About the Author
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SHE HAD DARK and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
April 21
Dearest Charles—
The distance between us grows, even as my pen hesitates. The engines drone in the spaces between words, eating up the miles, the acres of the flat farms in big brown and green squares below the wing as it inches along. I close my eyes and see our white house, its two screened porches and long glassy conservatory, its peek at the sea and the rocks of the cove—those gray rocks you and Pearl and I have picnicked on so many times and that when the sun beats on their veins feel warm even in February—and its undulating lap of lawn and the bulb bed so happy and thrusty with leaves, now that spring has come. Do leave a note for the lawn boys when they come tomorrow to set their big wide reel mower a notch higher, since last Tuesday they scalped that area over by the roses, where the ground bulges up. How often I’ve spoken to them about it, and with what results! Of course it’s not always the same boys, year after year.
I bought two extra boxes each of your apple granola and unprocessed bran—so you have breakfasts at least for a month. You may wish to speak to Mrs. Kimball about coming now more than once a week. As you know Thursday is her day and I always try to tidy up for her, especially the kitchen and our bedroom. She arrives around noon. If you can’t bring yourself to make the bed at least pull the covers up and smooth the puff. The most gracious thing, the day she comes, is to air the bed for the morning with the puff and covers down and windows open to get our body smells out but possibly such refinements were wasted on her anyway. Also: she knows where the front-door key is hidden down up in under the garbage-can bin lid, the door on the right, and puts it back there when she goes home, but don’t leave the burglar alarm on when you go off in the morning—I did once, as you may remember, absent-mindedly when Irving switched yoga lessons at Midge’s to Thursday morning because the boy who helps him in the framing shop had to go to his grandmother’s funeral or something and the police came as they’re supposed to (though not very promptly, she later confided) and poor Mrs. K. with that crooked heavy-lidded eye of hers that makes her look dishonest in any case had a terrible time explaining, since though I trust her with the key I could never bring myself to trust her with the code to the burglar-alarm system—it seemed too intimate. She does, incredible though it may seem to us, have a sex life and who knows with what kind of men who might casually get it out of her? Whereas it would take a real conscious betrayal for her to cold-bloodedly take a key to the hardware store and have duplicates made on that nasty-sounding little machine. You might ask her if she can give you Mondays as well. The thing about dust and dirt that men don’t realize is it doesn’t just sit there, it sinks in.
I withdrew half of our joint accounts, all the ones I could find records of—the 5½% checking, the savings account at 6½%, and the capital account in Boston at 7¼% (I think). Indeed, I took a teeny bit more than half since the CDs are tied up for six months at a time and you have all the Keogh and medical-partnership retirement-plan money stashed away that you’ve always been rather cagey and secretive about, not to mention those tax-shelter real-estate partnerships Ducky Bradford got you into years ago and that you said would be too much trouble and might alert the IRS to put into our joint name—one of the things I suppose I’ve always resented without admitting it to myself is how you tended to call money “yours” that we really earned together since not only was I keeping up our lovely home to enhance your image with your patients and fellow-doctors and raising our daughter virtually unassisted since you were always at the office for reasons that didn’t dawn on poor innocent me for years, not to mention how while you so heroically (everybody kept telling me) slogged through medical school and internship I was the one who gave up two years of college and any chance of going on to graduate school—I was majoring, you have no doubt forgotten, in French philosophy, Descartes to Sartre—it’s amazing to me what I once knew and have forgotten, all that being and nothingness and cogito ergo sum, all I remember now is essence precedes existence, or is it the other way around?—anyway I loved it then, and fantasized myself as Simone de Beauvoir or Simone Weil and instead substitute-taught French and sewing at that terrifying parochial school in Somerville, those clammy-faced nuns and priests who I swear did act a bit lecherous even though nobody in those days believed they could, and stood on my feet all day in the boutique in Porter Square where it turned out their real business was selling pot in little Marimekko sachets. And you have also no doubt forgotten that your tuition fees were partly paid out of that trust fund Daddy had set up for me.
As to the stocks—I had intended to sell only half but then couldn’t decide which ones and since everybody agrees the market can’t keep rising like it has been I told the broker at Shearson Lehman to go and unload them all. He sent me these forms requiring both our signatures and I rummaged through your desk for one of those big black felt-tips you always use—that same imperious C-scrawl you use on prescriptions and checks and even on the love-note to that brainless LPN you were fucking that time I discovered the Christmas present you were going to give her in your golf-club closet (a Wedgwood shepherdess!—no doubt some private erotic joke in that, to your little Bo-Peep)—I know it so well, that signature, it’s been branded into me, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it burned into my flank if I looked down, char for Charles, it felt wonderful writing it—being you for a second, with all your dark unheeding illegible male authority. I had meant to divide the amount but Shearson Lehman sent it all in one big check though I had asked the young man I talked to not to—Midge was saying they get them all out of Tufts and Northeastern, these baby brokers now, the smart boys from Harvard and Brandeis go to Hong Kong or straight to Wall Street where the huge money is—but it came in one check anyway and I figured that if the market goes down as it’s certain to—even Irving was saying the other day it will, according to the astrological signs—then I’m saving us both money and maybe should award myself a commission. So I have. Anyway, darling, you have all the house and furniture plus the Cape house and the acres in New Hampshire we bought as an investment in case the Loon Mountain condos ever spread that way. Besides taking my jewelry—you can’t object to that, some of it was Great-grandmother Perkins’s and you gave me the other things, the moonstone brooch for our fifth anniversary and the pear-cut diamond pendant for our tenth and for our fifteenth those rather ugly though I know expensive rectangular emerald earrings I always thought with my dark hair and rich complexion made me look too much like a squaw, a Navajo in turquoise chunks—I rented a big safe-deposit box and put in it the silver teapot with the side-hinged lid and the oblong salver with the big monogrammed P and embossed rim in rope motif that came from the Prices, and the chest of Adam flatware and those lovely fluted double-serpentine candleholders from the Peabodys, and Daddy’s coin collection and those old editions of Milton and the Metaphysicals he scandalized his family by spending so much money on the year he went to London to learn the luxury-leather business and didn’t, plus some other few odd old family things, I forget what. It’s a huge box, much bigger than a breadbox, and the girl at the bank and I both struggled sliding it back into its empty space, like a pair of weakling undertakers grunting and straining in the crypt. I have both keys, don’t bother looking.
