John Updike: The Centaurus

His conversation with Hummel was making Caldwell anxious. A clock in his head was ticking on; the school called to him urgently. Disjointed music seemed to be tugging at Hummel’s exhausted face. Images of loose joints, worn thread, carbon deposits, fatigued metal webbed across Caldwell’s apprehension of his old friend: Are we falling apart? In his own mind a gear kept slipping: Shellac on those old Buicks, shellac, shellac . “Al,” he protested, “I got to high-tail it. You won’t take a cent?”

“George: now not another word.” And this was the way with all these Olinger aristocrats. They wouldn’t take any money but they did take an authoritative tone. They forced a favor on you and that made them gods.

He walked toward the door but Hummel limped along with him. The three Cyclopes gabbled so loud the men turned. Archy, outpouring from his throat a noise like a butchery of birds, pointed to the floor. On the stained cement one shoe had left wet prints. Caldwell examined the injured foot; the shoe was saturated with blood. Black in the brown light, it was leaking out above the heel.

“George, you better get that tended,” Hummel said. “I will at lunch. Let it bleed itself out.” The thought of poison haunted him. “Let it flush itself.”

He opened the door and a box of cold air encased them. In stepping out, Caldwell put too much weight on the bloody foot and hopped in surprise.

“Tell Zimmerman,” Hummel insisted.

“I will.”

“No, really, tell him, George.”

“He’s helpless, Al. The kids today just aren’t the old kind; Zimmerman wants ‘em to chew us up.”

Hummel sighed. His gun-colored coveralls seemed deflated; a sprinkle of iron filings fell from his hair. “These are bad days, George.”

Caldwell’s long drawn face tweaked unusually; he was going to make a joke. He was rarely a formally humorous man. “It’s no Golden Age, that’s for sure.”

Hummel was pathetic, Caldwell decided as he walked away. Lonely devil, couldn’t stop talking, he couldn’t let you go. No need for mechanics like him anymore; everything mass-produced. Waste. If one wears out, get another. Biff. Bang. Smash ‘em up. Can only get one-eyed morons to work for him, wife sleeps all around town, Mobilgas moving in and now the rumor was Texaco too, Hummel was dead and de pressing. Sniffing the point so matter-of-factly for poison; brrough .

But as his hobbled walk toward the school building continued, and the cold flattened his threadbare brown suit against his skin, Caldwell’s heart changed tone. The garage had been warm. The man had been good to him. Had always been; Hummel was Pop Kramer’s nephew-in-law. He had been the key influence on the board when Caldwell had got the job, in the depths of the Depression, when all the olive trees died, and Ceres roamed the land mourning her stolen daughter. Where one of her tears fell, grass never grew again. The garland she was wearing turned venomous, and now poison ivy flourished by every barn. Hitherto everything in Nature had been kind to Man. Every species of berry had been gently aphrodisiac, and coming from Pelion at a canter he had spied the young Chariclo gathering watercress.

He drew near the immense orange wall. Classroom sounds like snowflakes drifted down on him. Metal tapped a brittle pane. Pholos appeared at a window, holding a window-pole, and looked down startled upon his fellow-teacher. His oblong, old-fashioned spectacles flashed in surprise beneath the neat cap of centrally parted hair. Pholos had once been a semi-pro shortstop, and the line of the cap still indented the hair above his ears, though his broad forehead was a river of middle-aged wrinkles. Caldwell tersely waved at his friend, and exaggerated his limp, as if that explained his being out of school. Though he bobbed like a ten-cent toy, it was scarcely an exaggeration; the pain in his ankle felt plaintive and forsaken after Hummel’s radiant attentions. At every other step, the hot earth climbed higher toward his knee. Caldwell gained the side door and grasped the bronze bar. Before entering, he gasped fresh air and stared sharply upward, as if in answer to a shout. Beyond the edge of the orange wall the adamantine blue zenith pronounced its un ceasing monosyllable: I.

Back inside the school, he paused, lightly panting, on the rubber mat of the landing. The lustrous yellow wall still said FUCK. Afraid of having to clatter past Zimmerman’s office on the first floor, Caldwell took the subterranean route. He went down the steps, past the boys’ locker room. The door was open; clothes were flung around in disarray and some clouds of steam loitered. Caldwell pushed through reinforced glass and entered the great basement study-hall. Through its length and width the children were unnaturally still. Medusa, who kept perfect discipline, was at the head desk. She glanced up, yellow pencils thrusting from her tangled hair. Caldwell avoided looking at her face. Head high, eyes forward, mouth in a prim determined set, he walked along the wall at his right hand. From the other side of the wall, where industrial arts were taught, arose the spurt and cry txz! aeiiii , of wood being tortured. On his left he heard the children rustle like shingle in a threatening tide. He did not look around until he had gained the safety of the far doorway. Here Caldwell turned, to see if he had left tracks. As he feared: a trail of red crescents, moons from his heel, marked his path. He pinched his lips in embarrassment; he would have to explain and apologize to the janitors.

In the cafeteria, the green-gowned women were bustling, setting out 8¢ cartons of chocolate milk, arranging trays of sandwiches bound in waxpaper, and stirring the cauldrons of soup. Tomato today. The sickly plangent odor filled the tiled volume. Mom Schreuer, a fat soul whose son was a dentist and whose apron was black beneath her bosom from leaning against the stoves, waved a wooden paddle at him. Grinning like a greeted boy, Caldwell waved back. He always felt securer among the people who staffed the school, who fed its furnaces, the janitors, the cooks. They reminded him of real people, the people of his boyhood in Passaic, New Jersey, where his father had been the poor minister of a poor church. Along the neighborhood street each man had ‘an occupation that could be simply named-milkman, welder, printer, ma son-and each house in the row wore to his eyes, in its individual nicks and curtains and flowerpots, a distinct face. A modest man, Caldwell was most comfortable in the under-reaches of the high school. It was warmest there; the steam pipes sang; the talk made sense.

The great building was symmetrical. He left the cafeteria by climbing a few steps and passing the girls’ locker room. Forbidden territory; but he knew from the tumble in the boys’ locker room that it was a male gym period, so there was no danger of blundering into the sacred. The sanctum was empty. The thick green door was ajar, exposing a strip of cement floor, a bit of tan bench, a tall segment of shut lockers under high frosted windows.

Hold!

Here it was, his feet frozen to this same spot of scratching cement, careless in his weariness, his eyes worn by correcting papers in the boiler room, the building growing dark, the students fled, the clocks ticking in unison throughout the empty rooms, that, climbing toward his room, he had surprised Vera Hummel, this same green door ajar, standing in view wreathed in steam, a blue towel held gracefully away from her body, her amber pudenda whitened by drops of dew.

“Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.”

“Milady Venus.” He bowed his splendid head. “Your beauty for the moment ravished me into forgetfulness of my fraternity.”

She laughed and, twisting her amber hair forward over one shoulder, indolently stroked it with the towel. “A fraternity, perhaps, your pride disdains to confess. For Father Kronos, in the shape of a horse, sired you upon Philyra in the fullness of his health; whereas at my begetting he tossed the severed genitals of Uranus like garbage into the foam.” Turning her head, she gave the negligent rope of her hair another twist. Sudden wrung water slipped along her collarbone. Her throat showed crystalline in silhouette against a red wet cloud; her near hair held the motion of running horses. With downcast eyes she displayed her profile. The pose overwhelmed Chiron; his guts became a harp. Her profession of sorrow at her barbarous birth, though its insincerity was patent, sent his tongue stammering in search of consolation.