The doctor's wife (by John Updike)

The doctor's wife was a queen here. She was the only fully white woman resident on the island. When the rare British official and the rarer, fantastically minor member of royalty came to grace this most remote and docile scrap of empire with a visit, she was the hostess. When she roared along the dirt roads in her spattered English Ford — its muffler had long ago rotted away — the older natives touched their foreheads ironically and the children flapped their arms in her wake of dust. When she and the doctor condescended to call upon the American family staying three weeks in the Bay, Hannah had trembled with pride and broken a cup in the kitchen. The doctor was a slight, rapid-voiced man with a witty air of failure. His fingertips were dyed deep yellow by smuggled cigarettes. He preferred Camels, but Chesterfields were all that were coming through now. Camels had more scratch in them. He had never seen a filtered cigarette. He and his wife had been ten years in the tropics — B.G., Trinidad, Barbados, now this. He had some vague scheme of getting to America and making a fortune and retiring to a Yorkshire village. He was off for the day to St Martin.
"In America, now," the doctor's wife said, vehemently brushing sand from her knees, "are the coloureds well cared for?"
"How do you mean?" Eve asked.
"Are they well off?"
"Not really," Ralph said, because he sensed that it would be better if he, rather than Eve, answered. "In some parts better than others. In the, South, of course, they're openly discriminated against; in the North they by and large have to live in the city slums but at least they have full legal rights."
"Oh, dear," the doctor's wife said. "It is a problem, isn't it?"
Eve's face flashed up from studying a shell. "Whose problem?" she asked. She was a graduate of one of those female colleges where only a member of a racial minority or a cripple can be elected class president. News from South Africa made her voice thrash, and she was for anyone — Castro, Ben-Gurion, Martin Luther King — who in her mind represented an oppressed race. That such automatic sympathy was itself condescending had not occurred to her. Of English blood, enriched by remote and aristocratic injections of French and Russian, she denied the less favoured even the compliment of fearing them.
The doctor's wife returned her gaze to the horizon, and Ralph wondered if they had been rude. In the woman's pointed profile there was a certain perhaps deliberately noble thrust. But, the hostess, she relented and tried to make the conversation go again. She turned her head, shading her eyes with a quick hand and exposing her neat white teeth in a tense smile. "The schools," she said. "Can they go to your schools?"
Of course, Ralph said swiftly, at the same time realizing that for her there was no "of course" to it. She knew nothing about his country. He felt firmer, having gauged her ignorance, and having moved to the hard ground of information. "Nobody denies them schools. In the South the schools are segregated. But in the North, and the West, and so on, there's no problem." He hunched his shoulders, feeling at his back Eve's disapproval of his saying "problem".
"But"— the doctor's wife's freckles gathered under her eyes as she squinted into the focus of the issue — "would your children go to school with them?"
"Sure. Good heavens. Why not?" He was relieved to clear this up, to lock this door. He hoped the doctor's wife would not turn away and talk of something else.
She sighed. "Of course, you in America have lived with the problem so long. In England, now, they're just waking up; the blacks are pouring into London."
A wave, pushed by one behind it, slid so far up the slant of sand their feet were delicately shocked and soaked. For a few seconds their ankles glittered in rippling sleeves of retreating water. Eve said slowly, "You talk as if they had asked to be made slaves and brought here."
"Mommy, look! Mommy, look!" Kate's voice, mingling with Larry's babyish yips of excitement, came from far down the beach. Their little silhouettes were jiggling around something dark at their feet, and out of the sea grape an old woman in a kerchief and a young sailor with a naked chest had emerged to 40
watch them, amused to see what amused these strange children. Eve rose, casting down, for Ralph to see, a startled and indignant look at the doctor's wife's body, as if it were an offensive piece of rubbish washed up on the pure sands of her mind.
As Eve walked away, the doctor's wife said, "Doesn't she take a tan beautifully?"
"Yes, she always does. She's part French." With his wife out of earshot, Ralph relaxed into the sand. Mediating between the two women had demanded an exhausting equilibrium. He resigned himself to listening; he knew the doctor's wife's tongue would be loosened. The presence of another white queen inhibited her, diluted her authority.
"Do you want to hear a frightening story?"
"Sure." He acquiesced uneasily. The attention of the houses behind them seemed to grow more intense. He felt that he and his family were liked in the village; the doctor's wife, driving down from the centre of the island to enjoy their beach, assumed an incriminating alliance which he did not wish to exist. For when the sun went down, she would go home, leaving them alone in the village with the night and its noises. Their tilly lamps hissed; black bugs droned into their heat and fell crackling to the floor; far up the road a boy practised on his lonely steel drum and next door, in an unpainted cabin that was never unshuttered, a woman wailed and a man infrequently growled a brief, hurt complaint.
"When Vie Johnson left", the doctor's wife said, lowering her voice and sinking back on her elbow, to bring her face closer to Ralph's, "they had a party to greet the new parson, a very nice young coloured boy from St. Kitts. Very nice, I must say, and they say very intelligent, though I haven't heard him preach. Well, the Warden — you haven't met him, and I dare say you won't, a big smooth Jamaican, takes himself oh ever so seriously — the Warden makes this little speech. He, of course, mentions Vic, forty years and so on, but right at the end he says that he knows we will not miss Reverend Johnson, because the new vicar is such a fine young man, comes to us with such an excellent record of study, and the rest of it, and furthermore, furthermore, what makes us especially happy and proud, he is one of us. Imagine! One of us! Of course, the young parson was embarrassed to death. It made me so mad I would have jumped up and left if the doctor hadn't held my hand. One of us! Vic had given his life to these people."
Her voice had become shrill; Ralph spoke in the hope of restraining it. "It seems unnecessary, but natural," he said.
"I don't see anything natural about it. Unnatural, in my book. Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don't know how unnatural these people are. If you could see one tenth of the antics, and then the selfishness, the doctor puts up with. At two in the morning, "Doctor, Doctor, come save my child," and then a week later, when he tries to collect his poor little dollar or two, they don't remember. They don't remember at all. And if he insists — "The white people are stealing our money." Oh, I hate them. God forgive me, I've come to hate them. They're not natural. They're not fully human." Seeing his hand begin a protesting movement, she added, "And for that matter, do you know what they say about you and your wife?" It was as if a shadow cruising through her words now made its lunge.
"No. Do they say something?"
"This is just to show how malicious they are. They say your wife has a touch of the brush. It took Ralph a moment to expand "brush" into "tar brush". He laughed; what else?
The doctor's wife laughed, too; but under the blonde eyebrows her blue eyes, the pupils pinpricks in the sun, were fixed on his face. She expected his face to crack and the truth to escape. "You see how dark she is," she explained. "How tan." He watched her tongue tick as she suspensefully pronounced the last two words. Girlish curiosity gave a taut surface to her mature malice.
Blood rushed through his body; the wound was confused; his anger entangled him with his attacker. He was supplying an absurd assault with teeth out of himself. "She just naturally gets that brown."
"And you see," the doctor's wife went on, still not unpinning her eyes from his face, "that's why they say you came here. No tourists come here, least of all with children. They say your wife's being part Negro has kept you out of the hotels on the better islands." 42
He felt certain that this ingenious argument was wholly her own. "We came here because it was cheap," he said.
"Of course," she said, "of course," and giggled, sensing that she had exposed herself to his defense. "But they can't believe that. They believe, you see, that all Americans are rich." Which was just what, Ralph knew, she and the doctor believed.
He stood up, wet sand collapsing from his legs. In an effort to rein his excitement, he threw several unrelated laughs, as if out of a renewed apprehension of absurdity, outwards into the air. He looked down at the woman and said, "Well, that explains why they seem to like her better than me."
The doctor's wife, having strained her neck to squint up at him, collapsed the rest of the way. She pillowed her head with one arm and threw the other over her eyes. Without her eyes her lips seemed vague and numb. "Oh, no," she said. "They hate her for getting away with it."
His laughter this time was totally vacant; it humiliated him. "I think I'll go in again," he said. "Before the sun fades."
"It won't fade," was the faint answer.
From the safety of the water he watched his dark wife herd his two pale, burned children up the beach. The distance between them and the doctor's wife's inert body diminished; he had an urge to shout a warning, then smiled, picturing the laughter that would greet this story when they were home, at a cocktail party, secure among their own. Abruptly, he felt guilty in relation to his wife. He had betrayed her. His seriousness had been unworthy of her. She would have wanted him to say yes, her grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that the comedy of this response depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious pride of race. That since this medium was poisoned all its creatures must be evil. That he and the doctor's wife were immersed together; he hated her blue eyes because they were pinned to his face, hated the taste of her because — could it be? — she was dying. His guilt could not be mapped. Its intricacy was as dense as a simple mass. He moved backwards in the ocean, touching the ribbed bottom with his toes, until the water wrapped around his throat. Something — seaweed or the pulse of a current — touched his calf. He thrashed, and peered down, but saw nothing. He was afraid of the sharks, and he was afraid of the doctor's wife, so he hung there between them, bleeding shame, while the water forgave him.