The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  Ben’s father’s voice had regained its strength in the warmth of this basement. He acted as interlocutor, to make the drama clear. “You mean you can just tell with your thumb if it’s a thousandth of an inch off?”

  “Yahh. More or less.”

  “That’s incredible. That to me is a miracle.” He explained to his son and grandson, “Dutch was head machinist at Hager Steel for thirty years. He had hundreds of men under him. Hundreds.”

  “A thousand,” Dutch growled. “Twelve hunnert during Korea.” His qualification slipped into place as if with much practice; Ben guessed his father came here often.

  “Boy, I can’t imagine it. I don’t see how the hell you did it. I don’t see how any man could do what you did; my imagination boggles. This kid here”—Murray, not Ben—“has what you have. Drive. Both of you have what it takes.”

  Ben thought he should assert himself. In a few crisp phrases he explained to Dutch how the gun had failed to fire.

  His father said to the man in spectacles, “It would have taken me all night to say what he just said. He lives in New England, they all talk sense up there. One thing I’m grateful the kid never inherited from me, and I bet he is too, is his old man’s gift for baloney. I was always embarrassing the kid.”

  Dutch slipped out the bolt of the .22 and, holding the screwdriver so the shortened finger lay along a groove of the handle, turned a tiny screw that Ben in all his years of owning the gun had never noticed. The bolt fell into several bright pieces, tinged with rust, on the counter. The gunsmith picked a bit of metal from within a little spring and held it up. “Firing pin. Sheared,” he said. His mouth when he talked showed the extra flexibility of the toothless.

  “Do you have another? Can you replace it?” Ben disliked, as emphasized by this acoustical cellar, the high, hungry pitch of his own voice. He was prosecuting.

  Dutch declined to answer. He lowered his remarkable lids to gaze at the metal under his hands; one hand closed tight around the strange little slab, with its gleaming ring.

  Ben’s father interceded, saying, “He can make it, Ben. This man here can make an entire gun from scratch. Just give him a lump of slag is all he needs.”

  “Wonderful,” Ben said, to fill the silence.

  Reiner unexpectedly laughed. “How about,” he said to the gunsmith, “that old Damascus double Jim Knauer loaded with triple FG and a smokeless powder? It’s a wonder he has a face still.”

  Dutch unclenched his fist and, after a pause, chuckled.

  Ben recognized in these pauses something of courtroom tactics; at his side he felt little Murray growing agitated at the delay. “Shall we come back tomorrow?” Ben asked.

  He was ignored. Reiner was going on, “What was the make on that? A twelve-gauge Parker?”

  “English gun,” Dutch said. “A Westley Richards. He paid three hunnert for it, some dealer over in Royersford. Such foolishness, his first shot yet. Even split the stock.” His eyelids lifted. “Who wants a beer?”

  Ben’s father said, “Jesus, I’m so full of turkey a beer might do me in.”

  Reiner looked amused. “They say liquor is good for bad circulation.”

  “I’d be happy to sip one but I can’t take an oath to finish it. The first rule of hospitality is, Don’t look a gift horse in the face.” But an edge was going off his wit. After the effort of forming these sentences, the old man sat down, in an easy chair with exploded arms. Against the yellowish pallor of his face, his nose looked livid as a bruise.

  “Sure,” Ben said. “If they’re being offered. Thank you.”

  “Son, how about you?” Dutch asked the boy. Murray’s eyes widened, realizing nobody was going to answer for him.

  “He’s in training for his ski team,” Ben said at last.

  Dutch’s eyes stayed on the boy. “Then you should have good legs. How about now going over and fetching four cans from that icebox over there?” He pointed with a loose fist.

  “Refrigerator,” Ben said to his son, acting as translator. As a child he had lived with a real icebox, zinc-lined oak, that digested a fresh block three times a week.

  Dutch turned his back and fished through a shelf of grimy cigar boxes for a cylinder of metal that, when he held it beside the fragment of firing pin, satisfied him. He shuffled into the little room behind the counter, which brimmed with light and machinery.

  As little Murray passed around the cold cans of Old Reading, his grandfather explained to the man in the Day-Glo hunting cap, “This boy is what you’d have to call an ardent athlete. He sails, he golfs, last winter he won blue medals at—what do they call ’em, Murray?”

  “Slaloms. I flubbed the downhill, though.”

  “Hear that? He knows the language. If he was fortunate enough to live down here with you fine gentlemen, he’d learn gun language too. He’d be a crack shot in no time.”

  “Where we live in this city,” the boy volunteered, “my mother won’t even let me get a BB gun. She hates guns.”

  “The kid means the city of Boston. His father’s on a first-name basis with the mayor.” Ben heard the strained intake of breath between his father’s sentences and tried not to hear the words. He and his son were tumbled together in a long, pained monologue. “Anything competitive, this kid loves. He doesn’t get that from me. He doesn’t get it from his old man, either. Ben always had this tactful way of keeping his thoughts to himself. You never knew what was going on inside his head. My biggest regret is I couldn’t teach him the pleasure of working with your hands. He grew up watching me scrambling along by my wits and now he’s doing the same damn thing. He should have had Dutch for a father. Dutch would have reached him.”

  To deafen himself Ben walked around the counter and into the workshop. Dutch was turning the little cylinder on a lathe. He wore no goggles, and seemed to be taking no measurements. Into the mirror-smooth blur of the spinning metal the man delicately pressed a tipped, hinged cone. Curls of steel fell steadily to the scarred lathe table. Tan sparks flew outward to the radius perhaps of a peony. The cylinder was becoming two cylinders, a narrow one emerging from the shoulders of another. Ben had once worked wood, in high-school shop, but this man could shape metal: he could descend into the hard heart of things and exert his will. Dutch switched off the lathe, with a sad grunt pushed himself away, and shuffled, splay-footed and swag-bellied, toward some other of his tools. Ben, not wanting to seem to spy, returned to the larger room.

  Reiner had undertaken a monologue of his own. “… you know your average bullet comes out of the barrel rotating; that’s why a rifle is called that, for the rifling inside, that makes it spin. Now, what the North Vietnamese discovered, if you put enough velocity into a bullet beyond a critical factor, it tumbles, end over end like that. The Geneva Convention says you can’t use a soft bullet that mushrooms inside the body like the dumdum, but hit a man with a bullet tumbling like that, it’ll tear his arm right off.”

  The boy was listening warily, watching the bespectacled man’s soft white hands demonstrate tumbling. Ben’s father sat in the exploded armchair, staring dully ahead, sucking back spittle, struggling silently for breath.

  “Of course, now,” the lecture went on, “what they found was best over there for the jungle was a plain shotgun. You take an ordinary twenty-gauge, maybe mounted with a short barrel, you don’t have visibility more than fifty feet anyway, a man doesn’t have a chance at that distance. The spread of shot is maybe three feet around.” With his arms Reiner placed the circle on himself, centered on his heart. “It’ll tear a man to pieces like that. If he’s not that close yet, then the shot pattern is wider and even a miss is going to hurt him plenty.”

  “Death is part of life,” Ben’s father said, as if reciting a lesson learned long ago.

  Ben asked Reiner, “Were you in Vietnam?”

  The man took off his hunting cap and displayed a bald head. “You got me in the wrong rumpus. Navy gunner, World War Two. With those forty-millimeter Bofors you could put a two-pound s
hell thirty thousand feet straight up in the air.”

  Dutch emerged from his workshop holding a bit of metal in one hand and a crumpled beer can in the other. He put the cylindrical bit down amid the scattered parts of the bolt, fumbled at them, and they all came together.

  “Does it fit?” Ben asked.

  Dutch’s clownish loose lips smiled. “You ask a lot of questions.” He slipped the bolt back into the .22 and turned back to the workshop. The four others held silent, but for Ben’s father’s breathing. In time the flat spank of a rifle shot resounded, amplified by cement walls.

  “That’s miraculous to me,” Ben’s father said. “A mechanical skill like that.”

  “Thank you very much,” Ben said, too quickly, when the gunsmith lay the mended and tested .22 on the counter. “How much do we owe you?”

  Rather than answer, Dutch asked little Murray, “Didja ever see a machine like this before?” It was a device, operated by hand pressure, that assembled and crimped shotgun shells. He let the boy pull the handle. The shells marched in a circle, receiving each their allotment of powder and shot. “It can’t explode,” Dutch reassured Ben.

  Reiner explained, “You see what this here is”—holding out the mysterious little slab with its bright ring—“is by putting in this bushing Dutch just made for me I can reduce the proportion of powder to shot, when I go into finer grains this deer season.”

  Murray backed off from the machine. “That’s neat. Thanks a lot.”

  Dutch contemplated Ben. His verdict came: “I guess two dollars.”

  Ben protested, “That’s not enough.”

  His father rescued him from the silence. “Pay the man what he asks; all the moola in the world won’t buy God-given expertise like that.”

  Ben paid, and was in such a hurry to lead his party home he touched the side door before Dutch could switch off the burglar alarm. Bells shrilled, Ben jumped. Everybody laughed, even—though he had hated, from his schoolteaching days, what he called “cruel humor”—Ben’s father.

  In the dark of the car, the old man sighed. “He’s what you’d have to call a genius and a gentleman. Did you see the way your dad looked at him? Pure adoration, man to man.”

  Ben asked him, “How do you feel?”

  “Better. I didn’t like Murray having to listen to all that blood and guts from Reiner.”

  “Boy,” Murray said, “he sure is crazy about guns.”

  “He’s lonely. He just likes getting out of the house and hanging around the shop. Must give Dutch a real pain in the old bazoo.” Perhaps this sounded harsh, or applicable to himself, for he amended it. “Actually, he’s harmless. He says he was in Navy artillery, but you know where he spent most of the war? Cruising around the Caribbean having a sunbath. He’s like me. I was in the first one, and my big accomplishment was surviving the Spanish flu in camp. We were going to board in Hoboken the day of the Armistice.”

  “I never knew you were a soldier, Grandpa.”

  “Kill or be killed, that’s my motto.”

  He sounded so faraway and fragile, saying this, Ben told him, “I hope we didn’t wear you out.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Ben’s father said, adding, as if reading a motto on the wall, “We aim to serve.”

  In bed, Ben tried to describe to Sally their adventure, the gun shop. “The whole place smelled of death. I think the kid was a little frightened.”

  Sally said, “Of course. He’s only fourteen. You’re awfully hard on him, you know.”

  “I know. My father was nice to me, and what did it get him? Chest pains. A pain in the old bazoo.” Asleep, he dreamed he was a boy with a gun. A small bird, smaller than a dot in a puzzle, sat in the peach tree by the meadow fence. Ben aligned the sights and with a learned slowness squeezed. The dot fell like a stone. He went to it and found a wren’s brown body, neatly deprived of a head. There was not much blood, just headless feathers. He awoke, and realized it was real. It had happened just that way, the first summer he had had the gun. He had been horrified.

  After breakfast he and his son went out across the dead strawberry leaves to the dump again. There, the dream continued. Though Ben steadied his trembling, middle-aged hands against a hickory trunk and aimed so carefully his open eye burned, the cans and bottles ignored his shots. The bullets passed right through them. Whereas, when little Murray took the gun, the boy’s freckled face gathered the muteness of the trees into his murderous concentration. The cans jumped, the bottles burst. “You’re killing me!” Ben cried. In his relief and pride, he had to laugh.

  Son

  He is often upstairs, when he has to be home. He prefers to be elsewhere. He is almost sixteen, though beardless still, a man’s mind indignantly captive in the frame of a child. I love touching him, but don’t often dare. The other day, he had the flu, and a fever, and I gave him a back rub, marvelling at the symmetrical knit of muscle, the organic tension. He is high-strung. Yet his sleep is so solid he sweats like a stone in the wall of a well. He wishes for perfection. He would like to destroy us, for we are, variously, too fat, too jocular, too sloppy, too affectionate, too grotesque and heedless in our ways. His mother smokes too much. His younger brother chews with his mouth open. His older sister leaves unbuttoned the top button of her blouses. His younger sister tussles with the dogs, getting them overexcited, avoiding doing her homework. Everyone in the house talks nonsense. He would be a better father than his father. But time has tricked him, has made him a son. After a quarrel, if he cannot go outside and kick a ball, he retreats to a corner of the house and reclines on the beanbag chair in an attitude of strange—infantile or leonine—torpor. We exhaust him, without meaning to. He takes an interest in the newspaper now, the front page as well as the sports, in this tiring year of 1973.

  He is upstairs, writing a musical comedy. It is a Sunday in 1949. He has volunteered to prepare a high-school assembly program; people will sing. Songs of the time go through his head, as he scribbles new words. Up in de mornin’, down at de school, work like a debil for my grades. Below him, irksome voices grind on, like machines working their way through tunnels. His parents each want something from the other. “Marion, you don’t understand that man like I do; he has a heart of gold.” His father’s charade is very complex: the world, which he fears, is used as a flail on his wife. But from his cringing attitude he would seem to an outsider the one being flailed. With burning-red face, the woman accepts the role of aggressor as penance for the fact, the incessant shameful fact, that he has to wrestle with the world while she hides here, in solitude, at home. This is normal, but does not seem to them to be so. Only by convolution have they arrived at the dominant/submissive relationship society has assigned them. For the man is maternally kind and with a smile hugs to himself his jewel, his certainty of being victimized; it is the mother whose tongue is sharp, who sometimes strikes. “Well, he gets you out of the house, and I guess that’s gold to you.” His answer is “Duty calls,” pronounced mincingly. “The social contract is a balance of compromises.” This will infuriate her, the son knows; as his heart thickens, the downstairs overflows with her hot voice. “Don’t wear that smile at me! And take your hands off your hips; you look like a fairy!” Their son tries not to listen. When he does, visual details of the downstairs flood his mind: the two antagonists, circling with their coffee cups; the shabby mismatched furniture; the hopeful books; the framed photographs of the dead, docile and still like cowed students. This matrix of pain that bore him—he feels he is floating above it, sprawled on the bed as on a cloud, stealing songs as they come into his head (Across the hallway from the guidance room / Lives a French instructor called Mrs. Blum), contemplating the view from the upstairs window (last summer’s burdock stalks like the beginnings of an alphabet, an apple tree holding three rotten apples as if pondering why they failed to fall), yearning for Monday, for the ride to school with his father, for the bell that calls him to homeroom, for the excitements of class, for Broadway, for fame, for the cloud th
at will carry him away, out of this, out.

  He returns from his paper-delivery route and finds a few Christmas presents for him on the kitchen table. The year? 1911. Without opening them, he knocks them to the floor, puts his head on the table, and falls asleep. He must have been consciously dramatizing his plight: his father was sick, money was scarce, he had to work, to win food for the family when he was still a child. In his dismissal of Christmas, he expressed a fact: his love of anarchy, his distrust of the social contract. He treasured this moment of revolt; else why remember it, hoard a memory so bitter, and confide it to his son many Christmases later? He had a teaching instinct, though he claimed that life miscast him as a schoolteacher. His son suffered in his classes, feeling the noisy confusion as a persecution, but now wonders if his father’s rebellious heart did not court confusion, not as Communists do, to impose their own order, but, more radical still, as an end pleasurable in itself, as truth’s very body. Yet his handwriting (an old pink permission slip recently fluttered from a book where it had been marking a page for twenty years) was always considerately legible, and he was sitting up doing arithmetic the morning of the day he died.

  And letters survive from that yet prior son, written in brown ink, in a tidy tame hand, home to his mother from the Missouri seminary where he was preparing for his vocation. The dates are 1887, 1888, 1889. Nothing much happened: he missed New Jersey, and was teased at a church social for escorting a widow. He wanted to do the right thing, but the little sheets of faded penscript exhale a dispirited calm, as if his heart already knew he would not make a successful minister, or live to be old. His son, my father, when old, drove hundreds of miles out of his way to visit the Missouri town from which those letters had been sent. Strangely, the town had not changed; it looked just as he had imagined, from his father’s descriptions: tall wooden houses, rain-soaked, stacked on a bluff. The town was a sepia postcard mailed homesick home and preserved in an attic. My father cursed: his father’s old sorrow bore him down into depression, into hatred of life. My mother claims his decline in health began at that moment.