WE SEE THE WORKING OF THE parental imagination in Updike's 1963 novel, The Centaur, in which Cassie Caldwell—the name given this time to the Mrs. Dow character—features, more or less, as a distant threat. The Centaur is primarily a novel about fathers and sons, after all, not about mothers and sons, but the relationship between George and Peter Caldwell is scarcely imaginable without Cassie's spectral presence. Her most important role in the novel is as the force that made George give up his dreams of city living; before the action of the novel, she has followed her own dreams of moving to a farmhouse a few miles away from Olinger. This detail parallels Updike's own life. His mother, Linda Hoyer Updike, moved her entire family, by sheer force of will, to her childhood farmhouse in Plowville, a few miles outside of Shillington, when her son was thirteen. She would later write John Updike a letter suggesting that she would not have been courageous enough to make such a move if she had known how disruptive it would be for him, but Adam Begley is skeptical:

The force of Linda Updike's imagination clearly exerted itself powerfully on her son. “Why is it,” he wonders in “Cemeteries,” “that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself, like Titania calling Peaseblossom and Mustardseed from the air?”