John Updike - S

(3) You tell me your father, who has flown over again, likes Jan very much and finds the van Hertzogs jolly fun and wholeheartedly approves of your engagement. Don't you see he's doing exactly what my father (whom I loved too-how can we help but love these fathers, the way the sides of their necks smell of sweat and aftershave when they pick us up off the floor and give us that squeeze that knocks us breathless?) did-pass you on like a manacled slave to another man? Men don't much like other men-all organic things intrinsically hate one another, except as food-but they're used to them and they're not used to free women-women standing upright and having ideas and walking up the middle of the sidewalk with unpinned hair bouncing and flowing behind, the way I've always pictured you. You can say I was trying to live my life through you in a way I never lived it myself; but that is what women must do when they knuckle under as I did through not knowing any better-and now as you are doing though knowing better and having other alternatives but spurning them. Of course your father would think it very cute having this bogus nobility with their unicorn and lion or whatever it is on every bottle as kin and connections over there so he can casually drop word to his posh surgeon pals of his jetting back and forth. New England snob as he is he imagines he always did have a foot still in the Old World. But what he really likes is that European dungeons are deeper, divorces are harder, and you are more securely locked in where he can get at you. There is no escaping Daddy once the van Hertzogs sink their claws in, and of course (you'll all say) poor Mother-she can't manage to leave her dreadful guru and always was a bit of a misfit… Sweet little Pearl, this is our goodbye. Those round blurry spots in these "wiggles" of mine (remember, your calling them that?), are tears, actual tears.

I'm making such a mess, I had to (lean back with folded hands and let them drop into my lap. The tears. I'm wearing the silk sari, in case the Master comes in. Water is bad for silk and saltwater must be worse. But it felt good to cry. The Master has given me so much of his own peace I'd almost forgotten how to manage a good old Occidental convulsion-a Schmerzfcst, a purgative déluge des lames cbaudes. So, then, to continue,

(4) You are pregnant. After wounding me in these various other ways you want to make me into a grandmother. White hair, trifocals, rocking chair, crewel work. 'Passing down wooden toys and family lore before winking out like a frosted light bulb. And I have never felt younger-the bride I was at twenty \vas a timid hidebound crone compaied with the womaq I feel myself now to be. And you've decided-though I don't see how anybody of your age and position, with all the contraceptive gadgets and creams and foams they have now, not to mention all the non-procreative ways of "getting off" that were terribly hush-hush and taboo in the dark age when / was young, could decide anything of the sort; you both must have been stoned or coked or whatever out of your fuzzy heads-to make me an ancestor, ashes and bones in a sacred urn, some yellowing photographs'in the family album, a filled-in slot in the genealogical chart, a sad old story buried amid the rubbish in the custom-house attic. I'm not ready, I'm still learning how to live, to be. I've reached the solar-plexus chakra and I'm still climbing. I'm having fun, honey.

People are supposed to rejoice at a pregnancy, however inconvenient it is. At least the Pope wants us to. I wonder why. You were always a healthy normal girl so this event physiologically is no triumph against the odds. You would have been able to pull it off at thirty, at forty even. Why so early? Naturally I blame myself. My running off-deserting my biological post-made you think you had to man-why isn't there a verb "to woman"?-the ramparts, the reproductive barricades. Or am I giving myself and the'old riddle of mother-daughter relations too much credit? Most pregnancies, like most wars, are totally silly, and aren't intended at all-they come about in a long blink while the mind is essentially asleep. With so many of these teen-age pregnancies now it's obviously a childish way of punishing the world. Consider me punished.

Consider me cheated of every woman's most harmless fantasy-to stage-manage a wedding, to be the mother of the bride. I suppose that the van Hertzogs and your father have the situation heavily in hand. By even the fifth month you might get by with an A-line tulle-and-satin gown, and if-it's only the fourth you could even have the dressmaker give you a bit of a waist. I love the look of a lace bodice, and a long stiff train, and a garland of real flowers that will wilt in an hour, and a veil with the bride's head obscured and vague like that of a goddess, a sacred statue, or a corpse-the menace of a bride coming down the aisle, to gobble up the quaking groom and, for dessert, his best man. It breaks my heart not to see my daughter married. But I disapprove so "thoroughly of this particular ceremony whereby your lovely erect and shining womanhood bows low to this callow spoiled Dutch boy (his finger in quite the wrong dike) and his obese parents that my presence there would create a spiritual irritant if not a vocal objection ringing off the scandalized church rafters. You don't say what kind of church the vain Warthogs favor; my intuition says not the sturdy Reformed faith that gave us all those gorgeous Rembrandt blacks and tidy tiled interiors but sneaky snobby Catholic, so watered down by these Dutch theologians one reads about being nearly excommunicated all the time that you've never noticed your in-laws' Papism until now that it's too late, and no doubt they'll want you to convert, smilingly assuring you that it's just a formality and doesn't mean a thing. Thus the Old World reclaims the New and rescinds its beautiful promise of liberty. What Catholicism means to you, my dear, is incessantly more pregnancies-Jan is himself the baby of six, you told me-until by mutual understanding your husband wanders off to deposit his sperm in the famous red-light district or else in some querulous but spermicidal mistress whose progeny are no priest's business. And you, my poor Pearl, where will you find happiness then, as the little warthogs swarm around you and their paternal grandparents, smelling of rancid hops, lower over you like two rainclouds and all around you the air is thick with the ugliest language in Christendom? If you ever seek to vary your entertainment as Jan does his, you have a world of flat-headed Dutchmen to choose a lover from. You will be saddled with respectability -respectability more oppressive and muggy than any form of bourgeois self-enthrallment that has ever taken root in America, where at least one can always go west or make a wisecrack. No wisecracks in Holland -just boors and beers and burghers and bores.

Let's hope I'm quite wrong. Have a lovely wedding. At some point in life a woman becomes her own mother and you have reached it sooner than I did. Even if I could stomach the jet lag and Lowlands humidity I by no means wish to encounter your father, who might slap a subpoena on me before giving the blushing and bulging bride away. He imagines all sorts of legal wrongs from his helpless old helpmeet. So let this be his circus, while I watch my gallant circus here slowly fold its tents and put its elephants to bed. The ashram's days feel numbered. Do drop a note to your grandmother to tell her she's becoming a great-. She is being romanced by some antique fraud the Navy let out of mothballs and may have some rude news of her own. For the baby's sake, take lots of vitamin B-complex and zinc -zinc for all life-changes that involve metabolism.