Updike John - Of the Farm

“O.K., frog,” I said.

Going downstairs, toward the voices that were growing in the light, I was touched, enclosed, by a faint familiar tint of vapor, that I assumed a moment’s hesitation would reveal to be some nostalgic treasure unlocked by the humidity within the stones, plaster, wood, and history of the house. But in fact the presence, rising from a damp towel tossed onto the landing, was the hoarse scent of Peggy’s wet hair.

MY WIFE and my mother talked, talked from eight-thirty to ten, and though their conversation—in which eddies of disagreement nonsensically dissolved as one or the other left the room and returned with a refilled glass of wine or a handful of pretzels or a weak gin-and-tonic, and where suffocating tunnels of tension broke onto plateaus of almost idyllic reminiscence that imperceptibly narrowed again—was in a sense the climax and purpose of our visit, I could not quite listen. While they talked, my mother half-lying on the sofa soaked in dog hair and Peggy leaning forward from within the wing chair where my grandfather had pontificated, I sat between them, on the blue-painted lawn chair, reading Wodehouse. Occasionally I would be addressed, appealed to:

“Did you feel your father, Joey, was so put upon? Where did this girl get the idea if not from you?”

“You’ve told me yourself, Joey, you weren’t allowed to have dates until you were eighteen.”

“Joey, is it true Joan was unfaithful, or is this what they call projection?”

“Joey, stand by me! If you’re silent now you must have lied to me before.”

“Does she always take such a lofty tone, Joey, or is it looking at me that makes her hysterical?”

In the stretches between these urgently darted hooks, which would snap up my head painfully and drag from me words of placation, self-defense, or impatience, I was conscious—while in my lap some transparent eccentrics cavorted through a landscape purely green—of an onflowing voluminous conversation in whose murk two exasperatingly clumsy spirits were passing, searching for, and repassing one another; deeper and deeper their voices dived into the darkness that was each woman to the other, in pursuit of shadows that I supposed were my father and myself. Peggy’s idea, which now, in the awful fullness of this exchange, she could expand from a suspicion to an accusation, a detailed indictment of a past that had touched her only through my hands, was that my mother had undervalued and destroyed my father, had been inadequately a “woman” to him, had brought him to a farm which was in fact her giant lover, and had thus warped the sense of the masculine within me, her son. Overhearing her dimly, I thought of my father as he had been, in his stubborn corporeality, his comic kindness—he indulged himself in self-denial as other men are sensualists—and closed my mind against her voice, so painfully did it fail to harmonize with the simple, inexpressible way that things had been. And my mother, on her side, swept forward with a fabulous counter-system of which I was the center, the only child, the obscurely chosen, the poet, raped, ignorantly, from my ideally immaterial and unresisting wife and hurled into the shidepoke sin of adultery and the eternal curse of my children’s fatherlessness. “Look at his eyes!” my mother shockingly cried, and I looked up, giving them, in my face, the evidence both sought.

Perhaps they were both right. All misconceptions are themselves data which have the minimal truth of existing in at least one mind. Truth, my work had taught me, is not something static, a mountain-top that statements approximate like successive assaults of frostbitten climbers. Rather, truth is constantly being formed from the solidification of illusions. In New York I work among men whose fallacies are next year worn everywhere, like the new style of shoes.

Out of fear I refused to listen to my wife and mother. Their sweeping disruption of the past threatened to show me that I had never known my father and was a blank to myself. Their conversation seemed a collision of darknesses to me but my mother’s darkness was nurturing whereas Peggy’s was cold, dense, and metallic. Surely in becoming my wife she had undertaken, with me, the burden of mothering my mother, of accommodating herself to the warps of that enclosing spirit. Her cigarette smoke insulted the room.

The puppy shifted from the sofa to the hearth rug, once a bathmat, and from there, troubled by the combustion near his ears, transferred himself to the kitchen and the space beneath the dining table. The fire needed fresh wood. I went into the cellar, where my father’s ghost still labored, and returned with my arms full. The fire reawakened, and I thought that to its wild gaze Peggy, proud and stiff in her wing chair, must seem as inflexibly in profile as a playing card. Parallel to the rain’s infiltrating murmur, my mother was telling her, “I used to worry about Joey. He had this cruel streak. He never tortured insects but he would torment his toys. We could hear him in his room, talking to them, trying to make them confess. His father thought it was the effect of war propaganda. It might have been. I thought it might be more the case that pain was too real to him, so he was fascinated by it. When we first moved to the farm we got a puppy for him, Mitzi. He would tease her so badly she would hide in the drainpipe down by the chicken shed. But she was growing, and one day she was too big to turn around in there and come out. Joey came running to me; I’ve never seen such an expression on a face, and I remember thinking at the time, that no matter what happens to him, he’ll never go through anything worse. He had tried to dig down to the buried end of the pipe with his bare hands. Actually, by the time we got down, the dog had come to the conclusion that she must back out. Dogs are remarkably acute animals. A horse would never have made such a deduction. I’ve heard of horses burning to death with an open door right behind them. When I was a little girl, in Alton for market day, I saw a horse strangle itself trying to run with a buggy whose axle had snapped. At any rate, what I didn’t like about this incident with Mitzi is that Joey was terribly grateful to the dog for saving herself, but whenever he felt a bit mean he would take her down there and show her the hole and pretend to put her in the pipe again. I thought that was ungentlemanly.”

The rain and my mother’s voice had merged for Peggy; at the point where they intersected, she nodded once, twice, and fell asleep. In a moment she stood up, all dignity, and said, “Excuse me. I think I should go to bed.”

My mother said, “That’s a smart idea, Peggy. I’ve enjoyed our talk, though I’m not sure I’ve explained myself.”

“I don’t think one ever can,” Peggy said; her dip into sleep had blurred her face. She turned, smiled down at me as if I were an interloper to whom she should be polite, and left without giving me an opportunity to go with her.

My mother said, when the footsteps on the floor above our heads had gone into the bathroom and ceased, “Do you think you’ve made a mistake?”

“A mistake how?”

“By divorcing Joan and marrying Peggy.” I was pleased that she should call my wife by her name so simply, and in precisely the same tone with which she pronounced “Joan.” She might have been speaking of two daughters.

“Yes, yes. Yes.”

“Yes what?” She smiled apologetically at our difficulty in comprehending one another.

“Yes, it was wrong.”

Her eyebrows lifted, perhaps at my rewording her question. Her words seemed snipped from another line of thought. “The children?”

“Wrong even leaving them out of account. Joan did not make me happy, especially, but she was what my life had been directed to go through. In leaving her I put my life out of joint.”