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

sang when struck) or blooped into the air where the other could not reach them. He was embarrassed by her bare-legged figure joining him in this lonely game, her face growing redder as her clumsy efforts continued; trolley cars and traffic passed on the Alton Pike close enough for people to stare at this little boy and grown woman trying to pat an uncoöperative ball back and forth. Only now could Owen glimpse her purposes: to combat the weight problem that was overtaking her and to help him gain a skill he might need in life. In fact he went on, in the playful milieu of Middle Falls, to play a lot of tennis, though never with much of a backhand; he gave it up early, in the first years of his marriage to Julia, because of a rotator cuff that hurt when he tried to reach up into the serve. But the game had always been tainted for him by that shameful memory, the public struggle with his mother, while people in the trolley cars stared, to get the ball back and forth; there had been a pathetic impotence to the fuzzy balls—white, back then—as they hit the wire of the net or the fencing with a sad, reverberating thud. Mother and son had seemed so lost, the two of them, there at the far end of the flat school acreage, linked in a common ordeal as they had been at his painful birth.

She had died, finally, some years after his marriage to Julia, having made an impressive, white-haired, broad-bodied presence among the few wedding guests that day in Lower Falls. She didn’t have the energy to create with Julia the tensions that had existed with her first daughter-in-law; rather, she let the younger woman roll over her, even submitting to the massages that Julia skillfully applied to the aches in her osteoporotic shoulders and neck. She had never liked being touched; or so she had thought. “Julia,” she said to her second daughter-in-law, “you have a healing touch. Owen looks so much better since he took up with you. He had a sneaky, pasty look before, didn’t he?”

“To me he always looked very handsome and honorable,” Julia said, unanswerably, with a complacent closing of her lips. It was as when Elsie used to come to the house, with a lively courtesy facing his mother down, claiming her share of the son. Women are possessive. The world divides itself into their territories. A smile similar to Elsie’s would stretch Alissa’s lips when, her face perspiring inches from his, her dull blue eyes turned inky. Though we speak of a man possessing a woman it is she who takes possession.

His mother died neatly, quickly, of heart failure, in her little country house, having exerted herself with an unusual spurt of housework. Her old Hoover burned out its engine as her body lay beside it on the clean carpet. All four of the adults Owen had lived with as a boy died tidily, out of sight, as if to spare him unpleasantness and preserve his charmed, only-child sense of life.

Yet something feels amiss; there is something within him that needs to be relaxed. His fulfillment with Julia, his arrival at a harbor of safe uxoriousness and well-heeled retirement, is a strain to maintain, as his restless dissatisfaction with Phyllis had not been. Phyllis and he, in mating, had not so stressed the world that they had to be perfect; they had been the age to marry and leave their homes and make another, according to common social usage. He and Julia wrecked two existing households, and caused a death, though no court could convict them for it. Art Larson, as he calls himself now, left the ministry and enjoys well-paid employment as a p.r. interface in New York, but when he shows up, for a child’s wedding or the funeral of a dear pre–Middle Falls friend of the former couple, his neck looks vulnerable without the backwards collar. His hair no longer has the wiry health of a dog’s tousled, tight coat. His voice, however, is as resonant and gravely melodious as ever, and his manner toward Owen no less benign than at their first meeting. Even vestigial faith arms the believer in fatalism and an energy-conserving disposition to forgive.

There are two evidential arguments, Owen has reasoned, for the truths of the Christian religion: one, our wish to live forever, however tedious the actual experience of eternal consciousness might be, and, two, our sensation that something is amiss—that there has been a lapse or slippage in the world and things are not quite as they should be. We feel made for a better world, and the fault is ours that this is not Eden. The second may be the more solid evidence, since fear and loathing of death can be explained as, like pain, a survival device selected and refined by Darwinian evolution. Because we fear death, we try harder to live. As long as our genes get through, Nature doesn’t care how we suffer.

A third supernaturalist argument could be that belief, with a pinch of salt (that is, short of self-mutilation, a martyr’s suicide, or murder of one’s children as a surefire, low-cost relocation to Heaven), benefits the health; repeated medical studies bear this out. An anxiety-relieving faith conduces to worldly efficiency and success: this argument to Owen seems crassly pragmatic. Optimism tends to succeed, but does this refute the majestic truths of pessimism? The human animal, evolved in trees and then dropped down to run in the grasslands of Kenya, arrived at a highly conscious position awkward beyond any easements of philosophy. At three in the morning, our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship. But jumping out of the self is not a Western skill. The walls of the skull stay solid, sealing us in with our fears.

They cling to each other, he and Julia, in what