Rabbit, Run (25 page)

“Dear, I’ve brought you someone. He was waiting outside in the most miraculous way.”

“Hello, Mr. Tothero. My wife’s had her baby.” He speaks these words and goes toward the bed with blank momentum; the sight of the old man lying there shrunken, his tongue sliding in his lopsided mouth, has stunned him. Tothero’s face, spotted with white stubble, is yellow in the pillows, and his thin wrists stick out from candy-striped pajama sleeves beside the shallow lump of his body. Rabbit offers his hand.

“He can’t lift his arms, Harry,” Mrs. Tothero says. “He is helpless. But talk to him. He can see and hear.” Her sweet patient enunciation has a singing quality that is sinister, like a voice humming in empty rooms.

Since he has extended his hand, Harry presses it down on the back of one of Tothero’s. For all its dryness, the hand, under a faint scratchy fleece, is warm, and to Harry’s horror moves, revolves stubbornly, so the palm is presented upward to Harry’s touch. Harry takes his fingers back and sinks into the bedside chair. His old coach’s eyeballs shift with scattered quickness as he turns his head an inch toward the visitor. The flesh under them has been so scooped that they are weakly protrusive.
Talk
, he must talk. “It’s a little girl. I want to thank you”—he speaks loudly—“for the help you gave in getting me and Janice back together again. You were very kind.”

Tothero retracts his tongue and shifts his face to look at his wife. A muscle under his jaw jumps, his lips pucker, and his chin crinkles repeatedly, like a pulse, as he tries to say something. A few dragged vowels come out; Harry turns to see if Mrs. Tothero can decipher them, but to his surprise she is looking elsewhere. She is looking out the window, toward an empty green courtyard. Her face is like a photograph.

Is it that she doesn’t care? If so, should he tell Tothero about Margaret? But there was nothing to say about Margaret that might make Tothero happy. “I’m straightened out now, Mr. Tothero, and I hope you’re up and out of this bed soon.”

Tothero’s head turns back with an annoyed quickness, the mouth closed, the eyes in a half-squint, and for this moment he looks so coherent Harry thinks he will speak, that the pause is just his old disciplinarian’s trick of holding silent until your attention is complete. But the pause stretches, inflates, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words. Yet in the first moments of the silence a certain force flows forth, a human soul emits its invisible and scentless rays with urgency. Then the point in the eyes fades, the brown lids lift and expose pink jelly, the lips part, the tip of the tongue appears.

“I better go down and visit my wife,” Harry shouts. “She just had the baby last night. It’s a girl.” He feels claustrophobic, as if he’s inside Tothero’s skull; when he stands up, he has the fear he will bump his head, though the white ceiling is yards away.

“Thank you very much, Harry. I know he’s enjoyed seeing you,” Mrs. Tothero says. Nevertheless from her tone he feels he’s flunked a recitation. He walks down the hall springingly, dismissed. His health, his reformed life, make space, even the antiseptic space in the hospital corridors, delicious. Yet his visit with Janice is disappointing. Perhaps he is still choked by seeing poor Tothero stretched out as good as dead; perhaps out of ether Janice is choked by thinking of how he’s treated her. She complains a lot about how much her stitches hurt, and when he tries to express his repentance again she seems to find it boring. The difficulty of pleasing someone begins to hem him in. She asks why he hasn’t brought flowers. He had no time; he tells her how he spent the night and, sure enough, she asks him to describe Mrs. Eccles.

“About your height,” he says. “Freckles.”

“Her husband’s been wonderful,” she says. “He seems to love everybody.”

“He’s O.K.,” Rabbit says. “He makes me nervous.”

“Oh, everybody makes you nervous.”

“No now that’s not true. Marty Tothero never made me nervous. I just saw the poor old bastard, stretched out in a bed up the hall. He can’t say a word or move his head more than an inch.”

“He doesn’t make you nervous but I do, is that right?” “I didn’t say that.”

“Oh no. Ow. These damn stitches they feel like barbed wire. I just make you so nervous you desert me for two months. Over two months.”

“Well Jesus Janice. All you did was watch television and drink all the time. I mean I’m not saying I wasn’t wrong, but it felt like I had to. You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out. On that first night, when I got in the car in front of your parents’ place, even then I might just as easy have gone down to get Nelson and driven it home. But when I let the brake out—” Her face goes into that bored look again. Her head switches from side to side, as if to keep flies from settling. He says, “Shit.”

This gets her. She says, “I see your language hasn’t been improved by living with that prostitute.”

“She wasn’t a prostitute, exactly. She just kind of slept around. I think there are a lot of girls like her around. I mean if you’re going to call everybody who isn’t married a prostitute—”

“Where are you going to stay now? Until I get out of the hospital.”

“I thought Nelson and me would move into our apartment.”

“I’m not sure you can. We didn’t pay any rent on it for two months.”

“Huh? You didn’t?”

“Well my
goodness
, Harry. You expect a lot. You expect Daddy to keep paying rent? I didn’t have any money.”

“Well did the landlord call? What happened to our furniture? Did he put it out on the street?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know
? Well what
do
you know? What have you been doing all this time? Sleeping?”

“I was carrying your baby.”

“Well hell, I didn’t know you had to keep your whole mind on
that
all the time. The trouble with you, kid, is you just don’t give a damn. Really.”

“Well listen to you.”

He does listen to what he’s been sounding like, remembers how he felt last night, and after a pause tries to begin all over again. “Hey,” he says, “I love you.”

“I love you,” she says. “Do you have a quarter?”

“I guess. I’ll look. What do you want it for?”

“If you put a quarter in that”—she points toward a small television set on a high stand, so patients can see it over the foot of their beds—“it’ll play for an hour. There’s a silly program on at two that Mother and I got to watching when I was home.”

So for thirty minutes he sits by her bed watching some curly-haired M.C. tease a lot of elderly women from Akron, Ohio, and Oakland, California. The idea is all these women have tragedies they tell about and then get money according to how much applause there is, but by the time the M.C. gets done delivering commercials and kidding them about their grandchildren and their girlish hairdos there isn’t much room for tragedy left. Rabbit keeps thinking that the M.C., who has that way of a Jew of pronouncing very distinctly, no matter how fast the words, is going to start plugging the MagiPeel Peeler but the product doesn’t seem to have hit the big time yet. It’s not too bad; a pair of peroxide twins with twitchy tails push the women around to various microphones and booths and applause areas. It even makes for a kind of peace; he and Janice hold hands. The bed is almost as high as his shoulders when he sits down, and he enjoys being in this strange relation to a woman. As if he’s carrying her on his shoulder but without the weight. He cranks her bed up and pours her a drink of water and these small services suit some need he has. The program isn’t over when some nurse comes and says, “Mr. Angstrom, if you want to see your baby the nurse is holding them to the window now.”

He goes down the hall after her; her square hips swing under the starched white. From just the thickness of her neck he figures her for a good solid piece: haunchy. Big above the knee. He does like women big above the knee. Also he’s worrying about what a woman from Springfield, Illinois, was going to say happened after her son’s dreadful automobile accident, in which he lost an arm. So he’s quite unprepared when the nurse in the baby room, where little bundles with heads like oranges lie in rows of supermarket baskets, some tilted, brings his girl to the viewing window, and it’s like a damper being slid back in his chest. A sudden stiff draft freezes his breath. People are always saying how ugly new babies are, maybe this is the reason for the amazement. The baby is held by the nurse so her profile is sharp red against the buttoned white bosom of the uniform. The folds around the nostril, worked out on such a small scale, seem incredibly precise; the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid runs diagonally a great length, as if the eye, when it is opened, will be huge and see everything and know everything. As if behind the bulge of membrane a quantity of the most precious and clear liquid in the world is held in suspense. In the suggestion of pressure behind the tranquil lid and in the tilt of the protruding upper lip he reads a delightful hint of disdain. She knows she’s good. What he never expected, he can feel she’s feminine, feels something both delicate and enduring in the arc of the long pink cranium, furred in bands with black licked swatches. Nelson’s head had been full of lumps and frightening blue veins and bald except at the base of the neck. Rabbit looks down through the glass with a timidity in the very act of seeing, as if rough looking will smash the fine machinery of this beautiful life.

The smile of the nurse, foreshortened and flickering cutely between his eyes and the baby’s nose, reassures him that he is the father. Her painted lips wrinkle a question through the glass, and he calls, “O. K., yeah,” and gestures, throwing his hands, fingers splayed, to the height of his ears. “She’s great,” he adds, in a forced voice meant to carry through glass, but the nurse is already returning his daughter to her supermarket basket. Rabbit turns the wrong way, into the pink-lidded face of the father next in line, and laughs outright. He goes back to Janice with the wind swirling through him and fire the red of the baby’s skin blazing. In the soap-scented hall he gets the idea: they should call the girl June. This is June, she was born in June. He’s never known a June. It will please Janice because of the J. But Janice has been thinking about names too and wants to call her after her mother. Harry never thinks of Mrs. Springer as having a first name. It is Rebecca. His warm gust of pride in his child turns Janice soft in the bed, and he in turn is sweetened by her daughterly wish; it worries him at times that she does not seem to love her mother. They compromise: Rebecca June Angstrom.

The straight path is made smooth. Mr. Springer had been paying rent on the apartment all along, it turns out; he is a personal friend of the landlord and had arranged it without troubling his daughter. He always had a hunch Harry would come back but didn’t want to advertise it in case he was wrong. Harry and Nelson move in and start housekeeping. Rabbit has a gift for housekeeping; the sensation of dust sucking into the vacuum cleaner, down the cloth hose, into a paper bag that when it is full of compact gray fluff will pop the cover of the Electrolux, like a gentleman tipping his hat, pleases him. He was not entirely miscast as a barker for the MagiPeel Peeler; he has an instinctive taste for the small appliances of civilization, the little grinders and slicers and holders. Perhaps the oldest child should always be a girl; Mim, coming after him to the Angstrom household, was never exposed direct to the bright heart of the kitchen, but was always in his shadow with the housework, and sullen about assuming her share, which eventually became the greater share, because he was, after all, a boy. He supposes it will be the same with Nelson and Rebecca.

Nelson is a help. Closer to three now than two, the child can carry out orders that do not take him out of the room, understands that his toys belong in the bushel basket, and feels the happiness in cleanness, order, and light. The June breeze sighs at the screens of the long-closed windows. The sun dots the mesh with hundreds of sparkling T’s and L’s. Beyond the windows Wilbur Street falls away. The flat tin-and-tar roofs of their neighbors, weathered into gentle corrugations, glitter with mysterious twists of rubble, candy-bar wrappers and a pool of glass flakes, litter that must have fallen from the clouds or been brought by birds to this street in the sky, planted with television aerials and hooded chimneys the size of fire hydrants. There are three of these roofs on the down side, tipped like terraces for drainage, three broad dirty steps leading to a brink below which the better homes begin, the stucco and brick forts, rugged with porches and dormer windows and lightning rods, guarded by conifers, protected by treaties with banks and firms of lawyers. It was strange that a row of tenements had been set above them; they had been tricked by growth. But in a town built against a mountain, height was too common to be precious; above them all there was the primitive ridge, the dark slum of forest, separated from the decent part of town by a band of unpaved lanes, derelict farmhouses, a cemetery, and a few raw young developments. Wilbur Street was paved for a block past Rabbit’s door, and then became a street of mud and gravel between two short rows of ranch-houses of alternating color erected in 1953 on scraped red earth that even now gives scant support to the blades of grass that speckle it. The land grows steeper still, and the woods begin.

Straight out from the windows Rabbit can look in the opposite direction across the town into the wide farm valley, with its golf course. He thinks,
My valley, my home
. The blemished green-papered walls, the scatter-rugs whose corners keep turning under, the closet whose door bumps the television set, absent from his senses for months, have returned with unexpected force. Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick already in his brain. This adds another dimension of neatness to his housecleaning.

Under the sofa and chairs and behind doors and in the footspace under the kitchen cabinets he finds old fragments of toys that delight Nelson. The child has a perfect memory for his own possessions. “Mom-mom gay me dis.” Holding up a plastic duck that had lost its wheels.