Updike John - Of the Farm

I went into our bedroom and changed out of my suit. Downstairs, Peggy, seeing me again in my father’s dungarees, asked, “Are you going to mow?”

“I can’t, it’s Sunday.”

“Are we going back today, or what?”

“I don’t know if we can.”

’Please call the doctor.”

“I’m scared to.”

“Don’t be such a baby.”

This time someone answered, Doc Graaf’s wife. Her tone suggested she had been taken from the Sunday dinner table. She called my news into the next room and relayed to me the doctor’s answer. He would come at two-thirty. In the meantime I should let my mother sleep.

We ate lunch. Richard asked when we were going home.

“Do you want to go home? I thought you liked the farm.”

“There’s nothing to do here.”

“My mother would be very sad to hear you say that.”

“She did. I told her and she agreed. She said she liked it here because she had never been a doer.”

“We can’t go home until we know how sick she is. I may have to send you and your mother home alone.” In anticipation of full ownership, my heart expanded to the limits, the far corners and boundary-stones, of the farm. Soon it would be fall, the trees transparent, the sky clean, the stars pressing at night, asters everywhere, first frost.

Peggy said, “I think she needs a trained nurse staying with her.”

I said, “Maybe we could get Joan to do it. She needs a job. Then I could pay her her alimony as a salary.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Do you know what trained nurses cost ?”

“A lot less than I cost, is I suppose what you’re saying.”

“A hell of a lot less. But that’s still plenty.”

Richard said, “We could call her every night at some appointed hour to see if she’s all right.”

I said to him, “Maybe we could get a private television circuit so we could watch her whenever we turned the switch.”

“I read somewhere where they already have those in baby wards in hospitals.”

“Excuse me. Behind the times again.”

Peggy said, “Don’t pick on Richard. You can take your foul temper out on me but not on him.”

“Oh? I thought we were all legally one. You and me and Richard and Dean McCabe and four dozen other gentlemen not specifically identified.”

She reached across the table and tried to slap me; I caught her wrist in mid-air and twisted it so she had to sit down again. The exchange, transpiring in Richard’s wide eyes, perversely worked to her advantage. Though for a second my animus had surfaced, her decent simplicity washed over me again, around me, under me. Holding the wrist I had hurt in her other hand, she enunciated, “One thing I want very clear with you, Joey. Don’t throw Joan in my face like that again. You made your choice. I had no power over you and tried to be honest with you and you made your choice. If you have anything constructive to say to me say it, but don’t tease me like you did that dog. Don’t keep showing me the hole. If I have to make any sacrifices so your mother gets proper care of course I’ll make them, but I’m not Joan and we all knew it at the time and I’m not going to act sorry.”

I attempted to apologize, for I knew it was by accident that she had come between me and my momentary vision of the farm, the farm as mine, in the fall, the warmth of its leaves and the retreat of its fields and the benign infinity of its twigs. I said, “Don’t be dumb. You’re great.” But my failure to be able to cherish both her and the farm at once seemed somehow a failure of hers, a rigidity that I lived with in virtual silence until at two-thirty promptly the doctor came, smelling of antiseptic soap and sauerkraut.

WHEN THE DOCTOR had gone, we went upstairs. Richard and Peggy kept their distance from the bed, while I went closer. It was after three o’clock and I could feel the Sunday evening traffic building on the Turnpike. My mother was propped up in bed, her gray hair dark against the white pillow. She seemed slimmer; her skin had the papery look of the recently awakened and her slightly twisted lips seemed amused. “What did he say to you ?”

“He said we should consider your going to a hospital.”

“For how long?”

“Until the likelihood of these attacks lessens.”

“Why would the likelihood lessen? Why doesn’t he want me to die here where I belong? My parents died here, my husband died here, I want to die here. It seems little enough to ask from these medical buzzards. All these drugs, just to prolong your misery. I’m not leaving my land.”

“It’s not a question of your dying. It’s a question of your comfort and your getting better.”

“You know better than that.” She gazed at me directly; her eyes were very clear. They had simply ceased to ask for anything other than the truth. At thirty-five, I felt still too young to live in this element. Tempering herself to me, or lapsing into old habits, she began to clown, to exaggerate. “The ghost in me wants to get out. I can feel it pushing.”

I fell in with her tone. “You know,” I said, “you mustn’t think only of yourself. You must think of how it makes me look. From the way Doc Graaf shook hands good-bye, I don’t think he thinks I’m much of a son.”

“Oh,” she said, “the Hofstetters never did have much of a name in this township, it’s too late to worry about the neighbors now. We’ve always been cranks and villains. They liked your father, because he came from out-of-state and made them feel superior, but you and me—we’re beyond help, Joey.”

“Please don’t let the money be a factor.” Through this she could see that I would let her have her way, and could know that I was grateful for her insisting on what I could not propose.

Her arm lifted impatiently. “When isn’t money a factor? Of course it’s a factor. Isn’t it, Peggy?”

Peggy came forward a step. “Would you like us to stay?”

“Thank you, Peggy, but I want you to go. I want you all to go back to New York where you belong. You’ve done your duty, all three of you, and you’ve made this old woman very happy, and it’s not your fault her arteries couldn’t take so much happiness.”

Peggy said, “But we can’t leave you helpless in bed.”

“Who says I’m helpless? I’ll get up when I have to. The Schoelkopfs keep an eye on my chimney and when no smoke shows they’ll come over. The dogs will bark. Isn’t there a saying about lying in the bed you’ve made?” She patted the blanket. “Well if ever a woman made her bed, I’m the one.” There was in her small laugh the vanity she must have had as a young woman, and that had hardened into a tricky pride by the time I knew her.

She looked at Richard. “Will you come again, Richard?”

Unsmiling, he nodded, his brown eyes fascinated and embarrassed and bright.

“The next time,” she promised, “I’ll try not to get between you and your mother. That’s a naughty thing for an old witch to do.”

“We can wait until dark,” I said suddenly, almost exclaiming, for my nerves had become taut, pulling me back toward the city, away from this sickness. “I should mow some more.”

My mother’s squarish hand, short-fingered and worn like a man’s, dismissed the offer indisputably. “Don’t worry about the mowing, Joey,” she said. “Sammy can finish it up some day. You did the man-sized part.” She turned her head and said to Peggy, “He’s a good boy and I’ve always been tempted to overwork him.”

“He is a good boy.” Affirming this, Peggy grinned, grinned at me as in my dream of her in the farmhouse window or as she had the first time we met, at a party in an apartment whose large abstract paintings seemed windows overlooking a holocaust. I felt lost here—idle, unconsulted; my life felt misplaced. She had been standing talking to Joan; at my approach the two women, Joan in blue and Peggy in wheat-yellow, had turned to face me, and when Joan said, This is my husband , Peggy’s hand stabbed mannishly toward mine and she grinned with startling width, as if incredulous.