Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “How are you sure?”

  “I just am. Look, Mrs. –”

  “Aldridge.” And this, of all things, her second husband’s name, set her to crying.

  He fought through her sobbing. “Look, it’s hard to talk now, I’m dead beat, my kid’s in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain –”

  The outrage tested a wing. “Explain! Can you explain her back to life?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  The politeness returned. “My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet.”

  “Yeah. I’d have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour.”

  “We’ll meet at the West Brewer police station,” the distant voice said with surprising firmness, a sudden pinch of authority. “At noon.”

  Rabbit had never been there before. The West Brewer Borough Hall was a brick building with white trim, set diagonally on a plot of grass and flower beds adjacent to the tall madhouse, itself really an addition to the original madhouse, a granite mansion built a century ago by one of Brewer’s iron barons. All this land had belonged to that estate. Behind the borough hall stretched a long cement-block shed with a corrugated roof; some doors were open and Rabbit saw trucks, a steamroller, the spidery black machine that tars roads, the giant arm that lifts a man in a basket to trim branches away from electric wires. These appliances of a town’s housekeeping seemed to him part of a lost world of blameless activity; he would never be allowed to crawl back into that world. Inside the town hall, there were wickets where people could pay their utilities bills, paneled doors labelled in flaking gold Burgess and Assessor and Clerk. Gold arrows pointed downstairs to the Police Department. Rabbit saw too late that he could have entered this half-basement from the side, saving himself the curious gaze of ten town employees. The cop behind the green-topped counter looked familiar, but it took a minute for the side-burns to register. The collegiate type. Harry was led down a hall past mysterious rooms; one brimmed with radio equipment, another with filing cabinets, a third gave on a cement stairway leading still further down. The dungeon. Jail. Rabbit wanted to run down into this hole and hide but was led into a fourth room, with a dead green table and metal folding chairs. The broken-nosed chief was in here and a woman who, though hollow with exhaustion and slow-spoken with pills, was Connecticut. She had more edge, more salt to her manner, than Pennsylvania women. Her hair was not so much gray as grayed; her suit was black. Jill’s pensive thin face must have come from her father, for her mother had quite another kind, a roundish eager face with pushy lips that when she was happy must be greedy. Rabbit flicked away the impression of a peppy little dog: wideset brown eyes, a touch of jowl, a collar of pearls at her throat. Nifty tits, Jill had said, but her mother’s cupped and braced bosom struck Rabbit in this moment of sexless and sorrowing encounter as a militant prow, part of a uniform’s padding. He regretted that he had not enough praised Jill here, her boyish chest with its shallow faint shadows, where she had felt to herself shy and meager and yet had been soft enough in his mouth and hands, quite soft enough, and abundant, as grace is abundant, that we do not measure, but take as a presence, that abounds. In his mist, he heard the chief grunt introductions: Mr. and Mrs. Aldridge. Rabbit remembered in Jill’s song the tax lawyer from Westerly, but the man remained blank for him; he had eyes only for the woman, for this wrong-way reincarnation of Jill. She had Jill’s composure, less fragilely; even her despairing way of standing with her hands heavy at her sides, at a loss, was Jill’s. Rabbit wondered, Has she come from identifying the remains? What was left but blackened bones? Teeth. A bracelet. A flesh-colored swatch of hair. “Hey,” he said to her, “I’m sick about this.”

  “Yes-s.” Her bright eyes passed over his head. “Over the phone, I was so stupid, you mentioned explaining.”

  Had he? What had he wanted to explain? That it was not his fault. Yet Nelson thought it was. For taking her in? But she was unsheltered. For fucking her? But it is all life, sex, fire, breathing, all combination with oxygen, we shimmer at all moments on the verge of conflagration, as the madhouse windows tell us. Rabbit tried to remember. “You had asked about Skeeter, why I was sure he hadn’t set the fire.”

  “Yes. Why were you?”

  “He loved her. We all did.”

  “You all used her?”

  “In ways.”

  “In your case” – strange precision, clubwoman keeping a meeting within channels, the vowels roughened by cigarettes and whisky, weathered in the daily sunslant of cocktails – “as a concubine?”

  He guessed at what the word meant. “I never forced it,” he said. “I had a house and food. She had herself. We gave what we had.”

  “You are a beast.” Each word was too distinct; the sentence had been lying in her mind and had warped and did not quite fit.

  “O.K., sure,” he conceded, refusing to let her fly, to let that caged outrage escape her face and scream. Stepdaddy behind her coughed and shifted weight, preparing to be embarrassed. Harry’s guts felt suspended and transparent, as before a game. He was matched against this glossy woman in a way he was never matched with Jill. Jill had been too old for him, too wise, having been born so much later. This little pug, her money and rasping clubwoman voice aside, was his generation, he could understand what she wanted. She wanted to stay out of harm’s way. She wanted to have some fun and not be blamed. At the end she wanted not to have any apologizing to do to any heavenly committee. Right now she wanted to tame the ravenous miracle of her daughter’s being cast out and destroyed. Mrs. Aldridge touched her cheeks in a young gesture, then let her hands hang heavy beside her hips.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There are always. . . circumstances. I wanted to ask, were there any . . . effects.”

  “Effects?” He was back with blackened bones, patterns of teeth, melted bracelets. He thought of the bracelets girls in high school used to wear, chains with name-tags, Dorene, Margaret, Mary Ann.

  “Her brothers asked me . . . some memento . . .”

  Brothers? She had said. Three. One Nelson’s age.

  Mrs. Aldridge stepped forward, bewildered, hoping to be helpful. “There was a car.”

  “They sold the car,” Rabbit said, too loudly. “She ran it without oil and the engine seized up and she sold it for junk.”

  His loudness alarmed her. He was still indignant, about the waste of that car. She took a step backward, protesting, “She loved the car.”

  She didn’t love the car, she didn’t love anything we would have loved, he wanted to tell Mrs. Aldridge, but maybe she knew more than he, she was there when Jill first saw the car, new and white, her father’s gift. Rabbit at last found in his mind an “effect.” “One thing I did find,” he told Mrs. Aldridge, “her guitar. It’s pretty well burned, but –”

  “Her guitar,” the woman repeated, and perhaps having forgotten that her daughter played brought her eyes down, made her round face red and brought the man over to comfort her, a man blank like men in advertisements, his coat impeccable and in the breast pocket a three-folded maroon handkerchief. “I have nothing” she wailed, “she didn’t even leave me a note when she left.”

  And her voice had shed its sexy roughness, become high and helpless; it was Jill again, begging, Hold me, help me, I’m all shit inside, everything is crashing in.

  Harry turned from the sight. The chief, leading him out the side door, said, “Rich bitch, if she’d given the girl half a reason to stay home she’d be alive today. I see things like this every week. All our bad checks are being cashed. Keep your nose clean, Angstrom, and take care of your own.” A coach’s paternal punch on the arm, and Harry was sent back into the world.

  “Pop, how about a quick one?”

  “Not today, Harry, not today. We have a surprise for you at home. Mim’s coming.”

  “You sure?” The vigil for Mim is months old; she keeps sending postcards, always with a picture of a new hotel on them.<
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  “Yep. She called your mother this morning from New York City, I talked to your mother this noon. I should have told you but you’ve had so much on your mind I thought, Might as well save it. Things come in bunches, that’s the mysterious truth. We get numb and the Lord lets us have it, that’s how His mercy works. You lose your wife, you lose your house, you lose your job. Mim comes in the same day your mother couldn’t sleep a wink for nightmares, I bet she’s been downstairs all day trying to tidy up if it kills her, you wonder what’s next.” But he has just said it: Mom’s death is next. The number 16A bus joggles, sways, smells of exhaust. The Mt. Judge way, there are fewer Negroes than toward West Brewer. Rabbit sits on the aisle; Pop, by the window, suddenly hawks and spits. The spittle runs in a weak blur down the dirty glass. “Goddammit, but that burns me,” he explains, and Rabbit sees they have passed a church, the big gray Presbyterian at Weiser and Park: on its steps cluster some women in overcoats, two young men with backwards collars, nuns and schoolchildren carrying signs and unlit candles protesting the war. This is Moratorium Day. “I don’t have much use for Tricky Dick and never have,” Pop is explaining, “but the poor devil, he’s trying to do the decent thing over there, get us out so the roof doesn’t fall in until after we leave, and these queer preachers so shortsighted they can’t see across the pulpit go organizing these parades that all they do is convince the little yellow Reds over there they’re winning. If I were Nixon I’d tax the bejesus out of the churches, it’d take some of the burden off the little man. Old Cushing up there in Boston must be worth a hundred million just by his lonesome.”

  “Pop, all they’re saying is they want the killing to stop.”

  “They’ve got you too, have they? Killing’s not the worst thing around. Rather shake the hand of a killer than a traitor.”

  So much passion, where he now feels none, amuses Harry, makes him feel protected, at home. It has been his salvation, to be home again. The same musty teddy-bear smells from the carpet, the same embrace of hot air when you open the cellar door, the same narrow stairs heading up off the living room with the same loose baluster that lost its dowel and has to be renailed again and again, drying out in the ebb of time; the same white-topped kitchen table with the four sets of worn spots where they used to eat. An appetite for boyish foods has returned: for banana slices on cereal, for sugar doughnuts though they come in boxes with cellophane windows now instead of in waxpaper bags, for raw carrots and cocoa, at night. He sleeps late, so he has to be wakened for work; in Penn Villas, in the house where Janice never finished making curtains, he would be the one the sun would usually rouse first. Here in Mt. Judge familiar gloom encloses him. The distortions in Mom’s face and speech, which used to distress him during his visits, quickly assimilate to the abiding reality of her presence, which has endured all these years he has been absent and which remains the same half of the sky, sealing him in – like the cellar bulkhead out back, of two heavy halves. As a child he used to crouch on the cement steps beneath them and listen to the rain. The patter above seemed to be pitting his consciousness lovingly and mixing its sound with the brusque scrape and stride of Mom working in the kitchen. She still, for spells, can work in the kitchen. Harry’s being home, she claims, is worth a hundred doses of L-dopa.

  The one disturbing element, new and defiant of assimilation, is Nelson. Sullen, grieving, strangely large and loutish sprawled on the caneback davenport, his face glazed by some television of remembrance: none of them quite know what to do about him. He is not Harry, he is sadder than Harry ever was, yet he demands the privileges and indulgence of Harry’s place. In the worn shadows of the poorly lit half-house on Jackson Road, the Angstroms keep being startled by Nelson’s ungrateful presence, keep losing him. “Where’s Nellie?” “Where did the kid get to?” “Is the child upstairs or down?” are questions the other three often put to one another. Nelson stays in his temporary room – Mim’s old room – for hours of listening to rock-pop-folk turned down to a murmur. He skips meals without explaining or apologizing, and is making a scrapbook of news items the Brewer papers have carried about their fire. Rabbit discovered this scrapbook yesterday, snooping in the boy’s room. Around the clippings the boy had drawn with various colors of ballpoint flowers, peace signs, Tao crosses, musical notes, psychedelic rainbows, those open-ended swirling doodles associated with insanity before they became commercial. Also there are two Polaroid snaps of the ruin; Billy took them Monday with a new camera his father had given him. The photos, brownish and curling, show a half-burned house, the burned half dark like a shadow but active in shape, eating the unburned half, the garage studs bent like matchsticks in an ashtray. Looking at the photographs, Rabbit smells ash. The smell is real and not remembered. In Nelson’s closet he finds the source, a charred guitar. So that is why it wasn’t in the garage when he looked for it, to give to Jill’s mother. She is back in Connecticut now, let the poor kid keep it. His father can’t reach him, and lives with him in his parents’ house as an estranged, because too much older, brother.

  He and his father see, walking up Jackson Road, a strange car parked in front of number 303, a white Toronado with orange-on-blue New York plates. His father’s lope accelerates; “There’s Mim!” he calls, and it is. She is upstairs and comes to the head of the stairs as they enter beneath the fanlight of stained glass; she descends and stands with them in the murky little foyer. It is Mim. It isn’t. It has been years since Rabbit has seen her. “Hi,” Mim says, and kisses her father dryly, on the cheek. They were never, even when the children were little, much of a family for kissing. She would kiss her brother the same way, dismissingly, but he holds her, wanting to feel the hundreds of men who have held her before, this his sister whose diapers he changed, who used to hold his thumb when they’d go for Sunday walks along the quarry, who once burst out oh I love you sledding with him, the runners whistling on the dark packed slick, the street waxy with snow still falling. Puzzled by his embrace, Mim kisses him again, another peck on the same cheek, and then firmly shrugs his arms away. A competence in that. She feels lean, not an ounce extra but all woman; swimming must do it, in hotel pools, late hours carve the fat away and swimming smooths what’s left. She appears to wear no makeup, no lipstick, except for her eyes, which are inhuman, Egyptian, drenched in peacock purple and blue, not merely outlined but re-created, and weighted with lashes he expects to stick fast when she blinks. These marvellously masked eyes force upon her pale mouth all expressiveness; each fractional smile, sardonic crimping, attentive pout, and abrupt broad laugh follows its predecessor so swiftly Harry imagines a coded tape is being fed into her head and producing, rapid as electronic images, this alphabet of expressions. She used to have buck teeth but that has been fixed. Her nose, her one flaw, that kept her off the screen, that perhaps kept her from fame, is still long, with a faceted lump of cartilage at the end, exactly like Mom’s nose, but now that Mim is thirty and never going to be a screen beauty seems less a flaw, indeed saves her face from looking like others and gives it, between the peacock eyes and the actressy-fussy mouth, a lenient homeliness. And this, Rabbit guesses, would extend her appeal for men, though now she would get barroom criers, with broken careers and marriages, rather than hard-hearted corners who need an icy showpiece on their arm. In the style of the Sixties her clothes are clownish: bell-bottom slacks striped horizontally as if patched from three kinds of gingham; a pinstripe blouse, mannish but for the puff sleeves; shoes that in color and shape remind him of Donald Duck’s bill; and hoop earrings three inches across. Even in high school Mim had liked big earrings; they made her look like a gypsy or Arab then, now, with the tan, Italian. Or Miami Jewish. Her hair is expensively tousled honey-white, which doesn’t offend him; not since junior high has she worn it the color it was, the mild brown she once called, while he leaned in her doorway watching her study herself in the mirror, “Protestant rat.”

  Pop busies his hands, touching her, hanging up his coat, steering her into the dismal living room. “
When did you get here? Straight from the West Coast? You fly straight to Idlewild, they do it non-stop now, don’t they?”

  “Pop, they don’t call it Idlewild any more. I flew in a couple days ago, I had some stuff in New York to do before I drove down. Jersey was breathtaking, once you got past the oil tanks. Everything still so green.”

  “Where’d you get the car, Mim? Rent it from Hertz?” The old man’s washed-out eyes sparkle at her daring, at her way with the world.

  Mim sighs. “A guy lent it to me.” She sits in the caneback rocker and puts her feet up on the very hassock that Rabbit as a child had once dreamed about: he dreamed it was full of dollar bills to solve all their problems. The dream had been so vivid he had tested it; the stitched scar of his incision still shows. The stuffing had been disagreeable fiber deader than straw.

  Mim lights a cigarette. She holds it in the exact center of her mouth, exhales twin plumes around it, frowns at the snuffed match.

  Pop is enchanted by the routine, struck dumb. Rabbit asks her, “How does Mom seem to you?”

  “Good. For someone who’s dying.”

  “She make sense to you?”

  “A lot of it. The guy who doesn’t make much sense to me is you. She told me what you’ve been doing. Lately.”

  “Harry’s had a hell of a time lately,” Pop chimes in, nodding as if to mesh himself with this spinning wheel, his dazzling daughter. “Today in at Verity, get this, they gave him his notice. They kept me on and canned a man in his prime. I saw the handwriting on the wall but I didn’t want it to be me who’d tell him, it was their meatloaf, let them deliver it, bastards, a man gives them his life and gets a boot in the fanny for his pains.”

  Mim closes her eyes and lets a look of weary age wash over her and says, “Pop, it’s fantastic to see you. But don’t you want to go up and look in on Mom for a minute? She may need to be led to the pot, I asked her but with me she could be shy still.”