Word: piet
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After the Whitman baby is born, Foxy gets pregnant by Piet. In panic, they turn to Freddy Thorne for help in finding an abortionist. There follows a rather absurd turn of plot that seems straight out of 19th century melodrama. All but twirling his mustachios, Freddy agrees-in return for a night alone with Piet's wife Angela, the one woman in the tribe who has never entered the communal bed. Implausibly, Angela consents. One night in a ski lodge, after the Thornes and the Hanemas have had too much to drink, Angela suddenly says, "Well, is this...
...Freddy," says Piet, "should you get your toothbrush or anything...
...rest of the ritual plays itself out almost mechanically: Foxy's fetus is aborted, the Whitmans and the Hanemas get divorced, Piet and Foxy marry and move away. The remaining couples take up bridge, their place in the town having been quietly usurped by a younger crowd that "held play readings, and kept sex in its place, and experimented with LSD." Toward the end, Updike provides a fortissimo blast of obvious symbolism: the Congregational Church goes up in an apocalyptic fire that leaves untouched only the old tin weathercock, riding high over the gutted house...
...Piet Hanema alone, the chase into neighborly beds comes close to the course of tragedy. Unlike the others he is hounded not only by lust, curiosity and boredom but by a terrible sense of time fleeing. He is haunted by the past by shepherds paralyzed in webs of lead his boyhood Dutch Reformed Church, by his father's rough hands tending the fragile flowers in his greenhouse, most of all by his parents' death in an automobile accident. ("Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road...
...snow continue to descend sparkling in the policemen's whirling lights.") Death for Piet is not a future moment in time: it is time itself, and life is what Updike calls "a series of little losses" leading toward the dry well. Piet fights death by trying to turn time around, to recapture the past, to make manifest the heaven of nostalgia...