The Violet Hour (18 page)

Asked once about his own parents' reaction to his work, Updike said, “They both have a rather un-middle-class appetite for the jubilant horrible truth,” and that phrase—“the jubilant horrible truth”—gets at his sensibility with rare precision. His impulse toward exposure, his brutal accuracy, his honesty about the degrading or harsher sides of life, all tango with joy. One of the great draws and challenges of Updike is that horrible truths are happily reported, reveled in, celebrated, and aging is no exception.

When Rabbit's mother is dying, his father says that “she's having the adventure now we're all going to have to have.” The word “adventure” here glows bright with the curiosity that Updike himself brings to the topic. There is an “adventure,” an experience that he is hungry to capture and pin down in words; the excitement, the appetite, of the word is what is strange: An adventure for Updike was something to be written about.

A couple of summers earlier, he had written to Ian McEwan about Philip Roth's novel of physical decline,
Everyman
. He said that he felt he had to read the new book even though he didn't want to face death. With the jostling and explicit rivalry between them, he may also have meant, little as he wanted to cede a big subject like that to Roth.

He couldn't stand up to shave. Martha's son Ted came for a visit, and he helped him. Ted, Martha's youngest, had been five when Updike moved in with them, and the two had a close,
uncomplicated rapport. He told Updike that an electric razor would arrive for him the next day, which surprised Updike, who was not
au courant
on the efficacies of the Internet. When it arrived, Updike was very pleased. He held it in his hands in bed, a small miracle.

Martha and Updike were driving around Manchester, which was a nearby town. He waited in the car while she picked up some medicine. “How would you like to drive me to Smith's Point?” he asked, and she did. He wanted to see Emmanuel Church. She went there in the summers, on her own, and was on the church council.

It was a small, pretty, red-brick church with a white steeple. The church had just completed a memorial garden, the ins and outs of which Updike was very familiar with from Martha's involvement. They stood looking out at the simple garden. It had a dogwood tree; in summer, it would have hydrangeas. There were benches, but there would be no gravestones or markers. There would only be small plaques on the church wall. They stood there but didn't say much. Finally Martha said, “How would you like to be buried here?” and he said he would.

He had originally planned to be buried in Plowville, Pennsylvania, with his mother and father, and had more recently told his children he wanted to be buried in Chicago with Martha's family. But this way he would be closer.

Here is a conversation about death that Rabbit's grown son, Nelson, has with his friend Billy: “By our age, Billy, we should have come to terms with this stuff.” “Have you?” “I think so. It's like a nap, only you don't wake up and have to find your shoes.”

Updike's first wife, Mary, wanted to come and visit. Martha told her that, yes, she was on the list of people Updike wanted to see and she could come, but she needed to come with one of the children, so she brought their youngest daughter, Miranda. It was Mary's third visit to Haven Hill. The first had been for Elizabeth's wedding, and the second had been to get some books signed for a friend.

Mary lives with her second husband in the same house overlooking the salt marshes in Ipswich that she had shared with Updike. Photographs from her years with Updike show Mary in black turtlenecks and jeans, with a casually upswept dark bun, chopped bangs, and a warm, open smile; one can see the quiet, artistic Radcliffe girl Updike had pursued. One detects the splendid, sweet, earthy power of his fictional first wives. He wrote about one of them that she was always giving her husband courage and did not forsake that habit even as he was leaving her for another woman and needed courage to do it. In books like
Marry Me, Couples
, and
The Maples Stories
, one is struck not by the glittering seductions of the sharp, ambitious, sexually enthralling mistresses but by the deep, agonized love
the husbands feel for the first wives, a mystery and softness that Updike could never quite finish plumbing the depths of: It is the first wife who fascinates.

When Mary and Miranda walked in, Mary hugged Martha, who stiffened. Mary and Miranda both sterilized their hands, and then Martha took them into the living room and said he was so weak it would have to be a short visit. Mary was worried that Updike could hear Martha talking about how weak he was, that her voice carried upstairs.

They went up to the second floor, where he was lying in a four-poster double bed in a guest room. He was cheerful and talkative. Mary held his feet through the covers. Miranda stood near the head of the bed. Martha stayed in the room until the phone rang. When she left to take the call, Mary and Updike started talking about the woman who was calling, whom they all knew. Mary said something not entirely flattering about her. When Martha came back in, she said, “We are not here to gossip.”

Updike talked with enthusiasm about the Obama inauguration. It was exactly the kind of charged cultural moment that always appealed to him, but Mary felt that he was—that they both were—particularly invested in it because of their three bi-racial grandchildren.

A few minutes later, Martha told them it was time to leave. Updike said, “Remember Aunt Polly.” He loved Mary's aunt
Polly, who had lived to be ninety-two, doing the
New York Times
crossword puzzle and reading the news, sharp and independent until her death.

Mary didn't kiss him goodbye. She thought they were coming back. Holding his feet through the covers was as close as she got to conveying anything.

On the way down the stairs, Mary told Martha she wanted to see him again. Martha said no, that this would have to be the last visit. He was too weak.

Over the years, Mary and Updike had talked less and less about the children. She had gone back to painting and sometimes exhibited her work in local galleries. Her paintings are lovely and peaceful; even the urban scenes are suffused with surprisingly hopeful colors, salmons and lilacs and powder blues, making everything look ordered and quietly right. Updike would go to the shows and write his comments in the guest book.

Mary does not indulge the bitterness or hardness or self-protective irony that most people harbor toward their ex-spouses; she does not feel the need to prove that he was at heart a very bad or impossible or fundamentally remote person and she was better off without him. Instead, she projects clarity and honesty in her discussion of him; she has access to a surprisingly uncomplicated affection toward him that is at once realistic and tender. He left her for another woman and then publicly examined that departure for decades, and yet it
seems that she accepts him, in all of his glories and limitations, in a pretty rare way.

“I would have loved to have that last conversation,” she says, “but there was no way to bring it up without his bringing it up. I didn't want to say I knew he was dying. I didn't want to alarm him.”

What would the conversation have been like? In Mary's description, there were still mysteries to be unclouded, history to be straightened out, some of it trivial, some of it not. “There were so many things I could have asked him that only he could answer.” But with Miranda there and Martha hovering in the middle distance, there was no possibility of that conversation.