The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,50
chisels dull, the saw rusty, his fingers thick with lack of sleep. The sun poured down, beyond the porch, on a world of neglect. The bushes already needed pruning, the windward side of the house was shedding flakes of paint, rain would get in when he was gone. Insects, rot, death. His family, the family he was about to lose, filtered through the edges of his awareness as he struggled with screw holes, splinters, opaque instructions, minutiae of metal.
Judith sat on the porch, a princess returned from exile. She regaled them with stories of fuel shortages, of bomb scares in the Underground, of Pakistani workmen loudly lusting after her as she walked past on her way to dance school. Joan came and went, in and out of the house, calmer than she should have been, praising his struggles with the lock as if this were one more and not the last of their long succession of shared chores. The younger of his sons, John, now at fifteen suddenly, unwittingly handsome, for a few minutes held the rickety screen door while his father clumsily hammered and chiselled, each blow a kind of sob in Richard’s ears. His younger daughter, having been at a slumber party the night before, slept on the porch hammock through all the noise – heavy and pink, trusting and forsaken. Time, like the sunlight, continued relentlessly; the sunlight slowly slanted. To day was one of the longest days, but not long enough. The lock clicked, worked. He was through. He had a drink; he drank it on the porch, listening to his daughter. ‘It was so sweet,’ she was saying, ‘during the worst of it, how all the butchers and bakery shops kept open by candlelight. They’re all so plucky and cute. From the papers, things sounded so much worse here – people shooting people in gas lines, and everybody freezing.’
Richard asked her, ‘Do you still want to live in England forever?’ Forever: the concept, now a reality upon him, pressed and scratched at the back of his throat.
‘No,’ Judith confessed, turning her oval face to him, its eyes still childishly far apart, but the lips set as over something succulent and satisfactory. ‘I was anxious to come home. I’m an American.’ She was a woman. They had raised her; he and Joan had endured together to raise her, alone of the four. The others had still some raising left in them. Yet it was the thought of telling Judith – the image of her, their first baby, walking between them arm in arm to the bridge – that broke him.
The partition between his face and tears broke. Richard sat down to the celebratory meal with the back of his throat aching; the champagne, the lobster seemed phases of sunshine; he saw them and tasted them through tears. He blinked, swallowed, croakily joked about hay fever. The tears would not stop leaking through; they came not through a hole that could be plugged but through a permeable spot in a membrane, steadily, purely, endlessly, fruitfully. They became, his tears, a shield for himself against these others – their faces, the fact of their assembly, a last time as innocents, at a table where he sat the last time as head. Tears dropped from his nose as he broke his lobster’s back; salt flavored his champagne as he sipped it; the raw clench at the back of his throat was delicious. He could not help himself.
His children tried to ignore his tears. Judith, on his right, lit a cigarette, gazed upward in the direction of her too-energetic, too-sophisticated exhalation; on her other side, John earnestly bent his face to the extraction of the last morsels – legs, tail segments – from the scarlet corpse. Joan, at the opposite end of the table, glanced at him surprised, her reproach displaced by a quick grimace, of forgiveness, or of salute to his superior gift of strategy. Between them, Margaret, no longer called Bean, thirteen and large for her age, gazed from the other side of his pane of tears as if into a shopwindow at something she coveted – at her father, a crystalline heap of splinters and memories. It was not she, however, but John who, in the kitchen, as they cleared the plates and carapaces away, asked Joan the question: ‘Why is Daddy crying?’
Richard heard the question but not the murmured answer. Then he heard Bean cry, ‘Oh, no-oh!’ – the faintly dramatized exclamation of one who had