Updike John: Of the Farm

“And other lives.”

“It’s hard to move without touching other lives.”

“That’s what I said to myself when we bought the farm.”

I said, “I knew it was a mistake even before it was too late to change.” I spoke with a voice that—slightly plangent and quick—did not seem mine, though it arose within me. “But it had gone so far that, I guess it was Daddy’s stubbornness, I was damned if I’d back out.”

“More like Daddy’s curiosity.”

“That’s it; I had to see what it would be like.”

“What is it like?”

“Wonderful, really. But there are moments when she seems to be a blank wall. She can be terribly obtuse.”

“She’s not subtle.”

“Not as subtle as us, no.”

“Not as subtle as Joan.”

“Why did you dislike Joan so much? In the end you made me dislike her.”

“You imagine that. I liked Joan. She had a style. She had what they used to call poise. It’s very rare. She reminded me of Daddy’s sister, and I was always a little uncomfortable with my sister-in-law, was all. I felt when I got too near her that I hadn’t quite washed everywhere. It was you who didn’t like Joan.”

“I didn’t know her, would be more exact.”

“Yes. In a way, Joan snubbed you.”

“I love her now. It’s amazing, how much I love her, now that she’s in Canada.”

“With Joan, you still had the space to be a poet. That’s who you love, the poet you can never become now.”

“Poet. It was you who wanted to be the poet.”

“No. I wanted to be a farmer. My father, who was a farmer, wanted to be an orator.”

I laughed at the ease with which she, short of breath and recumbent, could weave these patterns. “And now,” I said, “you’ve become the orator and me the farmer.”

She shifted her position with a small cry, as of soft pain. “Oh, don’t laugh, Joey. How can you laugh when you’ve brought my death into the house?”

“How?”

“That woman. She’s fierce. She’ll have me dead within the year.”

“You think?”

“You watch. I saw my mother put Grammy Hofstetter away without laying a finger on her. When I saw her trip so gaily down the walk last night I knew I was kissing my own death.”

“Mother, you’re too egocentric. She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t care about you and your farm.”

“Don’t you believe it. She’s from Nebraska and knows a good piece of land when she sees it. She wants the money sitting in these acres. You should have seen her perk up as we walked along the upper road where the first lots would be.”

I laughed, since I could picture it; Peggy is a passionate window shopper.

My mother went on, “You may make more money than your father but you don’t make enough to support two women. Don’t think she and Joan are going to eat peaceably out of the same dish. Joey, you’ve bought an expensive piece of property. These cute little Iwo Jimas or whatever they are and Lord and Taylor pants and transparent nighties aren’t bought with just wishing.”

“Her nighties aren’t transparent.”

“No, but her eyes are and I see my son’s ruin in them.”

Perhaps it was merely that, feeling my mother’s fright at her coming death, I needed a great grief of my own as an answer, an exchange; but there seemed truth in what she said. Ruin. It pleased me to feel myself sinking, smothered, lost, forgotten, obliterated in the depths of the mistake which my mother, as if enrolling my fall in her mythology, enunciated:

“You’ve taken a vulgar woman to be your wife.”

It was true.

She shrugged, and said, speaking less to me than into the record, the weave of truth that needs perpetual adjusting, “Well, the Bible tells us we all waste our patrimony. The wonder is, after six thousand years, there’s anything left in the world to waste.”

“She is simple-minded.” I am always a little behind my mother, always arriving at the point from which she has departed. She smiled, seeing me sitting upright, excited like a boy by my discovery of the obvious. “She sees with one eye.”

“Well you knew that.”

“No,” I said. “I threw myself into her. I gave her credit for everything I thought. I couldn’t believe that anything so beautiful could be less intelligent than I.I must have thought she had made herself.”

“See, you forgot God.”

My mother’s wantonness is most conspicuous here; her religiosity comes and goes as beckoned. “Actually,” I said, wishing to curve my words precisely around the sore area her accusation had touched, “I’ve never felt so serene about that. I find that’s one consolation of being middle-aged. Or of having a loving wife.” I think I meant that I believed.

With the curious abrupt impatience that, like the lightness of her voice, had come to live on the edges of her inert mass and central incapacity, she waved Peggy and God away. “Now what about the farm?”

“What about it? It exists.”

“Is it going to vanish when I do?”

I got up from the chair, somehow offended; my emotion, if it could be fitted to a sin, was one of jealousy. “I scarcely think,” I told my mother, “you’re on the point of vanishing.” I was angry at the ease with which she had accepted my betrayal of Peggy, had absorbed it parasitically, sitting there motionless, devoting her thought, her innermost thought, not to me but to her farm. So I scorned her death.

“It’s almost on me, Joey!” Her voice was warped, urgent, and diminished, and from her position on the sofa there did seem something pressing her down, bending her face backwards so the soft pale neck was bared. My throat engorged, as if I had surprised my parents in coitus. I wanted to flee, but some thread—the courtesy of estrangement, a child’s habit of waiting for permission—held me fast, amid the walls of rain and photographs, between the dark kitchen and the fire collapsing into its ashes.

My mother looked at me alertly. By one of those sharp withdrawals by which she kept me, in the end, at a son’s distance, she sat up and said, “I hope all that work wasn’t too much for you today.”

I said, “I feel pleasantly stiff.”

She said, “Your eyes have that puffy look they used to get in goldenrod season. I thought living by the sea had cured you.”

I said, “I’m sorry more didn’t get done. If you’d let me, I could probably do at least the small field tomorrow before we go.”

She asked, “When must you go?”

“By the middle of the afternoon at the latest. Monday’s a work day and a school day for Richard.”

She sighed, “We’ll see. Now don’t keep Peggy waiting any longer.”

“Do you want to use the bathroom first?”

“No, you go.”

“Pleasant dreams.”

“Pleasant dreams.”

In the staircase the rain had a different voice, and at the head of the steps its pattering seemed trapped on the wrong side of the window and to be searching among the dry magazines stacked, untouched since my father’s death, on the deep sill. Richard’s breath skipped a beat and I stood a moment, satisfying myself that he was asleep. I entered our bedroom timidly. Its darkness, wrapped around with rain, was complete, save for a glimmer left lingering in the mirror above the bureau. Rather than risk waking Peggy in searching for my pajamas, I crept into bed in my underpants. The space receiving me seemed enormous. My foot stealthily travelled a wide arc before encountering Peggy’s still skin. She was on her back. The window on my side had been left open a crack; the drumming of the rain was delicately amplified, fanned into a rainbow of sound, by this prism of air. Cool spray grazed my face, my hand beside my face, my naked chest. I sneezed. All the pollen and chaff of the day’s labor puckered at the bridge of my nose. I sneezed again.