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John Updike's 'The Wallet'

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(page 2 of 5)

He slept poorly, agitated by the injustice of it. There was no one to blame and no court in which to place an appeal -- just an impenetrable delivery system stretched airily between New England and Texas. Awake at odd hours, he imagined footsteps softly passing on the sidewalk and hands rattling at his mailbox. The box itself, substituted by governmental decree for his infallibly retentive front door letter slot, seemed a perilous extension of himself, an indefensible outpost, subject to graffiti and casual battering. He tried to imagine in detail the processes of the mails -- the belts, the sacks, the shufflings, the sorting machines that fling envelopes in all directions. He yearned to seize and shake that vast imagined system, to shake loose that stuck small fortune so blithely confided to a scrap of paper within another folded scrap. The wish to shake shook him; his pulpy, intimidated heart filled his skull, the bed, and the bedroom with its thumping.

His wife, awakened by his furious rotation beneath the covers, couldn't grasp the problem, the indignity. Each day she was still eating, still tending her garden in the milky morning cool of these late summer days and then going over to the club for lunch and a swim or nine holes with her giggling, brown-legged female foursome. For Diane, perhaps there was no abyss. She had been a schoolteacher forty years ago, inculcating young minds with the lessons of cause and effect and of patience.

"The man said," she reminded Fulham in the middle of the night, "that if it didn't show up in a few more days they'd cancel it and mail another."

"That means waiting more days. I should be getting interest on that amount."

"But we don't need the interest."

"It's not a question of need, it's a question of right. We have a right to that money. Furthermore, every day that check is uncashed the company is drawing interest on its balance. Not only are we losing a profit, they're gaining one, thanks to their own inefficiency."

"I think you're making too much of it. There's no issue involved, it's just one of those things. It got on the bottom of a mail sack somewhere."

She thus managed in her soothing effort to stumble on the imagery that infuriated him: the flaw in the mindless system, the letter lost at the bottom of a sack forever. The outrage without a perpetrator, or at least a perpetrator who could be discovered, who would declare himself. A certain horrible smugness within the actual, imperfect and blundering as it was: an unanswerableness.

The perpetrator struck again, inside the home. Waking on Friday morning, Fulham discovered that his wallet was not on the top of his bureau, where he almost invariably put it upon retiring. He looked in the hip pocket of the pants he had worn the day before, and then, with increasing desperation, on the closet floor, under the bed, in the bedside table, on the bathroom sink, into the pockets of all his pants hanging in the closets, and, insanely, all the pockets of all his coats, even those which had been hanging in dry-cleaning bags since June.

For the years and decades of his urban employment, Fulham had carried a breast wallet, a small leather shield above his heart, gradually thickening with the years. In his retirement he wore coats only to go out at night, and so, in a minor rite of passage, a slight change of armor, he bought a hip wallet to go with his new working uniform of slacks and sports shirt. Strange and forgettable at first, and a little unbalancing, the wallet soon came to feel like a friendly adjunct to his person, a reminder, in its delicate pressure upon his left buttock, of his new, freer stage of life. It was, the wallet, almost too plump to sit upon, containing plastic charge cards for BayBanks, NYNE, Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Visa, Amoco, American Express, MasterCharge, The Harvard Coop, Filene's, the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital, plus his plasticized driver's license and paper cards signifying his membership in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Athenaeum, the Wellesley Country Club, the Tavern Club, the Harvard Club, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and Social Security. Fulham was a sentimental and retentive man; the wallet also held, in its insert of transparent leaves, photos of his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren, and in its various leather pockets, a card showing his last draft classification (5-A), his insurance agent's business card, six business cards of his own, a yellowed newspaper clipping recording his victory years ago in an intercollegiate tennis championship, and a little brown photograph, taken in a booth at the Topsfield Fair, of a seventeen-year-old girl with bangs whom he had once loved. There were also a number of obsolete receipts (for film left at the drugstore dry cleaning, a lawnmower to be sharpened) and perhaps sixty dollars in cash.