by John Updike
In his memory of these outings they always seem to be climbing toward the ocean as toward a huge blue mountain. Sometimes at night before falling to sleep he hears his mother say with a hiss, “Hassy.” He sees now that he is rich that these were the outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.
So as a stranger to summer places Rabbit had come to this cottage Fred Springer had bought rather late in his life, after the Toyota franchise had made him more than a used-car dealer, after his one child was married and grown. Harry and Janice used to come for just visits of a week. The space was too small, the tensions would begin to rub through, with Nelson bored and bugeaten after the first day or so. You can only go visit Bushkill Falls so often, climbing up and down those steps admiring the ferns.
When old man Springer died Harry became the man of the place and at last understood that Nature isn’t just something that pushes up through the sidewalk cracks and keeps the farmers trapped in the sticks but is an elixir, a luxury that can be bought and fenced off and kept pure for the more fortunate, in an impure age. Not that this five-room, dark-shingled cottage, which Ma Springer rents for all but these three weeks of August, taking the Labor Day gravy and renting into hunting season if she can, was in any league with the gabled estates and lodges and resort hotels that are all around them tumbling down or being broken up by developers; but it has two acres ofwoods behind it and a dock and rowboat of its own, and holds out to Harry the possibility that life can be lived selectively, as one chooses from a menu, or picks a polished fruit from a bowl. Here in the Poconos food, exercise, and sleep, no longer squeezed into the margins of the day, swell to a sumptuous importance. The smell of fresh coffee drifting to greet him as he walks still wet back from his swim; the kiss of morning fog through a rusted window screen; the sight of Janice with bare brown feet wearing the same tennis shorts and kid’s black T-shirt day after day; the blue jay switching stances on the porch rail; the smooth rose-veined rock holding shut the upstairs door that has lost its latch; the very texture of root-riddled mud and reeds where the fresh cedar dock pilings have been driven: he feels love for each phenomenon and not for the first time in his life seeks to bring himself into harmony with the intertwining simplicities that uphold him, that were woven into him at birth. There must be a good way to live.
He eases off on the gin and snacks. He swims and listens to Ma Springer reminisce over the morning coffee and goes down into the village with Janice each day to shop. At night they play threehanded pinochle by the harsh light of bridge lamps, the light feeling harsh because when he had first come to this place they lit kerosene lamps, with fragile interior cones of glowing ash, and went to bed soon after dark, the crickets throbbing. He does not like to fish, nor does he much like playing tennis with Janice against one of the other couples that have access to the lake community’s shared court, an old rectangle of clay in the pines, the edges coated with brown needles and the chicken-wire fencing drooping like wet wash. Janice plays every day at the Flying Eagle, and beside her efficient grace he feels cumbersome and out of it. The ball hops at him with a speed his racket cannot match. Her black T-shirt has on it in faded 3-D script the word Phillies; it is a shirt he bought Nelson on one of their excursions to Veterans Stadium, and the boy left it behind when he went away to Kent, and Janice in her middle-aged friskiness found it and made it hers. Typical of the way things have gone, that the kid’s growing up should seem a threat and a tragedy to him and to her an excuse to steal a T-shirt. Not that it would fit Nelson anymore. It fits her fine; he feels her beside him in the corner of his eye nimbler and freer than he in her swarthy thick-middled old girl’s shape with her short hair and bouncing bangs. The ball arcs back steadily from her racket while he hits it too hard or else, trying to “stroke” it like she tells him, pops it weakly into the net. “Harry, don’t try to steer it,” she says. “Keep your knees bent. Point your hip toward the net.” She has had a lot of lessons. The decade past has taught her more than it has taught him.
What has he done, he wonders as he waits to receive the serve, with this life of his more than half over? He was a good boy to his mother and then a good boy to the crowds at the basketball games, a good boy to Tothero his old coach, who saw in Rabbit something special. And Ruth saw in him something special too, though she saw it winking out. For a while Harry had kicked against death, then he gave in and went to work. Now the dead are so many he feels for the living around him the camaraderie of survivors. He loves these people with him, penned in among the lines of the tennis court. Ed and Loretta: he’s an electrical contractor from Easton specializing in computer installations. Harry loves the treetops above their heads, and the August blue above these. What does he know? He never reads a book, just the newspaper to have something to say to people, and then mostly human interest stories, like where the Shah is heading next and how sick he really is, and that Baltimore doctor. He loves Nature, though he can name almost nothing in it. Are these pines, or spruces, or firs? He loves money, though he doesn’t understand how it flows to him, or how it leaks away. He loves men, uncomplaining with their pot bellies and cross-hatched red necks, embarrassed for what to talk about when the game is over, whatever the game is. What a threadbare thing we make of life! Yet what a marvellous thing the mind is, they can’t make a machine like it, though some of these computers Ed was telling about fill rooms; and the body can do a thousand things there isn’t a factory in the world can duplicate the motion. He used to love screwing, though more and more he’s willing just to think about it and let the younger people mess with it, meeting in their bars and cars, amazing how many of them there are now, just walking down the street or getting into a movie line he often seems to be the oldest guy in sight. At night when he’s with Janice, she needing a touch of cock to lead her into sleep, he tries to picture what will turn him on, and he’s running out of pictures; the last that works is of a woman on all fours being fucked by one man while she blows another. And it’s not clear in the picture if Harry is doing the fucking or is the man being blown, he is looking at all three from the outside, as if up on a screen at one of these movie theaters on upper Weiser with titles like Harem Girls and All the Way, and the woman’s sensations seem nearer to him than the man’s, the prick in your mouth like a small wet zucchini, plus the other elsewhere, in and out, in and out, a kind of penance at your root. Sometimes he prays a few words at night but a stony truce seems to prevail between himself and God.
He begins to run. In the woods, along the old logging roads and bridle trails, he ponderously speeds in tennis shoes first, orange with clay dust, and then in gold-and-blue Nikes bought at a sporting goods shop in Stroudsburg especially for this, running shoes with tipped-up soles at toe and heel, soles whose resilient circlets like flattened cleats lift him powerfully as, growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. At first he feels his weight like some murderous burden swaddled about his heart and lungs and his thigh muscles ache in the morning so that he staggers in leaving the bed and laughs aloud in surprise. But as over the days, running after supper in the cool of the early evening while all the light has not ebbed from the woods, he accustoms his body to this new demand, his legs tighten, his weight seems less, his chest holds more air, the twigs fly past his ears as if winged on their own, and he extends the distance he jogs, eventually managing the mile and a half to the waist of the hourglass, where the gates of an old estate bar the way. Carbon Castle the locals call the estate, built by a coal baron from Scranton and now little utilized by his scattered and dwindled descendants, the swimming pool drained, the tennis courts overgrown, energy gone. The glass eyes of the stuffed deer heads in the hunting lodge stare through cobwebs; the
great main house with its precipitous slate roofs and diamond-paned windows is boarded up, though ten years ago one of the grandsons tried to ‘make of it a commune, the villagers say. The young people vandalized the place, the story runs, and sold off everything they could move, including the two bronze brontosaurs that guarded the main entrance, emblems of the Coal Age. The heavy iron gates to Carbon Castle are double-chained and padlocked; Rabbit touches the forbidding metal, takes a breath for a still second while the world feels still to be rushing on, pouring through the tremble of his legs, then turns and jogs back, casting his mind wide, so as to become unconscious of his heaving body. There is along the way an open space, once a meadow, now spiked with cedars and tassle-headed weeds, where swallows dip and careen, snapping up insects revived in the evening damp. Like these swallows Rabbit, the blue and gold of his new shoes flickering, skims, above the earth, above the dead. The dead stare upwards. Mom and Pop are lying together again as for so many years on that sway-backed bed they’d bought second-hand during the Depression and never got around to replacing though it squeaked like a tricycle left out in the rain and was so short Pop’s feet stuck out of the covers. Paperywhite feet that got mottled and marbled with veins finally: if he’d ever have exercised he might have lived longer. Tothero down there is all eyes, eyes big as saucers staring out of his lopsided head while his swollen tongue hunts for a word. Fred Springer, who put Harry where he is, eggs him on, hunched over and grimacing like a man with a poker hand so good it hurts. Skeeter, who that newspaper clipping claimed had fired upon the Philly cops first even though there were twenty of them in the yard and hallways and only some pregnant mothers and children on the commune premises, Skeeter black as the earth turns his face away. The meadow ends and Harry enters a tunnel, getting dark now, the needles a carpet, he makes no sound, Indians moved without sound through trees without end where a single twig snapping meant death, his legs in his fatigue cannot be exactly controlled but flail against the cushioned path like arms of a loose machine whose gears and joints have been bevelled by wear. Becky, a mere seed laid to rest, and Jill, a pale seedling held from the sun, hang in the earth, he imagines, like stars, and beyond them there are myriads, whole races like the Cambodians, that have drifted into death. He is treading on them all, they are resilient, they are cheering him on, his lungs are burning, his heart hurts, he is a membrane removed from the hosts below, their filaments caress his ankles, he loves the earth, he will never make their mistake and die.
The last hundred feet, up their path to the tilting front porch, Rabbit sprints. He opens the front screen door and feels the punky floorboards bounce under him. The milk-glass shades of the old kerosene lamps, increasingly valuable as antiques, tremble, like the panes in the breakfront back on Joseph street. Janice emerges barefoot from the kitchen and says, “Harry, you’re all red in the face.”
“I’m. All. Right.”
“Sit down. For heaven’s sakes. What are you training for?”
“The big bout,” he pants. “It feels great. To press against. Your own limitations.”
“You’re pressing too hard ifyou ask me. Mother and I thought -you got lost. We want to play pinochle.”
“I got to take. A shower. The trouble with running is. You get all sweaty.”
“I still don’t know what you’re trying to prove.” With that Phillies shirt on she looks like Nelson, before he needed to shave.
“It’s now or never,” he tells her, the blood of fantasy rushing through his brain. “There’s people out to get me. I can lie down now. Or fight.”
“Who’s out to get you?”
“You should know. You hatched him.”
The hot water here runs off a little electric unit and is scalding for a few minutes and then cools with lightning speed. Harry thinks, A good way to kill somebody would be to turn off the cold water while they’re in the shower. He dances out before the hot expires totally, admires the wet prints of his big feet on the bare pine floors of this attic-shaped upstairs, and thinks of his daughter, her feet in those cork-soled platforms. With her leggy pallor and calm round face she glows like a ghost but unlike the dead shares the skin of this planet with him, breathes air, immerses herself in water, moves from element to element, and grows. He goes into the bedroom he and Janice have here and dresses himself in Jockey shorts, an alligator shirt, and soft Levis all washed and tumble-dried at the laundromat behind the little Acme in the village. Each crisp item seems another tile of his well-being he is fitting into place. As he sits on the bed to put on fresh socks a red ray of late sun slices through a gap in the pines and falls knifelike across his toes, the orangish corns and the little hairs between the joints and the nails translucent like the thin sheets in furnace peepholes. There are feet that have done worse than his, on a lot ofwomen’s in summer sandals you notice how the little toes have been bent under by years of pointy high-heeled shoes, and the big toes pushed over so the joint sticks out like a broken bone; thank God since he is a man that has never had to happen to him. Nor to Cindy Murkett either, come to think of it: toes side by side like candies in a box. Suck. That lucky stiff Webb. Still. It’s good to be alive. Harry goes downstairs and adds the fourth element to his happiness; he lights a fire. Ma Springer, riding shrewdly with the times, has bought a new wood stove. Its bright black flue pipe fits snugly into the smudged old fireplace of ugly fieldstones. Old man Springer had installed baseboard electric heat when the cottage was connected for electricity, but his widow begrudges the expense of turning it on, even though by August the nights bring in a chill from the lake. The stove comes from Taiwan and is clean as a skillet, installed just this summer. Harry lays some rough sticks found around the cottage on top of a crumpled Sports page from the Philadelphia Bulletin and watches them catch, watches the words EAGLES READY ignite and blacken, the letters turning white on the crinkling ash; then he adds some crescentshaped scraps of planed fruitwood a local furniture-maker sells by the bushel outside his factory. This fire greets the dark as Janice and her mother, the dishes done, come in and get out the pinochle deck.
As she deals, Ma Springer says, the words parcelled out in rhythm with the cards, ` “Janice and I were saying, really we don’t think it’s so wise, for you to be running like this, at your age.”
“My age is the age to do it. Now’s the time to start taking care of myself, I’ve had a free ride up to now.”
“Mother says you should have your heart checked first,” Janice says. She has put on a sweater and jeans but her feet are still bare. He glances at them under the card table. Pretty straight, the toes are. Not too much damage, considering. Bony and brown and boyish. He likes it, that up here in the Poconos she looks so often like a boy. His playmate. As when a child he would stay over at a playmate’s house.
“Your father, you know,” Ma Springer is telling him, “was taken off by his heart.”
“He’d been suffering for years,” Harry says, “with a lot of things. He was seventy. He was ready to go.”
“You may not think so when your time comes.”
“I’ve been thinking about all the dead people I know lately,” Harry says, looking at his cards. Ace, ten, king, and jack of spades, but no queen. No pinochle either therefore. No runs. No four of anything. A raft of low clubs. “I pass.”
“Pass,” Janice says.
“I’ll take it at twenty-one,” Ma Springer sighs, and lays down a run in diamonds, and the nine, and a queen of spades to go with the jack.
“Wow,” Harry tells her. “What power.”
“Which dead, Harry?” Janice asks.
