by John Updike
In the bedroom there is a pretty moment. She takes off her skirt and blouse to try on an old black suit she has, and as she moves about in her slip, barefoot on the carpet, she reminds him of the girl he knew, with her narrow ankles and wrists and small shy head. The black suit, bought when she was in high school, doesn’t fit; her stomach is still too big from having the baby. And maybe her mother’s plumpness is beginning. Standing there trying to get the waist of the suit skirt to link at her side, the tops of her breasts pushing above her bra as she bends into the effort, the space between them dimpling into a dark crease, she does have a plumpness, a sweet plumpness that pleases him. He thinks Mine, my woman, but then she straightens up and her smeared frantic face blots out his pride of possession. She becomes a liability that painfully weights the heaviness already below his chest. This is the wild woman he must steer with care down a lifelong path, away from yesterday. “It won’t do it!” she screams, and jerks her legs out of the skirt and flings it, great twirling bat, across the room.
“You have nothing else?”
“What am I going to do?”
“Come on. Let’s get out of here and go back to your place. This place is making you nervous.”
“But we’re going to have to live here!”
“Yeah, but not today. Come on.”
“We can’t live here,” she says.
“I know we can’t.”
“But where can we live?”
“We’ll figure it out. Come on.”
She stumbles into her skirt and puts her blouse over her arms and turns away from him meekly and asks, “Button my back.”
Buttoning the pink cloth down her quiet spine somehow makes him cry; the hotness in his eyes works up to a sting and he sees the little babyish buttons through a cluster of disks of watery light like petals of apple blossoms. Water hesitates on his lids and then runs down his cheeks; the wetness is delicious. He wishes he could cry for hours, for just this tiny spill relieves him. But a man’s tears are rare and his stop before they are out of the apartment. As he closes the door he feels he has already spent his whole dry life opening and closing this door.
Nelson takes the rubber panda along and every time he makes it squeak it makes Rabbit’s stomach ache. The town now is bleached by a sun nearing the height of noon.
Mrs. Springer, when Janice tells what happened, bustles around and finds an old black dress of hers that, with skillful pinning and a little sewing, she thinks will do. She and Janice go upstairs and after half an hour Janice comes down wrapped in black. “Harry. Does it look all right?”
“What in hell do you think this is going to be? A fashion show?” The idea that she can wear her mother’s clothes infuriates him. He adds regretfully, “You look fine,” but the damage is done. Janice is wounded and collapses upstairs and Mrs. Springer revokes the small measure of tolerance she had extended to him. The house again fills with the unspoken thought that he is the murderer. He accepts the thought gratefully; it’s true, he is, he is, and hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate he doesn’t have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
He reads Nelson a Little Golden Book about a little choochoo who was afraid of tunnels but finally became courageous. Mrs. Springer comes in and bites off the word “Lunch.” Harry says he doesn’t want any but, taking courage from the storybook, goes into the kitchen to supervise and guard Nelson. Mrs. Springer manages to keep her back to him all the time. When Nelson is finished with his soup and raw carrots and Lebanon balony sandwich Harry takes him upstairs and settles him in bed and then resumes sitting in the living-room chair. Janice has fallen asleep and the sound of Mrs. Springer’s sewing machine spins out into the birdsong and murmur of the early afternoon. Janice wakes up and comes down to the refrigerator and then goes up again and her voice and her mother’s mingle. Mr. Springer comes home, comes in and tries to talk about nothing, and senses that Harry’s status in the house has gone down again. He trots upstairs to the women. Footfalls pad above. Fancy dishes in the glass-fronted cupboard behind Harry vibrate.
He wonders if the pain in his stomach comes from eating so little in the last two days and goes out to the kitchen and eats two crackers. He can feel each bite hit a scraped floor inside. The pain increases. The bright porcelain fixtures, the steel doors, all seem charged with a negative magnetism that pushes against him and makes him extremely thin. He goes into the shadowy living-room and at the front window watches two teen-age girls in snug shorts shuffle by on the sunny sidewalk. Their bodies are already there but their faces are still this side of being good. Funny about girls about fourteen, their faces have this kind of eager bunchy business. Too much candy, sours their skin. They walk as slowly as the time to the funeral passes. Daughters, these are daughters, would June—he chokes the thought. The girls’ long legs and slow, developed motions seem distasteful and unreal. He himself, watching them behind the window, seems a smudge on the glass. He wonders why the universe doesn’t just erase a thing so dirty and small. He looks at his hands and they seem fantastically ugly.
He goes upstairs and with intense care washes his hands and face and neck. He doesn’t dare use one of their fancy towels. Coming out with wet hands he meets Springer in the muted hallway and says, “I don’t have a clean shirt.” Springer says “Wait” and brings him a shirt and black cuff links. Harry dresses in the room where Nelson sleeps. Sunlight under the drawn shades; the boy’s heavy breath. It takes less time to dress than he hoped it would. The wool suit is uncomfortably hot, but something stubborn in him refuses to take off the coat. He sits, immaculately dressed, the shirt too tight, in the living-room looking at the tropical plants on the glass table, moving his head so that now this leaf eclipses that, now that this, and wondering if he is going to throw up. His insides are a clenched mass of dread, a tough bubble that can’t be pricked.
Of the things he dreads, he is most conscious of seeing his parents. He hasn’t had the courage to call them or see them since the thing happened; Mrs. Springer called Mom Monday night and asked her to the funeral. The silence from his home since then has frightened him. It’s one thing to get hell from other people and another from your own parents. Ever since he came back from the Army Pop had been nibbling at a grudge because he wouldn’t go to work in the shop and in a way had nibbled himself right into nothing in Harry’s heart. All the mildness and kindness the old man had ever shown him had faded into nothing. But his mother was something else; she was still alive, and was still attached to the cord of his life. If she comes in and gives him hell he thinks he’ll die rather than take it. And of course what else is there to give him? Whatever Mrs. Springer says he can slip away from because in the end she has to stick with him and anyway he feels somehow she wants to like him but with his mother there’s no question of liking him they’re not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Of all the people in the world he wants to see her least. He wishes she’d die.
At last they’re ready, Mr. Springer in a spiffy dark gray drip-and-dry and Nelson in a sissy suit with straps and Mrs. in a black felt hat with a veil and a stem of purple berries and Janice all pinned and hemmed in but still looking broad and sooty in her mother’s fat dress. She doesn’t wear a hat. The undertaker’s black Cadillac comes and takes them to the funeral parlor. It was once a house but now is carpeted the way no house ever was, pale green carpets that deaden your steps like an inch of dust on the floor. Little silver tubes on the wall shield a yellowish light and the colors everywhere, on all the walls and curtains you can see, are colors no one would live with, salmon and aqua and the violet that kills germs on toilet seats. They come up a flagstone walk in the sunshine past frothy green bushes into this, and wait in a little pink side-room. Harry can see into the main room; on a few rows of auditorium chairs about six people sit, five of
them women. The only one be knows is Peggy Gring. Her little boy wriggling beside her makes seven. It was meant to be at first nobody but the families, but the Springers then asked a few close friends. His parents are not here. Somewhere someone’s boneless hands trail up and down the keys of an electric organ. The unnatural coloring of the interior comes to a head in the hothouse flowers arranged around a little white coffin. The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform covered with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician’s trick, the living baby underneath. Janice looks in and yields a startled whimper and an undertaker’s man, blond and young with an unnaturally red face, conjures a bottle of spirits of ammonia out of his side pocket. Her mother holds it under her nose and she suppresses a face of disgust; her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane. Harry takes her arm and turns her so she can’t see into the next room.
The side-room has a window through which they can look at the street, where children and cars are running. “Hope the minister hasn’t forgotten,” the young red-faced man says, and to his own embarrassment chuckles. He can’t help being at his ease here.
“Does that happen often?” Mr. Springer asks. He is standing behind his wife, and his face tips forward with curiosity, a birdy black gash below his pale mustache. Mrs. Springer has sat down on a chair is pressing her palms against her face through the veil. The purple berries tremble in their stem of wire.
“About twice a year,” is the answer.
A familiar old Plymouth slows against the curb outside and Rabbit’s mother gets out and looks up and down the sidewalk angrily. His heart leaps and trips his tongue: “Here come my parents.” As if giving a warning. And they do all come to attention, as if to withstand an attack. Mrs. Springer gets up and Harry places himself between her and Janice. Standing in formation with the Springers like this, he can at least show his mother that he’s reformed, that he’s accepted and been accepted. The undertaker’s man goes out to bring them in; Harry can see them standing on the bright sidewalk, arguing which door to go into; Mim a little to one side. Dressed in a quiet suit and with no make-up, she reminds him of the little sister he once had. The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them.
His mother comes through the door first; her eyes sweep the line of them and she steps toward him with reaching curved arms. “Hassy, what have they done to you?” She asks this out loud and wraps him in a hug as if she would carry him back to the sky from which they have fallen.
This quick it opens, and seals shut again. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he pushes her away and stands to his full height. As if unaware of what she has said, his mother turns and embraces Janice. He is relieved to see her act courteously, normally. Pop, murmuring, shakes Springer’s hand. Mini comes and touches Harry on the shoulder and then squats and whispers to Nelson, these two the youngest. All under him Harry feels these humans knit together. His wife and mother cling together. His mother began the embrace automatically but has breathed a great life of grief into it. Her face creases in pain; Janice, rumpled and smothered, yet responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the great frame yearning against her. Mrs. Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height sees. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a member with her of an ancient abused slave race, and then she had realized that, having restored her son to herself, she too must be deserted.
He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her arms tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness, they of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, “My daughter,” recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.
And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.
Eccles comes, panting from some drugstore or tormented home, and the seven of them file with Nelson into the room of flowers and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, with a strange deep soft probe of guilt, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
The angular words walk in Harry’s head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility. Eccles doesn’t; his face is humorless and taut. His voice is false. All these people are false: except his dead daughter, the white box with gold trim.
“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom.”
Shepherd, lamb, arms: Harry’s eyes fill with tears. It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at last the saltwater gets into his eyes. His daughter is dead; June gone from him; his heart swims in grief, that had skimmed over it before, dives deeper and deeper into the limitless volume of loss. Never hear her cry again, never see her marbled skin again, never balance her faint weight in his arms again and watch for the blue knives of her eyes to widen at his words. Never, the word never stops, there is never a gap in its thickness.
They go to the cemetery. He and his father and Janice’s father and the undertaker’s man carry the white box to the hearse. There is weight to it but the weight is all wood. The cemetery is beautiful at four o’clock. Its nurtured green nap slopes down somewhat parallel to the rays of the sun. Tombstones cast long slate shadows. Up a crunching blue gravel lane moves the careful procession; their destination a meek green canopy smelling of earth and ferns. Beyond them at a distance a crescent sweep of black woods; the cemetery is high on the hill, between the town and the forest. Below their feet chimneys smoke. Harry can see across the valley but from here it looks different, more blue. A man on a power lawnmower rides between the worn teeth of tombstones far off. Swallows in a wide ball dip and toss themselves above a stone cottage, a crypt. The white coffin is artfully rolled on casters from the hearse’s deep body onto crimson straps that hold it above the small nearly square-mouthed but deep-dug grave. The small creaks and breaths of effort scratch on a pane of silence. Silence. A cough. The flowers have followed them; here they are under the tent. Behind Harry’s feet a neat mound of dirt topped with squares of sod waits to be replaced and meanwhile breathes a deep word of earth. The undertaking men look pleased, fold their pink hands in front of their flies. Silence.
“The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing.”
Eccles’ voice made fragile by the outdoors; the distant buzz of the power mower halts respectfully. Rabbit’s chest vibrates with excitement and strength; he is sure his girl has ascended to Heaven. This feeling fills Eccles’ recited words like a living body a skin. “O God, whose most dear Son did take little children into his arms and bless them; Give us Grace, we beseech thee, to entrust the soul of this child to thy never-failing care and love, and bring us all to the heavenly kingdom; through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” Mrs. Springer whispers.
Yes. That is how it is. He feels them all, the heads as still around him as tombstones, he feels them all one, all one with the grass, with the hothouse flowers, all, the undertaker’s men, the unseen caretaker who has halted his mower, all gathered into one here to give his unbaptized baby force to leap to Heaven.
An electric switch is turned, the straps begin to lower the casket into the grave and stop. Eccles makes a cross of sand on the lid; stray grains roll one by one down the curved lid into the
hole. A pink hand throws crumpled petals. “Deal graciously, we pray thee, with all those who mourn, that, casting every care on thee …” The straps whine again. Janice at his side staggers. He holds her arm and even through the cloth it feels hot. A small breath of wind makes the canopy fill and flap like a sail. The smell of flowers rises toward them. “… and the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, now and for evermore. Amen.”
Eccles closes his book. Harry’s father and Janice’s, standing side by side, look up and blink. The undertaker’s men begin to be busy with their equipment, retrieving the straps from the hole. Mourners move into the sunshine. “Casting every care on thee.” He has done that; he feels full of strength. The sky greets him. It is as if he has been crawling in a cave and now at last beyond the dark recession of crowding rocks he has seen a patch of light; he turns, and Janice’s face, dumb with grief, blocks the light. “Don’t look at me,” he says. “I didn’t kill her.”
This comes out of his mouth clearly, in tune with the simplicity he feels now in everything. Heads talking softly snap around at a voice so sudden and cruel.
They misunderstand. He just wants this straight. He explains to the heads, “You all keep acting as if I did it. I wasn’t anywhere near. She’s the one.” He turns to her, and in her face, slack as if slapped, sees that she too is a victim, that everyone is; the baby is gone, is all he’s saying, he had a baby and his wife drowned it. “Hey it’s O.K.,” he tells her. “You didn’t mean to.” He tries to take her hand but she snatches it back like from a trap and looks toward her parents, who step toward her.