In the Beauty of the Lilies (60 page)

They sat down together, Teddy in the blue easy chair he had just about worn the color out of in the seat and the arms, and little Farrah with her tidy Whaley mouth and apricot Bacheller hair in the velvet wing chair with the curved legs and matching velvet stool Em used to rest her poor leg on. Some nights he gets to watching the comedies, one after another; they run together as he bobs in and out of sleep, and it’s as if Em is sitting right there, if he doesn’t make a mistake and turn his head and look.

Many of the clips had been shown on the local news, so it was like watching a movie twice, a silent movie even, because Farrah had tuned it to suit herself and he was hard enough of hearing to miss a lot of the commentary. There were the military vehicles, the same green as in Vietnam and before that. Photos of this Smith madman as a round-faced young farmer boy and then talking and waving his arms in some interview they flattered his craziness with. He looked a little like Harlan Dearholt that used to be big in Dad’s parish—favored the same kind of little eyeglasses. Quick still photos of Clark and Essie from ten, twenty years ago, posing as mother and son out there in Hollywood, and then some group photos of the other poor deluded souls. Pictures of the old farmhouse with its wings, and then pictures of it burning like a stack of kindling
soaked in gasoline; it made your stomach hurt to think of people in there. A commercial about a cruise ship that looks like a New Year’s Eve party, with this big-mouthed woman singing how you should see her now. Then Brokaw earnestly mumbling and close-ups of the skinny guilty-looking man who was shot trying to get out but would live, and then one of the women, with a freckled face, describing the shooting that had taken place inside and how Clark had done it to save them all. Then a concluding zoom of the four or so women with smoky faces coming out of this storm hutch like they’re scared they’re going to be shot, then stepping into the open, squinting, blinking as if just waking up, carrying or holding on to the hands of their children, too many to count. The children.

Afterword
 

For invaluable help with the particulars of this novel, I thank Herb Yellin, Emily and Gregory Harvey, Carole Sherr, Elaine Burnett, Theodore Vrettos, Stephanie Egnotovich and Davis Perkins of the Westminster John Knox Press, Clifford S. Wunderlich of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Yvonne Lavelle and Paula E. Rabkin of the United States Postal Service, Jeffrey W. Gmys and Kwaku Amoabeng of the Paterson Free Library, Dennis Santillo, Norma Harrison, Robert Atwan, Steve Golin, Rodney Dennis, Ray and Joyce Smith, Peter and David and Cindy Gordon, Ray Maguire, Hugo Weisgall, Arthur Griffin, Donald Burt, Frederic R. Bernhard, Cyril Wismar, Barbara Platt-Hendrin, Mary Yuhasz, Paul L. Singer, Diana Waggoner, Kathy Zuckerman, William Koshland, Judith Jones, and the ever-obliging staff of the Beverly, Massachusetts, Public Library.

The following books were especially useful:
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
, by Steve Golin;
Delaware: A Bicentennial History
, by Carol E. Hofecker;
Greenhouse Gardener’s Companion
, by Shane Smith;
Cinema: The First Hundred Years
, by David Shipman;
The Story of Cinema
, by David Shipman;
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
, by David Thomson;
The Film Encyclopedia
, by Ephraim Katz;
One Hundred Years of Filmmaking
, by Jeanine Basinger;
American Cinema:
Hollywood at Sunset
, by Charles Higham;
The Hollywood Story
, by Roy Pickard;
The Columbia Story
, by Clive Hirschhorn;
A Million and One Nights
, by Terry Ramsaye;
Grace
, by Robert Lacey;
Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe
, by Fred Lawrence Guiles;
Doris Day: Her Own Story
, with A. E. Hotchner;
King Cohn
, by Bob Thomas;
Acting in the Cinema
, by James Naremore;
Making Movies
, by Sidney Lumet;
Mad Man in Waco
, by Brad Bailey and Bob Darden;
Inside the Cult
, by Marc Breault and Martin King;
Religious Cults in America
, edited by Robert Emmet Long;
Less Than Zero
, by Bret Easton Ellis.

POEMS

The Carpentered Hen
(1958) •
Telephone Poles
(1963) •
Midpoint
(1969) •
Tossing and Turning
(1977) •
Facing Nature
(1985) •
Collected Poems 1953–1993
(1993)
• Americana
(2001)
• Endpoint
(2009)

NOVELS

The Poorhouse Fair
(1959)
• Rabbit, Run
(1960)
• The Centaur
(1963) •
Of the Farm
(1965)
• Couples
(1968)
• Rabbit Redux
(1971)
• A Month of Sundays
(1975)
• Marry Me
(1976)
• The Coup
(1978)
• Rabbit Is Rich
(1981)
• The Witches of Eastwick
(1984)
• Roger’s Version
(1986)
• S
. (1988)
• Rabbit at Rest
(1990)
• Memories of the Ford Administration
(1992)
• Brazil
(1994)
• In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1996) •
Toward the End of Time
(1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius
(2000)
• Seek My Face
(2002)
• Villages
(2004)
• Terrorist
(2006)
• The Widows of Eastwick
(2008)

SHORT STORIES

The Same Door
(1959)
• Pigeon Feathers
(1962)
• Olinger Stories
(a selection, 1964)
• The Music School
(1966)
• Bech: A Book
(1970) •
Museums and Women
(1972)
• Problems
(1979)
• Too Far to Go
(a selection, 1979)
• Bech Is Back
(1982)
• Trust Me
(1987)
• The Afterlife
(1994)
• Bech at Bay
(1998)
• Licks of Love
(2000)
• The Complete Henry Bech
(2001)
• The Early Stories: 1953–1975
(2003)
• My Father’s Tears
(2009)
• The Maples Stories
(2009)

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Assorted Prose
(1965)
• Picked-Up Pieces
(1975)
• Hugging the Shore
(1983)
• Just Looking
(1989)
• Odd Jobs
(1991)
• Golf Dreams
(1996) •
More Matter
(1999)
• Still Looking
(2005)
• Due Considerations
(2007) •
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
(2010)
• Higher Gossip
(2011)

PLAY

Buchanan Dying
(1974)

MEMOIRS

Self-Consciousness
(1989)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Magic Flute
(1962)
• The Ring
(1964)
• A Child’s Calendar
(1965) •
Bottom’s Dream
(1969)
• A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects
(1996)

J
OHN
U
PDIKE
was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of
The New Yorker
. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.