Updike John: Of the Farm

The two women kissed. They had met once before, at the wedding I had urged my mother not to attend. It had been held, a week after my divorce from Joan became final, in the downtown private chambers of a municipal judge whose son I knew. The building was a survival, with cage elevators and brown linoleum halls lined with office doors whose frosted glass suggested a row of lavatories. It had been June, hot. The windows were old-fashionedly flung open and the sounds of the East River lifted into the room. The judicial sanctum was capacious along obsolete lines of office space, and the furniture, which included a wooden bench where my mother sat, looked sparse and stray, as if these inanimate survivors of a vanished courthouse era had been humanly subjected to the bewildering thinning of mortality. My mother kept folding and unfolding and smoothing on her lap a tiny linen handkerchief which she would now and then, as if stung, dartingly press to the side of her neck. I had thought of her as being hopelessly out of place at this ceremony, but we were all displaced: my bride’s virtually adolescent son; the stiffish Park Avenue couple of whom the wall-eyed wife was Peggy’s maid of honor; the freckled ex-Olympic skier and ex-lover of Joan’s and professional colleague of mine who was, for want of a better, best man; Peggy’s father, a pink-faced widower who managed an Omaha department store; and, least expected, my hyperthyroid nephew-in-law, a Union Theological School student present as a kind of delegate from Joan and my children, who were in retreat with her parents beside a Canadian lake. In this weird congregation my mother was no embarrassment. The judge, a gentle old shark in a seersucker suit, was charming to her. As if filing a bulky brief, with burled brown hands that he held in the bent-fingered manner of a manual workman, he carefully seated her on the bench. There she patted herself and panted in rapid faint eddies, like a resting dog. Her coming here (by bus, with an hour’s wait in Philadelphia), which I had resisted, now seemed an extravagant exertion on my behalf, and I was grateful. I was conscious of her presence even at the pinnacle of the rite, when in the corner of my eye I saw Peggy’s firm chin redden and the dark star of her lashes alter position as her profile lowered toward the shuddering bouquet of violets clasped at her waist. She had read that a bride previously married carried flowers not white and had spent the morning phoning around the city for violets in June. I felt her then, my bride, for all the demure youth of her profile, as middle-aged—felt us both to be standing, in vulnerable poses of beginning, on the verge of some great middle, beside a river grander than its shores. Seen through the flung-open window beyond the judge’s robed shoulder, the river, tilted by our height, supported a slow traffic of miniature barges and, elevating through the tall afternoon in which Brooklyn was a glistening vision stitched with derricks, tipped into this room a breeze that nudged a few papers on the legally impassive oak desk. A single fly circled a knotted light cord. Then the vows were sworn and I had a sense of falling, of collapsing, at last, into the firm depths of a deed too long and too painfully suspended above completion. Turning to receive congratulations, to bestow and accept kisses from the few who had climbed to this height with me, I was confused to discover that my mother’s eyes were remote with anger and her cheek, for all the heat of the day, was cool.

NOW IN COOL AIR I kissed her and her face felt feverish. Fall, which comes earlier inland, was present not so much as the scent of fallen fruit in the orchard as a lavender tinge in the dusk, a sense of expiration. The meadow wore a strip of mist where a little rivulet, hardly a creek, choked by weeds and watercress, trickled and breathed. A bat like a speck of pain jerked this way and that in the membranous violet between the treetops. My mother had touched Peggy quickly and as if for contrast her hands lingered on me—one on my forearm, the other on my shoulder. “How tired are you?” she asked. She meant that I looked tired.

“Not at all,” I said. “We beat the rush across the bridge and had a hamburger in New Jersey.”

“Oh I didn’t mean ,” my mother said, turning too adroitly, “that Peggy looked tired. I’ve never seen Peggy look anything but cheerful.” Her voice seemed generated forward in her body, in her throat and mouth rather than in her lungs, and, disassociated from the depths of her person, was breathy but more agile than ever. There was something ironical in this agility, and in the way she held her shoulders cupped, as if to deepen her lungs—a kind of parody, perhaps, designed to distract us from her unexaggerated condition.

Peggy’s cheerful expression faded; then she gamely grinned and said, “It’s just a front.”

“A delightful one,” my mother said.

I took Peggy’s arm to lead her toward the house, but she moved away from me, to admit Richard, who had come up behind us. I had forgotten him. He had insisted on lugging the heavier suitcase, which held his mother’s clothes. He shifted it to his left hand and held out his right for my mother to shake. “You have quite a farm here, Mrs. Robinson,” he said. He could deepen his voice impressively, for short utterances.

“Why, I thank you, kind sir,” my mother said. “You’ve hardly seen any of it. I was hoping your parents could get here early enough for us to take a walk in the light.”

“We can do that tomorrow,” Peggy said. “I’d love it.”

“I have to mow the fields,” I said, wondering if only I had flinched at my mother’s imprecise use of the word “parents.”

She said, “Poor Joey. So conscientious.”

“I like what I’ve seen,” Richard assured her. His voice relaxed into a childish register. “We passed an old foundation you could very easily make into a two-car garage.”

“The old tobacco shed,” I explained. “I always thought that would be the pro shop when we made the farm into a golf course.” The golf course was a family joke, conceived when my father was living, whose exact quality I had never understood; but I inserted it here as a shield for my stepson’s innocence.

My mother studied him, feigned dismay, and cried, “But that’s where the best blackberries grow!”

We all laughed in gratitude at her relieving, if only for a moment, the darkness that had come upon her since her health had weakened. Her spirit had acquired a troubling resonance, a murky subtlety doubly oppressive out of doors—as if in being surrounded by her farm we had been plunged into the very territory of her thoughts.

Walking with that perhaps ironical slowness, my mother led us into the house. Since my first return from college nearly twenty years ago, my homecomings had tapered to the moment that now again was upon me; my feet touched the abrasive sandstone sill of our back porch while the dogs with joyful savagery yapped in the pen next to the crippled privet bush once gored by a runaway bull that my grandmother had tamed with an apron. It had happened the first summer we lived on the farm. A Mennonite dairy farmer rented our meadow for a small herd that included this rust-colored bull, who had found a slack section of the fence behind the springhouse. He pranced up into our yard, snorted, attacked the little round bright green bush, and stood there shaking his head as if to silence a buzzing in his ears. Flapping the apron and speaking to him with the same cross sibilance she employed to hold door-to-door salesmen at bay, my grandmother—the rest of us cowering and shouting in the kitchen—protected the bit of privet, a transplant from her beloved Olinger yard, until the Mennonite’s hired hands arrived with ropes. The bush had lived, but each winter’s burden of snow had spread its split wider, even as it grew taller.