by John Updike
"Let it be," Janice says. She rises. "Goddam your mother, Harry. The only thing she's ever done for us is try to poison our marriage. Now she's drowning in the poison of her life. She's dying and I'm glad."
"Jesus, don't say that."
"Why not? She would, if it were me. Who did she want you to marry? Tell me, who would have been wonderful enough for you? Who?"
"My sister," he suggests.
"Let me tell you something else. At first with Charlie, whenever I'd feel guilty, so I couldn't relax, I'd just think ofyour mother, how she's not only treated me but treated Nelson, her own grandson, and I'd say to myself, O.K., fella, sock it to me, and I'd just come."
"O.K., O.K. Spare me the fine print."
"I'm sick, so sick, of sparing you things. There've been a lot of days" – and this makes her too sad to confess, so that a constraint slips like a net over her face, which goes ugly under the pull "when I was sorry you came back that time. You were a beautiful brainless guy and I've had to watch that guy die day by day."
"It wasn't so bad last night, was it?"
"No. It was so good I'm angry. I'm all confused."
"You've been confused from birth, kid." He adds, "Any dying I've been doing around here, you've been helping it right along." At the same time, he wants to fuck her again, to see if she can turn inside out again. For some minutes last night she turned all tongue and his mouth was glued to hers as if in an embryo the first cell division had not yet occurred.
The phone rings. Janice plucks it from its carriage on the kitchen wall and says, "Hi, Daddy. How was the Poconos? Good. I knew she would. She just needed to feel appreciated. Of course he's here. Here he is." She holds it out to Rabbit. "For you."
Old man Springer's voice is reedy, coaxing, deferential. "Harry, how's everything?"
"Not bad."
"You still game for the ball game? Janice mentioned you asked about the tickets to the Blasts today. They're in my hand, three right behind first base. The manager's been a client of mine for twenty years."
"Yeah, great. The kid spent the night at the Fosnachts, but I'll get him back. You want to meet at the stadium?"
"Let me pick you up, Harry. I'll be happy to pick you up in my car. That way we'll leave Janice yours." A note in his voice that didn't used to be there, gentle, faintly wheedling: nursing along an invalid. He knows too. The world knows. It'll be in the halt next week. LINOTYPER'S WIFE LAYS LOCAL SALES REP. Greek Takes Strong Anti– Viet Stand.
"Tell me, Harry," Springer wheedles on, "how is your mother's health? Rebecca and I are naturally very concerned. Very concerned."
"My father says it's about the same. It's a slow process, you know. They have drugs now that make it even slower. I've been meaning this week to get up to Mt. Judge to see her but we haven't managed."
"When you do, Harry, give her our love. Give her our love."
Saying everything twice: he probably swung the Toyota franchise because the Japs could understand him second time around.
"O.K., sure enough. Want Janice back?"
"No, Harry, you can keep her." A joke. "I'll be by twelvetwenty, twelve-thirty."
He hangs up. Janice is gone from the kitchen. He finds her in the living room crying. He goes and kneels beside the sofa and puts his arms around her but these actions feel like stage directions followed woodenly. A button is off on her blouse and the sallow curve of breast into the bra mixes with her hot breath in his ear. She says, "You can't understand, how good he was. Not sexy or funny or anything, just good."
"Sure I can. I've known some good people. They make you .feel good."
"They make you feel everything you do and are is good. He never told me how dumb I am, every hour on the hour like you do, even though he's much smarter than you could ever imagine. He would have gone to college, if he hadn't been a Greek."
"Oh. Don't they let Greeks in now? The nigger quota too big?"
"You say such sick things, Harry."
"It's because nobody tells me how good I am," he says, and stands. The back of her neck is vulnerable beneath him. One good karate chop would do it.
The driveway crackles outside; it's much too early for Springer. He goes to the window. A teal-blue Fury. The passenger door swings open and Nelson gets out. On the other side appears Peggy Gring, wearing sunglasses and a miniskirt that flashes her big thighs like a card dealer's thumbs. Unhappiness -being deserted – has made her brisk, professional. She gives Rabbit hardly a hello and her sunglasses hide the eyes that he knows from school days look northeast and northwest. The two women go into the kitchen. From the sound of Janice snuffling he guesses a confession is in progress. He goes outside to finish the yard work he began last night. All around him, in the back yards of Vista Crescent, to the horizons of Penn Villas with their barbecue chimneys and aluminum wash trees, other men are out in their yards; the sound of his mower is echoed from house to house, his motions of bending and pushing are carried outwards as if in fragments of mirror suspended from the hot blank sky. These his neighbors, they come with their furniture in vans and leave with the vans. They get together to sign futile petitions for better sewers and quicker fire protection but otherwise do not connect. Nelson comes out and asks him, "What's the matter with Mommy?"
He shuts off the mower. "What's she doing?"
"She's sitting at the table with Mrs. Fosnacht crying her eyes out."
"Still? I don't know, kid; she's upset. One thing you must learn about women, their chemistries are different from ours."
"Mommy almost never cries."
"So maybe it's good for her. Get lots of sleep last night?"
"Some. We watched an old movie about torpedo boats."
"Looking forward to the Blasts game?"
"Sure."
"But not much, huh?"
"I don't like sports as much as you do, Dad. It's all so competitive."
"That's life. Dog eat dog."
"You think? Why can't things just be nice? There's enough stuff for everybody to share."
"You think there is? Why don't you start then by sharing this lawnmowing? You push it for a while."
"You owe me my allowance." As Rabbit hands him a dollar bill and two quarters, the boy says, "I'm saving for a mini-bike."
"Good luck."
"Also, Dad -?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I should get a dollar twenty-five an hour for work. That's still under the federal minimum wage."
"See?" Rabbit tells him. "Dog eat dog."
As he washes up inside, pulling grass bits out of his cuffs and putting a Band-aid on the ball of his thumb (tender place; in high school they used to say you could tell how sexy a girl was by how fat she was here), Janice comes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and says, "I've decided to tell him. While you're at the ball game I'll tell him." Her face looks taut but pretty dried-out; patches of moisture glisten beside her nose. The tile walls amplify her sniffs. Peggy Gring's car roars outside in leaving.
"Tell who what?"
"Tell Charlie. That it's all over. That you know."
"I said, keep him. Don't do anything for today at least. Calm down. Have a drink. See a movie. See that space movie again, you slept through the best parts."
"That's cowardly. No. He and I have always been honest with each other, I must tell him the truth."
"I think you're just looking for an excuse to see him while I'm tucked away at the ball park."
"You would think that."
"Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?"
"He wouldn't."
"Suppose he does, as a graduation present?"
She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. "I would," she says.
"Where are you going to find him?"
"At the lot. He stays on until six summer Saturdays."
"What reason are you going to give him? For breaking it off" "Why, t
he fact that you know."
"Suppose he asks you why you told?"
"It's obvious why I told. I told because I'm your wife."
Tears belly out between her lids and the tension of her face breaks like Nelson's when a hidden anxiety, a D or a petty theft or a headache, is confessed. Harry denies his impulse to put his arm around her; he does not want to feel wooden again. She teeters, keeping her balance while sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while the plastic shower curtain rustles at her shoulder.
"Aren't you going to stop me?" she brings out at last.
"Stop you from what?"
"From seeing him!"
Given this rich present of her grief, he can afford to be cruel. Coolly he says, "No, see him if you want to. Just as long as I don't have to see the bastard." And, avoiding the sight of her face, he sees himself in the cabinet mirror, a big pink pale man going shapeless under the chin, his little lips screwed awry in what wants to be a smile.
The gravel in the driveway crackles again. From the bathroom window he sees the boxy dun top of Springer's spandy new Toyota wagon. To Nelson he calls, "Grandpa's here. Let's go-o." To Janice he murmurs, "Sit tight, kid. Don't commit yourself to anything." To his father-in-law, sliding in beside him, across a spaghetti of nylon safety straps, Rabbit sings, "Buy me some peanuts and crack-er jack .. ."
The stadium is on the northern side of Brewer, through a big cloverleaf, past the brick hulks of two old hosiery mills, along a three-lane highway where in these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs. GENUINE "Dutch" COOKING. Pa. Dutch Smorgasbord. Trying to sell what in the old days couldn't be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples. They pass the country fairgrounds, where every September the same battered gyp stands return, and the farmers bring their stinking livestock, and Serafina the Egyptian Temptress will take off all her clothes for those yokels who put up a dollar extra. The first naked woman he saw was Serafma or her mother. She kept on her high heels and a black mask and bent way backwards; she spread her legs and kept a kind of token shimmy rhythm as she moved in a semi-circle so every straining head (luckily he was tall even then) could see a trace of her cleft, an exciting queasy-making wrinkle shabbily masked by a patch of hair that looked to him pasted-on. Rubbed threadbare? He didn't know. He couldn't imagine.
Springer is shaking his head over the York riots. "Sniper fire four nights in a row, Harry. What is the world coming to? We're so defenseless, is what strikes me, we're so defenseless against the violent few. All our institutions have been based on trust."
Nelson pipes up. "It's the only way they can get justice, Grandpa. Our laws defend property instead of people."
"They're defeating their own purposes, Nellie. Many a white man of good will like myself is being turned against the blacks. Slowly but surely he's being turned against them. It wasn't Vietnam beat Humphrey, it was law and order in the streets. That's the issue that the common man votes upon. Am I right or wrong, Harry? I'm such an old fogey I don't trust my own opinions any more."
One old geezer, Harry is remembering, at the side of the little stage, reached from behind and put his hand up on her pussy, shouting, "Aha!" She stopped her dance and stared out of the black mask. The tent went quiet; the geezer, surprisingly, found enough blood in himself to blush. Aha. That cry of triumph, as if he had snared a precious small animal, Harry never forgot. Aha. He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, "Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world .isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything."
Old man Springer laughs; he snorts and snarls so his little gray mouse of a mustache merges with his nostril hairs. "Did you hear about Teddy Kennedy this morning?"
"What about him? No."
"Shut your ears, Nellie. I forgot you were in the car or I wouldn't have mentioned it."
"What, Grandpa? What did he do? Did somebody shoot him?"
"Apparently, Harry" – Springer talks out of the side of his mouth, as if to shield Nelson, yet so distinctly the child can easily hear– "he dumped some girl from Pennsylvania into one of those Massachusetts rivers. Murder as plain as my face." Springer's face, from the side, is a carving of pink bone, with rosy splotches where the cheekbones put most pressure, and a bump of red on the point where the nose turns. An anxious sharp face creased all over by a salesman's constant smile. One thing at least about setting type, there's a limit on how much ass you must kiss.
"Did they get him? Is he in jail, Grandpa?"
"Ah, Nellie, they'll never put a Kennedy in jail. Palms will be greased. Evidence will be suppressed. I call it a crying shame."
Rabbit asks, "What do you mean, dumped some girl?"
"They found her in his car upside down in the water beside some bridge, I forget the name, one of those islands they have up there. It happened last night and he didn't go to the police until they were about to nab him. And they call this a democracy, Harry, is the irony of it."
"What would you call it?"
"I'd call it a police state run by the Kennedys, is what I would call it. That family has been out to buy the country since those Brahmins up in Boston snubbed old Joe. And then he put himself in league with Hitler when he was FDR's man in London. Now they've got the young widow to marry a rich Greek in case they run out of American money. Not that she's the goodie-gumdrop the papers say; those two were a match. What's your opinion, Harry? Am I talking out of line? I'm such a back number now I don't trust to hear myself talk." Aha.
"I'd say," Harry says, "you're right with it. You should join the kids and buy yourself a bomb to throw."
Springer looks over from driving (the yellow parabolas of a McDonald's flash by; the tinsel spinners of a Mobil station break the noon sun into trinkets) to see if he has oversold. How timid, really, people who live by people must be. Earl Angstrom was right about that at least: better make your deals with things. Springer says, hedgily smiling, showing porcelain teeth beneath the gray blur, "I'll say this for the Kennedys, however, they don't get my dander up like FDR. There was a man, Harry, so mad he died of maggots in the brain. One thing to be said for the Kennedys, they didn't try to turn the economy upside down for the benefit of the poor, they were willing to ride along with the System as it's been handed down."
Nelson says, "Billy Fosnacht says when we grow up we're going to overthrow the System."
Springer can't hear, lost in his vision of executive madness and corruption. "He tried to turn it upside down for the benefit of the black and white trash, and when that didn't work for eight years he finagled the little Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so he had a war to bail him out of the Depression. That's why you have these wars, believe it or not, to bail the Democrats out of their crazy economics. LBJ, now, as soon as he got his four-year guarantee, went into Vietnam where nobody wanted us, just to get the coloreds up into the economy. LBJ, he was an FDR man. Truman, the same thing in Korea. History bears me out, every time, call me an old fogey if you want to: what's your angle on it, Nelson?"
"Last night on television," the boy says, "we watched an old movie about fighting the Japs in the Pacific, this little boat sank, and the captain or whatever he was swam miles with a broken back dragging this other guy."
"That was Kennedy," Springer says. "Pure propaganda. They made that movie because Old Joe owned a lot of those studios. He sank his money into the movies when aL the honest businessmen who'd put this country on the map were losing their shirts. He was in close league, the story I heard, with those Jewish Communists out there."
Rabbit tells Nelson, "That's where your Aunt Mim is now, out .there with those Communists."
"She's beautiful," Nelson tells his grandfather. "Have you ever seen my Aunt Mim?"
&nb
sp; "Not as much as I'd have liked to, Nellie. She is a striking figure, however, I know you're right there. You're right to be proud of her. Harry, your silence disturbs me. Your silence disturbs me. Maybe I'm way off base – way off: Tell me what you think of the state of the nation. With these riots everywhere, and this poor Polish girl, she comes from up near Williamsport, abused and drowned when the future President takes his pleasure. Pregnant, wouldn't surprise me. Nellie, you shouldn't be hearing any of this."
Harry stretches, cramped in the car, short of sleep. They are near the stadium, and a little colored boy is waving them into a lot. "I think," he says, "about America, it's still the only place."
But something has gone wrong. The ball game is boring. The spaced dance of the men in white fails to enchant, the code beneath the staccato spurts of distant motion refuses to yield its meaning. Though basketball was his sport, Rabbit remembers the grandeur of all that grass, the excited perilous feeling when a high fly was hoisted your way, the homing-in on the expanding dot, the leathery smack of the catch, the formalized nonchalance of the heads-down trot in toward the bench, the ritual flips and shrugs and the nervous courtesies of the batter's box. There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America. Sitting behind first base between his son and his father-in-law, the sun resting on his thighs, the rolled-up program in his hand, Rabbit waits for this beauty to rise to him, through the cheers and the rhythm of innings, the traditional national magic, tasting of his youth; but something is wrong. The crowd is sparse, thinning out from a cluster behind the infield to fistfuls of boys sprawling on the green seats sloped up from the outfield. Sparse, loud, hard: only the drunks, the bookies, the cripples, the senile, and the delinquents come out to the ball park on a Saturday afternoon. Their catcalls are coarse and unkind. "Ram it down his throat, Speedy!" "Kill that black bastard!" Rabbit yearns to protect the game from the crowd; the poetry of space and inaction is too fine, too slowly spun for them. And for the players themselves, they seem expert listlessly, each intent on a private dream of making it, making it into the big leagues and the big money, the own-your-own-bowlingalley money; they seem specialists like any other, not men playing a game because all men are boys time is trying to outsmart. A gallant pretense has been abandoned. Only the explosions of orange felt on their uniforms, under the script Blasts, evoke the old world of heraldic local loyalties. Brewer versus Hazleton and who cares? Not Springer: as he watches, his lips absent-mindedly move as if sorting out old accounts. Not Nelson: the screen of reality is too big for the child, he misses television's running commentary, the audacious commercials. His politely unspoken disappointment nags at Rabbit, prevents the game from rising and filling the scared hollow Janice's confession has left in him. The eight-team leagues of his boyhood have vanished with the forty-eight-star flag. The shortstops never chew tobacco any more. The game drags on, with a tedious flurry of strategy, of pinch-hitters and intentional walks, prolonging the end. Hazleton wins, 7-3. Old man Springer sighs, getting up as if from a nap in an unnatural position. He wipes a fleck of beer from his mustache. " 'Fraid our boys didn't come through for you, Nellie," he says.