouldn’t promise if he got in he wouldn’t try to get the Lands back to Washington. So we voted Aahk in; he was the best we could get.”

  Donald pointed at him gingerly. “You, of course, don’t want the Tidelands to revert to the federal government.”

  “They cain’t. There won’t be any gas. It’s off twelve percent from last year now, for the needs. You see—Are you all interested in this?”

  The group nodded hastily.

  “I have a trillion feet of gas. It’s down there. In the ground. It’s not gone to go away. Now, I made a contract to sell that gas at eighteen cents in Chicago. In the city of Chicago there are maybe twelve thousand meters now that don’t have adequate supply. I wanted to pipe it up, from Texas. That was two years ago. They won’t let me do it. I’ve been in Washington, D.C., for most of those two years, trying to see a bill passed that’ll let me do it.” He released some smoke and smiled. Washington, the implication was, had agreed with him.

  Donald asked why they wouldn’t let him do it. Mr. Born explained in detail—clearly and kindly, and even got to his feet to explain—federal agencies, state commissions, wellhead quotas, costs of distillate, dry holes (“They don’t allow you for drah holes after; the ones up to, O.K., but then they don’t recognize ’em”), and the Socialist color of thinking in Washington. On and on it went, a beautiful composition, vowel upon vowel, occasional emphasis striking like an oboe into a passage of cellos. The coda came too soon: “But the point, the point is this: If they do pass it, then fine. I’m contracted out; I’m willing to stick by it. But if they don’t—if they don’t, then I sell it for more insaahd Texas. That’s how demand is gone up.”

  Luke realized with delight that here, not ten feet away, walked and talked a bugaboo—a Tidelands lobbyist, a States’ Righter, a Purchaser of Congressmen, a Pillar of Reaction. And what had he proved to be, this stout man holding his huge head forward from his spine, bisonlike? A companion all simplicity and courtesy, bearing without complaint—and all for the sake, it seemed, of these young people—the unthinkable burden of a trillion feet of gas. Luke could not remember the reasons for governmental control of big business any better than he could recall when drunk the defects of his own personality. With a gentle three-finger grip on his cigar, Mr. Born settled back into the armchair, the viewpoints alternative to his hanging vaporized in the air around him, a flattering haze.

  The next minute, Mr. and Mrs. Fraelich came and took John Born away, though not before old man Fraelich, his bulbous gray voice droning anxiously, exuded every fact he knew about the natural-gas industry. Mr. Born listened politely, tilting his stogie this way and that. The possibility occurred to Luke that, as Mr. Born owned a trillion feet of gas, Mr. Fraelich owned John Born.

  “He’s really a hell of a nice guy,” Tim said when the older people had gone.

  “Oh, he was wonderful!” Liz said. “The way he stood there, so big in his black suit—” She encircled an area with her arms and, without thinking, thrust out her stomach.

  Kathy asked, “Did he mean a trillion feet of gas in the pipe?”

  “No, no, you fluff,” Tim said, giving her a bullying hug that jarred Luke. “Cubic feet.”

  “That still doesn’t mean anything to me,” Liz said. “Can’t you compress gas?”

  “Where does he keep it?” Kathy asked. “I mean have it.”

  “In the ground,” Luke said. “Weren’t you listening?” But she wasn’t his to scold.

  Kathy kept at it. “Gas like you burn?”

  “A trillion,” Donald said, tentatively sarcastic. “I don’t even know how many ciphers are in it.”

  “Twelve in America,” Luke told him. “In Britain, more. Eighteen.”

  “You Americans are so good at figgers. Yankee ingenuity.”

  “Watch it, Boyce-King. If you British don’t learn how to say ‘figures’ we’ll pipe that gas under your island and float it off into space.”

  Though no one else laughed, Luke himself did, at the picture of England as a red pieplate skimming through space, fragments chipping off until nothing remained but the dome of St. Paul’s. And after they had sat down to dinner, he continued, he felt, to be quite funny, frequently at the expense of “Boyce-King.” He felt back in college, full of novel education and undulled ambition. Kathy Fraelich laughed until her hand shook over the soup. It was good to know he could still, impending fatherhood or not, make people laugh. “… but the great movies are the ones where an idol teeters, you know, all grinning and bug-eyed”—he wobbled rigidly in his chair and then with horrible slow menace fell forward, breaking off the act just as his nose touched the rim of the water glass—“and then crumbles all over the screaming worshippers. They don’t make scenes like that in British movies. They save their idols and pawn them off as Druid shrines. Or else scratch ‘Wellington’ across the front. Ah, you’re a canny race, Boyce-King.”

  After dinner they watched two television plays, which Luke ingeniously defended as fine art at every turn of the action, Donald squirming and blinking and the others not even listening but attending to the screen. Liz in her passive pregnant state didn’t resist TV. The young Fraelichs nuzzled together in one fat chair. The black-and-white figures—Luke kept saying “figgers”—were outlined on Fraelich’s costly color set with rainbows.

  Luke, at the door, thanked their hosts enthusiastically for the excellent meal, the educational company, the iridescent dramas. The two couples expanded the last goodbye with a discussion of where to live eventually. They decided, while Donald nodded and chuckled uneasily on the fringe of the exchange, that nothing was as important as the children’s feeling secure in a place.

  In the taxi, Luke, sorry that in the end Donald had seemed an extra party, said to him, “Well, we’ve shown you the Texas Billionaire. You’ve gazed into the heart of a great nation.”

  “Did you notice his hands?” Liz asked. “They were really beautiful.” She was in a nice, tranquil mood, bathed in maternal hormones.

  “It was extraordinary,” Donald said, squeezed in the middle and uncertain where his arms should go, “the way he held you all, with his consistently selfish reasoning.”

  Luke put his
arm on the back of the seat, including his visitor in a non-tactile embrace and touching Liz’s neck with his fingers. The packet from France, he reckoned, was on the way. The head of the cabby jerked as he tried to make out his passengers in the rearview mirror. “You’re afraid,” Luke said loudly, so the cabbie, democratically, could hear, “of our hideous vigor.”

  Dear Alexandros

  Translation of a letter written by Alexandros Koundouriotis, Needy Child No. 26,511 in the records of Hope, Incorporated, an international charity with headquarters in New York.

  July, 1959

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bentley:

  Dear American Parents, first of all I want to inquire about your good health, and then, if you ask me, tell you that I am keeping well, for which I thank God, and hope that it is the same with you. May God keep you always well, and grant you every happiness and joy. With great eagerness I was looking forward again this month to receiving a letter from you, but unfortunately I have again not received one. So I am worried about you, for I am longing to hear about you, dear American Parents. You show such a great interest in me, and every month I receive your help. Over here it is very hot at this time of the year, for we are in the heart of the summer. The work out in the fields is very tiring, as I hear the older people saying. As for me, when I have no work at home I go down to the sea for a swim, and enjoy the sea with my friends. For at this time of the year the sea is lovely. So much for my news. Vacations continue, until it is time for the schools to reopen, when with new strength and joy we shall begin our lessons again. Today that I am writing to you I received again the $8.00 that you sent me, for the month of July, and I thank you very much. With this money I shall buy whatever I need, and we shall also buy some flour for our bread. In closing, I send you greetings from my granny and my sister, and hope that my letter finds you in good health and joy. I shall be looking forward to receiving a letter from you, to hear about you and how you are spending your summer. I greet you with much affection.

  Your son,

  Alexandros

  Reply from Kenneth Bentley, American Parent No. 10,638.

  September 25

  Dear Alexandros:

  We are all sorry that you should worry about us because you have not received a letter from us. I fear we are not as regular in writing as you are, but the grandly named organization which delivers our letters seems to be very slow, they take about three months to deliver. Perhaps they send them by way of China.

  You describe the Greek summer very beautifully. It is autumn now in New York City. The sad little trees along the somewhat sad little street where I live now are turning yellow, the ones that are not already dead. The pretty girls that stride along the broad avenues are putting on hats again. In New York the main streets run north and south so that there is usually a sunny side and a shady side and now people cross the street to be on the sunny side because the sun is no longer too warm. The sky is very blue and some evenings, after I eat in a drugstore or restaurant, I walk a few blocks over to the East River to watch the boats and look at Brooklyn, which is another section of this excessively large city.

  Mrs. Bentley and I no longer live together. I had not intended to tell you this but now the sentence is typed and I see no harm in it. Perhaps already you were wondering why I am writing from New York City instead of from Greenwich, Connecticut. Mrs. Bentley and little Amanda and Richard all still live in our nice home in Greenwich and the last time I saw them looked very well. Amanda now is starting kindergarten and was very excited and will never wear dungarees or overalls any more but insists on wearing dresses because that is what makes little girls look nice, she thinks. This makes her mother rather angry, especially on Saturdays and Sundays when Amanda plays mostly in the dirt with the neighbor children. Richard walks very well now and does not like his sister teasing him. As who does? I go to see them once a week and pick up my mail and your last letter was one of the letters I picked up and was delighted to read. Mrs. Bentley asked me to answer it, which I was delighted to do, because she had written you the last time. In fact I do not think she did, but writing letters was one thing she was not good at, although it was her idea for us to subscribe to Hope, Incorporated, and I know she loves you very much, and was especially happy to learn that you plan to begin school with “new strength and joy.”

  There has been much excitement in the United States over the visit of the head of Soviet Russia, Mr. Khrushchev. He is a very talkative and self-confident man and in meeting some of our own talkative and self-confident politicians there has been some friction, much of it right on television where everybody could see. My main worry was that he would be shot but I don’t think he will be shot any more. His being in the country has been a funny feeling, as if you have swallowed a penny, but the American people are so anxious for peace that they will put up with small discomforts if there is any chance it will do any good. The United States, as perhaps you will learn in school, was for many years an isolated country and there still is a perhaps childish belief that if other nations, even though we are a great power, leave us alone, then the happiness will return.

  That was not a very good paragraph and perhaps the man or woman who kindly translates these letters for us will kindly omit it. I have a cold in my chest that mixes with a great deal of cigarette smoke and makes me very confused, especially after I have been sitting still for a while.

  I am troubled because I imagine I hear you asking, “Then were Mr. and Mrs. Bentley, who sent me such happy letters from America, and photographs of their children, and a sweater and a jackknife at Christmas, telling lies? Why do they not live together any more?” I do not wish you to worry. Perhaps in your own village you have husbands and wives who quarrel. Perhaps they quarrel but continue to live together but in America where we have so much plumbing and fast automobiles and rapid highways we have forgotten how to live with inconveniences, although I admit that my present mode of life is something of an inconvenience to me. Or perhaps in your schooling, if you keep at it, and I hope you will, the priests or nuns will have you read the very great Greek poem the Iliad, in which the poet Homer tells of Helen who left her husband to live with Paris among the Trojans. It is something like that with the Bentleys, except that I, a man, have gone to live among the Trojans, leaving my wife at home. I do not know if the Iliad is a part of your schooling, and would be curious to know. Your nation should be very proud of producing masterpieces which the whole world can enjoy. In the United States the great writers produce works which people do not enjoy, because they are so depressing to read.

  But we were not telling lies: Mrs. Bentley and Amanda and Richard and I were very happy and to a degree are yet. Please continue to send us your wonderful letters, they will go to Greenwich, and we will all enjoy them. We will continue to send you the money for which you say you are grateful, though the money we give you this way is not a tenth of the money we used to spend for alcoholic drinks. Not that Mrs. Bentley and I drank all these alcoholic drinks. We had many friends who helped us, most of them very tedious people, although perhaps you would like them more than I do. Certainly they would like you more than they presently like me.

  I am so happy that you live near the sea where you can swim and relax from the tiring work of the fields. I was born far inland in America, a thousand miles from any ocean, and did not come to love the sea until I was grown up and married. So in that sense you are luckier than I. Certainly to be near the sea is a great blessing, and I remember often thinking how nice it was that my own children should know what it was to run on the sand of the pretty though not large beach at Greenwich, and to have that invigorating, cold, “wine-dark,” as your Homer writes, other world to contemplate.

  Now I must end, for I have agreed to take a young woman out to dinner, a young woman who, you will be interested to hear, is herself partially Greek in origin, though born in America, and who has much of the beauty of your race. But I have already cruelly burdened our translator. My best wishes to your granny, who has
taken such good care of you since your mother died, and to your sister, whose welfare and good health is such a large concern in your heart.

  Sincerely,

  Kenneth Bentley

  P.S.: In looking back at the beginning of my letter I see with regret that I have been unkind to the excellent organization which has made possible our friendship with you, which has produced your fine letters, which we are always happy to receive and which we read and reread. If we have not written as often as we should have it is our fault and we ask you to forgive us.

  The Doctor’s Wife

  “Sharks?” The tip of the doctor’s wife’s freckled nose seemed to sharpen in the sparkling air. Her eyes, momentarily rendered colorless by thought, took up the green of the Caribbean; the plane of the water intersected her throat. “Yes, we have some. Big dark fellows, too.”

  Ralph, hanging beside her, squatting on buoyance, straightened up, splashing, and tried to survey the beryl depths around him. His sudden movements rendered even the immediate water opaque. The doctor’s wife’s surprisingly young laughter rang out.

  “You Americans,” she said, “so nervy,” and with complacence pushed a little deeper into the sea, floating backward while the water gently bubbled around her mouth. She had a small face, gone freckled and rosy in this climate; her stringy auburn hair had been bleached by daily seabathing. “They rarely come in this far,” she said, tilting her face upward and speaking to the sky. “Only in the turtle-killing season, when the blood draws them in. We’re fortunate. Our beaches go out shallowly. Over in St. Martin, now, the offshore water is deep, and they must be careful.”

  She turned and, with the casual paddling stroke of a plump woman who floats easily, swam smiling toward him. “A shame,” she said, her voice strained by the effort of curving her throat to keep her lips free, “Vic Johnson is gone. He was a dear soul. The old Anglican vicar.” She pronounced “vicar” rather harshly, perhaps humorously. She stood up beside Ralph and pointed to the horizon. “Now, he,” she said, “used to swim far out into the bay, he and his great black dog, Cato. Vic would swim straight out, until he couldn’t move a muscle, and then he would float, and grab Cato’s tail, and the dog would pull him in. Honestly, it was a sight, this fat old Englishman, his white hair streaming, coming in on the tail of a dog. He never gave a thought to sharks. Oh, he’d swim way out, until he was just a dot.”