John Updike - Toward the End of Time

The clergyperson was stationed at the door, though the day was cold, alternating spells of pale sunlight with unseasonable spittings of snow. She greeted Deirdre by name, but after a hesitation that showed a long gap of attendance. When introduced to me, she darted her sensitive bright eyes back and forth between our ill-matched faces before granting me a firm little handshake and an abrupt smile I must call boyish. Her teeth were as straight and neat as her bangs.

I like these contemporary females, stripped of so much of the devious nonsense the rise of capitalism imposed upon women.

I liked, too, my drug-raddled consort’s dragging me to church, this homely brown church out of Protestantism’s fading, working-class middle range. There was a nakedness in that, a bared need. Gloria had been an old-style Episcopalian, resenting any tampering with Cranmer’s prayer-book language and any evangelical or feel-good pollutions of the service, such as a homily at morning prayer or the passing of the peace at any service. Perdita had drifted from Unitarianism into Buddhism and settlement-house good works. Both women were religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing. For primitive Deirdre, something existed, hot, in the knots of her nature, that she was unashamed to bow to. Though I was ashamed, I was also somewhat primitive, and had willingly attended as an extension of my worship of her body.

We walked arm in arm out of a swirl of snow into a pollen-colored cloud of sunshine on the way to the parked car. I felt better for having done this-put Easter behind me. Perhaps Easter is my problem with spring-the unreasonable expectation of it. That distant spring when I was too paralyzed by dread to build little Mildred’s dollhouse, I went, gigantic in my numbness, out on a warm day and marvelled to find little swarms of tiny winged ephemerids already active in the air, jiggling together in some obligatory procedure, offering themselves as a humble rung in the food chain, though it seemed too wintry still for spiders to be stirring and for swallows to have migrated north. Snowdrops- an early small amaryllis, Galanthus nivalis -have always worried me: if flowers exist to attract insects, where in this just-unfrozen world do the insects come from? Well, here insects were, in my muddy backyard, and if these gnats were not oppressed by death, why should I be? A vast camaraderie of living cells, all doomed to disintegrate back into insensate dust, cheered me for a moment. I shouldered my life-my house, my four and a half children, my two cars, my half-acre-and moved on, toward this present moment in time.

Tax time. Though no one takes it seriously-the District of Columbia is entirely given over to deserted monuments and warring gangs of African-American teenagers, who have looted every office of its last stapler and photocopier refill cartridge-a ghost of federal government exists in Maryland and Virginia, too weak to do anything but send out forms, which I sentimentally file in the drawer along with my prewar returns. Deirdre is very upset that I have allowed Phil and Spin to raise the protection money again-from an even grand to thirteen-hundred fifty. Spin explained that their own expenses have gone up, what with the teenage competition coming out from Lynn, moving up the coast. “They don’t go by any rules, Mr. Turnbull,” he explained to me. “To them killing is nothing-it’s not a last resort, or taking care of business, it’s for sheer entertainment value. You don’t want those babies to get into your pocket-they’ll take it all, and then hang your hide out to dry.”

Macho, rumpled Phil was offended by his partner’s betrayal of fear. “They’re kids,” he said, “for Chrissake. Fifteen, sixteen. Some even, Jesus, like ten, eleven. Kids can’t stand up to experience. We’re professionals, right? We provide a service, we keep our bargains. Our clients trust us, right, Mr. Turnbull?”

“Right, Phil.”

“Any of those Lynn kids show up on your hill, you know how to reach us. You have the phone numbers.”

“I do.”

Phil’s eyes slid over to Deirdre, who always comes out-of-doors when she hears men’s voices on the driveway. “How’s she treatin’ you?” he asked me, as if she couldn’t talk for herself. “She keepin’ in line?”

“She’s my little lady,” I told him, not liking his tone.

“I could tell you some stories,” he said, “from the old days. Huh, Dee?”

“Tell all you want. It still leaves you as a A-1 asshole.”

His eyes did a dance from her face to mine to Spin’s, and he held his tongue, with an effort that pushed his head forward like a bison’s. They didn’t want to offend me, they wanted to keep the scrip flowing.

But Deirdre was roused. She asked me, “Whaddeya give these guys anything for? They couldn’t do anything if you really needed protection. Look at ’em-they’re scared shitless of these little kids from Lynn. Wait’ll the Russian gangs from Mattapan get here. These are two-bit punks, Ben, and you’re their only patsy.”

“They’ve taken good care of me so far,” I told her.

Spin seemed startled by my support; his toothpick bob-bled under his mustache as he said to Deirdre, “Hear that, smart cunt? And this is one smart former financier talking. Outsmarted his way up the ladder from utter nowhere out in the western part of the state.”

“How’d you know that?” I asked, startled in turn.

Phil smirked, checking if Deirdre took this in. “We know everything about our clients,” he said, “we need to know.”

“Fuck you two,” she said. “When those kids from Lynn get here you’re both going to wake up plugged some day. Or with a smile cut into your throats that’ll make your mouths look like assholes.”

Phil took this in and winked at me. “You watch her, Mr. Turnbull. Back in high school everybody said she could suck dick all right, but that’s not the same as dependable.”

Spin was pocketing the April money. To end the conference, he said, “Trust us,” but the words had a shaky ring even in my ears.

Back in the house, as their rusty old Camaro wheeled down the driveway, I explained to Deirdre that what they charged was so much less than what the government used to extract that it was a bargain, regardless of how real their alleged protection was.

“Yeah, but when there was government, there were things like the FBI and the Federal Reserve Board to keep things stable. There was structure,” she told me. “Structure is worth paying quite a lot for. Without it, you get just survival of the brutes.”

“Where did you hear all this?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

“A program on television the other night, when I couldn’t sleep. I get jittery; it’s too quiet here at night. You were dead to the world. It talked about the Roman Empire. You know how, before it broke up, it made the spread of Christianity possible? All those roads and soldiers-Christianity would never have gotten out of Jerusalem without those roads. And it needed to get out of Jerusalem. It would have been squelched by the Jewish establishment. The Jews hated it, though it was Jews at first.”

I was amused; this young person under my roof was trying to grow, to learn, to orient herself in the world as it now was. She wanted to live a life. My amusement was cruel, of course. I said, “I have to tell you, Deirdre, that I don’t much care what happens in the world. I’ve had my years in it, by and large. You’ve arrived as a late kicker, one last joy, and I’m grateful. But time is running out for me. What Spin and Phil and the kids from Lynn do with the world is up to them. I just want to buy a little peace, day by day.”