In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
“School is more than O.K. It’s a positive pleasure, isn’t it?”
Was it? Teddy was no athlete, and no tough guy, the kind that girls somehow like, even though they mean them no good. Girls didn’t notice Teddy; by the time he turned fourteen he had grown bigger but was still soft and square in shape, with the beginning of whiskers. He was quiet in class and his grades were good but not the best, not so good as to make him a star that way either, a future millionaire. He enjoyed being one of the bunch, swept through the halls and the day on the tides of young bodies, the others indifferent toward him but accepting, since he had met the basic requirements of the club, by being the same age as the others and being born in Paterson. He felt carefree, a harmless cog, doing his assignments, taking his place at the desk assigned. At home, sickness and worry ruled, and a sense of waiting, waiting for some second, even bigger blow to fall. This blow hung trembling in the faintly sweet bedroom air. “Yeah. I like school.”
“I was very fond of school, when I was your age. It seemed to me such a satisfactory place. I excelled, and never knew why I excelled. My mind could just take things in without any effort, it seemed. I fooled myself. Things should never be too easy.”
“I guess not,” the boy responded, wondering why not. He would never be as clever as his father, or as popular and exciting as Jared—he had accepted that. He was even grateful, since both, through these qualities, had gotten into trouble.
His father strove to elevate his head on the pillows, alarmingly; the bed groaned and heaved with the effort and his head, lean and pale and waxen, seemed bigger than real, with its drooping, elongated, almost-white mustache. The unbuttoned neck of his nightshirt revealed some lank pale chest hairs. It seemed to Teddy at times that but for himself his father was being forgotten, in his quiet room, as Mother and Esther busied themselves with survival. His father was like an untended plant sending out yellow shoots in a dim half-light. “There’s some things you ought to know,” the invalid’s mouth pronounced.
Teddy was so afraid of hearing them that he merely nodded.
“Everything passes,” his father said, huskily. “ ‘This, too, shall pass away’ are words more comforting than any I ever found in the Bible. Abraham Lincoln said them, in a speech before the War between the States. He was referring to a story about an Eastern potentate who asked his wise men for a sentence that would be good for all occasions, and that’s what they came up with. ‘This, too, shall pass away.’ It’s good when you’re high, and good when you’re low. I’m not low now, Theodore, though I know I must seem so. I’m having a selfish rest, while my family keeps up the struggle. I feel guilty, sometimes, to be having so good a time, lying here on my side watching Mrs. Levi hanging out her wash so it snaps and shines in the breeze, or listening to the O’Brien girls practice their duets, while the rest of my poor little crew carries the weight of the world. But your mother loves the battle; a healthy husband wouldn’t give her enough to do.” Silence passed, and then the man continued as if Teddy had asked a question. “You’ll be fine, son—don’t you worry. You have a caring heart and a good level head. If there’s any danger, it’s that you’ll settle too cheap, from not valuing yourself enough. If I’d valued myself more, I wouldn’t have let my dad scare me into the ministry. He was the one wanted to preach, and instead he ran a gravel pit.” He smiled at his son’s serious face. “Now, what does that have to do with anything? When you use your voice so little, when you drag it out of its box it tends to run on.” He reached out a bony dry hand, which was surprisingly warm. Embarrassed, Teddy took it in one of his plump, square, sweating ones. His father softly squeezed out of his chest, “This will pass, for better or worse. I feel I’m getting better, the curious truth is. How do I sound?”
“Better,” the boy lied, feeling breathless himself.
“Well, then. Now run tell your ma I have some business to do.” This meant he had to go to the bathroom, and he needed her to help him get there. Such help Clarence asked of the two women in the house, but not of his younger son.
Thus Teddy moved through adolescence, its storms of desire muffled, waiting for his father to die. Like many organic processes it took longer than it humanly seemed it should; the loss that sooner befell them was Jared’s, an arm crippled by shrapnel in the battle for the Marne, outside the village of Trughy-Epied, on the 24th of July, 1918. He lay in a Paris hospital for a month and then was shipped back to the state hospital in Newark. Only Mother visited him, since now with the end of this cruel war in sight an influenza epidemic was raging around the globe, killing more than the war had. Right there in the hospital wards men who had survived Château-Thierry and the second Marne were dying of it, quickly and quietly, after a few days of aching and fever: their spirits just flew up out of their mouths, Mother said. She told Teddy to stay off of trolley cars and out of crowds. The old red-brick high school on Lee Place, which the city authorities declined to close, was one big crowd, buzzing with news of a grandparent or parent or brother or sister suddenly carried off. The desks on both sides of Teddy were empty for several days but the children—Charlotte Weed, Jacob Wyzanski—both came back, gloating at having out-toughed death. When Teddy came down with a fever and dryness in the throat and a feeling of the walls around him being paper-shin and covered with moving designs, he thought of praying that he not die, but this seemed disloyal to his father, somehow. His father had fallen out with God and Teddy would not go behind his back. It was easy, after a while, not to pray. Statistics showed that children resisted the flu better than the old and frail and what a terrible sort of divine punishment it would be if he brought home the illness that killed his father—if he was his father’s murderer. But the fever passed, and then the cough, and he was ready to take on the paper route again. Jared, too, survived, lying in the Newark hospital surrounded by dying young men.
Jared had quit Rutgers with one year left to go, in 1916—they never explained to Teddy quite why; it had not everything to do with the girl who wanted to marry him, there was some problem with his grades as well. He had neglected his studies for extra-curricular activities, was how Mother put it. But he had worked as a slip runner and then found a job as a rent collector with a New York real-estate corporation. Supposedly he was doing well. He wore checked suits and a bowler when he visited, and seemed to his brother harder and more remote than ever; when he knuckled Teddy’s head it felt like the grip of a knobby, implacable machine. “I’m going to be a soldier man,” he had bragged.
“Why? Do you have to?”
“Yeah, they’ll be having a draft anyways. All my buddies in Noo Yawk are signing up. If you don’t, you won’t get any more pussy, that’s what our girlfriends tell us. Over in France, the mademoiselles do it to Americans for free. They aimez beaucoup.”
“They do?” He tried to picture what “it” was, and came up with twisted positions like the rubber man at the circus freak show could get into, in the tent with the smelly sawdust.
“Sure. We go over there to save their ass, you bet they do. They slobber all over you. Anyways, like the President says, who wants to live in a world run by Germans? They’d make you eat sauerkraut every day and wipe your heinie with a wire brush.”
Teddy laughed, pleased to be talked to this dirty way—the code of a monstrous world that a man evidently grows into. “Aren’t you scared?”
“What’s to be scared of? They see that old red, white, and blue flappin’ away, they’ll run, the dumb Huns. They can push the frogs and Belgies around, but they won’t push real he-men. Anyway, Ted, you take your chances, ain’t that the way of life? You can’t live forever, so why try?”
“You said it,” Teddy said, at heart disagreeing. You could see in the newspapers every day, there were the reckless and foolish, who sinned and suffered for it, and there were others, who played it safe and stayed out of the papers. Now, according to Mother, they had removed eight jagged pieces of metal from Jared’s right shoulder and certain nerves were severed forever. He had
Father, sitting up downstairs in his bathrobe and Turkish slippers, did not agree: it had been necessary, it had been successful, and a lasting peace would result. With Europe rid of its royalty, democracy could take hold even in Germany, where the old autocratic ideas had the most stubborn grip—the darkest part of Martin Luther’s heritage. “Wilson is right—America can no longer hide from the role it must play in the world. We are, as Abraham Lincoln said, the last, best hope of earth.”
Mr. Dearholt just sat there, his glasses and teeth gleaming, not wanting to argue with a sick man, or else still giving him the respect owed a clergyman. Teddy wondered why Mr. Dearholt stuck by Father, when no one else from the church had. There was something in his father worth admiring: the boy held on to that thought.
Jared when he came home, hard of hearing in one ear and his limp arm in a sling, didn’t want to talk about the war, or his experiences in it. Teddy asked him once about the French girls who aimezed beaucoup.
“They were there, I guess all right, but it was different than you pictured it ahead of time. The froggies had set it up as a kind of industry—they’re way ahead of us, with doctors checking out les poules every month, for VD—and the officers got the benefit, not your ordinary doughboy. Everything is some kind of business over there, even the church. Nothing’s sacred, believe me. Even the priests drink and eat till they’re red in the face and fat as pigs. Imagine: the war just a few miles away, their country a battlefield for four years, and these waiters in the bistros hurrying and scurrying making a quick franc on the Americans dragged over there to save their lousy froggy hides. If the Germans had broken through to Paris, they would have hurried and scurried for them too. They don’t have our pride, Ted. For all their talk of gloire this and gloire that from all I saw this glorious war was just a mess of bodies, some dead and some still alive and kicking, and nobody had a notion in hell of what it was all about—why the war had come, or why it was going away. It just happened. Millions died, and it just happened. C’est la guerre, c’est la vie. It was weird, the war, how normal it got to be. Guys you know, guys you’ve been beside day and night, suddenly they’re dead—a piece of garbage, like some big white log you step over without thinking much about it, until it begins to stink. I’m not complaining. It could have been a lot worse, personally. At least I kept my sight, I wasn’t gassed like those poor bastards in the Toul, fresh off the boat and sent into battle without masks by officers green as paint. Europe, they can keep it—the frogs, the Krauts. I don’t ever want to cross the fucking-ass Atlantic again.”
Teddy tried to hide his shock at the swear-word, stronger and stranger than any he had heard Jared use before. “So what are you going to do?” Teddy surprised himself with the question; he realized only he could ask it, directly like that—Mother and Father and Esther were too afraid. They were afraid of Jared since he had come back hardened in a fire they would never experience. Teddy had no desire to experience that fire, or any fire really, but he found that now he loved his brother, which he hadn’t before. And his brother in his thin-lipped way found something in Teddy that he hadn’t needed before—a listening audience before which he could hear himself speak. Wounded people need an audience.
Jared’s eyes since he came back had changed; a muddy green, energetically protruding, they had grown a film, a fishy imperviousness beneath the pointy fox-red brows. “Do? Well, for what they call my partial disability I’ll be getting fifteen bucks a month for the next year plus the sixty that comes with every discharge. So I’ll sit around living on Uncle Sam till I get some use back in my arm and clear up this ringing in my ears. Then go back to Noo Yawk and make a ton of do-re-mi. If there’s one thing this war taught me, it’s that money is more important than pussy. Money makes the man, Ted, and pussy unmakes him. Money gives, and pussy takes.”
Teddy could see his brother’s nervous eyes narrow as he shifted into the more personal gear. Awkwardly, perched on the arm of the wicker chair on the little screened-in back porch here on East Twenty-seventh Street, where they had gone despite the November cold to be out of Mother’s and Father’s earshot—the bedridden man could hear everything, even the tiniest noise downstairs gave him some kind of pain—Jared leaned forward, his head cocked in a new way he had now, to let the good ear hear. “You got to watch it about becoming a mama’s boy. You’re going to be alone with Mom and Esther once Pop and I pull out.”
“Is Pop pulling out?” Teddy still thought of him as “Dad,” which had a childish ring.
“He’s been pulling out ever since we’ve known him,” Jared said. “Only it’s going faster now. Let me finish about women. They want two things, Ted: your money and your nuts. They spend your money; God knows what they do with your nuts. Nothing, I guess—they just don’t want you to have ’em.”
This all sounded a little off-key and flat to Teddy—missing a dimension, though he had no idea how to supply the dimension. His brother talked survival, and that was the name of the world’s game. His mother talked love, and that was the game you played at home, in its shelter and shadows.
Coming into his room in the dark just as he had cupped his left hand beneath his balls in anticipation of the loop-the-loop trip he had discovered he could give himself, she would tousle the hair on the top of his head and say, “Now, don’t you fret, little sweetheart, your daddy’s getting better every day, the doctor says, though I know he looks thinner—his body’s just squeezing the bad cells out, that’s what’s happening—and the way you’re growing, and bringing home those fine report cards, is a ray of sunshine in his life, he tells me twice a day.”
But she was scared, he could sense it in the quickened way she moved about the house, and in the way she touched him, for luck or reassurance, more than she used to, and in the tension of her hug, the hug a little shy now that he was fifteen going on sixteen. She had begun to clean houses, not the houses of her old parishioners—that would have been too great a comedown—but of those to whom she was recommended by her old parishioners. Her houses were not just on the East Side of Paterson but over in Clifton and up in Hawthorne, so there were long trolley-car rides. Teddy would often get back from school at four and find nobody in the house but Dad, dozing. He couldn’t talk now, just lay there with his head held sideways on two pillows and his blue eyes getting livelier, looking out the window at Mrs. Levi’s wash, and the fences and backyards beyond like a ramshackle set of stairs mounting into the distance, south toward the inverted rows of rain clouds above Clifton. When Teddy would peek in, his father was lying there motionless. But then his eyes would open with their disconcerting lightness of milky-blue color and his eyebrows—thin and long like a woman’s, not bushy like Jared’s and their grandfather’s in the old photos—would arch in what Teddy knew to be a question.
“Good,” he answered. “School was good.” He did not say that he smoked a Fatima cigarette with Jake Wyzanski on the mile-long walk home along Grand and Essex Streets and then through Sandy Hill Park to Twentieth Avenue or that he had seen Charlotte Weed’s ankle when she reached down and scratched herself in American-history class or how the armpits of Edna Jacobson’s frilly blouse were stained wet from running when she came in late after lunch or how Peter McHegan said you could tell which girls were having their period from how red their pimples were or how Maria Caravello had come to the school as a substitute English teache
Well, he could tell his father one of the things from school. “Dad, remember the Caravellos that used to be members of our church?” The long horizontal head, the ends of its mustache both drooping in the same direction, made a sideways motion the boy took to be a nod. It was not the Caravellos but themselves whose connection with the church “used to be,” but his father had understood. “I saw her in the hall and she didn’t recognize me, then she came into English class because Miss Harriman is sick and she recognized our name on the list and after class talked a little to me. She was much better than Miss Harriman, much livelier, and her English is perfect now—better than ours. Her sister and mother are both married, she said, but she had it in her mind always to be a schoolteacher in this country, where women were allowed to be teachers without being nuns.”