Updike John - Of the Farm

“Why, she’s the toughest of the lot.”

“She’ll wet her bed.”

“Of course she won’t. She’s a wonderful child. They’re all wonderful children—aren’t they, Peggy?” My wife had come into the kitchen and was standing beside and above me. From beneath she looked formidably tall, her nose somewhat hooked, her hanging hair expanded by being damp.

“Yes, they’re nice,” she said to my mother, “and I’m very sad about them too.”

“Nobody’s asked you to be sad. It makes us happy to talk about them.”

“Joey went through hell over those children.” My phrase, “through hell,” sounded flat, as if she realized it was an echo. Peggy went on, “I’m sorry, I just don’t see a need to remind him of them. He needs a rest.”

My mother said, “A rest from remembering his own children?”

“What I really mean is please don’t talk about the children as a way of getting at me. It’s too hard on Joey.”

“What a fancy idea! I talk about them, Peggy, when I do, because I’m a garrulous old misfit and because talk is the only way I can touch them now. I enjoyed being a grandmother, it was a curious comfort, an accomplishment I had never considered possible for me, I don’t know why; and talking is the only way I can touch them now. Their father can visit them whenever he wants, but I don’t expect ever to see them on Grammy’s farm again. Or elsewhere.”

“Oh sure you will,” I said quickly, to stifle her terrifying threat of tears. “I’ll bring them over this fall, when we’re all back in the city again.”

“Your wife won’t wish you to,” my mother said. Stemming her tears seemed to have dried her diction to a quaint stiffness. “‘Cleave to thy wife,’ the Good Book admonishes.”

“I intend to cleave to my wife,” I said, “but I certainly expect you to see my children again.”

“I have no such expectation; and for that matter, Joey, I don’t expect ever to see you here again either.” She turned to Peggy and said, “Thanks for coming this once, Peggy. And I liked your hoeing. You do careful work.”

“Maybe I misunderstood,” Peggy said. Her hardworking hands hung blood-heavy beside her thighs, touching lace. “But I know how Joey wants to hurt himself over those children, and I suppose I overreact when I hear their names.”

My mother looked at me, my wife, and me again. Then she put her palms flat on the table and pushed herself, so slowly she seemed to be growing, up off the chair, sighing. In such a moment, while changing physical position, she will often drop one of those casual remarks that let into a congested situation an unexpected amount of air. “Well,” she said, “my parents stayed together without being happy and to tell the truth I’m not very grateful to them.”

Standing, she turned her back and began to cook. Peggy offered to help, but my mother said she was ashamed of letting her guest do all the work. My mother’s shape and face looked strange to me, lumpy and colorless, and I wondered if she were suffering pain. Pain in my parents had always been a difficult concept for me, like the galaxies beyond our galaxy. The rain whipped, caressed, embraced the house, made the wooden parts of it resound, set the shell of it afloat on seas of shimmering grass. I stood at the window looking toward the near woods. Thunder muttered from beyond where the owl had hooted. In my mother’s ragged flower garden the phlox was being battered, letting white coins fall, and in the weedy caves at the feet of the passé hollyhocks hung small orange papery constructs, lantern-shaped, that I had not seen in any garden since leaving Pennsylvania. I asked my mother what they were and she said, “I don’t know. We used to call them Japanese lanterns and then during the war the name was changed to Chinese lanterns. Now I suppose it’s Japanese lanterns again.” This window, giving on the most lonely side of the house, where the grass was softest and where Peggy had sunbathed, bore on its sill a toy metropolis of cereal and dogfood and birdseed boxes, whose city gates were formed by an unused salt-and-pepper set of aqua ceramic I had sent from Cambridge fifteen years ago. It was a window enchanted by the rarity with which I looked from it. Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain. A physical sense of ulterior mercy overswept me and led me to turn; I avoided my mother’s glance, lest with a boyish openness I overcommit myself to her again. Leaving the quieting cluck of her cooking on my left, I went into the living room, in search of the other children.

Peggy was sitting cross-legged before the fire again. She looked at me with eyes watery from the heat. Richard closed his book and his leg stopped swinging. “Well, that’s a very surprising ending,” he said.

I asked, “Is this still the story about the boy with the gigantic I.Q.?”

“Yes. He reinvents geometry with bits of colored cloth when he’s three years old and then reinvents all mathematics and finally asks somebody how long it will be for a line pointed straight up to come back from underneath to where it started. You see, that’s relativity.”

“Is it?”

“Oh sure. Einstein said space is curved.”

“That does seem precocious to figure out all by yourself. What finally happens to this boy?”

“As I said, it’s very surprising. He turns into a cretin. He just sits down and won’t move or look at anything and at the very end of the story his mother is overjoyed because he’s learned to hold a fork and put a bite of food in his mouth.”

“Like the line that comes back on itself from underneath.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Please stop reading those stories,” Peggy said from within her drying hair. “They can’t be good for your psyche.”

“That’s what I used to tell Joey,” my mother called, “and he never paid the slightest attention.”

“And look how healthy my psyche is!” I called back to her.

“Ha ha,” Peggy said.

Soon, sooner than we had expected, my mother had set the meal on the table: the peas, and boiled potatoes flecked with parsley, and, cold from the Armour’s can, a pressed ham she asked me to slice. The knife startled me by being sharp. My father had cared about knives and tools, and might have made a good craftsman had he not been expected, like me, to work with intangibles. When I had served everybody, my mother asked Richard what he would like to do in life.

“How do you mean exactly?”

“Do you want to live in New York and do what Joey does, whatever it is? I’ve never understood it; he won’t explain it to me.”

I had explained it to her many times. I work for a firm which arranges educational programs for corporations on such matters as tax minimization, overseas expansion, federal contract acquisition, and automation. My specialty is advertising dollar distribution, which is to say, broadly, corporate image presentation. My mother had wanted me to be a poet, like Wordsworth. She rarely read poetry but had a clear dogmatic sense of its importance. I had been sent, over my father’s pleas for an engineering school, to Harvard, because Harvard had graduated, from Emerson to Eliot, more poets than any other American college. The pleasant joke on my father was that I graduated into a world where a flexible student of old fables could soon earn more, in the widening multicentered, public-relations-minded affluence, than all but a few engineers. I do not know when, if ever, I gave up my poetic ambitions. I think I married Joan because, when I first saw her wheeling her bicycle through the autumnal dusk of the Yard, she suggested, remote and lithe and inward, the girl of “The Solitary Reaper” and, close-up, seemed a half-hidden Lucy who might make “oh, the difference to me!”