Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“No, I have no idea why I’ve lived so long,” let us suppose she said, in response to the obvious question from one of the children, probably the wide-eyed Daphne. She would have been pushing thirteen by now, and Buzzy still fourteen, and Andrew a year into his driver’s license. He had driven to the airport in Boston to pick her up, and I was to drive her back the day after tomorrow, the length of her stay having been forced upon us by the terms of her economy plane ticket. Three days of family make-believe without so much as a glimpse of my real and perfect mate. My mother’s presence lay heavy across my chest. She knew only that Norma and I were having “difficulties” and that I, like a fourth-grader running off to a corner of the schoolyard to get away from the other children, had moved across the river. “ ‘Too mean to die,’ they used to say when I was a girl,” she said.

“Oh no! ” came the pro forma protest, as with shaky but practiced and determined hands she served up pieces of cake, using the slender palette knife that, in the disorder of my legal wife’s kitchen, was the closest thing to a cake server.

“Oh yes ,” my mother insisted to us, “and I even know why I’m so mean. When I was a little girl, I had this hair down to my waist, what they call chestnut, with a touch of red in it but nothing like as red as your mother’s, and my mother used to do it all up every morning in these long, long braids that she would then wind around my head and fix with pins so tight I would go around all day feeling as if my scalp was going to lift right off my head. It hurt .”

The children abruptly laughed, at the prod of that last word.

“Didn’t you ever tell your mother it hurt?” Buzzy asked. He was the most open of the children, the most — it hurt me to see — trustingly inquisitive. Andrew had his gathering armature of male equipment — his license and rock tapes, and girlie magazines and cigarettes tucked not quite out of sight in his room — and Daphne still had some cocoon of hopeful childish ignorance, but Buzzy had nothing to protect him from the facts of the world. Or do I mean to say that there was nothing to deflect my pained identification with him?

“Oh, I wouldn’t have dared ,” my mother asserted, “because that was the way people did things. When I was a little girl, people did things one way only, or they were driven out — they would leave and go to Ohio, or Michigan, or Montana, where it didn’t matter what they did. They never came back.” Behind her eyeglasses, whose frames, in Florida style, were shaped, of several glittering ersatz substances, to suggest butterfly wings, her reptilian old eyes went round in mock alarm, and her audience of children laughed half in fright.

went the refrain of a poem she used to read her fourth-graders, with just this expression on her face. “In my day,” she concluded, “suffering was thought to be good for people.”

Her discourse was aimed, I felt, at me. The Claytons didn’t do things like run away from their families, even only a mile away. There had never been a divorce among the Claytons, or in her family, the Heebes: I had heard her say this often. And yet there was, too, in her discourse an undercurrent of forgiveness, a certain playful softness. Florida had made her more sociable than when my father had done enough socializing for two, and more tolerant. She watched television, its shameless talk shows and raunchy serials; she heard the horror stories of her fellow senior citizens, the tales of modern life. Rampant divorce, cohabitation without benefit of marriage rites, unapologetic homosexuality, promiscuous communes. Loyalty to spouse a joke, loyalty to nation a scandal. And now her son gone under to the tide of endless wanting. It was not in me to explain the paradox: I was leaving this marriage as a tribute to marriage, to create a perfect marriage. Not the most uxorious Methodist deacon in Hayes would be a stricter adherent of the old vows, once I got the right wife. I was a fervent supporter of marriage, just not of my marriage, my present marriage. In the meantime, there I sat, my own family’s black sheep, being gently teased.

“Was that the way Daddy was as a little boy?” asked Daphne, her cheeks made rosy by surfeit of cake and candlelight. “Bad?”

“Why, no ,” my mother emphatically proclaimed, directing her rounded stare down through the candlelight, where I sat in the place of a fourth child, she and Norma having taken the heads of the table. “He was a good boy, all the neighbors agreed. They seemed surprised, because I had not been thought to be a good girl — I couldn’t explain how my braids had been pulling at my scalp and making me wild . I called your daddy my miracle child,” my mother went on, “because, as you know, he came into being long after such a thing was thought seemly.” Here her age had betrayed her language into an awkward quaintness; she swiftly read puzzlement on the faces of her audience of children and like a good schoolteacher clarified: “I was forty-one when he was born. His father and I were so afraid”—here she laughed, exposing the touching perfection of her dentures — “oh dear, the things people didn’t know in those years, we were just bundles of superstition; we were afraid that because we weren’t so young little Alfred would turn out weak and frail in his body. But look at him — a year short of forty and except for a gray hair here and there he could be your older brother!” They all admired me; I could even feel, in the corner of my vision, the Queen of Disorder turning her abstracted face toward me, where she sat at my elbow, at the head of the table I had deserted. “He used to suffer so with his asthma,” my mother went on, rather piteously now, as if all at the table must share her maternal concern. “There were whole nights when his father and I took turns not sleeping, this poor child gasping like every breath might be his last; but the doctor said he’d outgrow it, and he has!” The children stared at me with amazement — a prize they had somehow lost. Andrew, I felt, felt sorry for me, being held up to view this way; a confluence of little painfulnesses led him to frown and avert his gaze downward, his brow dark under its straggle of uncombed, Seventies-length hair. I imagined him trying, through the interference of these other psyches, to strike with mine the solidarity of mature males, and yet being inwardly defeated by the undeniable insult of my defection. Or perhaps he was simply longing for a cigarette and a cruise in the Volvo, to check out what his pals were doing tonight.

My mother might have stopped talking if a child had spoken up, but none of us did, overwhelmed by the sore points her monologue touched, singing my praises. “Except he was always so mannerly, and responsible, and even kind to animals. In that way, it may be, your daddy was a fragile child. He used to come home in tears from watching the other boys and even some of the girls do the things children do — pull the legs off grasshoppers, and torture frogs with matches and such.”

I wondered if that was my bond with Buchanan — a helpless standing by, while vitality performed its wanton deeds.

“And he never made the least bit of trouble for his father and me — got such good marks, and helped out in the store since when he was no higher than the counter top. We used to say sometimes it was as if we were the children, and this boy the grown-up. Honestly.”

It was true, one of my first impressions had been that my parents, being so much older than the parents of my friends, shouldn’t be tested with the usual childish unruliness, lest they sicken and cease to shelter me. My instinctive attitude to the whole world, struck in infancy, might be described as oversolicitous. Or conceited — imagining that everyone depended on me for happiness.