Rabbit, Run (19 page)

“I don’t know why you come to me,” she says. “Harold’s one and twenty. I have no control over him.”

“He hasn’t been to see you?”

“No sir.” She displays her profile above her left shoulder. “You’ve made him so ashamed I suppose he’s embarrassed to.”

“He
should
be ashamed, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she’s two-thirds crazy.”

“Oh now, that’s not true, is it?”

“Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was Why don’t I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life.”

“Surely you don’t think she meant anything?”

“No, she didn’t mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run-down half-house when she came from a great big barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and Wasn’t I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well-equipped little trick? I never liked that girl’s eyes. They never met your face full-on.” She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles—an old-fashioned type, circles of steel-rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light—her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that’s it, it’s the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn’t really see him at all. Her confrontation is with the whole world, and secure under the breadth of her satire, he can say what he pleases.

He bluntly defends Janice. “The girl is shy.”

“Shy! She wasn’t too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirttail in.”

“He was one and twenty, as you say.”

“Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”

Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn’t acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. “About as shy as a snake,” she says, “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc.”

He laughs again; but isn’t she? “Well uh, what does Mr. Angstrom think Harry should do?”

“Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He’s just like his father underneath. All soft heart. I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.”

“That’s an unusual view.”

“Is it? It’s what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don’t know who’s supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.”

He smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps—overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Deep fundamental hopelessness in such a mind. Hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he’s forgotten much theology. It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.

Mrs. Angstrom picks up a dropped thread. “Now my daughter Miriam is as old as the hills and always was; I’ve never worried about her. I remember, on Sundays long ago when we’d walk out by the quarry Harold was so afraid-he wasn’t more than twelve then—he was so afraid she’d fall over the edge. I knew she wouldn’t. You watch her. She won’t marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out.”

“I don’t think the world
has
jumped on him. The girl’s mother and I were just discussing that it seemed quite the contrary.”

“Don’t you think it. That girl gets no sympathy from me. She has everybody on her side from Eisenhower down. They’ll talk him around.
You’ll
talk him around. And there’s another.”

The front door has opened with a softness she alone hears. Her husband comes into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and a tie but with his fingernails ringed in black; he’s a printer. He’s as tall as his wife but seems shorter. His mouth works self-deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth. His nose is Harry’s, a neat smooth button. “How do you do, Father,” he says; either he was raised as a Catholic or among Catholics.

“Mr. Angstrom, it’s very nice to meet you.” The man’s hand has tough ridges but a soft, dry palm. “We’ve been discussing your son.”

“I feel terrible about that.” Eccles believes him. Earl Angstrom has a gray, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips over his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.

“He goes on and on about that girl as if she was the mother of Christ,” Mrs. Angstrom says.

“That’s not true,” Angstrom says mildly, and sits down in his white shirt at the porcelain kitchen table. Four settings, year after year, have worn black blurs through the enamel. “I just don’t see how Harry could make such a mess. As a boy he was always so trim. He wasn’t like other boys, sloppy. He was a neat worker.”

With raw sudsy hands Mrs. Angstrom has set about heating coffee for her husband. This small act of service seems to bring her into harmony with him; they begin, in the sudden way of old couples apparently at odds, to speak as one. “It was the Army,” she says. “When he came back from Texas he was a different boy.”

“He didn’t want to come into the shop,” Angstrom says. “He didn’t want to get dirty.”

“Reverend Eccles, would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Angstrom asks.

At last, his chance. “No, thank you. What I would love, though, is a glass of water.”

“Just water? With ice?”

“Any way. Any way would be lovely.”

“Yes, Earl is right,” she says. “People now say how lazy Hassy is, but he’s not. He never was. When you’d be proud of his basketball in high school you know, people would say, ‘Yes well but he’s so tall, it’s easy for him.’ But they didn’t know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see.”

“From about twelve years old on,” Angstrom says, “he was at that night and day. I put a pole up for him out back; the garage wasn’t high enough.”

“When he set his mind to something,” Mrs. Angstrom says, “there was no stopping him.” She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice-cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose. “He wanted to be best at that and I honestly believe he was.”

“I know what you mean,” Eccles says. “I play a little golf with him and already he’s been better than I am.”

She puts the cubes in a glass and holds the glass under a spigot and brings it to him. He tilts it at his lips and Earl Angstrom’s palely vehement voice wavers through the liquid. “Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass. He won’t come work in the print shop because it’ll get his fingernails dirty.” Eccles lowers the glass and Angstrom says full in his face across the table, “He’s become the worst kind of Brewer bum. If I could get my hands on him, Father, I’d try to thrash him if he killed me in the process.” His ashen face bunches defiantly at the mouth; his colorless eyes swarm with glitter.

“Your language, Earl,” his wife says, setting coffee in a flowered cup on the table between his hands.

He looks down into the steam and says, “Excuse me. When I think of what that boy’s doing my stomach does somersaults.”

Eccles lifts his glass and says “No” into it like a megaphone and then drinks until no more water can be sucked from under the ice cubes that bump under his nose. He wipes the moisture from his mouth and says, “There’s a great deal of goodness in your son. When I’m with him—it’s rather unfortunate, really—I feel so cheerful I quite forget what the point of my seeing him is.” He laughs, first at Mr., and, failing here to rouse a smile, at Mrs.

“This golf you play,” Angstrom says. “What is the point? Why don’t the girls parents get the police after him? In my opinion a good swift kick is what he needs.”

Eccles glances toward Mrs. Angstrom and feels the arch of his eyebrows like drying paste on his forehead. He didn’t expect, a minute ago, to be looking toward her as an ally and toward this worn-out good man as a rather vulgar and disappointing foe.

“Mrs. Springer wants to,” he tells Angstrom. “The girl and her father want to wait.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Earl,” Mrs. Angstrom says. “What does old Springer want with his name in the papers? The way you talk you’d think poor Harry was your enemy.”

“He is my enemy,” Angstrom says. He touches the saucer from both sides with his stained fingertips. “That night I spent walking the streets looking for him he became my enemy. You can’t talk. You didn’t see the girl’s face.”

“What do I care about her face? You talk about tarts: they don’t become ivory-white saints in my book just by having a marriage license. That girl wanted Harry and got him with the only trick she knew and now she’s run out of tricks.”

“Don’t
talk
that way, Mary. It’s just words with you. Suppose I had acted the way Harry has.”

“Ah,” she says, and turns, and Eccles flinches, seeing her face taut to release a special missile. “I didn’t want
you
; you wanted
me
. Or wasn’t it that way?”

“Yes of course it was that way,” Angstrom mutters.

“Well then: there’s no comparison.”

Angstrom has hunched his shoulders over the coffee, drawn himself in very small; as if she has painted him into a tiny corner. “Oh Mary,” he sighs, not daring move with words.

Eccles tries to defend him; he goes to the weaker side of a fight almost automatically. “I don’t think you can say,” he tells Mrs. Angstrom, “that Janice didn’t imagine that her marriage was built on mutual attraction. If the girl was such a clever schemer she wouldn’t have let Harry slip away so easily.”

Mrs. Angstrom’s interest in this discussion, now that she knows she pressed her husband too hard, has waned; she maintains a position—that Janice is in control—so obviously false that it amounts to a concession. “She hasn’t let him slip away,” she says. “She’ll have him back, you watch.”

Eccles turns to the man; if he will agree they will all three be united and he can leave. “Do you think too that Harry will come around?”

“No,” Angstrom says, looking down, “never. He’s too far gone. He’ll just slide deeper and deeper now until we might as well forget him. If he was twenty, or twenty-two; but at his age … In the shop sometimes you see these young Brewer bums. They can’t stick it. They’re like cripples only they don’t limp. Human garbage, they call them. And I sit there at the machine for two months wondering how the hell it could be my Harry, that used to hate a mess so much.”

Eccles looks over at Harry’s mother and is jarred to see her leaning against the sink with soaked cheeks gleaming under the glasses. He gets up in shock. Is she crying because she thinks her husband is speaking the truth, or because she thinks he is saying this just to hurt her, in revenge for making him admit that he had wanted her? “I hope you’re wrong,” Eccles says. “I must go now; I thank you both for discussing this with me. I realize it’s painful.”

Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining-room touches his arm. “He liked things just so,” he says. “I never saw a boy like him. Any rumpus in the family he’d take hard out of all reason—when Mary and I, you know would have our fun.” Eccles nods, but doubts that “fun” describes what he’s seen.

In the living-room shadows a girl stands in a bare-armed summer dress. “Mim! Did you just get in?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Father—I mean Reverend—”

“Eccles.”

“Eccles, he came to talk about Harry. My daughter Miriam.”

“Hello, Miriam. I’ve heard Harry speak very fondly of you.”

“Hi.”

With that word the big window behind her takes on the intimate glaze of the big window in a luncheonette. Flip greetings seem to trail behind her with wisps of cigarette smoke and drugstore perfume. Mrs. Angstrom’s nose has delicacy on the girl’s face, a sharpness Saracen or even more ancient, barbaric. Taken with the prominent nose her height at first glance seems her mother’s, but when her father stands beside her, Eccles sees that it is his height; their bodies, the beautiful girl’s and the weary man’s, are the same. They have the same narrowness; a durable edge that, Eccles knows after seeing the wounds open under Mrs. Angstrom’s spectacles, can cut. That narrowness, and a manageable vulgarity that offends him. They’ll get through. They know what they’re doing. It’s a weakness of his, to prefer people who don’t know what they’re doing. The helpless: these, and the people on top, beyond help. The ones who maneuver more or less well in the middle seem to his feudal instincts to be thieving from both ends. When they bunch at the door, Angstrom puts his arm around his daughter’s waist and Eccles thinks of Mrs. Angstrom silent in the kitchen with her wet cheeks and red arms.

It’s just a flash; an impression. From the pavement turning to wave at the two of them in the doorway he is grateful for the fine picture they make and laughs at their incongruous symmetry, the earringed Arab boy with her innocent contempt for his Christian collar and the limp-faced old woman of a printer, paired in slenderness, interlocked.

He gets into the car thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half-hour but he can’t remember what it was. He’s scratched, hot, confused, and dry; he’s spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. He’s seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year’s dead stalks. Mrs. Angstrom’s ice water has left him thirstier than before; his palate seems coated with cobwebs. The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window.
Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du
. Cars are whispering home from work. He drives across the town, tacking on the diagonal streets along a course parallel to the distant ridge of the mountain. Fritz Kruppenbach, Mt. Judge’s Lutheran minister for twenty-seven years, lives in a high brick house not far from the cemetery. The motorcycle belonging to his college-age son is on its side in the driveway, partly dismantled. The sloping lawn, graded in fussy terraces, has the unnatural chartreuse evenness that comes with much fertilizing, much weed-killing, and much mowing. Mrs. Kruppenbach—will Lucy ever achieve that dimpled, obedient look?—comes to the door in a gray dress that makes no compromise with the season. Her gray hair girdles her head with braids of great compactness. When she lets all that hair down, she must be a witch. “He’s mowing out back” she says.