KINDERSCENEN

Windows frame pictures of the world outside. A window along the side porch shows the painted porch boards and the curved backs of the wicker furniture and, beyond the porch edge, the bricks of the walk where it broadens beneath the grape arbor and the boards and posts of the arbor and the ragged gaps of sunlight and scenery between the broad grape leaves. Ants make mounds like coffee grounds between the bricks, and the grapevines attach themselves to the arbor with fine pale-green tendrils that spell letters of a sort: these are things Toby knows from being outside and looking. What he does not know and never thinks to ask is who built the arbor, whose idea was it, his grandparents' or that of the people who owned the house before him. He will never think to ask; he will never know. What he does know is how Daddy's cigarette looks in the evening when, sitting on a wicker chair with the other grown-ups softly talking in a row, he flips it away, its red star tracing lopsided loops before shattering into sparks on the bricks. The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them. The panes in the window have bubbles in them, like hollow teardrops, that warp the edges of things when the boy slightly shifts his head, a little like the way that bad boys hold a magnifying glass above an ant until it stops moving and shrivels up, with a snap Toby can almost hear.

The thin glass divides the world outside, which is ordinary, from inside the house, where something is out of the ordinary and feels sad and wrong. The adult assumption that the town is an ordinary one, just like many another, is in the air, along with fireflies in summer and snowflakes in winter. Toby sees nothing ordinary about it. It is a tiny piece of the world but the piece nearest him. In his heart he knows that it is the best town in the world, and he the most important person, though he would never say that to the grown-ups around him. There are four--Mother, Daddy, Grandfather, and Grandmother--the same way the house has four sides.

On the side that has the porch and the grape arbor on it, toward the alley that goes along beyond the hedge, where bigger boys walk along talking loudly and rudely on their way to the school grounds and the baseball field, there is a large complicated territory crowded with bushes and flower beds. Toby's mother and grandmother preside above this fancy area, a showplace maintained for the neighbors as they walk by, in case they look in over the hedge. The bushes need to be clipped and to have their lower branches held up while Mother, red-faced as if angry, pushes the lawn mower with its noisy scissoring underneath to get at the grass growing secretly there. She calls this job "holding up the bushes' skirts," which has a naughty sound to it that nevertheless doesn't make it fun. She makes Toby do it, calling him outdoors from his toys and his Big Little Books and his pretending things to himself. The stiff branches poke his arms and face and some have little thorns that scratch, it seems on purpose. If he isn't careful he could lose an eye. His mother doesn't care about that. She is always working in the garden in pants with dirt-stained knees, but he likes her best when she dresses up to go to the city, in blue skirt and coat and a little hat tilted on her head, walking down not the alley but the street at the front of the house, through the thick shade of its horse-chestnut trees, to the avenue to catch the trolley car.

Across the alley is the vacant lot where the bigger children in summer have noisy games, with a lot of shouting and tumbling down into grass so tall it goes to seed at the top and at the bottom never loses the dampness of dew. Beyond this shaggy lot, houses stretch one after the other to a farm where the pigpen smells terrible. Some of the houses are tucked back from the sidewalk, like Toby's own, "out of harm's way," as Grandfather likes to say, twiddling his cigar on the sofa and putting on that foxy sly look that irritates Mother. She says he should smoke his cigars only outdoors. But it is his house. He and Grandmother own it. Mother and Daddy and Toby moved in when Daddy lost his job and have stayed even though he got another job. Most of the houses along the street have only a little piece of grass in front of their porches, and many are really two houses, with two different house numbers and shades of paint, joined in the middle, so each has windows only on three sides, unlike the long white house Toby lives in.

The other side yard is toward the Eichelbergers, an elderly couple of which Mr. always wears a creased gray hat and Mrs. has a goiter hanging under her chin. Toby is afraid of the narrow gloomy yard in their direction and hates even to see it out of a window. Mr. and Mrs. Eichelberger always seem to be creeping about together, murmuring together, poking at things. Mother says their tragedy is they never had any children. Toby is an only child and so is his mother, so he escaped into life by the narrowest of chances.

People call his house white but in fact it is yellowy--"cream," he has heard his mother say. Cream, with green wooden trim, including the windows. In crayoning at elementary school a picture of the house where he lives, he discovered that green and yellow go together in a way some colors don't. Black and orange also go together, as at Halloween, and purple and gold at Easter, and red and green at Christmas. Red, white, and blue together in the American flag are like three notes on a brass trumpet. Discovering such harmonies excites him, more than it does other children.

His playmates, when he has them, come to him through the side yard toward the alley, by the little brick walk leading in past the pansy bed from the gap in the hedge. The gap used to have a heavy green-painted gate that creaked and clanged until eventually Grandfather gave it to the scrap drive for the war. It was rotten with rust anyway, he said, and he was sick of painting it. Betty Lou Polyak, who is a year ahead of Toby at school and tall for her age in any case, peeks in at the gap to see if he is in the yard or on the porch, so she doesn't have to knock on the side door and face Grandmother in the kitchen. Grandmother makes her feel unwelcome.

Mother once commented humorously on this peeking habit of Betty Lou's. To amuse her further, Toby made a little card from stiff paper like a comical birthday card with a movable insert of Betty Lou's long neck and little face poking in and out of a slot at the edge of the hedge, which he cut carefully to show the leafy roughness. He showed it to Mother, but she didn't smile and asked him if he wasn't being unkind.

Unkind. It is true, Betty Lou is the best friend he has. The only friend, in a way. She follows all his suggestions for games and activities. Sometimes on the side porch they turn the wicker chairs upside down and pretend they are caves in which they are hiding from Indians or bandits. Or they cut out and color paper apples and pears and bananas and set them up in an empty orange crate to sell to imaginary customers.

Betty Lou likes his back yard, its lush lawn and abundance of trees compared with her own. Hers is beaten bare of grass by all her family and has a cross dog tied at the lower end. The dog terrifies Toby, having lunged at him once, his snarl showing horrible blue gums. He tries never to play at the Polyak house, which is small inside and doesn't have much plumbing. Mrs. Polyak gives Betty Lou a bath by standing her naked on a chair in the kitchen and wiping her all over with a washcloth wet in a soapy basin. Toby knows this because he once peeked though the crack where the kitchen door didn't close completely, until Mrs. Polyak announced out loud that he wasn't being very nice. How had she seen him peeking? Girls, he glimpsed, had bottoms like he did but in front there was something different, hardly anything, a little dent.

For some reason there are no boys near his age in the neighborhood, on his side of the street, which should be crossed without a grown-up only at a traffic light far away, at the avenue. A kind of tough boy, Warren Frye, in Betty Lou's grade at school, lives in the other direction, down the alley, where it turns along the school grounds and becomes a street, with a row of houses. He comes to the house from the lower end, past the chicken house beside the vegetable garden. Grandmother doesn't like him either. She doesn't care for his "people." She has known the Fryes since she herself was a child, way before Toby was born. He doesn't like to think about that strange blank period of time when he must have been someplace that he can't remember.

One day when Warren and Toby were wrestling on the linoleum kitchen floor, fighting because Warren had been treating Toby's toys too roughly and then teasing Toby for being too fussy about it, Toby sneakily tripped him so his head went into the radiator spines and bled as if he might die. Grandmother made a nice tidy bandage for him out of a dust rag and sent him home still bleeding, and though Warren came back the next day already pretty much healed he never did return the dust rag. To hear Grandmother tell it, there had never been a dust rag like it.

Grandmother doesn't like Betty Lou's people either. What she doesn't like has something to do with how many brothers and sisters Betty Lou has and with money, though from what Toby overhears in the house Grandfather doesn't have money anymore either; it was eaten up in the stock market crash. What money they live on Daddy earns being a schoolteacher and is kept in a little red-and-white tin box saying Recipes on top of the icebox. The grown-ups dip into it when they go off shopping, Grandfather to Hen Geiger's little front-room grocery store a few houses up from Betty Lou's house, with floorboards so worn the nail heads shine, and Mother and Grandmother up the hill two blocks to Pep Miller's bigger store, which has more kinds of ice cream and meat so fresh it oozes blood onto the butcher block, all crisscrossed with marks of the cleaver. Pep has a refrigerator so big he can walk into it without bending over and comes out breathing the smoke your breath makes in January. When Toby got big enough to move a kitchen chair to the icebox and stand on it, he was allowed to dip into the Recipe box too and take out a nickel for a Tastykake or a lemon-filled doughnut at Hen Geiger's on his way back to school after lunch. He loves eating while he is walking along instead of sitting down and being told to have good manners. Because there are five of them, he sits at the comer of the little kitchen table, and it pokes him in the stomach.

There is the alley, the street, and the avenue, where the trolley cars run and the elementary-school building stands on its asphalt lake. As he walks down the street toward the avenue, the houses he passes get smaller, their porches lower to the ground, without railings. Grandmother complains about "people," but it seems to Toby that these are the people his family lives among and they should make do with them. These are the people of his life.

The side yard is too crowded with bushes and flower beds to play in, except for hide-and-seek. But the back yard stretches all the way to the chicken house and the garage for the green Model A Ford in the days, when Grandfather had a car. Toby remembers the car before they sold it, sitting squeezed in the back seat between his parents. Near the fenced-in chicken yard is the burning barrel where he is allowed to hold a match to the previous day's newspaper and the other paper trash, including magazines that won't burn up unless you poke them, separating the pages. The barrel has flaps cut near the bottom because fire needs oxygen. Table scraps don't bum and go to the chickens.

Above the burning barrel, nearer the house, is the vegetable garden that Grandfather spades in the spring and where they all hoe and weed through the summer. Daddy is exempted from such farm labor, but not Toby. The weeds between the rows of lima beans and beets and carrots and kohlrabi have to be pulled and carefully laid flat, otherwise they will take root again. Until it dries, the hoed earth is the same dark damp color it was when Grandfather turned the soil in the spring. In the fall, Mother and Grandmother put up tomatoes and sliced peaches and rhubarb in Mason jars, filling the kitchen with clouds of steam. The jars are sealed with red rubber rings that are good to play indoor quoits with. Each ring has a little tab that just fits your finger.

The way the weeds lie helpless in the sun and then shrivel seems cruel to Toby, but then he didn't ask them to grow there. There is a plan and a purpose to things. At school Miss Kendall, who teaches second grade, told the class that grass was green because green was the most soothing color for the eyes. God designed it that way. If everything was red or yellow, she explained, people would go crazy with there being too much of it. The same with the sky being blue, though even so sometimes when Toby looks straight up his eyes wince as if pinched in all that blue, and if he catches the sun in his glance a circular ghost stays in his vision for minutes. God made the world to suit Mankind, Miss Kendall says.

The back yard slopes from the brick walk along the porch and the wooden cellar door down to the vegetable gardens through a breadth of grass where Daddy, the sleeves of his white teacher's shirt rolled up past his elbows, pushes the lawn mower on Saturdays. After dinner they move porch chairs out to the top of the yard and sit as the fireflies come out, Grandfather smoking his cigar and Mother not complaining. It keeps the mosquitoes away, he explains to her. He speaks to her in a rumbling, friendly way. She is his daughter. "Lois," he calls her. It is a strange name, two syllables, like "Toby," and the same number of letters, and enough like it so that it seems his came out of hers, as he is supposed to have come out of her. And as she came out of Grandmother, whose name is Elizabeth, which in a way has Lois in it. Picturing all this makes Toby sleepy.

After school Betty Lou and Warren Frye before he stopped coming and some others from the neighborhood, mostly girls, sometimes come to play in the back yard, climbing the trees or swinging on the swing Grandfather once hung on a low branch of the English-walnut tree for Toby when he was smaller. The swing gets quickly boring, with the ropes babyishly short, but there are all the trees, the peach trees with their long, pointy, deeply creased leaves, and the leaning cherry trees with their ringed bark like stacks of black coins, and the maples whose winged seeds you can split and stick on your nose, and the English walnut whose lowest branch is shiny from being climbed on. From tree to tree the children race squealing in their versions of baseball and dodgeball, where when the person who has the ball yells "Freeze" everybody must stop, even off-balance in mid-step.

In his element, proud, Toby leads them to the stone birdbath that rocks a little on its pedestal, spilling some water onto the girls' shoes, and to the Japanese-beetle traps on the grape arbor, loudly buzzing with the beetles' angry dying, and the broad lilies-of-the-valley bed where it is against the rules to look for a lost ball, though what else can they do, treading on tiptoe to minimize the flowers they flatten as they search?

This lilies-of-the-valley bed is dizzyingly fragrant when the little white bells on their arched stems are in bloom. Once Toby stood on its edge, persistently worrying at a loose front tooth with his tongue and fingers until finally it came out, with a fleck of blood at its rubbery root. He carried the tooth back into the house to win praise from the grown-ups, for growing. He wants to cheer them up. They give off a scent of having lived so long they are stuck where they are for good, like a disease he doesn't want to catch. His mother is not pleased by the tooth, worrying that because he forced it out the next ,one will come Tin crooked.

The grown-up sadness he feels around him is thickest in the smaller side yard, the neglected one toward the Eichelbergers'. The houses cast a constant shadow between them, and poisonous-green moss grows in the gloom beneath the hydrangea bushes. These bushes produce blossoms as big as a woman's hat but are almost the only flowering things here, as opposed to the other, sunny side. There is on this shadowy side (its lawn faintly spongy underfoot) the stillness of things Toby doesn't like to think about--church, and deep woods, and cemeteries where a single potted plant has been left in memory of someone but, itself forgotten, has long dried out and died. The Eichelbergers' house looms close, and the child has the fear that Mr. will somehow pounce, though in fact the stooped stout old man, in his baggy gray sweater with gray pearl buttons down the front, slightly smiles on the rare occasions when his and Toby's eyes meet across the property line.

All by himself on this side of the house, Toby becomes more frightened than when alone elsewhere in the yard. The house has fewer windows on this side, so there is less chance of Mother or Grandmother glancing out and seeing him to check on his safety. He might almost be on the moon. Though there is a long clear space here for a game of catch, he and Betty Lou never stay at it long. If the ball gets loose and goes into the Eichelbergers' peonies next to their house, the pair of them--Mr. in his greasy gray hat and then Mrs. with the apron she always wears and her horrible goiter-might come out and catch him retrieving the ball and, after giving him a good shaking, pen him into their cellar, among the cobwebby shelves of sealed fruit staring out and the skeletons of other caught children. Already the Eichelbergers, he has overheard, have complained to Grandfather about children making noise when they are trying to nap.

And yet, safe inside his own house, his grandfather's house, Toby looks out one of the few windows in that direction and feels sorry for the side yard, it looks so unused and unvisited. It is as still as the toadless terrarium at elementary school. It brims with the adult sadness he feels at his back, in his family.

What is the sadness about? Money, Toby guesses. They never spend any without Daddy worrying. When the coal truck comes and backs up over the curb on thick wooden triangles carried along for just that purpose, and the long chutes, polished bright by sliding anthracite, telescope out of the truck's body into the little cellar window under the front porch, and the whole house trembles and fills with the racket of coal roaring into the bin, Toby feels the wonder of all the world's provisions for his happiness, but Daddy feels money sliding away. He is usually at work, but when he is at home he looks worried, wringing his hands in a way Mother calls "womanish." They are a man's hands, square and freckled with raised warts on the backs, but they do perform a scrubbing, wringing motion like women's housework as the man tries to rub away the sadness inside him. He himself says that he has "the jitters" and "the blues." He is a schoolteacher and has a way with words. He calls Toby "Young America" and, when Toby is bored or complaining, announces as if to an unseen audience, "The kid has the wim-wams."

The sadness accumulates toward the back of the house, in the kitchen, farthest from the street and its daily traffic. The linoleum floor with its design worn off where feet walk most, and the old slate sink smelling like well water, and the long-nosed copper faucets turning green, and the oilcloth that covers the little table where the comer pokes him in the stomach and they eat with bone-handled knives and forks--it all looks tired and old-fashioned, compared with the kitchens some of his playmates have. Not Betty Lou Polyak's people, but the Nagel twins three doors up from there, and some of the houses across the street, which sit higher than the houses on this side, above retaining walls and flights of cement stairs so long the mailman takes a shortcut along the porches by stepping over the low hedges--these ordinary houses have purring electric refrigerators instead of iceboxes dripping water into a tin tray and toasters that plug in and pop up the toast instead of simply sitting on a smelly old gas stove, the dirty burner with its little purple flames like dog teats.

And at Christmas, other front parlors, where people passing on the sidewalk can look in and see, hold in their windows like illustrations in a magazine visions of luxurious long-needled evergreens drenched in tinsel's silver rain and bearing as thick as holly berries thin-skinned hollow ornaments sprinkled with glitter. Mother, favors keeping the tree natural, and her ornaments, as simple as the false eggs that trick a chicken into laying, emerge from a few boxes in the attic, where each is thriftily nested in tissue, in its own little cardboard square. The Nagel twins say their parents buy new ornaments every year, all blue or red, like a Christmas tree in a department store. Toby doesn't want that; he just wants to be ordinary, and to have an ordinary amount of money.

Toby is not always good. He is timid and obedient but harbors violence inside. His grandparents' house reaches around him with comers and spaces and even entire locked rooms where monsters of living death, ghosts and demons, have room to lurk and breathe. The five human lives in the house are not enough to crowd out these menaces, to oust the terrors in the coal-dark cellar and in the musty attic with its scent of mothballs and cedar. The attic, deep under the eaves, holds folded old carpets and fancy dishes with piecrust edges and kerosene lamps and knobby trunks that will never travel again and cloth-covered albums full of his grandparents' "people," ancestors long dead but with button-bright eyes staring right at him when he opens an album's thick gilt-edged pages. The men have mustaches and hair parted in the middle. The women have hair pulled tightly back and layered stiff clothes of different shades of black. Throughout the house Toby is aware of little-used closets and built-in cupboards and spaces under the bed, and a back stairs whose doors are never unlatched, as if a mummy or a maniac is locked in there.

He rarely goes into his grandparents' room, and when he does there is a smell, an old people's smell, parched and sweet, that frightens him. Right at the heart of the house there is a space that frightens him: the front stairs climb to a landing from which little sets of two steps lead one way to his grandparents' room and in the opposite way to his parents' room and then a third way into the upstairs bathroom. When he does "toidy" in the bathroom, he is frightened by the door that closes behind him; something might be waiting for him behind the door when he comes out, so he makes Grandmother wait there, sitting on the little steps, to protect him. It is her duty, because next to Toby she is most sensitive to the ghosts in the house. He has caught his belief in them from her.

One time when he came out of the bathroom she had fallen asleep on the steps, her wire-rimmed glasses tipped on her sharp small nose and her false teeth slipping down in a terrifying way, and Toby was furious to find she wasn't protecting him. He leaped up and pounded on her hunched bony back as she tried to stand. She softly grunted as his fists hit. Her long gray hair seemed to fly out in every direction from her head. He knew he was being bad but knew she wouldn't tell Mother, and even if she did Mother would understand his being upset. Her mother annoyed her, too.

The worst thing he does is torture his toys. His teddy bear, pale woolly Bruno, once lost one glass eye, the brown of a horehound drop, to Toby's infant fingers, in the time before he can remember. The baby he once was pulled it out on its wire stem and then forgot where it went. Now that he is older he likes to pull out the remaining eye, and gloat at Bruno for being blind, and then have mercy and kiss the woolly blank place and stick the eye back in. If he loses this eye they will have to throw Bruno away.

By saving pennies and begging for presents, Toby has collected rubber dolls of Disney characters--a black-limbed Mickey with a hollow head that comes off, leaving a neck with a rim like the top of a bottle, and a Donald with a solid fat white bottom that weighs pleasantly in Toby's hand, and a Pinocchio who isn't as satisfactory, with his knobby knees and goody-goody, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed boy's face without the long nose you get by telling lies. In the stretch of bare floor beside the dining-room carpet he lines them up and bowls them down 'like tenpins, with a softball. The hardest to knock over is a chocolate-brown Ferdinand the Bull, dense and short-legged. When he is playing this game just by himself, not with Betty Lou, as he sets them up again he tells them what he will do to them if they don't obey him and fall down.

Once Toby got carried away with a single-edged T reet razor blade he used for cutting cardboard into shapes, holding the edge against Donald's long white throat, and to show he meant business went deeper than he had meant to, so that now when he bends Donald's head back a second mouth opens below the yellow beak. This evidence of his own cruelty shames Toby to see--each time he tips Donald's head back, the cut widens a little-but then he doesn't step on ants like a lot of boys and even girls do, showing off, or go fishing out by the dam and put worms and grasshoppers on hooks. He doesn't see how people can do it.

After Pearl Harbor the United States is at war and violence has taken over the world. There are mock air raids in town. They have to turn off all the lights and sit, he and Mother and Grandfather and Grandmother, in the windowless landing that has always slightly frightened him anyway. Daddy is out in the dark with a flashlight, being an air-raid warden. While they are sitting there trying not to breathe, an airplane goes over, high above their roof. Toby knows in the bottom of his belly that it will drop a bomb and they will all be obliterated. That is a new word in the paper, "obliterated," along with "blitzkrieg" and "U-boat." Incredibly, in England and in China children are among the obliterated. The saw-toothed drone of the airplane above slowly recedes. Toby's life goes on. Elsewhere, millions die.

When he strips a tin can of its paper labels and removes the top and bottom and bends them in and, on the cement floor of the chicken house, jumps to flatten the shining cylinder, it is like jumping on the face of a Jap. Chicken-dung dust rises from the cement with each impact. Mother doesn't understand fighting--that you have to do it sometimes. On the walk back from fourth grade the fifth-grade boys pick on Toby because he is still wearing knickers, or is a schoolteacher's son, or lives in a big white house beyond his family's means, or raises his hand too much in class. They know this even though they aren't in class with him. They sneer to him, "You think you're much," when all he wants is to be an ordinary boy.

Boys from the ordinary world keep attacking him. One time, one of the fifth-graders, Ricky Fritz, wrestled him to a sort of standstill on the dirty macadam of the parking lot behind the Acme, except that Toby was on the bottom and came up with a bloody nose. When he came in the front door, his mother saw the bloody nose and in a minute was on the phone (a stand-up model of black Bakelite, his grandfather's pride, along with the Model A, when it was new) to Ricky Fritz's house and the principal of the elementary school.

An even more humiliating interference occurred on the softball field. The field is a two-minute walk from the lower end of his yard, through the narrow space between the chicken house and the empty garage. Mother complains that the space smells of urine, and blames the men of the house, including Toby. It makes her wild just to think about it. "What's the point of having indoor toilets?" she asks, getting red in the face. Still, Toby keeps doing it. Just being in this space between the two walls, the chicken-house asbestos-shingled and the old garage wooden clapboards with the paint flaking off, makes his belly feel watery.

Daddy walks his way to the high school every day, wearing a coat and tie, out past the buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, down between the yard and the asparagus bed, out through the lower hedge. Mother almost never comes down here; she avoids the school grounds. That is part of what makes what happened so shocking. It involved Warren Frye--Warren Frye of the bleeding head, who never came to the house anymore, and possibly resented Toby's being here, in the territory of the lower alley, where Warren lives in a tight row of asphalt-shingled houses. Behind the backstop of the softball game--not a school game, a league game, on a Saturday, with players graduated from school, and a raucous mood in the crowd of grownups--Warren pushed Toby, and Toby pushed back, and soon they were tussling on the dirt, before a small standing crowd that included Daddy.

Daddy was just standing there, his combed head high, trying to forget his worries and watch the game, trying to blend in, as was Toby in his way. Perhaps, teaching school all week, he was enjoying not having to enforce any discipline, letting nature take its course, ignoring the child's fight in front of him and the crowd around him, which was noticing and loudly beginning to take sides. Toby was getting slightly the worse of the tussle-Warren had had a growth spurt, in the thickness dimension--and tears of fury were spouting in Toby's eyes when his mother appeared.

She was just suddenly there, his tall slender mother, seizing Warren by the hair and slapping him in the face, as loud and sharp as a baseball being hit. Then, not missing a beat, holding Toby tightly by the hand, she wheeled and with the same amazing accuracy reached out and slapped Daddy in the face, for just standing there and letting nature take its course.

She pulled Toby home. He was blinded by his tears and burbling protests, while the part of his brain not incoherent with shame tried to figure out how she had known to appear. She must have heard crowd noise from inside the yard, and then somehow seen, out across the lower hedge. Why, Toby wonders at the center of this scene (the softball field fading behind them, the white house and side porch drawing closer, the asparagus bed on their left already beginning to turn frothy and go to seed, his tears warping everything like bubbles in windowpanes), does he have to be the one with a mother living so close to the school grounds, a mother so magical and fierce and unwilling to let nature take its course? Not entirely unhappily, as his arm feels tugged from its socket, he resigns himself to the fact that with such a mother he can never be an ordinary, everyday boy.

By John Updike, Harper's Magazine, Dec2006