My Father's Tears: And Other Stories by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Short Stories (single author), General, Literary, American, Fiction, Short stories
ISBN: 9780345513809
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-25T10:00:00+00:00

The day was a clear one in February, with a chilly breeze. The barn was a relic of the horse-and-buggy era, with several stalls and mangers and a large central space the Fairchilds had slowly filled with things the couple didn’t have the heart or the imagination to throw away. Their children had left bulky deposits of schoolbooks, flat-tired bicycles, defunct toys, unplayable 33⅓ rpm records. Dead ancestors persisted in the form of framed diplomas, garden tools, and musty trunks stuffed with clothes and letters more ancient than the barn itself.

After a frightening moment of senile blankness, Fairchild recalled the padlock combination. The creosoted barn doors creaked open. The interior, lit by high windows of dirty glass, held the expectant hush of an abandoned church. The two living-room doors leaned in their beige tarpaulin against a wall six feet behind an antique cherrywood corner cupboard that Fairchild had inherited when his mother died.

The imposing three-sided cupboard had been a presence in his childhood, a choice piece of Philadelphia cabinet-making and a looming proof of his family’s pretensions to respectability. In a child’s view it had emanated the grave mystery of ownership. To buy things, and then to have them all yours, and to place them safely on shelves, and to have the government with its laws and enforcers keep others from taking them, had struck him as a solemn privilege of grownup life. He could still hardly bear to part with anything that was his. Even the oldest clothes might be used as cleaning rags, or an outfit for a very dirty job, dirtier than this one.

A section of the corner cupboard with two panelled doors formed the lower portion; upon it rested, with no attachment but gravity, a similar-sized unit whose single large door held nine panes of wavery old glass. The shelves behind the glass used to be loaded with rarely used family china, its gleaming ranks changelessly presiding in the dining room while Fairchild as a child played on the carpet and executed crayon drawings, much admired by his elders, at the dining table. When, after a long widowhood, his mother had died, the cupboard had seemed the most precious part of his inheritance, and he had saved it from auction and in a rented truck brought it up to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania. But none of his children had wanted it, or had room for it, and Carol, whose sense of décor, formed in hospitals, favored a clean and uncluttered look, didn’t see that their house, a stately neo-colonial with more than its share of windows and radiators, had any place for it either. And so it had come to rest in the barn, waiting for someone to cherish it as Fairchild did and come take it away.

Fairchild loved it because its subtly irregular old panes reflected into his mind the wobbly ghosts of his grandparents and his mother and father and Uncle Wilbur, a New Jersey dairy farmer who once had taken out his penknife and jimmied open the corner cupboard’s door during a summer visit.

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