“Giving Blood”
The story titled “Giving Blood” actually is about donating blood. Of course, what it is really about is situating Richard Maple once again as Kirk Van Houten-type of perpetually emasculated half-man. In this case, Richard is nearly catatonic over the idea of giving blood for the first time. It isn’t a fair appraisal—many men are deathly afraid of needless—but it serves the purpose and gives Updike an opportunity for one atypically mundane and unsurprising stab at metaphor:
“There is a touch that good dentists, mechanics, and barbers have, and this intern did not have it; he fumbled and in compensation was too rough. Again and again, an atrociously clumsy vampire, he tugged and twisted the purpling finger in vain.”
Taking Blood
In the very same story mentioned above, just one short little conversation later in which the intern has suddenly found the strength that comes with being judgmental enough to view Richard as a clown and in which Joan Maple has responded in a way completely inappropriate for a wife, Updike ups his game by giving Richard a perfect snappily ironic comeback regarding his wife’s betrayal to the vampire:
“Her full name is Joan of Arc”
From Rome without Love
The plan is like that undertaken by so many other couples: energize a marriage coming apart by visiting
Rome. One is forced to wonder if this ever works. Maybe in fictional marriages that of Ray and Debra Barone, but probably most in real life end up like the marriage of the Maples:
“The Maples embarked again upon Rome, and, in this city of steps, of sliding, unfolding perspectives, of many-windowed surfaces of sepia and rose ochre, of buildings so vast one seemed to be outdoors in them, the couple parted. Not physically – they rarely left each other’s sight. But they had at last been parted. Both knew it.”
Home from Rome
After the recognition in Rome that the marriage as it was is over and gone, things change quickly. Joan is energized and becomes politically active. Richard is not and stays home and stews becoming typically 1960’s male in his view toward the job of actually having to parent in the absence of traditional gender roles. When she returns early in the morning from a trip to Alabama to support the Civil Rights movement alongside Martin Luther King, Richard whines:
“I’m very tired from being a mother.”
The Eldest
Being a story about a crumbling American marriage just after the mid-century point, the Maples have kids. Daughter Judith is the eldest and as such, over the course of the twenty years the stories stretch, is the member of the brood given the most opportunity to evolve and mature:
“Judith had become an optical illusion in which they all saw different things: Dickie saw a threat, Joan saw herself of twenty-five years ago, Bean saw another large warmth-source that, unlike horses, could read her a bedtime story. John, bless him, saw nothing, or, dimly, an old pal receding. Richard couldn’t look.”
