Free Bech by John Updike Page B

long blond hair—hopped out and raced back to Bech’s window, extending a soft hand that, as Bech docilely shook it, trembled like a bird’s breast. The boy’s plump face seemed falsified by the uncut mane; it engulfed his ears and gave his mouth, perhaps because it was unmistakably male, an assertive quarrelsome look. His eyebrows were sun-bleached to invisibility; his pallid blue eyes were all wonder and love.
    “Mr. Bech, hey. I couldn’t believe it was you.”
    “Suppose it hadn’t been me. How would you explain forcing me into this ditch?”
    “I bet you don’t remember who I am.”
    “Let me guess. You’re not Sabu, and you’re not Freddie Bartholomew.”
    “Wendell Morrison, Mr. Bech. English 1020 at Columbia, 1963.” For one spring term Bech, who belonged to the last writing generation that thought teaching a corruption, had been persuaded to oversee—it amounted to little more than that—the remarkably uninhibited conversations of fifteenundergraduates and to read their distressingly untidy manuscripts. Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. Living off fathers they despised, systematically attracted to the outrageous, they seemed ripe for Fascism. Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters like Miller and Tolkien and away from those austere, prim saints—Eliot, Valéry, Joyce—whose humble suppliant Bech had been. Bech even found fault with them physically: though the girls were taller and better endowed than the girls of his youth, with neater teeth and clearer skins, there was something doughy about their beauty; the starved, conflicted girls of Bech’s generation had had distinctly better legs. He slowly remembered Wendell. The boy always sat on Bech’s left, a fair-haired young Wasp from Stamford, crewcut—a Connecticut Yankee, more grave and respectful than the others, indeed so courteous Bech wondered if some kind of irony were intended. He appeared to adore Bech; and Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known. “You wrote in lower case,” Bech said. “An orgy with some girls in a house full of expensive furniture. Glints of pink flesh in a chandelier. Somebody defecated on a polar-bear rug.”
    “That’s right. What a great memory.”
    “Only for fantasies.”
    “You gave it an A, you said it really shook you up. That meant a hell of a lot to me. I couldn’t tell you then, I was playing it cool, that was my hang-up, but I can tell you now, Mr. Bech, it was real encouragement, it’s really kept me going. You were
great
.”
    As the loosening of the boy’s vocabulary indicated a prolonged conversation, the woman beside Bech shifted restlessly.Wendell’s clear blue eyes observed the movement, and obligated Bech to perform introductions. “Norma, this is Wendell Morris. Miss Norma Latchett.”
    “Morrison,” the boy said, and reached in past Bech’s nose to shake Norma’s hand. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he, Ma’am?”
    She answered dryly, “He’ll do.” Her thin brown hand rested in Wendell’s white plump one as if stranded. It was a sticky day.
    “Let’s
go
,” a child exclaimed from the back seat, in that dreadful squeezed voice that precedes a tantrum. Helplessly Bech’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. After two weeks, he was still unacclimated to the pressures of surrogate paternity. The child grunted, stuffed with fury; Bech’s stomach sympathetically clenched.
    “Hush,” the child’s mother said, slow-voiced, soothing. “Uncle Harry’s talking to an old student of his. They haven’t seen each other for years.”
    Wendell bent low to peer into the back seat, and Bech was obliged to continue introductions. “This is Norma’s sister, Mrs. Beatrice Cook, and her children—Ann, Judy, Donald.”
    Wendell nodded four times in greeting. His