Which excerpt from john updike's "the brown chest" includes a historical reference for the story? so he was , one winter day, two years after their wayward drive north, to have gordon call and ask if he could come look at the furniture in the barn.  he had a job, he said, or almost, and was moving into a bigger place, out from the city.  he would be bringing a friend, he vaguely added. for in this house, the house that he inhabited as if he would never live in any other, there were popular cheerful places, where the radio played and the legs of grown-ups went back and forth, and there were haunted bad places, like the coal bin behind the furnace, and the attic with its spiders and smell of old carpet, .  .  .the chest, on that day of moving, had been set in the new attic, which was smaller than the other, and less frightening, perhaps because gaps in the cedar-shingled roof let dabs of daylight in.  when the roof was being repaired, the whole space was thrown open to the weather, .  .  .he found the place in the chest lid, near one of the little dark hinges, where a split had occurred, and with a few carefully driven nails repaired the damage well enough. he could not blame the boy, who was named gordon, after his paternal grandfather, the onetime football player crouching for his picture in some sunny autumn when harding was president.