Rabbit, Run (28 page)

Eccles comes down the aisle shuffling behind a flood of acolytes and choristers. Up behind the altar rail he looks absentminded and grouchy, remote and insubstantial and stiff, like a Japanese doll in his vestments. The affected voice, nasal-pious, in which he intones prayers affects Rabbit disagreeably; there is something disagreeable about the whole Episcopal service, with its strenuous ups and downs, its canned petitions, its cursory little chants. He has trouble with the kneeling pad; the small of his back aches; he hooks his elbows over the back of the pew in front of him to keep from falling backward. He misses the familiar Lutheran liturgy, scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription. In this service he blunders absurdly, balked by what seem willful dislocations of worship. He feels too much is made of collecting the money. He scarcely listens to the sermon at all.

It concerns the forty days in the Wilderness and Christ’s conversation with the Devil. Does this story have any relevance to
us
, here, now? In the Twentieth Century, in the United States of America. Yes. There exists a sense in which
all
Christians must have conversations with the Devil, must learn his ways, must hear his voice. The tradition behind this legend is very ancient, was passed from mouth to mouth among the early Christians. Its larger significance, its greater meaning, Eccles takes to be this: suffering, deprivation, barrenness, hardship, lack are all an indispensable part of the education, the initiation, as it were, of any of those who would follow Jesus Christ. Eccles wrestles in the pulpit with the squeak in his voice. His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks. It is an unpleasant and strained performance, contorted, somehow; he drives his car with an easier piety. In his robes he seems the sinister priest of a drab mystery. Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the
going through
quality of it, the passage
into
death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it glances into his retina.

Lucy Eccles’ bright cheek ducks in and out of view under its shield of straw. The child, hidden—all but her ribbon—behind the back of the pew, whispers to her, presumably that he is behind them. Yet the woman never turns her head directly to see. This needless snub excites him. The most he gets is her profile; the soft tuck of doubleness in her chin deepens as she frowns down at the child beside her. She wears a dress whose narrow blue stripes meet at the seams in numerous sharp V’s. The smart fabric and cut of the cloth on her shoulders clash with the church yet submit to it; there is something sexed in her stillness in the church, in her obedience to its manly, crusted, rigid procedure. He flatters himself that her true attention radiates backwards at him. Against the dour patchwork of subdued heads, stained glass, yellowing memorial plaques on the wall, and laboriously knobbed and beaded woodwork, her hair and skin and hat glow singly, their differences in tint like the shades of brilliance within one flame.

So that when the sermon yields to a hymn, and her bright nape bows to receive the benediction, and the nervous moment of silence passes, and she stands and faces him, it is anticlimactic to see her face, with its pointed collection of dots—eyes and nostrils and freckles and the tight faint dimples that bring a sarcastic tension to the corners of her mouth. That she wears a facial expression at all shocks him slightly; the luminous view he had enjoyed for an hour did not seem capable of being so swiftly narrowed into one small person.

“Hey. Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” she says. “You’re the last person I ever expected to see here.”

“Why?” He is pleased that she thinks of him as an ultimate.

“I don’t know. You just don’t seem the institutional type.”

He watches her eyes for another wink. He has lost belief in that first one, weeks ago. She returns his gaze until his eyes drop. “Hello, Joyce,” he says. “How are you?”

The little girl halts and hides behind her mother, who continues to maneuver down the aisle, walking with small smooth steps, brightly distributing smiles to the faces of the sheep. He has to admire her social co-ordination.

At the door Eccles clasps Harry’s hand with his broad grip, a warm grip that tightens at the moment it should loosen. “It’s exhilarating to see you here,” he says, hanging on. Rabbit feels the whole line behind him bunch and push.

“Nice to be here,” he says. “Very nice sermon.”

Eccles, who has been peering at him with a feverish smile and a blush that seems apologetic, laughs; the roof of his mouth glimmers a second and he lets go.

Harry hears him tell Lucy, “In about an hour.”

“The roast’s in now. Do you want it cold or overdone?”

“Overdone,” he says. He solemnly takes Joyce’s tiny hand and says, “How do you do, Mrs. Pettigrew? How splendid you look this morning!”

Startled, Rabbit turns and sees that the fat lady next in line is startled also. His wife is right, Eccles is indiscreet. Lucy, Joyce behind her, walks up beside him. Her straw hat comes up to his shoulder. “Do you have a car?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. Walk along with us.”

“O.K.” Her proposition is so bold there must be nothing in it; nevertheless the harpstring in his chest tuned to her starts trembling. Sunshine quivers through the trees; in the streets and along unshaded sections of the pavement it leans down with a broad dry weight. It has lost the grainy milkiness of morning sun. Mica fragments in the pavement glitter; the hoods and windows of hurrying cars smear the air with white reflections. She pulls off her hat and shakes her hair. The church crowd thins behind them. The waxy leaves, freshly thick, of the maples planted between the pavement and curb embower them rhythmically; in the broad gaps of sun her face, his shirt, feel white, white; the rush of motors, the squeak of a tricycle, the touch of a cup and saucer inside a house are sounds conveyed to him as if along a bright steel bar. As they walk along he trembles in light that seems her light.

“How are your wife and baby?” she asks.

“Fine. They’re just fine.”

“Good. Do you like your new job?”

“Not much.”

“Oh. That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose you’re supposed to like your job. If you did, then it wouldn’t be a job.”

“Jack likes his job.”

“Then it’s not a job.”

“That’s what he says. He says it’s not a job, as I would treat it. But I’m sure you know his lines as well as I do.”

He knows she’s needling him, but he doesn’t feel it, tingling all over anyway. “He and I in some ways I guess are alike,” he says.

“I know. I know.” Her odd quickness in saying this sets his heart ticking quicker. She adds, “But naturally it’s the differences that I notice.” Her voice curls dryly into the end of this sentence; her lower lip goes sideways.

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn’t know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. He doesn’t know if she’s a conscious or unconscious flirt. He always thinks when they meet again he will speak firmly, and tell her he loves her, or something as blunt, and lay the truth bare; but in her presence he is numb; his breath fogs the glass and he has trouble thinking of anything to say and what he does say is stupid. He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes. He asks, “Like what?”

“Oh—like the fact that you’re not afraid of women.”

“Who is?”

“Jack.”

“You think?”

“Of course. The old ones, and the teenagers, he’s fine with; the ones who see him in his collar. But the others he’s very leery of; he doesn’t like them. He doesn’t really think they even ought to come to church. They bring a smell of babies and bed into it. That’s not just in Jack; that’s in Christianity. It’s really a very neurotic religion.”

Somehow, when she fetches out her psychology, it seems so foolish to Harry his own feeling of foolishness leaves him. Stepping down off a high curb, he takes her arm. Mt. Judge, built on its hillside, is full of high curbs difficult for little women to negotiate gracefully. Her bare arm remains cool in his fingers.

“Don’t tell that to the parishioners,” he says.

“See? You sound just like Jack.”

“Is that good or bad?” There. This seems to him to test her bluff. She must say either good or bad, and that will be the fork in the road.

But she says nothing. He feels the effort of self-control this takes; she is accustomed to making replies. They mount the opposite curb and he lets go of her arm awkwardly. Though he is awkward, there is still this sense of being nestled against a receptive grain, of fitting.

“Mommy?” Joyce asks.

“What?”

“What’s rottic?”

“Rottic. Oh.
Neu
rotic. It’s when you’re a little bit sick in the head.”

“Like a cold in the head?”

“Well yes, in a way. It’s about that serious. Don’t worry about it, sweetie. It’s something most everybody is. Except our friend Mr. Angstrom.”

The little girl looks up at him across her mother’s thighs with a spreading smile of self-conscious impudence. “He’s naughty,” she says.

“Not very,” her mother says.

At the end of the rectory’s brick walk a blue tricycle has been abandoned and Joyce runs ahead and mounts it and rides away in her aqua Sunday coat and pink hair ribbon, metal squeaking, spinning ventriloquistic threads of noise into the air. Together they watch the child a moment. Then Lucy asks, “Do you want to come in?” In waiting for his reply, she contemplates his shoulder; her white lids from his angle hide her eyes. Her lips are parted and her tongue, a movement in her jaw tells him, touches the roof of her mouth. In the noon sun her features show sharp and her lipstick looks cracked. He can see the inner lining of her lower lip wet against her teeth. A delayed gust of the sermon, its anguished exhortatory flavor, like a dusty breeze off the desert, sweeps through him, accompanied grotesquely by a vision of Janice’s breasts, green-veined, tender. This wicked snip wants to pluck him from them.

“No thanks, really. I can’t.”

“Oh come on. You’ve been to church, have a reward. Have some coffee.”

“No, look.” His words come out soft but somehow big. “You’re a doll, but I got this wife now.” And his hands, rising from his sides in vague explanation, cause her to take a quick step backward.

“I beg your pardon.”

He is conscious of nothing but the little speckled section of her green irises like torn tissue paper around her black pupildots; then he is watching her tight round butt jounce up the walk. “But thanks anyway,” he calls in a hollowed, gutless voice. He dreads being hated. She slams the door behind her so hard the knocker clacks by itself on the empty porch.

He walks home blind to the sunlight. Was she mad because he had turned down a proposition, or because he had shown that he thought she had made one? Or was it a mixture of these opposites, that had somehow exposed her to herself? His mother, suddenly caught in some confusion of her own, would turn on the heat that way. In either case he smiles; he feels tall and elegant and potential striding along under the trees in his Sunday suit. Whether spurned or misunderstood, Eccles’ wife has jazzed him, and he reaches his apartment clever and cold with lust.

His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached. The baby scrawks tirelessly. It lies in its crib all afternoon and makes an infuriating noise of strain,
hnnnnnah ah ah nnnnh
, a persistent feeble scratching at some interior door. What does it want? Why won’t it sleep? He has come home from church carrying something precious for Janice and keeps being screened from giving it to her. The noise spreads fear through the apartment. It makes his stomach ache; when he picks up the baby to burp her he burps himself; the pressure in his stomach keeps breaking and reforming into a stretched bubble as the bubble in the baby doesn’t break. The tiny soft marbled body, weightless as paper, goes stiff against his chest and then floppy, its hot head rolling as if it will unjoint from its neck. “Becky, Becky, Becky,” he says, “go to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.”

The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged, he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better-formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living-room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the membrane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again,
Nnnh, A-nnnnnih!

“Oh my God,” Rabbit says. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

Around five in the afternoon, Janice begins to cry. Tears burble down her dark pinched face. “I’m dry,” she says. “I’m dry. I just don’t have anything to feed her.” The baby has been at her breasts repeatedly.

“Forget it,” he says. “She’ll conk out. Have a drink. There’s some old whisky in the kitchen.”

“Say; what is this Have a drink routine of yours? I’ve been trying not to drink. I thought you didn’t like me to drink. All afternoon you’ve been smoking one cigarette after another and saying, ‘Have a drink. Have a drink.’ ”

“I thought it might loosen you up. You’re tense as hell.”

“I’m no tenser than you are. What’s eating you? What’s on your mind?”

“What’s happened to your milk? Why can’t you give the kid enough milk?”

“I’ve fed her three times in four hours. There’s nothing there any more.” In a plain, impoverished gesture, she presses her breasts through her dress.

“Well have a drink of something.”

“Say what did they tell you at church? ‘Go on home and get your wife soused’? You have a drink if that’s on your mind.”