The Maples Stories by John Updike Page B

exercise of good will and wore a saucer-sized SCLC button in the lapel of a coarse green suit. Richard coveted the suit; it looked warm. The day was continuing overcast and chilly. Something odd, perhaps the successive explosions of the antihistamine pill, was happening inside him, making him feel queerly elongated; the illusion crossed his mind that he was destined to seduce this woman. She beamed and said, ‘My daughter Trudy and her
best
friend, Carol.’
    They were girls of sixteen or so, one size smaller in their bones than women. Trudy had the family pastry texture and a darting frown. Carol was homely, fragile, and touching; her upper teeth were a gray blur of braces and her arms were protectively folded across her skimpy bosom. Over a white blouse she wore only a thin blue sweater, unbuttoned. Richard told her, ‘You’re freezing.’
    ‘I’m freezing,’ she said, and a small love was established between them on the basis of this demure repetition. She added, ‘I came along because I’m writing a term paper.’
    Trudy said, ‘She’s doing a history of the labor unions,’ and laughed unpleasantly.
    The girl shivered. ‘I thought they might be the same. Didn’t the unions use to march?’ Her voice, moistened by the obtrusion of her braces, had a sprayey faintness in the raw gray air.
    The psychiatrist’s sister said, ‘The
way
they
make
these poor children
study
nowadays! The
books
they have them
read
! Their
English
teacher
assigned
them
Tropic of Cancer
! I picked it
up
and read
one page
, and Trudy reassured me, “It’s all
right
, Mother, the teacher says he’s a transcen
dent
alist!”’
    It felt to Richard less likely that he would seduce her. His sense of reality was expanding in the nest of warmth these people provided. He offered to buy them all Popsicles. His consciousness ventured outward and tasted the joy of so many Negro presences, the luxury of immersion in the polished shadows of their skins. He drifted happily through the crosshatch of their oblique, sardonic hooting and blurred voices, searching for the Popsicle vendor. The girls and Trudy’s mother had said they would take one; the psychiatrist and Joan had refused. The crowd was formed of jiggling fragments. Richard waved at the rector of a church whose nursery school his children had attended;winked at a folk singer he had seen on television and who looked lost and wan in three dimensions; assumed a stony face in passing a long-haired youth guarded by police and draped in a signboard proclaiming MARTIN LUTHER KING A TOOL OF THE COMMUNISTS; and tapped a tall bald man on the shoulder. ‘Remember me? Dick Maple, Plato to Dante, B-plus.’
    The section man turned, bespectacled and pale. It was shocking; he had aged.
    The march was slow to start. Trucks and police cars appeared and disappeared at the playground gate. Officious young seminarians tried to organize the crowd into lines. Unintelligible announcements crackled within the loudspeakers. Martin Luther King was a dim religious rumor on the playground plain – now here, now there, now absent, now present. The sun showed as a kind of sore spot burning through the clouds. Carol nibbled her Popsicle and shivered. Richard and Joan argued whether to march under the Danvers banner with the psychiatrist or with the Unitarians. In the end it did not matter; King invisibly established himself at their head, a distant truck loaded with singing women lurched forward, a far corner of the crowd began to croon, ‘Which side are you on, boy?,’ and the marching began.
    On Columbus Avenue they were shuffled into lines ten abreast. The Maples were separated. Joan turned up between her psychiatrist and a massive, doleful African wearing tribal scars, sneakers, and a Harvard Athletic Association sweatshirt. Richard found himself in the line ahead, with Carol beside him. Someone behind him, a forward-looking liberal, stepped on his heel, giving the knit of his loafer such a wrench that he had to