by John Updike
With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can’t seize the solid of; it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.
She lifts the living thing into air and hugs it against her sopping chest. Water pours off them onto the bathroom tiles. The little weightless body flops against her neck and a quick look of relief at the baby’s face gives a fantastic clotted impression. A contorted memory of how they give artificial respiration pumps Janice’s cold wet arms in frantic rhythmic hugs; under her clenched lids great scarlet prayers arise, wordless, monotonous, and she seems to be clasping the knees of a vast third person whose name, Father, Father, beats against her head like physical blows. Though her wild heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers she doesn’t feel the faintest tremor of an answer in the darkness against her. Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
3
JACK comes back from the telephone a shocking color.
“Janice Angstrom has accidentally drowned their baby.”
“How could she?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid she was drunk. She’s unconscious now.”
“Where was he?”
“Nobody knows. I’m supposed to find him. That was Mrs. Springer.”
He sits down in the great walnut-armed chair that had been his father’s and Lucy realizes with resentment that her husband is middle-aged. His hair is thinning, his skin is dry, he looks exhausted. She cries, “Why must you spend your life chasing after that worthless heel?”
“He’s not worthless. I love him.”
“You love him. That’s sickening. Oh I think that’s sickening, Jack. Why don’t you try loving me, or your children?”
“I do.”
“You don’t, Jack. Let’s face it, you don’t. You couldn’t bear to love anybody who might return it. You’re afraid of that, aren’t you? Aren’t you afraid?”
They had been drinking tea in the library when the phone rang and he picks his empty cup off the floor between his feet and looks into the center. “Don’t be fancy, Lucy,” he says. “I feel too sick.”
“You feel sick, yes, and I feel sick. I’ve felt sick ever since you got involved with that animal. He’s not even in your church.”
“Any Christian is in my church.”
“Christian! If he’s a Christian thank God I’m not one. Christian. Kills his baby and that’s what you call him.”
“He didn’t kill the baby. He wasn’t there, it was an accident.”
“Well he as good as did. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The girl had adjusted and something like this never would have happened.”
Eccles blinks; shock has put a great analytic distance between him and things. He’s rather impressed by the way she has reconstructed what must have happened. He wonders a little why her speech is so vengeful. “Heel” was a strange word for her to have used. “So you’re saying I really killed the baby,” he says.
“Of course not. I didn’t mean to say that at all.”
“No. I think you’re probably right,” he says, and lifts himself out of the chair. He goes into the hall to the telephone and again draws out of his wallet the number written in pencil below the faint name, Ruth Leonard. The number worked once but this time the mouse of electricity gnaws at the remote membrance of metal in vain. He lets it ring twelve times, hangs up, dials the number again, and hangs up after seven rings. When he returns to the study Lucy is ready for him.
“Jack, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest you were responsible at all. Of course you’re not. Don’t be silly.”
“It’s all right, Lucy. The truth shouldn’t be able to hurt us.” These words are a shadow of his idea that if Faith is true, then nothing that is true is in conflict with Faith.
“Oh mercy, the martyr. Well I can see it’s an idea you have that it’s your fault and nothing I can say will change your mind. I’ll save my breath.”
He keeps silent to help her save her breath but after a moment she asks in a softer voice, “Jack?”
“What?”
“Why were you so anxious to get them back together?”
He picks the slice of lemon up from the saucer of his teacup and tries to squint through it into the room. “Marriage is a sacrament,” he says.
He half-expects her to laugh but instead she asks earnestly, “Even a bad marriage?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s ridiculous. That’s not common sense.”
“I don’t believe in common sense,” be says. “If it’ll make you happy, I don’t believe in anything.”
“That doesn’t make me happy,” she says. “You’re being psychopathic. But I’m sorry this has happened.” She takes away their cups and swishes into the kitchen and leaves him alone. Afternoon shadows gather like cobwebs on the walls of books, most of them belonging not to him but to his predecessor in the rectory, the noble and much admired Dr. Langhorne. He sits waiting numbly but not too long. The phone rings. He hurries to answer it before Lucy can; through the window above the sill where the phone rests he can see his neighbor unpinning her wash from the line.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jack? This is Harry Angstrom. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You don’t have any old ladies sitting around sewing or anything, do you?”
“No.”
“Why, I’ve been trying to call my apartment and nobody answers and I’m kind of nervous about it. I didn’t spend last night there and I’m getting sort of a prickly feeling. I want to go home but I want to know if Janice has done anything like call the cops or anything. Do you know?”
“Harry, where are you?”
“Oh, at some drugstore in Brewer.”
The neighbor has bundled the last sheet into her arms and Jack’s sight leans on the bare white line. One of the uses society seems to have for him is to break tragic news and the cave of his mouth goes dry as he braces for the familiar duty. No man, having put his hand to the plough … He keeps his eyes wide open so he will not seem too close to the presence by his ear. “I guess to save time I’d better tell you over the phone,” he begins. “Harry. A terrible thing has happened to us.”
When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn’t know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone-booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is rereading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two boxes of Kleenex. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It’s a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone façades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with som
e red sweating shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16A; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from doubling up with the kink inside. Curved posters advertise filtered cigarettes and sun-tan lotion and an international charity.
He had ridden one of these buses last night into Brewer and gone to Ruth’s apartment but there was no light on and nobody answered his ring, though there was a dim light behind the frosted glass lettered F. X. Pelligrini. He sat around on the steps, looking down at the delicatessen until the lights went out and then looking at the bright church window. When the lights went out behind that he felt cramped and hopeless and thought of going home. He wandered up to Weiser Street and looked down at all the lights and the great sunflower and couldn’t see a bus and kept walking, over to the south side, and became afraid of getting knifed and robbed and went into a low-looking hotel and bought a room. He didn’t sleep very well with a neon tube with a taped connection buzzing outside and some woman laughing and woke up early enough to go back to Mt. Judge and get a suit and go to work but something held him back. Something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn’t there probably off to Atlantic City with some madman and still he wandered around Brewer, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and ten and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see her shoulders that he kissed jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds were totally against him and anyway there was tons of time he could find her another day. No, what kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and down between counters of perfumed lingerie thinking of all the delicate ass these veils would flavor the little tits to be tucked into these cups and jewelry and salted nuts poor old Jan and up into the park along paths he walked once with Ruth to watch from under a horse-chestnut tree five mangy kids play cat with a tennis ball and a broomstick and then finally back down Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he’d find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn’t so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And the feeling that he wouldn’t always be able to produce this flame. What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it’s this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus, he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it. The kink in his stomach starts to take the form of nausea and he clings to the icy bar bitterly as the bus swings around the mountain. He gets off, in a sweat, blocks too soon. Here in Mt. Judge the shadows have begun to grow deep, the sun baking Brewer rides the crest of the mountain, and his sweat congeals, shortening his breath. He runs to keep his body occupied, to joggle his mind blank. Past a dry-cleaning plant with a little pipe hissing steam at the side. Through the oil and rubber smells riding above the asphalt pond around the red pumps of an Esso station. Past the Mt. Judge town-hall lawn and the World War II honor roll with the name plaques crumbled and blistered behind glass.
When he gets to the Springers’ house Mrs. comes to the door and shuts it in his face. But he knows from the olive Buick parked outside that Eccles is in there and in a little while Jack comes to the door and lets him in. He says softly in the dim hall, “Your wife has been given a sedative and is asleep.”
“The baby …”
“The undertaker has her.”
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.
Eccles goes upstairs and Harry sits in a chair and watches the light from the window play across an iron table of ferns and African violets and cacti. Where it hits the leaves they are bright yellow-green; the leaves in shadow in front of them look like black-green holes cut in this golden color. Somebody comes down the stairs with an erratic step. He doesn’t turn his head to see who it is; he doesn’t want to risk looking anybody in the face. A furry touch on his forearm and he meets Nelson’s eyes. The child’s face is stretched shiny with curiosity. “Mommy sleep,” he says in a deep voice imitating the tragedy-struck voices he has been hearing.
Rabbit pulls him up into his lap. He’s heavier and longer than he used to be. His body acts as a covering; he pulls the boy’s head down against his neck. Nelson asks, “Baby sick?”
“Baby sick.”
“Big, big water in tub,” Nelson says, and struggles to sit up so he can explain with his arms, which go wide. “Many, many water,” he says. He must have seen it. He wants to get off his father’s lap but Harry holds him fast with a kind of terror; the house is thick with a grief that seems to threaten the boy. Also the boy’s body wriggles with an energy that threatens the grief, might tip it and bring the whole house crashing down on them. It is himself he is protecting by imprisoning the child.
Eccles comes downstairs and stands there studying them. “Why don’t you take him outside?” he asks. “He’s had a nightmare of a day.”
They all three go outdoors. Eccles takes Harry’s hand in a long quiet grip and says, “Stay here. You’re needed, even if they don’t tell you.” After Eccles pulls away in his Buick, he and Nelson sit in the grass by the driveway and throw bits of gravel down toward the pavement. The boy laughs and talks in excitement but out here the sound is not so loud. Harry feels thinly protected by the fact that this is what Eccles told him to do. Men are walking home from work along the pavement; Nelson nearly gets one with a pebble. They change their target to a green lawn-seeder leaning against the wall of the garage. Harry hits it four times running. Though the air is still light the sunshine has shrunk to a few scraps in the tops of trees. The grass is growing damp and he wonders if he should sneak Nelson in the door and go.
Mr. Springer comes to the door and calls, “Harry.” They go over. “Becky’s made a few sandwiches in place of supper,” he says. “You and the boy come in.” They go into the kitchen and Nelson eats. Harry refuses everything except a glass of water. Mrs. Springer is not in the kitchen and Harry is grateful. Her hate of him lingers in the room like a smell. “Harry,” Mr. Springer says, and stands up, patting his mustache with two fingers, like he’s about to make a financial concession, “Reverend Eccles and Becky and I have had a talk. I won’t say I don’t blame you because of course I do. But you’re not the only one to blame. Her mother and I somehow never made her feel secure, never perhaps you might say made her welcome, I don’t know”—his little pink crafty eyes are not crafty now, blurred and chafed—“we tried, I’d like to think. At any rate”—this comes out harsh and crackly; he pauses to regain quietness in his voice—“life must go on. Am I making any sense to you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Life must go on. We must go ahead now with what we have left. Though Becky’s too upset to see you now, she agrees. We had a talk and agree that it’s the only way. I mean, what I meant to say, I can see you’re puzzled, is that we consider you in our family, Harry, despite”—he lifts an arm vaguely toward the stairs—“this.” His arm slumps back and he adds the word “accident.”