The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,74

unequal to its task. Richard hadn’t thought to throw pajamas in with tomorrow’s fresh shirt; he shivered in his underwear between the clammy sheets, got up, robbed the other twin bed of its skimpy blanket and bedspread, and finally draped his overcoat on top of himself. Still, the cold pressed in upon him from the walls like a force that wanted to compress his existence to nothing, that wanted to erase this temporary blot of heated, pumping blood. It’s a lot to give up, Joan had said of the womb, and indeed the cosmic volume of lightless, warmthless space hostile to us is overwhelming. He felt, huddled up, like a homunculus frigidly burning at the far end of God’s indifferently held telescope. He was a newly hatched grandfather, and the universe wanted to crush him, to make room for newcomers. He did fall asleep, a little, and his dreams, usually so rich in suppressed longing and forgotten knowledge, were wispy, as if starved by his body’s effort to maintain body temperature.

In the morning, checking out, groggy and still chilled, at the front desk, he complained of the lack of heat; the youthful clerk, fresh arrived from a cozy bed elsewhere, shrugged in scant apology and said, ‘We don’t get a night like last night very often. Four below, on my mom’s porch.’

By daylight the hospital looked different: more bustling, yet more shabby and temporary, a factory of healing staffed by weary people working half in the dark. A Hartford Courant Richard bought with his tea – no more coffee, he vowed; keep that blood pressure down – said that his team of bronze-helmeted heroes had lost in the last thirty seconds, to a forty-seven-yard field goal. Miracles are cheap.

When, at last, against the strict rules, they let him in to see his daughter, Judith looked unexpectedly neutral after her ordeal – neither drained nor jubilant, sick nor well, older nor younger than her age of thirty-one. She was wearing a hospital johnny under Joan’s old powder-blue bathrobe, and sitting on the edge of the bed. She had been feeding the baby, and the nurses had taken him back to the nursery. ‘I don’t know, Dad,’ she said. ‘It was a little weird. They put this thing in my arms this morning and it’s like I had no idea what to do with it. I hardly even knew which end was up. I was afraid I’d drop it and felt very, you know, awkward.’

He sat down in the big leather chair Andy had taken last night and smiled paternally. ‘You’ll stop feeling awkward very quickly.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Paul says.’ Paul, the know-it-all. From just the way in which Judith pronounced his name, he had won an undeserved promotion. Richard found himself more jealous and resentful of Paul and the baby than of Andy. Judith said, ‘He’s a great father already.’

‘Maybe it’s an easier role. There isn’t all that – that apparatus. Maybe you’re still feeling the baby is part of yourself, like a foot. I mean, how much feeling can you work up right off the bat toward a foot? How did the actual – what’s the word – birthing go?’

Judith from infancy on had been a sturdy, independent sort, a little opaque in her feelings, with something of her mother’s detached honesty. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It was good. Paul was great, with the breathing. At one point he began to sing, and got all the nurses laughing. But they were wrong about the Lamaze method. It hurt. They kept saying it was just pressure, but it hurt, Dad.’

Warmth swarmed to his eyes, at the thought of his daughter in pain. He blinked and stood and kissed her lightly on her forehead, that wide pale brow that from the start, love her as much as he could, held behind it her secrets, her sensations, her identity. ‘I should go. The nurses want to do something to you.’

‘Look at him around the corner. See who you think he looks like. Mom thinks he looks like Grandpa, the way his mouth has a little pinch in the middle, and turns down at the ends.’

‘Sounds like Andy’s mouth to me. You don’t suppose he’s the real grandfather, do you?’

It took Judith a moment to put it together and to realize that her father was being ironical. She was as groggy as he was; he had been compressed in the night, and she had been split in two. He told her, ‘Your mother by the way said to give her love. Andy was rushing her back to Boston bright and early, as soon as they could spring their car from the garage, where it got trapped last night.’

‘She told me all about it. She was in, she and Andy, right after breakfast. She talked him into it, I guess.’

Richard laughed. ‘It’s going to be hard to keep up with your mother, in the grandparenting business.’

‘Yeah. You should see her hold the baby. She knew which end was up.’

To him, too, it seemed clear, when a nurse brought his grandson to the window, that this reddish grapefruit, with its frowning closed eyes and its few licks of silky hair, pale like its father’s, was a human head, and that the tiny lavender appendages on the other, unswaddled end were toes. ‘Want to hold him?’ the nurse, who was young and black, asked him through the glass.

‘Do I dare?’

‘You’re the grandpap, aren’t you? Grandpaps are special people around here.’

And the child’s miniature body did adhere to his chest and arms, though more weakly than the infants he had presumed to call his own. Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nine of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Your Lover Just Called’, ‘Eros Rampant’ and ‘Sublimating’ were originally published in Harper’s Magazine; ‘Waiting Up’ in Weekend; ‘The Red-Herring Theory’ in The New York Times Sunday Magazine; ‘Nakedness’ in The Atlantic Monthly; and ‘Gesturing’ in Playboy.

The quotations concerning science in ‘Here Come the Maples’ are from a talk by Professor Steven Weinberg, ‘The Forces of Nature’, given before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and reprinted in that organization’s January 1976 bulletin.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

First published in Everyman’s Library, 2009

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random

House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc.,

New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library,

Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V0AT, and

distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.

With the exception of ‘Grandparenting’, all of the stories in this book as

well as an earlier version of the foreword previously appeared in Too Far

1960,1963,1966,1967,1971,1975,1976,1978,1979 by John Updike.

‘Grandparenting’ previously appeared in The Afterlife and Other Stories by

John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random

US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans

eISBN: 978-0-307-59334-4

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