The Early Stories by John Updike Page A

oval. He had risen in his unease; he was afraid she would reach out and touch him.
    â€œHe made everything? You feel that?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen who made Him?”
    â€œWhy, Man. Man.” The happiness of this answer lit up her face radiantly, until she saw his gesture of disgust. She was so simple, so illogical; such a femme.
    â€œWell, that amounts to saying He doesn’t exist.”
    Her hand reached for his wrist but he backed away. “David, it’s a mystery.A miracle. It’s a miracle more beautiful than any Reverend Dobson could have told you about. You don’t say houses don’t exist because Man made them.”
    â€œNo. God has to be different.”
    â€œBut, David, you have the
evidence
. Look out the window at the sun; at the fields.”
    â€œMother, good grief. Don’t you see”—he rasped away the roughness in his throat—“if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and whatnot are all, ah,
horror?
It’s just an ocean of horror.”
    â€œBut, David, it’s not. It’s so clearly not that.” And she made an urgent, opening gesture with her hands that expressed a willingness to receive his helplessness; all her grace and maternal nurturing were gathered into a passive intensity that intensely repelled him. He would not be wooed away from the truth.
I am the Way, the Truth …
    â€œNo,” he told her. “Just let me alone.”
    He found his tennis ball behind the piano and went outside to throw it against the side of the house. There was a patch high up where the brown stucco laid over the sandstone masonry was crumbling away; he kept trying with the tennis ball to chip more pieces off. It was difficult, aiming up; the ball kept falling short.
    Superimposed upon his deep ache was a smaller but more immediate worry—that he had hurt his mother. He heard his father’s car rattling on the straightaway, and went into the house, to make peace before he arrived. To his relief, she was not giving off the stifling damp heat of her anger, but instead was cool, decisive, maternal. She handed him an old green book, her college text of Plato.
    â€œI want you to read the Parable of the Cave,” she said.
    â€œAll right,” he said, though he knew it would do no good. Some story by a dead Greek just vague enough to please her. “Don’t worry about it, Mother.”
    â€œI
am
worried. Honestly, David, I’m sure there will be something for us. As you get older, these things seem to matter a great deal less.”
    â€œThat may be. It’s a dismal thought, though.”
    His father bumped at the door. The locks and jambs stuck here. But before Granmom could totter to the latch and let him in, he had knocked it open. He had been in Olinger dithering with track-meet tickets. Although Mother usually kept her talks with David a secret between them, she called instantly, “George, David is worried about death!”
    Daddy came to the doorway of the living room, his shirt pocket bristling with pencils, holding in one hand a pint box of melting ice cream andin the other the knife with which he was about to divide it into four sections, their Sunday treat. “Is the kid worried about death? Don’t give it a thought, David. I’ll be lucky if I live till tomorrow, and I’m not worried. If they’d taken a buckshot gun and shot me in the cradle I’d be better off. The
world
’d be better off. Hell, I think death is a wonderful thing. I look forward to it. Get the garbage out of the way. If I had the man here who invented death, I’d pin a medal on him.”
    â€œHush, George. You’ll frighten the child worse than he is.”
    This was not true; he never frightened David. There was no harm in his father, no harm at all. Indeed, in the man’s lively self-disgust the boy felt a kind of ally. A distant ally. He saw his position with a certain