In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
“How come you never went?” Clark asked.
The retired mailman turned his profile into the tinted glare of the windshield and his thin lips gathered into a pugnacious pursed hardness—a Wilmot kind of mouth. “Never seemed to need it,” he allowed. “Stopped dead after Dad died.” He reflected a bit more, thinking back. “I must have had a grudge.” A patch of whiskers his razor had skimmed over showed white stubble in the glare. Just by the silver fence a strip of marsh lay undisturbed and out of it flew two great blue herons, the S of their necks straightening as their shadowy wings labored to beat their arrowing bodies into the air and away.
“Grudge?”
His grandfather slowly scratched his jaw at the very spot where the razor had skipped. “This’ll sound strange, coming out of the way people used to think, but it seemed to me God could have given Dad a sign. To help him out. Just a little sign would have done it, and cost God nothing much. Damned if I’d go to church to sing His praises after that. Mother never pushed me on it, either, much as church meant to her. Actually I think I scared her. Emily came along, and went in my place. I would never take the comfort away from those it comforts, and I don’t mean to bother your head with this, Clark—you asked, and I answered the best I can remember. It’s all a long while ago. Now we have a President resigned, and nothing’s sacred.”
He waited for Clark to say something, to argue with his position possibly. But Clark could think of nothing to say; the thought of God, right there by the glossy white gas tanks that could explode in a fiery ball as big as an atom bomb might make, frightened him, so his tongue felt enormous and numb.
His grandfather put the key in the ignition and said kindly, “Sometime when you’re here for a weekend we ought to drive up to Paterson and see how much is left that I remember. It seemed the center of the universe then; the silk strike made headlines all over the country.” He put the heavy Chrysler in gear. “Now let’s go home and see what good thing Mother has cooked up for us.” In this sentence “Mother” meant his wife.
After he had graduated from St. Andrew’s, and come back to college at U.C.L.A. in Westwood, and dropped out when it seemed a really good opportunity in an independent production unit of mostly young people had started up to make a picture that would cash in on the Superman craze (only he wouldn’t be called Superman or after any superhero in copyright, and all of his superhuman effects like bending a crowbar or lifting a steam engine wouldn’t come off, hilariously, which also meant a big saving on special effects), and drifted back to take some classes when he couldn’t take any more crap from the snotty head of production, who seemed to get his kicks putting a star’s son down, just with little nasty subtle things, and Clark had told him what he thought of him—after all this, while waiting for the right combination to click, sleeping to noon and watching MTV or the old movies on cable and wondering why the people in these black-and-white screwball comedies talked so fast and loud—audiences then must have understood them but he couldn’t—and phoning around and showing up at Ma Maison or Jimmy’s or Spago or the Colony with the right-looking chick, who for all her leather mini and see-through blouse and pierced nostril and stiletto-heeled purple vinyl boots and the butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder blade was a nice-enough good-hearted girl who like him had improved her mood with a few too many chemicals and hoped that just showing up at these places redolent of success would catch her up in the gears, the magic mechanism that maneuvered the trip to the stars, and then going to the parties in somebody or other’s absent parents’ house with everybody a different flavor of stoned it seemed and the water in the swimming pool lit from underneath like a piece of sky upside down by wobbly golden bulbs and the pet Russian wolfhound lying out on the terrace watching with a worried look and wanting to play with the chewed yellow tennis ball between his long white paws but nobody playful, everyone too wasted and self-absorbed and carefully moussed and pinned together to go entertain a dog, all this arduously attained and Mex-trimmed multi-million-dollar home being turned into the shit of boring chatter going nowhere, not even to bed, people too strung-out and scared of or tired of the idea of love, the moviemakers had done love, the songwriters had done it, what was left were jagged images, one after another, mocking, slicing in MTV like sharks’ mouths in a feeding frenzy in that documentary about the Great Barrier Reef—during all this his grandfather would send him patient letters from Basingstoke, in stamped envelopes and the address very tidy in its numbers, the high Los Angeles numbers that amused the former small-town mailman. The letters were in acknowledgment of the affection the boy had shown him and attempted to respond to the need he had sensed in his grandson, for a faith. But Teddy had no faith to offer; he had only the facts of daily existence. Weather, family news, local change.
February 19, 1983
Dear Clark:
It’s been a mild winter so far but it’s only February so anything can still happen. I have seen it snow a foot in March.
Emily has been having a time with her leg and her breathing; an infirmity like that certainly adds to the bothers of old age, but she has never been a person to complain. It gives me pleasure to wait on her, after all the years she’s waited on me.
The drug store, you will remember, where she and I met down at the corner of Rodney and Elm has changed hands again. It’s been empty for some months, even the Liggett’s up the street couldn’t match the prices at the cut-rate at the mall over toward Red Lion.
It is sad to see the old big windows empty and the door at the corner boarded across. When I was your age I would have thought if anything was going to last forever it was Seth Addison’s drug store and Wayne Phillips’ bank down the street but both were just here for a time it turns out.
The whole block has changed—a pit full of bricks where the Roxie was and the Oddfellows’ Hall locked up for lack of new members. A video store where the pool tables used to be. People blame the malls but it’s not all the malls it’s that people don’t have the loyal sense of community they used to. Also the young people are too busy making ends meet.
Your grandmother and I were both sorry to hear from your mother that your latest job hasn’t been working out. It sounds like they don’t really want anybody to be creative. They just want to imitate what has proven to be a success before. That’s the mall mentality all over.
Don’t be discouraged, Clark. We all know you have ability to spare to do the necessary and make your future. There were plenty around here ready to laugh at your mother but she held fast to her dreams. Now those same people come to me expecting some touch of magic to rub off. I tell them, Essie did it herself, we just loved her. We had never expected something so pretty to come out of us.
Your Uncle Danny has been posted to East Germany and that’s all he’s allowed to say about it. We enjoyed seeing him and his family several times when he was back in Washington on leave. His little ones are cute as buttons and he’s putting on some weight. These Asian women know how to take care of a man.
Even the post office has been moved out of town to a new facility located on what used to be beet fields, meant to serve three communities. But you’re supposed to buy your stamps from a machine and the men and women at the window are mostly colored and don’t know you and don’t care. In my day we gave everybody personal service and often delivered letters without an address, just a name.
Well that’s enough grousing from this old party. We still have some of the books and little tapes you used to bring down from St. Andrew’s on weekends and then forgot. Whenever we talk about wrapping them up and sending them it gives us the blues so we’ve been lazy about it. Next time you’re here you can take them away.
It was the same way when my sister Esther died and Pete was keen to get their place ready for sale but I couldn’t make myself go over and sort out the old things she had in the attic from the Paterson days. She hadn’t wanted to move down here from that area but came because I begged her. She was always a good sport, thinking of others, never of he
Now Mother is calling me to dinner. The six o’clock news says a storm may be heading up from the Carolinas this weekend but I doubt it will amount to more than rain or a few inches. With the big ones there’s a taste of iron in the air and the hair on your arms stands up in the electricity.
Mother says a hug from her to you and to get your rest. Sufficient sleep is the sine qua non, my father used to say.
Fondly,
Grandfather Wilmot
Clark sometimes thought being better-looking would have solved his problems. Hollywood was a town based on looks and those who didn’t meet the minimal standard were non-persons; people looked right through you. Not that he was ugly: like his grandfather, he was harmless-looking, bland. But he had not inherited either his mother’s fine-whittled bones and glowing skin and taut, sultry features or his father’s lithe charm and head of curly hair. Matthias Lazlo was in and out of his son’s life like a rumor of grace. His failures as a scriptwriter, his unwavering commitment to last year’s formulas and the ageless power of pure triteness, did not destroy his career; people liked having him around. He was a native golden boy with a seasoning of Hungarian charm. He blended in. Hollywood, its sunshine and sexual plenty and cheerful rapacity, its comically desperate dependence on the whims of a global public, made him happy. He was incorruptible in his happiness, and that made the people around him feel better. Clark’s mother saw the industry as fraught with peril, a wheel turning faster and faster beneath her slowing feet; Matthias Lazlo, with maybe one screen credit a year, saw it as swarms of talented, hard-working specialists in beauty and excitement whose epic task had shifted from easing a nation’s pain with entertainment to easing the pain of the entire free and third worlds, not excluding parts of Eastern Europe. His idea of fatherhood had been a night game against the Mets at Dodger Stadium, a birthday dinner at Chasen’s, a game of tennis at the Hillcrest Country Club, a couple of lo-fat mushroom-burgers at Carneys on the Strip, or, a few years later, an attempt at a double pickup at the Hard Rock Café, over on La Brea. It was his father, depressingly, who always got the play, from, say, the magenta-haired girl with silver sprinkles around her eyes and a bleach-spattered denim vest over a flesh-colored bra and bare belly.
So he liked it that at the Temple of True and Actual Faith he was the suave one, the slick outside operator, the one who gave the TV interview when Jesse refused to come out of his bedroom. Zebulun was a well of money but his brains had been baked somewhere back in the pineapple fields. Matthew—the broad-faced, near-sighted, fast-talking son of an Adventist preacher back in Indiana—had his relentless, humorless powers of persuasion but could only talk to other Adventists; when he got among people reared on other premises, with no expectation of a Prophet and of the world’s soon ending, he was lost, dumbfounded by the vastness of such skepticism. With his mother’s milk Matthew had taken in heated, fine distinctions in scriptural interpretation; that the Bible was not divine in every phrase and comma had never seriously occurred to him. Luke and Jonas had been with Jesse a long time, from near the start, and had his cowboy hardness without the playful streak, the mystical bemusement. Their clothes, but for the big polished silver belt buckles, looked as if they had rolled in the corral in them. Their wiry bodies and withered, unforgiving faces made Clark feel soft and smooth; he sensed their dislike. He was an outsider, a non-rube. In their minds the wagons were circled and anything that moved outside the circle presented a target. Mephibosheth was far milder, an intensely practical man—a skilled carpenter and amateur electrician and plumber who with his wife, Mercy, had been converted after reading a hostile, sardonic account of the Temple in the Grand Junction newspaper. Belief, unaccountably, had dawned on them both; they had talked through that night all about it, discovering this miracle in each other, and, the next day, began to sell their home. They had brought three half-grown children and devoted themselves to the orderly running of this commune on the lines of their former household. Tom and Jim, like Clark, were a few years one side or the other of thirty, and like him had found the outside world unrewarding. They were educated; Tom had been a trained physical therapist in rehab clinics, and Jim (Tom’s first cousin) and Jim’s wife, Polly, had both been high-school teachers, of business math and Spanish respectively. Though Clark should have felt most at home with them, and did not dislike them, their commitment had a casual, half-hearted quality—a kind of “Well, why not?”—that disturbed him, quickening what was left of his own incredulity. They were too much like the California people he had come here to escape. He preferred the quaint, stolid company of Mephibosheth, who spoke of himself and Mercy as “sunk in the pit of Hell so deep we didn’t know we was burning,” and of Zebulun, whose alarming gaps of sense were smoothed over by a Polynesian benignity as deep as the Pacific. Each day took Zebulun slightly by surprise, giving him a small perpetual smile and a giggle quick to spring forth and quick to shut down. He lived to please Jesse, and brought back guns from trips to Texas and Nevada, those free-wheeling super-American states, as a lover would bring bouquets of roses. A company of believers is like a prisonful of criminals: their intimacy and solidarity are based on what about themselves they can least justify.
August 28, 1988
Dear Clark:
Now with Mother taken from me I rattle around and the day seems so long there’s no getting from one end of it to the other. I wake up feeling like I’ve been dumped at the foot of a mountain and can’t possibly climb it. Just to shave my kisser seems more than a body can do.
Those years when we had your mother and Danny and my mother all here with us I would never have thought the day would arrive when this little house is too big. But it feels like the governor’s mansion.
A girl comes in once a week, one of Loretta Bacheller’s girls, and gives it a going-over with the vacuum, but I make it easy for her by hardly setting foot in more than two rooms, my bedroom and the kitchen and back. When Em was slowing down we put a TV in both rooms, to spare her the steps.
They keep thrashing this Iran-contra thing but they’ll never get Reagan the way they got Nixon. The American people like him too much and we’re tired of agitation. This Roseanne character on TV tickles me. Vulgar some would say, but she tells it like it is.
I confess it raised my eyebrows when you first joined up with this Temple but if it settles you down and gives you comfort there’s no complaint from me. I never minded other people believing, and maybe being surrounded by two good believing women as I was freed me up to coast along with the Lord’s forbearance. Looking back I wonder if Dad didn’t believe more than he knew, and that’s what made him so serene at the end. I hope when my turn comes shortly I make no more fuss than my old man.
I’m not expecting to omit dying from my schedule entirely the way my brother Jared seems to be. I must say it is a strange development to have two Wilmots out on those Colorado peaks. Back in Paterson we couldn’t imagine anything bigger than Garrett Mountain. On a Sunday half the town’s laboring class went up there and it was a glorious sight to see, the pretty Irish girls and the young Italian dyers.
Speaking of Paterson, I finally did get back there. Ira had some business with a nursery in Clifton and asked me if I’d like to ride up, now that I’m on my own. He and Benjy Whaley try to keep me entertained now and then. Benjy has done real well in electronic repair and I’m not just any old local geezer, I’m your mother’s dad.
It knocked the wind out of me, seeing the old town. The Falls is still there, bigger than when I was a boy because the mills aren’t drawing water off, and the grand buildings, the City Hall and Courthouse and the old Post Office, the prettiest of them all I always thought, standing on the edge of acres of rubble.
Pretty near everybody is black. Those that aren’t are spic. Market Street looked like something out of Haiti, it felt to me like carnival time, all these boom boxes and the girls in bright rags and not much of them, the men standing around laughing as though every day was a legal holiday. It makes you re
There are parking lots the size of tobacco farms all over town. The mills are gone from one side of the river and some of the others have been turned into a museum. The highway dumped us off into all these streets that have become one-way.
Dad’s church up near the Library had become an African Baptist and didn’t look like it was thriving. The brick parsonage with all the lovely old walnut woodwork inside had been torn down for a housing project along Straight Street.
Ira had his appointment in Clifton so I didn’t press him to drive up Twenty-seventh Street to where we lived after the parsonage. I couldn’t remember exactly the number anyway, which surprised me.
Don’t think I was put off. The memories weren’t so happy. There was a lot of ugliness to the mills, and the noise they made you could hear all over town, grinding up human lives. The noise and the streets filthy with horse manure. Today we have problems but we did then too. I’d rather see people jigging down the middle of Market Street than huddled in those slave shacks over on Beaver Road.
This Jesse Smith seems a sincere and interesting man from the material you sent me. I can’t follow a lot of interpretations, bringing these old stories up to modern times. What I never liked was the way the voices of ministers sounded when they got up there in the pulpit—like they were simultaneously begging and bossing. My dad lost his voice, literally, under the strain.
I don’t expect anything of dying but then I never expected too much of life. That way, you can’t be disappointed. I got more than I expected, as it turned out. Em and the Postal Department were mighty good to me.
I’m trying these days to make myself stop listening for her step. One thing about her, her step was like nobody else’s. You always knew where she was. It impressed me when I first got to know her how fast she could skip along regardless.