The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,2

told some stories – how they had lived in a log cabin in a YMCA camp for the first three months of their married life; how Bitsy Flaner, a mutual friend, was the only girl enrolled in Bentham Divinity School; how Richard’s advertising work brought him into glancing contact with Yogi Berra, who was just as funny as the papers said – they did not regard themselves (that is, each other) as raconteurs, and Rebecca’s slight voice dominated the talk. She had a gift for odd things.

Her rich uncle lived in a metal house, furnished with auditorium chairs. He was terribly afraid of fire. Right before the Depression he had built an enormous boat to take himself and some friends to Polynesia. All his friends lost their money in the crash. He did not. He made money. He made money out of everything. But he couldn’t go on the trip alone, so the boat was still waiting in Oyster Bay, a huge thing, rising thirty feet out of the water. The uncle was a vegetarian. Rebecca had not eaten turkey for Thanksgiving until she was thirteen years old because it was the family custom to go to the uncle’s house on that holiday. The custom was dropped during the war, when the children’s synthetic heels made black marks all over his asbestos floor. Rebecca’s family had not spoken to the uncle since. ‘Yes, what got me,’ Rebecca said, ‘was the way each new wave of vegetables would come in as if it were a different course.’

Richard poured the sherry around again and, because this made him the center of attention anyway, said, ‘Don’t some vegetarians have turkeys molded out of crushed nuts for Thanksgiving?’

After a stretch of silence, Joan said, ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice, unused for ten minutes, cracked on the last syllable. She cleared her throat, scraping Richard’s heart.

‘What would they stuff them with?’ Rebecca asked, dropping an ash into the saucer beside her.

Beyond and beneath the window there arose a clatter. Joan reached the windows first, Richard next, and lastly Rebecca, standing on tiptoe, elongating her neck. Six mounted police, standing in their stirrups, were galloping two abreast down Thirteenth Street. When the Maples’ exclamations had subsided, Rebecca remarked, ‘They do it every night at this time. They seem awfully jolly, for policemen.’

‘Oh, and it’s snowing!’ Joan cried. She was pathetic about snow; she loved it so much, and in these last years had seen so little. ‘On our first night here! Our first real night.’ Forgetting herself, she put her arms around Richard, and Rebecca, where another guest might have turned away, or smiled too broadly, too encouragingly, retained without modification her sweet, absent look and studied, through the embracing couple, the scene outdoors. The snow was not taking on the wet street; only the hoods and tops of parked automobiles showed an accumulation.

‘I think I’d best go,’ Rebecca said.

‘Please don’t,’ Joan said with an urgency Richard had not expected; clearly she was very tired. Probably the new home, the change in the weather, the good sherry, the currents of affection between herself and her husband that her sudden hug had renewed, and Rebecca’s presence had become in her mind the inextricable elements of one enchanted moment.

‘Yes, I think I’ll go because you’re so snuffly and peakèd.’

‘Can’t you just stay for one more cigarette? Dick, pass the sherry around.’

‘A teeny bit,’ Rebecca said, holding out her glass. ‘I guess I told you, Joan, about the boy I went out with who pretended to be a headwaiter.’

Joan giggled expectantly. ‘No, honestly, you never did.’ She hooked her arm over the back of the chair and wound her hand through the slats, like a child assuring herself that her bedtime has been postponed. ‘What did he do? He imitated headwaiters?’

‘Yes, he was the kind of guy who, when we get out of a taxi and there’s a grate giving off steam, crouches down’ – Rebecca lowered her head and lifted her arms – ‘and pretends he’s the Devil.’

The Maples laughed, less at the words themselves than at the way Rebecca had evoked the situation by conveying, in her understated imitation, both her escort’s flamboyant attitude and her own undemonstrative nature. They could see her standing by the taxi door, gazing with no expression as her escort bent lower and lower, seized by his own joke, his fingers writhing demonically as he felt horns sprout through his scalp, flames lick his ankles, and his feet shrivel into hoofs. Rebecca’s