The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,54

was stunned.

‘Yes. Dickie, I want to tell you something. This last hour, waiting for your train to get in, has been about the worst of my life. I hate this. Hate it. My father would have died before doing it to me.’ He felt immensely lighter, saying this. He had dumped the mountain on the boy. They were home. Moving swiftly as a shadow, Dickie was out of the car, through the bright kitchen. Richard called after him, ‘Want a glass of milk or anything?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Want us to call the course tomorrow and say you’re too sick to work?’

‘No, that’s all right.’ The answer was faint, delivered at the door to his room; Richard listened for the slam that went with a tantrum. The door closed normally, gently. The sound was sickening.

Joan had sunk into that first deep trough of sleep and was slow to awake. Richard had to repeat, ‘I told him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing much. Could you go say good night to him? Please.’

She left their room, without putting on a bathrobe. He sluggishly changed back into his pajamas and walked down the hall. Dickie was already in bed, Joan was sitting beside him, and the boy’s bedside clock radio was murmuring music. When she stood to go, an inexplicable light – the moon? – outlined her body through the nightie. Richard sat on the warm place she had indented on the boy’s narrow mattress. He asked him, ‘Do you want the radio on like that?’

‘It always is.’

‘Doesn’t it keep you awake? It would me.’

‘No.’

‘Are you sleepy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. Sure you want to get up and go to work? You’ve had a big night.’

‘I want to. They expect me.’

Away at school this winter he had learned for the first time that you can go short of sleep and live. As an infant he had slept with an immobile, sweating intensity that had alarmed his baby-sitters. In adolescence he had often been the first of the four children to go to bed. Even now, he would go slack in the middle of a television show, his sprawled legs hairy and brown. ‘O.K. Good boy. Dickie, listen. I love you so much, I never knew how much until now. No matter how this works out, I’ll always be with you. Really.’

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks embraced him and gave him a kiss, on the lips, passionate as a woman’s. In his father’s ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: ‘Why?’

Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The waiting white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.

GESTURING

SHE TOLD HIM with a little gesture he had never seen her use before. Joan had called from the station, having lunched with her lover, Richard guessed. He had been spending the Saturday baby-sitting for his own children, in the house the Maples had once shared. Her new Volvo was handier in the driveway, but for several minutes it refused to go into first gear for him. By the time he had reached the center of town, she had walked down the main street and up the hill to the green. It was September, leafy and warm, yet with a crystal chill on things, an uncanny clarity. Even from a distance they smiled to see one another. She opened the door and seated herself, fastening the safety belt to silence its chastening buzz. Her face was rosy from her walk; her city clothes looked like a costume; she carried a small package or two, token of her ‘shopping.’ Richard tried to pull a U-turn on the narrow street, and in the long moment of his halting and groping for reverse gear she told him. ‘Darley,’ she said, and, oddly, tentatively, soundlessly, tapped the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, a gesture between a child’s clap of glee and an adult’s signal for attention, ‘I’ve decided to kick you out. I’m going to ask you to leave town.’

Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. ‘O.K.,’ he said carefully. ‘If you think you can manage.’ He glanced sideways at her face to see if she meant it; he could not believe she did. A red, white, and blue mail truck that had braked to a stop behind them tapped its horn, more reminder than rebuke; the Maples were known in the town. They