by John Updike
Yes, the deacon sees, it is indeed a preparation for death—an emptiness where many others have been, which is what death will be. It is good to be at home here. Nothing now exists but himself, this shell, and the storm. The windows clatter; the sand has turned to gravel, the rain has turned to sleet. The storm seizes the church by its steeple and shakes, but the walls were built, sawed and nailed, with devotion, and withstand. The others are very late, they will not be coming; Miles is not displeased, he is pleased. He has done his part. He has kept the faith. He turns off the lights. He locks the door.
The Carol Sing
Surely one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the Town Hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas:
Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly:
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less co-oh-ldly.
When he hit a good “oh,” standing beside him was like being inside a great transparent Christmas ball. He had what you’d have to call a God-given bass. This year, we other male voices just peck at the tunes: Wendell Huddlestone, whose hardware store has become the pizza place where the dropouts collect after dark; Squire Wentworth, who is still getting up petitions to protect the marsh birds from the atomic-power plant; Lionel Merson, lighter this year by about three pounds of gallstones; and that selectman whose freckled bald head looks like the belly of a trout; and that fireman whose face is bright brown all the year round from clamming; and the widow Covode’s bearded son, who went into divinity school to avoid the draft; and the Bisbee boy, who no sooner was back from Vietnam than he grew a beard and painted his car every color of the rainbow; and the husband of the new couple that moved this September into the Whitman place on the beach road. He wears thick glasses above a little mumble of a mouth, but his wife appears perky enough.
The-ey lo-okèd up and sa-haw a star,
Shining in the east, beyond them far;
And to the earth it ga-ave great light,
And so it continued both da-hay and night.
She is wearing a flouncy little Christmassy number, red with white polka dots, one of those dresses so short that when she sits down on the old plush deacon’s bench she has to help it with her hand to tuck under her behind, otherwise it wouldn’t. A lively bit of a girl with long thighs as glossy as pond ice. She smiles nervously up over her cup of cinnamon-stick punch, wondering why she is here, in this dusty drafty public place. We must look monstrous to her, we Tarbox old-timers. And she has never heard Mr. Burley sing, but she knows something is missing this year; there is something failed, something hollow. Hester Hartner sweeps wrong notes into every chord: arthritis—arthritis and indifference.
The first good joy that Mary had,
It was the joy of one;
To see the blessèd Jesus Christ
When he was first her son.
The old upright, a Pickering, for most of the year has its keyboard locked; it stands beneath the town zoning map, its top piled high with rolled-up plot plans being filed for variances. The Town Hall was built, strange to say, as a Unitarian church, around 1830, but it didn’t take around here, Unitarianism; the sea air killed it. You need big trees for a shady mystic mood, or at least a lake to see yourself in like they have over to Concord. So the town bought up the shell and ran a second floor through the air of the sanctuary, between the balconies: offices and the courtroom below, more offices and this hall above. You can still see the Doric pilasters along the walls, the top halves. They used to use it more; there were the Tarbox Theatricals twice a year, and political rallies with placards and straw hats and tambourines, and get-togethers under this or that local auspices, and town meetings until we went representative. But now not even the holly the ladies of the Grange have hung around can cheer it up, can chase away the smell of dust and must, of cobwebs too high to reach and rats’ nests in the hot-air ducts and, if you stand close to the piano, that faint sour tang of blueprints. And Hester lately has taken to chewing eucalyptus drops.
And him to serve God give us grace,
O lux beata Trinitas.
The little wife in polka dots is laughing now: maybe the punch is getting to her, maybe she’s getting used to the look of us. Strange people look ugly only for a while, until you begin to fill in those tufty monkey features with a little history and stop seeing their faces and start seeing their lives. Regardless, it does us good, to see her here, to see young people at the carol sing. We need new blood.
This time of the year is spent in good cheer,
And neighbors together do meet,
To sit by the fire, with friendly desire,
Each other in love to greet.
Old grudges forgot are put in the pot,
All sorrows aside they lay;
The old and the young doth carol this song,
To drive the cold winter away.
At bottom it’s a woman’s affair, a chance in the darkest of months to iron some man-fetching clothes and get out of the house. Those old holidays weren’t scattered around the calendar by chance. Harvest and seedtime, seedtime and harvest, the elbows of the year. The women do enjoy it; they enjoy jostle of most any kind, in my limited experience. The widow Covode as full of rouge and purple as an old-time Scollay Square tart, when her best hope is burial on a sunny day, with no frost in the ground. Mrs. Hortense broad as a barn door, yet her hands putting on a duchess’s airs. Mamie Nevins sporting a sprig of mistletoe in her neck brace. They miss Mr. Burley. He never married and was everybody’s gallant for this occasion. He was the one to spike the punch, and this year they let young Covode do it, maybe that’s why Little Polka Dots can’t keep a straight face and giggles across the music like a pruning saw.
Adeste, fideles,
Laeti triumphantes;
Venite, venite
In Bethlehem.
Still that old tussle, “v” versus “wenite,” the “th” as hard or soft. Education is what divides us. People used to actually resent it, the way Burley, with his education, didn’t go to some city, didn’t get out. Exeter, Dartmouth, a year at the Sorbonne, then thirty years of Tarbox. By the time he hit fifty he was fat and fussy. Arrogant, too. Last sing, he two or three times told Hester to pick up her tempo. “Presto, Hester, not andante!” Never married, and never really worked. Burley Hosiery, that his grandfather had founded, was shut down and the machines sold south before Burley got his manhood. He built himself a laboratory instead and was always about to come up with something perfect: the perfect synthetic substitute for leather, the perfectly harmless insecticide, the beer can that turned itself into mulch. Some said at the end he was looking for a way to turn lead into gold. That was just malice. Anything high attracts lightning, anybody with a name attracts malice. When it happened, the papers in Boston gave him six inches and a photograph ten years old. “After a long illness.” It wasn’t a long illness, it was cyanide, the Friday after Thanksgiving.
The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas day in the morn.
They said the cyanide ate out his throat worse than a blowtorch. Such a detail is satisfying but doesn’t clear up the mystery. Why? Health, money, hobbies, that voice. Not having that voice makes a big hole here. Without his lead, no man dares take the lower parts; we just wheeze away at the melody with the women. It’s as if the floor they put in has been taken away and we’re standing in air, halfway up that old sanctuary. We peek around guiltily, missing Burley’s voice. The absent seem to outnumber the present. We feel insulted, slighted. The dead turn their backs. The older you get, the more of them snub you. He was rude enough last year, Burley, correcting Hester’s tempo. At one point, he even reached over, his face black with impatience, and slapped her hands as they were still trying to make sense of the keys.
R
ise, and bake your Christmas bread:
Christians, rise! The world is bare,
And blank, and dark with want and care,
Yet Christmas comes in the morning.
Well, why anything? Why do we? Come every year sure as the solstice to carol these antiquities that if you listened to the words would break your heart. Silence, darkness, Jesus, angels. Better, I suppose, to sing than to listen.
The Taste of Metal
Metal, strictly, has no taste; its presence in the mouth is felt as disciplinary, as a No spoken to other tastes. When Richard Maple, after many years of twinges, jagged edges, and occasional extractions, had all his remaining molars capped and bridges shaped across the gaps, the gold felt chilly to his cheeks and its regularity masked holes and roughnesses that had been a kind of mirror wherein his tongue had known itself. The Friday of the final cementing, he went to a small party. As he drank a variety of liquids that tasted much the same, he moved from feeling slightly less than himself (his native teeth had been ground to stumps of dentine) to feeling slightly more. The shift in tonality that permeated his skull whenever his jaws closed corresponded, perhaps, to the heightened clarity that fills the mind after a religious conversion. He saw his companions at the party with a new brilliance—a sharpness of vision that, like a camera’s, was specific and restricted in focus. He could see only one person at a time, and found himself focusing less on his wife, Joan, than on Eleanor Dennis, the long-legged wife of a municipal-bond broker.
Eleanor’s distinctness in part had to do with the legal fact that she and her husband were “separated.” It had happened recently; his absence from the party was noticeable. Eleanor, in the course of a life that she described as a series of harrowing survivals, had developed the brassy social manner that converts private catastrophe into public humorousness; but tonight her agitation was imperfectly converted. She listened for an echo that wasn’t there, and twitchily crossed and recrossed her legs. Her legs were handsome and vivid and so long that, after midnight, when parlor games began, she hitched up her brief shirt and kicked the lintel of a doorframe. The host balanced a glass of water on his forehead. Richard, demonstrating a headstand, mistakenly tumbled forward, delighted at his inebriated softness, which felt to be an ironical comment upon flesh that his new metal teeth were making. He was all mortality, all porous erosion save for these stars in his head, an impervious polar cluster at the zenith of his slow whirling.
His wife came to him with a face as unscarred and chastening as the face of a clock. It was time to go home. And Eleanor needed a ride. The three of them, plus the hostess in her bangle earrings and coffee-stained culottes, went to the door, and discovered a snowstorm. As far as the eye could probe, flakes were falling in a jostling crowd through the whispering lavender night. “God bless us, every one,” Richard said.
The hostess suggested that Joan should drive.
Richard kissed her on the cheek and tasted the metal of her bitter earring and got in behind the wheel. His car was a brand-new Corvair; he wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else to drive it. Joan crawled into the back seat, grunting to emphasize the physical awkwardness, and Eleanor serenely arranged her coat and pocketbook and legs in the space beside him. The motor sprang alive. Richard felt resiliently cushioned: Eleanor was beside him, Joan behind him, God above him, the road beneath him. The fast-falling snow dipped brilliant—explosive, chrysanthemumesque—into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun—a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.
In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge, Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. “You have no idea,” she said, “you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t dream of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that man! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was me.”
“Sometimes,” Richard said.
His wife behind him said, “Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?”
“That’s the shine of the headlights,” he told her.
Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, “And his trips. I wondered why the same city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so good, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly, silly mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that phase of my life is over. I went to his mother—for sympathy, I suppose—and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.”
“I always have trouble,” Richard told her, “finding the second joint.”
Joan said, “Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?”
“You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.”
“On my birthday, my birthday,” Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, “the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me—men are incredible—he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.”
Richard’s responsive laugh was held in suspense as the car skidded on the curve. A dark upright shape had appeared in the center of the windshield, and he tried to remove it, but the automobile proved impervious to the steering wheel and instead drew closer, as if magnetized, to a telephone pole that rigidly insisted on its position in the center of the windshield. The pole enlarged. The little splinters pricked by the linemen’s cleats leaped forward in the headlights, and there was a flat whack surprisingly unambiguous, considering how casually it had happened. Richard felt the sudden refusal of motion, the No, and knew, though his mind was deeply cushioned in a cottony indifference, that an event had occurred which in another incarnation he would regret.
“You jerk,” Joan said. Her voice was against his ear. “Your pretty new car.” She asked, “Eleanor, are you all right?” With a rising inflection she repeated, “Are you all right?” It sounded like scolding.
Eleanor giggled softly, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said, “except that I can’t seem to move my legs.” The windshield near her head had become a web of light, an exploded star.
Either the radio had been on or had turned itself on, for mellow, meditating music flowed from a realm behind time. Richard identified it as one of Handel’s oboe sonatas. He noticed that his knees distantly hurt. Eleanor had slid forward and seemed unable to uncross her legs. Shockingly, she whimpered. Joan asked, “Sweetheart, didn’t you know you were going too fast?”
“I am very stupid,” he said. Music and snow poured down upon them, and he imagined that, if only the oboe sonata were played backwards, they would leap backwards from the telephone pole and be on their way home again. The little distances to their houses, once measured in minutes, had frozen and become immense, like those in galaxies.
Using her hands, Eleanor uncrossed her legs and brought herself upright in her seat. She lit a cigarette. Richard, his knees creaking, got out of the car and tried to push it free. He told Joan to come out of the back seat and get behind the wheel. Their motions were clumsy, wriggling in and out of darkness. The headlights still burned, but the beams were bent inward, toward each other. The Corvair had a hollow head, its engine being in the rear. Its face, an unimpassioned insect’s face,
was inextricably curved around the pole; the bumper had become locked mandibles. When Richard pushed and Joan fed gas, the wheels whined in a vacuum. The smooth encircling night extended around them, above and beyond the snow. No window light had acknowledged their accident.
Joan, who had a social conscience, asked, “Why doesn’t anybody come out and help us?”
Eleanor, the voice of bitter experience, answered, “This pole is hit so often it’s just a nuisance to the neighborhood.”
Richard announced, “I’m too drunk to face the police.” The remark hung with a neon clarity in the night.
