The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,51
long expected it.
John returned to the table carrying a bowl of salad. He nodded tersely at his father and his lips shaped the conspiratorial words ‘She told.’
‘Told what?’ Richard asked aloud, insanely.
The boy sat down as if to rebuke his father’s distraction with the example of his own good manners. He said quietly, ‘The separation.’
Joan and Margaret returned; the child, in Richard’s twisted vision, seemed diminished in size, and relieved, relieved to have had the bogeyman at last proved real. He called out to her – the distances at the table had grown immense – ‘You knew, you always knew,’ but the clenching at the back of his throat prevented him from making sense of it. From afar he heard Joan talking, levelly, sensibly, reciting what they had prepared: it was a separation for the summer, an experiment. She and Daddy both agreed it would be good for them; they needed space and time to think; they liked each other but did not make each other happy enough, somehow.
Judith, imitating her mother’s factual tone, but in her youth off-key, too cool, said, ‘I think it’s silly. You should either live together or get divorced.’
Richard’s crying, like a wave that has crested and crashed, had become tumultuous; but it was overtopped by another tumult, for John, who had been so reserved, now grew larger and larger at the table. Perhaps his younger sister’s being credited with knowing set him off. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ he asked, in a large round voice quite unlike his own. ‘You should have told us you weren’t getting along.’
Richard was startled into attempting to force words through his tears.
‘We do get along, that’s the trouble, so it doesn’t show even to us –’ That we do not love each other was the rest of the sentence; he couldn’t finish it.
Joan finished for him, in her style. ‘And we’ve always, especially, loved our children.’
John was not mollified. ‘What do you care about us?’ he boomed. ‘We ‘re just little things you had.’ His sisters’ laughing forced a laugh from him, which he turned hard and parodistic: ‘Ha ha ha.’ Richard and Joan realized simultaneously that the child was drunk, on Judith’s homecoming champagne. Feeling bound to keep the center of the stage, John took a cigarette from Judith’s pack, poked it into his mouth, let it hang from his lower lip, and squinted like a gangster.
‘You’re not little things we had,’ Richard called to him. ‘You’re the whole point. But you’re grown. Or almost.’
The boy was lighting matches. Instead of holding them to his cigarette (for they had never seen him smoke; being ‘good’ had been his way of setting himself apart), he held them to his mother’s face, closer and closer, for her to blow out. He lit the whole folder – a hiss and then a torch, held against his mother’s face. The flame, prismed by Richard’s tears, filled his vision; he didn’t know how it was extinguished. He heard Margaret say, ‘Oh, stop showing off,’ and saw John, in response, break the cigarette in two and put the halves entirely into his mouth and chew, sticking out his tongue to display the shreds to his sister.
Joan talked to him, reasoning – a fountain of reason, unintelligible. ‘Talked about it for years … our children must help us … Daddy and I both want …’ As the boy listened, he wadded a paper napkin into the leaves of his salad, fashioned a ball of paper and lettuce, and popped it into his mouth, looking around the table for the expected laughter. None came. Judith said, ‘Be mature,’ and dismissed a plume of smoke.
Richard got up from this stifling table and led the boy outside. Though the house was in twilight, the outdoors still brimmed with light, the lovely waste light of high summer. Both laughing, he supervised John’s spitting out the lettuce and paper and tobacco into the pachysandra. He took him by the hand – a square gritty hand, despite its softness a man’s. Yet it held on. They ran together up into the field, past the tennis court. The raw banking left by the bulldozers was dotted with daisies. Past the court and a flat stretch where they used to play family baseball stood a soft green rise glorious in the sun, each weed and species of grass as distinct as illumination on parchment. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ Richard cried. ‘You were the only one who ever tried to help me with