Read Online Museums and Women by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

roaring until two and three in the morning. Trucks heave and shift gears, turning north. Summer weekends see a parade of motorboats on trailers. The housing development, Marshview, on the east end of town, adds dozens of cars to the daily flow. The corner has already been widened—the Van der Bijns’ house once had a front yard. Old photographs exist, on sepia cardboard, that show fewer wires on the poles, a great beech where none now stands, a front yard at the house that was not then a store, the dark house across from the Blandys’ painted white, no porch at the Blandys’, no traffic island, and a soft, trodden, lanelike look to the surface of the roadway. When the Van der Bijns move or die (the same thing to the town clerk), their house will be taken by eminent domain and the corner widened stillfurther, enabling the cars to go still faster. Engineers’ drawings are already on file at Town Hall.
    Yet, though the inhabitants strain their ears at night waiting for the squeal of tires to mushroom into the crash of metal and the splintering of glass, nothing usually happens. The corner is one of those places where nothing much happens except traffic and weather. Even death, when it came for Miss Cogswell, came as a form of traffic, as an ambulance in the driveway, and a cluster of curious neighborhood children.
    The weather happens mostly in the elm, a vast old elm not yet felled by the blight. Its branches overarch the corner. Its drooping twigs brush the roofs of the dark house, and the young couple’s house, and the Latroys’. Shaped like a river system—meandering tributaries thickening and flowing into the trunk, but three-dimensional, a solid set of streets where pigeons strut, meet, and mate—the tree’s pattern of limbs fills the Blandys’ bedroom windows and their eyes on awaking in all weathers: glistening and sullen in November rain, so that you feel the awful weight the tree upholds, like a cast-iron cloud; airy tracery after a snow, or in the froth of bloom; in summer a curtain of green, with a lemon-yellow leaf, turned early, here and there like a random stitch. Lying bedridden in fever or in despair, each of the Blandys has concluded, separately, that, if there was nothing to life but lying here looking at the elm forever, it would suffice—it would be, though just barely, enough.
    The elm’s leaves in autumn blow by the bushel down Prudence Lane into the Van der Bijns’ side yard, confirming the old man’s contention that the weather is always outrageous. He came to this country before the war, foreseeing it, and still finds the intemperances of the American climate remarkable. The faithful gray damp of Holland is a benchmark in his bones. For months ahead of time, he foresees the troublesomewonder of snow, and gloats over his bizarre fate of having to shovel it. Though weak from his long days of sitting, he shovels compulsively, even during a blizzard trying to keep his forty feet of sidewalk as clean as swept tiles. Some ironical gallantry seems intended—a humorous grateful willingness to have the land that gave him refuge take his life with its barbaric weather. Our summer’s extremes also astonish him. Four sunny days become a drought in his eyes, which are delft-blue and perpetually wide open, within deep, skeletal sockets. Each growing season, as he observes its effects on Mrs. Hannaford’s bushes and lawn, seems in some way abnormal, unprecedented, weird. “Naaow, da forsydia last yaar wasn’t aaout yet vor two weeks!” “Naaow, I’fe nefer once zeen da grass zo zoon brown!”
    And Mrs. Hannaford, whose house of all the houses on the corner is most distant from the elm, regards this tree as a benign veil drawn across the tar-shingled roofs and ungainly dormers of the neighborhood. She sees it, too, as a sea fan superimposed on a cockleshell sunset, and as a living entity that has doubled its size since as a girl she studied it from the same windows she now sleeps behind. Once,