by John Updike
“Now you can wear your bathing suit,” he says, smiling and entering the drift of her ether-talk, feeling himself as if he has no legs and is floating on his back on a great sea of cleanness light as a bubble amid the starched sheets and germless surfaces before dawn. Fear and regret are dissolved, and gratitude is blown so large it has no cutting edge. “The doctor said you were a good girl.”
“Well isn’t that silly; I wasn’t. I was horrible. I cried and screamed and told him to keep his hands to himself. Though the thing I minded worst was when this horrible old nun shaved me with a dry razor.”
“Poor Janice.”
“No it was wonderful. I tried to count her toes but I was so dizzy I couldn’t so I counted her eyes. Two. Did we want a girl? Say we did.”
“I did.” He discovers this is true, though the words discover the desire.
“Now I’ll have somebody to side with me against you and Nelson.”
“How is Nelson?”
“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.
“Oh, damn,” he says, and his own tears, that it seemed didn’t exist, sting the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe it was me. I don’t know why I left.”
“Vnnn.” She sinks deeper into the pillow as a lush grin spreads her cheeks apart. “I had a little baby.”
“It’s terrific.”
“You’re lovely. You look so tall.” She says this with her eyes shut, and when she opens them, they brim with an inebriated idea; he has never seen them sparkle so. She whispers, “Harry. The girl in the other bed in here went home today so why don’t you sneak around when you go and come in the window and we can lie awake all night and tell each other stories? Just like you’ve come back from the Army or somewhere. Did you make love to other women?”
“Hey I think you ought to go to sleep now.”
“It’s all right, now you’ll make better love to me.” She giggles and tries to move in the bed. “No I didn’t mean that, you’re a good lover you’ve given me a baby.”
“It seems to me you’re pretty sexy for somebody in your shape.”
“That’s how you feel,” she says. “I’d invite you into bed with me but the bed’s so narrow. Ooh.”
“What?”
“I just got this terrible thirst for orangeade.”
“Aren’t you funny?”
“You’re funny. Oh that baby looked so cross.”
A nun fills the doorway with her wings. “Mr. Angstrom. Time.”
“Come kiss,” Janice says. She touches his face as he bends to inhale her ether again; her mouth is a warm cloud that suddenly splits and her teeth pinch her lower lip. “Don’t leave,” she says.
“Just for now. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Love you.”
“Listen. I love you.”
Waiting for him in the anteroom, Eccles asks, “How was she?”
“Terrific.”
“Are you going to go back now, to uh, where you were?”
“No,” Rabbit answers, horrified, “for Heaven’s sake. I can’t.”
“Well, then, would you like to come home with me?”
“Look, you’ve done more than enough. I can go to my parents’ place.”
“It’s late to get them up.”
“No, really, I couldn’t put you to the trouble.” He has already made up his mind to accept. Every bone in his body feels soft.
“It’s no trouble; I’m not asking you to live with us,” Eccles says. The long night is baring his nerves. “We have scads of room”
“O.K. O.K. Good. Thanks.”
They drive back to Mt. Judge along the familiar highway. At this hour it is empty even of trucks. Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do but go down it.
He is taken to a room that has tassels on the bedspread. He uses the bathroom stealthily and in underclothes curls up between the sheets, making the smallest possible volume of himself. Thus curled near one edge, he draws backward into sleep like a turtle drawing into his shell. Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside.
Sunshine, the old clown, rims the room. Two pink chairs flank the gauze-filled window buttered with light that smears a writing desk furry with envelope-ends. Above it a picture of a lady in pink stepping toward you. A woman’s voice is tapping the door. “Mr. Angstrom. Mr. Angstrom.”
“Yeah. Hi,” he calls, hoarse.
“It’s twelve-twenty. Jack told me to tell you the visiting hours at the hospital are one to three.” He recognizes Eccles’ wife’s crisp little curly tone, like she was adding, “And what the hell are you doing in my house anyway?”
“Yeah. O.K. I’ll be right out.” He puts on the cocoa-colored trousers he wore last night and, displeased by the sense of these things being dirty, he carries his shoes and socks and shirt into the bathroom with him, postponing putting them against his skin, giving them another minute to air. Still foggy despite splashing water all around, he carries them out of the bathroom and goes downstairs in his bare feet and a T shirt.
Eccles’ little wife is in her big kitchen, wearing khaki shorts this time and sandals and painted toenails. “How did you sleep?” she asks from behind the refrigerator door.
“Like death. Not a dream or anything.”
“It’s the effect of a clear conscience,” she says, and puts a glass of orange juice on the table with a smart click. He imagines that seeing how he’s dressed, with just the T shirt over his chest, makes her look away quickly.
“Hey don’t go to any bother. I’ll get something in Brewer.”
“I won’t give you eggs or anything. Do you like Cheerios?”
“Love ‘em.”
“All right.”
The orange juice burns away some of the fuzz in his mouth. He watches the backs of her legs; the white tendons behind her knees jump as she assembles things at the counter. “How’s Freud?” he asks her. He knows this could be bad, because if he brings back that afternoon he’ll bring back how he nicked her fanny; but he has this ridiculous feeling with Mrs. Eccles, that he’s in charge and can’t make mistakes.
She turns with her tongue against her side teeth, making her mouth lopsided and thoughtful, and looks at him levelly. He smiles; her expression is that of a high-school tootsie who wants to seem to know more than she’s telling. “He’s the same. Do you want milk or cream on the Cheerios?”
“Milk. Cream is too sticky. Where is everybody?”
“Jack’s at the church, probably playing ping-pong with one of his boys. Joyce and Bonnie are asleep, Heaven knows why. They kept wanting to look at the naughty man in the guest room all morning. It took real love to keep them out.”
“Who told them I was a naughty man?”
“Jack did. He said to them at breakfast, ‘I brought home a naughty man last night who’s going to stop being naughty. The children have names for all of Jack’s problems—you’re the Naughty Man, Mr. Carson, an alcoholic, is the Silly Man, Mrs. MacDaniel is the Woman Who Calls Up in the Night. Then there’s the Droopsy Lady, Mr. Hearing-Aid, Mrs. Side-Door, and Happy Beans. Happy Beans is just about the least happy man you ever wanted to see, but once he brought the children some of those celluloid capsules with a weight in them, so they jiggle around. Ever since that he’s Happy Beans.”
Rabbit laughs, and Lucy, having delivered the Cheerios—too much milk; he is used to living with Ruth, who let him pour his own milk; he likes just enough to take away the dryness, so that the milk and cereal come out even—chats on gaily. “The worst thing that happened, in connection with some committee or other Jack was talking with one of the vestrymen over the phone and had the idea that it would b
uck this poor soul up to be given a church job so he said, ‘Why not make Happy Beans the chairman of something or other?’ Well, the man on the other end of the line said “Happy Who?” and Jack realized what he’d said but instead of just sluffing it off like anybody else would have, Jack tells the whole story about the children calling him Happy Beans and of course this stuffy old vestryman doesn’t think it’s at all funny. He was a friend, you see, of Happy Beans; they weren’t exactly business associates but often had lunch together over in Brewer. That’s the thing about Jack; he always tells people too much. Now this vestryman is probably telling everybody how the rector pokes fun of this poor miserable Happy Beans.”
He laughs again. His coffee comes, in a thin shallow cup monogrammed in gold, and Lucy sits down opposite him at the table with a cup of her own. “He said I’m going to stop being naughty,” Rabbit says.
“Yes. He’s overjoyed. He went out of here virtually singing. It’s the first constructive thing he thinks he’s done since he came to Mt. Judge.”
Rabbit yawns. “Well I don’t know what he did.”
“I don’t either,” she says, “but to hear him talk the whole thing was on his shoulders.”
This suggestion that he’s been managed rubs him the wrong way. He feels his smile creak. “Really? Did he talk about it?”
“Oh, all the time. He’s very fond of you. I don’t know why.”
“I’m just lovable.”
“That’s what I keep hearing. You have poor old Mrs. Smith wrapped around your little finger. She thinks you’re marvelous.”
“And you don’t see it?”
“Maybe I’m not old enough. Maybe if I were seventy-three.” She lifts the cup to her face and tilts it and the freckles on her narrow white nose sharpen in proximity to the steaming brown coffee. She is a naughty girl. Yes, it’s very clear, a naughty girl. She sets the cup down and looks at him with round green eyes, and the triangular white space between her eyebrows seems to look and mock too. “Well tell me. How does it feel? To be a new man. Jack’s always hoping I’ll reform and I want to know what to expect. Are you ‘born anew’?”
“Oh, I feel about the same.”
“You don’t act the same.”
He grunts “Well” and shifts in his chair. Why does he feel so awkward? She is trying to make him feel foolish and sissy, just because he’s going to go back to his wife. It’s quite true, he doesn’t act the same; he doesn’t feel the same with her, either; he’s lost the nimbleness that led him so lightly into tapping her backside that day. He tells her, “Last night driving home I got this feeling of a straight road ahead of me; before that it was like I was in the bushes and it didn’t matter which way I went.”
Her small face above the coffee cup held in two hands like a soup bowl is perfectly tense with delight; he expects her to laugh and instead she smiles silently. He thinks, She wants me.
Then he thinks of Janice with her legs paralyzed talking about toes and love and orangeade and this perhaps seals shut something in his face, for Lucy Eccles turns her head impatiently and says, “Well you better get going down that nice straight road. It’s twenty of one.”
“How long does it take to walk to the bus stop?”
“Not long. I’d drive you to the hospital if it weren’t for the children.” She harks. “Speak of the devil: here comes one.”
As he’s pulling on his socks the older girl sneaks into the kitchen, dressed just in underpants.
“Joyce.” Her mother halts halfway to the sink with the empty cups. “You get right back up to bed.”
“Hello, Joyce,” Rabbit says. “Did you come down to see the naughty man?”
Joyce stares and hugs the wall with her shoulder blades. Her long golden stomach protrudes thoughtfully.
“Joyce,” Lucy says. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Why doesn’t he have his shirt on?” the child asks distinctly.
“I don’t know,” her mother says. “I suppose he thinks he has a nice chest.”
“I have a T shirt on,” he protests. It’s as if neither of them see it.
“Is that his boo-zim?” Joyce asks.
“No, darling: only ladies have bosoms. We’ve been through that.”
“Hell, if it makes everybody nervous,” Rabbit says, and puts on his shirt. It’s rumpled and at the collar and cuffs gray; he puts it on clean to go to the Club Castanet. He has no coat, he left Ruth too hastily. “O.K.,” he says, tucking in the tail. “Thank you very much.”
“You’re very welcome,” Lucy says. “Be good now.” The two girls walk with him down the hall. Lucy’s white legs mix in pallor with the child’s naked chest. Little Joyce keeps staring up at him. He wonders what she’s puzzling about. Children and dogs smell things. He tries to calculate how much sarcasm was in that “Be good now” and what it meant, if anything. He wishes she could drive him; he wants, he really wants, to get into a car with her. Not so much to do anything as just feel how things set. His reluctance to leave pulls the air between them taut.
They stand at the door, he and Eccles’ baby-skinned wife and under them Joyce’s face looking up with her father’s wide lips and arched eyebrows and under them all Lucy’s painted toenails, tiny scarlet shells in a row on the carpet. He strums the air with a vague disclaimer and puts his hand on the hard doorknob. The thought that only ladies have bosoms haunts him foolishly. He looks up from the toenails to Joyce’s watching face and from there to her mother’s bosom, two pointed bumps under a buttoned blouse that shows through its airy summer weave and white shadow of the bra. When his eyes reach Lucy’s an amazing thing enters the silence. The woman winks. Quick as light: maybe he imagined it. He turns the knob and retreats down the sunny walk with a murmur in his chest as if a string in there had snapped.
At the hospital they say Janice has the baby with her for a moment and would he please wait? He is sitting in the chair with chrome arms leafing through a Woman’s Day backwards when a tall woman with beautiful gray hair and somehow silver, finely wrinkled skin comes in and looks so familiar he stares. She sees this and has to speak; he feels she would have preferred to ignore him. Who is she? Her familiarity has touched him across a great distance. She looks into his face reluctantly and tells him, “You’re an old student of Marty’s. I’m Harriet Tothero. We had you to dinner once, I can almost think of your name.”
Yes, of course, but it wasn’t from that dinner he remembers her, it was from noticing her on the streets. The students at Mt. Judge High knew, most of them, that Tothero played around, and his wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr, a breathing shadow of sin. It was less pity than morbid fascination that singled her out; Tothero was himself such a clown and windbag, such a speechifier, that the stain of his own actions slid from him, oil off a duck. It was the tall, silver, serious figure of his wife that accumulated the charge of his wrongdoing, and released it to their young minds with an electrical shock that snapped their eyes away from the sight of her, in fear as much as embarrassment. Harry stands up, surprised to feel that the world she walks in is his world now. “I’m Harry Angstrom,” he says.
“Yes, that’s your name. He was so proud of you. He often talked to me about you. Even recently.”
Recently. What did he tell her? Does she know about him? Does she blame him? Her long schoolmarmish face, as always, keeps its secrets in. “I’ve heard that he was sick.”
“Yes, he is, Harry. Quite sick. He’s had two strokes, one since he came into the hospital.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes. Would you like to visit him? I know it would make him very happy. For just a moment. He’s had very few visitors; I suppose that’s the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you.”
“I’d like to see him, sure.”
“Come with me, then.” As they walk down the halls she says, “I’m afraid you’ll find him much changed.” He doesn’t take this in fully; he is conce
ntrating on her skin, trying to see if it does look like a lot of little lizard skins sewed together. Just her hands and neck show.
Tothero is in a room alone. White curtains seem to hang expectantly around his bed. Green plants on the windowsills dutifully exhale oxygen. Canted panes of glass lift the smells of summer into the room. Footsteps crunch on the gravel below.
“Dear, I’ve brought you someone. He was waiting outside in the most miraculous way.”
“Hello, Mr. Tothero. My wife’s had her baby.” He speaks these words and goes toward the bed with blank momentum; the sight of the old man lying there shrunken, his tongue sliding in his lopsided mouth, has stunned him. Tothero’s face, spotted with white stubble, is yellow in the pillows, and his thin wrists stick out from candy-striped pajama sleeves beside the shallow lump of his body. Rabbit offers his hand.
“He can’t lift his arms, Harry,” Mrs. Tothero says. “He is helpless. But talk to him. He can see and hear.” Her sweet patient enunciation has a singing quality that is sinister, like a voice humming in empty rooms.
Since he has extended his hand, Harry presses it down on the back of one of Tothero’s. For all its dryness, the hand, under a faint scratchy fleece, is warm, and to Harry’s horror moves, revolves stubbornly, so the palm is presented upward to Harry’s touch. Harry takes his fingers back and sinks into the bedside chair. His old coach’s eyeballs shift with scattered quickness as he turns his head an inch toward the visitor. The flesh under them has been so scooped that they are weakly protrusive. Talk, he must talk. “It’s a little girl. I want to thank you”—he speaks loudly—“for the help you gave in getting me and Janice back together again. You were very kind.”
Tothero retracts his tongue and shifts his face to look at his wife. A muscle under his jaw jumps, his lips pucker, and his chin crinkles repeatedly, like a pulse, as he tries to say something. A few dragged vowels come out; Harry turns to see if Mrs. Tothero can decipher them, but to his surprise she is looking elsewhere. She is looking out the window, toward an empty green courtyard. Her face is like a photograph.