Rabbit, Run (27 page)

But he doesn’t say this; he has a stubbornness to match hers. He doesn’t say much at all to her, after telling her what good sports the Springers are doesn’t go over. He just hangs around, him and Nelson rolling a lemon back and forth in the kitchen. Whenever the lemon wobbles over toward his mother’s feet he has to get it; Nelson won’t. The silence makes Rabbit blush, for himself or for her he doesn’t know. When his father comes home it isn’t much better. The old man isn’t angry but he looks at Harry like there isn’t anything there. His weary hunch and filthy fingernails annoy his son; it’s as if he’s willfully aging them all. Why doesn’t he get false teeth that fit? His mouth works like an old woman’s. But one thing at least, his father pays some attention to Nelson, who hopefully rolls the lemon toward him. He rolls it back. “You going to be a ballplayer like your Dad?”

“He can’t, Earl,” Mom interrupts, and Rabbit is happy to hear her voice, thinks the ice has broken, until he hears what she says. “He has those little Springer hands.” These words, spoken hard as steel, strike a flurry of sparks off Rabbit’s heart.

“The hell he does,” he says, and regrets it, being trapped. It shouldn’t matter what size hands Nelson has. Now he discovers it does matter; he doesn’t want the boy to have his mother’s hands, and, if he does—and if Mom noticed it he probably does—he likes the kid a little less. He likes the kid a little less but he hates his mother for making him do it. It’s as if she wants to pull down everything, even if it falls on her. And he admires this, her willingness to have him hate her, so long as he gets her message. But he rejects her message, he feels it probing at his heart and rejects it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to hear her say another word. He just wants to get out with a little piece of his love of her left.

At the door he asks his father, “Where’s Mim?”

“We don’t see much of Mim any more,” the old man says. His blurred eyes sink and he touches the pocket of his shirt, which holds two ballpoint pens and a little soiled packet of cards and papers. Just in these last few years his father has been making little bundles of things, cards and lists and receipts and tiny calendars that he wraps rubber bands around and tucks into different pockets with an elderly fussiness. Rabbit leaves his old home depressed, with a feeling of his heart having slumped off center.

The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and, the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear. The child’s sleep is so heavy he fears it might break the membrane of life and fall through to oblivion. Sometimes he reaches into the crib and lifts the boy’s body out, just to reassure himself with its warmth and the responsive fumbling protest of the tumbled limp limbs.

He rattles around in the apartment, turning on all the lights and television, drinking ginger ale and leafing through old
Life’s
, grabbing anything to stuff into the emptiness. Before going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toilet, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee-wee springs from the child’s irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl. Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson’s middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the moment when in the furry slant of morning sun the boy will appear, resurrected, in sopping diapers, beside the big bed, patting his father’s face experimentally. Sometimes he gets into the bed, and then the clammy cold cloth shocking Rabbit’s skin is like retouching a wet solid shore. The time in between is of no use to Rabbit. But the urgency of his wish to glide over it balks him. He lies in bed, diagonally, so his feet do not hang over, and fights the tipping sensation inside him. Like an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother’s ugly behavior, his father’s gaze of desertion, Ruth’s silence the last time he saw her, his mother’s oppressive not saying a word, what ails her? He rolls over on his stomach and seems to look down into a bottomless sea, down and down, to where crusty crags gesture amid blind lead. Good old Ruth in the swimming pool. That poor jerk Harrison sweating it out Ivy-League style the son of a bitch. Margaret’s weak little dirty hand flipping over into Tothero’s mouth and Tothero lying there with his tongue floating around under twittering jellied eyes: No. He doesn’t want to think about that. He rolls over on his back in the hot dry bed and the tipping sensation returns severely. Think of something pleasant. Basketball and cider at that little school down at the end of the country Oriole High but it’s too far back he can’t remember more than the cider and the way the crowd sat up on the stage. Ruth at the swimming pool; the way she lay in the water without weight, rounded by the water, slipping backwards through it, eyes shut and then out of the water with the towel, him looking up her legs at the secret hair and then her face lying beside him huge and yellow and still: dead. No. He must blot Tothero and Ruth out of his mind both remind him of death. They make on one side the vacuum of death and on the other side the threat of Janice coming home grows: that’s what makes him feel tipped, lopsided. Though he’s lying there alone he feels crowded, all these people troubling about him not much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water and under everything like a faint high hum Eccles’ wife’s wink. That wink. What was it? Just a little joke in the tangle at the door, the kid coming down in her underpants and maybe she conscious of him looking at her toenails, a little click of the eye saying On your way Good luck or was it a chink of light in a dark hall saying come in? Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her that steady high hum bothering him ever since she wanted him to really nail her the shadow of her bra tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the childish thighs fat butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white-painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father canals on the sofa she sits spreads like two white gates parted—what a nice chest you have and here and here and here. He rolls over and the dry sheet is the touch of her anxious hands, himself tapering tall up from furred velvet, ridges through which the thick vein strains, and he does what he must with a tight knowing hand to stop the high hum and make himself slack for sleep. A woman’s sweet froth. Nails her. Passes through the diamond standing on his head and comes out on the other side wet. How silly. He feels sorry. Queer where the wet is, nowhere near where you’d think, on the top sheet instead of the bottom. He puts his cheek on a fresh patch of pillow. He tips less, Lucy undone. Her white lines drift off like unraveled string. He must sleep; the thought of the far shore approaching makes a stubborn lump in his glide. Think of things pleasant. Out of all his remembered life the one place that comes forward where he can stand without the ground turning into faces he is treading on is that lot outside the diner in West Virginia after he went in and had a cup of coffee the night he drove down there. He remembers the mountains around him like a ring of cutouts against the moon-bleached blue of the night sky. He remembers the diner, with its golden windows like the windows of the trolley cars that used to run from Mt. Judge into Brewer when he was a kid, and the air, cold but soft with the beginnings of spring. He hears the footsteps tapping behind him on the asphalt, and sees the couple running toward their car, hands linked. One of the red-haired girls that sat inside with her hair hanging down like seaweed. And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he
is
following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place. On this note he carries into sleep.

But awakes before dawn being tipped again, frightened on the empty bed, with the fear that Nelson has died. He tries to sneak back into the dream he was having but his nightmare fear dilates and he at last gets up and goes to hear the boy breathe and then urinates with slight pain and returns to a bed whose wrinkles the first stirrings of light are etching into black lines. On this net he lies down and steals the hour left before the boy comes to him, hungry and cold.

On Friday Janice comes home. For the first days the presence of the baby fills the apartment as a little casket of incense fills a chapel. Rebecca June lies in a bassinet of plaited rushes painted white and mounted on a trundle. When Rabbit goes over to look at her, to reassure himself that she is there, he sees her somehow dimly, as if the baby has not gathered to herself the force that makes a silhouette. Her averted cheek, drained of the bright red he glimpsed at the hospital, is mottled gray, yellow, and blue, marbled like the palms of his hands when he is queasy; when Janice suckles Rebecca, yellow spots well up on her breast as if in answer to the fainter shadows of this color in the baby’s skin. The union of breast and baby’s face makes a globular symmetry to which both he and Nelson want to attach themselves. When Rebecca nurses, Nelson becomes agitated, climbs against them, pokes his fingers into the seam between the baby’s lips and his mother’s udder and, scolded and pushed away, wanders around the bed intoning, a promise he has heard on television, “Mighty Mouse is on the way.” Rabbit himself loves to lie beside them watching Janice manipulate her swollen breasts, the white skin shiny from fullness. She thrusts the thick nipples like a weapon into the blind blistered mouth, that opens and grips with birdy quickness. “Ow!” Janice winces, and then the glands within the baby’s lips begin to bubble in tune with her milk-making glands; the symmetry is established; her face relaxes into a downward smile. She holds a diaper against the other breast, mopping the waste milk it exudes in sympathy. Those first days, full of rest and hospital health, she has more milk than the baby takes. Between feedings she leaks; the bodices of all her nighties bear two stiff stains. When he sees her naked, naked all but for the elastic belt that holds her Modess pad in place, her belly shaved and puffed and soft, his whole stomach stirs at the fierce sight of her breasts, braced high by the tension of their milk, jutting from her slim body like glossy green-veined fruit with coarse purple tips. Top-heavy, bandaged, Janice moves gingerly, as if she might spill, jarred. Though with the baby her breasts are used without shame, tools like her hands, before his eyes she is still shy, and quick to cover herself if he watches too openly. But he feels a difference between now and when they first loved, lying side by side on the borrowed bed, his eyes closed, together making the filmy sideways descent into one another. Now, she is intermittently careless, walks out of the bathroom naked, lets her straps hang down while she burps the baby, seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for loving, hatching, feeding. He, too, leaks, thick sweet love burdens his chest, and he wants her—just a touch, he knows she’s a bleeding wound, but just a touch, just enough to get rid of his milk, give it to her. Though in her ether trance she spoke of making love, she turns away from him in bed, and sleeps with a heaviness that feels sullen. He is too grateful, too proud of her, to disobey. He in a way, this week, worships her.

Eccles comes calling and says he hopes to see them in church. Their debt to him is such that they agree it would be nice of them, at least one of them, to go. The one must be Harry. Janice can’t; she has been, by this Sunday, out of the hospital nine days, and, with Harry off at his new job since Monday, is beginning to feel worn out, weak, and abused. Harry is happy to go to Eccles’ church. Not merely out of affection for Eccles, though there’s that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it. He dresses in his new gray suit and steps out at quarter of eleven into a broad blue Sunday morning a day before the summer solstice. He always envied those people parading into church across from Ruth’s place and now he is one of them. Ahead of him is the first hour in over a week when he won’t be with a Springer, either Janice at home or her father at work. The job at the lot is easy enough, if it isn’t any work for you to lie. He feels exhausted by midafternoon. You see these clunkers come in with 80,000 miles on them and the pistons so loose the oil just pours through and they get a washing and the speedometer turned back and you hear yourself saying this represents a real bargain, owned by a man with two cars and not 30,000 miles of wear in it. He’ll ask forgiveness.

He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly he loves the ones dressed for church; the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest, sandwiched between their parents with olive complexions and bony arms, walk in Rabbit’s eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of relief, he could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated with happiness to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, “God,” “Rebecca,” “thank you,” bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. He is surrounded by people who know God; he has come into a field of flowers. When he sinks back into sitting position the head in front of him takes his eye. A woman in a wide straw hat. Smaller than average with narrow freckled shoulders, probably young, though women tend to look young from the back. The straw hat is so fresh, so pleasing. The way it broadcasts the gentlest tilt of her head, the way it turns the twist of blond hair at the nape of her neck into a kind of peeping secret he alone knows. She
is
young; her neck and shoulders are given a faint, shifting lambency by their coat of fine white hairs, invisible except where the grain lies with the light. He smiles, remembering Tothero talking about women being covered all over with hair. He wonders if Tothero is dead now and quickly prays not. He becomes impatient for the woman to turn so he can see her profile under the rim of the hat, a great woven sun-wheel, garnished with an arc of paper violets. She turns to look down at something beside her; his breath catches; the thinnest crescent of cheek gleams, and is eclipsed again. Something in a pink ribbon pops up beside her shoulder. He stares into the inquisitive, delighted face of little Joyce Eccles. His fingers fumble for the hymnal as the organ heaves into the service; it is Eccles’ wife rising within reach of his arm.