Free Museums and Women by John Updike Page A

larger audience, her voice lifted operatically.
    The mother in red pants said, “One of them came into the house to call the police and another one came after her and said not to bother, they’d drive to the station, it’d be faster.” She had a narrow, impoverished face but an exotic flat accent, Midwestern or Western. As she spoke, she kept bouncing the baby on her hip.
    A ginger-haired lady said, “One of them said it was all right, she was the wife of a fireman.”
    “
Uh
-ohh,” the other said. “He’s been going to too many fires.” There was general laughter.
    The drizzle was lifting, but the neighbors drew snugly closer beneath the sheltering elm, as if to consolidate their sudden conquest of the distance the houses had always imposed between them. “Naaow, isn’t dis wedder somezing,” Mr. Van der Bijn said, and again they all laughed, having heard him say it so often before. The driver of the disabled car glanced toward them enviously. His sedan was up the street, sideways against a telephone pole; it had spun almost totally around. His gaze inhibited the carnival crowd on the corner. He smelled of recent danger, and was dangerous. The man who lived in the dark house emerged in pants and rumpled shirt and spectacles; his eyes looked rubbed, as after sleep or a long bout of television. His ladies grew animated; the more flirtatious one told Ray her version of the accident. The VW was coming down Prudence Lane, and didn’t stop at the Stop sign, they never do, and the black sedan, to avoid hitting it, swerved to the left, into the pole. Ray told her, no, he had happened to be at his window, and the VW was being chased by the other—a drag race, obviously.
    June asked, “Hasn’t
any
body called the police?”
    Mrs. Van der Bijn said, “Mr. Latroy has.” But by this she meant, probably, that in a sense he
was
police; for he had not moved from the sidewalk. He stood there serenely, his face tilted upward, as if basking on a sunny day. The window above him lit up, and two of his beautiful daughters were framed in it, their blond hair incandescent. A carload of male teen-agers swung around the corner, abruptly braked, and eased by. The two daughters waved. Another car stopped, and asked the wayto East Mather. Three voices at once—Ray, Mr. Latroy, and a ginger-haired lady—chorused the directions.
    June was conferring with the girl in velvet pants. The girl agreed to go inside and call the police. Her husband was asleep. He was a very sound sleeper. “I can never get the lunk up, to take care of Emily. Every night, it’s the same story.”
    “She has fear,” Mrs. Van der Bijn announced. “You must sing her to sleep.”
    The girl studied Mrs. Van der Bijn and handed her the baby and went into her house. The baby began its feeble, well-practiced whimper, paced to last for hours. Mrs. Van der Bijn began to sing, in a distant lost language, its gutturals low in her throat.
    The driver of the sedan came closer. He swaggered like a man with something to sell, his hands in his pockets. He was a stocky young man, with hair combed wet, so the tooth furrows showed. “It’s all right,” he told them. “I got everybody’s number. Nothing to worry about,” he said, and told them his story. There was a third car. A yellow convertible, a crazy man. Down by the wharf, it had cut right in front of him, and tried to run him off the road, into that metal rail there. He, the man telling the story, had braked just in time—he was lucky to have such fast reflexes—and then, seeing red, had given chase, lost control at the corner, and had this accident. There was a VW bus right behind him. It had stopped, and the people in it had said they knew the driver of the convertible, and would catch him and bring him back. As some kind of insurance, the sedan’s passengers, a guy he knew and the guy’s girlfriend, had crowded into the bus, and off they had all gone. They should be back any minute. At any rate, it