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John Updike's 'The Wallet'

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(page 4 of 5)

"Deposit it in your own account?"

"And then transfer it to their own, some how. I don't know, I don't know how criminals do their work exactly; that's their job. I do know that with these computers there's no more common sense in banking -- a wino off the street can walk away with ten thousand dollar s if he knows how to satisfy the idiotic machine. People and institutions are being -- what's the phrase these kids have? -- ripped off all the time. We ourselves have just been ripped off of -- "He named the amount of the lost check from Houston and her blue eyes went round as she began to believe him. "Don't you see?" Fulham pressed. "The check, and now the wallet -- it's too much of a coincidence."

"I can't believe," Diane said weakly, "it's as simple as you make it sound, with all these safeguards -- our code word, for instance."

He scoffed: "Hundreds of people know our code word by now -- all the employees at the bank and anybody who's ever stood behind us in line." It was irrefutably clear to him that forces out there beyond the horizon of towering beech trees and dormered slate roofs were silently, invisibly conspiring to invade him and steal all his treasure. Every door and window, even the little apertures of the mail slot and the telephone, were holes through which his possessions, the accumulations of a lifetime, were being pulled from him. Ruinously the world has cast property into the form of nebulous, mechanized fluidity. The cards in the missing wallet opened into slippery tunnels of credit, veins of his blood. Fulham stood, feeling nauseous. "I'm going to call Houston and stop the check," he told his wife. "Then the bank and freeze my account."

Even as he acted, Fulham knew his enemies, armed with his wallet, were running up giant bills buying cars, clothes, front-seat theatre tickets, mockingly extravagant meals. Yet the girls he talked to that Friday afternoon counseled delay; they all sounded seventeen, with placid, gum-chewing voices. As a group they seemed to have dealt with momentarily disappearing wallets before. Houston did agree to stop payment on the check, but the bank said the computer could not possibly be programmed to stop his account before early next week. The credit card offices all had busy phones and differing policies, and by the time Fulham hung up in exhaustion, his credit lay in a tangle, a hydra with a few of the heads cut off but most still writhing. He went through the whole house again, trying to imagine his self of yesterday in every tidy room, including the small room, once a sewing room, where they watched television. To discourage watching, the Fulhams had furnished it austerely; there was only the bare set, an oval rag rug, and a cushionless Windsor love seat with a plaid blanket neatly folded against one arm. The wallet's non-existence rang out through the rooms like a pistol shot that leaves deafness in its wake; he stood stunned that an absence could be so decisive. It occurred to Fulham that the house would feel like this the day after he died.

Downstairs, the front door slammed and Diane's after-golf shoes tapped across the floor. "Got the mail," she called up. In his distraction he had forgotten to make his usual noon trip to the box at the end of the brick walk. But into his subconscious had filtered, hours ago, Rodolpho's "Che gelida manina" from La Boheme, whistled off-key. The mail was dumped on the hall table with the petals fallen from the summer's last roses. A long sand-colored envelope from Houston lay amid the junk and bills. It held the check, dated three weeks ago. No hidden message, no mark of misdirection or extra wear on the envelope betrayed where it had been for so long a time. In this blankness he felt a kind of magnificence, the same kind that declines to answer prayer. He found himself not consoled. Payment on the check had been stopped, it was worthless.