by John Updike
“Great.”
“I want to see you in four weeks. Here are slips for the blood tests and EKG, and prescriptions for a diuretic and a relaxant for you at night. Don’t forget the diet lists. Walk. Not violently, but vigorously, two or three miles a day.”
“O.K.,” Rabbit says, beginning to rise from his chair, feeling as light as a boy called into the principal’s office and dismissed with a light reprimand.
But Dr. Morris fixes him with those sucked-out old blue eyes and says, “Do you have any sort of a job? According to my last information here, you were in charge of a car agency.”
“That’s gone. My son’s taken over and my wife wants me to stay out of the kid’s way. The agency was founded by her father. They’ll probably wind up having to sell it off.”
“Any hobbies?”
“Well, I read a lot of history. I’m a kind of a buff, you could say.”
“You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you.”
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way. He resumes rising from the chair and takes Dr. Morris’ many slips of paper out into the towering heat. The few other people out on the parking lot seem tinted smoke rising from their shadows, barely cxisting. The radio in the Celica is full of voices yammering about Deion Sanders, about Koch losing the New York Democratic primary to a black, about the SAT scores dropping in Lee County, about President Bush’s televised appeal to America’s schoolchildren yesterday. “The man’s not doing anything!” one caller howls.
Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for him? On the car seat next to him Dr. Morris’ prescriptions and medical slips and Xeroxed diet sheets lift and scatter in the breeze from the car air-conditioning. On another station he hears that the Phillies beat the Mets last night, two to one. Dickie Thon homered with one out in the ninth, dropping the pre-season pennant favorites five and a half games behind the once-lowly Chicago Cubs. Harry tries to care but has trouble. Ever since Schmidt retired. Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It’s Nature’s way.
But he does begin to walk. He even drives to the Palmetto Palm Mall and buys a pair of walking Nikes, with a bubble of special hi-tech air to cushion each heel. He sets out between nine and ten in the morning, after eating breakfast and digesting the News-Press, and then again between four and five, returning to a nap and then dinner and then television and a page or two of his book and a sound sleep, thanks to the walking. He explores Deleon. First, he walks the curving streets of low stucco houses within a mile of Valhalla Village, with unfenced front yards of tallish tough grass half-hiding bits of dried palm frond, a Florida texture in that, a cozy sere Florida scent. Encountering a UPS man delivering or a barking small dog - a flat-faced Pekinese with its silky long hair done up in ribbons - is like finding life on Mars. Then, growing ever fonder of his Nikes (that bubble in the heel, he thought at first it was just a gimmick but maybe it does add bounce), he makes his way to the downtown and the river, where the town first began, as a fort in the Seminole wars and a shipping point for cattle and cotton.
He discovers, some blocks back from the beachfront and the green glass hotels, old neighborhoods where shadowy big spicy gentle trees, live oaks and gums and an occasional banyan widening out on its crutches, overhang wooden houses once painted white but flaking down to gray bareness, with louvered windows and roofs of corrugated tin. Music rises from within these houses, scratchy radio music, and voices raised in argument or jabbery jubilation, bright fragments of overheard life. The sidewalks are unpaved, small paths such as cats make have been worn diagonally between the trees, in and out of private property, the parched grass growing in patches, packed dirt littered with pods and nuts. It reminds Harry of those neighborhoods he blundered into trying to get out of Savannah, but also of the town of his childhood, Mt. Judge in the days of Depression and distant war, when people still sat on their front porches, and there were vacant lots and oddshaped cornfields, and men back from work in the factories would water their lawns in the evenings, and people not long off the farm kept chickens in back-yard pens, and peddled the eggs for odd pennies. Chickens clucking and pecking and suddenly squawking: he hasn’t heard that sound for forty years, and hasn’t until now realized what he’s been missing. For chicken coops tucked here and there dot this sleepy neighborhood he has discovered.
In the daytime here, under the heavy late-summer sun, there are few people moving, just women getting in and out of cars with pre-school children. The slams of their car doors carry a long way down the dusty straight streets, under the live oaks. At some corners there are grocery stores that also sell beer and wine in the permissive Southern way, and pastel-painted bars with the door open on a dark interior, and video rental places with horror and kung-fu tapes displayed in the window, the boxes’ colors being bleached by the sun. One day he passes an old-fashioned variety store, in a clapboarded one-story building, displaying all sorts of innocent things - erector sets, model airplane kits, Chinese-checker boards and marbles - that he hadn’t known were still being sold. He almost goes in but doesn’t dare. He is too white.
Toward late afternoon, when he takes his second walk of the day, the neighborhood begins to breathe, a quickness takes hold, men and boys return to it, and Rabbit walks more briskly, proclaiming with his stride that he is out for the exercise, just passing through, not spying. These blocks are black, and there are miles of them, a vast stagnant economic marsh left over from Deleon’s Southern past, supplying the hotels and condos with labor, with waiters and security guards and chambermaids. To Harry, whose Deleon has been a glitzy community of elderly refugees, these blocks feel like a vast secret, and as the shadows lengthen under the trees, and the chickens cease their day-long clucking, his senses widen to grasp the secret better, as when in whispering knickers he would move through Mt. Judge unseen, no taller than a privet hedge, trying to grasp the unspeakable adult meaning of the lit windows, of the kitchen noises filtering across the yards mysterious and damp as jungles. An unseen child would cry, a dog would bark, and he would tingle with the excitement of simply being himself, at this point of time and space, with worlds to know and forever to live, Harold C. Angstrom, called Hassy in those lost days never to be relived. He prolongs his walks, feeling stronger, more comfortable in this strange city where he is at last beginning to exist as more than a visitor; but as darkness approaches, and the music from the glowing slatted windows intensifies, he begins to feel conspicuous, his whiteness begins to glimmer, and he heads back to the car, which he has taken to parking in a lot or at a meter downtown, as base for his widening explorations.
Coming back one day around six-thirty, just in time for a shower and a look at the news while his TV dinner heats in the oven, he is startled by the telephone’s ringing. He has ceased to listen for it as intensely as in that first lonely week. When it does ring, it has been one of those recordings (“Hello there, this is Sandra”) selling health insurance or a no-frills burial plan or reduced-fee investment services, going through all the numbers by computer, you wonder how it pays, Harry always hangs up and can’t imagine who would listen and sign up for this stuff. But this time the caller is Nelson, his son.
“Dad?”
“Yes,” he says, gathering up his disused voice, trying to imagine what you can say to a son whose wife you’ve boffed. “Nellie,” he says, “how the hell is everybody?”
The distant voice is gingerly, shy, also not sure what is appropriate. “We’re fine, pretty much.”
“You’re staying clean?” He didn’t mean to take the offensive so sharply; the other voice, fragile in its distance, is stunned into silence for a moment.
“You mean the drugs. Sure. I don’t even think about coke, except at NA meetings. Like they say, you give your life over to a higher power. You ou
ght to try it, Dad.”
“I’m working on it. Listen, no kidding, I am. I’m proud ofyou, Nelson. Keep taking it a day at a time, that’s all anybody can do.”
Again, the boy seems momentarily stuck. Maybe this came over as too preachy. Who is he to preach? Shit, he was just trying to share, like you’re supposed to. Harry holds his tongue.
“There’s been so much going on around here,” Nelson tells him, “I really haven’t thought about myself that much. A lot of my problem, I think, was idleness. Hanging around the lot all day waiting for some action, for the customers to show up, really preys on your selfconfidence. I mean, you have no control. It was degrading.”
“I did it, for fifteen years I did it, every day.”
“Yeah, but you have a different sort of temperament. You’re more happy-go-lucky.”
“Stupid, you mean.”
“Hey Dad, I didn’t call up to quarrel. This isn’t exactly fun for me, I’ve been putting it off. But I got some things to say.”
“O.K., say ‘em.” This isn’t working out. He doesn’t want to be this way, he is putting his anger at Janice onto the kid. Her silence has hurt him. He can’t stop, adding, “You’ve sure taken your time saying anything, I’ve been down here all by myself for two weeks. I saw old Dr. Morris and he thinks I’m so far gone I should stop eating.”
“Well,” Nelson says back, “if you were so crazy to talk you could have come over that night instead of getting in the car and disappearing. We weren’t going to kill you, we just wanted to talk it through, to understand what had happened, really, in terns of family dynamics. Pru’s as good as admitted it was a way of getting in touch with her own father.”
“With Blubberlips Lubell? Tell her thanks a lot.” But he is not displeased to hear Nelson taking a firmer tone with him. You’re not a man in this world until you’ve got on top of your father. In his own case, it was easier, the system had beaten Pop so far down already. “Coming over there that night felt like a set-up,” he explains to Nelson.
“Well, Mom didn’t think any of us should try to get in touch if that’s the kind of cowardly trick you were going to pull. She wasn’t too happy you telephoned Pru instead of her, either.”
“I kept trying our number but she’s never home.”
“Well, whatever. She wanted me to let you know a couple things. One, she has an offer on the house, not as much as she’d hoped for, one eighty-five, but the market’s pretty flat right now and she thinks we should take it. It would reduce the debt to Brewer Trust to the point where we could manage it.”
“Let me get this straight. This is the Penn Park house you’re talking about? The little gray stone house I’ve always loved?”
“What other house could you think? We can’t tell the Mt. Judge house -where would we all live?”
“Tell me, Nelson,. I’m just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents’ house in crack?”
The boy begins to sound more like himself. He whines, “I keep telling you, I was never that much into crack. The crack just came into it toward the end, it was so much more convenient than freebasing. I’m sorry, Jesus. I went to rehab, I took the vows, I’m trying to make amends like they say. Who are you to still be on my case?”
Who indeed? “O.K.,” Rabbit says. “Sorry to mention it. What else did your mother tell you to tell me?”
“Hyundai is interested in the lot, the location is just what they want and don’t have. They’d enlarge the building out toward the back like I always wanted to do.” Goodbye, Paraguay, Rabbit thinks. “They’d keep the service people on, with a little retraining, and some of the sales force, Elvira might go over to Rudy’s on 422. Hyundai’s made her a counteroffer. But they don’t want me. No way. Word gets around, I guess, among these Oriental companies.”
“I guess,” Harry says. Too much ninjó not enough giri. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Dad. It frees me up. I’m thinking of becoming a social worker.”
“A social worker!”
“Sure, why not? Help other people instead of myself for a change. It’s a two-year course at the Penn State extension, I could still get in for this October.”
“Sure, why not, come to think of it,” Rabbit agrees. He is beginning to dislike himself, for being so agreeable, for wanting to worm back into everybody’s good graces.
“Me and the lawyers all think if it goes through we should lease to Hyundai rather than sell; if we sell the house in Penn Park we wouldn’t need any more capital and should keep the lot as an investment, Mom says it’s going to be worth millions by the year 2000.”
“Wow,” Harry says unenthusiastically. “You and your mom are quite a team. Anything else to hit me with?”
“Well, this maybe isn’t any of your business, but Pru thought it was. We’re trying to get pregnant.”
“We?”
“We want to have a third child. All this has made us realize how much we’ve been neglecting our marriage and how much really we have invested in making it work. Not only for Judy and Roy, but for ourselves. We love each other, Dad.”
Maybe this is supposed to make him feel jealous, and there is a pang, just under the right ventricle. But Rabbit’s basic emotion is relief, at being excused from having to keep any kind of candle burning at Pru’s shrine. Good luck to her, her and her sweet slum hunger. “Great,” he tells the boy. He can’t resist adding, “Though I’m not so sure social workers make enough to support three kids.” And, getting mad, feeling squeezed, he goes on, “And tell your mother I’m not so sure I want to sign our house away. It’s not like the lot, we’re co-owners, and she needs my signature on the sales agreement. Ifwe split up, my signature ought to be worth quite a bit, tell her.”
“Split up?” The boy sounds frightened. “Who’s saying anything about splitting up?”
“Well,” Harry says, “we seem split up now. At least I don’t see her down here, unless she’s under the bed. But don’t you worry about it, Nelson. You’ve been through this before and I felt lousy about it. You get on with your own life. It sounds like you’re doing fine. I’m proud of you. Or did I say that?”
“But everything kind of depends on selling the Penn Park house.”
“Tell her I’ll think about it. Tell Judy and Roy I’ll give ‘em a call one of these days.”
“But, Dad -“
“Nelson, I got this low-cal frozen dinner in the oven and the buzzer went off five minutes ago. Tell your mother to call me sometime if she wants to talk about it. Must run. Terrific to talk to you. Really.” He hangs up.
He has been buying low-cal frozen meals, raw vegetables like cabbage and carrots, and no more sodium-laden munchies. He has lost three pounds on the bathroom scale, if he weighs himself naked and right in the morning after taking a crap. At night, to keep himself away from the TV and the breadbox in the kitchen drawer and the beer in the refrigerator, he gets into bed and reads the book Janice gave him for last Christmas. Its author has joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries not much bigger than Harry’s will be in the Brewer Standard. In the News-Press he doesn’t expect to get an inch. He read in her obituary that the author had been a niece of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Harry remembers Morgenthau: the pointy-nosed guy who kept urging him and his schoolmates to buy war stamps with their pennies. It’s a small world, and a long life in a way.
He has reached the exciting part of the book, where, after years of frustration and starvation and lousy support from his fellow would-be Americans, Washington has hopes of joining up with a French fleet sailing from the Caribbean to trap Cornwallis and his army at York in the Chesapeake Bay. It seems impossible that it will work. The logistics of it need perfect timing, and the communications take weeks, ships to land and back. Anyway, what’s in it for France? Instead of an aggressive ally, they were tied
to a depen dent client, unable to establish a strong government and requiring transfusions of men-at-arms and money to keep its war effort alive. The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. What was in it for the soldiers? The American troops, for too long orphans of the battle, unkempt, underfed and unpaid while Congress rode in carriages and dined at well-laid tables, would not march without pay. What was in it for Washington? He couldn’t even have known he’d get his face on the dollar bill. But he hangs in there, patching, begging, scrambling, his only assets the fatheadedness of the British commanders, all gouty noblemen wishing they were home in their castles, and the fact that, just like in Vietnam, the natives weren’t basically friendly. Washington gets his troops across the Hudson while Clinton cowers defensively in New York. DeGrasse gets his fleet heading north because Admiral Rodney cautiously chooses the defense of Barbados over pursuit. But, still, the odds of the troops and the ships arriving at the Chesapeake at the same time and Cornwallis remaining a sitting duck in Yorktown are preposterous. All that transport, all those men trudging and horses galloping along the New World’s sandy, woodsy roads, winding through forests, past lonely clearings, among bears and wolves and chipmunks and Indians and passenger pigeons, it makes Harry sleepy to think about. The tangle of it all, the trouble. He reads ten pages a night; his is a slow march.