Museums and Women: And Other Stories by Updike John

Author:Updike, John [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780679645733
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Carol Sing

SURELY one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the Town Hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas:

Mark my footsteps, good my page;

Tread thou in them boldly:

Thou shalt find the winter’s rage

Freeze thy blood less co-oh-ldly.

When he hit a good “oh,” standing beside him was like being inside a great transparent Christmas ball. He had what you’d have to call a God-given bass. This year, we other male voices just peck at the tunes: Wendell Huddlestone, whose hardware store has become the pizza place where the dropouts collect after dark; Squire Wentworth, who is still getting up petitions to protect the marsh birds from the atomic-power plant; Lionel Merson, lighter this year by about three pounds of gallstones; and that selectman whose freckled bald head looks like the belly of a trout; and that fireman whose face is bright brown all the year round from clamming; and the widow Covode’s bearded son, who went into divinity school to avoid the draft; and the Bisbee boy, who no sooner was back from Vietnam than he grew a beard and painted his car every color of the rainbow; and the husband of the new couple that moved this September into the Whitman place on the beach road. He wears thick glasses above a little mumble of a mouth, but his wife appears perky enough.

The-ey lo-okèd up and sa-haw a star,

Shining in the east, beyond them far;

And to the earth it ga-ave great light,

And so it continued both da-hay and night.

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