The Centaur by John Updike Page A

knew best of him, for, the one in the family with the youngest eyes, it was my job to remove with my mother’s tweezers the microscopic brown thorns that on his weed-pulling walks around our farm would gather in the dry, sensitive, translucently mottled skin of his palms.
    “Thanks, Pop, we’ll need ’em,” my father said, wrenching the door open with a quick undercurrent of splintering. He never turned the knob quite enough, so the catch always resisted. “My goose is cooked,” he said, glancing at his clock. My mother’s cheek brushed mine as I followed him.
    “And if there’s anything I
hate
in my
house
,” she called after my father, “it’s cheap red
clocks
.”
    Safe on the porch, my father striding around the corner, I looked back, which was a mistake. The toast in my mouth turned salty at the sight. My mother, in the momentum of her last cry, went to the wall and, silent through the glass, tore theelectric clock from its nail on the wall and made as if to dash it to the floor but then, instead, hugged it with its trailing cord like a baby to her bosom, her cheeks wetly shining. Helplessly her eyes widened, confronting mine. She had been a beautiful young woman and her eyes had not aged. Each day her plight seemed to startle her afresh. Behind her, her father, his head bowed obsequiously, his elastic jaws munching, shuffled across the floor back to his place in the living-room. I wanted to move my face into some expression of consolation or humorous communication but felt it frozen with fear. Fear for her and of her.
    And yet, love, do not think that our life together, for all its mutual frustration, was not good. It was good. We moved, somehow, on a firm stage, resonant with metaphor. When my grandmother lay dying in Olinger, and I was a child, I heard her ask in a feeble voice, “Will I be a little debil?” Then she took a sip of wine and in the morning she was dead. Yes. We lived in God’s sight.
    My father was striding across the sandpaper lawn. I chased him. The little tummocks raised by moles in warm weather made it buckle in spots. The barn wall was full in the sun, a high dappled pentagon. “Mother almost smashed the clock,” I told him when I caught up. I meant this to shame him.
    “She’s in a funny mood,” he said. “Your mother’s a real femme, Peter. If I’d been any kind of man I would have put her on the burlesque stage when she was young.”
    “She thinks you tease Grampop.”
    “Huh? Does she? I’m wild about Pop Kramer. He’s the nicest man I ever knew. I worship that man.”
    Words seemed whittled and diminished by the still bluevolumes of cold air that clove our cheeks. Our black Buick, a ’36 fourdoor, waited by the barn, facing downhill. That car had had a beautiful swanky grille; my father, unexpectedly—for material things meant little to him—had taken childish pride in those slim parallels of chrome. Last fall, Ray Deifendorf’s muddy old Chevy had stalled on the high school lot and my father with his usual impulsive Christianity had volunteered to push him and, just when they had reached a good speed, Deifendorf through some stupidity braked, and our car’s grille smashed on Deifendorf’s bumper. I wasn’t there. Deifendorf himself told me, laughing, how my father had rushed around to the front and gathered up all the bits of broken metal, muttering to himself, “Maybe they can weld it together, maybe Hummel can weld it together.” This hopelessly shattered grille. The way Deifendorf told it I had to laugh too.
    The bright fragments still rode around in the trunk, and our car’s face had jagged front teeth. It was a long, heavy car, and the cylinders needed to be rebored. Also it needed a new battery. My father and I got in and he pulled out the choke and switched on the ignition and listened, head cocked, to the starter churn the stiff motor. There was frost on the windshield that made the interior dim. The resurrection felt impossible. We listened so