Villages by John Updike (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📗

in solving problems that he set for himself, or that he and Buddy Rourke devised together, stood him in good stead in the burgeoning computer industry; but even on the social level he is not quite inept. His manner is shy but seductive. The villages he has lived in have been sites of instruction.

In Willow, by the inarguable providence of the state, he had daily escaped his house to attend the schools, whose grades up to junior high were taught almost entirely by motherly, mildly challenging women, and to walk the sidewalks with the twittering, teasing pack of girls, who could tell (not just Ginger Bitting but Barbara Emerich, with her cornsilk braids and one gray front tooth which showed when she smiled, and lithe, dark, grave-eyed Grace Bickta) that he adored them. Little Owen was malleable, gullible. He believed everything he was told and took comfort, abnormally much, from the town’s presiding public presences—the schoolteachers, and the highway crew, who from their tarry truck threw down cinders in winter and smoking gravel in the summer, and the three town cops, one short, one fat, and one with a rumored drinking problem. He took comfort from the little old lady, her glasses on a cord around her goitrous neck, who accepted their monthly electric bill at her barred window in Borough Hall, and the mailman, Mr. Bingham, who with the heroism of the well-publicized postal-service slogan heroically plodded his way up and down Mifflin Avenue twice a day, leaning at an angle away from the weight of his leather pouch, in which Mickey Mouse comic books and secret decoding rings and signed photographs of movie stars would sometimes come to Owen. If his diffuse childhood happiness could be distilled into one moment, it would be the day of a snowstorm, in the vicinity of Christmas—mid-afternoon, the outdoors already darkened under the cloud cover, tinsel and dried needles falling off the holiday evergreen in the front parlor onto the miniature landscape below, which he and his mother had concocted: cotton and flakes of Lux for snow, toothpicks stuck into bits of green-painted sponge for trees, and for habitations fragile store-bought papier-mâché houses gathered around the speckled mirror of a pond. Around the oval three-rail track ran his little blue Lionel train with its obedient speed shifts and translucent smell of lubricating oil. Suddenly—a noise that electrified Owen—the clacking letter slot announced that Mr. Bingham had trudged through the blizzard and, for the second time that day, delivered the mail. That mailmen walked and trolley cars clanged through the storm seemed to confirm the Hollywood, comic-strip version of American reality: we were as safe, and as lovingly regarded from on high, as the tiny, unaging figures in a shaken snow globe.

Just slightly above the administrators of local order were the national celebrities. They were, indeed, more accessible and familiar: Jack Benny and Fibber McGee cracking their jokes and suffering their embarrassments in the little Philco right in the piano room, next to the greasy-armed easy chair where Owen ate peanut-butter crackers in a double rapture of laughter and mastication; Tyrone Power, his black eyebrows knitted in a troubled frown, and Joan Crawford, her huge dark lips bravely tremulous and her enlarged eyes each harboring a tear that would fill a bucket, on the screen at the Scheherazade; and the tweedy, pipe-sucking writers and bespectacled lab-coated inventors and slick-haired café-society people present in the shiny magazines, Life and Liberty and Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, on the upright wooden rack at Eberly’s Drug Store, buyable by any local person with a dime. There was a friendliness, a closeness, in the way this firmament curved over Willow in its valley. The voices of Bing Crosby and Lowell Thomas and Kate Smith carried none of the abrasive demands of real voices—his mother’s, his teachers’, the teasing girls’—and yet these celebrities, to judge from the scripts of the radio comedies, lived lives much like ours, visiting the bank and the dentist. Jack Benny even went next door to borrow a cup of sugar from Ronald Colman. At their continental distance these stars partook of the life lived in Owen’s neighborhood, with its spindly porches and buckling retaining walls. There was no better way to live, no grander, more virtuous country than America, and no homier state than Pennsylvania. God figured at the top, the unthinkable keystone, but at a mercifully great distance, farther away than even Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

“There you are,” he tells his wife, when he has deciphered “Here” and found her in the flesh—her frosted hair, her blue flip-flops—out on the veranda, reading the New York Times.

He insists on reading the Boston Globe—another misalignment. “I had the weirdest dream,” he begins. “You were in it twice.”

“Please, baby,” she says, not turning her head. “Couldn’t you tell me later? I’m trying to understand Enron—the way they did it, siphoning off these fortunes for themselves.”

“I’ll have forgotten it later, but never mind,” he says, feeling the splash of imagery in his mind evaporate, sparkling though it was with an elixir of her, of their life together. “Never mind. Tell me what’s on for today.” Today was Saturday, his favorite day as a child, but threateningly formless in his retirement.

Julia, her eyelashes fluttering in irritation as she stared into the Times version of breathtaking corporate corruption, says, “Nothing until cocktails at the Achesons’.”

“Oh, God. Do we have to go?”

“Of course, dear. Miriam is one of my best friends. As Brad is yours.”

“They’ll be having everybody; we won’t be missed.”

“Oh yes we will. Why do you put me through this every time? You always enjoy yourself once you’re there. You’re charming, in fact, in that ah-shucks way you have.”

“I pretend to enjoy myself. I have nothing to say to those people. Nothing.”

Owen’s lifework has been the creation and vetting of computer software, and now that he has closed his last little office in Boston, a four-man (three-man-and-a-woman) consultancy, he has little to say to anybody. The