Pigeon Feathers by John Updike Read Free Book Online

life was least affected by time. The onions were as immutable as the statues; but the cabbage, peeled by Robin to its solid pale heart, had relaxed in wilting, and its outer leaves, gray and almost transparent,rested on the yellow cloth. His painting, still standing in its easel, preserved the original appearance of the cabbage, but the pigments had dulled, sinking into the canvas; their hardness made the painting seem finished, though there were several uncovered corners and numerous contrasts his fresh eye saw the need of adjusting. He loaded his palette and touched paint to the canvas reluctantly. The Well was so empty on this Monday morning of resumption, he wondered if he had made a mistake, misreading the schedule or taking it too seriously. At the far end, the wispy English boy, who had established himself as the teachers’ pet, noisily dismantled groups, crashing vegetable elements into a paper sack.
    After eleven o’clock, Robin appeared on the balcony of the spiral stair. She overlooked the Well with her serene Britannia stance—her bosom a brave chest, her hips and legs a firm foundation—and then descended in a flurry. “Leonard. Where have you
been?
”
    “I told you, I was going to Europe with Max. We went as far east as Hamburg, and came back through Holland and Belgium.”
    “You went to
Germany?
Whatever for?”
    “Well, I am German, eventually.”
    Her attention went sideways. “I say, the cabbage has taken it hard, hasn’t it?” She lifted her own painting off the easel. “Are you still going at it? Puss has put me back in antique.”
    “Of all the
crust
.”
    “Oh, well. He said to me, ‘You’re pretty rotten at this, aren’t you?’ and I agreed. It’s the truth.”
    Leonard resented the implication in this blitheness that he, too, the companion of her futile labors, was easy to give up. His mouth stiff with injury, he sarcastically asked, “How’s your posing for Jack Fredericks coming?”
    Her blue eyes squared. “Posing for
him?
I did nothing of the sort.” Her words might have been “I love you”; his heart felt a sudden draft and he started to say, “I’m glad.”
    But she went on with surprising vehemence, “Really, Leonard, you refuse to take me
seriously
. I could see all along he was a dreadful bore.” Her arm held her canvas captive against her side and with her free hand she impatiently pushed floppy hair back from her forehead—a rigid, aristocratic gesture that swept his stir of hope quite away. He had been stupid. He had been stupid to think that if Fredericks were eliminated he, Leonard Hartz, was left. Over here, he and Jack were two of a kind, and by his own admission he was Jack’s social inferior. She was done with the silly strange lot. After all, boyfriends are a serious bit.
    Like those flocks of birds seen from the bus window, she had exploded as he watched. Even before she took a backward step, her receding from him seemed so swift he raised his voice in claiming, less in apology than as a fresh basis, “All Americans are bores, I guess.”

Flight
    A T THE AGE OF SEVENTEEN I was poorly dressed and funny-looking, and went around thinking about myself in the third person. “Allen Dow strode down the street and home.” “Allen Dow smiled a thin sardonic smile.” Consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy. Years before, when I was eleven or twelve, just on the brink of ceasing to be a little boy, my mother and I, one Sunday afternoon—my father was busy, or asleep—hiked up to the top of Shale Hill, a child’s mountain that formed one side of the valley that held our town. There the town lay under us, Olinger, perhaps a thousand homes, the best and biggest of them climbing Shale Hill toward us, and beyond them the blocks of brick houses, one- and two-family, the homes of my friends, sloping down to the pale thread of the Alton Pike, which strung together the high school, the tennis courts, the movie theatre, the town’s few