In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-42133-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Hello Essie,

These are the best of the bunch. You look good I think. I showed them to my editor and he couldn’t use them since the competition is an old story but if I had some full figures posed with studio lights I’d like to send them to a model agency in New York where I know a guy. Could you come up to Philly some Saturday or Sunday in the next month, the sooner the better? Give me a call at the number here, extension 403.

Friendly regards to you and your Mom,

Doug

As it turned out, it was not so hard to get away. The family was distracted that October, the October when Chuck Yaeger in a Bell X-1 rocket plane broke the sound barrier and a black man, Jackie Robinson, played in the World Series. Jeb Horley was retiring as postmaster in Basingstoke and the kitchen table was animated every suppertime by discussions of whether or not Daddy should be the next postmaster. Jeb said the job was his for the asking, there was no reason it couldn’t be a carrier who got the promotion instead of a clerk, according to regulations he had to live in the delivery district and not be the spouse of a rural carrier, and he did and he wasn’t and all he had to do was post a bond and take an oath and the President himself would appoint him. But Daddy—stubborn, shy Daddy—said he didn’t want to be cooped up day after day with all that paperwork and politicking and making idle conversation with the town loafers and half-crazy gossips; he liked getting out and walking the town. Jeb Horley’s pipe smoke had stunk up the air in there for forty years past and forty years to come. Let Lyle Dresham have the job. Lyle had come back from the South Pacific with a case of malaria and a bellyful of parasites and was delivering on the edges of town in the Willys station wagon that had replaced the Jeep; he had a young family and was ambitious. This seemed to Essie and Danny much too cautious of their father, and rather selfish and unkind to deny them and Momma (though they couldn’t exactly say this) the advantages that would come with a raise in his pay and status; but Ama took her son’s side, saying to them privately, “It keeps him fit, and it’s something he can handle. Your daddy has a certain temperament. They used to say in Missouri, ‘Don’t race a plow horse, and don’t eat a laying chicken.’ ”

Momma had her hands full over at the greenhouse, where Grandma Sifford was having health problems. With no appetite and constant pain, she was shrivelling and looking ever darker, ever more of a Moor from North Africa. Doc Hedger’s successor, handsome young Dr. Jessup, had her worked up at the Wilmington General Hospital on South Broom Street and the X-rays found a tumor, in fact several little tumors. Only Essie

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