We regret to report the passing of Alexander Alfred Bernhard, who died in Boston at the age of 89 on June 15, 2026. Though Alexander was not known personally by The John Updike Society, members certainly knew of him. He and first wife Martha Bernhard, who would become Updike’s second wife, were part of the couples group that Updike wrote about in his 1968 bestselling novel Couples. Bernhard’s first marriage and the children produced were not mentioned in the obituary, nor was a second marriage to Joyce Harrington, who was part of another couple from those Ipswich years.

According to the obituary, Bernhard led a “peripatetic life,” attending high school in Mexico City, graduating from MIT in 1957, serving in the US Navy with the majority of time spent in the submarine force, and eventually settling on a career in law after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1964—just four years before the publication of Updike’s scandalous novel. After a stint as clerk for the 9th circuit of the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Bernhard settled into a career as a corporate lawyer at Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr) in Boston for 32 years. “He had a profound sense of community and was active with many nonprofit organizations,” the obituary noted. In 2004, he and his wife, Myra, founded The Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, which “successfully converted the abandoned Boston and Maine train line from Concord, NH to Lebanon, NH into a year-round walking and biking trail.”

The society offers its deepest sympathies to his surviving wife, Myra, three sons, and seven grandchildren.