by John Updike
There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles’ voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit’s ears were around the corner, “Don’t think this is pleasure for me. It’s work.”
“There’s no other way to talk to him?”
“He’s frightened.”
“Sweetie, everybody’s frightened to you.”
“But he’s even frightened of me.”
“Well, he came through that door cocky enough.”
This was the place for, And he slapped my sweet ass, that’s yours to defend.
What! Your sweet ass! I’ll murder the rogue. I’ll call the police.
In reality Lucy’s voice stopped at “enough,” and Eccles is talking about if so-and-so called, where are those new golf balls?, Joyce you had a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, good-by. Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl, awkward, cross, pops out of the kitchen.
They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the green skin of the Buick has a tropical waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest. “So your trouble isn’t really lack of religion.”
“Huh?”
“I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree.”
“Yeah well: I stole that from Mickey Mouse.”
Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. “It stopped me short,” be admits, closing this flirtatious cave. “Then you said you know what’s inside you. I’ve been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?”
Rabbit doesn’t want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He’s safe inside his own skin, he doesn’t want to come out. This guy’s whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit’s lips. “Hell, it’s nothing much,” he says. “It’s just that, well, it’s all there is. Don’t you think?”
Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. The trap is there waiting; damn him, he’s so sure I’ll come down the path. “How’s Janice now?” Rabbit asks.
Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. “I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs.—Foster? Fogleman?”
“What did she look like?”
“I don’t really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces.”
“Oh Peggy Gring. That moron. She married that hick Morris Fosnacht.”
“Fosnacht. That’s right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something very local about the name.”
“You’d never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?”
“Never. Not in Norwalk.”
“The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn’t be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then.” He hasn’t thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.
“What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?”
“I forget. It was just something you didn’t want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn’t like it and I guess I cried, I don’t know. Anyway that’s why the old man stayed up.”
“He was your father’s father?”
“My mother’s. He lived with us.”
“I remember my father’s father,” Eccles says. “He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo-Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to.”
“About the lion?”
“Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can’t appreciate. He mocks children, which she can’t forgive. It’s her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered-down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious practice a certain color and a, a rigor that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was extremely remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn’t want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living-room? ‘You don’t think God is in the woods?’ my grandfather would say. ‘Just behind stained glass?’ And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy in a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never get rid of the idea that maybe after all they’re right. A little dried-up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, ‘Has he made you believe in Hell?’ ” Harry laughs; Eccles’ imitation is good; being an old man fits him.
“Did he? Do you?”
“Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.”
“Well then we’re all more or less in it.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call”—he looks at Harry and laughs—“inner darkness.”
Eccles’ volunteering all this melts Rabbit’s caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and jiggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, “Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you. I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this”—he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards with tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world—“there’s something that wants me to find it.”
Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny cross-notched cup in the car ashtray. “Of course, all vagrants think they’re on a quest. At least at first.”
Rabbit doesn’t see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserves this slap. He supposes this is what ministers need, to cut everybody down to the same miserable size. He says, “Well I guess that makes your friend Jesus look pretty foolish.”
Mention of the holy name incites pink spots high on Eccles’ cheeks. “He did say,” the minister says, “that saints shouldn’t marry.”
They turn off the road and go up the winding drive to the clubhouse, a big cinder-block building fronted with a long sign that has CHESTNUT GROVE GOLF COURSE lettered between two Coca-Cola insignia. When Harry caddied here it was just a clapboard shack holding a wood-burning stove and charts of old tournaments and two armchairs and a counter for candy bars and golf balls you fished out of the swamp and that Mrs. Wenrich resold. He supposes Mrs. Wenrich is dead. She was a delicate old rouged widow like a doll with white hair and it always seemed funny to hear talk about greens and turf and tourneys and par come out of her mouth. Eccles parks the Buick on the asphalt lot and says, “Before I forget.”
Rabbit’s hand is on the door handle. “What?”
“Do you want a job?”
“What kind?”
“A parishioner of mine, a Mrs. Horace Smith, has about eight acres of garden around her home, towa
rd Appleboro. Her husband was an incredible rhododendron enthusiast. I shouldn’t say incredible; he was a terribly dear old man.”
“I don’t know anything about gardening.”
“Nobody does, that’s what Mrs. Smith says. There are no gardeners left. For forty dollars a week, I believe her.”
“A buck an hour. That’s pretty poor.”
“It wouldn’t be forty hours. Flexible time. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Flexibility? So you can be free to preach to the multitudes.”
Eccles really does have a mean streak. Him and Belloc. Without the collar around his throat, he kind of lets go. Rabbit gets out of the car. Eccles does the same, and his head across the top of the car looks like a head on a platter. The wide mouth moves. “Please consider it.”
“I can’t. I may not even stay in the county.”
“Is the girl going to kick you out?”
“What girl?”
“What is her name? Leonard. Ruth Leonard.”
“Well. Aren’t you smart?” Who could have told him? Peggy Gring? By way of Tothero? More likely Tothero’s girl Whatsername. She looked like Janice. It doesn’t matter; the world’s such a web anyway, things just trickle through. “I never heard of her,” Rabbit says.
The head on the platter grins weirdly in the sunglare off the metal.
They walk side by side to the cement-block clubhouse. On the way Eccles remarks, “It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”
“Say. I didn’t have to show up today, you know.”
“I know. Forgive me. I’m in a very depressed mood.”
There’s nothing exactly wrong with his saying this, but it rubs Harry’s inner hair the wrong way. It kind of clings. It says, “Pity me. Love me.” The prickly sensation makes his lips sticky; he is unable to open them to respond. When Eccles pays his way, he can scarcely negotiate thanking him. When they pick out a set of clubs for him to rent, he is so indifferent and silent the freckled kid in charge stares at him as if he’s a moron. As he and Eccles walk together toward the first tee he feels partially destroyed, like a good horse yoked to a pulpyhoofed nag. Eccles’ presence drags at him so decidedly he has to fight leaning toward that side.
And the ball feels it too, the ball he hits after a little advice from Eccles. It sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin that makes it fall from flight as dumpily as a blob of clay.
Eccles laughs. “That’s the best first drive I ever saw.”
“It’s not a first drive. I used to hit the ball around when I was a caddy. I should do better than that.”
“You expect too much of yourself. Watch me, that’ll make you feel better.”
Rabbit stands back and is surprised to see Eccles, who has a certain spring in his unconscious movements, swing with a quaint fifty-year-old stiffness. As if he has a pot to keep out of the way. He punches the ball with weak solidity. It goes straight, though high and weak, and he seems delighted with it. He fairly prances into the fairway. Harry trails after him heavily. The soggy turf, raw and wet from recently thawing, sinks beneath his big suede shoes. They’re on a seesaw; Eccles goes up, he comes down.
Down in the pagan groves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed. Brainless gaiety animates him. He laughs and swings and clucks and calls. Harry stops hating him; he himself is so awful. Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease; he is grateful to Eccles for not fleeing from him. Often Eccles, fifty yards further on—he has an excited gleeful habit of running ahead—comes all the way back to find a ball Harry has lost. Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. His eyes can’t keep with where it did go. “Here it is,” Eccles says. “Behind a root. You’re having terrible luck.”
“This must be a nightmare for you.”
“Not at all, not at all. You’re extremely promising. You’ve never played and yet you haven’t once missed the ball completely.”
This does it; he aims and in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the ball completely.
“You only mistake is trying to use your height,” Eccles says. “You have a beautiful natural swing.” Rabbit whacks again and the ball flops out and wobbles a few yards.
“Bend to the ball,” Eccles says. “Imagine you’re about to sit down.”
“I’m about to lie down,” Harry says. He feels sick, giddily sick, sucked deeper into a vortex whose upper rim is marked by the tranquil tips of the leafing trees. He seems to remember having been up there once. He skids into puddles, is swallowed by trees, infallibly sinks into the mangy scruff at the sides of the fairways.
Nightmare is the word. In waking life only animate things slither and jerk for him this way. He’s always had a touch with objects. His unreal hacking dazes his brain; half-hypnotized, it plays tricks whose strangeness dawns on him slowly. In his head he talks to the clubs as if they’re women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands, are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here we go, easy. When the slotted club face gouges the dirt behind the ball and the shock jolts up his arms to his shoulders his thought is that Janice has struck him. Oh, dumb, really dumb. Screw her. Just screw her. Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, the brittle silver shaft one more stick, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can’t be burned away. She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth dirt stubs fat: with the woods the “she” is Ruth. Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass-stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K. if you’re so smart and clenches and swirls. Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk this! The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush; white tail. And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like shirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there in the center of everything. As the seven iron chops down please Janice just once awkwardness spiders at his elbows and the ball as be stares with bitten elbows hooks with dismal slowness into more sad scruff further on, the khaki color of Texas. Oh you moron go home. Home is the hole, and above, in the scheme of the unhappy vision that frets his conscious attention with an almost optical overlay of presences, the mild gray rain sky is his grandfather waiting upstairs so that Harry will not be a Fosnacht.
And, now at the corners, now at the center of this striving dream, Eccles flits in his grubby shirt like a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.
The greens, still dead from the winter, are salted with a dry dirt; fertilizer? The ball slips along making bits of grit jump. “Don’t stab your putts,” Eccles says. “A little easy swing, arms stiff. Distance is more important than aim on the first putt. Try again.” He kicks the ball back. It took Harry about twelve to get up here on the fourth green, but this smug assumption that his strokes are past counting irritates him. Come on, sweet, he pleads with his wife, there’s the hole, big as a bucket. Everything is all right.
But no, she has to stab in a panicked way; what was she afraid of? Too much, the ball goes maybe five feet past. Walking toward Eccles, he says, “You never did tell me how Janice is.”
“Janice?” Eccles with an effort drags his attention up from the game. He is absolutely in love with winning; he is eating me up, Harry thinks. “She seemed in good spirits on Monday. She was out in the back yard with this other woman, and they were both giggling when I came. You must realize that for a little while, now that she’s adjusted somewhat, she’ll probably enjoy being back with her parents. It’s her own version of your irresponsibility.”
“Actually,” Harry says gratingly, squatting to line up the putt, the way they do it on television, “she can’t stand her parents any more than I can. She probably wouldn’t’ve married me if she hadn’t been in such a hurry to get away from um.” His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet.
Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in. The minister looks up with the light of triumph in his eyes. “Harry,” he asks, sweetly yet boldly, “why have you left her? You’re obviously deeply involved with her.”
“I told ja. There was this thing that wasn’t there.”
“What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?”
Harry’s two-foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with trembling fingers. “Well if you’re not sure it exists don’t ask me. It’s right up your alley. If you don’t know nobody does.”
“No,” Eccles cries in the same strained voice in which he told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. “Christianity isn’t looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we’d pass out opium at services. We’re trying to serve God, not be God.”