Updike John - Of the Farm

I had forgotten the cellar: dried paint cans, turpentine, apples, Mason jars bearded with spider cocoons, potatoes dumbly odorous of earth in a bin against which split logs fragrant of the winter woods had been stacked by my dead father, a glistening hill of coal, a squat furnace branching into aluminum ducts overspreading the cellar ceiling. Once my father and I had spent a hellish afternoon down here tugging stiffening cement this way and that across the dirt. I noticed with surprise that the floor we had made that day was smooth and level and innocent of seepage; it was as if the day itself were preserved, an underground pond, a lake of treasure in a vault.

I carried up the wood and fed the fire. The dogs, all three of them, had been let into the house by my mother and lay in a long damp heap on the sofa, asleep. One bright round eye opened when I dumped the wood on the andirons, and an animal wheezed. Peggy did not look up from her game, though the resurgent glow described the curve of her thighs. Before dinner she had gone upstairs and changed from her slip into a cashmere sweater and the smoky-blue stretch pants that imitate dungarees. I wiped the crumbs of bark from my hands and went back into my book. A strange stealth had been imposed on us. The rain lowered its voice. Richard whispered something to Peggy drowned out for me by the rustle of a page as I turned it.

In the kitchen, my mother smashed a plate. To abolish any doubt that it had been deliberate, she smashed another, after a bleached space of dumbfounded silence; the explosion was somewhat muddier than the first, as if the plate had struck the floor diagonally.

The heap of fur on the sofa stirred and churned itself into three individual dogs. The biggest, ears erect, bristled, leaped onto a windowsill, and began barking at an imagined attacker. The smallest, the puppy, scurried into the kitchen, its pale tailtip wagging low, undecided between fear and amusement. We followed the dog into the kitchen. My mother was holding in her two hands, chest high, a third dish, an oval blue platter, and clearly, having hesitated, had passed the moment when she could have smashed it also. It was the platter of the set she had received at the Olinger movie house, Tuesday after Tuesday, before the war. Putting it down on the table, she cried with a semblance of agony, “What’s all the whispering!”

Alone on the cleared table was a white china sugar bowl I had sent on some anniversary from San Francisco. Peggy snatched it up, asked, “Is this a new game?,” and dropped it to the floor. The bowl bounced without breaking, tossing its sugar upward in an hallucinatory figure eight, like a twist of smoke, then complacently rolled to the baseboard, bumping on its handles.

I asked my mother, “What whispering?”

“You were whispering. I heard Richard whispering.”

“He was asking me why it was so quiet,” Peggy said.

“Well why is it?”

“You know damn well why,” Peggy said. “You’re throwing a sulk and worrying your son.”

“My son? My son worries me. He says I killed his father.”

I said, “I never said that.” My mother’s face, turning to me, seemed vast, as the slanting veined faces of rocks in tidewater look vast, wet and stricken, between waves.

“I’m tired,” she said, “of being hated. I’ve lost everything but this child’s respect and I don’t want him whispering.”

“Nobody hates you.”

“Well I’m tired,” Peggy said, “of this ,” and she glanced around so that we could see how in her eyes our house was a maze. “I’m not going to keep Richard exposed to so much neuroticism. Joey, you can drive us back or come later on your own. I’m sorry, Mrs. Robinson, but I don’t feel I’m a help here and we’ll both feel better if I go.”

“It’s night,” I said.

She told me, “Stay or come, it’s up to you. I lived alone five years and unlike some men I’m not afraid of the dark.”

“Bravo,” I said. “ Die Konigin der Nacht. ”

“Sweetie, I’m packing.” Peggy went upstairs. The stair door latch resisted and—legs spread, backside broadened—she tore it open vehemently.

“She has been a help,” my mother said in a small mild voice. Hysteria fell from her like a pose.

“I’ll go talk to her.” Richard’s voice cracked between assumed gravity and a child’s alto.

“What’ll you say?” I wanted to go to her myself and was jealous. More precisely, I wanted to be his size and to go to her.

“I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.” His smile showed the gap between his teeth. “I’m very good at calming her down.”

“Tell her,” my mother called, as the boy went up the staircase, “that I’ve been meaning to throw away those old blue plates for a long time.” To me she added, “Never liked them anyway, but they were free. Silly what greed makes you do.”

“Let’s smash,” I said, “all the pictures of me you have sitting around.”

“Don’t you touch them. Those pictures are my son. Those pictures are the only son I have.”

“You have such dramatic ideas, Mother.”

In an attitude of weariness so little exaggerated that it left her the option to smile or not, I took the dustpan and brush from behind the refrigerator and swept up the shards of blue plate and grains of white sugar. The puppy tried to help and his solicitous moist nose kept jostling my hand. When I straightened up, my mother, finishing her drying, flirted her head at the silent ceiling and said, topping my mythological allusion, “Cupid interviewing Venus.”

I said, “If Joan had ever offered to pack I might still be married to her.”

“I can’t imagine why you blame me for Joan,” she said.

“What do I blame on you, the marriage or the divorce?”

“Both. Your father was like that. Women made the rules, women made the babies, women did everything. He used to say he had no recollection of asking me to marry him, it was just something I’d made happen.”

The contents of the dustpan slithered, slash , into the wastebasket, a cheap battered thing painted on each side with bouquets of red roses tied with gold ribbon. My father had salvaged it from the stage set of a high school play. Like many of my father’s fragile redemptions, it had absurdly endured. “Poor Charlie,” I said. “I wonder now if he’ll become like Richard, a little husband.”

“Poor Charlie, yes. How could you have done it, Joey?”

“It seemed necessary. Charlie still knows he’s my son.”

I had remained staring into the wastebasket, seeking in its jagged contents perhaps some revelation as to the state of my abandoned son’s mind, so I was taken unawares when my mother, moving behind me, put her hand on the back of my skull, just above the neck. “Such a lot of sadness,” she said, “in such a little head.”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs; we pulled apart guiltily. Richard came into the kitchen and proudly told us, “She’ll stay.”

I asked him, “What did you say to her?”

“I said it would be impolite.”

“You’re a genius. That would never have occurred to me.”

My mother asked him, “What would you like for a reward?”

The boy pointed at me. “He says you have some nature books that tell the names of plants. Could I look at them, please?”

“Plants. You don’t want birds.”

“I think I should begin with plants.”

“All I have that I can remember is an old Schuyler Mathews Wild Flowers with crinkly pages. I got it when I was in normal school and I used to go out into the fields with a paint box and try to tint the drawings to match. I think it’s still on the shelf if the silver fish haven’t eaten it.”