by John Updike
Is it that she doesn’t care? If so, should he tell Tothero about Margaret? But there was nothing to say about Margaret that might make Tothero happy. “I’m straightened out now, Mr. Tothero, and I hope you’re up and out of this bed soon.”
Tothero’s head turns back with an annoyed quickness, the mouth closed, the eyes in a half-squint, and for this moment he looks so coherent Harry thinks he will speak, that the pause is just his old disciplinarian’s trick of holding silent until your attention is complete. But the pause stretches, inflates, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words. Yet in the first moments of the silence a certain force flows forth, a human soul emits its invisible and scentless rays with urgency. Then the point in the eyes fades, the brown lids lift and expose pink jelly, the lips part, the tip of the tongue appears.
“I better go down and visit my wife,” Harry shouts. “She just had the baby last night. It’s a girl.” He feels claustrophobic, as if he’s inside Tothero’s skull; when he stands up, he has the fear he will bump his head, though the white ceiling is yards away.
“Thank you very much, Harry. I know he’s enjoyed seeing you,” Mrs. Tothero says. Nevertheless from her tone he feels he’s flunked a recitation. He walks down the hall springingly, dismissed. His health, his reformed life, make space, even the antiseptic space in the hospital corridors, delicious. Yet his visit with Janice is disappointing. Perhaps he is still choked by seeing poor Tothero stretched out as good as dead; perhaps out of ether Janice is choked by thinking of how he’s treated her. She complains a lot about how much her stitches hurt, and when he tries to express his repentance again she seems to find it boring. The difficulty of pleasing someone begins to hem him in. She asks why he hasn’t brought flowers. He had no time; he tells her how he spent the night and, sure enough, she asks him to describe Mrs. Eccles.
“About your height,” he says. “Freckles.”
“Her husband’s been wonderful,” she says. “He seems to love everybody.”
“He’s O.K.,” Rabbit says. “He makes me nervous.”
“Oh, everybody makes you nervous.”
“No now that’s not true. Marty Tothero never made me nervous. I just saw the poor old bastard, stretched out in a bed up the hall. He can’t say a word or move his head more than an inch.”
“He doesn’t make you nervous but I do, is that right?” “I didn’t say that.”
“Oh no. Ow. These damn stitches they feel like barbed wire. I just make you so nervous you desert me for two months. Over two months.”
“Well Jesus Janice. All you did was watch television and drink all the time. I mean I’m not saying I wasn’t wrong, but it felt like I had to. You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out. On that first night, when I got in the car in front of your parents’ place, even then I might just as easy have gone down to get Nelson and driven it home. But when I let the brake out—” Her face goes into that bored look again. Her head switches from side to side, as if to keep flies from settling. He says, “Shit.”
This gets her. She says, “I see your language hasn’t been improved by living with that prostitute.”
“She wasn’t a prostitute, exactly. She just kind of slept around. I think there are a lot of girls like her around. I mean if you’re going to call everybody who isn’t married a prostitute—”
“Where are you going to stay now? Until I get out of the hospital.”
“I thought Nelson and me would move into our apartment.”
“I’m not sure you can. We didn’t pay any rent on it for two months.”
“Huh? You didn’t?”
“Well my goodness, Harry. You expect a lot. You expect Daddy to keep paying rent? I didn’t have any money.”
“Well did the landlord call? What happened to our furniture? Did he put it out on the street?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Well what do you know? What have you been doing all this time? Sleeping?”
“I was carrying your baby.”
“Well hell, I didn’t know you had to keep your whole mind on that all the time. The trouble with you, kid, is you just don’t give a damn. Really.”
“Well listen to you.”
He does listen to what he’s been sounding like, remembers how he felt last night, and after a pause tries to begin all over again. “Hey,” he says, “I love you.”
“I love you,” she says. “Do you have a quarter?”
“I guess. I’ll look. What do you want it for?”
“If you put a quarter in that”—she points toward a small television set on a high stand, so patients can see it over the foot of their beds—“it’ll play for an hour. There’s a silly program on at two that Mother and I got to watching when I was home.”
So for thirty minutes he sits by her bed watching some curly-haired M.C. tease a lot of elderly women from Akron, Ohio, and Oakland, California. The idea is all these women have tragedies they tell about and then get money according to how much applause there is, but by the time the M.C. gets done delivering commercials and kidding them about their grandchildren and their girlish hairdos there isn’t much room for tragedy left. Rabbit keeps thinking that the M.C., who has that way of a Jew of pronouncing very distinctly, no matter how fast the words, is going to start plugging the MagiPeel Peeler but the product doesn’t seem to have hit the big time yet. It’s not too bad; a pair of peroxide twins with twitchy tails push the women around to various microphones and booths and applause areas. It even makes for a kind of peace; he and Janice hold hands. The bed is almost as high as his shoulders when he sits down, and he enjoys being in this strange relation to a woman. As if he’s carrying her on his shoulder but without the weight. He cranks her bed up and pours her a drink of water and these small services suit some need he has. The program isn’t over when some nurse comes and says, “Mr. Angstrom, if you want to see your baby the nurse is holding them to the window now.”
He goes down the hall after her; her square hips swing under the starched white. From just the thickness of her neck he figures her for a good solid piece: haunchy. Big above the knee. He does like women big above the knee. Also he’s worrying about what a woman from Springfield, Illinois, was going to say happened after her son’s dreadful automobile accident, in which he lost an arm. So he’s quite unprepared when the nurse in the baby room, where little bundles with heads like oranges lie in rows of supermarket baskets, some tilted, brings his girl to the viewing window, and it’s like a damper being slid back in his chest. A sudden stiff draft freezes his breath. People are always saying how ugly new babies are, maybe this is the reason for the amazement. The baby is held by the nurse so her profile is sharp red against the buttoned white bosom of the uniform. The folds around the nostril, worked out on such a small scale, seem incredibly precise; the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid runs diagonally a great length, as if the eye, when it is opened, will be huge and see everything and know everything. As if behind the bulge of membrane a quantity of the most precious and clear liquid in the world is held in suspense. In the suggestion of pressure behind the tranquil lid and in the tilt of the protruding upper lip he reads a delightful hint of disdain. She knows she’s good. What he never expected, he can feel she’s feminine, feels something both delicate and enduring in the arc of the long pink cranium, furred in bands with black licked swatches. Nelson’s head had been full of lumps and frightening blue veins and bald except at the base of the neck. Rabbit looks down through the glass with a timidity in the very act of seeing, as if rough looking will smash the fine machinery of this beautiful life.
The smile of the nurse, foreshortened and flickering cutely between his eyes and the baby’s nose, reassures him that he is the father. Her painted lips wrinkle a question through the glass, and he calls, “O. K., yeah,” and gestures, throwing his hands, fingers splayed, to the height of his ears. “
She’s great,” he adds, in a forced voice meant to carry through glass, but the nurse is already returning his daughter to her supermarket basket. Rabbit turns the wrong way, into the pink-lidded face of the father next in line, and laughs outright. He goes back to Janice with the wind swirling through him and fire the red of the baby’s skin blazing. In the soap-scented hall he gets the idea: they should call the girl June. This is June, she was born in June. He’s never known a June. It will please Janice because of the J. But Janice has been thinking about names too and wants to call her after her mother. Harry never thinks of Mrs. Springer as having a first name. It is Rebecca. His warm gust of pride in his child turns Janice soft in the bed, and he in turn is sweetened by her daughterly wish; it worries him at times that she does not seem to love her mother. They compromise: Rebecca June Angstrom.
The straight path is made smooth. Mr. Springer had been paying rent on the apartment all along, it turns out; he is a personal friend of the landlord and had arranged it without troubling his daughter. He always had a hunch Harry would come back but didn’t want to advertise it in case he was wrong. Harry and Nelson move in and start housekeeping. Rabbit has a gift for housekeeping; the sensation of dust sucking into the vacuum cleaner, down the cloth hose, into a paper bag that when it is full of compact gray fluff will pop the cover of the Electrolux, like a gentleman tipping his hat, pleases him. He was not entirely miscast as a barker for the MagiPeel Peeler; he has an instinctive taste for the small appliances of civilization, the little grinders and slicers and holders. Perhaps the oldest child should always be a girl; Mim, coming after him to the Angstrom household, was never exposed direct to the bright heart of the kitchen, but was always in his shadow with the housework, and sullen about assuming her share, which eventually became the greater share, because he was, after all, a boy. He supposes it will be the same with Nelson and Rebecca.
Nelson is a help. Closer to three now than two, the child can carry out orders that do not take him out of the room, understands that his toys belong in the bushel basket, and feels the happiness in cleanness, order, and light. The June breeze sighs at the screens of the long-closed windows. The sun dots the mesh with hundreds of sparkling T’s and L’s. Beyond the windows Wilbur Street falls away. The flat tin-and-tar roofs of their neighbors, weathered into gentle corrugations, glitter with mysterious twists of rubble, candy-bar wrappers and a pool of glass flakes, litter that must have fallen from the clouds or been brought by birds to this street in the sky, planted with television aerials and hooded chimneys the size of fire hydrants. There are three of these roofs on the down side, tipped like terraces for drainage, three broad dirty steps leading to a brink below which the better homes begin, the stucco and brick forts, rugged with porches and dormer windows and lightning rods, guarded by conifers, protected by treaties with banks and firms of lawyers. It was strange that a row of tenements had been set above them; they had been tricked by growth. But in a town built against a mountain, height was too common to be precious; above them all there was the primitive ridge, the dark slum of forest, separated from the decent part of town by a band of unpaved lanes, derelict farmhouses, a cemetery, and a few raw young developments. Wilbur Street was paved for a block past Rabbit’s door, and then became a street of mud and gravel between two short rows of ranch-houses of alternating color erected in 1953 on scraped red earth that even now gives scant support to the blades of grass that speckle it. The land grows steeper still, and the woods begin.
Straight out from the windows Rabbit can look in the opposite direction across the town into the wide farm valley, with its golf course. He thinks, My valley, my home. The blemished green-papered walls, the scatter-rugs whose corners keep turning under, the closet whose door bumps the television set, absent from his senses for months, have returned with unexpected force. Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick already in his brain. This adds another dimension of neatness to his housecleaning.
Under the sofa and chairs and behind doors and in the footspace under the kitchen cabinets he finds old fragments of toys that delight Nelson. The child has a perfect memory for his own possessions. “Mom-mom gay me dis.” Holding up a plastic duck that had lost its wheels.
“She did?”
“Yop. Mom-mom did.”
“Wasn’t that nice of Mom-mom?”
“Yop.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“Mom-mom is Mommy’s mommy!”
“Yop. Where Mommy?”
“At the hospital.”
“At hop-pital? Come back Fi-day?”
“That’s right. She’ll come back Friday. Won’t she be happy to see how clean we make everything?”
“Yop. Daddy at hop-pital?”
“No. Daddy wasn’t at the hospital. Daddy was away.”
“Daddy away”—the boy’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open as he stares into the familiar concept of “away”; his voice deepens with the seriousness of it—“very, very long.” His arms go out to measure the length, so far his fingers bend backward. It is as long as he can measure.
“But Daddy’s not away now, is he?”
“Nope.”
He takes Nelson with him in the car the day he goes to tell Mrs. Smith he has to quit working in her garden. Old man Springer has offered him a job in one of his lots. The rhododendron trees by the crunching driveway look dusty and barren with a few brown corsages still pinned to their branches by fronds of light green new growth. Mrs. Smith herself comes to the door. “Yes, yes,” she croons, her brown face beaming.
“Mrs. Smith, this is my son Nelson.”
“Yes, yes, how do you do, Nelson? You have your father’s head.” She pats the small head with a hand withered like a tobacco leaf. “Now let me think. Where did I put that jar of old candy? He can eat candy, can’t he?”
“I guess a little but don’t go looking for it.”
“I will too, if I want to. The trouble with you, young man, you never gave me credit for any competence whatsoever.” She totters off, plucking with one hand at the front of her dress and poking the other into the air before her, as if she’s brushing away cobwebs.
While she’s out of the room he and Nelson stand looking at the high ceiling of this parlor, at the tall windows with mullions as thin as chalk-lines, through whose panes, some of which are tinted lavender, they can see the pines and cypresses that guard the far rim of the estate. Paintings hang on the shining walls. One shows, in dark colors, a woman wrapped in a whipping strip of silk apparently having an argument, from the way her arms are flailing, with a big swan that just stands there pushing. On another wall there is a portrait of a young woman in a black gown sitting in a padded chair impatiently. Her face, though squarish, is fine-looking, with a triangular forehead caused by her hairdo. Round white arms curve into her lap. Rabbit moves a few steps closer to get a less oblique view. She has that short puffy little upper lip that is so good in a girl. The way it lifts to let a dab of dark come between her lips. Lifted like the top petal of a blossom. There is this readiness about her all over. He feels that she’s about to get out of the chair and step forward toward him with a frown on her triangular forehead. Mrs. Smith, returning with a crimson glass ball on a stem like a wineglass, sees where he’s looking and says, “What I always minded was Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn’t like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women. Here.” She has crossed to Nelson with the candy glass. “You try one of these. They’re old but good like a lot of old things in this world.” She takes off the lid, a knobbed hemisphere of turquoise glass, and holds it waggling in her hand. Nelson looks over and Rabbit nods at him to go ahead and he chooses a piece wrapped in colored tinfoil.
“You won’t like it,” Rabbit tells him. “That’s gonna have a cherry inside.”
“Shoosh,” Mrs. Smith says. “Let the boy
have the one he wants.” So the poor kid goes ahead and takes it, bewitched by the tinfoil.
“Mrs. Smith,” Rabbit begins, “I don’t know if Reverend Eccles has told you, but my situation has kind of changed and I have to take another job. I won’t be able to help around here any more. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, alertly watching Nelson fumble at the tinfoil.
“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he goes on. “It was sort of like Heaven, like that woman said.”
“Oh that foolish woman Alma Foster,” Mrs. Smith says. “With her lipstick halfway up to her nose. I’ll never forget her, the dear soul. Not a brain in her body. Here, child. Give it to Mrs. Smith.” She sets the dish down on a round marble table holding only an oriental vase full of peonies and takes the piece of candy from Nelson and with a frantic needling motion of her fingers works the paper off. The kid stands there staring up with an open mouth; she thrusts her hand down jerkily and pops the ball of chocolate between his lips. With a crease of satisfaction in one cheek she turns, drops the tinfoil on the table, and says to Rabbit, “Well, Harry. At least we brought the rhodies in.”
“That’s right. We did.”
“It pleased my Harry, I know, wherever he is.”
Nelson bites through to the startling syrup of the cherry and his mouth curls open in dismay; a dribble of brown creeps out one corner and his eyes dart around the immaculate palace room. Rabbit cups a hand at his side and the kid comes over and silently spits the mess into it, bits of chocolate shell and stringy warm syrup and the broken cherry.
Mrs. Smith sees none of this. Her eyes with their transparent irises of crazed crystal burn into Harry’s as she says, “It’s been a religious duty to me, to keep Horace’s garden up.