The Maples Stories by John Updike

growing lustrous, her very hair gaining body and sheen. Though he had resigned himself, through twelve years of marriage, to a rhythm of apathy and renewal, he distrusted this raw burst of beauty.
    The night she returned from Alabama, it was three o’clock in the morning. He woke and heard the front door close behind her. He had been dreaming of a parallelogram in the sky that was also somehow a meteor, and the darkened house seemed quadrisected by the four sleeping children he had, with more than paternal tenderness, put to bed. He had caught himself speaking to them of Mommy as a distant departed spirit, gone to live, invisible, in the newspapers and the television set. The little girl, Bean, had burst into tears. Now the ghost closed the door and walked up the stairs, and came into his bedroom, and fell on the bed.
    He switched on the light and saw her sunburned face, her blistered feet. Her ballet slippers were caked with orange mud. She had lived for three days on Coke and dried apricots; at one stretch she had not gone to the bathroom for sixteen hours. The Montgomery airport had been a madhouse – nuns, social workers, divinity students fighting for space on the northbound planes. They had been in the air when they heard about Mrs Liuzzo.
    He accused her: ‘It could have been you.’
    She said, ‘I was always in a group.’ But she added guiltily, ‘How were the children?’
    ‘Fine. Bean cried because she thought you were inside the television set.’
    ‘Did you see me?’
    ‘Your parents called long-distance to say they thought they did. I didn’t. All I saw was Abernathy and King andtheir henchmen saying, “Thass right. Say it, man. Thass sayin’ it.”’
    ‘Aren’t you mean? It was very moving, except that we were all so tired. These teen-age Negro girls kept fainting; a psychiatrist explained to me that they were having psychotic breaks.’
    ‘What psychiatrist?’
    ‘Actually, there were three of them, and they were studying to be psychiatrists in Philadelphia. They kind of took me in tow.’
    ‘I bet they did. Please come to bed. I’m very tired from being a mother.’
    She visited the four corners of the upstairs to inspect each sleeping child and, returning, undressed in the dark. She removed underwear she had worn for seventy hours and stood there shining; to the sleepy man in the bed it seemed a visitation, and he felt as people of old must have felt when greeted by an angel – adoring yet resentful, at this flamboyant proof of a level of existence above theirs.
    She spoke on the radio; she addressed local groups. In garages and supermarkets he heard himself being pointed out as her husband. She helped organize meetings at which dapper young Negroes ridiculed and abused the applauding suburban audience. Richard marvelled at Joan’s public composure. Her shyness stayed with her, but it had become a kind of weapon, as if the doctrine of non-violence had given it point. Her voice, as she phoned evasive local real-estate agents in the campaign for fair housing, grew curiously firm and rather obstinately melodious – a note her husband had not heard in her voice before. He grew jealous and irritable. He found himself insisting, at parties, on the constitutional case for states’ rights, on the misfortunes of African independence, on the history of Reconstruction from the South’spoint of view. Yet she had little trouble persuading him to march with her in Boston.
    He promised, though he could not quite grasp the object of the march. All mass movements, of masses or of ideas supposedly embodied in masses, felt unreal to him. Whereas his wife, a liberal theology professor’s daughter, lived by abstractions; her blood returned to her heart enriched by the passage through some capillarious good cause. He was struck, and subtly wounded, by the ardor with which she rewarded his promise; under his hands her body felt baroque and her skin smooth as night.
    The march was in April. Richard awoke that