Authors: John Updike
Piet remembered the
eek eeik
by which he had learned to lull himself to sleep and slid from the bed with fear lumping in his stomach. Angela sighed moistly but did not stir. The floor and stairs were cold. Nancy, huddled in her pink nightie on the brown living-room sofa in the shadowless early-morning light, removed her thumb from her mouth and told him, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, it was a ’stake!”
His mouth felt crusty. “Mean to what? Where’s the animal?”
The child looked at him with eyes so pure and huge a space far bigger than this low-ceilinged room seemed windowed. The furniture itself, surfacing from the unity of darkness, seemed to be sentient, though paralyzed.
He insisted, “Where is the animal you told Ruthie about, Nancy?”
She said, “I didn’t mean to,” and succumbed to tears; her smooth face disintegrated like a prodigy of embalming suddenly exposed to air, and Piet was numbed by the force that flowed through the hole her face made in the even gray light.
Ruth said, “Crybaby, crybaby, sit-and-wonder-whybaby,” and Nancy plugged her face again with her thumb.
The little animal, sack-shaped, lay belly up in the center of the kitchen linoleum. The dairy cat watched at a distance, both cowardly and righteous, behind the rungs of a kitchen chair. Its quick instinctive work had been nicely done. Though scarcely marked, the hamster was dead. Its body yielded with a sodden resilience to the prodding of Piet’s finger; its upper lip was lifted to expose teeth like the teeth of a comb and its eyes, with an incongruous human dignity, were closed. A trace of lashes. The four curled feet. The lumpy bald nose.
Ruth asked, though she was standing in the kitchen doorway and could see for herself, “Is it him?”
“Yes. Sweetie, he’s dead.”
“I know.”
The adventure was easy to imagine. Ruth, feeling that her pet needed more room for running, suspecting cruelty in the endless strenuousness of the wheel, not believing with her growing mind that any creature might have wits too dim to resent such captivity, had improvised around his tiny cage a larger cage of window screens she had found stacked in the attic waiting for summer. She had tied the frames together with string and Piet had never kept his promise to make her a stronger cage. Several times the hamster had nosed his way out and gone exploring in her room. Last night he had made it downstairs, discovering in the moonsoaked darkness undreamed-of continents, forests of furniture legs, vast rugs heaving with oceanic odors; toward morning an innocent giant in a nightgown had admitted a lion with a mildewed eye. The hamster had never been given cause for fear and must have felt none until claws sprang from a sudden heaven fragrant with the just-discovered odors of cat and cow and dew.
Angela came downstairs in her blue bathrobe, and Piet could not convey to her why he found the mishap so desolating, the dim-witted little exploration that had ended with such a thunderclap of death. The kitchen linoleum, the color of grass, felt slick beneath him. The day dawning outside looked stale and fruitless and chill, one more of the many with which New England cheats spring. Angela’s concern, after a glance at him and Ruth and the body of the hamster, was for Nancy; she carried her from the living room into the relative brightness of the kitchen. Squeamishly Piet enfolded the russet corpse, disturbingly dense and, the reins of blood slackened, unstable, in a newspaper. Nancy asked to see it.
Piet glanced at Angela for permission and unfolded the newspaper.
KENNEDY PRAISES STEEL RESTRAINT
. Nancy stared and slowly asked, “Won’t he wake up?”
Ruth said, her voice forced through tears, “No stupid he will not wake up because he is dead and dead things do not wake up ever ever ever.”
“When will he go to Heaven?”
All three looked to Piet for the answer. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe he’s up there already, going round and round in a wheel.” He imitated the squeaking; Ruth laughed, and it had been her he had meant to amuse. Nancy’s anxious curiosity searched out something he had buried in himself and he disliked the child for seeking it. Angela, holding her, seemed part of this same attempt, to uncover and unman him, to expose the shameful secret, the childish belief, from which he drew his manhood.
He asked Nancy roughly, “Did you see it happen?”
Angela said, “Don’t, Piet. She doesn’t want to think about it.”
But she did; Nancy said, staring at the empty floor where it
had happened, “Kitty and Hamster played and Hamster wanted to quit and Kitty wouldn’t let him.”
“Did you know the hamster was downstairs when you let Kitty in?”
Nancy’s thumb went back into her mouth.
“I’m sure she didn’t,” Angela said.
“Let me see him once more,” Ruth said, and in disclosing to her the compact body like a stiffening heart Piet saw for himself how the pet had possessed the protruding squarish bottom of the male of its species, a hopeful sexual vanity whose final denial seemed to Piet a kind of relief. With Ruth he knew now the strange inner drying, a soft scorching, that follows the worst, when it has undeniably come true. She went off to school, walked down the crunching driveway in her yellow Easter coat to await the yellow school bus, with all her tears behind her, under a cloudy sky that promised no rain.
Piet had promised her a new hamster and a better cage. He buried the old hamster in the edge of the woods, near a scattering of scilla, little lillies of a wideawake blue, where the earth was soft and peaty. One shovelful did for the grave; two made it deep. The trees were beginning to leaf and the undergrowth was sketchy, still mixed, its threads of green, with winter-bleached dead stalks delicate as straws, as bird bones. In a motion of the air, the passionless air which passively flows downhill, spring’s terror washed over him. He felt the slow thronging of growth as a tangled hurrying toward death. Timid green tips shaped like tiny weaponry thrust against nothing. His father’s green fond touch. The ungrateful earth, receptive. The hamster in an hour of cooling had lost weight and shape to the elements. All that had articulated him into a presence worth mourning, the humanoid feet and the groping
trembling nose whose curiosity, when Ruth set him out on her blanket, made her whole bed lightly vibrate, had sunk downward toward a vast absence. The body slid nose down into the shoveled hole. Piet covered him with guilty quickness. In the nearly five years they had lived here a small cemetery had accumulated along this edge of woods: injured birds they had vainly nursed, dime-store turtles that had softened and whitened and died, a kitten slammed in a screen door, a chipmunk torn from throat to belly by some inconclusive predator who had left a spark of life to flicker all one long June afternoon. Last autumn, when the robins were migrating, Nancy had found one with a broken back by the barn, groveling on the asphalt basketball court in its desire to fly, to join the others. Lifted sheerly by the beating of its heart, it propelled itself to the middle of the lawn, where the four Hanemas gathered in expectation of seeing it take wing, healed. But the bird was unhinged, as Piet’s own father with his shattered chest and spine would have been unhinged had his lungs let him live; and the children, bored by the bird’s poor attempt to become a miracle, wandered away. So only Piet, standing helpless as if beside a party guest who refuses to leave, witnessed the final effort, an asymmetric splaying of the dusty wings and a heave that drove the robin’s beak straight down into the sweetish weedy shadowy grass. The bird emitted a minute high cry, a point of noise as small as a star, and relaxed. Only Piet had heard this utterance. Only Piet, as now, attended the burial.
Angela came across the lawn to him where he stood with the shovel. She was dressed in an English-appearing suit of salt-and-pepper tweed; today, Tuesday, was her day to be a teaching parent at Nancy’s nursery school. “How unfortunate,” she said, “that of all of us it had to be Nancy who saw
it happen. Now she wants me to take her to Heaven so she can see for herself that there’s room for her, and a little wheel. I really do wonder, Piet, if religion doesn’t complicate things worse than they’d have to be. She can see that I don’t believe it myself.”
He stooped beside the shovel and assumed the manner of an old yeoman. “Ah,” he said, “thet’s all verra well for a fine leddy like yerself, ma’am, but us peasants like need a touch o’ holy water to keep off the rheumatism, and th’ evil eye.”
“I de
test
imitations, whether you do them, or Georgene Thorne. And I detest being put in the position of trying to sell Heaven to my children.”
“But Angel, the rest of us think of you as never having left Heaven.”
“Stop trying to get at me and sympathize with the child. She thinks of death all the time. She doesn’t understand why she has only two grandparents instead of four like the other children.”
“You speak as if you had married a man with only one leg.”
“I’m just stating, not complaining. Unlike you, I don’t blame you for that accident.”
“Ah, thank ye kindly, ma’am, and I’ll be makin’ a better hamster cage today, and get the poor kid a new hamster.”
“It’s not Ruth,” Angela said, “I’m worried about.” These were the lines drawn. Angela’s heart sought to enshrine the younger child’s innocence; Piet loved more the brave corruption of the older, who sang in the choir and who had brusquely pushed across the sill of fear where Nancy stood wide-eyed.
Angela and Nancy went off to nursery school together. Piet drove the pick-up truck into downtown Tarbox and at Spiros Bros. Builders & Lumber Supply bought five yards of galvanized cage mesh, a three-by-four-piece of ¾” plywood,
twenty feet of 2” pine quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1½” finishing nails, and the same quantity of the finer gauge of poultry staples. Jerry Spiros, the younger of the two brothers, told Piet about his chest, which since Christmas had harbored a congestion that ten days in Jamaica did not clear up. “Those fucking blacks’d steal,” Jerry said, “the watch right off your wrist,” and coughed prolongedly.
“Sounds like you’ve been sniffing glue,” Piet told him, and charged the hamster-cage materials to the Gallagher & Hanema account, and threw them into the back of his truck, and slammed shut the tailgate that said
WASH ME
, and drove to Indian Hill, taking the long way around. He swung by his office to see if Gallagher’s gray Mercedes was there. Their office was a shacklike wing, one-story, upon an asphalt-shingled tenement, mostly unoccupied, on Hope Street, a little spur off Charity, a short cut to the railroad depot. Charity, the main business street, met Divinity at right angles, and Divinity carried up the hill, past Cogswell’s Drug Store. The church bulked white on the green.
Huge airy thing. Twenty-four panes in each half window, forty-eight in all, often while Pedrick wrestled he counted them, no symbolism since when it was built there weren’t that many states in the Union, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indian Territory. The lumber those people had. To burn. Waste? Gives the town a sense of itself. Dismal enough otherwise. On this heavy loveless day everything looked to need a coat of paint. The salt air corrupts. In Michigan barns stayed red for ages.
The green was hourglass-shaped, cut in two by a footpath, the church’s section pinched off from the part holding the backstop and basepaths. Swinging left along the green’s waist, Piet looked toward the Constantines’ side yard hoping to see Carol hanging out wash with upstretched arms and flattened
breasts. At Greek dances, leading the line, hair in spit curls, slippered toe pointed out, the neighbors’ boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle, Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, a subtle stiffness, resisting something, air. Eddie’s Vespa but no Ford, Carol’s car. He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment.
I ache afterwards
. Funeral home driveway held a Cadillac hearse and a preschool child playing with pebbles. Growing up in odor of embalming oil instead of flowers, corpses in the refrigerator, a greenhouse better, learn to love beauty, yet might make some fears seem silly. Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.
Forsythia like a dancing yellow fog was out in backyards and along fences and hedges and garages, the same yellow, continuous, dancing yard to yard, trespassing. Forgive us. Piet drove on down Prudence Street past the Guerins’. Nicely restored, six thou, one of their first jobs in Tarbox, Gallagher not so greedy then, Adams and Comeau did all the finish work, nobody under sixty knows how to hang a door. The whole frame had sagged. Dry rot. The uphill house sill buried in damp earth. They had threaded a reinforcing rod eighteen feet long through the summer beam up through a closet to an ironshod A-brace in the attic. Solid but still a touch off true.
Why don’t you want to fuck me?
Good question. Loyalty to Georgene, offshoot loyalty, last year’s shoot this year’s limb, mistress becomes a wife. Sets. Determined set of Georgene’s chin. Not always attractive. Coke-bottle eyes, nude like rancid butter, tarpaper grits, Freddy’s spies. Piet’s thoughts shied from a green plastic spoon.
Downhill a mailman gently sloped away from the pull of his bag. Blue uniform, regular hours, walk miles, muscles
firm, live forever. At the corner two dogs were saying hello. Hello. Olleh.
He drove along Musquenomenee Street, along the river, tidal up to the factory waterfall, low at this moment, black salt mud gleaming in wide scummy puddled flats, the origin of life. Across the river were high-crowned streets of elms and homes with oval windows and leaded fanlights built in the tinkling decades of ice wagons. Knickers, mustaches, celluloid collars: nostalgic for when he had never been. Piet saw no one. No one walked now. The silver maples were budding in reddish florets but the elms in tan tassels. Rips in a lilac sky. Nature, this sad grinding fine, seed and weed.
His spirits slightly lifted as he passed the Protestant cemetery, fan-shaped acres expanding from a Puritan wedge of tilted slate stones adorned with winged skulls and circular lichen. Order reigned. Soon cemeteries and golf courses the last greenswards. Thronging hungry hoardes, grain to India. On the golf course he spotted two lonely twosomes. Too early, mud, heavy lies, spikes chew up the green, proprietors greedy for fees, praise restraint, earth itself hungry, he had thrown it a sop. Pet. Pit. He drove through pastel new developments, raw lawns and patchwork façades, and up a muddy set of ruts beside which hydrants and sewer ports were already installed, in obedience to town ordinances, to his site on Indian Hill.