by John Updike
“Hey come on over,” he begs. “We miss you. I played pretty good, the second nine, once I worked a g-and-t out of my system. With our handicap strokes Webb figures our best ball to be a sixty-one, which ought to be good for an alligator shirt at least. You should have seen my sand shot on the third.”
“I’d like to come over,” Janice says, her voice sounding so careful and far away the idea crosses his mind she’s being held for ransom and so must be careful what she says, “but I can’t. There’s somebody here.”
“Who?”
“Somebody you haven’t met yet.”
“Important?”
She laughs. “I believe so.”
“Why are you being so fucking mysterious?”
“Harry, just come.”
“But there’s going to be the banquet, and the prizes. I can’t desert my foursome.”
“If you won any prize Webb can give it to you later. I can’t keep talking forever.”
“This better be good,” he warns her, hanging up. What can it be? Another accident for Nelson, the police have come for him. The kid has a criminal slouch. Harry goes back to the pool and tells the others, “Crazy Janice says I have to come home but she won’t say why.”
The women’s faces show concern but the men are on their second round of drinks now and feeling no pain. “Hey Harry,” Buddy Inglefinger shouts. “Before you go, here’s one you might not have heard up in the Poconos. Why did the Russian ballet dancer defect to the U.S.A.?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because Communism wasn’t Goodunov.”
The obliging laughter of the three women, as they all gaze upward in the reddening slant sun toward Harry’s face, is like some fruit, three different ripenesses on the same branch, still hanging there when he turns his back. Cindy has put on over her bare shoulders a peach-colored silken shirt and in the V of its throat her little gold cross twinkles; he hadn’t noticed it when she was nearly naked. He changes out of his golf shoes in the locker room and instead of showering just takes the hanger holding the sports coat and slacks he was going to put on for the banquet out to the parking lot on his arm. The Corona still doesn’t feel right. He hears on the radio the Phillies have eked out a victory in Atlanta, 2-1. The gang never mentions the Phillies anymore, they’re in fifth place, out of it. Get out of it in this society and you’re as good as dead, an embarrassment. Not Goodunov. Keep Our City Clean. The radio announcer is not that wiseass woman but a young man with a voice like bubbles of fat in water, every syllable. Hurricane David has already left six hundred dead in the Caribbean region, he says, and, finally, life may exist, some scientists are coming to believe, on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Harry passes the old box factory and enjoys yet once again the long view of the town of Mt. Judge you get coming in the Route 422 way. The row houses ascending the slope of the mountain like stairs, their windows golden with setting sun like holes in a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Suppose he had been born on Titan instead, how different would he feel down deep? He thinks of those cindery lunar surfaces, the chunky men in their white suits hopping, the footprints they left in the dust there forever. He remembers how when they’d come visiting the Springers or after the fire the first years they lived here he and Nelson used to watch Lost in Space together on the gray sofa, how they’d squirm and groan when Doctor Smith did some dumb imperilling egotistical thing, and only that manly-voiced robot and the little boy Will with enough sense to pull the thing off, the spaceship fighting free of man-eating plants or whatever the week’s villains were. He wonders now if Nelson saw himself as Will, saving the grownups from themselves, and he wonders where the boy actor is now, what he is, Rabbit hopes not a junkie the way so many of these child stars seem to end up. That was good solid space they were lost in, not this soupy psychedelic space they have on TV now, all tricks with music and lights, tricks he associates with the movie 2001, an unpleasant association since that was the time Janice ran off with Charlie and all hell broke loose on the home front. The problem is, even if there is a Heaven how can there be one we can stand forever? On Earth, when you look up from being bored, things have changed, you’re that much closer to the grave, and that’s exciting. Imagine climbing up and up into that great tree of night sky. Dizzying. Terrible. Rabbit didn’t even like to get too high into these little Norway maples around town, though with the other kids as witnesses he pushed himself up, gripping tighter and tighter as the branches got smaller. From a certain angle the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it’s yours and nobody else’s. A loop is rising in his chest as in a rope when you keep twisting. Whatever can have happened bad enough to make Janice miss the fourball banquet?
He accelerates along Jackson as the streetlights come on, earlier each day now. Janice’s Mustang is out along the curb with the top down, she must have gone somewhere after church, she wouldn’t take Bessie to church with the top down. Inside the front door, a wealth of duffel bags and suitcases has been deposited in the living room as by a small army. In the kitchen there is laughter and light. The party comes to meet him halfway, in the shadowy no-man’s land between the staircase and the breakfront. Ma Springer and Janice are overtopped by a new female, taller, with a smoothly parted head of hair from which the kitchen light strikes an arc of carrot color, where Melanie’s hair would have caught in its curls a straggly halo. He had grown used to Melanie. It is Nelson who speaks. “Dad, this here is Pru,” the “this here” a little scared joke.
“Nelson’s fiancée,” Janice amplifies in a voice tense but plump, firmly making the best of it.
“Is that a fact?” Harry hears himself ask. The young woman saunters forward, a slender slouching shape, and he takes the bony hand she extends. In the lingering daylight that the dining-room windows admit she stands plain, a young redhead past girlhood, with amts too long and hips too wide for the boniness of her face, an awkward beauty, her body helplessly not only hers but somehow theirs, overcommitted, with a look about her of wry, slightly twisted resignation, of having been battered by life young as she is, but the battering having not yet reached her eyes, which are clear green, though guarded. As she entrusts her hand to his her smile is a fraction slow, as if inside she must make certain there is something to smile at, but then comes forth eagerly enough, with a crimp in one comer. She wears a baggy brown sweater and the new looser style of jeans, bleach spattered across the thighs. Her hair, swept back behind her ears to form a single fanning sheaf down her back, looks ironed, it is so straight, and dyed, it is so vivid a pallid red.
“I wouldn’t say fiancée exactly,” Pru says, directly to Harry. “There’s no ring, look.” She holds up a naked trembling hand.
Harry in his need to get a fix on this new creature glances from Nelson right through Janice, whom he can grill later in bed, to Ma Springer. Her mouth is clamped shut; if you tapped her she’d ring like a gong, rigid in her purple church dress. Nelson’s mouth is ajar. He is a sick man fascinated by the ministration of doctors around him, his illness at last confessed and laid open to cure. In Pru’s presence he looks years younger than when Melanie was about, a nervous toughness melted all away. It occurs to Harry that this girl is older than the boy, and another, deeper, instinctive revelation pounds in upon him even as he hears himself saying, as humorous paternal host, “Well in any case it’s nice to meet you, Pru. Any friend of Nelson’s, we put up with around here.” This maybe falls flat, so he adds, “I bet you’re the girl’s been sending all those letters.”
Her eyes glance down, the demure plane of her cheek reddened as if he’s slapped her. “Too many I suppose,” she says.
“No bother to me,” he assures her, “I’m not the mailman. He recently upped and died, by the way. Not your fault, though.”
She lifts her eyes, a flourishing green.
Pru is pregnant. One of the few advantages of not having been born yesterday is that a man acquires, like a notion of tomorrow’s weather from the taste of the evening air, some sense
of the opposite sex’s physiology, its climate. She has less waist than a woman so young should, and that uncanny green clarity of her eyes and a soft slowed something in her motions as she turns away from Harry’s joke to take a cue from Nelson bespeak a burden beyond disturbing, a swell beneath the waves. In her third or fourth month, Rabbit guesses. And with this guess a backwards roll of light illumines the months past. And the walls of this house, papered with patterns sunk into them like stains, change meaning, containing this seed between them. The fuzzy gray sofa and the chair that matches and the Barcalounger and the TV set (an Admiral) and Ma Springer’s pompous lamps of painted porcelain and tarnished brass and the old framed watercolors sunk to the tint of dust from never being looked at, the table runners Ma once crocheted and her collection of brittle bright knickknacks stored on treble corner shelves nicked and sanded to suggest antique wood but stemming from an era of basement carpentry in Fred Springer’s long married life: all these souvenirs of the dead bristle with new point, with fresh mission, if as Harry imagines this intruder’s secret is a child to come.
He feels swollen. His guess has been like a fist into him. As was not the case with Melanie he feels kinship with this girl, is touched by her, turned on: he wants to be giving her this baby.
In bed he asks Janice, “How long have you known?”
“Oh,” she says, “about a month. Melanie let some of the cat out of the bag and then I confronted Nelson with it. He was relieved to talk, he cried even. He just didn’t want you to know.”
“Why not?” He is hurt. He is the boy’s father.
Janice hesitates. “I don’t know, I guess he was afraid you’d be mad. Or laugh at him.”
“Why would I laugh at him? The same thing happened to me.”
“He doesn’t know that, Harry.”
“How could he not? His birthday keeps coming around seven months after our anniversary.”
“Well, yes.” In her impatience she sounds much like her mother, setting the heel of her voice into each word. The bed creaks as she flounces in emphasis. “Children don’t want to know these things, and by the time they’re old enough to care it’s all so long ago.”
“When did he knock the girl up, does he remember that much?”
“Weren’t you funny, guessing so quickly she was in a family way? We weren’t going to tell you for a while.”
“Thanks. It was the first thing that hit me. That baggy sweater. That, and that she’s taller than Nelson.”
“Harry, she isn’t. He’s an inch taller, he’s told me himself, it’s just that his posture is so poor.”
“And how much older is she? You can see she’s older.”
“Well, a year or less. She was a secretary in the Registrar’s office -“
“Yeah and why wasn’t he fucking another student? What does he have to get mixed up in the secretarial pool for?”
“Harry, you should talk to them if you want to know every in and out ofit all. You know though how he used to say how phony these college girls were, he never felt comfortable in that atmosphere. He’s from business people on my side and working people on yours and there hasn’t been much college in his background.”
“Or in his future from the way it looks.”
“It’s not such a bad thing the girl can do a job. You heard her say at supper she’d like him to go back to Kent and finish, and she could take in typing in their apartment.”
“Yeah and I heard the little snot say he wanted no part of it.”
“You won’t get him to go back by shouting at him.”
“I didn’t shout.”
“You got a look on your face.”
“Well, Jesus. Because the kid gets a girl pregnant he thinks he’s entitled to run Springer Motors.”
“Harry, he doesn’t want to run it, he just wants a place in it.” “You can’t give him a place without taking a place from somebody else.”
“Mother and I think he should have a place,” Janice says, so definitely it seems her mother has spoken, out of the dark air of this bedroom where the old lady’s presence was always felt as a rumble of television or a series of snores coming through the wall.
He reverts to his question, “When did he get her pregnant?”
“Oh, when these things happen, in the spring. She missed her first period in May, but they waited till they got to Colorado to do the urine test. It was positive and Pru told him she wasn’t going to get an abortion, she didn’t believe in them and too many of her friends had had their insides messed up.”
“In this day and age, she said all that.”
“Also I believe there’s Catholicism in her background, on her mother’s side.”
“Still, she looks like she has some common sense.”
“Maybe it was common sense talking. If she goes ahead and has the baby then Nelson has to do something.”
“Poor little devil. How come she got pregnant in the first place? Don’t they all have the Pill, and loops, and God knows what else now? I was reading in Consumer Reports about these temporary polyurethane tube ties.”
“Some of these new things are getting a bad name in the papers. They give you cancer.”
“Not at her age they wouldn’t. So then she sat out there in the Rocky Mountains hatching this thing while Melanie kept him on a short leash around here.”
Janice is growing sleepy, whereas Harry fears he will be awake forever, with this big redhead out of the blue across the hall. Ma Springer had made it clear she expected Pru to sleep in Melanie’s old room and had stomped upstairs to watch The Jeffersons. The old crow had just sat there pretty silent all evening, looking like a boiler with too. much pressure inside. She plays her cards tight. Harry nudges Janice’s sleepy soft side to get her talking again.
She says, “Melanie said Nelson became very hard to manage, once the test came back positive - running around with a bad crowd out there, making Pru take up hang gliding. Then when he saw she wouldn’t change her mind all he wanted to do was run back here. They couldn’t talk him out of it, he went and quit this good job he had with a man building condominiums. Melanie I guess had some reasons of her own to get away so she invited herself along. Nelson didn’t want her to but I guess the alternative was Pru letting her parents and us know what the situation was and instead of that he begged for time, trying to get some kind of nest ready for her here and maybe still hoping it would all go away, I don’t know.”
“Poor little Nelson,” Harry says. Sorrow for the child bleeds upward to the ceiling with its blotches of streetlight shuffling through the beech. “This has been Hell for him.”
“Well Melanie’s theory was not Hell enough; she didn’t like the way he kept going out with Billy Fosnacht and his crowd instead of facing us with the facts and telling us why he really wanted to go to work at the lot.”
Harry sighs. “So when’s the wedding?”
“As soon as it can be arranged. I mean, it’s her fifth month. Even you spotted it.”
Even you, he resents this, but doesn’t want to tell Janice of the instinctive bond he has with this girl. Pru is like his mother, awkward and bony, with big hands, but less plain.
“One of the reasons I took Mother to church this morning was so we could have a word with Reverend Campbell.”
“That fag? Lordy-O.”
“Harry you know nothing about him. He’s been uncommonly sweet to Mother and he’s really done a lot for the parish.”
“The little boys’ choir especially, I bet.”
“You are so un-open. Mother with all her limitations is more open than you.” She turns her face away and says into her pillow, “Harry, I’m very tired. All this upsets me too. Was there anything else you wanted to ask?”
He asks, “Does he love the girl, do you think?”
“You’ve seen her. She’s striking.”
“I can see that, but can Nelson? You know they say history repeats but it never does, exactly. When we got married everybody was doing it but now when these kids
hang back and just live together it must be a bigger deal. I mean, marriage must be more frightening.”
Janice turns her head back again and offers, “I think it’s good, that she’s a little older.”
“Why?”
“Well, Nelson needs steadying.”
“A girl who gets herself knocked up and then pulls this rightto-life act isn’t my idea of steady. What kind of parents does she come from anyway?”
“They’re just average people in Ohio. I think the father works as a steamfitter.”
“A-ha,” he says. “Blue collar. She’s not marrying Nelson, she’s marrying Springer Motors.”
“Just like you did,” Janice says.
He should resent this but he likes it, her new sense of herself as a prize. He lays his hand in that soft place where her waist dips. “Listen,” he says, “when I married you you were selling salted nuts at Kroll’s and my parents thought your dad was a shifty character who was going to wind up in jail.”
