by John Updike
Harry shields his eyes with his hand. They feel hot and vulnerable to light. “Thank you,” he says, and almost moans in his gratitude to this man, whom he has always despised, for making a speech so generous. He tried to frame, in accordance with an etiquette that continues to operate in the thick of grief as if underwater, a counter-speech. “I promise I’ll keep my end of the bargain,” he brings out, and stops, stifled by the abject sound of his voice. What made him say bargain?
“I know you will,” Springer says. “Reverend Eccles assures us you will.”
“Dessert,” Nelson says distinctly.
“Nelly, why don’t you take a cookie to bed?” Springer speaks with a familiar jollity that, though strained, reminds Rabbit that the kid lived here for months. “Isn’t it your bedtime? Shall Mom-mom take you up?”
“Daddy,” Nelson says, and slides off his chair and comes to his father.
Both men are embarrassed. “O.K.,” Rabbit says. “You show me your room.”
Springer gets two Oreo cookies out of the pantry and unexpectedly Nelson runs forward to hug him. He stoops to accept the hug and his withered dandy’s face goes blank against the boy’s cheek; his unfocused eyes stare at Rabbit’s shoes, and big black square cuff links, thinly rimmed and initialed S in gold, creep out of his coat sleeves as his arms tighten the hug.
As Nelson leads his father to the stairs they pass the room where Mrs. Springer is sitting. Rabbit has a glimpse of a puffed face slippery with tears and averts his eyes. He whispers to Nelson to go in and kiss her good-night. When the boy returns to him they go upstairs and down a smooth corridor papered with a design of old-style cars into a little room whose white curtains are tinted green by a tree outside. On either side of the window symmetrical pictures, one of kittens and one of puppies, are hung. He wonders if this was the room where Janice was little. It has a musty innocence, and a suspense, as if it stood empty for years. An old teddy-bear, the fur worn down to cloth and one eye void, sits in a broken child’s rocker. Had it been Janice’s? Who pulled the eye out? Nelson becomes queerly passive in this room. Harry undresses the sleepy body, brown all but the narrow bottom, puts it into pajamas and into bed and arranges the covers over it. He tells him, “You’re a good boy.”
“Yop.”
“I’m going to go now. Don’t be scared.”
“Daddy go way?”
“So you can sleep. I’ll be back.”
“O.K. Good.”
“Good.”
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“Is baby Becky dead?”
“Yes.”
“Was she frightened?”
“Oh no. No. She wasn’t frightened.”
“Is she happy?”
“Yeah, she’s very happy now.”
“Good.”
“Don’t you worry about it.”
“O.K.”
“You snuggle up.”
“Yop.”
“Think about throwing stones.”
“When I grow up, I’ll throw them very far.”
“That’s right. You can throw them pretty far now.”
“I know it.”
“O.K. Go to sleep.”
Downstairs he asks Springer, who is washing dishes in the kitchen, “You don’t want me to stay here tonight, do you?”
“Not tonight, Harry. I’m sorry. I think it would be better not tonight.”
“O.K., sure. I’ll go back to the apartment. Shall I come over in the morning?”
“Yes, please. We’ll give you breakfast.”
“No, I don’t want any. I mean, to see Janice when she wakes up.”
“Yes of course.”
“You think she’ll sleep the night through.”
“I think so.”
“Uh—I’m sorry I wasn’t at the lot today.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. That’s negligible.”
“You don’t want me to work tomorrow, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I still have the job, don’t I?”
“Of course.” His talk is gingerly; his eyes fidget; he feels his wife is listening.
“You’re being awfully good to me.”
Springer doesn’t answer; Harry goes out through the sun-porch, so he won’t have to glimpse Mrs. Springer’s face again, and around the house and walks home in the soupy, tinkling dark. He lets himself into the apartment with his key and turns on all the lights as rapidly as he can. He goes into the bathroom and the water is still in the tub. Some of it has seeped away so the top of the water is an inch below a faint gray line on the porcelain but the tub is still more than half full. A heavy, calm volume, odorless, tasteless, colorless, the water shocks him like the presence of a silent person in the bathroom. Stillness makes a dead skin on its unstirred surface. There’s even a kind of dust on it. He rolls back his sleeve and reaches down and pulls the plug; the water swings and the drain gasps. He watches the line of water slide slowly and evenly down the wall of the tub, and then with a crazed vortical cry the last of it is sucked down. He thinks how easy it was, yet in all His strength God did nothing. Just that little rubber stopper to lift.
In bed he discovers that his legs ache from all the walking he did in Brewer today. His shins feel splintered; no matter how he twists, the pain, after a moment of relief gained by the movement, sneaks back. He tries praying to relax him but it doesn’t do it. There’s no connection. He opens his eyes to look at the ceiling and the darkness is mottled with an unsteady network of veins like the net of yellow and blue that mottled the skin of his baby. He remembers seeing her neat red profile through the window at the hospital and a great draft of horror sweeps through him, brings him struggling out of bed to turn on the lights. The electric glare seems thin. His groin aches to weep. He is afraid to stick even his hand into the bathroom; he fears if he turns on the light he will see a tiny wrinkled blue corpse lying face up on the floor of the drained tub. Fear presses on his kidneys and he is at last forced to dare; the dark bottom of the tub leaps up blank and white.
He expects never to go to sleep and, awaking with the slant of sunshine and the noise of doors slamming downstairs, feels his body has betrayed his soul. He dresses in haste, more panicked now than at any time yesterday. The event is realer. Invisible cushions press against his throat and slow his legs and arms; the kink in his chest has grown thick and crusty. Forgive me, forgive me, he keeps saying silently to no one.
He goes over to the Springers’ and the tone of the house has changed; he feels everything has been rearranged slightly to make a space into which he can fit by making himself small. Mrs. Springer serves him orange juice and coffee and even speaks, cautiously.
“Do you want cream?”
“No. No. I’ll drink it black.”
“We have cream if you want it.”
“No, really. It’s fine.”
Janice is awake. He goes upstairs and lies down on the bed beside her; she clings to him and sobs into the cup between his neck and jaw and the sheet. Her face has been shrunk; her body seems small as a child’s, and hot and hard. She tells him, “I can’t stand to look at anyone except you. I can’t bear to look at the others.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he tells her. “It was mine.”
They cling together in a common darkness; he feels the walls between them dissolve in a flood of black; but the heavy knot of apprehension remains in his chest, his own.
He stays in the house all that day. Visitors come, and tiptoe about. Their manner suggests that Janice upstairs is very sick. They sit, these women, over coffee in the kitchen with Mrs. Springer, whose petite rounded voice, oddly girlish divorced from the sight of her body, sighs on and on in indistinct syllables, like the mourning chant of an ancient tribe. Peggy Fosnacht comes, her sunglasses off, her wall eyes wild, wide to the world, and goes upstairs. Her son Billy plays with Nelson, and no one moves to halt their squeals of anger and pain in the back yard, which, neglected, in time
die, and revive, after a pause, in the form of laughter. Even Harry has a visitor. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Springer goes and comes into the dim room where Harry is sitting looking at magazines and says, in a surprised and injured voice, “A man for you.”
She leaves the doorway and he gets up and walks a few steps forward to greet the man coming into the room, Tothero, leaning on a cane his face half paralyzed; but talking, walking, alive. “Hi! Gee, how are you?”
“Harry.” With the hand that is not on the cane he grips Harry’s arm. He brings a long look to bear on Harry’s face; his mouth is tweaked downward on one side, the skin over his eye on this side is dragged down diagonally so it nearly curtains the glitter, and it may be the bad light but this whole side looks the color of stone. The gouging grip of his fingers trembles.
“Let’s sit down,” Rabbit says, and helps him into an easy chair. Tothero knocks off a doily in arranging his arms. Rabbit brings over a straight chair and sits close so he won’t have to raise his voice. “Should you be running around?” he asks when Tothero says nothing.
“My wife brought me. In the car. Outside, Harry. We heard your terrible news. Didn’t I warn you?” Already his eyes are bulging with water.
“When?”
“When?” The stricken side of his face is turned away, perhaps consciously, into shadow, so his smile seems wholly alive, wise, and sure. “That fight night. I said go back. I begged you.”
“I guess you did. I’ve forgotten.”
“No you haven’t. No you haven’t, Harry.” His breath chuffs on the “Ha” of “Harry.” “Let me tell you something. Will you listen?”
“Sure.”
“Right and wrong,” he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. “Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—his pride at negotiating the long word shows, simple as a boy’s—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.” Rabbit wonders when the tear-trails appeared on Tothero’s cheeks; there they are. “Do you believe me?”
“Sure. Sure. Look, I know this has been my fault. I’ve felt like a, like an insect ever since the thing happened.” Tothero’s tranquil smile deepens; a faint rasping purr comes out of his face. “I warned you,” he says, his diction quickening, “I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”
Harry blurts, “But what can I do?”
Tothero doesn’t seem to hear. “Don’t you remember? My begging you to go back?”
“I don’t know, I guess so.”
“Good. Ah. You’re still a fine man, Harry. You have a healthy body. When I’m dead and gone, remember how your old coach told you to avoid suffering. Remember.” The last word is intoned coyly, with a little wag of the head; on the thrust of this incongruous vivacity he rises from his chair, and prevents himself from pitching forward by quick use of his cane. Harry jumps up in alarm, and the two of them stand for the moment very close. The old man’s big head breathes a distressing scent, not so much medicine as a sweet vegetable staleness. “You young people,” he says with a rising intonation, a schoolteacher’s tone, scolding yet sly, even encouraging, “tend to forget. Don’t you? Now don’t you?”
He wants this admission mysteriously much. “Sure,” Rabbit says, praying he’ll go.
Harry helps him to his car, a ‘57 blue-and-cream Dodge waiting in front of the orange fire hydrant. Mrs. Tothero offers, rather coolly, her regrets at the death of his infant daughter. She looks harried and noble. Gray hair straggles down across her finely wrinkled silver temple. She wants to get away from him, away with her prize. Beside her on the front seat Tothero looks like a smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curve of his cane. Rabbit returns to the house feeling depressed and dirtied by the visit. Tothero’s revelation chilled him. He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all things.
Eccles comes in the late afternoon, to complete the arrangements for the funeral: it will be held tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday. As he leaves Rabbit catches his attention and they talk in the front hall a moment. “What do you think?” Rabbit asks.
“About what?”
“What shall I do?”
Eccles glances up nervously. He is very tired; Harry has never seen him look so tired. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. “Do what you are doing,” he says. “Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left.”
“And that’s enough?”
“You mean to earn forgiveness? I’m sure it is, carried out through a lifetime.”
“I mean”—he’s never before felt pleading with Eccles—“remember that thing we used to talk about? The thing behind everything.”
“Harry, you know I don’t think that thing exists in the way you think it does.”
“O.K.” He realizes that Eccles wants to get away too, that the sight of himself is painful, disgusting.
Eccles must see that he senses this, for he abruptly summons up mercy and makes an attempt. “Harry, it’s not for me to forgive you. You’ve done nothing to me to forgive. I’m equal with you in guilt. We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything. Harry, I know that people are brought to Christ. I’ve seen it with my eyes and tasted it with my mouth. And I do think this. I think marriage is a sacrament, and that this tragedy, terrible as it is, has at last united you and Janice in a sacred way.”
Through the next hours Rabbit clings to this belief, though it seems to bear no relation to the colors and sounds of the big sorrowing house, the dabs and arcs of late sunshine in the little jungle of plants on the glass table, or the almost wordless supper he and Janice share in her bedroom.
He spends that night in the Springers’ house, sleeping with Janice. Her sleep is so solid. A thin snore out of her black mouth sharpens the moonlight and keeps him awake. He gets up on an elbow and studies her face; it is frightening in the moonlight, small and smeared by patches of dark cut it seems in a soft substance that lacks the edges of a human presence. He resents her sleep. When, in sunlight, he feels her weight stir and slide off the bed, he turns his face deeper into the pillow, retracts his head half under the covers, and goes back to sleep stubbornly. Sleep is a safe cave. Today is the last day of his abnormal life, today is the funeral; tomorrow he is scheduled to go back to work.
He has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect disks, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, “The cowslip swallows up the elder.” The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: “the cowslip” is the moon, and “the elder” the sun, and that what he had witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. With great excitement he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the disks, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world, and the knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.
She makes him breakfast, the cereal drowned in milk, the coffee scalded in her style. With Nelson they walk over to the apartment to get clothes for the funeral. Rabbit resents her being able to walk; resents her not dying of remorse and shame.
What kind of grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him. They walk with their child through streets they walked as children. The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime-rimmed ice-plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—starts panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body and he feels detached, as if at last he is, what he’s always dreaded, walking on air. The details of the street—the ragged margin where the pavement and grass struggle, the tarry scarred trunks of the telephone poles—no longer speak to him in a child’s intimate, excited voice. He is no one; it is as if he stepped outside of his body and brain a moment to watch the engine run and stepped into nothingness, for this “he” had been merely a refraction, a vibration within the engine, and now can’t get back in. He feels be is behind the windows of the houses they walk by, watching this three-cornered family walk along solidly with no sign that their universe has convulsed other than the woman’s quiet tears. Janice’s tears have come as gently as dew comes; the sight of the morning-fresh streets seems to have sprung them.
When they get inside the apartment she gives a sharp sigh and collapses against him. Perhaps she didn’t expect the place to be full of sunshine; buttresses of dust drifting in milky light slant from the middle of the floor to the tops of the windows and touch everything with innocence and newness and hopefulness. The door to his closet is near the entry door so they needn’t go very deep into the apartment at first. He opens the closet door as far as he can without bumping the television set and reaches far in and unzips a plastic zippered storage bag and takes out his blue suit, a winter suit made of wool, but the only dark one he owns. Nelson ranges through the apartment, going wee-wee in the bathroom, finding an old rubber panda in his bedroom that he wants to take along. His exploring drains enough of the menace from the rooms for them to go into their bedroom, where Janice’s clothes hang. On the way she indicates a chair. “Here I sat,” she says, “yesterday morning, watching the sun come up.” Her voice is lifeless; he doesn’t know what she wants him to say and says nothing. He is holding his breath.