Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “I’m tormented something cruel at night, Harry. Did Earl tell you?”

  “He mentioned bad dreams.”

  “Yes, bad, but not so bad as not being able to sleep at all. I know this room so well now, every object. At night even that innocent old bureau and that – poor shapeless armchair — they.”

  “They what?” He sits on the bed to take her hand, and fears the swaying under his weight will jostle and break her bones.

  She says, “They want. To suffocate me.”

  “Those things do?”

  “All things – do. They crowd in, in the queerest way, these simple homely bits of furniture I’ve. Lived with all my life. Dad’s asleep in the next room, I can hear him snore. No cars go by. It’s just me and the streetlamp. It’s like being – under water. I count the seconds I have breath left for. I figure I can go forty, thirty, then it gets down to ten.”

  “I didn’t know breathing was affected by this.”

  “It isn’t. It’s all my mind. The things I have in my mind, Hassy, it reminds me of when they clean out a drain. All that hair and sludge mixed up with a rubber comb somebody went and dropped down years ago. Sixty years ago in my case.”

  “You don’t feel that about your life, do you? I think you did a good job.”

  “A good job at what? You don’t even know what you’re trying to do, is the humor of it.”

  “Have a few laughs,” he offers. “Have a few babies.”

  She takes him up on that. “I keep dreaming about you and Mim. Always together. When you haven’t been together since you got out of school.”

  “What do Mim and I do, in these dreams?”

  “You look up at me. Sometimes you want to be fed and I can’t find the food. Once I remember looking into the icebox and. A man was in it frozen. A man I never knew, just one. Of those total strangers dreams have. Or else the stove won’t light. Or I can’t locate where Earl put the food when he came home from shopping, I know he. Put it somewhere. Silly things. But they become so important. I wake up screaming at Earl.”

  “Do Mim and I say anything?”

  “No, you just look up like children do. Slightly frightened but sure I’ll save. The situation. This is how you look. Even when I can see you’re dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. All powdered and set out in coffins. Only still standing up, still waiting for something from me. You’ve died because I couldn’t get the food on the table. A strange thing about these dreams, come to think of it. Though you look up at me from a child’s height. You look the way you do now. Mim all full of lipstick, with one of those shiny miniskirts and boots zippered up to her knee.”

  “Is that how she looks now?”

  “Yes, she sent us a publicity picture.”

  “Publicity for what?”

  “Oh, you know. For herself. You know how they do things now. I didn’t understand it myself. It’s on the bureau.”

  The picture, eight by ten, very glossy, with a diagonal crease where the mailman bent it, shows Mim in a halter and bracelets and sultan pants, her head thrown back, one long bare foot – she had big feet as a child, Mom had to make the shoe salesmen go deep into the stockroom – up on a hassock. Her eyes from the way they’ve reshaped them do not look like Mim at all. Only something about the nose makes it Mim. The kind of lump on the end, and the nostrils: the way as a baby they would tuck in when she started to cry is the way they tuck in now when they tell her to look sexy. He feels in this picture less Mim than the men posing her. Underneath, the message pale in ballpoint pen, she had written, Miss you all Hope to come East soon Love Mim. A slanting cramped hand that hadn’t gone past high school. Jill’s message had been written in splashy upright private-school semi-printing, confident as a poster. Mim never had that.

  Rabbit asks, “How old is Mim now?”

  Mom says, “You don’t want to hear about my dreams.”

  “Sure I do.” He figures it: born when he was six, Mim would be thirty now: she wasn’t going anywhere, not even in harem costume. What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do. What you have done you’ll do lots more. He says to his mother: “Tell me the worst one.”

  “The house next door has been sold. To some people who want to put up an apartment building. The Scranton pair have gone into partnership with them and then. These two walls go up, so the house doesn’t get any light at all, and I’m in a hole looking up. And dirt starts to come down on me, cola cans and cereal boxes, and then. I wake up and know I can’t breathe.”

  He tells her, “Mt. Judge isn’t zoned for high-rise.”

  She doesn’t laugh. Her eyes are wide now, fastened on that other half of her life, the night half, the nightmare half that now is rising like water in a bad cellar and is going to engulf her, proving that it was the real half all along, that daylight was an illusion, a cheat. “No,” she says, “that’s not the worst. The worst is Earl and I go to the hospital for tests. All around us are tables the size of our kitchen table. Only instead of set for meals each has a kind of puddle on it, a red puddle mixed up with crumpled bedsheets so they’re shaped like. Children’s sandcastles. And connected with tubes to machines with like television patterns on them. And then it dawns on me these are each people. And Earl keeps saying, so proud and pleased he’s brainless, ‘The government is paying for it all. The government is paying for it.’ And he shows me the paper you and Mim signed to make me one of – you know, them. Those puddles.”

  “That’s not a dream,” her son says. “That’s how it is.”

  And she sits up straighter on the pillows, stiff, scolding. Her mouth gets that unforgiving downward sag he used to fear more than anything – more than vampires, more than polio, more than thunder or God or being late for school. “I’m ashamed of you,” she says. “I never thought I’d hear a son of mine so bitter.”

  “It was a joke, Mom.”

  “Who has so much to be grateful for,” she goes on implacably.

  “For what? For exactly what?”

  “For Janice’s leaving you, for one thing. She was always. A damp washrag.”

  “And what about Nelson, huh? What happens to him now?” This is her falsity, that she forgets what time creates, she still sees the world with its original four corners, her and Pop and him and Mim sitting at the kitchen table. Her tyrant love would freeze the world.

  Mom says, “Nelson isn’t my child, you’re my child.”

  “Well, he exists anyway, and I have to worry about him. You just can’t dismiss Janice like that.”

  “She’s dismissed you.”

  “Not really. She calls me up at work all the time. Stavros wants her to come back.”

  “Don’t you let her. She’ll. Smother you, Harry.”

  “What choices do I have?”

  “Run. Leave Brewer. I never knew why you came back. There’s nothing here any more. Everybody knows it. Ever since the hosiery mills went south. Be like Mim.”

  “I don’t have what Mim has to sell. Anyway she’s breaking Pop’s heart, whoring around.”

  “He wants it that way, your father has always been looking. For excuses to put on a long face. Well, he has me now, and I’m excuse enough. Don’t say no to life, Hassy. Let the dead bury the dead. Bitterness never helps. I’d rather have a postcard from you happy than. See you sitting there like a lump.”

  Always these impossible demands and expectations from her. These harsh dreams. “Hassy, do you ever pray?”

  “Mostly on buses.”

  “Pray for rebirth. Pray for your own life.”

  His cheeks flame; he bows his head. He feels she is asking him to kill Janice, to kill Nelson. Freedom means murder. Rebirth means death. A lump, he silently resists, and she looks aside with the corner of her mouth worse bent. She is still trying to call him forth from her womb, can’t she see he is an old man? An old lump whose only use is to stay in place to keep the lumps leaning on him from tumbling.

  Pop comes upstairs and tunes in the Phi
llies game on television. “They’re a much sounder team without that Allen,” he says. “He was a bad egg, Harry, I say that without prejudice; bad eggs come in all colors.”

  After a few innings, Rabbit leaves.

  “Can’t you stay for at least the game, Harry? I believe there’s a beer still in the refrigerator, I was going to go down to the kitchen anyway to make Mother some tea.”

  “Let him go, Earl.”

  To protect the electrical wires, a lot of the maples along Jackson Road have been mutilated, the center of their crowns cut out. Rabbit hadn’t noticed this before, or the new sidewalk squares where they have taken away the little surface gutters that used to trip you roller skating. He had been roller skating when Kenny Leggett, an older boy from across the street, who later became a five-minute miler, a county conference marvel, but that was later, this day he was just a bigger boy who had hit Rabbit with an icy snowball that winter – could have taken out an eye if it had hit higher – this day he just tossed across Jackson Road the shout, “Harry, did you hear on the radio? The President is dead.” He said “The President,” not “Roosevelt”; there had been no other President for them. The next time this would happen, the President would have a name: as he sat at the deafening tall machine one Friday after lunch his father sneaked up behind him and confided, “Harry, it just came over the radio, engraving had it on. Kennedy’s been shot. They think in the head.” Both charmers dead of violent headaches. Their smiles fade in the field of stars. We grope on, under bullies and accountants. On the bus, Rabbit prays as his mother told him to do: Make the L-dopa work, give her pleasanter dreams, keep Nelson more or less pure, don’t let Stavros turn too hard on Janice, help Jill find her way home. Keep Pop healthy. Me too. Amen.

  A man in a pink shirt drops down beside him with a stagey sigh, after a stop on the side of the mountain, by the gas station with the Day-Glo spinner. The man’s face, turned full, clings to the side of Rabbit’s vision; after a while he defiantly returns the stare. The other man’s cheeks are like his shirt pink, smooth as a boy’s though his hair is gray, and his long worried eyebrows are lifted with an effort of recognition. “I do beg your pardon,” he says, with an emphasis that curls back into his voice purringly, “but aren’t you Harry –?”

  “Hey, and you’re Eccles. Reverend Eccles.”

  “Angstrom, yes? Harry Angstrom. How very wonderful. Really.” And Eccles takes his hand, in that plump humid grip that feels as if it will never let go. In the clergyman’s eyes there is something new, a hardened yet startled something, naked like the pale base of his throat, which lacks a clerical collar. And the shirt, Rabbit sees, is a fancy shirt, with a fine white stitch-stripe and an airy semi-transparent summer weave: he remembers how the man wore not black but a subtly elegant midnight blue. Eccles still has hold of his hand. Harry pulls it free. “Do tell me,” Eccles says, with that preening emphasis again, which Rabbit doesn’t remember from ten years ago, “how things have gone for you. Are you still with –?”

  “Janice.”

  “She didn’t seem quite up to you, I can say now, frankly.”

  “Well, or vice versa. We never had another child.” That had been Eccles’ advice, in those first months of reconciliation, when he and Janice were starting fresh and even going to the Episcopal church together. Then Eccles had been called to a church nearer Philadelphia. They had heard a year or two later, by way of Janice’s mother, that he had run into some trouble in his new parish; then nothing. And here he was again, grayer but looking no older: if anything, younger, slimmer through the middle, in self-consciously good condition, hard and tan in a way few in Brewer bother to cultivate, and with that young, startled look to his eyes. His hair is long, and curls at the back of his shirt collar. Rabbit asks him, “And what about things with you?” He is wondering where Eccles could have been, to board the bus at the side of the mountain. Nothing there but the gas station, a diner, a view of the viaduct, and some rich men’s homes tucked up among the spruces, behind iron fences.

  “Ça va. It goes. I’ve been buried; and yet I live. I’ve parted company with the ministry.” And his jaw stays open, propped as if to emit a guffaw, though no sound comes, and those strangely purified eyes remain watchful.

  “Why’d you do that?” Rabbit asks.

  Eccles’ chuckle, which always had something exploratory and quizzical about it, has become impudent, mocking, if not quite unafraid. “A variety of reasons. I was rather invited to, for one. I wanted to, for another.”

  “You no longer believe it?”

  “In my fashion. I’m not sure I believed it then.”

  “No?” Rabbit is shocked.

  “I believed,” Eccles tells him, and his voice taken on an excessive modulation, a self-caressing timbre, “in certain kinds of human interrelation. I still do. If people want to call what happens in certain relationships Christ, I raise no objection. But it’s not the word I choose to use anymore.”

  “How’d your father feel about this? Wasn’t he a bishop?”

  “My father—God rest his, et cetera—was dead when my decision was reached.”

  “And your wife? She was nifty, I forget her name.”

  “Lucy. Dear Lucy. She left me, actually. Yes, I’ve shed many skins.” And the mouth of this pale-throated, long-haired man holds open on the possibility of a guffaw, but silently, watchfully.

  “She left ya?”

  “She fled my indiscretions. She remarried and lives in Wilmington. Her husband’s a painfully ordinary fellow, a chemist of some sort. No indiscretions. My girls adore him. You remember my two girls.”

  “They were cute. Especially the older one. Since we’re on the subject, Janice has left me, too.”

  Eccles’ pale active eyebrows arch higher. “Really? Recently?”

  “The day before the moon landing.”

  “She seemed more the left than the leaving type. Look, Harry, we should get together in a more, ah, stationary place and have a real conversation.” In his leaning closer for emphasis, as the bus sways, his arm touches Rabbit’s. He always had a certain surprising muscularity, but Eccles had become burlier, more himself. His fluffed-up head seems huge.

  Rabbit asks him, “Uh, what do you do now?”

  Again, the guffaw, the held jaw, the watchfulness. “I live in Philadelphia, basically. For a while I did youth work with the Y.M.C.A. I was a camp supervisor three summers in Vermont. Some winters, I’ve chosen just to read, to meditate. I think a very exciting thing is happening in Western consciousness and, laugh if you will, I’m making notes toward a book about it. What I think, in essence, is that, at long last, we’re coming out of Plato’s cave. How does ‘Out from Plato’s Cave’ strike you as a title?”

  “Kind of spooky, but don’t mind me. What brings you back to this dirty old burg then?”

  “Well, it’s rather curious, Harry. You don’t mind my calling you Harry? That all is beginning to seem as if it were only yesterday. What curious people we were then! The ghosts we let bedevil us! Anyhow, you know the little town called Oriole, six miles south of Brewer?”

  “I’ve been there.” With his high-school basketball team, in his junior year. He had one of his great nights there.

  “Well, they have a summer theater, called the Oriole Players.”

  “Sure. We run their ads.”

  “That’s right—you’re a printer. I’ve heard that.”

  “Linotyper, actually.”

  “Good for you. Well, a friend of mine, he’s an absurd person, very egotistical, but nevertheless a wonderful man, is with them as co-director, and has talked me into helping with their P.R. Public relations. It’s really being a fund raiser. I was in Mt. Judge just now seeing this impossible old Mahlon Youngerman, that’s Sunflower Beer of course, for a donation. He said he’d think about it. That’s code for he won’t think about it.”

  “It sounds a little like what you used to do.”

  Eccles glances at him more sharply; a defensive sleepiness masks h
is face. “Pearls before swine, you mean? Pushing stumbling-blocks at the Gentiles. Yes, a little, but I only do it eight hours a day. The other sixteen, I can be my own man.”

  Harry doesn’t like the hungry way he says man, like it means too much. They are jerking and trembling down Weiser Street; Eccles looks past Harry out the window and blinks. “I must get off here. Could I ask you to get off with me and have me buy you a drink? There’s a bar here on the corner that’s not too depressing.”

  “No, Jesus, thanks. I got to keep riding. I got to get home. I have a kid there alone.”

  “Nelson.”

  “Right! What a memory! So thanks a lot. You look great.”

  “Delightful to see you again, Harry. Let’s do make a more leisurely occasion sometime. Where are you living?”

  “Over in Penn Villas, they put it up since you were here. Things are a little vague right now . . .”

  “I understand,” Eccles says, quickly, for the bus is chuffing and groaning to a stop. Yet he finds time to put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, up near the neck. His voice changes quality, beseeches, becomes again a preacher’s: “I think these are marvellous times to be alive in, and I’d love to share my good news with you at your leisure.”

  To put distance between them, Rabbit rides the 16A six blocks further, to where it turns up Greely, and gets off there, walking back to the roasted-peanut place on Weiser to catch the bus to Penn Villas. PIG ATROCITIES STIR CAMDEN says a headline on a rack, a radical black paper out of Philly. Harry feels nervous, looking north along Weiser for a pink shirt coming after him. The place on his bare neck where Eccles touched tickles: amazing how that guy wants to cling, after all these years, with both their lives turned upside down. The bus number 12 comes and pulls him across the bridge. The day whines at the windows, a September brightness empty of a future: the lawns smitten flat, the black river listless and stinking. HOBBY HEAVEN, BUTCH CSSDY & KID. He walks down Emberly toward Vista Crescent among sprinklers twirling in unison, under television aerials raking the same four-o’clock garbage from the sky.