by John Updike
“I thought she’d be with them,” Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn’t bawling him out or something; he doesn’t seem to know his job.
The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. “Evidently,” be says, “when you didn’t come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game.”
“Where was old man Springer?”
“She didn’t call them. She didn’t call them until two o’clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope.” “Poor thing” is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
Harry asks, “Not until two?” Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.
“Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know. People do.” Eccles laughs. “They’re supposed to; it’s comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn’t been to church in months.” As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.
“This was around two in the morning?”
“Between two and three.”
“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”
The minister shakes his head irritably. “That’s not to be considered.”
“Well I feel terrible about this.”
“Do you? That’s hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?”
“I don’t really have a plan. I’m sort of playing it by ear.”
Eccles’ laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is a connoisseur of affairs like this, broken homes, fleeing husbands, and that “playing it by ear” has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered; Eccles has this knack.
“Your mother has an interesting viewpoint,” Eccles says. “She thinks it’s all an illusion your wife and I have, that you’ve deserted. She says you’re much too good a boy to do anything of the sort.”
“You’ve been busy on this, haven’t you?”
“This, and a death yesterday.”
“Gee, I’m sorry.”
They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley. “Say, if you really want to give me a lift,” Rabbit says, “you could drive over into Brewer.”
“You don’t want me to take you to your wife?”
“No. Good grief. I mean I don’t think it would do any good, do you?”
For a long time it seems that the other man didn’t hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, “Not if you don’t want good to come of it.”
The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday-school clothes. Little girls in pink bell dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.
Eccles asks, “What did she do that made you leave?”
“She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.”
Eccles doesn’t laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. “It’s the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.”
“For less than two days, it’s been.”
“Oh. There’s the law I suppose—”
“I wasn’t thinking of that so much. Your mother-in-law thought of it immediately, but your wife and Mr. Springer are dead against it. I imagine for different reasons. Your wife seems almost paralyzed; she doesn’t want anyone to do anything.”
“Poor kid. She’s such a mutt.”
“Why are you here?”
“ ‘Cause you caught me.”
“I mean why were you in front of your home?”
“I came back to get clean clothes.”
“Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?”
Rabbit feels now the danger of talking; his words are coming back to him, little hooks and snares are being fashioned. “Also I was leaving her the car.”
“Why? Don’t you need it, to escape?”
“I just thought she should have it. Her father sold it to us cheap. Anyway it didn’t do me any good.”
“No?” Eccles stubs his cigarette out in the car ashtray and goes to his coat pocket for another. They are rounding the mountain, at the highest stretch of road, where the hill rises too steeply on one side and falls too steeply on the other to give space to a house or gasoline station. The river down below. “Now if I were to leave my wife,” he says, “I’d get into a car and drive a thousand miles.” It almost seems like advice; coming calmly from above the white collar.
“That’s what I did!” Rabbit cries, delighted by how much they have in common. “I drove as far as West Virginia. Then I thought the hell with it and came back.” He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he’s doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man in black.
“Should I ask why?”
“Oh I don’t know. A combination of things. It seemed safer to be in a place I know.”
“You didn’t come back to protect your wife?”
Rabbit is wordless at the idea.
Eccles continues, “You speak of this feeling of muddle. What do you think it’s like for other young couples? In what way do you think you’re exceptional?”
“You don’t think I can tell ya but I will. I once played a game real well. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.”
The dashboard lighter pops. Eccles uses it and quickly returns his eyes to his driving. They’ve come down into the outskirts of Brewer. He asks, “Do you believe in God?”
Having rehearsed that this morning, Rabbit answers promptly, “Yes.”
Eccles blinks in surprise. The furry lid in his one-eyed profile shutters, but his face does not turn. “Do you think, then, that God wants you to make your wife suffer?”
“Let me ask you. Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?” This question of Jimmy’s sounds, Rabbit realizes, ridiculous; he is annoyed that Eccles simply takes it in, with a sad drag of smoke. He realizes that no matter what he says, Eccles will take it in with the same weary smoke; he is a listener by trade. His big fair head seems stuffed with a gray mash of everybody’s precious secrets and passionate questions, a mash that nothing, young as he is, can color. For the first time, Rabbit dislikes him.
“No,” Eccles says after thought. “But I think He wants a little tree to become a big tree.”
“If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead.”
“I’m immature myself,” Eccles offers.
It’s not enough of an offering. Rabbit tells him off. “Well, I’m not going back to that little dope no matter how sorry you feel for her. I don’t know what she feels. I never have. All I know is what’s inside m
e. That’s all I have. Do you know what I was doing to support that bunch? I was demonstrating a penny’s worth of tin called a frigging MagiPeeler in five-and-dime stores!”
Eccles looks at him and laughs, his eyebrows all surprise now. “Well that explains your oratorical gifts,” he says.
This aristocratic sneer rings true; puts them both in place. Rabbit feels less at sea. “Hey, I wish you’d let me out,” he says. They’re on Weiser Street, heading toward the great sunflower, dead in day.
“Won’t you let me take you where you’re staying?”
“I’m not staying anywhere.”
“All right.” With a trace of boyish bad temper Eccles pulls over and stops in front of a fire hydrant. As he brakes racily, something clatters in the trunk.
“You’re coming apart,” Rabbit tells him.
“Just my golf clubs.”
“You play?”
“Badly. Do you?” He seems animated; the cigarette burns forgotten in his fingers.
“I used to caddy.”
“Could I invite you for a game?” Ah. Here’s the hook.
Rabbit gets out and stands on the curb and sidesteps, clowning in his freedom. “I don’t have clubs.”
“They’re easy to rent. Please. I mean it.” Eccles leans far over, to speak through the door. “It’s hard for me to find partners. Everybody works except me.” He laughs.
Rabbit knows he should run, but the thought of a game, and his idea that it’s safest to see the hunter, make resistance.
Eccles presses. “I’m afraid you’ll go back to demonstrating peelers if I don’t catch you soon. Tuesday? Tuesday at two? Shall I pick you up?”
“No; I’ll come to your house.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah. But don’t trust a promise from me.”
“I have to.” Eccles names an address in Mt. Judge and they call good-by at the curb. An old cop walks with a wise squint along the pavement beside the shut, stunned Sunday storefronts. To him it must look like a priest parting from the president of his Youth Group. Harry grins at this cop, and walks along the pavement with his stomach singing. Funny, the world just can’t touch you.
Ruth lets him in, a pocket mystery in one hand. Her eyes look sleepy from reading. She has changed into another sweater. Her hair seems darker. He dumps the clothes on her bed. “Do you have hangers?”
“Say. You really think you have it made.”
“I made you,” he says. “I made you and the sun and the stars.” Squeezing her in his arms it seems that he did. She is tepid and solid in his embrace, not friendly, not not. The filmy smell of soap lifts into his nostrils while dampness touches his jaw. She has washed her hair. It pulls back from her forehead in darker straighter strands evenly harrowed by the comb. Clean, she is clean; he puts his nose against her skull to drink in the demure sharp scent. He thinks of her naked in the shower, her hair hanging oozy with lather, her neck bowed to the whipping water. “I made you bloom,” he says.
“Oh you’re a wonder,” she answers, and pushes away from his chest. As he hangs up his suits tidily, Ruth asks, “You give your wife the car?”
“There was nobody there. I snuck in and out. I left the key inside.”
“And nobody caught you?”
“As a matter of fact somebody did. The Episcopal minister gave me a ride back into Brewer.”
“Say; you are religious aren’t you?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing much.”
“What was he like?”
“Kind of creepy. Giggled a lot.”
“Maybe just you make him giggle.”
“I’m supposed to play golf with him on Tuesday.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really. I told him I don’t know how.”
She laughs, on and on, in that prolonged way women use when they’re excited by you and ashamed of it. “Oh, my Rabbit,” she exclaims in a fond final breath. “You just wander, don’t you?”
“He got hold of me,” he insists, knowing his attempts to explain will amuse her, for shapeless reasons. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You poor soul,” she says. “You’re just irresistible.”
With keen secret relief, he at last takes off his dirty clothes and changes into clean underwear, fresh socks, the sports shirt, and suntans. He has to put his suede shoes back on. He forgot to steal his sneakers. “Let’s go for that walk,” he announces, dressed.
“I’m reading,” she says from a chair. The book is open to near the end. She reads books nicely, without cracking their backs, though they cost only 35¢.
“Come on. Get out in the weather.” He goes over and tries to tug the mystery from her hand. The title is The Deaths at Oxford. Now what should she care about deaths at Oxford? When she has him here.
“Wait,” she pleads, and turns a page, and reads some sentences as the book is pulled slowly up, her eyes shuttling, and then suddenly lets him take it. “God, you’re a bully.”
He marks her place with a burnt match and looks at her bare feet. “Do you have sneakers or anything?”
“No. Hey I’m sleepy.”
“We’ll go to bed early.”
Her eyeballs turn on him at this, her lips pursed a little. There is this vulgarity in her, that just couldn’t let that go by. Ever so faintly unctuous vulgarity.
“Come on,” he says. “Put on flat shoes and well dry your hair.”
“I’ll have to wear heels.” As she bows her head to pinch them on, the white line of her parting makes him smile, it’s so straight. Like a little birthday girl’s parting.
They approach the mountain through the city park. The trash baskets and movable metal benches have not been set out yet. On the concrete-and-plank benches fluffy old men sun like greater pigeons, dressed in patches of gray multiple as feathers. The trees in small leaf dust the half-bare ground with shadow. Sticks and strings protect the newly seeded margins of the unraked gravel walks. The breeze, flowing steadily down the slope from the empty bandshell, is cool out of the sun. Pigeons with mechanical heads flee on pink legs from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, near their heels. A derelict stretches an arm along the back of a bench to dry, and out of a gouged face sneezes petitely, catlike. A few toughs, fourteen or younger, smoke and jab near the locked equipment shed of a play pavilion on whose yellow boards someone has painted with red paint Tex & Josie, Rita & Jay. Where would they get red paint? Threads of green poke up through matted brown. He takes her hand. The ornamental pool in front of the bandshell is drained and scum-stained; they move along a path parallel to the curve of its cold lip, which echoes back the bandshell’s silence. A World War II tank, made a monument, points its guns at far-off tennis courts. The nets are not up, the lines unlimed.
Trees darken; pavilions slide downhill. They walk through the upper region of the park, which thugs haunt at night, scattering candy-bar wrappers. The beginning of the steps is almost hidden in an overgrowth of great bushes tinted dull amber with the first buds. Long ago, when hiking was customary entertainment, people built stairs up the Brewer side of the mountain. They are made of six-foot tarred logs with dirt filled in flat behind them. Iron pipes have since been driven, to hold these tough round risers in place, and fine blue gravel scattered over the packed dirt they dam. The footing is difficult for Ruth; Rabbit watches her body struggle to propel her weight on the digging points of her heels. They catch and buckle on an unevenness hidden below the coating of gravel. Her backside lurches, her arms grab out for balance.
He tells her, “Take off your shoes.”
“And kill my feet? You’re a thoughtful bastard”
“Well then, let’s go back down.”
“No, no,” she says. “We must be halfway.”
“We’re nowhere near half up. Take off your shoes. These blue stones are stopping; it’ll just be mashed-down dirt.”
“With chunks of glass in it.”
/> But further on she does take off her shoes. Bare of stockings, her white feet lift lightly under his eyes; the yellow skin of her heels flickers. Thin ankles under the swell of calf. In a gesture of gratitude he takes off his shoes, to share whatever pain there is. The dirt is trod smooth, but embedded pebbles negligible to the eye do stab the skin, with the force of your weight. Also the ground is cold. “Ouch,” he says. “Owitch.” “Come on, soldier,” she says, “be brave.”
They learn to walk on the grass at the ends of the logs. Tree. branches overhang part of the way, making it an upward tunnel. At other spots the air is clear behind them, and they can look over the rooftops of Brewer into the twentieth story of the courthouse, the city’s one skyscraper. Concrete eagles stand in relief, wings flared, between its top windows. Two middle-aged couples in plaid scarves, birdwatchers, pass them on the way down; as soon as they have descended out of sight behind the gnarled arm of an oak, Rabbit hops up to Ruth’s step and kisses her, hugs her hot bulk, tastes the salt in the sweat on her face, which is unresponsive. She thinks that is a silly time; her one-eyed woman’s mind is intent on getting up the hill. But the thought of her city girl’s paper-pale feet bare on the stones for his sake makes his heart, fevered with exertion, sob, and he clings to her tough body with the weakness of grief. An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air.
“My queen,” he says, “my good horse.”
“Your what?”
“Horse.”
Near the top, the mountain rises sheer in a cliff, and here modern men have built concrete stairs with an iron railing that in a Z of three flights reach the macadam parking lot of the Pinnacle Hotel. They put their shoes back on and climb the stairs and watch the city slowly flatten under them.
Rails guard the cliff edge. He grips one white beam, warmed by the sun now sinking steeply away from the zenith, and looks straight down, into the exploding heads of trees. A frightening view, remembered from boyhood, when he used to wonder if you jumped would you die or be cushioned on those green heads as on the clouds of a dream? In the lower part of his vision the stone-walled cliff rises to his feet foreshortened to the narrowness of a knife; in the upper part the hillside slopes down, faint paths revealed and random clearings and the steps they have climbed.