Updike John - Of the Farm

My mother put her hand on my forehead, testing for a fever. “Now don’t overdo. Remember you’re a city boy now.”

“Sometimes when he brought me back,” Richard told me, innocently proud of having not been neglected, “he used to spend the night and have breakfast with us.”

They went on down to the house. My mother stooped to retrieve a hoe from the long grass. Peggy got up from the blanket to greet them. Perhaps I imagined the whorish little hitch of her hips as she stood erect, and the arrogant flick of her hair back from her eyes. I had met her first husband just once, in New Haven, when we retrieved Richard from him on the drive back from our Truro honeymoon—two weeks containing ten days of rain. The decaying stairs on the sand cliffs of the outer beach had seemed Jacob’s-ladders to me and the variety of smoothed pebbles miraculous; the drizzly mist made our bodies vague except to each other and I had been imprudently happy, so happy my heart seemed to trespass the limits set to joy. At night, when Peggy fell asleep beside me in the little rented cottage furnished with wicker armchairs and wartime-edition detective novels and ashtrays that were quahog shells, the roof muttered in the rain and my mind would wander in the encircling desolation where things necessarily end. Our little lease expired. Richard’s father—McCabe, she always called him, never using his first name—was an assistant dean at Yale. Prepared to hate him, I confused myself by liking him. No taller than Peggy, ruddy and shy and balding, he had the tremulous yet smug air of the born academic. My mother had wanted me to become a poet or, failing that, a teacher; in the end I had disappointed both her expectations. Here in McCabe I confronted what I might have become. He had an unnatural physical youthfulness. Tennis and squash had conditioned his terse springy motions. The strange redness of his very neat lips suggested something vampirish to me, as if he were feeding off of his students. His smile was professionally ready. Like Richard he was engagingly gattoothed and his eyes, of a deep clouded humorless brown, seemed prepared to receive a child’s draught of unhappiness. The habit of interview carried from his job into his encounter with us in the form of an uncanny attentiveness betrayed, when Peggy’s voice nervously reached too high, by a fiddling pronation of his wrists in his shirt cuffs. His manner with his ex-wife, while fond and sane, seemed above all wary.

This meeting left me with a need to understand better who had divorced whom. I had gathered that Peggy had decided, Peggy had insisted, Peggy had fought free; but from the humorless glint in Dean McCabe’s round brown eyes I had received a disturbing contrary impression reinforced by the puzzling emphasis of his parting handshake. It seemed to be trying to squeeze too much into this moment of contact—pity, forgiveness, competitive self-assertion, a relief that I had somehow proved harmless, gratitude, hatred, what? I could never get out of her what had been wrong with him. We just weren’t temperamentally well-suited. I felt it first and McCabe was nice enough to agree. But what was your complaint exactly? Was he cruel? Did he philander? No, not really. Not really? Not until I drove him to it. You drove him to it? Not consciously at first. She tucked back her hair. But was he impotent? Of course not. Don’t be silly, Joey. Her refutation seemed excessive, an unfeeling reflex mechanically ingrained by habits of self-defense. I hadn’t really been asking her to tell me that they never made love. Or had I? But what did he fail to do for you then? I don’t know. I can’t express it. He didn’t make me feel enough like a woman. But I do? Of course. But how? You act as though I’m yours. It’s wonderful. It’s not something a man can do deliberately. You just do it. And he didn’t? He was conceited and timid. I was a burden to him. He liked books and other men. Is that why he hasn’t remarried? All she had to say was Yes, but she said, That, and I suppose —blithely— he thinks he’s still in love with me.

The clouds surrounding her divorce became the clouds I moved beneath, mowing. The sky that had seemed a nation of citadels and an arena of political maneuver verged on divulging the anatomy of a dead marriage: a luminous forearm seemed laid in sleep across a darker anatomy; the gathering nimbus suggested platoons of somber lawyers; the edge of a glowing, boiling protest told too sharply against a dwindling patch of blue. I struggled to dispel the thought, atmospherically encouraged by my mother, that I had been a fool, that McCabe’s attitude toward me had been pitying and amused. If Peggy had slept with him after their separation, after their divorce, it could only mean she had wanted him back, and in the end he had not come.

A horn honked.

My mother was driving up the road in my father’s old Chevrolet. I parked the tractor in the open and brushed the chaff from my shirt. Richard was in the front seat beside her. I asked, “Where’s Peggy?”

“She decided not to come. She would have had to change clothes.”

“Did you ask her nicely?”

“Very nicely, didn’t I, Richard?” My mother moved over, so I could drive.

“She said,” Richard said, “she’d just as soon not come if we didn’t need her.”

I was suspicious of them both. “How unfriendly. Will she be all right alone?”

“Oh my goodness,” my mother said, “we’ll be gone fifteen minutes. She’ll have the dogs to protect her. I’ve been alone here every day for seven years and every night for a year and I’ve never been approached.”

“Well—”

“But I don’t have as much to tempt evildoers, you’re going to say?” She was agitated and reckless. Before I could soothe her, she went on, “Why don’t you stay then and let me and Richard go, though what they’ll think I want with Tampax I can’t imagine. But never mind, they think I’m crazy in Galilee anyway. I must say Peggy impresses me as more able to take care of herself than any of us.”

I got in beside her and let out the clutch and, still attuned to the tractor, made the old Chevy buck clumsily. My father’s headlong and heedless style of driving seemed still to live in its metal. We went up the dirt road to the paved township road and from there back onto the state highway that yesterday had brought us south from the Turnpike. It continued toward Alton. After a mile the macadam road we had always travelled was swallowed by a new four-lane highway with a median strip of gray-blue spalls. White posts bore keystoneshaped reflectors. Between smoothly blasted banks of red rock the superhighway plunged through the hill the old road had skirted and carried us toward Alton in a way totally unfamiliar to me; it was magical. We seemed to skim free of any contact with the earth.

“Where are we?” I asked.

My mother said, “This is the back of Benjy’s farm.” Benjy was a Hofstetter, a cousin of hers, and of mine. “The state gave him a handsome sum,” she added proudly. The land my father and I had travelled so often, back and forth to school, had been abolished, and for the shaggy curves and intimate quick vistas and postered barn walls sequentially fixed on the scroll of our pilgrimage had been substituted certain vague sweeping images of faded unfarmed grass and slashed clay. My mother, far from feeling lost as I did, seemed exhilarated, and pointed out that with the new arrangement of roads it took as long to get to the halfway town of Galilee as to the shopping center on the outskirts of Alton itself.

At my mother’s insistence we went to the shopping center. The garish abundance, the ubiquitous music, the surrealist centrality of automobiles made me feel, emerging from my father’s dusty car, like a visitor from the dead. I remembered these acres as a city dump adorned with pungent low fires and rust-colored weeds. In the supermarket nothing smelled, because even the turnips were bagged in cellophane, and the air had the faintly sour coolness of plastic. The greed my mother and Richard exercised in the aisles with my money exasperated me. I burned to return to Peggy, fearing that by some cruel rerouting of time she would have aged or vanished and I would be left with nothing but this present, this grim echo of my mother and this lonely child impersonating me—how eager to please we are, setting out in life!—amid this acreage of brightly shoddy goods.