Roger's Version: A Novel Read online

  Roger’s Version is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1986 by Itzy

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1986.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Updike, John.

  Roger’s version / John Updike.

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64591-7

  1. Religious Educators—Fiction. 2. God—Proof—Data-Processing—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3571.P4 R6 1986

  813′.54—dc23 86045298

  Heartfelt thanks to Michael L. Dertouzos, Jerome Kanter, and Richard Hawkes for generously sharing their knowledge of computers. And to Jacob Neusner for helping with the Hebrew. Ideas in this novel derived, in part, from books and articles by Paul Davies, Robert Jastrow, George Gale, Ann Finkbeiner, Sir John Eccles, Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Martin Gardner, P. W. Atkins, James S. Trefil, Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro, Alan MacRobert, Norman Macbeth, A. G. Cairns-Smith, Francis Hitching, and Gordon Rattray Taylor.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Heroic Music: excerpt from “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Robert Hazard. © Heroic Music 1979. Permission to use lyric granted by Heroic Music (ASCAP), for songwriter, Robert Hazard. 65 West Entertainment Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “She Bop” by C. Lauper, S. B. Lunt, G. Corbett, and R. Chertoff. © 1983 by Rellla Music Corp., Noyb Music Co., Perfect Punch Music (BMI), Hobbler Music (ASCAP), C. Lauper, S. B. Lunt, G. Corbett, and R. Chertoff. Used by permission.

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: Ray Laskowitz/Perspectives/Getty Images

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  To what purpose is this waste?

  —MATTHEW 26:8

  O infinite majesty, even if you were not love, even if you were cold in your infinite majesty I could not cease to love you, I need something majestic to love.

  —KIERKEGAARD, Journals XI2 A 154

  What if the result of the new hymn to the majesty of God should be a new confirmation of the hopelessness of all human activity?

  —KARL BARTH, “THE HUMANITY OF GOD”

  god the wind as windless as the world behind a computer screen

  —JANE MILLER, “HIGH HOLY DAYS”

  I

  i

  I have been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile—there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living. I consider my years spent in the active ministry, before meeting and marrying Esther fourteen years ago, if not exactly wasted, as a kind of pre-existence, the thought of which depresses me.

  Yet when this young man called me at the school and, requesting an appointment, named my half-sister Edna’s daughter Verna as a friend of his, and he explained that he, like me, came from the Cleveland area, my wish to hang up was less strong than my curiosity. I named an afternoon and an hour, and so he came. The time was late October, a time in New England of golden leaves and tumultuous, luminous skies.

  He was, I saw as he came in the door, the type of young man I like least: tall, much taller than I, and pale with an indoors passion. His waxy pallor was touched along the underside of his jaw with acne, like two brush burns, and his eyes in their deep bony sockets were an uncanny, sheepish, unutterably cold pale blue, pale almost to colorlessness. He had been wearing a wool knit navy-blue watch cap, which he stuffed into the pocket of his army-surplus camouflage jacket as he stood there awkwardly, taking up too much space and in his embarrassment blinking and looking around, at my bookshelves and through the lancet window beyond my head. His dirty-looking, somewhat curly brown hair, I could see at his temples, was already beginning to thin.

  “These are lovely buildings,” he said. “I’ve never been to this part of the university before.”

  “It’s a bit out of the way,” I told him, wishing it were even more so. “Where do you normally, uh, hang out?”

  “Computer labs, sir; I’m a research assistant for a special graphics project the Cube has taken on on a combined government and private-sector grant. Artificial intelligence is what the higher-ups down there really care about—you know, yoking hundreds of minis together to modulize the problem, trying to develop rules that keep the search tree from expanding exponentially, using heuristics to generate new heuristics, and so on. But in the meantime it’s data processing and bionics and now graphics that keep the wheels greased, or the bread buttered, or whatever.”

  I am a depressive. It is very important for my mental well-being that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me and pull me down. The young man had, with his computer-talk, conjured up just such an area. The Cube is the jocular local name for the University Computer Research Center, which is housed in a new building whose edges are all equal in length. I have never entered it, nor do I hope to. I smiled, and told him, “We haven’t yet introduced ourselves. I, of course, am Roger Lambert.”

  “Dale Kohler, sir. I really appreciate your seeing me.” His handshake was just as I expected: bony, cool as wax, and too earnestly firm in its grip. He did not seem to want to let go.

  “Let’s sit down. You said you know my sister’s daughter, Verna. I’m very curious to know how she’s doing. Very. That was a set of shocking developments.”

  In sitting opposite me in the official wooden armchair the university provides to hundreds of its offices and rooms (each element, an accompanying brochure boasts, carved of a different wood—the seat of adamant oak, the spindles of fine-grained maple, the curved arms of ruddy cherry, and so on), the boy somehow got a pocket of his camouflage jacket caught, and there was a certain amount of apologetic heaving and writhing before he was settled. His knuckles and wrists looked huge, morbidly enlarged. I judged his age to be in the late twenties; he was no fledgling student. You see many of them in a university town, these people who settle into the casual uniform and cunning ingenuousness of the youthful learner as though it is a permanent, and paying, profession. Some grow gray hair and great bushy tails of ill-fed progeny while still innocently pursuing knowledge.

  “Which do you mean was shocking?” asked the young man, who, awkward as he seemed, had something challenging, something of impudence and insinuation, about him. He offered me a choice: “The race of the father, the fact that the father has copped out, or the crummy way her parents have treated her?”

  I took offense. All of us at the university are racially liberal. “The race, of course, was and is dandy, other things being equal. But since they so clearly weren’t, I
was surprised that the child went ahead and had the baby.”

  My visitor shifted weight, like a man with too full a wallet in his hip pocket, and I was reminded to reach for my pipe. “Well …” he began.

  The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.

  “Once she was pregnant,” he confided to me out of his lopsided slouch, “it was a religious decision.” His face—his uncanny long face with its swipes of acne and a curious unshaven fuzz high on the same jaws, an incipient fur vivid in the light from the tall window behind my head—expressed displeasure at my smoke. This generation, which by and large has lost all inculturated instinct for the Judaeo-Christian sacral, has displaced much of its religiosity onto anti-pollution, ranging from the demand for smoke-free zones in restaurants to violent demonstrations in front of nuclear-power plants.

  “Religious?” I framed the word between aggressive moist puffs on my pipe.

  “Sure. Not to kill it.”

  “You’re of the same school of thought, then, as our President?”

  “I’m not saying I am, I’m just saying Verna’s not getting an abortion had some reasoning and feeling behind it, but now …”

  “Now?” The tobacco was still burning on only one side of the bowl. I began to feel cross-eyed—another of those habitual expressions that irritate me in my fellow pipe-smokers.

  “Now it’s not so good, sir. The little girl’s about one and a half, and I guess that’s a demanding age, at least Verna says the kid is driving her crazy, babbling and getting into things all the time. She says it clings to her and I say to her, What else do you expect it to do, go out and get a job? I try to swing by once or twice a week at least; but this project she’s living in … I don’t want to sound racist—”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not a good place. She has no real friends.”

  “Odd,” I offered (the pipe smoothly functioning at last), “her decision to come here to live.”

  “Well … I don’t know how much you know.”

  “Very little. My father divorced and remarried when I was very small—the precipitating affair had evidently been progressing while my mother was pregnant with me—and with his new wife, he had this little girl, this other child, scarcely a year after I was born. I used to see her, my sister, or half-sister I should say, only when visiting him—sometimes, I admit, for as much as a month during summer vacations. So Edna and I didn’t grow up together at all in the ordinary sense; and I scarcely knew her own family, once she married, living as they all did in Cleveland Heights. Her husband and Verna’s father, as she may have already described to you, is this quite rigidly philistine, cold-blooded brute of Norwegian descent called Paul Ekelof who works as an engineer and now is some sort of executive at one of the Republic steel plants down in the Flats, along the river—why am I telling you all this?”

  “Because I’m interested,” Dale Kohler said. His pious smile was insufferable.

  “I’m almost done. Edna had Verna rather late in life—she was well past thirty—and I was long gone, first as a minister, and then as a professor. So, yes, I saw the child very little, and didn’t know what was expected of me when my sister, my half-sister, wrote me over a year ago to say how upset they had been with Verna, and that she had moved to here, of all places.”

  “Well,” Dale said, yet again, “it’s East, and I think she thought, with the half-black child, it might be more tolerant, being a university town, and also I think Verna thought there would be a lot to do—art films, free lectures. She and I met, for instance, at this symposium on Nicaragua at a Congregational church. We got to talking over the Kool-Aid and discovered we were fellow Buckeyes! Also, I think she wanted to put distance between herself and her parents, she was so angry with them. Not that Cleveland is that far away any more; they have these nonstop flights, you used to have to come down in Pittsburgh, and if you go standby it’s almost as cheap as the bus.”

  One’s time is hard to put a value on: much of it, clearly and inevitably, is spent to no immediate profit, and one of the Christian consolations, as I construe them, is that the Lord’s unsleeping witness and strict accountancy redeems all moments from pointlessness, just as His Son’s sacrifice redeemed Time in the larger sense. But my time, surely, was ill-spent in sitting and listening to the praises of the scheduled air service to Cleveland, that most dismal and forsaken of rust-belt metropolises, to which nothing but funerals has induced me, for thirty years, to return. Why was this young man seeming to suggest that I should fly back there, back to that muggy, suffocating heartland? Why was he here at all? How had we become entangled, in this sudden stilted intimacy?

  “How is she,” I asked him, “as a mother? Verna, not Edna.” Of Edna’s mothering I had seen, at wide intervals, something: like most of what she did, from playing tennis to driving that Studebaker convertible my deplorable father had bought for her when she turned eighteen, it was impulsive and slovenly, characterized by an absent-minded and serenely selfish carelessness she expected the world to forgive and overlook for the sake of her “warmth,” her fleshly charm. From infancy on, Edna had had a peculiar carnal pungence, a scented sponginess to her flesh; when, she a bumptious thirteen and I a recessive fourteen and condemned to spend all of August with my father and my vapid stepmother (whose name, Veronica, seemed as faded and prissy as she, the vampishness that had pre-natally wrecked my life collapsed into the dreariest sort of domestic respectability) in Chagrin Falls—when, I say, Edna began to menstruate, I had the powerful impression that the days of her “period” flooded the house with her sticky, triumphantly wounded animal aroma, even to the corners of my room with its boyish stink of athletic socks and airplane glue. Edna had had naturally curly hair and an obstinate, pudgy face that sprouted a dimple when she chose to smile.

  “Well,” the boy allowed, “I don’t know how good anybody would be, only nineteen and figuring the world is passing you by, with just this baby and the welfare check for company. She says what she really minds is not having graduated from high school, but when I tell her there are these courses you can take, and equivalency tests and so on, she tunes me right out.”

  “If she were good at tuning in, she perhaps wouldn’t have got so involved with this young black man and had his baby.”

  “You’ll pardon my saying this, sir, but you sound a lot like her mother when you say that.”

  A rebuke in this, and an aggression in his repeated stirring of me. I resented it. Ressentiment: according to Nietzsche, the kernel of Christian morality. I have a dark side, I know, a sullen temper, an uprising of bile that clouds my vision and turns my tongue heavy and ugly; it is the outward manifestation of my tendency to be depressed. In the professor’s role, I have found it easier to control (perhaps because less often stimulated) than in the clergyman’s. I generated some more smoke as pesticide against my visitor and, ignoring his coupling of me with that brainless Edna, asked him from behind my armor of amiable tweed, “Is there anything, you think, I could do for Verna?”

  “Do what I do, sir. Remember her in your prayers.”

  My inner cloud darkened. The present generation of Jesus addicts, though not, like their Sixties predecessors, wildly intoxicated on such heady blends as LSD and the NLF, have a boneless, spaced-out benignity and an invincible historical innocence that tend to madden me. I smiled. “That is certainly the least I can do,” I told him. “Do give her my love when you see her next.”

  “Also, if I may say,
you could visit her yourself. Here she has been in your neck of the woods for over a year, and—”

  “And she has not once sought to reach me. Surely there is a message there. Now, was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Yes.” He leaned melodramatically forward. His corneas had a fishy shine, vertically speared by the reflected shape of the tall pointed window at my back. “God.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Sir, have you been following any of the recent developments in physics and astronomy?”

  “Only in the vaguest way. The moon shots, and the rather marvellous photographs of Jupiter and Saturn.”

  “Begging your pardon, but that stuff is utterly trivial. Even our whole galaxy, relatively, is a trivial case, though symptomatic, you could say. Professor Lambert …”

  A long pause while his pale eyes lovingly glittered at me. “Yes?” I seemed compelled to answer, like Lazarus awakened.

  “The most miraculous thing is happening,” my visitor proclaimed with a painful sincerity, probably overrehearsed. “The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they’ve really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. They hate it, but they can’t do anything about it. Facts are facts. And I don’t think people in the religion business, so to speak, are really aware of this—aware, that is, that their case, far-out as it’s always seemed, at last is being proven.”

  “That sounds charming, Mr.—”

  “Kohler. Like the plumbing.”

  “Kohler. What kind of God is showing through, exactly?”

  The boy seemed shocked. His tufty, rather nibbled-looking eyebrows lifted. “You know,” he told me. “There’s only one kind of God. God the Creator, Maker of Heaven and Earth. He made it, we now can see, in that first instant with such incredible precision that a Swiss watch is just a bunch of little rocks by comparison.”