Free Assorted Prose by John Updike Page A

“Out of Town.” Framed by the window marked “Postal Savings” (another of Summerfield’s victims, along with the nib pen), the postmaster himself is seen—his shirtsleeves secured by elastics, his glasses hung on the tip of his nose—alternately dispensing gossip and stamped envelopes. Beside him stands his wife, a pencil in her hair, weighing packages. Some are enormous; she forces a grin as she lifts them. Over by the wall, next to the radiator, the town idler lingers, pretending to fill out money-order blanks. Uncle Sam gesticulates from the bulletin board; a W.P.A. mural, executed with Assyrian dignity, fades above the transom. The laughter of the sorting clerks filters in from the back room.… The vision fades.
    Instead, we see a cinder-block cube, painted indigo, scarlet, and ivory. Within, a loudspeaker murmurs cocktail music as shoppers promenade along clearly marked lanes, between pyramids of sanitarily wrapped Defense Bonds, postcards, and stamps. A sign proclaims, “5¢ STAMP SPECIAL— 1,000 FOR $49.98.” Another importunes, “ SEND A PACKAGE TO BRITAIN FOR JUST 20¢ DOWN. ” At the door sits a young man in white,hammering a cash register; $2,000,000,000.00 is the sum he has just rung up.
Old and Precious
    March 1957
    U P AT THE T HIRTEENTH A NNUAL N ATIONAL A NTIQUES S HOW , held in the not undingy basement of Madison Square Garden, we saw more old and precious things than you could shake a stick at. For that matter, a person shaking a stick in among all those Staffordshire inkwells, Baccarat chandeliers, hurricane lamps, crystal
bobêches
, Japanese
netsukes, doré
bronze candelabra, Zuñi necklaces, Bohemian tankards, vellum music sheets, bisque clocks, Basque jugs, and specimens of dragware, cream-ware, queen’s ware, stoneware, pearlware, and colored, cut, blown, pressed, and authentic milk glass would doubtless be removed from the premises—quite properly, too. All the booths—and they were legion—were numbered. We paused by F-15, distinguished by a huge green metal cow, a hideous brittle pillar about the size of an umbrella stand, and an 1807 sampler upon which a childish artisan had inscribed, “May I with equal art engrave each gentle Virtue on my heart and as Life wears away may I grow wiser and better each Day. The Ways of Wisdom are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.” Anxious to set off on the pleasant ways of wisdom, we asked F-15’s proprietor, a tall, elegantly turned-out gentleman, what the cow was. “A weather vane,” he said, in a tone of who-doesn’t-know-that.
    “It looks heavy for the purpose,” we said.
    “On the contrary, it’s light. It’s hollow,” he said, and rapped the creature’s resounding flank, then punched its head. “They always weighted the head, for balance, so it would turn.”
    “Oh. And that?” We indicated the umbrella stand.
    “Hungarian. Made in Budapest. Eighteenth-century.”
    “Uh, what does it do?” we asked.
    “Do? It doesn’t do, it
is
,” he replied. “It’s a pedestal. Something stood on it. Now,
that
is a stein.” He pointed at a ponderous mug decoratedwith drunken trolls doing the Germanic version of the light fantastic in the convex confines of a bas-relief tavern, and waved us off.
    At G-5, we studied a
fin-de-siècle
painting of a child with elevated eyeballs. The nineteenth century, to judge by the relics recovered from its ruins, had a much keener
Innigkeit
toward animals than toward human beings. The innocence of the child’s face was so vacuous, so total, that it gave us a queer, embarrassing impression of nudity. In fact (forgive us if we sermonize), the Victorian era was, in its sly way, appallingly naked. Gladstone’s minions made lamp bases out of the bodies of young marble girls and covered footstools with cloth the pink of painted skin. Even the vases—florid, nippled, with provocative concavities—are scarcely fit for twentieth-century eyes. Seeking chastity, we turned to the consoling