Read Online Roger's Version by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

gave the colonial settlement its raison d’être . From the time when villages clustered here and there in the land, which the Indians had already partially cleared, there grew up municipalities each with its own city hall and power-jealous boards of administrators; but automobiles and their highways in this century have welded the whole area into one. We skim past boundary signs too quickly to read them. Bridges, some of painted steel, some of arched stone, connect the river’s two sides. Lifted up suddenly out of a subway tunnel on one of the bridges—an old bridge, say, of sandstone hacked into big rough blocks and set there as if by a race of Titans, with buttresses and quaint conical towers and floriate lamp standards—the metropolitan transit passengers wince at the splendor of the sudden view, of the hotels and emporia of glass and anodized metal which glitter at the city’s commercial center, of the roseate and powder-blue skyscrapers of the financial district that hover above the brick silhouette of the old residential neighborhoods built on rubble-filled marsh a century ago, of the recently condominiumized warehouses and deserted churches, of the ribbon of Olmstead park along the riverbank and the bandshell and planetarium and the rented sailboats tilting on the river’s sparkling plane, all these man-created wonders thrown into brilliant visibility by the impassive slant of our local star, the sun.
    The university is situated on the duller, shabbier side of the river. Having walked a few blocks from the Divinity School, through the shady enclave of tall turn-of-the-century houses each of which, including mine, has doubled in value several times in the last decade, I came to the avenue called Sumner Boulevard in honor of that fanatic Yankee abolitionist nowbest remembered for having been beaten on his bald head by an equally self-righteous, if oppositely persuaded, Congressman; this unlovely broad way marks the end of university precincts. A big young man in a dirty loden coat, with a wide head of uncut curly sawdust-colored hair and a Mormon-style beard that left the area around his mouth clean of whiskers, stood stock still, as if signalling a boundary; he could have been an aging divinity student, or a TV repairman waiting for his partner to park the van or a madman about to strangle me in order to silence the voices in his head. Just the way this ambiguous stout fellow stood, unbudging in the center of the sidewalk, introduced a touch of menace to the neighborhood.
    Sumner Boulevard stretched straight a mile, heading diagonally toward the river. A supermarket had boarded up the lower portions of its plate-glass windows, making it harder to break them. A drugstore advertised itself with a dead neon sign. Vinyl siding replaced honest clapboard; the houses took on that teetering three-decker look. Malvin Lane’s lush back-yard beeches and oaks gave way to tougher city trees, scabby-barked sycamores and primeval ginkgos spaced as evenly along the sidewalk as telephone poles; instead of plump plastic pillows of raked leaves nicely set out by the picket fences for the trash collector, here dog-torn bags of garbage and stacks of flattened cartons were heaped up along the curb. There were no more Volvos and Hondas, just Chevies and Plymouths and Mercurys, rusted and nicked, Detroit’s old big boats being kept afloat by the poor. Trans Am. Gran Torino. Sunoco. Amoco. Colonial Cleansers. Boulevard Bottle. Professional Podiatry. A triangular intersection was marked with the Italian name of a soldier killed in Vietnam. Imitation stone, oddly painterly in its mixture of artificial tints, wrapped around the little windows of a corner grocerystore. On the asphalt of a gasoline station a puddle of an astonishingly pure green color meant that here a car had been bled of antifreeze; but I sensed that to Dale such utter viridity would have been a marvel, a signifier of another sort, a sign from above. To a believer of his