Updike John - Of the Farm

“The old fella you asked advice from whenever you wanted to do anything.”

“Oh—that’s a story maybe you shouldn’t know. What do you think, Peggy?”

“I don’t know the story.”

“He was an old cousin, Richard, named Uncle Rupe, that some people thought had been very partial to my mother. And stayed too long after his attentions were appropriate, some said. Anyway, I was his pet, so there must have been something strange. He was the only person who ever thought I was cute.”

“That seems surprising,” Richard said.

My mother stared; but the boy’s bright-eyed and flatly fascinated face, quite bare of any impudent intention, was a sufficient shield. She stated, “That’s what I thought, too.”

Peggy had stiffened in the moment of danger and now said, “Richard, it’s an hour past your bedtime.”

“I’m not sleepy,” he said. “It must be the change of climate. Maybe it’s a matter of altitude. The men who climbed Everest couldn’t sleep hardly at all.”

I asked my mother, “Have you thrown out those old sciencefiction anthologies of mine? Richard is just starting to read science fiction.”

“It’s deliciously frightening,” he said.

“Nothing’s been moved,” my mother told me, in a weary voice that harbored an irrelevant note of complaint.

I went to the shelves, where as many books were horizontal as upright, below the window that looked toward the barn, which was now a pale hollow in the night, eclipsing stars; and there, under some paperback Thorne Smith and P. G. Wodehouse that had long ago amused me and that now, in the very look of their peeling and outmoded covers, revived the dusty pollen-stuffed sensations of those interminable summer days before I acquired a driver’s license and could escape the farm, the fat faded science-fiction collection Doubleday had printed in the Forties was preserved: a miracle. Time’s battering had bleached not only the spine but the margin of the front cover not covered by another book. With this frayed bribe I urged Richard up the narrow stairs. “Brush your teeth,” Peggy called after us. I left him tucked in, his kiss tasting of Crest, propped up on two pillows beneath the old bridge lamp with the dented paper shade that my father used to sleep directly under while it burned. The lamp had been standing cobwebbed in a corner, unplugged.

Downstairs, the women were doing the dishes. With my fresh vision of Joan’s photograph, I remembered how she had chronically offended my mother by too diligently helping her. My mother was fearfully sensitive to any suggestion that she was being ousted, perhaps because her own mother, who had held command of the kitchen until her death at seventy-nine, had fiercely resisted ouster by her. Peggy had seized the dominant position at the sink while my mother docilely fetched and stacked. The docility was not merely an optical impression; there was no hint in my mother’s atmosphere—a volatile pressure system to which I am more sensitive than to weather itself—of a latent storm of resentment, and I was struck again by how weak she had become. She carried dishes to Peggy with the wary explorative motions of an invalid. I helped her. The dishes done, she slowly gathered three wine glasses and the bottle of sherry that was the only liquor in the house, and a cellophane bag of pretzels, and we went into the living room and talked.

TALK—it seemed throughout my growing-up that there was no end of talk. Talk was everything to us—food and love, money and mud, God and the Devil, confession, philosophy, and exercise. And though my grandfather’s sculpturally spaced utterances, given additional dignity and point by many judicious throat-clearings and heavenward gesticulations of his dry-skinned hands, had ceased, and my father’s humorous prancing whine had fallen silent forever, yet my mother’s voice alone, rising and falling, sighing itself away and wishing itself reborn, letting itself grow so slack and diffuse it seemed the murmur of nature and then abruptly narrowing into swift self-justification, managed, for all the distention of her heart and lungs, to maintain almost uninterrupted the dense vocal outpouring in which I had been bathed and raised. Talk in our house was a continuum sensitive at all points of past and present and tirelessly harking back and readjusting itself, as if seeking some state of equilibrium finally free of irritation. My mother was bothered by my saying, an hour back, of my father, “He never farmed,” and implying, with this, that the farm had been a burden upon him and had shortened his life. I felt this was true; my mother feared it might be. Her method of expiation, of seeking equilbrium, was to describe to Peggy, in ample and convoluted and cute detail, our financial and personal situation when we made the move. In this story, which slightly changed each time I heard it, her mother (“who,” my mother said to Peggy, “reminds me a lot of you; she didn’t have red hair, but she had your energy, and your way with the dishes, and your pointed nose. If I had inherited my mother’s nose instead of my father’s shapeless blob I wouldn’t have wound up as a crazy old hermit”) was finding the Olinger house too big to run. My grandfather was settling into apathy. The heating and maintenance bills were driving my father to an early grave. I, my mother’s son, was in danger of becoming “an Olinger know-nothing, a type of humanity, Peggy, that must be seen to be believed—you can’t believe it, but the people of that town with absolute seriousness consider it the center of the universe. They don’t want to go anywhere, they don’t want to know anything, they don’t want to do anything except sit and admire each other. I didn’t want my only child to be an Olingerite; I wanted him to be a man. ” So she had brought me here. And my father; well—“My husband and I, Peggy, never had much imagination, and we had very simple needs, so whenever one of us managed to think of something he or she really wanted, the other would try to help. I’ve really wanted only two—no, three—things in my life. The first thing I wanted was a horse, and my father got it for me, and then I couldn’t keep it when we moved away. The next two things I really wanted were my son and my farm, and George let me have both.”

Peggy asked, “And what did he want?”

My mother tipped her head, as if to identify a remote bird-call.

The question was very clear in Peggy’s mind and she tried to share this clarity. “What did you help him get? He gave you Joey and the farm; what did you give him?” Her expression was polite, but her eyes, whose lids showed green shadow lingering from the city, were dangerously tired.

My heart was thudding; my tingling fingers felt swollen around the cold core of the wine-glass stem. My mother’s silences, in which her soul plunged backwards from her eyes and mouth and revisited the darkness in which I might have remained unborn, were as terrible as ever.

“Why,” she said at last, expansively spreading her hands, “his freedom!”

In this reply, this daring vindication of her marriage, all her old wit sprang to life; and it dismayed me to see that Peggy was puzzled. Her chin went stubborn and I felt her resisting, as she would resist the fit of a dress handed down to her from another, the frame of assumptions and tolerances in which my mother’s description of my father’s anguished restlessness as “his freedom” was beautifully congruous. My mother within the mythology she had made of her life was like a mathematician who, having decreed certain severely limited assumptions, performs feats of warping and circumvention and paradoxical linkage that an outside observer, unrestricted to the plane of their logic, would find irksomely arbitrary. And, with the death of my father and my divorce of Joan, there was no inside observer left but myself—myself, and the adoring dogs.