Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “What do you think she meant,” he asks Janice, ” `gone crazy’? How crazy can you go from cocaine?”

  “Doris Kaufmann, I mean Eberhardt, has a brother-in-law whose stepson by his wife’s first marriage had to go to a detox center out near the middle of the state. He got to be paranoid and thought Hitler was still alive and had agents everywhere to get just him. He was Jewish.”

  “Did he beat up his wife and children?”

  “He didn’t have a wife, I think. We don’t know for sure Nelson’s threatened the children.”

  “Pru said he did.”

  “Pru was very upset. It’s the money I think upsets her, more than anything.”

  “It doesn’t upset you?”

  “Not as much as it seems to you and Pru. Money isn’t something I worry about, Harry. Daddy always said, `If I don’t have two nickels to rub together, I’ll rub two pennies.’ He had faith he could always make enough, and he did, and I guess I inherited his philosophy.”

  “Is that the reason you keep letting Nelson get away with murder?”

  Janice sighs and sounds more than ever like her mother, Bessie Koerner Springer, who lived her whole life overweight, without a lick of exercise except housework, sitting in her big house with its shades down to protect the curtains and upholstery from sunlight and sighing about the pains in her legs. “Harry, what can I do, seriously? It’s not as if he’s still a child, he’s thirty-two.”

  “You could fire him from the lot, for starters.”

  “Yes, and shall I fire him as my son, too - tell him I’m sorry, but he hasn’t worked out? He’s my father’s grandson, don’t forget. Daddy built that lot up out of nothing and he would have wanted Nelson to run it, run it even if he runs it into the ground.”

  “Really?” Such a ruinous vision startles him. Having money makes people reckless. Bet a million. Junk bonds. “Couldn’t you fire him provisionally, until he shapes up?”

  Janice’s tone has the bite of impatience, of fatigue. “All this is so easy for you to say - you’re just sore since Lyle told you I was the real boss, you’re trying to make me suffer for it. You do it, you do whatever you think should be done at the lot and tell them I said you should. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of you and Nelson fighting your old wars through me.”

  Streetlights flicker more swiftly on his hands as the Celica moves more rapidly through the city park, above the tennis courts and the World War II tank painted a thick green to forestall rust, repainted so often they’ve lost the exact military green Harry remembers. What did they call it? Olive drab. He feels under the barrage of streetlights bombarded, and Brewer seems empty of life like those bombed-out German cities after the war. “They wouldn’t believe me,” he tells her spitefully, “they’d still come to you. And I’m like you,” he tells her more gently, “scared of what I’ll stir up.”

  After the park there is a stoplight that says red, and a locally famous old turreted house roofed in round fishscale slate shingles, and then a shopping mall where the cineplex sign advertises SEE YOU DREAM TEAM SAY ANYTHING OUT OF CONTROL. Then they’re on 422 and a territory bred into their bones, streets they crossed and recrossed in all seasons as children, Central, Jackson, Joseph, the hydrants and mailboxes of the borough of Mt. Judge like buttons fastening down their lives, their real lives, everything drained of color at this nadir of the night, the streets under the burning blue mercury lights looking rounded like bread-loaves and crusted with snow, the brick-pillared porches treacherous emplacements up behind their little flat laps oflawn and tulip bed. Number 89 Joseph, the Springers’ big stucco house where when Rabbit was courting Janice in his old Nash he used to hate to come because it made his own family’s semi-detached house on Jackson Road look poor, has all its lights ablaze, like a ship going down amid the silent darkened treetops and roof peaks of the town. The huge spreading copper-beech tree on the left side where Harry and Janice’s bedroom used to be, a tree so dense the sun never shone in and its beech nuts popping kept Harry awake all fall, is gone, leaving that side bare, its windows exposed and on fire. Nelson had it cut down. Dad, it was eating up the whole house. You couldn’t keep paint on the woodwork on that side, it was so damp. The lawn wouldn’t even grow. Harry couldn’t argue, and couldn’t tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot.

  They park outside, under the maples that are shedding chartreuse fuzz and sticky stuff this time of year. He always hates that about parking here. He’ll get the car washed Monday.

  Pru has been watching for their arrival. She pulls the door open as their feet hit the porch, as if there’s an electric eye. Like Thelma the other week. Judy is with her, in some fuzzy Oshkosh B’Gosh pajamas that are too small for her. The child’s feet look surprisingly long and white and bony, with the inches of exposed ankle.

  “Where’s Roy?” Harry asks instantly.

  “Nelson’s putting him in bed,” Pru says, with a wry downward tug of one side of her mouth, a kind of apology.

  “To bed?” Harry says. “You trust him with the kid?”

  She says, “Oh yes. He’s calmed down since I called. I think he shocked himself, hitting me so hard. It did him good.” In the illumination of the front hall they can see the pink welt along one cheekbone, the lopsided puffiness of her upper lip, the redness around her eyes as if rubbed and rubbed with a scouring pad. She is wearing that quilted shorty morning-glory bathrobe but not as in Florida over bare legs; under it she has on a long blue nightgown. But you can see the outline of her legs through the thin cloth, like fish moving through murky water. Fake-fur-lined bedroom slippers clothe her feet, so he can’t check out her toenail polish.

  “Hey, is this some kind of false alarm?” Harry asks.

  “When you see Nelson I don’t think you’ll think so,” Pru tells him, and turns to the other woman. ` Janice, I’ve had it. I want out. I’ve kept the lid on as long as I can and now I’ve had it!” And the eyes that have scoured their lids with tears begin to water again, and she embraces the older woman before Janice has quite straightened out from bending down to kiss and hug Judy hello.

  Harry’s guts give a tug: he can feel Pru’s attempt to make a sweeping connection; he can feel his wife’s resistance. Pru was raised a Catholic, showy, given to big gestures, and Janice a tight little Protestant. The embrace breaks up quickly.

  Judy takes Harry’s fingertips. When he stoops to peck her on the cheek, her hair gets in his eye. The little girl giggles and says in his ear, “Daddy thinks ants are crawling all over him.”

  “He’s always feeling itchy,” Pru says, sensing that her attempt to sweep Janice into her escape plan has failed, she must do some more selling of the situation. “That’s the coke. They call it formication. His neurotransmitters are fucked up. Ask me anything, I know it all. I’ve been going to Narc-Anon in Brewer for a year now.

  “Huh,” Rabbit says, not quite liking her tough tone. “And what else do they tell you?”

  She looks straight at him, her green eyes glaring with tears and shock, and manages that smile of hers, downtwisted at the corner. Her upper lip being puffy gives it a sad strangeness tonight. “They tell you it’s not your problem, the addicts can only do it themselves. But that still leaves it your problem.”

  “What happened here tonight, exactly?” he asks. He has to keep speaking up. He feels Janice pulling back, distancing herself irritatingly, like that time they took the kids to jungle Gardens in the Camry.

  Judy doesn’t find her grandparents as much fun as usual and leaves Harry’s side to go lean against her mother, pressing her carrot-colored head back against Pru’s belly. Pru protectively encircles the child’s throat with a downy freckled forearm. Now two pairs of greenish eyes stare, as if Harry and Janice are not the rescue squad but hostile invaders.

  Pru’s voice sounds tough and weary. “The usual sort of garbage. He came home after one and I asked him where he’d been and h
e told me none of my business and I guess I didn’t take it as docilely as usual because he said if I was going to be that way he needed a hit to calm his nerves, and when the coke wasn’t in the bathroom where he thought he hid it in an aspirin bottle he smashed things up and when I didn’t like that he came out after me and started slugging me all over the place.”

  Judy says, “It woke me up. Mommy came into my room to get away and Daddy’s face was all funny, like he wasn’t really seeing anything.”

  Harry asks, “Did he have a knife or anything?”

  Pru’s eyebrows knit crossly at the suggestion. “Nelson would never go for a knife. He can’t stand blood and never helps in the kitchen. He wouldn’t know which end of a knife to use.”

  Judy says, “He said he was real sorry afterwards.”

  Pru has been smoothing Judy’s long red hair back from her face and now, just the middle fingers touching her forehead and cheeks, tucks back her own. She has outgrown the Sphinx look; it hangs limp to her shoulders. “He calmed down after I called you. He said, `You called them? I can’t believe it. You called my parents?’ It was like he was too stunned to be angry. He kept saying this is the end and how sorry he was for everything. He makes no sense.” She grimaces and lightly pushes Judy away from her body and tightens the robe around her middle, with a shiver. For a second they all seem to have forgotten their lines. In crises there is something in our instincts which whittles, which tries to reduce the unignorable event back to the ignorable normal. “I could use a cup of coffee,” Pru says.

  Janice asks, “Shouldn’t we go upstairs to Nelson first?”

  Judy likes this idea and leads the way upstairs. Following her milky bare feet up the stair treads, Harry feels guilty that his granddaughter has to wear outgrown pajamas while all those Florida acquaintances of theirs have different-colored slacks for every day of the week and twenty sports coats hanging in cleaner’s bags. The house, which he remembers from way back in the days of the Springers, when they were younger than he is now, seems rather pathetically furnished, now that he looks, in remnants from the old days, including the battered old brown Barcalounger that used to be Fred Springer’s throne, along with nondescript newer stuff from Schaechner’s or one of the shabby furniture places that have sprung up along the highways leading out of the city, mingled among the car lots and fast-food joints. The stairs still have the threadbare Turkish runner the Springers had tacked down forty years ago. The house has descended to Nelson and Pru in stages and they never really have taken it on as their own. You try to do something nice for kids, offer them a shortcut in life, a little padding, and it turns out to be the wrong thing, undermining them. This was no house for a young couple.

  All the lights being turned on gives the house a panicky overheated air. They ascend the stairs in the order Judy, Harry, Janice, and Pru, who maybe regrets having called them by now and would rather be nursing her face and planning her next move in solitude. Nelson greets them in the hallway, carrying Roy in his. “Oh,” he says, seeing his father, “the big cheese is here.”

  “Don’t mouth off at me,” Harry tells him. “I’d rather be home in bed.”

  “It wasn’t my idea to call you.”

  “It was your idea though to go beating up your wife, and scaring the hell out of your kids, and otherwise acting like a shit.” Harry fishes in the side pocket of his chinos to make sure the little vial of heart pills is there. Nelson is trying to play it cool, still wearing the black slacks and white shirt he was out on the town in, and having the kid on his arm, but his thinning hair is bristling out from his head and his eyes in the harsh hallway light are frantic, full of reflected sparks like that time outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent. Even in the bright light his pupils look dilated and shiny-black and there is a tremor to him, a shiver now and then as if this night nearly in May is icy cold. He looks even thinner than in Florida, with that same unpleasant sore-looking nose above the little half-ass blur of a mustache. And that earring yet.

  “Who are you to go around deciding who’s acting like a shit?” he asks Harry, adding, “Hi, Mom. Welcome home.”

  “Nelson, this just won’t do.”

  “Let me take Roy,” Pru says in a cool neutral voice, and she pushes past the elder Angstroms and without looking her husband in the face plucks the sleepy child from him. Involuntarily she grunts with the weight. The hall light, with its glass shade faceted like a candy dish, crowns her head with sheen as she passes under it, into Roy’s room, which was Nelson’s boyhood room in the old days, when Rabbit would lie awake hearing Melanie creep along the hall to this room from her own, the little room at the front of the house with the dress dummy. Now she’s some gastroenterologist. In the harsh overhead light, Nelson’s face, white around the gills, shows an electric misery and a hostile cockiness, and Janice’s a dark confused something, a retreat into the shadows of her mind; her capacity for confusion has always frightened Harry. He realizes he is still in charge. Little Judy looks up at him brightly, titillated by being awake and a witness to these adult transactions. “We can’t just stand here in the hall,” he says. “How about the big bedroom?”

  Harry and Janice’s old bedroom has become Nelson and Pru’s. A different bedspread - their old Pennsylvania Dutch quilt of little triangular patches has given way to a puff patterned with yellow roses, Pru does like flowered fabrics - but the same creaky bed, with the varnished knobbed headboard that never hit your back quite right when you tried to read. Different magazines on the bedside tables - Racing Cars and Rolling Stone instead of Time and Consumer Reports - but the same cherry table on Harry’s old side, with its sticky drawer. Among the propped-up photographs on the bureau is one of him and Janice, misty-eyed and lightly tinted, taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in March of 1981. They look embalmed, Rabbit thinks, suspended in that tinted bubble of time. The ceiling light in this room, glass like the hall light, is also burning. He asks, “Mind if I switch that off? All these lights on, I’m getting a headache.”

  Nelson says sourly, “You’re the big cheese. Help yourself.”

  Judy explains, “Mommy said to turn them all on while Daddy was chasing her. She said if it got worse I should throw a chair through a front window and yell for help and the police would hear.”

  With the light switched off, Rabbit can see out into the dark gulf of air where the copper beech used to be. The neighbor’s house is closer than he ever thought, in his ten years of living here. Their upstairs lights are on. He can see segments of wall and furniture but no people. Maybe they were thinking of calling the police. Maybe they already have. He switches on the lamp on the cherry table, so the neighbors can look in and see that everything is under control.

  “She overreacted,” Nelson explains, fitfully gesturing. “I was trying to make a point and Pru wouldn’t hold still. She never listens to me any more.”

  “Maybe you don’t say enough she wants to hear,” Harry tells his son. The kid in his white shirt and dark trousers looks like a magician’s assistant, and keeps tapping himself on the chest and back of the neck and rubbing his anus through the white cloth as if he’s about to do a trick. The boy is embarrassed and scared but keeps losing focus, Rabbit feels; there are other presences for him in the room besides the bed and furniture and his parents and daughter, a mob of ghosts which only he can see. A smell comes off him, liquor and a kind of post-electrical ozone. He is sweating; his gills are wet.