Last fall, they had moved to an old farmhouse surrounded by vegetation that had been allowed to grow wild. This spring, they attacked the tangle of Nature around them with ominously different styles. Joan raked away dead twigs beneath bushes and pruned timidly, as if she were giving her boys a haircut. Richard scorned such pampering and attacked the problem at the root, or near the root. He wrestled vines from the barn roof, shingles popping and flying; he clipped the barberries down to yellow stubble; he began to prune some overweening yews by the front door and was unable to stop until each branch became a stump. The yews, a rare Japanese variety, had pink soft wood maddeningly like flesh. For days thereafter, the stumps bled amber.
The entire family was shocked, especially the two boys, who had improvised a fort in the cavity under the yews. Richard defended himself: “It was them or me. I couldn’t get in my own front door.”
“They’ll never grow again, Dad,” Dickie told him. “You didn’t leave any green. There can’t be any photosynthesis.” The boy’s own eyes were green; he kept brushing back his hair from them, with that nervous lady-like gesture of his long-haired generation.
“Good,” Richard stated. He lifted his pruning clippers, which had an elbow hinge for extra strength, and asked, “How about a haircut?”
Dickie’s eyes rounded with fright and he backed closer to his brother, who, though younger, had even longer hair. They looked like two chunky girls, blocking the front door. “Or why don’t you both go down to the cellar and stick your heads in the guillotine?” Richard suggested. In a few powerful motions he mutilated a flowering trumpet vine. He had a vision, of right angles, clean clapboards, unclouded windows, level and transparent spaces from which the organic—the impudent, importunate, unceasingly encroaching organic—had been finally scoured.
“Daddy’s upset about something else, not about your hair,” Joan explained to Dickie and John at dinner. As the pact wore on, the family gathered more closely about her; even the cats, he noticed, hesitated to take scraps from his hand.
“What about, then?” Judith asked, looking up from her omelette. She was sixteen and Richard’s only ally.
Joan answered, “Something grown-up.” Her older daughter studied her for a moment, alertly, and Richard held his breath, thinking she might see. Female to female. The truth. The translucent vista of scoured space that was in Joan like a crystal tunnel.
But the girl was too young and, sensing an enemy, attacked her reliable old target, Dickie. “You,” she said. “I don’t ever see you trying to help Daddy, all you do is make Mommy drive you to golf courses and ski mountains.”
“Yeah? What about you,” he responded weakly, beaten before he started, “making Mommy cook two meals all the time because you’re too pure to sully your lips with animal matter.”
“At least when I’m here I try to help; I don’t just sit around reading books about dumb Billy Caster.”
“Casper,” Richard and Dickie said in unison.
Judith rose to her well-filled height; her bell-bottom hip-hugging Levi’s dropped an inch lower and exposed a mingled strip of silken underpants and pearly belly. “I think it’s atrocious for some people like us to have too many bushes and people in the ghetto don’t even have a weed to look at, they have to go up on their rooftops to breathe. It’s true, Dickie; don’t make that face!”
Dickie was squinting in pain; he found his sister’s body painful. “The young sociologist,” he said, “flaunting her charms.”
“You don’t even know what a sociologist is,” she told him, tossing her head. Waves of fleshly agitation rippled down toward her toes. “You are a very spoiled and selfish and limited person.”
“Puh puh, big mature,” was all he could say, poor little boy overwhelmed by this blind blooming.
Judith had become an optical illusion in which they all saw different things: Dickie saw a threat, Joan saw herself of twenty-five years ago, Bean saw another large warmth-source that, unlike horses, could read her a bedtime story. John, bless him, saw nothing, or, dimly, an old pal receding. Richard couldn’t look. In the evening, when Joan was putting the others to bed, Judith would roll around on the sofa while he tried to read in the chair opposite. “Look, Dad. See my stretch exercises.” He was reading My Million-Dollar Shots, by Billy Casper. The body must be coiled, tension should be felt in the back muscles and along the left leg at top of backswing. Illustrations, with arrows. The body on the sofa was twisting into lithe knots; Judith was double-jointed and her prowess at yoga may have been why Joan stopped doing it, outshone. Richard glanced up and saw his daughter arched like a staple, her hands gripping her ankles; a glossy bulge of supple belly held a navel at its acme. At the top of the backswing, forearm and back of the left hand should form a straight line. He tried it; it felt awkward. He was a born wrist-collapser. Judith watched him pondering his own wrist and giggled; then she kept giggling, insistently, flirting, trying it out. “Daddy’s a narcissist.” In the edge of his vision she seemed to be tickling herself and flicking her hair in circles.
“Judith!” He had not spoken to her so sharply since, as a toddler, she had spilled sugar all over the kitchen floor. In apology he added, “You are driving me crazy.”
The fourth week, he went to New York, on business. When he returned, Joan told him during their kitchen drink, “This afternoon, everybody was being so cranky; you off, the weather lousy, I piled them all into the car, everybody except Judith; she’s spending the night at Margaret Merino’s—”
“You let her? With that little tart and her druggy crowd? Are there going to be boys there?”
“I didn’t ask. I hope so.”
“Live vicariously, huh?”
He wondered if he could punch her in the face and at the same time grab the glass in her hand so it wouldn’t break. It was from a honeymoon set of turquoise Mexican glass of which only three were left. With their shared eye she saw his calculations and her face went stony. He could break his fist on that face. “Are you going to let me finish my story?”
“Sure. Dîtes-moi, Scheherazade.”
“—and we went to the car wash. Hecuba was hilarious, she kept barking and chasing the brushes around and around the car trying to defend us. It took her three rotations to figure out that if it went one way it would be coming back the other. Everybody absolutely howled; we had Danny Vetter in the car with us, and one of Bean’s horsy friends; it was a real orgy.” Her face was pink, recalling.
“That is a truly disgusting story. Speaking of disgusting, I did something strange in New York.”
“You slept with a prostitute.”
“Almost. I went to a blue movie.”
“How scary for you, darley.”
“Well, it was. Wednesday morning I woke up early and didn’t have any appointment until eleven so I wandered over to Forty-second Street, you know, with this innocent morning light on everything, and these little narrow places were already open. So—can you stand this?”
“Sure. All I’ve heard all week are children’s complaints.”
“I paid three bucks and went in. It was totally dark. Like a fun house at a fairground. Except for this very bright-pink couple up on the screen. I could hear people breathing but not see anything. Every time I tried to slide into a row I kept sticking my thumb into somebody’s eye. But nobody groaned or protested. It was like those bodies frozen in whatever circle it was of Hell. Finally I found a seat and sat down and after a while I could see it was all men, asleep. At least most of them seemed to be asleep. And they were spaced so no two touched; but even at this hour, the place was half full. Of motionless men.” He felt her disappointment; he hadn’t conveyed the fairy-tale magic of the experience: the darkness absolute as lead, the undercurrent of snoring as from a single dragon, the tidy way the men had spaced themselves, like checkers on a board. And then how he had found a blank square, had jumped himself, as it were, into it, and joined humanity in stunned witness of its own process of perpetuation.
Joan a
sked, “How was the movie?”
“Awful. Exasperating. You begin to think entirely in technical terms: camera position, mike boom. And the poor cunts, God, how they work. Apparently to get a job in a blue movie a man has to be, A, blond, and, B, impotent.”
“Yes,” Joan said and turned her back, as if to conceal a train of thought. “We have to go to dinner tonight with the new Dennises.” Mack Dennis had remarried, a woman much like Eleanor only slightly younger and, the Maples agreed, not nearly as nice. “They’ll keep us up forever. But maybe tomorrow,” Joan was going on, as if to herself, timidly, “after the kids go their separate ways, if you’d like to hang around …”
“No,” he took pleasure in saying. “I’m determined to play golf. Thursday afternoon one of the accounts took me out to Long Island and even with borrowed clubs I was hitting the drives a mile. I think I’m on to something; it’s all up here.” He showed her the top of his backswing, the stiff left wrist. “I must have been getting twenty extra yards.” He swung his empty arms down and through.
“See,” Joan said, gamely sharing his triumph, “you’re sublimating.”
In the car to the Dennises, he asked her, “How is it?”
“It’s quite wonderful, in a way. It’s as if my senses are jammed permanently open. I feel all one with Nature. The jonquils are out behind the shed and I just looked at them and cried. They were so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. I can’t keep myself indoors, all I want to do is rake and prune and push little heaps of stones around.”
“You know,” he told her sternly, “the lawn isn’t just some kind of carpet to keep sweeping, you have to make some decisions. Those lilacs, for instance, are full of dead wood.”
“Don’t,” Joan whimpered, and cried, as darkness streamed by, torn by headlights.
In bed after the Dennises (it was nearly two; they were numb on brandy; Mack had monologued about conservation and Mrs Dennis about interior decoration, redoing “her” house, which the Maples still thought of as Eleanor’s), Joan confessed to Richard, “I keep having this little vision—it comes to me anywhere, in the middle of sunshine—of me dead.”
“Dead of what?”
“I don’t know that, all I know is that I’m dead and it doesn’t much matter.”
“Not even to the children?”
“For a day or two. But everybody manages.”
“Sweetie.” He repressed his strong impulse to turn and touch her. He explained, “It’s part of being one with Nature.”
“I suppose.”
“I have it very differently. I keep having this funeral fantasy. How full the church will be, what Spence will say about me in his sermon, who’ll be there.” Specifically, whether the women he has loved will come and weep with Joan; in the image of this, their combined grief at his eternal denial of himself to them, he glimpsed a satisfaction for which the transient satisfactions of the living flesh were a flawed and feeble prelude—merely the backswing. In death, he felt, as he floated on his back in bed, he would grow to his true size.
Joan with their third eye may have sensed his thoughts; where usually she would roll over and turn her sumptuous back, whether as provocation or withdrawal it was up to him to decide, now she lay paralyzed, parallel to him. “I suppose,” she offered, “in a way, it’s cleansing. I mean, you think of all that energy that went into the Crusades.”
“Yes, I dare say,” Richard agreed, unconvinced, “we may be on to something.”
TO ALFRED AND HELEN KNOPF
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, which first printed the stories specified:
THE NEW YORKER: “Marching Through Boston,” “The Witnesses,” “The Pro” (1966); “The Taste of Metal,” “Museums and Women” (1967); “Man and Daughter in the Cold” (1968); “The Corner,” “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” “I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me,” “One of My Generation,” “The Hillies” (1969); “The Deacon,” “The Orphaned Swimming Pool,” “The Carol Sing” (1970); “Plumbing,” “The Baluchitherium,” “Jesus on Honshu” (1971); “Solitaire” (1972).
HARPER’S MAGAZINE: “Your Lover Just Called” (1966); “Eros Rampant” (1968); “Sublimating” (1971).
THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW: “During the Jurassic” (1966); “Under the Microscope” (1968); “The Invention of the Horse Collar” (1972).
ESQUIRE: “God Speaks” [under the title “Deus Dixit”] (1965); “The Slump” (1968).
PLAYBOY: “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying” (1969).
AUDIENCE: “When Everyone Was Pregnant” (1971).
NEW WORLD WRITING: “The Sea’s Green Sameness” (1960).
Illustration credits will be found on this page.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
(illustration credit loi.1)
p01.1. Neck girth pressing on horse’s windpipe. From Histoire de la locomotion terrestre, by Maurice Fabre, Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre; 1963.
20.1. Cyclops, from “Some Pond Creatures and Their Sizes,” sheet printed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Lincoln, Mass.
20.2. Daphnia, ibid.
20.3. Water-mite (Hydrachna geographica), from Field Book of Ponds and Streams, by Ann Haven Morgan, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1930.
20.4. Fairy shrimp, ibid.
20.5. Diatoms (Meridion, Tabellaria), ibid.
20.6. Volvox, ibid.
20.7. Anatomy of a rotifer (after F. J. Myers), ibid.
20.8. Stentor, ibid.
20.9. Spirostumum, ibid.
20.10. Brown hydra (Hydra oligactis), ibid.
20.11. Hydra oligactis after eating, ibid.
21.1. Jurassic high life (left to right, Plateosaurus, Polacanthus, and Rhamphorynchus), from Le Monde après le création de l’homme, by Louis Fingier, 1870. Artist: Antoine Jobin. Engraver: Vermoreken.
21.2. Skull of Stegosaurus Stenops, from “Osteology of the Armored Dinosauria in the United States National Museum, with Special Reference to the Genus Stegosaurus,” by Charles Whitney Gilmore, Washington, D.C.: Govt. Printing Office; 1914.
21.3. Skeleton of Brontosaurus, from Webster’s New International Dictionary; Second Edition, © 1959 by G. & C. Merriam Co., publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionaries.
21.4. Skeleton of Iguanodon bernissartensis (after Dollo), from Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, article on “Iguanodon.”
22.1. Baluchitherium, from La Grand Larousse Encyclopédie Larousse, Volume I, Librairie Larousse.
22.2. Baluchitherium foot (upraised in admonition), from The Vertebrate Story, by Alfred S. Romer. Illinois: University of Chicago Press; 1959.
23.1. First picture of a horse collar. From a Frankish manuscript, tenth century. Reproduction from A History of Technology, edited by Singer, Holmyard, Hall and Williams, Volume II, New York: Oxford University Press; 1956.
23.2. Ancient Egyptian double yoke with neck and body girths. From Die Wägen und Fahrwerke der Griechen und Römer, by Johann Ginzrot, Volume I, München: J. Lentner; 1817.
23.3. Front view of chariot horses, with strap passing between legs from girth-band to breast-band. From a Greek vase of c. 500 B.C. Reproduction from A History of Technology, Volume II, New York: Oxford University Press; 1956.
23.4. Side view of chariot horses, with horizontal breast-band. Bone carving from a Byzantine casket, ninth century A.D. Reproduction ibid.
23.5. Mule and horse working fields; horse (right) in newly invented horse collar. From the Bayeux tapestry, eleventh century. Reproduction from A History of Western Technology, by Frederich Klemm, Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press; 1964.
23.6. Perfected medieval harness, being used to haul the sun up the sky. From Hortus delicarum, by Herrad von Landsperg, early thirteenth century. Reproduction ibid.
loi.1. Vorticella, from Field Book of Ponds and Streams, by Ann Haven Morgan, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1930.
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963)
• Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying (1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.