Museums and Women by John Updike

into windows where children were snipping and pasting up, in season, Easter eggs and pumpkins, Christmas trees and hearts, hatchets and cherries. Almost always a breeze flowed through our two large rooms, now from bedroom to living room, from factory to school, and now the other way, bringing with it the sounds of street traffic, which included the drunks on the pavement outside the Original Mario’s. Ours was the third floor—the lowest we have ever lived.
    Fred came promptly at seven. As he climbed the stairs, I thought the woman behind him was his wife. Indeed, she resembled his wife—an inch taller, perhaps, and a bit more adventurously dressed, but the same physical type, heavy and rounded below the waist, slender above. The two women had the same kind of ears, cupped and protruding, which compelled the same cover-up hairdo and understated earrings.Fred introduced her to us as Priscilla Evans. Jeanne had not known Marjorie Prouty well, yet to ask her to meet and entertain this other woman on no basis beyond the flat implication of her being Fred’s mistress was, as perhaps Fred in his infatuation imperfectly understood, a
gaffe
. Jeanne reached forward stiffly to take the girl’s hand.
    A “girl” more by status than by age. Priscilla was, though unmarried and a year or two younger, one of us—I never knew where Fred met her, but it could have been at work or a party or a crew race, if he still went to them. She had the social grace to be tense and quiet, and I wondered how Fred had persuaded her to come. He must have told her I was a very close friend, which perhaps, in his mind, I was. I was New Haven to him, distant and safe; touchingly, his heart had never left that middling town. I would like to reward the loyalty of a ghost by remembering that evening—hour, really, for we did not invite them for dinner—as other than dull. But, in part because Jeanne and I felt constrained from asking them any direct questions, in part because Priscilla put on a shy manner, and in part because Fred seemed sheepishly bewildered by this party he had arranged, our conversation was stilted. We discussed what was current in those departed days: McCarthy’s fall, Kefauver’s candidacy, Dulles’s tactlessness. Dulles had recently called Goa a “Portuguese province,” offending India, and given his “brinkmanship” interview, offending everyone. Priscilla said she thought Dulles deserved credit for at least his honesty, for saying out loud what everybody knew anyway. It is the one remark of hers that I remember, and it made me look at her again.
    She was like Marjorie but with a difference. There was something twisted and wry about her face, some arresting trace of pain endured and wisdom reluctantly acquired. Her life, I felt, had been cracked and mended, and in this her form differed from that of Fred’s wife or, for that matter, of my own.My attention, then, for an instant snagged on the irregularity where Fred’s spirit had caught, taken root, and hastily flourished. I try to remember them sitting beside each other—he slumped in the canvas sling chair, she upright on the half of the Sheraton settee nearer him. He had reddish hair receding on a brow where the freckles advanced. His nose was thin and straight, his eyes pale blue and slightly bulged behind the silver-frame spectacles that, through some eccentricity of the nose pads, perched too far out from his face. Fred’s mouth was one of those sharply cut sets of lips, virtually pretty, that frown down from portraits on bank walls. An atavistic farmerishness made his hands heavy; when he clasped his knee, the knuckles were squeezed white. In the awkward sling chair, he clasped his knee; his neck seemed red above the fresh white collar; he was anxious for her. He quickly, gently disagreed with her praise of Dulles, knowing we were liberals. She sat demure, yet with a certain gaudy and provocative tone to her clothes, and there was—I imagine or remember—a