Authors: John Updike
Linda Tyler returns from her leaf walk with the children she collected and makes them as a reward for being good some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Other children, late arrivals and adolescents too jaded for the walk, slouch in from the long living room, where a fire of green wood is smoking and where they have been dabbling with decks of greasy cards and old board games with pennies and buttons substituted over the years for the correct counters. Though they have been here on other Columbus Day weekends, they are shy of the kitchen. Other years, Mrs. Tremayne was cheerfully in charge, but this year she has withdrawn to her downstairs bedroom and shut the door; from behind it comes the whir and soft clatter of a spinning wheel. At the sound of food being prepared in the kitchen, the children gather like birds at a tray of seeds, and Linda hands out cookies, apples, pretzel sticks. She is petite, with pale freckled skin and kind green eyes, and wears baggy clothes that conceal her oddly good figure. As not only her husband here knows, her body on its modest scale has that voluptuous harmony, that curve of shoulder and swing of hip, which spells urgency to the male eye. She caters to the assembled children, warning them to leave room for the traditional big hot-dog-and-chili dinner tonight, after the Englehardts have arrived.
The children present for this weekend are: Milly, Skip, and Christine Tremayne; Matthew, Mark, Mary, Teddy, and Teresa Maloney; Fritz and Audrey Tyler; and Rebecca, Eve, and Seth and Zebulon (twins) Neusner. The Englehardts will bring Kenneth, Betsey, and their unplanned one-and-a-half-year-old, named in a jocular mood Dorothea—gift of God. The fanciful name would have been a curse had not the child lived up to it—an ethereal little girl with her mother’s agility and that milky, abstracted blue-eyed gaze of her father’s, set beneath not his bald dome but a head of angelic curls. The pets present are Toby Neusner, Ginger Maloney, Wolf Tremayne, and two cats, a sleepy, vain, long-haired white and a short-haired gray with extra toes who appears throughout the house at the strangest places, in locked rooms and bureau drawers, like an apparition. It is all too much, as the children get bigger. The oldest, Milly Tremayne and Fritz Tyler, are both seventeen, and embarrassed to be here. They were embarrassed last year as well, but not so keenly.
Ralph emerges at last from underneath the house and announces, spitting smoke and amiably sputtering, that it’s way past time for the softball game. “Wh-what are all you young br-bruisers lounging inside for on a gorgeous Saturday like this? Let’s c-compete!” He gets down in a football lineman’s crouch and, with the cigar stub in the center of his mouth like a rhinoceros horn, looks truly angry.
Softball is organized in the side field. Everyone plays, even Deborah Neusner and Bernadette Maloney, who had been murmuring upstairs for hours. What about? The absent, the present, the recent past, the near future—a liquid soft discourse that leaves, afterward, a scarcely perceptible residue of
new information, which yet enhances their sense of who and where they are.
Fritz Tyler bowls Milly Tremayne over, rushing across from shortstop for a pop fly. “You bastard, didn’t you hear me calling you off?” she asks him, sprawling in the long dry grass, red-faced and tousled, her upraised legs in their tight jeans looking elegant and thin. Her hair is dark like Ralph’s but though not blond has the shape of Marge’s, abundant and wiry and loose in a tent shape, before Marge began to braid it and pin it up like a nineteenth-century farmer’s wife. Bill Maloney hits a home run, over the heads of Seth and Zebulon—they have been put in right field together, as if two little eight-year-old boys will make one good grownup fielder. Their black, loping dog, Toby, helps them hunt for the ball in the burdock over by the split-rail fence. The sky in the west, above mountains whose blush is turning blue, has begun to develop slant stripes tinged with pink, and the battered hay in the outfield is growing damp, each bent strand throwing a longer and longer shadow. Though the children are encouraged to continue the game until darkness, the grownups drift away, and in the long, narrow living room, with its plaster ceiling drooping in the center like the underside of an old bed, a fresh fire is built, of dry and seasoned logs from the woodbox beneath the stairs (the children had tried to burn freshly split wood, from beneath the barn overhang), and an impressive array of bottles is assembled on the sideboard. Bring your own, the rule is.
Marge, ostentatiously drinking unfermented cider, sits on the sofa, which is faded and plaid and has wide wooden arms, and knits a sweater of undyed wool she has carded and spun herself. Toward seven o’clock Linda and Bernadette go into the kitchen to feed the starving younger children. The older
have scattered to their rooms upstairs, or out to the barn. By the time the Englehardts at last arrive, the adults not only are drunk but have gone through two boxes of crackers and a wedge of Vermont cheddar that was bought to last the weekend.
Cheers go up. Roly-poly, sleepy-looking Lee doffs his hunter’s cap and reveals the polished dome of his perfectly smooth skull. Tall, frizzy-haired Ruth stands there and surveys the scene through her huge glasses, taking it all in. The temples of her glasses have the shape of a lightning bolt, and the bridge rides so low on her nose as to reduce it to a tiny round tip, a baby’s nose. Kenneth and Betsey are lugging knapsacks and suitcases in from the car and up the stairs, including a plastic basket containing little Dorothea. “Who-who won the football game?” the host eagerly asks.
“We won,” Ruth tells him, in the complex, challenging tone of a joke on herself, “but Kenny didn’t play.” The weariness of the long drive is still in her voice. Ruth’s words are like glass sandwiches that reflect back an obvious meaning on the first level, a less obvious one on the second, and so on, as deep as you want to look. “The poor child sat on the bench,” she adds.
“Oh.” Ralph blinks, having evidently been tactless. His eyes slide over to Marge on the sofa, as if to seek support. Her eyes are lowered to the knitting. Wolf, who in his old age has been known to snap, sleeps at her feet. Upstairs, Kenneth and Betsey seek the company and comfort of the other children, as the Englehardts are meshed into the adult group beneath them and the hilarity, the shouting, swells by that increment.
It is hard, afterwards, to remember what was so funny. Their all being here in Vermont, in this old farmhouse with its smells from another century, is in itself funny, and the
Saturday-night meal of something so hearty and Western as chili and hot dogs is funny, and the half-gallons of cheap wine that replace themselves at the table, like successive generations of bulbous green dwarfs, are part of the delicate, hallucinatory joke.
They organize two tables of bridge afterwards, and, drunk as they know themselves to be now, this is droll also. “Double,” Lee Englehardt keeps saying solemnly, his shining brow furrowed, the long wisps of hair above his ears grayer than last year in the light of the paper-shaded bridge lamp that, like most of the furnishings of the house, will not be missed if ski tenants destroy it. “Four diamonds,” Andy Tyler says, hoping that Deborah Neusner will have the sense to put him back into spades. The Neusners, who spent their time at college less frivolously than the others, rarely play cards of any kind, and Deborah was pressed into service only because Marge pleaded a headache and has gone back into her bedroom. Husbands and wives cannot be partners, and should not be at the same table. “Double,” Lee Englehardt says.
Take me out of diamonds
, Andy Tyler thinks intensely, so intensely the message feels engraved on the smoke above his head. “Pass,” Deborah Neusner says, weakly. “Four hearts,” says Bernadette Maloney, feeling sorry for Deborah, knowing that being so close to Lee upsets her; the two had an affair years ago, a fling that ended up in the air, so in a sense it was never over. That is one of the Englehardts’ charms, their ability to leave things up in the air, like jugglers in a freeze-frame. “Four spades,” Andy pronounces with great relief, praying that Deborah will now have the wit to pass again. “Five diamonds?” she hesitantly says.
Josh Neusner reads a very old
National Geographic
he found in the woodbox beneath the stairs. It is so old that the photos are mostly black-and-white, and the type is different, and the cultural biases are overt. These bare-breasted women and woolly chiefs with bones through their noses are clearly, cheerfully being condescended to, anthropologically. This would never do now; isn’t it one of the tenets of our times that all cultural formations, even cannibalism and foot-binding, make equally good sense? Josh’s neck and shoulders ache from splitting his weight in wood. He has taken a glass of dinner wine away from the table and rests it on the broad arm of the corduroy-covered armchair by the dying fire that Ralph built. Suddenly the wine seems an odious, fermented substance, and the hilarious chatter from the bridge tables inane, poisonous. Above his head, on the swaybacked ceiling, footsteps scurry and rustle like those of giant rats. The children; he wants to go upstairs to check on the girls and tuck in the twins, but during these leaf-season weekends the children are invited to make their own society, and exist like a pack of shadows in the corners of the grownup fun. Strange places, strange customs; cannibalism, he reads, is almost never a matter of hunger but of ingesting the enemy’s spiritual virtues. He wonders why liquor is called spirits. The cheap wine tastes dead. The thumping and scurrying overhead slowly weakens, loses its grip. He himself, when at midnight both tables loudly announce another rubber, goes upstairs and puts himself into one of the upper bunk beds in the men’s dormitory. The window in the upstairs hall where Deborah and Bernadette met and talked this afternoon now displays white, scratchy, many-tentacled frost ferns above the radiator.
The bunk isn’t quite long enough for him to stretch out in. He thinks of Marge alone in her room below him, her sulky
mystery, her beautiful dancer’s body. She was the queen of all this and now is trying to withdraw. He could sneak down the back stairs and they could spin together. Josh cannot sleep. The noise from below, the sound of rampant spirits, is too great. And when at last the bridge concludes and people begin to clatter up the stairs, he still cannot sleep. Andy underneath him, Lee and Bill across the room in the other double bunk, all fall asleep swiftly, and snore. Lee is the most spectacular—nasal arpeggios that encompass octaves, up and down the scale—but Bill plugs steadily away, his rhythmic wheeze like a rusty engine that will not die, and Andy demonstrates, a few feet below Josh’s face, the odd talent of coughing in his sleep, coughing prolongedly without waking himself. Josh feels trapped. A broadsword of light falls diagonally across the floor, and there are faint, halting footsteps. One of the Tremaynes’ cats has pushed open the door and is nosing about. Josh strains his eyes and sees it is the gray one with extra toes. He reaches out from the upper bunk with his foot and nudges the door shut again. The house’s huge content of protoplasm ebbs in little stages into quiet, into sleep: twenty-six other human beings—he counts them up, including the boys in the barn—soaking up restorative dreams, leaving him stranded, high and listening, his ears staring into the tense, circumambient wilderness. Never again. This is the last time he and his family are going to come for this weekend to Vermont. This is torture.
Bacon! The crisp, illicit, life-enhancing smell of it penetrates the room, his nostrils, his brain. Josh sees that the three other bunks are empty, the day is well advanced. He must have fallen asleep after all. He remembers, as the wee hours
became larger and lighter, conducting mental negotiations, amid the brouhaha of the other men’s snoring, with the gray cat, who seemed to be here, and then there, in the room. Now the animal is nowhere to be seen, and Josh must have dropped off for an hour or two.
The house, like a ship under way, is shaking, trembling, with the passage of feet, with activity. A maul and wedge ring: Lee Englehardt is splitting his weight in wood. Car doors slam: the Maloneys, all seven of them, are going off to Mass. They’ll bring back Sunday papers and a whole list of staples—crackers, orange juice, cheddar cheese, tonic water—that Marge has pressed upon them. She seems in a better mood. She is wearing, instead of the sullen peasant skirt and sweater and shawl of last night, tight shiny red pants that make her legs look almost as thin and sexy as her daughter Milly’s. Her hair is done up in a fat blond-gray pigtail that bounces on her back as she friskily, bossily prepares breakfast, wave after wave, flipping six pieces of bacon at a time with a long aluminum spatula. “Three pieces per person, and that includes you, Fritz Tyler,” she says severely. “Those who like their scrambled eggs runny, come serve yourselves right now. Those who don’t, get at the end of the line. We don’t believe in Sugar Pops in this household, Seth Neusner. Up here in the mountains it’s all bran and granola and yucky fiber. Betsey, go out to the woodpile and tell your father the baby’s just spit up all over herself and your mother’s in the bathroom.”
Ralph comes sleepily into the kitchen, the first cigar of the day in his mouth, its lit end making a triangle with his two red eyes. He is barefoot—pathetic white feet, with ingrown yellow toenails and long toes crushed together—and is coming from the wrong direction, if we assume he slept in the master bedroom, at the front of the downstairs.
He hasn’t slept in the master bedroom. Beyond the kitchen lies a small room with a few cots in it, for an overflow ski crowd. Ralph slept in there. He did not sleep with Marge! The knowledge runs silently through the mingled families, chastening them. For this weekend Marge and Ralph are like the mother and father, even of the other adults. We want them to love each other. For if they do not love each other, how can they love and take care of us?
Marge seems intent on showing that she can do it all. She ruffles Ralph’s head as he sits groggily at the breakfast table. Grownups eat at the long dining-room table, where one of the bridge groups played last night, and children at the round butcher-block table in the center of the kitchen. “Achey, achey?” Marge asks, cooingly.