Updike John: Of the Farm

Peggy brutally asked, “Can you give a person freedom?” I saw that my mother’s describing as a gift her failure to possess my father had angered her; it had touched the sore point within her around which revolved her own mythology, of women giving themselves to men, of men in return giving women a reason to live.

My mother chose to understand her in terms of another religion. “I suppose,” she said, “only God really gives. But people can give by not denying, which comes to the same thing.” And then, like a stream swirling past a snag, the flow of her talk resumed, and her memories of buying the farm broadened to the farm itself, as it had been at the moment of purchase, ravaged, eroded; as it had been in her girlhood, the big upper field an ocean of barley, the little flat upper field laid out in tomato rows, the triangular field across from the meadow golden-green with sweet corn, the far field silver-green with alfalfa, a truck garden of potatoes and onions and cabbage and staked peas stretched all along the sandy ridge beyond the orchard whose overburdened lower limbs wore crutches, and even the woods fruitful, of berries and hickory nuts and firewood; the farm as it was now, at rest, the shaggy fields needing to be mowed. Thus her talk at last reached solid matter: the purpose of this trip was for me to run the tractor, which she had grown too frail to do. The Commonwealth would fine her if it wasn’t done. Our visit had been arranged in several gingerly phone calls in which my mother and I, our pauses shadowed by a crosshatch of conversations in New Jersey, had guessed at what the other wanted—I was to mow and she was to meet Peggy, to deepen her acquaintance with my wife, to learn, if possible, to love her. Peggy was asleep. My wide-hipped, heavylidded wife had been carried off during my mother’s discourse. She lay unconscious in the faded embrace of our old maroon wing chair, once my grandfather’s favorite forum. Her pointed yellow high-heeled shoes lay beside her feet as if dislodged by a sudden shift of momentum. Her feet, whose long toes were gauzily masked by the ashen nylon of her stockings, rested sideways on the floor, dragged by the length of her legs, which were propped at the knees against one arm of the chair. Her twisted skirt revealed a dark curve of stocking-top. Her forearms, freckled and downy, one slack palm and veined inner wrist turned upward into lamplight, lay crossed in her lap, and her averted face leaned into the shadowed red cloth of the chair while her long hair, having broken the clasp of its pins, flowed motionless down the submissive curve of her back and across the white of her neck. She overflowed the chair, and I felt proud before my mother, as if, while she was talking of the farm, I were silently displaying to her my own demesne seized from the world. Yet my mother’s gaze, after lingering on the long female body curled asleep as trustfully as that of a child, returned to me offended. Before she could say anything that would wound us both, I impatiently asked, “Why can’t we hire someone to mow? Why must you and I do it?”

“It’s our place.”

“It’s your place.”

“It will be yours soon enough.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I mean it as a pleasant fact. Are you serious about the golf course?”

“Of course not. It takes thousands of dollars to make one green, and then who’d run it? I live in New York.”

“I’ve been thinking, you could sell the small flat field off in half-acre lots, I guess my ghost could put up with that, and use the money to keep the rest intact. There’s not a week somebody doesn’t call and ask me to sell them a piece. The vultures are gathering.”

“What do they offer?”

“Well that’s it, next to nothing. Two hundred an acre. They must think I’m completely addled by now. A Philadelphia Jew offered twenty-five thousand and would have left me the house and orchard; that’s the fairest offer I’ve heard. I bet I could have jacked him up to forty.”

“You paid four.”

She shrugged. “That was twenty years ago. There’s more people now, and more money. It’s not the homely county you grew up in. The money’s come back. Which reminds me—Schoelkopf. He has a grandson now and thinks he wants the meadow.”

“All of it?”

“Oh, sure. He even slyly suggested, you know, it would be a kindness to you if I were to turn a little profit and stop accepting support from my son.”

“Don’t let that be a factor.”

“Aah”—she drew her hand across the air as her father used to do, a gesture that when I was a child reminded me of that mysterious sentence in the Rubáiyát about the moving finger, having writ, moving on—“don’t be too quick. You have two wives now, and I can run up a lot of medical bills for myself. Doc Graaf wants me in the hospital now.”

“Truly? You seem a little short of breath, but otherwise—”

“I have what they used to call ‘spells.’ The last one, I was out on the far field with the dogs and I think they must have dragged me back—all I remember is crawling upstairs on all fours and taking all the pills I could find, one of each. When I woke up it was the same time the next day and Flossie had half chewed through the window sash above the bookcase. They still get up there and look for George to come home.”

“You should have called me.”

“You were on your honeymoon. Anyway, Joey. Your father and I had our differences but there was one thing we agreed on and that was we wanted to the cheap. It’s hard now, you know. The doctors have these machines that can keep you going long enough to empty everybody’s bank account.”

“You can’t reduce everything to money.”

“What would you reduce it to? Sex?”

I blushed, and in the space of a breath she took pity, continuing, “Now tell me honestly. Am I a burden?”

“No. The money I send you is the least of my problems.”

“I believe that —but his pension almost stretches and I can do without a little more. I don’t want you to wind up hating me on account of a few dollars; we’ve come too far for that.”

“It won’t come to that. I’m all right, money, sex, everything.”

“May I ask, now, how much did divorce cost?”

“Well—for just the lawyers, not less than four thousand.” The same amount, I realized, that the farm had cost.

“That’s the lawyers. And Joan—?”

“Was very modest and considerate as usual. If she remarries in two years, the pinch should be bearable.”

“With three young children that’s quite an if. Joan doesn’t have your new one’s drive.”

Grief, or impatience—I had lost the ability to tell them apart—strained my voice. “Mother, that’s something I can’t control.”

She settled back contentedly. She was sitting in a chair that had always embarrassed me, a wire-mesh lawn chair that, invited by poverty, had come indoors, painted blue. “Now tell me. Don’t be polite. Do you want me to sell?”

“The farm?”

“A piece of it. Some lots.”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

Because, the real reason was, she didn’t want to. “Because it’s not necessary.”

“Will you promise me one thing? Will you tell me when it is?”

“I’d rather leave it up to you to guess.”

“Better not. I’m not as good at guessing as I used to be.”

So the appearance of a bargain was important to her. I said, “I promise.”

Peggy stirred; her long legs shifted away from some ache, a foot tipped over an empty shoe that had been upright, an unconscious hand tugged her skirt down.

“Your bride,” my mother said, “will have a stiff neck.”

Peggy’s eyes were open. She had heard this. She blinked, bewildered by where she was. Her drowsy state seemed to me a vulnerability. I stood, turning my back on my mother, and offered Peggy my hand. Weak with sleep, she tried to decipher my urgent, stern, beseeching hand, and then looked up to my face, where she must have read my conception of this moment as an emergency and a rescue, for she made an effort to collect herself. “Come on, lady,” I said. “Let’s get you into bed.”