Rabbit, Run (15 page)

A chaotic tumble on the stairs shakes the walls. Eccles jolts to a stop in front of them, off-balance, tucking a dirty white shirt into rumpled suntans. His shadowed eyes weep between his furry lids. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hadn’t really forgotten.”

“It’s kind of cloudy anyway,” Rabbit says, and smiles involuntarily. Her ass had felt so good, just right, dense yet springy, kind of smacked back. He supposes she’ll tell, which will finish him here. Just as well. He doesn’t know why he’s here anyway.

Maybe she would have told, but her husband starts annoying her immediately. “Oh, I’m sure we can get nine in before it rains,” he tells Rabbit.

“Jack, you aren’t
really
going to play golf again. You said you had all those calls to make this afternoon.”

“I made calls this morning.”

“Two. You made two. On Freddy Davis and Mrs. Landis. The same old safe ones. What about the Ferrys? You’ve been talking about the Ferrys for six months.”

“What’s so sacred about the Ferrys? They never do anything for the church. She came on Christmas Sunday and went out by the choir door so she wouldn’t have to speak to me.”

“Of course they don’t do anything for the church and that’s why you should call as you know perfectly well. I don’t think anything’s sacred about the Ferrys except that you’ve been brooding about her going out the side door and making everybody’s life miserable for months. Now if she comes on Easter it’ll be the same thing. To tell you my honest opinion you and Mrs. Ferry would hit it off splendidly, you’re both equally childish.”

“Lucy, just because Mr. Ferry owns a shoe factory doesn’t make them more important Christians than somebody who works in a shoe factory.”

“Oh Jack, you’re too tiresome. You’re just afraid of being snubbed and don’t quote Scripture to justify yourself. I don’t care if the Ferrys come to church or stay away or become Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

“At least the Jehovah’s Witnesses put into practice what they say they believe.” When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small-jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Lucy says, “but when you asked me to marry you I told you what I felt and you said all right fine.”

“I said as long as your heart remained open for
Grace
.” Eccles pours these words on her in a high strained blast that burns his broad forehead, soils it with a blush.

“Mommy I had a
rest
.” The little voice, shyly penetrating, ambushes them from above. At the head of the carpeted stairs a small brown girl in underpants hangs in suspense. She seems to Rabbit too dark for her parents, too somber in the shadows, braced on silhouetted stout legs, baby fat knotted on longer stalks. Her hands rub and pluck her naked chest in exasperation. She hears her mother’s answer before it comes.

“Joyce. You go right back into your own bed and have a
nap
.”

“I can’t. There’s too many noises.”

“We’ve been screaming right under her head,” Eccles tells his wife.

“
You’ve
been screaming. About Grace.”

“I had a scary dream,” Joyce says, and clumsily descends two steps.

“You did not. You were never asleep.” Mrs. Eccles walks to the foot of the stairs, holding her own throat gently.

“What was the dream about?” Eccles asks his child.

“A lion ate a boy.”

“That’s not a dream at all,” the woman snaps, and turns on her husband: “It’s those hateful Belloc poems you insist on reading her.”

“She asks for them.”

“They’re hateful. They give her traumas.”

“Joyce and I think they’re funny.”

“Well, you
both
have perverted senses of humor. Every night she asks me about that damn pony Tom and what does ‘die’ means?”

“Tell her what it means. If you had Belloc’s and my faith in the supernatural these perfectly natural questions wouldn’t upset you.”

“Don’t harp, Jack. You’re awful when you harp.”

“I’m awful when I take myself seriously, you mean.”

“Hey. I smell cake burning,” Rabbit says.

She looks at him and recognition frosts her eyes. That there is some kind of cold call in her glance, a faint shout from the midst of her enemies, he feels but ignores, letting his gaze go limp on the top of her head, showing her the sensitive nostrils that sniffed the smoking case. The compact arc of her skull under her short-clipped fluffed hairdo suggests that she’s been turned on an exceptionally precise lathe.

“If only you
would
take yourself seriously,” she says to Eccles, and on glimpsey bare legs flies down the sullen hall of the rectory.

Eccles calls, “Joyce, go back to your room and put on a shirt and you can come down.”

The child instead thumps down three more steps.

“Joyce, did you hear me?”

“You get it, Dayud-dee.”

“Why should I get it? Daddy’s all the way downstairs.”

 “I don’t know where it is.”

“You do too. Right on your bureau.”

“I don’t know where my bruro is.”

“In your room, sweet. Of course you know where it is. You get your shirt and I’ll let you downstairs.”

But she is already halfway down.

“I’m frightened of the li-un,” she sings with a little smile that betrays consciousness of her own impudence. Her voice has a spaced, testing quality; Rabbit heard this note of care in her mother’s voice too, when she was teasing the same man, and wonders why Eccles doesn’t go for it; drive a wedge in this chink of fear and make discipline. Not that he could do it either.

“There’s no lion up there. There’s nobody up there but Bonnie sleeping. Bonnie’s not afraid.”

“Please, Daddy. Please please please please
please
.” She has reached the foot of the stairs and seizes and squeezes her father’s knees.

Eccles laughs, bracing his unbalanced weight on the child’s head, which is rather broad and flat-topped, like his own. “All right,” he says. “You wait here and talk to this funny man.” And bounds up the stairs with that unexpected athleticism.

Rabbit says, “Joyce, are you a good girl?”

She waggles her stomach and pulls her head into her shoulders. The motion forces a little guttural noise, “cukk,” out of her throat. She shakes her head; he has the impression she is trying to hide behind a screen of dimples. But
^’
she says with unexpectedly prim and positive enunciation, “Yes.”

“And is your mommy good?”

“Yes.”

“What makes her so good?” He hopes Lucy hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.

Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hanging there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a laborious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John’s Episcopal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer, the letters interlocked artistically. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of Things; stuck into the frame is a yellow photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper’s head: the glass this is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head; this half-mirroring glass rejects his attention, which slips back and forth clinging nowhere. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibilities, “the man who disappeared.” “Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.” What a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She’d have an anxious little edge and want her own. Cookie. A sharp vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.

There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles’ voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit’s ears were around the corner, “Don’t think this is pleasure for me. It’s work.”

“There’s no other way to talk to him?”

“He’s frightened.”

“Sweetie, everybody’s frightened to you.”

“But he’s even frightened
of
me.”

“Well, he came through that door cocky enough.”

This was the place for,
And he slapped my sweet ass, that’s yours to defend
.

What! Your sweet ass! I’ll murder the rogue. I’ll call the police
.

In reality Lucy’s voice stopped at “enough,” and Eccles is talking about if so-and-so called, where are those new golf balls?, Joyce you
had
a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, good-by. Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl, awkward, cross, pops out of the kitchen.

They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the green skin of the Buick has a tropical waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest. “So your trouble isn’t really lack of religion.”

“Huh?”

“I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree.”

“Yeah well: I stole that from Mickey Mouse.”

Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. “It stopped me short,” be admits, closing this flirtatious cave. “Then you said you know what’s inside you. I’ve been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?”

Rabbit doesn’t want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He’s safe inside his own skin, he doesn’t want to come out. This guy’s whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit’s lips. “Hell, it’s nothing much,” he says. “It’s just that, well, it’s all there is. Don’t you think?”

Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. The trap is there waiting; damn him, he’s so sure I’ll come down the path. “How’s Janice now?” Rabbit asks.

Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. “I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs.—Foster? Fogleman?”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces.”

“Oh Peggy Gring. That moron. She married that hick Morris Fosnacht.”

“Fosnacht. That’s right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something very local about the name.”

“You’d never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?”

“Never. Not in Norwalk.”

“The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn’t be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then.” He hasn’t thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.

“What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?”

“I forget. It was just something you didn’t want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn’t like it and I guess I cried, I don’t know. Anyway that’s why the old man stayed up.”

“He was your father’s father?”

“My mother’s. He lived with us.”

“I remember my father’s father,” Eccles says. “He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo-Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to.”

“About the lion?”

“Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can’t appreciate. He mocks children, which she can’t forgive. It’s her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered-down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious
practice
a certain color and a, a
rigor
that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was
extremely
remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn’t want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living-room? ‘You don’t think God is in the woods?’ my grandfather would say. ‘Just behind stained glass?’ And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy in a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never get rid of the idea that maybe after all they’re
right
. A little dried-up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, ‘Has he made you believe in Hell?’ ” Harry laughs; Eccles’ imitation is good; being an old man fits him.

“Did he? Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.”

“Well then we’re all more or less in it.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call”—he looks at Harry and laughs—“inner darkness.”