In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
“Clark, I can hear in how you tell this that you loved your mother very much. You suffered along with her, though you were helpless.”
“Did I? I didn’t think I did. She was so famous my only way out from under her was to poke fun of her, really. She had these Fifties mannerisms—arching her eyebrows, pushing her mouth at the lens—that were easy to poke fun of. I used to do an imitation of her at school. People thought it was hilarious, coming from me. Hey—could I get a beer, do you think? My mouth’s drying out.”
“Friend, we keep no alcohol here at the Temple. We consider each body a temple in miniature.”
“Not even a beer? I was reading the other day how some scientific studies prove that it’s actually good for you—”
Jesse had touched Clark on the upper arm; now he touched him on the knee. “Scientific studies show, brother, that alcohol and tobacco impair sexual potency, and this impairs a man’s bounden duty to disseminate his seed, as enjoined in Genesis, Leviticus, and the Song of Songs. In the Song of Solomon, six eight, we read, ‘There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number.’ ” The gold tooth winked; the tawny eyes flared; the hand lightly resting on Clark’s knee squeezed. There was a humidity in Jesse’s close presence, and a restriction in Clark’s throat, a kind of tight internal collar, though he prided himself on not, whatever his failings, having inherited his mother’s ridiculous tendency to stutter. “Keep that temple pure,” Jesse told him, “and it will function.”
“Yeah, well. What was I going to say? Something. I don’t want to bore you.”
“You will never find Jesse bored. Never by a recital of the truth. Weary, yes, and sore-laden with the sorrows of mankind, but never bored.”
Clark had these irritating memory blanks, more and more of them lately; but then the break in the film was mended and the inner movie resumed. Loving his mother. Basingstoke, and Locust Street, and the greenhouse. “Yes. I don’t know what all I felt about my mother, but I loved her parents. I was sent to prep school near this town in Delaware where they lived and got to know them. They’d tell me all these stories about Mom when she was a little girl, and I would feel jealous, I guess. She had been a celebrity to them right from the start. They had given her all this attention.”
“Attention is a good thing. Awareness of the Lord’s love is a better. ‘I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.’ Proverbs, eight seventeen.”
“Yeah. You know, Mom never mentioned God to me. One of the few times my grandparents came out to the West Coast, she had me baptized at the Presbyterian church over on North Gower in Hollywood, but that was as far as religion went. Her father was kind of notorious in the family for never going to church.”
“False witness is more to be deplored than no witness.” Jesse shifted weight in his chair, making the rungs squawk. He had long arms and a wide bald skull. Clark could see him as a hunter, narrowing one lion-yellow eye behind a gunsight. Jesse’s voice softened, explaining. “Your mother perhaps was jealous of her God and did not wish to share Him with the world, even with her son.”
“Well, that seems a bit—”
“God has a relation with us all, friend or foe, atheist or otherwise. God had brought your mother a long way, it must have seemed to her, by allowing her a role in these whorish entertainments, and she did not wish to imperil their pact by breathing a word of it. What she called God was Satan, and I tell you she did not wish to share her indecent joy in Satan, her copulations and blasphemy.”
Clark had to laugh at that. Maybe Satan was all cock. He found himself strengthened by this conversation. It was shaking up his head and settling the pieces in a new order. This guy’s head did even crazier riffs than his did. “Hey, if I may ask, who are you, you know, to tell me about my own mother? You’ve never even seen one of her movies. You sure about that, by the way? Cream Cheese and Caviar, with Paul Newman? Or the one after that, that I thought was even sexier, A Stitch in Time, about the model business, with Steve McQueen as this blocked, pansyish couturier—it’s the one time they let McQueen show what he could do being funny.”
“I am the only person you will meet,” said Jesse Smith, “who is not interested in your mother. I am interested in you.”
“You mentioned those ’67 movies; maybe in ’68 you saw Baby Breaks the Bank, in which she played a mother for the first time? It killed her, to be bumped up a generation. ‘Next thing,’ she told me, ‘I’ll be doing Bette Davis’s sister!’ When I saw her on the screen I was fascinated, she was such a better mother up there than she was with me—so warm and perky and really on top of the kid and his needs. She was great.”
“In 1968,” Jesse told him, shutting those pained red-rimmed eyes, “I was not viewing motion pictures. Courtesy of King Gog, I was in Vietnam, as a PFC, humping the paddies.”
“Oh, ’Nam! You were there? That’s cool. Was it as wild as they had it in Apocalypse Now, all that rock music blaring and explosions all over the place?”
“There was music,” the mountain-man said heavily. “There was drugs. There was fear, and there were wounds. We prayed to be wounded, and thus sent Stateside. We had the phrase, ‘a million-dollar wound.’ I cannot say that God pulled me to His bosom in Vietnam. I cannot say, Clark, that I took consolation in prayer. I was not there to draw close to the Lord. That was not the Lord’s purpose at that point in time. I was there to witness evil. I was there to descend into Hell.”
“My uncle’s in the CIA, but of course he never admits it. It’s part of their code.”
Hannah reappeared, still in her scarlet bell-bottom jumpsuit and après-ski boots in a purplish fake fur. Her eyes went wide as she approached Jesse; she was in awe of him, and hesitated to approach closer. “I don’t mean to interrupt—”
Jesse grunted and pushed his weight up from the chair onto his spindly legs in their tight jeans. On his feet he wore not cowboy boots but wool socks and those sandals that have little curved sides and a German name. What was it? Jesse put a heavy hand on Clark’s shoulder and told him, “My brother, you have unholy antecedents. And yet, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.’ Psalm one eighteen, also found in Matthew twenty-one. I sincerely love you. You have qualities yet to be tapped. I think you will learn to love me. Now here is Hannah, announcing her meal; go, eat.”
In the primitive whitewashed kitchen, with its black woodstove and dangling iron and copper pots, she fed him a bowl of thick lentil soup, and a chunk of dense home-baked bread, and a dish of sliced pears in a peppery syrup; she said the pears came from an old orchard on the property and had been put up as preserves by the women of the Temple.
“How the hell many of you are there?” Clark asked. The talk with Jesse, so hypnotic and lulling while it had been going on, had left him irritable. All he wanted was to get back to Bighorn and grab some sleep. He had to be manning the double chair to the top when it opened at seven-fifteen for the hotshots who liked to ski the night’s fresh powder. He remembered a few sparklike flakes of snow fluttering in the truck headlights. Above their heads on a high kitchen shelf an old hand-wound wooden-cased clock with a ruddy moon on its face dropped—plock, plock—hollow drops of time into his echoing skull.
“Close to forty, counting the children. People come and go, there are no rules. Jesse doesn’t believe in controlling people that way.”
“In what way does he believe in controlling them?”
“With love and instruction,” she answered, her catechetical promptness amusing her, too, denting the corners of her dry, Sissy Spacek lips.
“That works?”
“Yes, it does, usually.”
“How much of this skiing do you do? Isn’t that sort of extra-curricular?”
The synthetic fabric of her jumpsuit faintly crackled and hissed as she moved about, serving him. “We move in the world,” she said, “until the Reckoning. A number of the men hold jobs outside. One is an accountant, another a carpen
“At the Reckoning.”
“Yes. Then.”
“When is it coming?”
“Sooner than we think. Jesse is always studying Revelation, to find the exact date.”
There was a buzzing expectancy in his head like the static that speckles a television screen before the video clicks in. “You don’t think your pal Jesse might be pretty thoroughly crazy?”
Perhaps the look she gave him was only mock-reproachful. “How can you say that, after talking with him for all that time? Some of our guests he hardly says a word to—he takes quite a dislike to them. He didn’t to you.”
“I did most of the talking.”
“Yes, darling. He draws a person out. You want to tell him everything. I told him I missed skiing, and he said, ‘Go, do it.’ Jesse believes,” she said, keeping her face very straight, “in doing it.”
“I was filling him in on old movies. Why are you calling me ‘darling’?”
She moved back and forth, clearing the long plank table at whose end he had eaten, wiping his place clean with a blue sponge. “May one not call a husband ‘darling’?” she asked. “Would you like a cup of herbal tea?”
“I’m not your husband. Jesus. Let’s skip the herbal tea. All I want is to get back to Bighorn.”
“I’ll drive you back to Bighorn if that’s what you really want.” The sponge stopped describing its quick circles, and she swept breadcrumbs into her palm, cupped at the edge of the table. The sink was a long steel trough; above it, shelves held stacks of thick plates and square-bottomed cups. The same crude artist who had done the bright Crucifixion scenes in the living room had done a Last Supper in here, with the thirteen pairs of bare feet lined up underneath the tablecloth like a row of pink buns in a pastry shop. Dry snow ticked at the black windows.
“You can’t do that. It would take you two hours.”
“An hour and a half if the snow doesn’t get worse.”
“Isn’t there any place here I could sack out?”
“Of course. My room.”
“How would your local spaceman feel about that?”
“Spaceman?”
“Your guru. Jesse.”
“He would approve. We try not to be selfish here. Sleeping with you is a way of sleeping with him.”
“Oh, great.”
“Of being his perfect bride.”
“You’re his bride.”
“All the women at the Temple are his brides.”
“The old skunk. He’s fucked all of you? Whose children were those I saw?”
Hannah’s face, still bent close above his, reddened in color as she said, “Not mine. None of them. Yet.” Then, solemnly, she did a thing he really liked, a dash of mischief from the normal world: she dumped the breadcrumbs her cupped hand held onto his head, into his hair. Clark laughed, jumped up, scrubbed his head so the crumbs flew from it. Standing, he felt her tense body, slight and muscular, as a challenge, a physical unit equal to his.
“Your skiing,” he said. “Is it skiing, or fishing?”
“I do love to ski. I was a junior champion, back in Minnesota. The fishing, sometimes you get lucky. It has to be the right fish.”
“What’s right about me?”
“You acted lost. Talking to you, I got the feeling you weren’t going anywhere but weren’t content with that. You got drunk but didn’t like it in yourself. You’re ambitious, just like your wonderful mom. Let’s go to bed. You don’t have to make love to me.”
“Thanks a bunch. That was the one thing that was still making sense.”
Taking up a four-battery flashlight resting with others on a shelf, Hannah led him through a panelled white-painted door beyond the sink, through a storeroom stocked with cans and boxes of food that did not need refrigeration, down makeshift chilly corridors floored in bare plywood or industrial carpet, past closed doors and unlit branchings-off. The further they moved from the central farmhouse, the colder it got. Her flashlight’s watery bull’s-eye of a beam flitted across surfaces of bare pine and untaped sheetrock. From behind some of the doors that they passed he heard voices muttering, coughing, settling for the night. A child’s voice piped some unanswered question. A male and a female voice were entwined in a recitation that Clark recognized, from the single word “trespasses,” as the Lord’s Prayer. From a smell of wet clay and heated brick he gathered they were passing close to the pottery. At St. Andrew’s School in Delaware he had gone to many chapel sessions and this Spartan setting reminded him of a verse that had struck him as sadly human—Jesus complaining that the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Birkenstocks—that was the name of that funky kind of sandal. Hannah came to an unpainted flush door she pushed open; it lacked a lock.
Her cubicle held a single, headboardless bed and a plain bureau and table and kerosene lamp and a few pegs from which to hang clothes; the room had been storing cold air all day and their breaths were visible in the skidding flashlight beam. It was March but not yet spring. She found matches with which to light the bedside lamp and then a cylindrical space-heater standing on the bare floor. Ornate perforations on the heater’s top projected a wide wavery image, an abstract rose, on the seamed ceiling of plasterboard, so roughly slapped-up some of the joint tape drooped down. The bathroom with its icy white fixtures and sloppy caulking was down the hall; she went first, and when he came back—having dipped his finger in baking soda and rubbed it across his teeth in place of a brush—she was already within the narrow bed, looking like a child, her hair fanned on the pillow, her eyes two dabs of shadow and her nostrils two more.
“Turn off the lamp, my darling husband,” she said, in a return of her betranced voice. Though the heater flame softly roared and its rosy projection wavered and swung on the ceiling as if warmly alive, every surface in the room was still cold, including his own skin and the brass knob of the kerosene lamp. The orange flame leaped up in a last flickering as the wick withdrew into its circular sheath. Hannah’s staring face went dark and then returned in the rosy tint of the heater glow, which permeated the room as if its plywood walls might sympathetically spring into flame.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“My flannel nightie. It was too cold to be naked. The nightie lifts up.”
“What do you think about a condom?”
“Jesse says—”
“Let’s think for ourselves on this one little issue. They’re clammy, but they save many an itch. Not to mention—”
“I know. Don’t mention it. I hate even the word. Do you have one?”
“As it happens, with my debonair bachelor lifestyle, I do. Right next to my driver’s license.”
“You’re dear, really. You’re a dear fish, Clark.”
“We don’t have to fuck at all, you know.”
“Don’t you like me even that much?”
“Please—I do, I do. It’s just I’m so beat.” Nowhere to lay his head. “I’m freezing out here. My teeth are chattering. Can you hear them?”
She listened, they both listened. The wind was picking up, the window sash shivered in its frame, a ceiling joist creaked, a coyote howled far away, a sheep nearby baaed in fright. Back in Beverly Hills he would occasionally hear a coyote, out in Coldwater Canyon or beyond. Maybe the same coyote, cruising the West. Clark took off his boots but left on his thick socks; he took off his Norwegian sweater but left on his turtleneck; he took off his work pants and silk long johns and his underpants. He held his Trojan in its oily foil packet like a ticket of admission and slid into the bed. The margin of sheet beside her bit into his bare thighs so sharply he convulsively embraced her for
He hardly had energy to strip off the Trojan (the damn pubic hairs always caught) and to drop it on the floor before turning his back and falling asleep. The bed was so narrow Hannah had no choice but to curl her arm around him and to fit her body against his. Between fits of cloud the moon, that debunked deity, poured its borrowed light through the invisible wind; the sash vibrated and coyotes sang mournfully to one another. Even the foxes have holes.
Fuzzy dawn light met his eyes when she awoke him. The frosted shade of the kerosene lamp had the shape of an old-fashioned big-hipped woman. The heater had purred all night and the cubicle was so hot his neck was sweaty. Hannah was bent above him, whispering insistently, “Clark. It’s six o’clock, darling. Shall I drive you back to Bighorn?”
“Bighorn,” he said, as his consciousness escaped from his dreams, which had been as entangled and shallow as the pattern on Uncle Jared’s boastful boots. “They think I’m a jerk,” he told her. “Let me sleep, honey. I’ll give them a call later.” It was as when a boy he travelled to Europe with his mother, and after that first sleepless day of dazed excitement—the crooked damp streets, the shops with iron shutters, the strange rapid language, the buildings that looked different, solid and rhythmic and gray like monuments—a profound need opened within him, a need to fall and fall into the gauzy substance of oblivion, the bottomless world beneath the waking world—a need his mother would explain with the breezy phrase “a change of air.”