Rabbit, Run (26 page)

“She did?”

“Yop. Mom-mom did.”

“Wasn’t that nice of Mom-mom?”

“Yop.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“Mom-mom is Mommy’s mommy!”

“Yop. Where Mommy?”

“At the hospital.”

“At hop-pital? Come back Fi-day?”

“That’s right. She’ll come back Friday. Won’t she be happy to see how clean we make everything?”

“Yop. Daddy at hop-pital?”

“No. Daddy wasn’t at the hospital. Daddy was away.”

“Daddy away”—the boy’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open as he stares into the familiar concept of “away”; his voice deepens with the seriousness of it—“very, very
long
.” His arms go out to measure the length, so far his fingers bend backward. It is as long as he can measure.

“But Daddy’s not away now, is he?”

“Nope.”

He takes Nelson with him in the car the day he goes to tell Mrs. Smith he has to quit working in her garden. Old man Springer has offered him a job in one of his lots. The rhododendron trees by the crunching driveway look dusty and barren with a few brown corsages still pinned to their branches by fronds of light green new growth. Mrs. Smith herself comes to the door. “Yes, yes,” she croons, her brown face beaming.

“Mrs. Smith, this is my son Nelson.”

“Yes, yes, how do you do, Nelson? You have your father’s head.” She pats the small head with a hand withered like a tobacco leaf. “Now let me think. Where did I put that jar of old candy? He can eat candy, can’t he?”

“I guess a little but don’t go looking for it.”

“I will too, if I want to. The trouble with you, young man, you never gave me credit for any competence whatsoever.” She totters off, plucking with one hand at the front of her dress and poking the other into the air before her, as if she’s brushing away cobwebs.

While she’s out of the room he and Nelson stand looking at the high ceiling of this parlor, at the tall windows with mullions as thin as chalk-lines, through whose panes, some of which are tinted lavender, they can see the pines and cypresses that guard the far rim of the estate. Paintings hang on the shining walls. One shows, in dark colors, a woman wrapped in a whipping strip of silk apparently having an argument, from the way her arms are flailing, with a big swan that just stands there pushing. On another wall there is a portrait of a young woman in a black gown sitting in a padded chair impatiently. Her face, though squarish, is fine-looking, with a triangular forehead caused by her hairdo. Round white arms curve into her lap. Rabbit moves a few steps closer to get a less oblique view. She has that short puffy little upper lip that is so good in a girl. The way it lifts to let a dab of dark come between her lips. Lifted like the top petal of a blossom. There is this readiness about her all over. He feels that she’s about to get out of the chair and step forward toward him with a frown on her triangular forehead. Mrs. Smith, returning with a crimson glass ball on a stem like a wineglass, sees where he’s looking and says, “What I always minded was Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn’t like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women. Here.” She has crossed to Nelson with the candy glass. “You try one of these. They’re old but good like a lot of old things in this world.” She takes off the lid, a knobbed hemisphere of turquoise glass, and holds it waggling in her hand. Nelson looks over and Rabbit nods at him to go ahead and he chooses a piece wrapped in colored tinfoil.

“You won’t like it,” Rabbit tells him. “That’s gonna have a cherry inside.”

“Shoosh,” Mrs. Smith says. “Let the boy have the one he wants.” So the poor kid goes ahead and takes it, bewitched by the tinfoil.

“Mrs. Smith,” Rabbit begins, “I don’t know if Reverend Eccles has told you, but my situation has kind of changed and I have to take another job. I won’t be able to help around here any more. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, yes,” she says, alertly watching Nelson fumble at the tinfoil.

“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he goes on. “It was sort of like Heaven, like that woman said.”

“Oh that foolish woman Alma Foster,” Mrs. Smith says. “With her lipstick halfway up to her nose. I’ll never forget her, the dear soul. Not a brain in her body. Here, child. Give it to Mrs. Smith.” She sets the dish down on a round marble table holding only an oriental vase full of peonies and takes the piece of candy from Nelson and with a frantic needling motion of her fingers works the paper off. The kid stands there staring up with an open mouth; she thrusts her hand down jerkily and pops the ball of chocolate between his lips. With a crease of satisfaction in one cheek she turns, drops the tinfoil on the table, and says to Rabbit, “Well, Harry. At least we brought the rhodies in.”

“That’s right. We did.”

“It pleased
my
Harry, I know, wherever he is.”

Nelson bites through to the startling syrup of the cherry and his mouth curls open in dismay; a dribble of brown creeps out one corner and his eyes dart around the immaculate palace room. Rabbit cups a hand at his side and the kid comes over and silently spits the mess into it, bits of chocolate shell and stringy warm syrup and the broken cherry.

Mrs. Smith sees none of this. Her eyes with their transparent irises of crazed crystal burn into Harry’s as she says, “It’s been a religious duty to me, to keep Horace’s garden up.

“I’m sure you can find somebody else. Vacation’s started; it’d be a perfect job for some high-school kid.”

“No,” she says, “no. I won’t think about it. I won’t be here next year to see Harry’s rhodies come in again. You kept me alive, Harry; it’s the truth; you did. All winter I was fighting the grave and then in April I looked out the window and here was this tall young man burning my old stalks and I knew life hadn’t left me. That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.” Her crystal eyes have filmed with a liquid thicker than tears and she grabs his arms above his elbows with hard brown claws. “Fine strong young man,” she murmurs, and her eyes come back into focus as she adds, “You have a proud son; take care.”

She must mean he should be proud of his son and take care of him. He is moved by her embrace; he wants to respond and did moan “No” at her prediction of death. But his right hand is full of melting mashed candy, and he stands helpless and rigid hearing her quaver, “Good-by. I wish you well. I wish you well.”

In the week that follows this blessing, he and Nelson are often happy. They go for walks around the town. One day they watch a softball game played on the high-school lot by men with dark creased faces like millworkers, dressed in gaudy felt-and-flannel uniforms, one team bearing the name of a fire hall in Brewer and the other the name of the Sunshine Athletic Association, the same uniforms, he guesses, that he saw hanging in the attic the time he slept in Tothero’s bedroom. The number of spectators sitting on the dismantleable bleachers is no greater than the number of players. All around, behind the bleachers and the chickenwire-and-pipe backstop, kids in sneakers scuffle and run and argue. He and Nelson watch a few innings, while the sun lowers into the trees. It floods Rabbit with an ancient, papery warmth, the oblique sun on his cheeks, the sparse inattentive crowd, the snarled pepper chatter, the spurts of dust on the yellow infield, the girls in shorts strolling past with chocolate popsicles. Brown adolescent legs thick at the ankle and smooth at the thigh. They know so much, at least their skins do. Boys their age scrawny sticks in dungarees and Keds arguing frantically if Williams was washed up or not. Mantle 10,000 times better. Williams 10,000,000 times better. He and Nelson share an orange soda bought from a man in a Boosters’ Club apron who has established a bin in the shade. The smoke of dry ice leaking from the ice-cream section, the
ffp
of the cap being pulled from the orange. The artificial sweetness fills his heart. Nelson spills on his chest trying to get it to his lips.

Another day they go to the playground. Nelson acts frightened of the swings. Rabbit tells him to hold on and pushes very gently, from the front so the kid can see. Laughs, pleads, “Me out,” begins to cry, “me out, me out, Da-dee.” Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle-chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children’s murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The best he can do is submit to the system and give Nelson the chance to pass, as he did, unthinkingly, through it. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

They visit Mom-mom Springer. The child is delighted; Nelson loves her, and this makes Rabbit like her. Though she tries to pick a fight with him he refuses to fight back, just admits everything; he was a crumb, a dope, he behaved terribly, he’s lucky not to be in jail. Actually there’s no real bite in her attack. Nelson is there for one thing, and for another she is relieved he has come back and is afraid of scaring him off. For a third, your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something relaxing and even comic about them. He and the old lady sit on the screened sunporch with iced tea; her bandaged legs are up on a stool and her little groans as she shifts her weight make him smile. It feels like he’s visiting a silly girl friend. Nelson and Billy Fosnacht are inside the house playing quietly. They’re too quiet. Mrs. Springer wants to see what’s happening but doesn’t want to move her legs; in her torment she starts to complain about what a crude child little Billy Fosnacht is, and from this shifts over to the kid’s mother. Mrs. Springer doesn’t like her, doesn’t trust her around the corner; it isn’t just the sunglasses, though she thinks that’s a ridiculous affectation; it’s the girl’s whole creepy manner, the way she came cozying around to Janice just because it looked like juicy gossip. “Why, she came around here so much that I had more charge of Nelson than Janice did, with those two off to the movies every day like high-school girls that don’t have the responsibility of being mothers.” Now Rabbit knows from school that Peggy Fosnacht, then Peggy Gring, wears sunglasses because she is freakishly, humiliatingly walleyed. And Eccles has told him that her company was a great comfort to Janice during the trying period now past. But he does not make either of these objections; he listens contentedly, pleased to be united with Mrs. Springer, the two of them against the world. The cubes in the iced tea melt, making the beverage doubly bland; his mother-in-law’s talk leaves his ears like the swirling mutter of a brook. Lulled, he lets his lids lower and a smile creeps into his face; he sleeps badly at nights, alone, and drowses now on the grassy breadth of day, idly blissful, snug on the right side at last.

It is quite different at his own parents’ home. He and Nelson go there once. His mother is angry about something; her anger hits his nostrils as soon as he’s in the door, like a lining of dust on everything. This house looks shabby and small after the Springers’. What ails her? He assumes she’s always been on his side and tells her in a quick gust of confiding how terrific the Springers have been, how Mrs. Springer is really quite warmhearted and seems to have forgiven him everything, how Mr. Springer kept up the rent on their apartment and now has promised him a job selling cars in one of his lots. He owns four lots in Brewer and vicinity; Rabbit had no idea he was that much of an operator. He’s really kind of a jerk but a successful jerk at least; at any rate he thinks he, Harry Angstrom, has gotten off pretty easily. His mother’s hard arched nose and steamed spectacles glitter bitterly. Her disapproval nicks him whenever she turns from the sink. At first he thinks it’s that he never got in touch with her but if that’s so she should be getting less sore instead of more because he’s in touch with her now. Then he thinks it’s that she’s disgusted he slept with Ruth, and committed adultery; she’s getting religious as she gets older and probably thinks of him as around twelve years old anyway, but out of a clear sky she explodes that by asking abruptly, “And what’s going to happen to this poor girl you lived with in Brewer?”

“Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn’t expect nothing.” But he tastes his own saliva saying it. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother’s mouth.

Her mouth goes thin and she answers with a smug flirt of her head, “I’m not saying anything, Harry. I’m not saying one word.”

But of course she is saying a great deal only he doesn’t know what it is. There’s some kind of clue in the way she treats Nelson. She as good as ignores him, doesn’t offer him toys or hug him, just says, “Hello, Nelson,” with a little nod, her glasses snapping into white circles. After Mrs. Springer’s warmth this coolness seems brutal. Nelson feels it and acts hushed and frightened and leans against his father’s legs. Now Rabbit doesn’t know what’s eating his mother but she certainly shouldn’t take it out on a two-year-old kid. He never heard of a grandmother acting this way. It’s true, just the poor kid’s being there keeps them from having the kind of conversation they used to have, where his mother tells him something pretty funny that happened in the neighborhood and they go on to talk about him, the way he used to be as a kid, how he dribbled the basketball all afternoon until after dark and was always looking after Mim. Nelson’s being half Springer seems to kill all that. For the moment he stops liking his mother; it takes insanity to snub a tiny kid that just learned to talk. He wants to say to her, What is this anyway? You act like I’ve gone over to the other side. You’re acting insane. Don’t you know it’s the right side and why don’t you praise me?