John Updike - My Fathers Tears and Other Stories

HAMISH HAMILTON

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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 2009

Published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton

Copyright The Estate of John Updike, 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Morocco, based on incidents in the spring of 1969, was written in 1979 and appeared in the November 1979 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The other stories were composed in the twenty-first century, in the order they have here. Varieties of Religious Experience and The Apparition first appeared in the Atlantic; Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage, The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe and Kinderszenen in Harpers Magazine; and German Lessons and Blue Light in Playboy. The other ten were published in the New Yorker, The Road Home under the title The Roads of Home.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

ISBN: 978-0-14-192455-7

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T HE SEACOAST ROAD went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept space, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowersviolets? poppies?which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, or any Arabic or Berber. Dont stop, Daddy, dont! was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations.

We were an American family living in England in 1969 and had come to Morocco navely thinking it would be, in April, as absolute an escape to the sun as a trip to the Caribbean from the Eastern United States would be at the same time of year.

But Restinga, where a British travel agency as innocent as we of climatic realities had sent us, was deserted and windy. The hotel, freshly built by decree of the progressive, tourism-minded king, was semicircular in shape. At night, doors in the curving corridors slammed, and a solitary guard in a burnoose kept watch over the vacant rooms and the strange family of pre-season Americans. By day, the waves were too choppy to swim in, and the Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black. Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet. When we lay down on the beach, wind blew sand into our ears. Off in the distance, apartment buildings of pink concrete were slowly being assembled, and there were signs that in a month vacationers from somewhere would fill the bleak plazas, the boarded-up arcades. But for now there was only the whipping wind, a useless sun, andsingly, idly, silently in the middle distanceArabs. Or were they Berbers? Dark men, at any rate, in robes, who frightened our baby, Genevieve. Fantastic as it seems now, when she is so tall and lovely in her spangled disco dress, she was then overweight and eight. Caleb was ten, Mark twelve, and Judith a budding fourteen.