Free The Centaur by John Updike Page A

so solemn, ‘and the Alton Railroad wait for no man.’ ”
    “Yeah but Pop,” my father said, “did you ever stop to think, does any man wait for time and tide?”
    At this absurdity my grandfather fell silent, and my mother, carrying a pot of simmering water for my coffee, went into the other room to defend him. “George,” she said, “why don’tyou go out and start the car instead of tormenting everybody with your nonsense?”
    “Huh?” he said. “Did I hurt Pop’s feelings? Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I meant what I said. I’ve been hearing that time and tide line all my life, and I don’t know what it means. What does it mean? You ask anybody, and the bastards won’t tell you. But they won’t be honest. They won’t admit they don’t know.”
    “Why, it means,” my mother said, and then hesitated, finding, as I had, that my father’s anxious curiosity had quite drained the saying’s simple sense away, “it means we can’t have the impossible.”
    “No, now look,” my father said, going on in that slightly high voice that forever sought a handhold on sheer surfaces, “I was a minister’s son. I was brought up to believe, and I still believe it, that God made Man as the last best thing in His Creation. If that’s the case, who are this time and tide that are so almighty superior to us?”
    My mother came back into the kitchen, bent over me, and poured the smoking water into my cup. I snickered up at her conspiratorily; my father was often a joke between us. But she kept her eyes on my cup as, holding the handle of the pan with a flowered potholder, she filled it without spilling. The brown powder, Maxwell’s Instant, made a tiny terrain on the surface of steaming water, and then dissolved, dyeing the water black. My mother stirred with my spoon and a spiral of tan suds revolved in the cup. “Eat your cereal, Peter,” she said.
    “I can’t,” I told her. “I’m too upset. My stomach hurts.” I wanted revenge for her snub of my flirting overture. It dismayed me that my father, that silly sad man whom I thought our romance had long since excluded, had this morning stolen the chief place in her mind.
    He was saying, “Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; it’s just that those old expressions get me so goddam mad I see red when I hear ’em. They’re so damn smug, is what gets my goat. If those old peasants or whoever the hell invented ’em have something to say to me, I wish they’d come right out and say it.”
    “George, it was
you
,” my mother called, “who brought it up in the first place.”
    He changed the subject. “Hey what time is it?”
    The milk was too cold, the coffee too hot. I took a sip and scalded my palate; following this the chill mush of the corn flakes was nauseous. As if to make good my lie, my stomach
did
begin to hurt; the ticking minutes pinched it.
    “I’m ready,” I shouted, “I’m ready, I’m ready.” I was like my father in performing for an unseen audience, but his was far off and needed to be shouted at, whereas mine was just over the footlights.
Boy, clutching stomach comically, crosses stage left
. I went into the living-room to gather up my coat and my books. My pea jacket, crusty, faithful, was hanging behind one door. My father was sitting in a rocking chair turned away from the fire that hissed and danced in the fireplace. He had on his overcoat, a tattered checkered castoff with mismatching buttons, which he had rescued from a church sale, though it was too small and barely reached his knees. On his head he wore a hideous blue knitted cap that he had plucked out of a trash barrel at school. Pulled down over his ears, it made him look like an overgrown dimwit in a comic strip. He had just recently taken to wearing this cap, and I wondered why. He still had a full head of hair, barely touched by gray. Understand that to me my father seemed changeless. In fact he did look younger than his years. When he turned his