Free The Centaur by John Updike Page B

head toward me, his face was that of a sly street urchin prematurely toughened.He had been a child in an humble neighborhood of Passaic. His face, compounded of shiny lumps and sallow slack folds, to me seemed both tender and brutal, wise and unseeing; it was still dignified by the great distance that in the beginning had lifted it halfway to the sky. Once I had stood beside his knees on the brick walk leading to the grape arbor of our house in Olinger and felt him look level into the tops of the horsechestnut trees and believed that nothing could ever go wrong as long as we stood so.
    “Your books are on the windowsill,” he said. “Did you eat your cereal?”
    I rebuked him sharply. “There isn’t
time
, you keep telling me.” I gathered up my books. Faded blue Latin, its covers all but unhinged. Smart red algebra, freshly issued this year; every time I turned a page, the paper released a tangy virginal scent. And a weary big gray book, General Science, my father’s subject. Its cover was stamped with a triangular design of a dinosaur, an atom blazing like a star, and a microscope. On its side and butts a previous possessor had lettered in blue ink the huge word FIDO. The size of this inscription seemed pathetic and abject, like an abandoned religious monument. Fido Hornbecker had been a football hero when I was in the seventh grade. In the list of names written inside the cover, where my own was last, I had never been able to locate the girl who had loved him. In five years, I was the first boy to be assigned the book. The four names written above mine—
    Mary Heffner
    Evelyn Mays “Bitsy”
    Rhea Furstweibler
    Phyllis L. Gerhardt—
    had melted in my mind into one nymph with inconstant handwriting. Maybe they had all loved Fido.
    “Time stolen from food,” my grandfather said, “is time stolen from yourself.”
    “The kid’s like I am, Pop,” my father said. “I never had time to eat either. Get your carcass away from the table is all I ever heard. Poverty’s a terrible thing.”
    My grandfather’s hands were folding and unfolding gingerly and his hightop button shoes twiddled in agitation. He was an ideal foil for my father because as a very old man he imagined that, if listened to, he could provide all answers and soothe all uncertainties. “I would see Doc Appleton,” he pronounced, clearing his throat with extreme delicacy, as if his phlegm were Japanese paper. “I knew his father well. The Appletons have been in the county since the beginning.” He was sitting bathed in white winter windowlight and seemed, in comparison with my father’s bullet-headed shape bulking black against the flickering fire, a more finely evolved creature.
    My father stood up. “All he does, Pop, when I go to him, is brag about himself.”
    There was a flurry in the kitchen. Doors squeaked and slammed; wild claws scrabbled on the wood floor. The dog came racing into the living-room. Lady seemed to hover on the carpet, crouched low as if whipped by joy. Her feet in a frantic swimming motion scratched one spot on the faded purple carpet that was never so worn it could not release under friction further small rolls of lavender fluff—“mice,” my grandmother had called them, when this carpet lay in Olinger and she was alive. Lady was so happy to be let indoors she was a bomb of good news, a furry bustle of vortical ecstasy that in vibrating emitted the scent of a skunk she hadkilled a week ago. Hunting a god, she started toward my father, veered past my legs, jumped on the sofa, and in frantic gratitude licked my grandfather’s face.
    Along his long life’s walks he had had bitter experiences with dogs and feared them. “Hyar,
hyaar
,” he protested, pulling his face away and lifting his shapely dry hands against Lady’s white chest. His voice was shocking in its guttural force, as if it arose from a savage darkness none of the rest of us had ever known.
    The dog pressed her twittering muzzle into his ear and her