Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  Charlie shifts his weight in his chair. “This gas crunch’s got to affect car sales. People won’t buy cows they can’t feed. Even if so far Toyota’s come along smelling pretty good.”

  Harry intervenes. “Bessie, there’s no way we can make room for Nelson on sales without hurting Jake and Rudy. They’re married men trying to feed babies on their commissions. If you want I could talk to Manny and see if he can use another kid on cleanup

  “He doesn’t want to work on clean-up,” Janice calls sharply from the kitchen.

  Ma Springer confirms, “Yes, he told me he’d like to see what he could do with sales, you know he always admired Fred so, idolized him you might say -“

  “Oh come on,” Harry says. “He never gave a damn about either of his grandfathers once he hit about tenth grade. Once he got onto girls and rock he thought everybody over twenty was a sap. All he wanted was to get the hell out of Brewer, and I said, O.K., here’s the ticket, go to it. So what’s he pussy-footing around whispering to his mother and grandmother now for?”

  Melanie brings in the two men’s drinks. Waitressly erect, she holds a triangulated paper napkin around the dewy base of each. Rabbit sips his and fords it strong when he asked for it weak. A love message, of sorts?

  Ma Springer puts one hand on each of her thighs and points her elbows out, elbows all in folds like little pug dog faces. “Now Harry -“

  “I know what you’re going to say. You own half the company. Good for you, Bessie, I’m glad. If it’d been me instead of Fred I’d’ve left it all to you.” He quickly turns to Melanie and says, “What they really should do with this gas crisis is bring back the trolley cars. You’re too young to remember. They ran on tracks but the power came from electric wires overhead. Very clean. They went everywhere when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, I know. They still have them in San Francisco.”

  “Harry, what I wanted to say

  “But you’re not running it,” he continues to his mother-in-law, “and never have, and as long as I am, Nelson, if he wants a start there, can hose down cars for Manny. I don’t want him in the sales room. He has none of the right attitudes. He can’t even straighten up and smile.”

  “I thought those were cable cars,” Charlie says to Melanie.

  “Oh they just have those on a few hills. Everybody keeps saying how dangerous they are, the cables snap. But the tourists expect them.”

  “Harry. Dinner,” Janice says. She is stern. “We won’t wait for Nelson any more, it’s after eight.”

  “Sorry if I sound hard,” he says to the group as they rise to go eat. “But look, even now, the kid’s too rude to come home in time for dinner.”

  “Your own son,” Janice says.

  “Melanie, what do you think? What’s his plan? Isn’t he heading back to finish college?”

  Her smile remains fixed but seems flaky, painted-on. “Nelson may feel,” she says carefully, “that he’s spent enough time at college.”

  “But where’s his degree?” He hears his own voice in his head as shrill, sounding trapped. “Where’s his degree?” Harry repeats, hearing no answer.

  Janice has lit candles on the dining table, though the July day is still so light they look wan. She had wanted this to be nice for Charlie. Dear old Jan. As Harry walks to the table behind her he rests his eyes on what he rarely sees, the pale bared nape of her neck. In the shuffle as they take places he brushes Melanie’s arm, bare also, and darts a look down the ripe slopes loosely concealed by the gypsy blouse. Firm. He mutters to her, “Sorry, didn’t mean to put you on the spot just now. I just can’t figure out what Nelson’s game is.”

  “Oh you didn’t,” she answers crooningly. Ringlets fall and tremble; her cheeks flame within. As Ma Springer plods to her place at the head of the table, the girl peeks up at Harry with a glint he reads as sly and adds, “I think one factor, you know, is Nelson’s becoming more security-minded.”

  He can’t quite follow. Sounds like the kid is going to enter the Secret Service.

  Chairs scrape. They wait while a dim tribal memory of grace flits overhead. Then Janice dips her spoon into her soup, tomato, the color of Harry’s Corona. Where is it? Out in the night, with the kid at the wheel making every joint rattle. They rarely sit in this room - even with the five of them now they eat around the ‘kitchen table - and Harry is newly aware of, propped on the sideboard where the family silver is stored, tinted photos of Janice as a high-school senior with her hair brushed and rolled under in a page-boy to her shoulders, of Nelson as an infant propped with his favorite teddy bear (that had one eye) on a stagy sunbathed window seat of this very house, and then Nelson as himself a highschool senior, his hair almost as long as Janice’s, but less brushed, looking greasy, and his grin for the cameraman lopsided, halfdefiant. In a gold frame broader than his daughter and grandson got, Fred Springer, misty-eyed and wrinkle-free courtesy of the portrait studio’s darkroom magic, stares in studied three-quarters profile at whatever it is the dead see.

  Charlie asks the table, “Did you see where Nixon gave a big party at San Clemente in honor of the moon-landing anniversary? They should keep that guy around forever, as an example of what sheer gall can do.”

  “He did some good things,” Ma Springer says, in that voice of hers that shows hurt, tight and dried-out, somehow. Harry is sensitive to it after all these years.

  He tries to help her, to apologize if he had been rough with her over who ran the company. “He opened up China,” he says.

  “And what a can of worms that’s turned out to be,” Stavros says. “At least all those years they were hating our guts they didn’t cost us a nickel. This party of his wasn’t cheap either. Everybody was there - Red Skelton, Buzz Aldrin.”

  “You know I think it broke Fred’s heart,” Ma Springer pronounces. “Watergate. He followed it right to the end, when he could hardly lift his head from the pillows, and he used to say to me, ‘Bessie, there’s never been a President who hasn’t done worse. They just have it in for him because he isn’t a glamour boy. If that had been Roosevelt or one of the Kennedys,’ he’d say, `you would never have heard “boo” about Watergate.’ He believed it, too.

  Harry glances at the gold-framed photograph and imagines it nodded. “I believe it,” he says. “Old man Springer never steered me wrong.” Bessie glances at him to see if this is sarcasm. He keeps his face motionless as a photograph.

  “Speaking of Kennedys,” Charlie puts in - he really is talking too much, on that one Kool-Aid - “the papers are sure giving Chappaquiddick another go-around. You wonder, how much more can they say about a guy on his way to neck who drives off a bridge instead?”

  Bessie may have had a touch of sherry, too, for she is working herself up to tears. “Fred,” she says, “would never settle on its being that simple. `Look at the result,’ he said to me more than once. `Look at the result, and work backwards from that.”’ Her berry-dark eyes challenge them to do so, mysteriously. “What was the result?” This seems to be in her own voice. “The result was, a poor girl from up in the coal regions was killed.”

  “Oh Mother,” Janice says. “Daddy just had it in for Democrats. I loved him dearly, but he was absolutely hipped on that.”

  Charlie says, “I don’t know, Jan. The worst things I ever heard your father say about Roosevelt was that he tricked us into war and died with his mistress, and it turns out both are true.” He looks in the candlelight after saying this like a cardsharp who has snapped down an ace. “And what they tell us now about how Jack Kennedy carried on in the White House with racketeers’ molls and girls right off the street Fred Springer in his wildest dreams would never have come up with.” Another ace. He looks, Harry thinks, like old man Springer in a way: that hollow-templed, wellcombed look. Even the little dabs of eyebrows sticking out like toy artillery.

  Harry says, “I never understood what was so bad about Chappaquiddick. He tried to get her out.” Water, flames, the tongues of God: a man is helpless.

  �
�What was bad about it,” Bessie says, “was he put her in.”

  “What do you think about all this, Melanie?” Harry asks, playing cozy to get Charlie’s goat. “Which party do you back?”

  “Oh the parties,” she exclaims in a trance. “I think they’re both evil.” Ev-il: a word in the air. “But on Chappaquiddick a friend of mine spends every summer on the island and she says she wonders why more people don’t drive off that bridge, there are no guard rails or anything. This is lovely soup,” she adds to Janice.

  “That spinach soup the other day was terrific,” Charlie tells Melanie. “Maybe a little heavy on the nutmeg.”

  Janice has been smoking a cigarette and listening for a car door to slam. “Harry, could you help me clear? You might want to carve in the kitchen.”

  The kitchen is suffused with the strong, repugnant smell of roasting lamb. Harry doesn’t like to be reminded that these are living things, with eyes and hearts, that we eat; he likes salted nuts, hamburger, Chinese food, mince pie. “You know I can’t carve lamb,” he says. “Nobody can. You’re just having it because you think it’s what Greeks eat, showing off for your old lover boy.”

  She hands him the carving set with the bumpy bone handles. “You’ve done it a hundred times. Just cut parallel slices perpendicular to the bone.”

  “Sounds easy. You do it if it’s so fucking easy.” He is thinking, stabbing someone is probably harder than the movies make it look, cutting underdone meat there’s plenty of resistance, rubbery and tough. He’d rather hit her on the head with a rock, if it came to that, or that green glass egg Ma has as a knickknack in the living room.

  “Listen,” Janice hisses. A car door has slammed on the street. Footsteps pound on a porch, their porch, and the reluctant front door pops open with a bang. A chorus of voices around the table greet Nelson. But he keeps coming, searching for his parents, and finds them in the kitchen. “Nelson,” Janice says. “We were getting worried.”

  The boy is panting, not with exertion but the shallow-lunged panting of fear. He looks small but muscular in his grape-colored tie-dyed T-shirt: a burglar dressed to shinny in a window. But caught, here, in the bright kitchen light. He avoids looking Harry in the eye. “Dad. There’s been a bit of a mishap.”

  “The car. I knew it.”

  “Yeah. The Toyota got a scrape.”

  “My Corona. Whaddeya mean, a scrape?”

  “Nobody was hurt, don’t get carried away.”

  “Any other car involved?”

  “No, so don’t worry, nobody’s going to sue.” The assurance is contemptuous.

  “Don’t get smart with me.”

  “O.K., O.K., Jesus.”

  “You drove it home?”

  The boy nods.

  Harry hands the knife back to Janice and leaves the kitchen to address the candlelit group left at the table - Ma at the head, Melanie bright-eyed next to her, Charlie on Melanie’s other side, his square cufflink reflecting a bit of flame. “Everybody keep calm. Just a mishap, Nelson says. Charlie, you want to come carve some lamb for me? I got to look at this.”

  He wants to put his hands on the boy, whether to give him a push or comfort he doesn’t know; the actual touch might demonstrate which, but Nelson stays just ahead of his father’s fingertips, dodging into the summer night. The streetlights have come on, and the Corona’s tomato color looks evil by the poisonous sodium glow - a hollow shade of black, its metallic lustre leeched away. Nelson in his haste has parked it illegally, the driver’s side along the curb. Harry says, “This side looks fine.”

  “It’s the other side, Dad.” Nelson explains: “See Billy and I were coming back from Allenville where his girlfriend lives by this windy back road and because I knew I was getting late for supper I may have been going a little fast, I don’t know, you can’t go too’ fast on those back roads anyway, they wind too much. And this woodchuck or whatever it was comes out in front of me and in trying to avoid it I get off the road a little and the back end slides into this telephone pole. It happened so fast, I couldn’t believe it.”

  Rabbit has moved to the other side and by lurid light views the damage. The scrape had begun in the middle of the rear door and deepened over the little gas-cap door; by the time the pole reached the tail signal and the small rectangular sidelight, it had no trouble ripping them right out, the translucent plastic torn and shed like Christmas wrapping, and inches of pretty color-coded wiring exposed. The urethane bumper, so black and mat and trim, that gave Harry a small sensuous sensation whenever he touched the car home against the concrete parking-space divider at the place on the lot stencilled ANGSTROM, was pulled out from the frame. The dent even carried up into the liftback door, which would never seat exactly right again.

  Nelson is chattering, “Billy knows this kid who works in a body shop over near the bridge to West Brewer and he says you should get some real expensive rip-offplace to do the estimate and then when you get the check from the insurance company give it to him and he can do it for less. That way there’ll be a profit everybody can split.”

  “A profit,” Harry repeats numbly.

  Nails or rivets in the pole have left parallel longitudinal gashes the length of the impact depression. The chrome-and-rubber stripping has been wrenched loose at an angle, and behind the wheel socket on this side - hooded with a slightly protruding flare like an eyebrow, one of the many snug Japanese details he has cherished - a segment of side strip has vanished entirely, leaving a chorus of tiny holes. Even the many-ribbed hubcap is dented and besmirched. He feels his own side has taken a wound. He feels he is witnessing in evil light a crime in which he has collaborated.

  “Oh come on, Dad,” Nelson is saying. “Don’t make such a big deal of it. It’ll cost the insurance company, not you, to get it fixed, and anyway you can get a new one for almost nothing, don’t they give you a terrific discount?”

  “Terrific,” Rabbit says. “You just went out and smashed it up. My Corona.”

  “I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, shit. What do you want me to do, piss blood? Get down on my knees and cry?”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Dad, it’s just a thing; you’re looking like you lost your best friend.”

  A breeze, too high to touch them, ruffles the treetops and makes the streetlight shudder on the deformed metal. Harry sighs. “Well. How’d the woodchuck do?”

  II

  ONCE that first weekend of riots and rumors is over, the summer isn’t so bad; the gas lines never get so long again. Stavros says the oil companies have the price hike they wanted for now, and the government has told them to cool it or face an excess profits tax. Melanie says the world will turn to the bicycle, as Red China has already done; she has bought herself a twelve-speed Fuji with her waitress’s wages, and on fair days pedals around the mountain and down, her chestnut curls flying, through Cityview Park into Brewer. Toward the end of July comes a week of record heat; the papers are full of thermal statistics and fuzzy photographs of the time at the turn of the century when the trolley tracks warped in Weiser Square, it was so hot. Such heat presses out from within, against our clothes; we want to break out, to find another self beside the sea or in the mountains. Not until August will Harry and Janice go to the Poconos, where the Springers have a cottage they rent to other people for July. All over Brewer, air-conditioners drip onto patios and into alleyways.

  On an afternoon of such hot weather, with his Corona still having bodywork done, Harry borrows a Caprice trade-in from the lot and drives southwest toward Galilee. On curving roads he passes houses of sandstone, fields of corn, a cement factory, a billboard pointing to a natural cave (didn’t natural caves go out of style a while ago?), and another billboard with a great cutout of a bearded Amishman advertising “Authentic Dutch Smorgasbord” Galilee is what they call a string town, a hilly row of house with a feed store at one end and a tractor agency at the other. In the middle stands an old wooden inn with a deep porch all along the second story and a renovated r
estaurant on the first with a window full of credit card stickers to catch the busloads of tourists that come up from Baltimore, blacks most of them, God knows what they hope to see out here in the sticks. A knot of young locals is hanging around in front of the Rexall’s, you never used to see that in farm country, they’d be too busy with the chores. There is an old stone trough, a black-lacquered row of hitching posts, a glossy new bank, a traffic island with a monument Harry cannot make out the meaning of, and a small brick post office with its bright silver letters GALILEE up a side street that in a block dead-ends at the edge of a field. The woman in the post office tells Harry where the Nunemacher farm is, along R. D. 2. By the landmarks she gives him - a vegetable stand, a pond rimmed with willows, a double silo close to the road - he feels his way through the tummocks and swales of red earth crowded with shimmering green growth, merciless vegetation that allows not even the crusty eroded road embankments to rest barren but makes them bear tufts and mats of vetch and honeysuckle vines and fills the stagnant hot air with the haze of exhaled vapor. The Caprice windows are wide open and the Brewer disco station fades and returns in twists of static as the land and electrical wires obtrude. NUNEMACHER is a faded name on a battered tin mailbox. The house and barn are well back from the road, down a long dirt lane, brown stones buried in pink dust.