In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
She moved a step toward him and he flinched until he realized she was giving him a quick hug. Upstairs, though they tiptoed, Mother appeared on the landing with her wonderful mass of gray-threaded chestnut hair spilled down across the shoulders of her voluminous cotton nightie. “Heavens above, why do you two keep slamming the screen door?” she asked, in a voice louder and more humorous than any she would have used when Father was alive, lying on his side staring blue-eyed at nothingness.
Basingstoke was named after a town in Hampshire, England, by homesick colonists who had set sail from Southampton in 1690. The Swedes and Dutch had already been displaced from rule of the New Castle region and the Duke of York had conveyed to William Penn his vast territories, including the three lower counties on the Delaware, their awkward apartness from the rest of Pennsylvania a strain even then. The colonists preferred to profess allegiance directly to the king rather than the aristocratic Quaker whose pacifism left them vulnerable to seaborne attacks by pirates and the French. The entire snippet of a state, with difficulty severed from the great domains of Penn and Lord Calvert, was saturated in English nostalgia, an emotion embodied, it seemed, in the picturesque mists that on many mornings arose from the river and its nearly level, humid, tree-filled valley. The river was named the Avon, though an old Nanticoke name, the Manito, had been recorded.
Teddy was eighteen his first summer here; awakened early by the unaccustomed quiet, marred by cries of roosters from their neighbor’s little poultry-yards, he would watch these mists burn off under a golden sun, or as it were sink back into the marshy, verdant terrain that surrounded the seven hundred houses—many wooden but more of brick, with some laid up in courses of alternating headers and stretchers in a style characteristic of old Delaware—that were home to Basingstoke’s more than three thousand residents. The town had been built densely, since the local farmland was rich and precious. Two grist mills had been turned by the Avon’s gentle current, less powerfully and prosperously than the flour and gunpowder mills drawing power from the swift-running Brandywine to the hilly north, and had yielded in the late eighteenth century to a tannery. In less than a century this industry had drained the local forests of oak bark and ceased to pour its acids and chromium salts and dyes into the Avon, which gradually recovered its clear color and its fish, its trout and perch and those bright little spiny, vicious catfish called madtoms. Now the only sizable mill in town made a newish thing, metal “crown” bottle caps, replacing the clumsy old stoppers of wired porcelain with rubber gaskets. The mill accepted thin sheets of enamelled low-carbon steel from Pittsburgh at one end of its loading platform and after a clacking, banging, hissing maze of procedures inside set out on the other end of the platform neat wooden cases, which made a musical metallic sloshing noise when moved, full of crimped discs imprinted with the florid scripted logos of manufacturers of root beer, birch beer, sarsaparilla, and other beverages concocted of carbonated sugar water. The bottling plants were at other sites, some as far distant as Atlanta; there the stacked caps were fed downward and jerkily popped, many per minute, over round glass lips by an automatic vertical hammer to which the tensile strength and elasticity of the crown caps were precisely adjusted against the eventual day when a consumer would lever one free, releasing a fizzy hiss of long-captive carbon dioxide. The plant producing this innocent product, and a few back-alley gun shops and automobile garages, and a single large but porous shed in which the last of a once-flourishing tribe of shipbuilders hammered and planed away at about one gaff-rigged oyster boat a year, constituted the visible local industry. Otherwise, the citizens of Basingstoke seemed to survive by supplying each other’s needs, and those of the farmers of the land around it, whose peach orchards and chicken houses and produce gardens and cornfields helped feed Wilmington and Philadelphia. The prosperity propelled by the Du Pont Company’s war profits on the sale of explosives and its post-war expansion into all aspects of the chemical industry reached far enough south to create, in Basingstoke, an economic sufficiency. Little changed; few new buildings went up, and those that existed were occupied and maintained. Picket fences were now and then repainted white; the most doddering widow contrived with the help of a neighbor child or colored boy to keep her bushes from overflowing her yard. The stores along Rodney Street—the main street, shaped like an elongated S to fit the river and named after Caesar Rodney, whose midnight ride to vote in Philadelphia for independence was Delaware’s most famous historical episode—sold their groceries and farm tools and clothes and watch fobs and birdseed and ice-cream sodas and patent medicines in steady quantities. It was a far cry from the economic violence of Paterson—its peril and passion, its laboring masses pitted against unseen, implacable proprietors. In Delaware, the situation was so different that T. Coleman du Pont out of his own pocket was building a highway for everybody, right down the middle of the state.
Teddy at first knew only that he was in a new space, awaking to different, more distant sounds, on the third floor of Aunt Esther’s big house on Willow Street. The atmosphere was sleepier, more Southern. The people showed none of the European variety and pushiness he was used to. Everyone bore simple English names; the only different people were the colored people, who lived in back alleys or shanties where the paved streets gave out and who seemed as shy and watchful and cautious as Teddy himself. A colored maid, Edwina, came to the house like Mavis used to, but when he tried to talk to her, she turned her face—the grave and lusterless color of a cast-iron stove—away from him, as if he was potent to a degree he didn’t realize. When she did respond, it was in a voice so slurred and entwined with nervous giggles that he couldn’t understand her. Beyond the walls of this house, he knew nobody. With Mr. Dearholt’s help, Mother had sold the house—to the bank, at no profit—but they stayed on in Paterson until he graduated from high school, fifty-first in his class of three hundred twelve. He had begged his mother to stay until graduation, yet it had deprived him, he saw now, of making friends of any Basingstoke classmates. People his age moseyed back and forth along Willow Street, or roared by in their tin lizzies, as if he were a fish in an aquarium, helplessly staring out. He had passed the age when a child can linger at the edge of a game of kickball or baseball and be, with scarcely an exchange of words, assimilated. Awkward in his new manhood, squarish and soft in build, Teddy walked the town, that first lonely summer, hoping to become part of it, taking the measure of its shady blocks, its ragged curving downtown, its little Greek temple of a town hall, the sprucely painted churches where the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Episcopalians entertained their bearded God in His several shades of Protestant doctrine, the close-set deepporched homes of the not uncomfortable, and the surprisingly stark rowhouses, with piebald asphalt shingles and sagging porches one step up from the pavement, tucked between the empty, hollow-eyed, rose-colored tannery and the busy bottle-cap factory, which had been built recently, of cinder blocks with a half-heartedly ornamental façade of glazed yellow bricks. The downtown turned its back on the river; but for slots between the buildings through which the shuffling glint of sunlight on water-dimples flashed through to his eye, the river was invisible, as it carried toward the sea the suds of brown foam churned up by the six-foot waterfall there by the ruddy ruin of the old tannery. The river was freshwater for several miles more, until it met the saltwater tides. Teddy walked to the edges of the town, to the Negroes’ scattered unpainted shacks and their swept dirt yards where dusty hens pecked and shuffled and submitted to the rooster’s hasty mounting, and to the lush, buggy, buzzing cornfields and receding pruned orchards and ragged vestiges of hardwood forest that marked the limits of Basingstoke. It would all have fit between the two railroad lines that ran through Paterson; Teddy got so he could hold a map of it in his mind.
What he had trouble holding in his mind was his father’s death, his eternal absence. He kept half-expecting time to be reversed and Father to walk in the door and take charge again, in his wry, slender, soft-spoken way. T
Aunt Esther and her runaway, unmentionable husband, Horace—Teddy remembered him, a pink-cheeked bald little man who sucked on his pipe and cackled like a woman when he laughed—had laid out a truck garden along the sunny side of their half-acre, including a big asparagus bed, and the first summer that Teddy lived in Basingstoke the women could think of nothing better to do with the sole man of the house than have him dig up several summers’ worth of weeds, break up the sod and shake the grass roots out of it, plant leaf lettuce and radishes and whatever other aboveground vegetables could come in after a late start, keep these rows hoed, and weed and harvest the asparagus bed. There was a little art to asparagus, knowing when the tender purple-tinged nose, its leaflets overlapped like fish-scales, had poked enough inches out of the ground to be dug with the asparagus cutter, which was shaped like the tail of an arrow. Bunches of a dozen or so stalks were to be peddled fresh in the neighborhood in the evenings. It was not unusual for the citizens of Basingstoke to sell each other produce; the dimes accumulated pleasantly in the pocket, and even some of the colored households—the better off, who lived closer to town, in painted houses—were willing to buy. But the experience of going door to door reminded Teddy of his father’s miserable year of encyclopedia-peddling, and his aversion to suffering such fatal humiliation would set off panic in him as his mother and aunt sent him out the door with his loaded basket of perhaps a dozen bunches, each tied prettily with a bow of red string. When a person came to the door he would sweat and stammer as if there were something deeply shameful in the vegetable itself, with its close, sour, secret fragrance and purplish head—as if he were trying to sell a part of his own body. His mother, seeing how deeply these innocent expeditions upset him, took mercy and would carry the asparagus herself, with an evident gregarious pleasure. She introduced herself to neighbor after neighbor; her Southern accent sounded at home here. It rarely took her more houses than there were bunches to empty her basket. Silently trailing along, he watched her do it but could only envy her simple confidence at putting herself forward, her lack of embarrassment about basic human transactions. Happily, the asparagus season didn’t last; by July the beds were clouded over with the feathery forms of stalks gone to seed. As the gardening season tapered into August, and the supper hour impinged on twilight, his mother asked at the kitchen table, in the slightly loud voice of a formal announcement, “Now, what can we all do about finding our Ted some real employment, that will take him out of himself?”
“The factory might take him on, but that doesn’t seem suitable for the son of a man with as much education as Clarence had,” Aunt Esther said. She was slender and sandy-haired like her late brother, her hair pulled back from a central parting to a strict-looking bun. That quality in her brother, handsomeness’s pale afterglow, which had made him seem fragile and misplaced, had imparted to her the strength of vanity. Before marrying she had given piano lessons but had never thought to work for a living since. Teddy tried to see what had attracted the unmentionable Horace, and what had eventually repelled him. Her features were regular and when she was young must have been fine, but her mind didn’t rise an inch out of her own skin and see beyond her immediate selfish needs, even to the extent that Mother’s did. Mother had enthusiasm, at least. When he asked her why Aunt Esther had never had children she answered carefully: “Well, I can’t absolutely say, but she was always vain of her figure and I think she didn’t want to be put to the inconvenience. Though Horace has done her a dreadful wrong, he had his provocations, the people around here let it be known.” Teddy did not imagine that from Aunt Esther’s standpoint he was more than a voracious boarder who should be put out into the community to bring back money. “Guilt checks” now and then arrived from Horace in envelopes without return addresses, and Jared spared them something every month from his expanding enterprises in New York, but the household was cash-poor, and not cheap to keep up, even with but one colored servant. Aunt Esther’s comfortable past, as the middle daughter of the righteous gravel-pit proprietor, floated on the merest excuse to her tongue. “He was the strangest boy,” she said of her brother, “his nose always in a book, and teaching himself foreign languages as if he was going to wander the globe. Then he never went anywhere, as it turned out. Like father, like son, it appears.”
His mother took up the challenge to her son, saying with a proud and wistful smile, beneath the liverish shadows that had come to stay beneath her eyes, “Teddy does take after his papa, in being able to amuse himself so easily, quiet in his room for hours. My dearest hope is in a year or two we might be able to scrape up enough to send him off to college. Wouldn’t he make a striking professor, with that wide brow and his solemn manner?”
Watching his father’s horrifying collapse had left Teddy with a number of aversions. The idea of his venturing out to the factory every day, with a tin lunch pail, sickened him, and so did the thought of teaching. In both factory and college, there would be all those probing, thrusting, jagged-edged other people to fit himself into, somehow, and compete with. He didn’t want to have to compete, and yet this seemed the only way to be an American. Be stretched or strike.
“Mother,” he protested. “We hardly have enough to eat on as is, you can’t go wasting it on me and college. What good did college do Dad and Jared?”
“Oh, it did your father no end of good. His education made his life and work possible.”
“And then made them impossible. If he hadn’t known so much he wouldn’t have had to quit the church.”
“He had to quit because his body failed,” she said, turning her impressive head, with its symmetrical pile of shining hair, to include the others in this reassurance. “His mind stayed clear to the end.”
“Too clear, that was the trouble, don’t you remember?” Teddy said. “He lost his faith.” It exasperated the boy to the point of tears, the way she was always remaking the truth, so the simplest facts of their family history kept sliding around underneath them. He used to wonder how the stories of Jesus’ miracles and Resurrection could have been spread across the world if they were not true, but his mother had showed him how.
“He didn’t lose his faith, he lost his voice,” she calmly informed her sister-in-law. Esther, like her brother, was a Presbyterian, and unlike him had remained staunch.
Young Esther, as they had to call her here, said to Teddy, “Hey, you can’t say Rutgers didn’t do Jared any good; a lot of the business connections over in New York come out of friendships he made at Rutgers. College men have a bond, even when they don’t finish.”
“Well, I’m not even starting.”
“Oh, little darling, don’t say that,” his mother urged him. “You have a brain it would be a sin to waste. Remember the parable of the talents.”
“My brain isn’t much, really,” he said. Nor was his stubby, plump body. He knew himself, and was willing to leave the aspiring to others; that should make things easy. “Look, I’m willing to work, I want to work. I just don’t know at what.”
“That was what high school was supposed to tell you,” Aunt Esther said. “Which subjects took your fancy? Chemistry? There’s a lot of talk about chemistry in this state.”
“Accountants,” his sister chipped in. “The accountants up at Weidmann pulled down their twenty a week and never got their hands dirty, and skipped out early on Fridays. There’s always going to be a need for men who can handle
Teddy volunteered, “I don’t want to sell anything, and I don’t want to teach anything.”
“Well, that knocks down two big Indians,” Aunt Esther dryly commented, taking some satisfaction from the hopelessness of the case.
“And I don’t want to make anything,” he added, thinking of those poor micks and wops and polacks and honkies stuck back in the mills, and their children, his classmates, stunted before they could straighten up, their places at the looms or dye vats all ready for them. Hands rotted, ears deafened, lungs clogged all so Milady could wear a silk ribbon in her hair.