The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  “Poor Dad,” Laura volunteered. “That prostitute really turned him on.”

  “Laura, I’m not sure you know what a prostitute is.”

  “Mom said every woman is a prostitute, one way or another.”

  “You know your mother exaggerates.”

  “I know she’s a bitch, you mean.”

  “Laura.”

  “She is, Dad. Look what she’s done to you. Now she’ll do it to Jim.”

  “You and I have different memories of your mother. You don’t remember her when you were little.”

  “I don’t want to live with her, either. When we all get back to Denver, I want to live with you. If she and I live together, it’ll always be competing, that’s how it was in Reno; who needs it? When I get to forty, I’m going to tell my lover to shoot me.”

  Polly cried out—an astonishing noise, like the crash of a jackpot. “Stop it,” she told Laura. “Stop talking big. That’s all you do, is talk big.” The child, salad dressing gleaming on her chin, pushed her voice toward her sister through tears: “You want Mommy and Daddy to fight all the time instead of love each other even though they are divorced.”

  With an amused smile, Laura turned her back on Polly’s outburst and patted Culp’s arm. “Poor Dad,” she said. “Poor old Dad.”

  Their steaks came, and Polly’s tears dried. They walked out into Elko again and at the town’s one movie theatre saw a Western. Burt Lancaster, a downtrodden Mexican, after many insults, including crucifixion, turned implacable avenger and killed nine hirelings of a racist rancher. Polly seemed to be sleeping through the bloodiest parts. They walked back through the dry night to the hotel. Their two adjoining rooms each held twin beds. Laura’s suitcase had appeared on the bed beside his.

  Culp said, “You better sleep with your sister.”

  “Why? We’ll have the door between open, in case she has nightmares.”

  “I want to read.”

  “So do I.”

  “You go to sleep now. We’re going to make Salt Lake tomorrow.”

  “Big thrill. Dad, she mumbles and kicks her covers all the time.”

  “Do as I say, love. I’ll stay here reading until you’re asleep.”

  “And then what?”

  “I may go down and have another drink.”

  Her expression reminded him of how, in the movie, the villain had looked when Burt Lancaster showed that he, too, had a gun. Culp lay on the bedspread reading a pamphlet they had bought at the museum, about ghost towns; champagne and opera sets had been transported up the valleys, where now not a mule survived. Train whistles at intervals scooped long pockets from the world beyond his room. The breathing from the other room had fallen level. He tiptoed in and saw them both asleep, his daughters. Laura had been reading a book about the persecution of the Indians and now it lay beside her hand, with its childish short fingernails. Relaxed, her face revealed its freckles, its plumpness, the sorrowing stretched smoothness of the closed lids. Polly’s face wore a film of night sweat on her brow; his kiss came away tasting salty. He did not kiss Laura, in case she was faking. He switched off the light and stood considering what he must do. A train howled on the other side of the wall. The beautiful emptiness of Nevada, where he might never be again, sucked at the room like a pump.

  Downstairs, his intuition was borne out. The change girl had noticed him, and said now, “How’s it going?”

  “Fair. You ever go off duty?”

  “What’s duty?”

  He waited at the bar, waiting for the bourbon to fill him; it couldn’t, the room inside him kept expanding, and when she joined him, after one o’clock, sidling up on the stool (a cowboy moved over) in a taut cotton dress that hid the tops of her arms, the blur on her face seemed a product of her inner chemistry, not his. “You’ve a room?” As she asked him that, her jaw went square: Mrs. Morgan in a younger version.

  “I do,” he said, “but it’s full of little girls.”

  She reached for his bourbon and sipped and said, in a voice older than her figure, “This place is lousy with rooms.”

  Culp arrived back in his own room after four. He must have been noisier than he thought, for a person in a white nightgown appeared in the connecting doorway. Culp could not see her features, she was a good height, she reminded him of nobody. Good. From the frozen pose of her, she was scared—scared of him. Good.

  “Dad?”

  “Yep.”

  “You O.K.?”

  “Sure.” Though already he could feel the morning sun’s grinding on his temples. “You been awake, sweetie? I’m sorry.”

  “I was worried about you.” But Laura did not cross the threshold into his room.

  “Very worried?”

  “Naa.”

  “Listen. It’s not your job to take care of me. It’s my job to take care of you.”

  The Gun Shop

  Ben’s son, Murray, looked forward to their annual Thanksgiving trip to Pennsylvania mostly because of the gun. A Remington .22, it leaned unused in the Trupp farmhouse all year, until little Murray came and swabbed it out and begged to shoot it. The gun had been Ben’s. His parents had bought it for him the Christmas after they moved to the farm, when he was thirteen, his son’s age now. No, Murray was all of fourteen, his birthday was in September. At the party, Ben had tapped the child on the back of the head to settle him down, and his son had pointed the cake knife at his father’s chest and said, “Hit me again and I’ll kill you.”

  Ben had been amazed. In bed that night, Sally told him, “It was his way of saying he’s too big to be hit any more. He’s right. He is.”

  But the boy, as he and Ben walked with the gun across the brown field to the dump in the woods, didn’t seem big; solemn and beardless, he carried the freshly cleaned rifle under his arm, in imitation of hunters in magazine illustrations, and the barrel tip kept snagging on loops of matted orchard grass. Then, at the dump, with the targets of tin cans and bottles neatly aligned, the gun refused to fire, and Murray threw a childish tantrum. Tears filled his eyes as he tried to explain: “There was this little pin, Dad, that fell out when I cleaned it, but I put it back in, and now it’s not there!”

  Ben, looking down into this small freckled face so earnestly stricken, couldn’t help smiling.

  Murray, seeing his father’s smile, said, “Shit.” He hurled the gun toward an underbrush of saplings and threw himself onto the cold leaf mold of the forest floor. He writhed there and repeated the word as each fresh slant of injustice and of embarrassment struck him; but Ben couldn’t quite erase his tense expression of kindly mockery. The boy’s tantrums loomed impressively in the intimate scale of their Boston apartment, with his mother and two sisters and some fine-legged antiques as audience; but out here, among these mute oaks and hickories, his fury was rather comically dwarfed. Also, in retrieving and examining the .22, Ben had bent his face close into the dainty forgotten smell of gun oil and remembered the Christmas noon when his father had taken him out to the barn and shown him how to shoot the virgin gun; and this memory prolonged his smile.

  That dainty scent. The dangerous slickness. The zigzag marks of burnishing on the bolt when it slid out, and the amazing whorl, a new kind of star, inside the barrel when it was pointed toward the sky. The snug, lethally smart clicks of reassembly. He had not known his father could handle a gun. He was forty-five when Ben was thirteen, and a schoolteacher; once he had been, briefly, a soldier. He had thrown an empty Pennzoil can into the snow of the barnyard and propped the .22 on the chicken-house windowsill and taken the first shot. The oil can had jumped. Ben remembered the way his father’s mouth, seen from the side, sucked back a bit of saliva that in his concentration had escaped. Ben remembered the less-than-deafening slap of the shot and the acrid whiff that floated from the bolt as the spent shell spun away. Now, pulling the dead trigger and sliding out the bolt to see why the old gun was broken, he remembered his father’s arms around him, guiding his hands on the newly varnished stock and pressing his h
ead gently down to line up his eyes with the sights. “Squeeze, don’t get excited and jerk,” his father had said.

  “Get up,” Ben said to his son. “Shape up. Don’t be such a baby. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; I don’t know why. It worked the last time we used it.”

  “Yeah, that was last Thanksgiving,” Murray said, surprisingly conversational, though still stretched on the cold ground. “I bet one of these idiot yokels around here messed it up.”

  “Idiot yokels,” Ben repeated, hearing himself in that phrase. “My, aren’t we a young snob?”

  Murray stood and brushed the sarcasm aside. “Can you fix it or not?”

  Ben slipped a cartridge into the chamber, closed the bolt, and pulled the trigger. A limp click. “Not. I don’t understand guns. You’re the one who wants to use it all the time. Why don’t we just point our fingers and say, ‘bang’?”

  “Dad, you’re quite the riot.”

  They walked back to the house. Ben lugged the disgraced gun while Murray ran ahead. Ben noticed in the dead grass the rusty serrate shapes of strawberry leaves, precise as fossils. When they had moved here, the land had been farmed out—“mined,” in the local phrase—and the one undiscouraged crop consisted of the wild strawberries running from ditch to ridge on all the sunny slopes. At his son’s age, Ben had no fondness for the strawberry leaves and the rural isolation they ornamented; it surprised him, gazing down, that their silhouettes fit so exactly a shape in his mind. The leaves were still here, and his parents were still in the square sandstone farmhouse. His mother looked up from her preparations for the feast and said, “I didn’t hear the shots.”

  “There weren’t any, that’s why.”

  Something pleased or amused in Ben’s voice tripped Murray’s temper again; he went into the living room and kicked a chair leg and swore. “Goddamn thing broke.”

  “That’s no reason to break a chair,” Ben shouted after him. “That’s not our furniture, you know.”

  Sally was helping in the kitchen, mashing the potatoes in an old striped bowl. “Hey,” she said to her husband. “Gently.”

  “Well, hell,” he said to her, “why are we letting the kid terrorize everybody?”

  In a murderous mood, he followed the boy into the living room. The two girls, in company with their grandfather, were watching the Macy’s parade on television. Murray, hearing his father approach, had hid behind the chair he had kicked. A sister glanced in his direction and pronounced, “Spoiled.” The other sniffed in agreement. One girl was older than Murray, one younger; all of his life he would be pinched between them. Their grandfather was sitting in a rocker, wearing the knit wool cap that made him feel less cold. Obligingly he had taken the chair with the worst angle on the television screen, watching in fuzzy foreshortening a flicker of bloated animals, drum majorettes, and giant cakes bearing candles that were really girls waving.

  “He’s not spoiled,” Ben’s father told the girls. “He’s like his daddy, a perfectionist.”

  Ben’s father since that Christmas of the gun had become an old man, but a wonderfully strange old man, with a long yellow-white face, a blue nose, and the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see. His circulation was poor, he had been hospitalized, he lived from pill to pill, he had uncharacteristic quiet spells that Ben guessed were seizures of pain; yet his hopefulness still dominated any room he was in. He looked up at Ben in the doorway. “Can you figure it out?”

  Ben said, “Murray says some pin fell out while he was cleaning it.”

  “It did, Dad,” the child insisted.

  Ben’s father stood, prim and pale and tall. He was wearing a threadbare overcoat, in readiness for adventure. “I know just the man,” he said. He called into the kitchen, “Mother, I’ll give Dutch a ring. The kid’s being frustrated.”

  “Aw, that’s O.K., forget it,” Murray mumbled. But his eyes shone, looking up at the promising apparition of his grandfather. Ben was hurt, remembering how his own knack, as father, was to tease and cloud those same eyes. There was something too finely tooled, too little yielding in the boy that Ben itched to correct.

  The two women had crowded to the doorway to intervene. Sally said, “He doesn’t have to shoot the gun. I hate guns. Ben, why do you always inflict the gun on this child?”

  “I don’t,” he answered.

  His mother called over Sally’s shoulder, “Don’t bother people on Thanksgiving, Murray. Let the man have a holiday.”

  Little Murray looked up, startled, at the sound of his name pronounced scoldingly. He had been named for his grandfather. Two Murrays: one small and young, one big and old. Yet alike, Ben saw, in a style of expectation, in a tireless craving for—he used to wonder for what, but people had a word for it now—“action.”

  “This man never takes a holiday,” Ben’s father called back. “He’s out of this world. You’d love him. Everybody in this room would love him.” And, irrepressibly, he was at the telephone, dialling with a touch of frenzy, the way he would scrub a friendly dog’s belly with his knuckles. Hanging up, he announced with satisfaction, “Dutch says to bring the gun over this evening, when all the fuss has died down.”

  After a supper of leftover turkey, the males went out into the night. Ben drove his father’s car. The dark road carried them off their hill into a valley where sandstone farmhouses had been joined by ranch houses, aluminum trailers, a wanly lit Mobil station, a Pentecostal church built of cinder blocks, with a neon JESUS LIVES. JESUS SAVES must have become too much of a joke.

  “The next driveway on the left,” his father said. The cold outdoor air had shortened his breath. No sign advertised a gun shop; the house was a ranch, but not a new one—one built in the early Fifties, when the commuters first began to come this far out from the city of Alton. In order of age, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest, the Trupps marched up the flagstones to the unlit front door; Ben could feel his son’s embarrassment at his back, deepening his own. They had offered to let little Murray carry the gun, but he had shied from it. Ben held the .22 behind him, so as not to terrify whoever answered his father’s ring at the door. It was a fat woman in a pink wrapper. Ben saw that there had been a mistake: this was no gun shop, his father had blundered once again.

  Not so. The woman said, “Why, hello, Mr. Trupp,” giving the name that affectionate long German u; in Boston people rhymed it with “cup.” “Come in this way, I guess; he’s down there expecting everybody. Is this your son, now? And who’s this big boy?” Her pleasantries eased their way across the front hall, with its braided rug and enamelled plaque of the Lord’s Prayer, to the cellar stairs.

  As they clattered down, Ben’s father said, “I shouldn’t have done that, that was a headache for his missus, letting us in, I wasn’t thinking. We should have gone to the side, but then Dutch has to disconnect the burglar alarm. Everybody in this county’s crazy to steal his guns. When you get to be my age, Ben, it hurts like Jesus just to try to think. Just to try not to annoy the hell out of people.”

  The cellar seemed bigger than the house. Cardboard cartons, old chairs and sofas, a refrigerator, stacked newspapers, shoot posters, and rifle racks lined an immense cement room. At the far end was a counter, and behind it a starkly lit workshop with a lathe. Little Murray’s eyes widened; gun shops were new to him. In an alley of Ben’s own boyhood there had been a mysterious made-over garage called “Repair & Ammo.” Sounds of pounding and grinding came out of it, the fury of metals. On dark winter afternoons, racing home with his sled, Ben would see blue sparks shudder in the window. But he had never gone in; so this was an adventure for him as well. There was that about being his father’s son: one had adventures, one blundered into places, one went places, met strangers, suffered rebuffs, experienced breakdowns, exposed oneself in a way that Ben, as soon as he was able, foreclosed, hedging his life with such order and propriety that no misstep could occur. He had become a lawyer, taking profit from the losses of others, reducing disorderly lives to legal folders. E
ven in his style of dress he had retained the caution of the Fifties, while his partners blossomed into striped shirts and bell-bottomed slacks. Seeing his son’s habitual tautness relax under the spell of this potent, acrid cellar, Ben realized that he had been much less a father than his own had been, a father’s duty being to impart the taste of the world. Golf lessons in Brookline, sailing in Maine, skiing in New Hampshire—what was this but bought amusement compared with the improvised shifts and hazards of poverty? In this cave the metallic smell of murder lurked, and behind the counter two men bent low over something that gleamed like a jewel.

  Ben’s father went forward. “Dutch, this is my son, Ben, and my grandson, Murray. The kid’s just like you are, a perfectionist, and this cheap gun we got Ben a zillion years ago let him down this afternoon.” To the other man in this lighted end of the cellar he said, “I know your face, mister, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

  The other man blinked and said, “Reiner.” He wore a Day-Glo hunting cap and a dirty blue parka over a holiday-clean shirt and tie. He looked mild, perhaps because of his spectacles, which were rimless. He seemed to be a customer, and the piece of metal in the gunsmith’s hand concerned him. It was a small slab with two holes bored in it; a shiny ring had been set into one of the holes, and Dutch’s gray thumb moved back and forth across the infinitesimal edge where the ring was flush with the slab.

  “About two-thousandths,” the gunsmith slowly announced, growling the ou’s. It was hard to know whom he was speaking to. His eyelids looked swollen—leaden hoods set slantwise over the eyes, eclipsing them but for a glitter. His entire body appeared to have slumped away from its frame, from the restless ruminating jowl to the undershirted beer belly and bent knees. His shuffle seemed deliberately droll. His hands alone had firm shape—hands battered and nicked and so long in touch with greased machinery that they had blackened flatnesses like worn parts. The right middle finger had been shorn off at the first knuckle. “Two- or three-thousandths at the most.”