Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

“They get frightened, Mother,” her daughter softly interposed, glancing apologetically in Owen’s direction.

But there was no need to apologize. All parents embarrass their children. Owen’s had seemed to him impossibly sad, putting on a quarrelsome show of discontent and maladjustment for all on Mifflin Avenue to see. Phyllis’s, in comparison, seemed model residents of Cambridge, as obedient to their grooves as the little interlocked figures that jiggle on the hour out of a Swiss clock. Owen liked this quick small lady of the house, with her clipped gray hair and upper eyelids collapsed upon her lashes. His experience with small women—Grammy, Elsie—had generally been good.

“Phyl tells us you’re quite brilliant, over there at the other place.”

“Oh, no, I’m just another plodding electrical-engineering major. It’s your daughter who—”

“—outsmarts the professors,” Carolyn Goodhue finished for him. “We find it so strange, Eustace and I—mathematics, we thought for years it was a phase she was going through, an awkward age. Girls do, of course, and unlike boys they find such devious ways to rebel, all the time with these sweet smiles so you can’t fault them. But, seriously, dear”—to her daughter—“your father and I are immensely proud. We boast. We put on brave faces when our friends tease us, asking why would a girl who could have waltzed into Radcliffe, or Wellesley or Bryn Mawr if she didn’t like boys, why would she want to go down the river to a place so—”

“Grubby,” Owen finished for her.

“Mother,” Phyllis intervened. “We’re grubby because we have to stay up all night, memorizing facts, and most of the boys do things with their hands.”

“Not too many things, I hope,” Mrs. Goodhue snapped, blinking rapidly when Owen laughed: he had never heard an off-color joke from Phyllis, they somehow didn’t enter her head.

It was from Professor Goodhue that Phyllis had inherited her shy slouch. His posture, though, was not trying to hide any excess of beauty but was the organic product of a life at a desk or curled in a chair reading. Chin on chest, he had lost all semblance of a neck, and had swollen in the middle like an old-fashioned clay jug, his head tipped forward as if to pour forth a lecture. His voice was reedy and faint, producing its sound on the intake of his breath, with the same pulmonary motion as sucking on a pipe. He was, in Owen’s limited view of him, more intake than output, though an occasional chuckle, like the snap of dried glue in an old binding, could be taken as an agreeable signal. He acted bemused by Owen’s appearance at his house and dinner table, and even made a point of this bemusement, demonstrating as it did a preoccupation with higher things. Elsie Seidel’s father had stridden forward in his feed-and-hardware store with too toothy a smile under his little sharper’s mustache and too fierce and friendly a handshake, signalling hostility and a manly knowledge of what Owen desired of his succulent daughter. Eustace Goodhue’s approach was much less confrontational, hardly an approach at all—an amiably baffled air like that of a man who works in a greenhouse with a stuffed-up nose and cannot understand why all these bumblebees keep flying in the window. Phyllis had attracted boy visitors before; her father seemed unaware that she, her college career ending and the professional prospects for a female mathematician being exceedingly slight, had arrived at an age of decision and eternal pledge. The age was reached early in Eisenhower’s America; women bred as if supplying a frontier, in that era of pioneer consumerism. To set up a household and breed and buy was to strike a blow against our enemy, those dowdy, repressive anti-capitalists behind the Iron Curtain. Owen was ready to serve, believing that he had found the woman for him—the mother of his children, the nurturer of his career, the presiding angel of a home better-equipped than the threadbare shelters the Rausches and Mackenzies had managed to provide in leaner, less electronic times.

Owen rather despised Professor Goodhue for not putting up a stiffer defense of his treasure. In the more than twenty years in which he and the man were members of the same family, the older becoming a grandfather in perfect synchrony as the younger became, repeatedly, a father, the first ten saw little respect tendered by Owen, a son-in-law exposed fully now to the shadowy, pampered role the professor played in his own household. True, in the last analysis its weight of books and eclectic, picturesque furniture rested on his intellectual labors, which had also wrested from the world a summer cottage in Truro and European travel every other year. But he seemed to dwell too much in the world of books, its conceits and fictions, to make much of a dent on this one.

In the second decade of this close acquaintance, Owen, his knowledge of the world deepened, could better appreciate his father-in-law’s sly withdrawal from the front line of family life, and the learned passion that had produced so many lectures and carefully pondered little articles, bound first in buff-colored academic quarterlies and then collected in fat, chaste volumes from the same university presses that issued the professor’s several anthologies and his critical biography of George Herbert. Those years saw little change in Eustace Goodhue, as he went from mid-life to retirement, and much change in Owen, progressing from naïve youth to experienced mid-life. They became two men roughly equal, with the companionable affection between them of any who have survived a hazardous voyage together. Owen, himself the father of two daughters, at last saw how weakened, by biology and by humanity’s village wisdom, the bond becomes: every cell in the aging father’s body yearns to pass her to another man, a man of her generation who can without taboo perform those elemental acts the cycle of generation demands.

There was in Professor Goodhue’s absent-minded complaisance something as yet dimly glimpsed by its beneficiary—the dubious pleasure taken