THE ROADS OF HOME

by JOHN UPDIKE

In his rented beige Nissan, in a soft but steady November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new toll booth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpass and underpass. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan’s Forge—an inn, a church, a feed store—which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother’s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters—more than an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

He felt lost. Then a rusted, bullet-pierced road sign in the shape of a keystone, naming Route 14, oriented him, and he pressed on the accelerator with a young man’s verve. He knew this road: the gradually rising straightaway, with Morgan’s dam down below on the right; the steep downhill plunge, heralded by a sign advising trucks to shift to a low gear, toward the creek that curled around the roofless shell of the one-room schoolhouse his mother had attended as a child; and then the sharp right turn, slowing you more than the car pressing behind you ever expected, onto the stony dirt lane, long since macadamized, that led to what had been, for a time, his home.

He drove between the twin housing developments that had once been the Gengrich dairy farm and old Amos Schrack’s orchard, and from the crest saw what had been his family’s land. The meadow, low land once drained by stone-lined ditches that had been dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather, was no longer mowed; instead it was planted in rows of evergreens and birches for sale to landscapers. Beside it, quite buried in sumac and wild raspberry canes, lay the grassy road his mother used to walk, all by herself until joined by the Gengrich children, on her way to the one-room schoolhouse. There had been a towering tulip poplar beside the meadow which had survived into Kern’s middle age, as had his mother. She would tell him how, in warm weather, she would pause in her quiet walk beneath the tree’s big heart-shaped leaves, grateful for the shade and for the birdsong, subdued by the heat, in the branches.
His vivid image of her as a little girl—her hair braided and pinned so tight by her mother that her scalp hurt, walking in her checked dress and matching ribbons down this lonely road between the fields—had been her creation, as she conjured up for him those days of paradisiacal country loneliness, of trusting animals and hazy silence. She had wanted to infect him, another only child, with her primal girlhood happiness, so that when he inherited the farm he would live on it. In the event, he had inherited it only to get rid of it quickly. The thirty acres on one side of the road, with the barn and house and chicken house, he sold to a cousin, and the remaining fifty, fields and woods, he rented to the neighboring farmers, the Reichardts, thus keeping the green space free of development, as his mother would have wanted. He had inherited as well her childhood bird guide, with carefully pencilled annotations and in the back a list of the species she had spotted on this farm—an index of her loneliness, this absorption in birds. One of her tales of herself recalled, with a trace of lingering grievance, how fiercely her mother had scolded her for climbing into a basket of freshly dry wash in imitation of a nesting bird.

Kern, the absentee owner of fifty acres, felt guilty at the rarity of his visits. His career had taken him West. He had retired from teaching English at Macalester College, in St. Paul, and he and his wife, who hated the cold, had moved to Southern California. He drove past his old house with hardly a glance. The cousin had sold it, and then it had been sold again, to a Philadelphian, and renovated beyond recognition. Where sandstone stepping stones had once led the way across a lawn mostly crabgrass, a smooth circular driveway now enclosed a clump of shrubs in shades of green like a nursery display, crowded around a terra-cotta gargoyle. Kern’s mother’s many birdhouses, and her wind chimes on the back porch, were gone.

He kept driving and pulled into the parking lot for the Reichardts’ produce stand. Their farm, one of the few surviving in the region, had prospered as the south of the county filled in with new customers. The Reichardts were pious people but not superstitious about keeping up with the times. Kern’s annual check was now printed by a computer; the simple shed that he remembered, with an awning and a few boards on sawhorses holding bushel baskets of peaches and apples, sweet corn, and string beans, had sprouted freezers and cash registers and supermarket carts and a sizable section of imported gourmet delicacies. Young Tad Reichardt, who usually dealt with Kern on his rare visits, was off with his family for a week at Disney World. “He goes every year, down to Orlando,” a girl at the cash register explained, in the friendly local style. “He says it’s never the same trip—as the children get older, they see different things. Now, you live near Disneyland, I understand.”

“Miles from it. Miles and miles. I’ve never been.”

“Oh. Well, Mr. Reichardt got your letter saying you were coming. He said I was to fetch his father when you did.” Though her hair was worn in a Mennonite cap, she pulled a cell phone from her apron pocket and deftly punched in numbers with her thumb, a trick all young people seem to have.

Kern protested, “There’s no need to bother. I can see for myself. Things are going fine here.”

“He’s here,” she announced into the tiny phone. Within a minute a member of Kern’s own generation, Enoch Reichardt, appeared, damp with rain and grinning widely. They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns’ yard—the Reichardts had no yard, all the space between their buildings was used for equipment and animals—and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumbledown foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, under the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy, buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play.

But today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well—stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch’s teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked Kern if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed.

“It’s pretty wet out,” Kern said. “I think I get the idea.”
He had arranged to meet two old classmates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall.
Enoch’s uncannily white smile broadened as he explained, “We’ll go in my car. It’ll take hardly a minute. There’s some new ideas around since you were here last. My car’s right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?”

“Don’t be silly,” Kern said. “It’s just a drizzle.”

“Yes, well. That’s the way I look at it,” Enoch allowed. His car was a comforting relic—a black Ford sedan, with its chrome painted black. The former playmates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen customers’ cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas—a kind of quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. “Remember how we used to grow strawberries?” Enoch asked.

“How could I forget?” Strawberries had been David’s 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a summer toward his eventual college expenses. He and his mother had stood along the road selling them, to his intense embarrassment.

Enoch braked. “Would you like to take a look inside?”

David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifying and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof. Enoch roughly, in his proud excitement, widened a gap in the white plastic, and David peeked in. He saw strawberry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. “Aquaponic,” Enoch told him. “The plastic keeps the warmth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in from a hose. There’s no dirt.”

“No dirt,” David numbly repeated.

“Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?”

“And how your back would ache from straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up your arms.”

“No more,” Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. “You pick these standing up.”

“Amazing,” Kern conceded, climbing back into the car, after checking the edges of his shoe soles for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather.

He asked, “Would you like me to drive you over the big field?”

“Sure,” David said. “If you won’t get stuck.”

“I don’t think we’ll get stuck.”

In farming the acres, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, David thought. They drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother’s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought secondhand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusty housing.

“Would you like to get out?” Enoch asked.

The car had gone as far as it could. David looked down at his shoes, and solicitously thought of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before.

“Sure,” he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made itself felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles away. Today the city hid from sight.

As Kern feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch’s friendly lecture on crop rotation, and on new varieties of corn that didn’t take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some reason, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow.

Feeling his listener’s attention wander, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his eyelashes, “Your mother used to talk about how someday you might build a house up here.”

David said, “Well, I may yet.” He couldn’t resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, “And make all this my front yard.”

On the way back, sure enough, the Ford began to slew and wallow in a stretch of puddles a short distance from the paved road. But Enoch downshifted and the black Ford slithered free, and Kern was spared having to get out, in his delicate clothes, and push.

He took away a gift, a paper bag of Enoch’s fresh apples. Heading north toward Alton, he moved from his mother’s territory into his father’s; he and his father, a schoolteacher, had daily driven together in this same direction, away from the farm to the region of schools, of close-packed row houses, of urban pleasures.

Kern was staying the night at the Alton Motor Inn, in West Alton, but was in no hurry to get there—to make his way through a newly developed section of malls and highways sprung up in recent years. He turned off Route 14, past the Jewish cemetery and under the railroad bridge, into Alton, over a bridge that his father, out of work at the start of the Depression, had helped to build, hauling blue-tinged Belgian blocks and tamping them between the trolley tracks. The old man remembered that summer as pure misery, and his son never crossed the bridge without imagining drops of his father’s sweat as part of it, dried into the concrete. Kern’s bloodlines had left not just country traces.

Alton was a dying city, but its occupants persisted in living. The ebb of its prime, which David located in his own boyhood but which his elders put earlier yet, before the Depression, had stranded a population that occupied the tightly built grid like sleepy end-of-summer wasps clustering in an old paper nest. Even in his boyhood the venerable industrial town had been prolific of what the child had thought of as throwaway men—working-class males whose craft or occupation had withered and left them with nothing to do all day but smoke cigarettes and wait for a visit to the local bar to come due. Driving through south Alton, Kern spotted them through the flapping windshield wipers, standing on tiny porches, watching the rain drip from the aluminum awnings and darken the composition sidings up and down the street.

He drove on, into the wide center blocks of Weiser Street where the trolley cars would clang and pass, where the shoppers and moviegoers would throng, and where David, when his parents still lived a trolley-car ride away, would methodically wander through all the five-and-tens, from McCrory’s up to Kresge’s, looking to enlarge his collection of Big Little Books. At a dime apiece, it was possible, even on a thirty-five-cent-a-week allowance, to accumulate a sizable hoard. The five-and-tens all wore warm clouds of perfume and candy scent just inside the entrance doors, and some had pet shops, with canaries and parakeets and goldfish, at the back. Alton, it seemed to him then, had everything you could ever want in life.

He had been told by Ned Miller, one of the few high-school classmates with whom he kept in touch, that Blankenbiller’s Department Store was being torn down, to make way for a new bank. A dying city, Kern thought, and they keep putting up banks. In the old days you couldn’t find a parking space on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller’s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing brass cannisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down: a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and hardware being sold, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show, and basement chambers, now filled with rubble, that hadn’t seen daylight for a century. Even in the rain, with daylight draining from the autumn afternoon, men were pecking away with their dolefully creaking front-loaders.

His mother had once explained to him how she had gotten fat: she blamed Blankenbiller’s basement restaurant, where the apple or rhubarb or pecan pie à la mode had been irresistibly good, to top off a lunch when she was working in the Christmas season as an extra saleswoman. You got so tired, she explained, standing on your feet being gracious for ten hours; the ordeal had made her a food addict. Kern gazed down into the sodden, brick-strewn grave of his mother’s girlish figure, a figure he had glimpsed only as a toddler. It had been at Blankenbiller’s that, one day when shopping, he had let go of his mother’s hand and got lost, burbling to the floorwalker and wetting his pants.

One of the city’s surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on Weiser Street. Kern winced in fear of being asked for a handout; but the man mutely stared with him through the chain-link fence. Kern’s father used to embarrass him, in the city, by talking to strangers; the more disreputable they appeared, the more enthusiastically his father seemed to regard them as potential sources of enlightenment. Kern had been a fastidious, touchy adolescent, but had slowly shed many of his inhibitions. Now he turned to the poorly clad, indifferently shaven stranger and attempted conversation: “Some hole, huh?”

The man turned away, offended by such levity. He might have said “Yeah,” or said nothing at all, Kern wasn’t sure.

The Alton Motor Inn and Function Suites sat slightly north of the river, where Kern’s mental map of the county gave out. North of Alton had always had a different, hostile flavor: the high-school kids were tougher, the industrial landmarks were bigger and darker, and the rich, who had made their millions off the dismal mills and quarries, lived on fenced estates well back from the highways. The geography was a tangle to Kern; confusing new highways sliced through former villages and sped shoppers to malls that were themselves becoming shopworn. Just after his mother’s death, without her to guide him, he had got lost on his way to the Alton airport to meet his children for the funeral. Though he now managed, after several wrong turns, to find the motor inn on its little rounded hill of asphalt, Kern was afraid he could not find, in the dark, in the rain, the Alton Country Club.

The girl at the front desk, dressed in a mannish jacket, had tufty hair dyed in blotches of magenta. To her it was so obvious where the country club was that a few stabs of her pencil at a miniature map and a hurried recitation of several route numbers satisfied her that Kern was as good as there. Uncomprehending, but afraid of appearing senile, he docilely nodded and went to the room. His room, its picture window overlooking the muffled traffic of a mysterious cloverleaf, seemed a safe cave. But his classmates, in deference to their age and frailty, had urged an early dinner hour, so, instead of lying down on one of the inviting twin beds and turning on television, he unpacked his toilet kit, brushed his teeth, changed his tie to a more festive one, and tried to clean his muddy loafers with a wad of moistened toilet paper. Out in the parking lot, the controls of the rented Nissan still seemed foreign, the dashboard miniaturized and dim. There was an invasive sweet smell in the car: he had forgotten Enoch’s apples. Blazing streams of other cars were hurrying home; the county was not so depleted as to lack a rush hour. He was due at six, in just fifteen minutes.

As Kern squinted to see road signs, the headlights behind him pressed mercilessly; those coming at him wore troubling halos of refraction. He had turned off at the route number the neo-punk girl at the hotel desk had written for him, but possibly in the wrong direction. Anonymous mills and storage tanks hulked on one side, with silhouetted conveyor belts and skeletal stairways; on the other, after a distance, a restaurant in an old limestone house advertised itself with a discreet white sign, and, closed for the winter, a driving range and miniature-golf course hurtled by. None of this was exactly unfamiliar—ages ago he and some boisterous friends had played among those windmills and tunnels, or somewhere similar—yet nothing told him exactly where he was. He was being punished: he had lived his formative years in the county while disdaining to learn its geography, beyond the sections proximate to his ego and his selfish needs. Now in revenge, the area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed.

Then a sweeping searchlight straight ahead declared, he decided, the presence of the Alton airport. It was down to about two flights a day yet kept its lights on. But it seemed to be, if he remembered the hotel clerk’s sketchy indications, on the wrong side of the highway. Kern was beginning to sweat. He would never get there. The highway surround was thinning into countryside: distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream. He needed to urinate. At last, the broad glow of a combination Getty gas and 7-Eleven appeared. Yet the doughy woman behind the counter—the lone sentinel in a sea of darkness, wearing steel-rimmed granny glasses—seemed frightened of him, her only customer. He saw as if through her oval lenses his pink panicked face and wrinkled Burberry and California-style necktie, splashily patterned in poinciana blossoms. When he explained his disorientation, her face hardened; she appeared offended that he could have gone so far astray. “Go back the way you came,” she told him. “It’s after the airport. You passed it.”

“How far after?”

“Oh—a mile or so.”

“On the right or the left?” These people, it occurred to him, did not want out-of-staters to make themselves too much at home.

“On the left.”

“Is there a sign or anything?”

The woman mulled this over, continuing to size him up and keeping one hand out of sight below the counter, probably on the alarm button. “You’ll see it,” she grudgingly promised. “There’s two big gateposts.”

And Kern did, ten minutes later, see the gateposts, very faintly, on the other side of the road. They might have been ghosts—spectral apparitions between beats of the windshield wipers—but his only hope of refuge lay between them. It was the worst kind of highway, a two-lane wanting to be a three-lane. The streams of traffic behind him and coming toward him looked endless; he braked in the center of the road and, as halted headlights piled up in his rearview mirror, he swerved into the oncoming lane. The lead car gave him a long blast of protest on its horn but braked enough to avoid the head-on collision that Kern’s heart had leaped up to greet.

He was in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flower bed named the club. An allée of horse chestnut trees led him between two areas of darkness—golf-course fairways, he guessed. The clubhouse loomed, spottily lit. There was plenty of parking; it was a weekday night. He got out of the car. His eyes watered; his knees were trembling. Ned Miller was waiting for him in the foyer. “We were getting worried,” Ned said.

"I had trouble finding it,” Kern told him, fervently gripping his old friend’s hand. “Then when I finally found it I nearly got killed pulling in. The guy who had to brake gave me a huge blast.”

“That’s a bad left turn. You should have been coming from the other direction.”

“I know, I know. Don’t rub it in. I’ll do better next time. Maybe.” Ned said nothing; both men were estimating that there might not be a next time.

Ned had been, like Kern, a good student, but less erratically and noisily so. He spoke no more than he needed to, and talkative Kern, so excitable he sometimes stuttered as the words crowded in, had realized that Ned was his best friend only when he realized that silence was the other boy’s natural, companionable mode. Ned’s head was full of unvoiced thoughts; they were for him a reservoir of strength. He had become a lawyer, a professional keeper of secrets.

The three other guests were seated at the table, their faces glamorously lit by glass-shaded candles. Ned’s wife was Marjorie, a firm-textured, silver-haired graduate of a different high school, north of Alton. Kern’s other classmate he had known as Sandra Auerbach, though she had long since married one of Ned’s legal partners, Jeff Lang. It must have been Ned’s sly, considerate idea to include the Langs, since Kern had, at a safe distance, loved Sandra all through school. It had taken no great imagination to love her—she was conspicuously vivacious, an athlete and a singer as well as the class beauty. He had heard, though, that she had fallen prey to various ills. He wondered if the aluminum walker tucked over by the windows was hers. Even as he gratefully took the place they had saved for him, beside Sandra, he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, before sex kicked in, it was purely spiritual and impervious to bodily change.

In his happiness to be next to her, he gushed, “Sandra, I had the most terrible time getting here, not knowing where anything is anymore. Not that I ever did. Furthermore my night vision isn’t that great. All the headlights had this rainbowy hair on them. In my panic I pulled right into the path of an oncoming car, and even in that split second I was thinking, Well, Stupid, you were born here, you might as well die here. Was the traffic always this bad?”

She stared at him out of her stony, twisted face, and with a spasmodic motion lifted her hand toward his lips as if to touch them, to still them. “David,” she said carefully, “I don’t hear well. Speak more slowly, and let me watch your mouth.” Her hair, a silky chestnut-brown permitted some streaks of gray, was sleekly swept back; he saw that the socket of her dainty ear was daintily filled by a flesh-colored hearing aid. But her voice had kept its old quiet confidence; she had never had to shout to get attention. Except for her bust, spectacularly bloomed by the eighth grade, Sandra’s physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness. Her nose had a barely noticeable bump at the bridge and her mouth a slight, demure, enchanting overbite. Kern’s lips tingled where Sandra had almost touched them.

He slowly mouthed, for her eyes, the words “It’s won-der-ful to see you. I’m sor-ry I was late.”

The general conversation sought its rhythm, and David, the returned prodigal, for a time was assigned the lead voice. But the questions he asked, the details he remembered, related to a few decades that for him had the freshness and urgency of youthful memories but that for his friends were buried beneath a silt of decades, of thousands of days spent in this same territory, maturing, marrying, childbearing, burying parents, laboring, retiring. He called across the table to Ned, “Remember how our mothers used to take us out once a summer to the Goose Lake Amusement Park, at the end of the trolley line? They would sit there,” he explained to the others, “side by side on a bench, while Ned and I went into the arcade and put pennies in these little paper peepshows that you cranked yourself—girls doing the hoochy-coochy in petticoats, all very tame, in retrospect. What the kids nowadays see, my God.”

Decades of teaching had left him perhaps too fluent. He evoked aloud the long-gone trolley cars—their slippery straw seats, the brass handles at the corners to switch the backs back and forth at the end of the line, the serious-faced conductor with the mechanical changemaker on his belt.

“Every child had to have one,” Ned chimed in. “As a toy.”

“Exactly!” Kern agreed. He recalled aloud Ned’s old house—its abundance of toys, its basement playroom, its side yard big enough for fungo, and the slate-floored screened side porch where they used to play Monopoly for hours. Kern, a poor schoolteacher’s son, had envied that house, and intended to praise it. But he got the name of Ned’s pet Labrador slightly wrong, Blackie instead of Becky; Ned made the correction with an uncharacteristic, irritated quickness.

Monopoly made Kern think of the canasta craze in their junior and senior years, those rows and rows of cards laid out on their parents’ dining-room tables, and asked if anybody could still remember the rules. Nobody volunteered. Marjorie Miller began to look glazed, and stated firmly that no one in her high school played canasta; it never spread, she insisted, to this part of the county.

Deferential waiters, meanwhile, took orders and brought food. They kept calling Ned “Mr. Miller” and Sandra “Mrs. Lang”; only Kern went unnamed, the club outsider. He had his own clubs, far from here, but had he stayed he could never have made the Alton Country Club; there was no road for him up into it.

As, feeling the fatigue of his day’s adventures, he fell relatively silent, his companions lapsed into local talk—the newest mayoral scandal in Alton, the hopeless condition of the downtown, the misfortunes (illnesses, business misjudgments, ill-advised second marriages) of mutual friends. Kern thought that Sandra kept up with the conversation pretty well, her calm gray-blue eyes darting from mouth to mouth, her own lips opening in a frequent laugh. When she laughed, the gleeful pealing, a bit shriller than expected, sounded a chord in Kern’s head first heard during recess at elementary school, on the little asphalt lake around the old red brick building, strictly divided into boys’ and girls’ sections. Her voice, though not loud, could be heard over those of all the other girls at play. He must have been listening for it.

The waiters—two of them, for this was a light night—stood ready, in their pleated shirts and striped bow ties, to take orders for dessert and coffee. The group looked toward Kern, and he said what he sensed they wanted to hear: “I don’t need anything. It’s late for us old-timers.” There was a babble of grateful agreement, and a pronged fuss of gathering coats and umbrellas. Sandra used her walker, but as if it were a plaything, swinging it jauntily ahead of her. Outside, the rain had stopped, and Kern could see off to the left a shadowy green, with its numbered flag still in the hole, ready for play if November relented.

On the glistening driveway, they shook hands and hugged goodbye. He and Sandra studied each other’s face a second, trying to decide between a kiss on the cheek or on the mouth; he decided on a cheek—as it happened on the side somewhat paralyzed. Backing off, he said, “Take care. You’re the best.” Not sure the lamplight was strong enough for her to read his words, he absurdly gave her a thumbs-up, and blushed.
Marjorie, hugging him almost too firmly, said, “We’re all in one car; you follow us. We don’t want you getting lost again.”

“Oh, I don’t think I will. I just do the same thing backwards, more or less. Don’t go out of your way. Ways.”

“David. You follow us.”

The four had come in a big midnight-blue S.U.V. belonging to the Langs. Marjorie’s silver hair flashed in the back seat; Sandra’s tidy profile sank into shadow beside her. Women rode contentedly in the back seat here. Jeff Lang’s tail-lights led Kern down the long, hushed double row of horse chestnuts; at the highway, after a wait for all traffic to clear, the tail-lights turned left, away from the airport, then right at the restaurant in the limestone house. Almost immediately, they were moving down narrow city streets. They had been on the edge of Alton, all along. What was I doing way out at the airport? Kern asked himself.

This section of the city was strange to him. Lone pedestrians flitted warily across the rain-stained streets. The glowing windows of laundromats, delicatessens, and corner taverns slid by like the illumined spectres and tableaux in the water ride at the Goose Lake Amusement Park. Some of the signs were in Spanish. The S.U.V., seeming almost to brush the parked cars on either side, led him first downhill, and then up. Continuing uphill, the street smoothly became a strange bridge, high above the black river. It descended on the other side into blocks where gaunt semi-detached houses were approached up long flights of concrete steps. The two-car caravan came to a traffic circle near a large parking lot, with a garish state-run liquor store on one side, and Kern at last knew where he was: in West Alton.

He and his mother used to come to West Alton from the trolley stop in front of Blankenbiller’s for his piano lessons with—yes, of course—Miss Schiffner. Thin, wan, wistful Miss Schiffner, perhaps once beautiful in her way, had he not been too young to notice. Concrete steps covered by green outdoor carpeting led up to her front parlor, where the upright piano waited amid doilies and porcelain figurines and dusty plush. Its white-and-black teeth were cold to touch, with his nervous hands. The keyboard had a right-angled lid that came down after the lesson, protecting the keys against dust. The trolley car at its stop—there had been no traffic circle then—would unfold a step with a harsh clack and David, leaping down, jarred the sour dread in his belly at not having mastered his lesson. This was before their move to the country, the beginning of his exile. His mother was still a city dweller, still banking on civilization, handing over precious Depression dollars in gullible hopes of lifting her son up from the ruck. It was clear to him and must have been to Miss Schiffner that he was no little Mozart, standing on tiptoe to tap out his first minuet.

Jeff Lang’s smug ruby tail-lights continued halfway around the traffic circle, passed the liquor store, and headed up Fourth Street, toward the old textile mills that had been reborn as discount outlets and then had gone empty again, as the busloads of Baltimore bargain hunters went instead to the outlets near Morgan’s Forge. It came to Kern that behind him, one block over from Fourth Street, there used to be an all-night diner where he, in no hurry to get back to the farm, would go alone after dropping off his date at her house. After a school dance, he would go with a gang of others, all the girls wearing strapless taffeta dresses if it had been a prom, their naked shoulders shining in the booths. Each booth had its own little jukebox, with “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine” and Russ Morgan’s “So Tired” among the selections. If Kern went there now, he could get a piece of Dutch apple pie with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream, to make up for the dessert he had missed.

He wanted to reverse his course, but the Langs’ tail-lights inexorably receded, waiting at every intersection for him to catch up. He couldn’t believe it: they were going to lead him like some moron right to the parking lot of the Alton Motor Inn. In his head he shouted furiously, I know where I am now! I’m here.