by John Updike
“If he faked any signatures, that’s forgery,” Harry says, and a black dye of despair is beginning to enter his heart, as he sees what a lost cause his son is. Human garbage, like his own father once said of him. He asks, “What’s going to happen with the kid?”
Janice blinks her wet lashes. What she has to say seems to her so momentous she withholds it a moment. Her voice has the juicy precision Ma Springer would speak with when she had made up her mind. “He’s agreed to enter a rehab place. Immediately.”
“Good, I guess. What made him agree?”
“I said it was either that or I’d fire him from the lot. And prosecute.”
“Wow. You said that? Prosecute?”
“I did, Harry. I made myself.”
“To your own son?”
“I had to. He’s been sinking, and he knows it. He was grateful, really. We had it out right there on the lot, out where the weeds are, while Charlie and the accountant stayed inside. Then we made some phone calls, from your old office.”
“Where is this rehab place?”
“In North Philadelphia. It’s the one his counsellor recommends, if he can get Nelson in. They’re all overcrowded, you know. Society can’t keep up. There are some day-treatment programs in Brewer but his counsellor says the important thing is to get away from the entire environment the drugs are part of.”
“So he really did go to a counsellor, after that blowup with Pru. “
“Yes, to everybody’s surprise. And even more surprisingly, Nelson seems to like him. Respect him. It’s a black man.”
Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn’t been good enough. They’re calling in the professionals. “For how long is the rehab?”
“The complete program is ninety days. The first month is detox and intensive therapy, and then he lives in a halfway house for sixty days and gets some kind of a job, a community-service sort of thing probably, just something to get him back out into the normal world.”
“He’ll be gone all summer. Who’ll run the lot?”
Janice puts her hand over his, a gesture that feels to him learned, coached. “You will, Harry.”
“Honey, I can’t. I’m a sick son of a bitch.”
“Charlie says your attitude is terrible. You’re giving in to your heart. He says the best thing is a positive spirit and lots of activity.”
“Yeah, why doesn’t he come back and run the lot if he’s so fucking active?”
“He has all these other fish to fry these days.”
“Yeah, and you seem to be one of them. I’m hearing you sizzle.”
She giggles, along with the ugly tears drying on her face. “Don’t be so silly. He’s just an old friend, who’s been wonderful in this crisis.”
“While I’ve been useless, right?”
“You’ve been in the hospital, dear. You’ve been being brave in your way. Anyway as we all know there are things you can’t do for me, only I can do them for myself.”
He is disposed to argue this, it sounds pious in a new-fashioned way he distrusts, but if he’s ever going to get back into the game he must let up and avoid aggravation. He asks, “How did Nelson take your getting tough?”
“Like I said, he liked it. He’s just been begging for the rest of us to take over, he knew he was way out of control. Pru is thrilled to think he’s going to get help. Judy is thrilled.”
“Is Roy thrilled?”
“He’s too little to understand, but as you say yourself the atmosphere around that house has been poisonous.”
“Did I say poisonous?”
She doesn’t bother to answer. She has straightened up and is wiping her face with a licked facial tissue.
“Will I have to see the kid before he goes?”
“No, baby. He’s going tomorrow morning, before we bring you home.”
“Good. I just don’t know as I could face him. When you think of what he’s done, he’s flushed the whole bunch of us, not just you and me but his kids, everybody, right down the toilet. He’s sold us all out to a stupid drug.”
“Well, my goodness, Harry - I’ve known you to act selfishly in your life.”
“Yeah, but not for a little white powder.”
“They can’t help it. It becomes their life. Anyway, evidently they were buying drugs for Lyle, too. I mean drugs for his illness - medicines for AIDS you can’t buy yet in this country and are terribly expensive, they have to be smuggled.”
“It’s a sad story,” Rabbit says, after a pause. Inky depression circulates in his veins. He’s been in the hospital too long. He’s forgotten what life is like. He asks Janice, “Where are you going now, in that snappy blouse?”
She rolls her eyes upward at him, from the mirror of her purse as she fixes her face, and then her face goes wooden and stubborn, bluffing it through. “Charlie said he’d take me out to dinner. He’s worried I’m going to crash, psychologically, after all this trauma. I need to process.”
“Process?”
“Talk thins through.”
“You can talk them through with me. I’m just lying here with nothing to do, I’ve already missed the sports section of the news.”
She makes that mmmm mouth women make after putting on lipstick, rolling her lips together in a complacent serious way, and tells him, “You’re not impartial. You have your own agenda with Nelson, and with me for that matter.”
“What’s so impartial about Charlie, he wants to get into your pants again. If he hasn’t already.”
She pops the lipstick back into her bomb-shaped pocketbook and touches up her new hairdo with her fingers, glancing from several angles at herself in the mirror, and snaps the lid shut. She says, “That’s sweet of you, Harry, to pretend to think I’m still interesting to anybody in that way, but in fact I’m not, except maybe once in a while to my own husband, I hope.”
He says, embarrassed, for he knows he’s been letting her down in that department lately, “Sure, but you know, for a man, it’s all a matter of blood pressure, and -“
“We’ll talk about it when you’re home. I told Charlie I’d meet him at seven -“
“Where? The salad bar that used to be Johnny Frye’s? It’s only two blocks from here. You can walk.”
“No, actually. There’s a new Vietnamese place out near Maiden Springs he wanted to try. It’s a bit of a drive and, you know me, I’ll probably get lost. And then on top of everything I have fifty pages of a book on British realty law, full of all these funny old obsolete words, I have to read before class tomorrow night.”
“You won’t be home tomorrow night? My first night home?” He is making a complaint of it, scoring points, but he wishes she’d go and leave him alone with the television screen.
“We’ll see,” Janice says, rising. “I have an idea.” Then she asks, “Aren’t you proud of me?” She bends forward to press her hot busy face against his. “Managing everything the way I am?”
“Yeah,” he lies. He preferred her incompetent. She leaves with her jonquil-yellow new coat over her arm and he thinks she is gaining weight behind, she has that broad-beamed look women of the county wear when they come into their own.
* * *
Harry watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a seven-o’clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people, the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma - she’s brought Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for the shape she’s in, for Ronnie’s being with her, for her being unable to stay away. “We were here in the hospital seeing my doctor,” she explains, “and Ron junior had heard you were in.”
“For what they call a little procedure,” he says, and gestures toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that’s probably still warm from her broad beam. “Ron, there’s that big padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it’s on wheels.”
“I’ll stand,” he says. “We can only stay a minute.”
He is sullen, but Rabbit didn’t ask the Harrisons to come visit and doesn’t see why he should be bullied. “Suit yourself.” He asks Thelma, “How are you?”
Thelma sighs elaborately. “You know doctors. They never admit they don’t have an answer. I’m on home dialysis twice a week, Ronnie’s a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope with the machine.”
“Ronnie always was a saint,” Harry tells her, everybody in the room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A dirty-mouthed plug-ugly even at the age of five, and now bald as a prick’s tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears. Ronnie in high school and afterward had a certain chunkiness, but the approach of old age has pulled the chunks like taffy, leaving hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the throat. Harry says, as if she doesn’t already know, “Janice is taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so she has a trade in case I pop off.”
Thelma’s eyelids flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes of her being his mistress, her looking so prim and being so wild in bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was put on purely for him. “Harry, you’re not going to pop off” she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves. “They do wonderful things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag dolls.” She manages a thin smile. “Want to see what I have?”
He thinks he knows what she has, all of it, but she unbuttons her sleeve and with that matter-of-fact baring which was her style Thelma shows him the underside of her bared arm. Two purple bruised patches on her slender wrist are connected by a translucent U of some plastic tubing taped flat against the jaundiced skin. “That’s called my shunt,” she says, pronouncing the last word carefully. “It connects an artery and vein and when I have the dialysis we take it off and connect me to the machine.”
“Pretty,” seems all he can say. He tells them about his angioplasty, but is already tired of describing it, and trying to convey the creepy business of seeing the dark shadow of the catheter like a snaky forefinger inch ever more intimately into his heart’s paler, trembling shades. “My coronary artery could have occluded and I would have gone into CA. Cardiac arrest.”
“But you didn’t, you jerk,” Ronnie says, standing erect and abandoning his shadow on the wall. “The Old Master,” he says, a sardonic phrase he used to kid Harry with in their basketball-playing days. Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with his ugly flesh, a reminder of everything sweaty and effortful in life Rabbit squeamishly hoped to glide over and avoid. “Nobody lays a finger on the Old Master. He makes it all look easy.” Ronnie used to resent how Marty Tothero would put him, Ronnie, into the game when the bruisers on the other side were roughing Harry up, to give rough stuff back. An enforcer, they call it now.
“It was never as easy as I made it look,” Rabbit tells him. He turns to Thelma, wanting to be tender, since she had braved her husband’s anger by bringing him here. She had never balked at humiliating Ronnie to give Harry her gift of love, and indeed, sick as the two lovers are, her nearness does give him that socketed feeling you have with certain women, that graceful feeling you can do no wrong. “How about you, Thel? Your docs think they’re licking it?”
“Oh, they never say die, but a body gets tired. You can fight only so long. The pains I can live with, and the weakness all the time, but the kidneys going is really demoralizing. It takes away your pleasure in life if you can’t take such things for granted. Harry, you know that part of the Bible they used to read to us in assembly, before the Bible got outlawed, about a time for everything? A time to gather up stones, a time to cast them away? I’m beginning to think there’s a time to give up.”
“They don’t say that,” Ronnie says, with an urgency of his own. He loves this woman too, also calls her Thel. It occurs to Harry that two men for a woman and vice versa is about right, just as we need two kinds of days, workdays and holidays, and day and night. Ronnie sounds angry, that she would talk of giving up, but this May evening is slowly melting him into the shadowy wall, so it is beginning to seem that Harry and Thelma are alone together, as in so many stolen afternoons, their hearts beating, the school buses braking outside on the curved street signalling that he must go, and as in that room in the Caribbean, their first time together, when they stayed awake until dawn and then fell asleep as one body as the tropical blue air between the louvers paled and the palm trees ceased their nighttime stirring. Ronnie’s disembodied voice says to her angrily, “You have three boys who want to see you grow old.”
Thelma smiles slyly at Harry, her face colorless and waxy in the May day fading above the fancy brickwork cornices and chimneys visible through the windows. “Why would they want to see that, Ron?” she asks mischievously, not taking her gaze from Harry’s face. “They’re grown men. I’ve done all I can do for them.”
Poor Ron has no answer. Maybe he’s choked up. Rabbit takes pity and says to him, “How’s the insurance business going, Ron?”
“It’s levelled out,” his voice says gruffly. “Not bad, not good. The S and L mess hurt some companies but not ours. At least people’ve stopped borrowing against their policies at five per cent and investing at ten the way they were. That was killing our figures.”
“One of the nice things about getting to be old geezers like us,” Harry says, “is people like you stop trying to sell me insurance.” Footsteps and tingling pans sound from the hall, where the lights seem bright suddenly. Night has come.
“Not necessarily,” Ron is saying. “I could get you a pretty fair deal on some twenty-payment straight life, if you and Janice are interested. I know a doctor who doesn’t look too close. You’ve survived one coronary, that’s in your favor. Let me work up some figures.”
Harry ignores him. To Thelma he says, “Your boys are in good shape?”
“We think so. Good enough. Alex has had an offer from a hightech place in Virginia, outside Washington. Georgie thinks he has a spot with a musical-comedy troupe in the Catskills this summer.”
“Here’s something Janice just told me. She’s got Nelson to sign up for a drug rehab.”
“That’s nice,” Thelma says, so softly and sincerely here in the gloom that her voice seems to exist not in the air but already in his blood, inserted intravenously. All the afternoons when their bodies intertwined and exchanged fluids are not gone but safe inside him, his cells remembering.
“You’re nice to say so,” he says, and dares to grasp her cool hand, the one without the shunt, and move it up from her lap so the back of his own hand brushes a breast.
Ronnie’s voice comes forward from the wall. “We gotta go, Thel.”
“Ron, thanks for bringing her by.”
“Anything for the Old Master. We were in the building.”
“Master of nothing at this point.”
Ronnie grunts. “Who’s to say?” He’s not all bad.
Thelma has stiffly stood and, bending by his bed, asks, right out in front of Ronnie, “Darling, can you manage a little kiss?”
He may imagine it, but Thelma’s pale cool departing face, swiftly pressed against his, their lips meeting a bit askew, gives off a faint far tang of urine. When he is alone in his room again he remembers how sometimes when he kissed Thelma goodbye at her house her mouth would be flavored by the sour-milk taste of his prick, the cheesy smegma secreted beneath his foreskin. She would be still all soft and blurred by their lovemaking and unaware, and he would try to conceal his revulsion, a revulsion at his own smell on her lips. It was like, another sad thing to remember, the time when Nixon, with Watergate leaking out all around him, during one of the oil crunches went on television to te
ll us so earnestly to turn our thermostats down, for not only would it save oil but scientific studies showed that colder houses were healthier for us. That big scowling scared face on television, the lips wet and fumbling. Their President, crook or not, going down in disgrace but trying to say what needed to be said; Harry as a loyal American did go and turn his thermostat down.
Janice wakes up early out of nervousness; it is going to be a long and complicated day for her, of seeing Nelson off at nine and picking Harry up at noon and taking a quiz in British property law at seven, in the Brewer extension of Penn State in a renovated disused elementary school on South Pine Street, a section she isn’t too easy about parking the car in at night. In Penn Park in midMay the day begins with a kiss of coolness as in Florida; the little limestone house is cozier now that the surrounding trees are fully leafed. She has enjoyed, enough to add to her feelings of guilt, these days of Harry’s being in the hospital and her being free to come and go without explanation, and to get into bed as early or late as she pleases, and to watch what television shows she wants to. Wednesday nights, for instance, she likes Unsolved Mysteries, but Harry is always sitting beside her in the study or in bed telling her how ridiculous these so-called mysteries are and how they always derive, if you think about it, from the testimony of people who are either mentally unbalanced or have something to gain financially. The older Harry gets the more cynical he is; he used to be religious in a funny way. They couldn’t put the show on television if there weren’t some truth to it and that Robert Stack seems ever so sensible. Last night, what with being out with Charlie at that Vietnamese place along the Maiden Springs Pike (it was nice, but she never figured out what she was supposed to do with those bubbly brittle rice things like warped pancakes that were so tasteless you must be supposed to dip them in something), she missed all but the last ten minutes of thirtysomething which she likes to watch Tuesdays because it’s so different from how she was when she was thirty-something, all those demands on her, mother wife daughter, and then being Charlie’s mistress for a while and feeling so inadequate and guilty and having no female friends really except Peggy Fosnacht who went and slept with Harry anyway and now is dead, terrible to think, all rotten and parchmenty like a mummy in her casket, too hideous for the mind to grasp but it happens anyway, even to people your own age. With Harry gone, she can eat Campbell’s chicken noodle soup cold out of the can if she wants, with a few Ritz crackers crushed in, and not have to worry about giving him a good balanced low-fat low-sodium meal that he complains to her is tasteless. Maybe being a widow won’t be so very bad is the thought she keeps trying not to think.