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

house on a small lot on a Cambridge street used as a short-cut between Garden Street and Mass. Avenue. A genteel-bohemian decency, extending to the end of life the student quest for knowledge, had been the communicated ideal. Colin Goodhue had become a professor of Romance languages at Cornell. He had married a Frenchwoman, and they spent every August in Provence. Phyllis’s mother and father had both died recently—only months apart, as sometimes happens with long-attached couples—and being gentle with Phyllis in her newly orphaned state had been part of Owen’s rationale for not hurrying the divorce process, with its distasteful facilitators: lawyers, furniture movers, child psychologists.

A fog of deferred intention had descended upon his mind. Of the long interim while he shuttled back and forth between the headless household on Partridgeberry Road and his unkempt semi-bachelor pad on the other side of the Chunkaunkabaug, in a four-story firetrap populated by elderly Polish widowers and overweight single mothers, he remembered little. With a numbed mind he met the surly feigned indifference of his two older, collegiate children, and the eager, round-eyed, yet subtly stilted affability of his two younger when he descended, in his now distinctly scuffed and rattling red Stingray, to glance over their homework or carry them off to a movie. Though his upbringing had been only perfunctorily religious, he could hear the prayers of his two younger children for his return rustling above him like the wingbeats of swifts trapped in the old farmhouse chimney. Phyllis was alternately despondent and jauntily brave in her abandoned state, sharing his sensation of an unreal interim. She had never quite fit in in Middle Falls, disdaining the middlebrow society with the offhand politesse of a professor’s daughter, but some of the local women now rallied to her, and not all of them the ones he had slept with, though these were the most companionably scornful of Julia. “She utterly just doesn’t get it, as if she’s from outer space … Those eyes of hers, they give me the absolute shivers … Parading around in the Acme as if she dared me not to look at her … That poor husband of hers, she must be setting him up for sainthood, Roscoe talked to him the longest time and couldn’t get him to say a word against her”: Phyllis relayed fragments like this to Owen, as if such cattiness, which had once been a kind of music to him, a murmur of initiation, would bring him back. True, he would awake in his squalid room—the odors of other people’s hot plates seeping through the walls, and the squalling of fatherless infants—with the same homesick gnawing in his stomach that he had felt those freshman months at MIT, hung in space by the implacable laws of growth, of aging. But then, as now, he had a mission: then, to survive, to not go back to Pennsylvania, to gain a degree and a career and, as things developed, the willowy girl he glimpsed in the hall. Now, as then, his mission was not purely selfish, and had to do with Phyllis; he wanted to free her of him, as well as himself of her. Their life together, Julia had explained to him, had become a mutual degradation. Staying with her was not doing her any favor. There was sense in this, he supposed, for people who had high standards bred of habitual rectitude; but it left out of account the plea for mercy that goes with human softness. He and Phyllis shared a ’fifties drift, a gliding carelessness. Between them, he felt there had been something off from the start. He had been ambitious and raw, and had used her. Now he wanted to undo his presumption in carrying off this princess; he wanted to give her time to see it his way and to help him divorce her, so it became as much her idea as their marriage had somehow been. At least she had consented to start seeing a lawyer in Hartford, a short dapper rapid talker she was amused by—both Roscoe Bisbee and Henry Slade had recommended him. Named Jerry Halloran, he talked to her in a mathematical language of dollars and cents.

In this delaying period Owen’s children invented a mode of protest, an automotive caricature of adult disorder. Floyd, just turned sixteen and freshly equipped with a driver’s license, took his mother’s Volvo station wagon out onto Partridgeberry Road and, in his inexperience veering too far to the right to avoid an oncoming pickup truck pulling a horse van, ran into a snow-filled ditch. The Volvo lurched over on its side into a stone wall, at fair speed. The boy was unhurt but the Volvo was totalled. With the insurance money, the Mackenzies settled for a second-hand Ford Falcon station wagon, serviceable although lighter on its wheels than the solid Swedish import.

Gregory, home from Brown for spring break, asked to borrow his father’s Corvette Stingray for a date with a girl he intended to impress, which that “tinny old Falcon” would not do. Though he didn’t like his son’s demanding tone, and regarded even in its old age his lipstick-red convertible as a treasure, Owen felt too guilty to deny the boy. He was wakened at one in the morning by a hysterical call from Phyllis. On the back road leading away from the far side of Heron Pond, where there was a well-known necking-and-make-out spot—one which years ago he and Faye in their innocence had resorted to—the Stingray had somehow veered and taken down four or five aluminum rail posts before coming to a stop. The engine had been moved halfway into the front seat, but neither Gregory nor his passenger was hurt. He manfully took the blame, claiming he had been trying to adjust the unfamiliar radio, but confided to his brother, who confided it to his mother, who told Owen, that in fact the girl, a wild one from Eastern Connecticut State University, had been driving, or at least had her hands