The Centaur by John Updike

faintness swooped at Caldwell but he held himself upright, having vowed to finish. “—called Man.”

II
    M Y FATHER AND my mother were talking. I wake now often to silence, beside you, with a pang of fear, after dreams that leave a sour wash of atheism in my stomach (last night I dreamt that Hitler, a white-haired crazy man with a protruding tongue, was found alive in Argentina). But in those days I always awoke to the sound of my parents talking, voices which even in agreement were contentious and full of life. I had been dreaming of a tree, and through the sound of their words I seemed to twist from an upright trunk into a boy lying in bed. I was fifteen and it was 1947. This morning their subject seemed to be new; I could not make out its form, only feel within myself, as if in my sleep I had swallowed something living that now woke within me, its restless weight of dread. “Don’t feel bad, Cassie,” my father said. His voice had a shy sound, as if he had turned his back. “I’ve been lucky to live this long.”
    “George, if you’re just trying to frighten me, it’s not funny,” my mother answered. Her voice was so often expressive of what I wanted to hear that my own brain sometimes thought in her voice; indeed, as I grow older, now and then, usually in instances of exclamation, I hear her voice issue from my mouth.
    I seemed now to know the subject: my father thought he was ill.
    “Cassie,” he said, “don’t be frightened. I don’t want you to be frightened. I’m not frightened.” His voice blanched in repetition.
    “You
are
frightened,” she said. “I wondered why you kept getting out of bed.” Her voice was white too.
    “I can feel the damn thing,” he said. “I can feel it in me like a clot of poison. I can’t pass it.”
    This detail seemed to balk her. “You can’t feel such things,” she said at last, in a voice abruptly small, like a chastened little girl’s.
    His voice gathered size. “I can feel it in me like a poison snake wrapped around my bowels.
Brooo!
”
    Lying in bed, I pictured my father making this noise—his head shaken so abruptly his jowls wagged, his lips a vehement blur. The picture was so vivid I smiled. Their conversation, as if they knew I had awakened, was closing up; the tone of their voices darkened. The little pale piteous bit, like a snowflake at the center of their marriage, which I had glimpsed, still half a tree, in first light, retreated behind the familiar opacities of clownish quarreling. I turned my head, as sleep’s heaviness lifted from it, and looked through the window. A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field beyond the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in theirtwigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January and Monday. I began to understand. After every weekend, my father had to gather his nerve to go back to teaching. During the Christmas vacation he became slack and in a fury of screw-turning had to retighten himself. “The long haul,” he called the stretch between Christmas and Easter. Last week, the first week of the new year, something had happened that had frightened him. He had struck a boy with Zimmerman in the room: he had told us that much.
    “Don’t be dramatic, George,” my mother said. “What does it feel like?”
    “I know where I got it.” He had a way of not speaking to her, but performing in front of her, as if there were an invisible audience at her side. “The damn kids. I’ve caught their damn hate and I feel it like a spider in my big intestine.”
    “It’s not hate, George,” she said, “it’s love.”
    “It’s hate, Cassie. I face it every day.”
    “It’s love,” she insisted. “They want to love each other and you’re in their way. Nobody hates you.