John Updike - The Centaurus

“Where have you been ?” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.

He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were beginning to look drawn as hell. Did my snoring keep you awake?”

“ No .” The snow on his coat and pants and shoes, testimony of adventure, made me jealous. Mrs. Hummel’s attention had shifted all to him; she was laughing without his even saying anything. His bumpy face was ruddy. He whipped his cap off like a boy and stamped his feet on the cocoa mat inside the door. I yearned to torment him; I became shrill. “What did you do at the school? How could you be so long ?”

“Jesus, I love that building when there aren’t any kids in it.” He was speaking not to me but to Mrs. Hummel. “What they ought to do with that brick barn, Vera, is turn the kids out on the street and let us teachers live there alone; it’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life where I didn’t feel like somebody was sitting on the back of my neck all the time.”

She laughed and said, “They’d have to put in beds.”

“An old Army cot is all I’d need,” he told her. “Two feet wide and six feet long; whenever I get in bed with somebody they take all the covers. I don’t mean you, Peter. Tired as I was last night I probably took ‘em from you. In answer to your question, what was I doing over there, I brought all my books up to date. For the first time since last marking period everything is apple pie; I feel like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly. If I don’t show up tomorrow, the new teacher can step right in and take over, poor devil. Biff, bang; move over, buddy, next stop, the dump.”

I had to laugh.

Mrs. Hummel moved to her refrigerator asking, “George, have you had lunch? Can I give you a roast beef sandwich?”

“Vera, that’s kind as hell of you. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t chew a roast beef sandwich, I had a back tooth pulled last night. I feel a hundred per cent better but it’s like the lost Atlantis in there. I had a bowl of oyster stew up at Mohnie’s. To be perfectly honest with you though, if you and the kid were having coffee, I’d take a cup. I forget if the kid drinks coffee.”

“How can you forget it?” I asked. “I try to drink it every morning at home but there’s never any time.”

“Jesus, that reminds me. I tried to get through to your mother but the lines are out. She doesn’t have a scrap of food in the house and if I know Pop Kramer he’ll be trying to eat the dog. Provided he hasn’t fallen down the stairs. That would be just my luck; no doctor can get in there.”

“Well when are we going to get there?”

“Any minute, kid, any minute. Time and tide for no man wait.” He called to Mrs. Hummel, “Never take a boy away from his mother.” Then he pinched his lips in; I knew he was wondering if this had been tactless because she, for reasons that were dark to me, had no children herself. With the pointed quiet of a servant she set the smoking coffee on the counter near him. A coil of hair came loose and trailed across her cheek like a comment. He tried to subdue the excitement in his voice and told her, “I saw Al over by Spruce Street and he’s on his way home. He and that truck have been performing miracles out there; this borough does a bang-up job when the chips are down. Traffic’s moving on everything but the alleys and the section around Shale Hill. Boy, if I was running this town we’d all be on snowshoes for a month.” He clenched and unclenched his hands happily as he gazed into this vision of confusion. “They say a trolley was derailed over in West Alton late last night.”

Mrs. Hummel tucked back her hair and asked, “Was anybody hurt?”

“Nobody. It jumped the rails but stayed on its feet. Our own trolleys didn’t get through to Ely until around noon. Half the stores in Alton are shut.” I marveled at all this information and imagined him gathering it, wading through snow banks, halting snowplows to question the drivers, running up and down raggedly heaped mounds in his too-small overcoat like an overgrown urchin. He must have circled the town while I was asleep.

I finished my coffee and the odd torpor that my nerves had been holding at bay now was permitted to invade. I ceased to listen as my father told Mrs. Hummel of his further adventures. Mr. Hummel came in the door, gray with fatigue, and shook snow from his hair. His wife fed him lunch; when it was over he looked at me and winked. “Do you want to go home, Peter?”

I went and put on my coat and socks and wrinkled clammy shoes and came back to the kitchen. My father took his empty cup to the sink and restored his cap to his head. “This is awfully white of you, Al; the kid and I really appreciate it.” To Mrs. Hummel he said, “Thanks a lot, Vera, you’ve treated us like princes,” and then, love, the strangest of all the strange things I have told, my father bent forward and kissed the woman on the cheek. I averted my eyes in shock and saw on the spatter-pattern linoleum floor her narrow feet in their blue slippers go up on their toes as she willingly received the kiss.

Then her heels returned to the floor and she was holding my father’s wart-freckled hands in her own. “I’m glad you came to us,” she told him, as if they were alone. “It filled up the house for a little while.”

When my turn to thank her came I didn’t dare a kiss and pulled my face back to indicate I was not going to give one. She smiled as she took my offered hand and then put her other hand over it. “Are your hands always so warm, Peter?”

Outside their door, the twigs of a lilac bush had become antlers. Hummel’s truck was waiting between the pumps and the air hose; it was a middle-sized rust-splotched Chevrolet pick-up with a flaring orange plow coupled to the front bumper. When it went into gear ten different colors of rattle seemed to spring into being around us. I sat between my father and Al Hummel; there was no heater in the front and I was glad to be between the men. We drove out Buchanan Road. Our old house looked like Old Man Winter’s palace, crowned with snow and sunning itself on the broad white side where I used to bounce a tennis ball when I was a child. Along the street children in passing had shaken the snow loose from the hedges and now and then above us a loosened batch poured down in a shuffling quick cascade through the branches of a horsechestnut tree. As the houses thinned, the snow reigned undisturbed over the curved fields beyond the steady ridge, as high as a man, of stained snow heaped by the plow. In the far distance the wooded hills still showed as blue and brown, but the tints were weak, as in the prints of an etching taken to clean the plate.

The weariness I felt overtakes me in the telling. I sat in the cab of the truck while, framed in the windshield like the blurred comics of an old silent movie, my father and Hummel shovelled out our Buick, which the plows in clearing Route 122 had buried up to the windows. I was bothered by an itching that had spread from my nose through my throat and that I felt to have some connection with the clammy chill of my shoes. The shoulder of the hill threw its shadow over us and a little wind ignited. The sunlight grew long, golden, and vanished from all but the tips of the trees. Expertly Hummel started the motor, backed the rear tires onto the chains, and made them fast with a plier-like tool. Little better than blurs now in the bluish twilight, the men enacted a pantomime with a wallet whose conclusion I did not comprehend. They both gestured widely and then hugged each other farewell. Hummel opened the door of the cab, cold air swept over me, and I transferred my brittle body to our hearse.