Updike John - Of the Farm

We entered the kitchen. Its warm worn wood was softly lit. We had never, all the time I was growing up, owned enough lamps, or bought strong enough bulbs. We were thrifty in small things and spendthrift in large. The interior of the thick-walled little house had been strangely enriched, gaudily barnacled, by gifts I had sent over the years. Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries, even Mother’s Days had deposited upon the windowsills and cupboard shelves trinkets of Danish pewter and Mexican pottery and Italian glass mailed by me, usually in haste and late, from Cambridge and Rome and Berkeley and New York. I felt these gifts, however expensive, to have been cheap substitutes for my love and my presence, and it was as if, entering the remembered interior expecting to find my threadbare youth, I found instead these gaudy scraps of my maturity. Each time I returned I more strongly resented how much of myself was already here. Pictures of me—of me graduating (three times), of me getting married (the first time), of me clowning in the sun with my children, of me staring mummified from the head of a yellowed news clipping “permanized” in plastic—were propped and hung throughout the living room, along with various medals and certificates I had won as a schoolboy; I was so abundantly memorialized it seemed I must be dead. Whereas my father, who hated to have his picture taken (for thirty years the yearbooks of the high school where he taught had printed the same unflattering photograph of him), was nowhere in sight, which gave his absence vitality. I could see him shying out of camera range, saying, “Keep my ugly mug out of it.” I listened for his footstep to scuff on the porch and for his hand to wrench open the back door with that strange vehemence he had, as if meeting more than halfway the possibility of its being locked. It did not seem incredible that he would walk into the living room holding his evening gift, a dewy pint box of tricolor ice cream, and look at me with his mixture of mischief and sorrow, and shake my hand and turn to my mother and say, “The kid looks healthy,” and turn to my wife and say, “You must be feeding him right.”

But he did not; the four of us were alone. There was another absence on the walls. Above the sofa whose pillows were fuzzed with shed dog hair, there had hung for twelve years a formal portrait of Joan, a companion to a photograph of me taken at the same time, in an Alton studio, when we were both in our early twenties and newly married. My mother had made the appointment without consulting us, and we had both resented it. I had thought such sentimentality uncharacteristic of my mother. I still saw her with the eyes of her child, as someone whose presence was renewed each day. Her passion for mementos of me had begun before I realized that I had truly left. Obediently we had climbed into the car one hot noon and drove ten miles south to keep the appointment. Joan had worn, as if to express simultaneously her contempt for this business and her confidence in her young beauty, a simple cotton dress, a dress that a farm girl might have peddled strawberries in, with a faded pattern of small blue flowers on a yellow ground and a broad square neckline that carelessly displayed her well-turned throat and shoulders. When the proofs came back, my mother chose for enlargement one that had caught Joan off guard, in one of those apprehensive moments, frequent with her, when her body like that of a flower toward light seemed to elongate in response to some distant challenge. She was shown from the hips up, kneeling with a concealed knee on the seat of a chair whose curved backrest her hands gripped with an intensity that accented their fine bones. She had had finer hands than Peggy. A pale, rounded, fully extended right arm held her posture erect and her face turned three-quarters toward an upward light that all but dissolved the suggestion of a pout on her lips. Through the stiffness of the pose and the softness of the focus there yet had penetrated the keenness of her grace, a natural grace rendered elusive by her air of reservation, her stubborn shyness, which in turn would be dazzlingly contradicted, slashed through, by one of her brilliant and absolutely symmetrical smiles. The picture held a secret. Joan had been pregnant. Seven months later, Ann, our elder daughter, had been born. And this immanence mingled with the cherished picture my memory had held behind the posed picture, of Joan grudgingly shrugging herself into the yellow dress and of the stifling midday ride into downtown Alton, so typical of those strained early visits to the farm, when the dust hung as rose-colored mist after the passage of each car, and my father would bring home ice cream from his daily tussle with his students, and my boyish loyalties fluttered bewildered between my mother and my wife, between whom, unaccountably, there was disharmony. It was typical of their relations that the photograph turned out to be not what my mother really wanted. “I had wanted,” she told Joan years later, “a picture of your smile.”

In its place above the sofa, not quite filling the telltale rectangle of less discolored wallpaper, there had been substituted an idyllic little landscape, a much-reduced print of an oil, that had ornamented my room as a child, when we lived in my grandparents’ house in the town. Instantly—and I wanted my mother to see me doing this, as a kind of rebuke—I went to examine the print closely. The pentagonal side of a barn was diagonally bisected by a purple shadow cast by nothing visible, and a leafless tree of uncertain species stood rooted in lush grass impossibly green. Beyond, I revisited, bending deeper into the picture, a marvellous sky of lateral stripes of pastel color where as a child I had imagined myself treading, upsidedown, a terrain of crayons. The tiny black V of one flying bird was planted in this sky, between two furrows of color, so that I had imagined that if my fingers could get through the glass they could pluck it up, like a carrot sprout. This quaint picture, windowing a fabulous rural world, had hung, after we had moved to the farmhouse, in the room at the head of the stairs, where I had slept as an adolescent and where, when I had gone away, my father had slept in turn. Climbing the stairs with Richard, I feared I would find my father there, asleep under the glaring light, a slippery magazine spread on his chest and his spectacles shielding his closed eyes. Instead I discovered, tucking Richard into the empty bed, that my mother had not hidden the photograph of Joan, but merely switched it with the landscape. Joan hung on my old wall.

“Who’s the attractive girl?” Richard asked. When my voice moved to tell him, it met an impenetrable obstacle, as if his not knowing by sight the woman his mother had replaced were a precious piece of ignorance it was my duty to preserve. I pushed his large furry head, bushy with a crew-cut that needed renewing, against my chest so he would not see my face. When he saw it anyway, I shakily explained, “This house is too full of me.”

BEFORE I PUT RICHARD to bed, we had eaten and talked. My mother, not knowing if we would eat on the road or not, had prepared a Pennsylvania snack, a meal by our standards: pork sausage, pepper cabbage (remembering a fondness I had forgotten, she had saved for me, as a treat, the cold-looking, hottasting scraped cabbage heart), applesauce, shoo-fly pie, the caffeine-less coffee her heart could tolerate. Peggy and Richard were rather overwhelmed by this brown, steaming outlay. I was surprised to see the boy, at an age when I never had had enough shoo-fly pie, politely refuse a second piece. My mother offered him coffee and Peggy said that he never drank it.

“Never?”

“Last summer with my father,” Richard said, “on a camping trip to the Adirondacks, we drank it, because the condensed milk was unbearable.”