by John Updike
“So this doctor,” he concedes, “is hauled into court for killing a goose on the course with a golf club.”
“What club?” Ronnie asks.
“I knew you’d ask that,” Harry says. “If not you, some other jerk.”
“I’d think a sand wedge,” Buddy says, “right at the throat. It’d clip the head right off.”
“Too short in the handle, you couldn’t get close enough,” Ronnie argues. He squints as if to judge a distance. “I’d say a five or even an easy four would be the right stick. Hey Harry, how about that five-iron I put within a gimme on the fifteenth from way out on the other side of the sand trap? In deep rough yet.”
“You nudged it,” Harry says.
“Heh?”
“I saw you nudge the ball up to give yourself a lie.”
“Let’s get this straight. You’re saying I cheated.”
“Something like that.”
“Let’s hear the story, Harry,” Webb Murkett says, lighting another cigarette to dramatize his patience.
Ginger was in the ballpark. Thelma Harrison is staring at him with her big brown sunglasses and that is distracting too. “So the doctor’s defense evidently was that he had hit the goose with a golf ball and injured it badly enough he had to put it out of its misery. Then this announcer said, it seemed cute at the time, she was a female announcer -“
“Wait a minute sweetie, I don’t understand,” Janice says. “You mean he threw a golf ball at this goose?”
“Oh my God,” Rabbit says, “am I ever sorry I got started on this. Let’s go home.”
“No tell me,” Janice says, looking panicked.
“He didn’t throw the ball, the goose was on the fairway probably by some pond and the guy’s drive or whatever it was -‘
“Could have been his second shot and he shanked it,” Buddy offers.
His nameless girlfriend looks around and in that fake little-girl voice asks, “Are geese allowed on golf courses? I mean, that may be stupid, Buddy’s the first golfer I’ve gone out with -‘
“You call that a golfer?” Ronnie interrupts.
Buddy tells them, “I’ve read somewhere about a course in Alaska where these caribou wander. Maybe it’s Sweden.”
“I’ve heard of moose on courses in Maine,” Webb Murkett says. Lowering sun flames in his twisted eyebrows. He seems sad. Maybe he’s feeling the liquor too, for he rambles on, “Wonder why you never hear of a Swedish golfer. You hear of Bjorn Borg, and this skier Stenmark.”
Rabbit decides to ride it through. “So the announcer says, `A mercy killing, or murder most foul?”’
“Ouch,” someone says.
Ronnie is pretending to ruminate, “Maybe you’d be better off with a four-wood, and play the goose off your left foot.”
“Nobody heard the punch line,” Harry protests.
“I heard it,” Thelma Harrison says.
“We all heard it,” Buddy says. “It’s just very distressing to me,” he goes on, and looks very severe in his steel-rimmed glasses, so the women at first take him seriously, “that nobody here, I mean nobody, has shown any sympathy for the goose.”
“Somebody sympathized enough to bring the man to court,” Webb Murkett points out.
“I discover myself,” Buddy complains sternly, “in the midst of a crowd of people who while pretending to be liberal and tolerant are really anti-goose.”
“Who, me?” Ronnie says, making his voice high as if goosed. Rabbit hates this kind of humor, but the others seem to enjoy it, including the women.
Cindy has returned glistening from her swim. Standing there with her bathing suit slightly awry, she tugs it straight and blushes in the face of their laughter. “Are you talking about me?” The little cross glints beneath the hollow of her throat. Her feet look pale on the poolside flagstones. Funny, how pale the tops of feet stay.
Webb gives his wife’s wide hips a sideways hug. “No, honey. Harry was telling us a shaggy goose story.”
“Tell me, Harry.”
“Not now. Nobody liked it. Webb will tell you.”
Sandra in her green and white uniform comes up to them. “Mrs. Angstrom.”
The words shock Harry, as if his mother has been resurrected.
“Yes,” Janice answers matter-of-factly.
“Your mother is on the phone.”
“Oh Lordie, what now?” Janice stands, lurches slightly, composes herself. She takes her beach towel from the back of her chair and wraps it around her hips rather than walk in merely a bathing suit past dozens of people into the clubhouse. “What do you think it is?” she asks Harry.
He shrugs. “Maybe she wants to know what kind of baloney we’re having tonight.”
A dig in that, delivered openly. The awful girlfriend titters. Harry is ashamed of himself, thinking in contrast of Webb’s sideways hug of Cindy’s hips. This kind of crowd will do a marriage in if you let it. He doesn’t want to get sloppy.
In defiance Janice asks, “Honey, could you order me another vod-and-ton while I’m gone?”
“No.” He softens this to, “I’ll think about it,” but the chill has been put on the party.
The Murketts consult and conclude it may be time to go, they have a thirteen-year-old babysitter, a neighbor’s child. The same sunlight that ignited Webb’s eyebrows lights the halo of fine hairs standing up from the goosebumps on Cindy’s thighs. Not bothering with any towel around her, she saunters to the ladies’ locker room to change, her pale feet leaving wet prints on the gray flagstones. Wait, wait, the Sunday, the weekend cannot be by, a golden sip remains in the glass. On the transparent tabletop among the wire chairs drinks have left a ghostly clockwork of rings refracted into visibility by the declining light. What can Janice’s mother want? She has called out to them from a darker older world he remembers but wants to stay buried, a world of constant clothing and airless front parlors, of coal bins and narrow houses with spitefully drawn shades, where the farmer’s drudgery and the millworker’s ruled land and city. Here, clean children shivering with their sudden emergence into the thinner element are handed towels by their mothers. Cindy’s towel hangs on her empty chair. To be Cindy’s towel and to be sat upon by her: the thought dries Rabbit’s mouth. To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No acne in that crotch. Heaven. He looks up and sees the shaggy mountain shouldering into the sun still, though the chairs are making long shadows, lozenge checkerboards. Buddy Inglefmger is saying to Webb Murkett in a low voice whose vehemence is not ironical, “Ask yourself sometime who benefits from inflation. The people in debt benefit, society’s losers. The government benefits because it collects more in taxes without raising the rates. Who doesn’t benefit? The man with money in his pocket, the man who’s paid his bills. That’s why” - Buddy’s voice drops to a conspiratorial hiss - “that man is vanishing like the red Indian. Why should I work,” he asks Webb, “when the money is taken right out of my pocket for the benefit of those who don’t?”
Harry is thinking his way along the mountain ridge, where clouds are lifting like a form of steam. As if in driven motion Mt. Pemaquid cleaves the summer sky and sun, though poolside is in shadow now. Thelma is saying cheerfully to the girlfriend, “Astrology, paten-reading, psychiatry - I’m for all of it. Anything that helps get you through.” Harry is thinking of his own parents. They should have belonged to a club. Living embattled, Mom feuding with the neighbors, Pop and his union hating the men who owned the printing plant where he worked his life away, both of them scorning the few kin that tried to keep in touch, the four of them, Pop and Mom and Hassy and Mim, against the world and a certain guilt attaching to any reaching up and outside for a friend. Don’t trust anybody: Andy Mellon doesn’t, and 1 don’t. Dear Pop. He never got out from under. Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, at rest.
Buddy’s voice nags on, aggrieved. “Money that goes out of one pocket goes into somebody else’s, it doesn’t just evaporate. The big boys are get
ting rich out of this.”
A chair scrapes and Rabbit feels Webb stand. His voice comes from a height, gravelly, humorously placating. “Become a big boy yourself I guess is the only answer.”
“Oh sure,” Buddy says, knowing he is being put off.
A tiny speck, a bird, the fabled eagle it might be, no, from the motionlessness of its wings a buzzard, is flirting in flight with the ragged golden-green edge of the mountain, now above it like a speck on a Kodak slide, now below it out of sight, while a bluebellied cloud unscrolls, endlessly, powerfully. Another chair is scraped on the flagstones. His name, “Harry,” is sharply called, in Janice’s voice.
He lowers his gaze at last out of glory and as his eyes adjust his forehead momentarily hurts, a small arterial pain; perhaps with such a negligible unexplained ache do men begin their deaths, some slow as being tumbled by a cat and some fast as being struck by a hawk. Cancer, coronary. “What did Bessie want?”
Janice’s tone is breathless, faintly stricken. “She says Nelson’s come. With this girl.”
“Melanie,” Harry says, pleased to have remembered. And his remembering brings along with it Buddy’s girlfriend’s name. Joanne. “It was nice to have met you, Joanne,” he says in parting, shaking her hand. Making a good impression. Casting his shadow.
As Harry drives them home in Janice’s Mustang convertible with the top down, air pours over them and lends an illusion of urgent and dangerous speed. Their words are snatched from their mouths. “What the fuck are we going to do with the kid?” he asks her.
“How do you mean?” With her dark hair being blown back, Janice looks like a different person. Eyes asquint against the rush of wind and her upper lip lifted, a hand held near her ear to keep her rippling silk head scarf from flying away. Liz Taylor in A Place in the Sun. Even the little crow’s-feet at the corner of her eye look glamorous. She is wearing her tennis dress and the white cashmere cardigan.
“I mean is he going to get a job or what?”
“Well Harry. He’s still in college.”
“He doesn’t act like it.” He feels he has to shout. “I wasn’t so fucking fortunate as to get to college and the guys that did didn’t goof off in Colorado hang gliding and God knows what until their father’s money ran out.”
“You don’t know what they did. Anyway times are different. Now you be nice to Nelson. After the things you put him through -“
“Not just me.”
“- after what he went through you should be grateful he wants to come home. Ever.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“This doesn’t feel good to me. I’ve been too happy lately.”
“Don’t be irrational,” Janice says.
She is not, this implies. But one of their bonds has always been that her confusion keeps pace with his. As the wind pours past he feels a scared swift love for something that has no name. Her? His life? The world? Coming from the Mt. Pemaquid direction, you see the hillside borough of Mt. Judge from a spread-out angle altogether different from what you see coming home from the Brewer direction: the old box factory a long lean-windowed slab down low by the dried-up falls, sent underground to make electricity, and the new supertall Exxon and Mobil signs on their tapered aluminum poles along Route 422 as eerie as antennae arrived out of space. The town’s stacked windows burn orange in the sun that streams level up the valley, and from this angle great prominence gathers to the sandstone spire of the Lutheran church where Rabbit went to Sunday school under crusty old Fritz Kruppenbach, who pounded in the lesson that life has no terrors for those with faith but for those without faith there can be no salvation and no peace. No peace. A sign says THICKLY SETTLED. As the Mustang slows, Harry is moved to confess to Janice, “I started to tell you last night, this young couple came into the lot yesterday and the girl reminded me of Ruth. She would be about the right age too. Slimmer, and not much like her in her way of talking, but there was, I don’t know, something.”
“Your imagination is what it was. Did you get the girl’s name?” “I asked, but she wouldn’t give it. She was cute about it, too. Kind of flirty, without anything you could put your finger on.”
“And you think that girl was your daughter.”
From her tone he knows he shouldn’t have confessed. “I didn’t say that exactly.”
“Then what did you say? You’re telling me you’re still thinking of this bag you fucked twenty years ago and now you and she have a darling little baby.” He glances over and Janice no longer suggests Elizabeth Taylor, her lips all hard and crinkled as if baked in her fury. Ida Lupino. Where did they go, all the great Hollywood bitches? In town for years there had been just a Stop sign at the corner where Jackson slants down into Central but the other year after the burgess’s own son smashed up a car running the sign the borough put in a light, that is mostly on blink, yellow this way and red the other. He touches the brake and takes the left turn. Janice leans with the turn to keep her mouth close to his ear. “You are crazy,” she shouts. “You always want what you don’t have instead of what you do. Getting all cute and smiley in the face thinking about this girl that doesn’t exist while your real son, that you had with your wife, is waiting at home right now and you saying you wished he’d stay in Colorado.”
“I do wish that,” Harry says - anything to change the subject even slightly. “You’re wrong about my wanting what I don’t have. I pretty much like what I have. The trouble with that is, then you get afraid somebody will take it from you.”
“Well it’s not going to be Nelson, he wants nothing from you except a little love and he doesn’t get that. I don’t know why you’re such an unnatural father.”
So they can finish their argument before they reach Ma Springer’s he has slowed their speed up Jackson, under the shady interlock of maples and horsechestnuts, that makes the hour feel later than it is. “The kid has it in for me,” he says mildly, to see what this will bring on.
It re-excites her. “You keep saying that but it’s not true. He loves you. Or did.” Where the sky shows through the mingled tree tops there is still a difference of light, a flickering that beats upon their faces and hands mothlike. In a sullen semi-mollified tone she says, “One thing definite, I don’t want to hear any more about your darling illegitimate daughter. It’s a disgusting idea.”
“I know. I don’t know why I mentioned it.” He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.
“Disgusting!” Janice cries.
“I’ll never mention it again,” he promises.
They ease into Joseph, at the corner where the fire hydrant still wears, faded, the red-white-and-blue clown outfit that schoolchildren three Junes ago painted on for the Bicentennial. Polite in his freshened dislike of her, he asks, “Shall I put the car in the garage?”
“Leave it out front, Nelson may want it.”
As they walk up the front steps his feet feel heavy, as if the world has taken on new gravity. He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died when Harry’s house burned down, a girl Nelson had come to love like a sister. At least like a sister. But the years have piled on, the surviving have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. Jill would be twenty-eight now. Nelson is twenty-two. Think of all the blame God has to shoulder.
Ma’s front door sticks and yields with a shove. The living room is dark and duffel bags have been added to its clutter of padded furniture. A shabby plaid suitcase, not Nelson’s, sits on the stair landing. The voices come from the sunporch. These voices lessen Harry’s gravity, seem to refute the world’s rumors of universal death. He moves toward the voices, through the dining room and then the kitchen, into the porch area c
onscious of himself as slightly too drunk to be cautious enough, overweight and soft and a broad target.
Copper-beech leaves crowd at the porch screen. Faces and bodies rise from the aluminum and nylon furniture like the cloud of an explosion with the sound turned down on TV. More and more in middle age the world comes upon him like images on a set with one thing wrong with it, like those images the mind entertains before we go to sleep, that make sense until we look at them closely, which wakes us up with a shock. It is the girl who has risen most promptly, a curly-headed rather sturdy girl with shining brown eyes halfway out of her head and a ruby-red dimpling smile lifted from a turn-of-the-century valentine. She has on jeans that have been through everything and a Hindu sort of embroidered shirt that has lost some sequins. Her handshake surprises him by being damp, nervous.
