Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  But he didn’t, he wound up in Heaven. Fred Springer made that long climb into the tree of the stars. Lost in space. Now Janice is following, his touch tipping her into sleep just as he feels below his waist a pulsing that might signal a successful erection. Nothing like the thought of fucking money. He doesn’t fuck her enough, his poor dumb moneybags. She has fallen asleep naked. When they were newly married and for years thereafter she wore cotton nighties that made her look like that old-fashioned Time to Retire ad, but sometime in the Seventies she began to come to bed in just her skin, her little still-tidy snake-smooth body brown wherever the tennis dress didn’t cover, with a fainter brown belly where that Op-pattern two-piece bathing suit exposed her middle. How quickly Cindy’s footprints dried on the flagstones behind her today! The strange thing is he can never exactly picture fucking her, it is like looking into the sun. He turns on his back, frustrated yet relieved to be alone in the quiet night where his mind can revolve all that is new. In middle age you are carrying the world in a sense and yet it seems out of control more than ever, the self that you had as a boy all scattered and distributed like those pieces of bread in the miracle. He had been struck in Kruppenbach’s Sunday School by the verse that tells of the clean-up, twelve baskets full of the fragments. Keep Your City Clean. He listens for the sound of footsteps slithering out of Melanie’s - no, Pru’s -room, she’d come a long way today and had met a lot of new faces, what a hard thing for her this evening must have been. While Ma and Janice had scraped together supper, another miracle of sorts, the girl had sat there in the bamboo basket chair brought in from the porch and they all eased around her like cars easing past an accident on the highway. Harry could hardly take his eyes from this grown woman sitting there so demure and alien and perceptibly misshapen. She breathed that air he’d forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days ofwork and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces ofbroken muffler. Rabbit remembered such beauty, seeing it caught here in Pru, in her long downy arms and skinny bangled wrists and the shining casual fall of her hair, caught as a stick snags the flow of a stream with a dimpled swirl. Janice sighs in her sleep. A car swishes by, the radio trailing disco through the open window. Labor Day Eve, the end of something. He feels the house swell beneath him, invading presences crowding the downstairs, the dead awakened. Skeeter, Pop, Mom, Mr. Abendroth. The photograph of Fred Springer fading on the sideboard fills with the flush of hectic color Fred carried on his cheeks and where the bridge of his nose pressed. Harry buries his mind in the girls of Mt. Judge High as they were in the Forties, the fuzzy sweaters and dimestore pearls, the white blouses that let the beige shadow of the bra show through, the skirts, always skirts, long as gowns when the New Look was new, swinging in the locker-lined halls, and then out along the pipe rail that guarded the long cement wells that let light into the basement windows of the shop and home ec. and music rooms, the long skirts in rows, the saddle shoes and short white socks in rows, the girls exhaling winter breath like cigarette smoke, their pea jackets, nobody wore parkas then, the dark lipstick of those girls, looking all like Rita Hayworth in the old yearbooks. The teasing of their skirts, open above their socks, come find me if you can, the wild fact of pubic hair, the thighs timidly parted in the narrow space of cars, the damp strip of underpants, Mary Ann his first girl, her underpants down around her saddle shoes like an animal trap, the motor running to keep the heater on in Pop’s new blue Plymouth, that they let him borrow one night a week in spite of all Mim’s complaining and sarcasm. Mim a flat-chested brat until about seventeen when she began to have her own secrets. Between Mary Ann’s legs a locker-room humidity and flesh smell turned delicate, entrusted to him. Married another while he was in the Army. Invited another into that secret space of hers, he couldn’t believe it. Lost days, buried at the back of his brain, deep inside, gray cells of which millions die every day he has read somewhere, taking his life with them into blackout, his only life, trillions of electric bits they say, makes even the biggest computer look sick: having found and entered again that space he notices his prick has stayed hard and grown harder, the process there all along, little sacs of blood waiting for the right deep part of the brain to come alive again. Left-handedly, on his back so as not to disturb Janice, he masturbates, remembering Ruth. Her room on Summer. The first night, him having run, all that sad craziness with dead Tothero, then the privacy of this room. This island, their four walls, her room. Her fat white body out of her clothes and her poking fun of his jockey underpants. Her arms seemed thin, thin, pulling him down and rising above him, one long underbelly erect in light.

  Hey.

  Hey.

  You’re pretty.

  Come on. Work.

  He shoves up and comes, the ceiling close above him, his body feeling curved as if tied to a globe that is growing, growing as his seed bucks up against the sheet. More intense than pumping down into darkness. Weird behavior for an old guy. He stealthily slides from the bed and gropes after a handkerchief in a drawer, not wanting the scrape to wake Janice or Ma Springer or this Pru, cunts all around him. Back in bed, having done his best, though it’s always queer where the wet is, maybe it doesn’t come out when you feel it does, he composes himself for sleep by thinking of his daughter, her pale round face floating in what appeared to be a milky serene disposition. A voice hisses, Hassy.

  The Reverend Archie Campbell comes visiting a few nights later, by appointment. He is short and slight, but his voice compensates by being deep and mellow; he enunciates with such casual smiling sonorousness that his sentences seem to keep travelling around a corner after they are pronounced. His head is too big for his body. His lashes are long and conspicuous and he sometimes shuts his eyes as if to display the tremor in his closed lids. He wears his backwards collar with a flimsy black buttonless shirt and a seersucker coat. When he smiles, thick lips like Carter’s reveal small even teeth, like seeds in a row, stained by nicotine.

  Ma Springer offers him a cup of coffee but he says, “Dear me, no thank you, Bessie. This is my third call this evening and any more caffeine intake will positively give me the shakes.” The sentence travels around a corner and disappears up Joseph Street.

  Harry says to him, “A real drink then, Reverend. Scotch? A g-and-t? It’s still summer officially.”

  Campbell glances around for their reaction - Nelson and Pru side by side on the gray sofa, Janice perched on a straight chair brought in from the dining room, Ma Springer uneasy on her legs, her offer of coffee spurned. “Well as a matter offact yes,” the minister drawls. “A touch of the sauce might be sheer bliss. Harry, do you have vodka, perchance?”

  Janice intervenes, “Way in the back of the corner cupboard, Harry, the bottle with the silver label.”

  He nods. “Anybody else?” He looks at Pru especially, since in these few days of living with them she’s shown herself to be no stranger to the sauce. She likes liqueurs; she and Nelson the other day brought back from a shopping expedition along with the beer sixpacks Kahlúa, Cointreau, and Amaretto di Saronno, chunky little bottles, there must have been between twenty and thirty dollars invested in that stuff. Also they have found in the corner cupboard some créme de menthe left over from a dinner party Harry and Janice gave for the Murketts and Harrisons last February and a little bright green gleam of it appears by Pru’s elbow at surprising times, even in the morning, as she and Ma watch Edge of Night. Nelson says he wouldn’t turn down a beer. Ma Springer says she’s going to have coffee anyway, she even has decaffeinated if the rector would prefer. But Archie sticks to his guns, with a perky little bow of thanks to her and a wink all around. The guy is something of a card, Rabbit can see that. Probably the best way to play it, at this late date A.D. They had figured him for the gray easy chair that matches the sofa, but he foxes them
by pulling out the lopsided old Syrian hassock from behind the combination lamp and table, where Ma keeps some of her knickknacks, and squatting down. Thus situated, the minister grins up at them all and, nimble as a monkey, fishes a pipe from his front coat pocket and stuffs its bowl with a brown forefinger.

  Janice gets up and goes with Harry into the kitchen while he makes the drinks. “That’s some little pastor you’ve got there,” he tells her softly.

  “Don’t be snide.”

  “What’s snide about that?”

  “Everything.” She pours herself some Campari in an orangejuice glass and without comment fills with créme de menthe one of the set of eight little cylindrical liqueur glasses that came as a set with a decanter she had bought at Kroll’s years ago, about the same time they joined the Flying Eagle. They hardly ever have used them. When Harry returns to the living room with Campbell’s vodka-and-tonic and Nelson’s beer and his own g-and-t Janice follows him in and sets this cylinder of gaudy green on the end table next to Pru’s elbow. Pru gives no sign of noticing.

  Reverend Campbell has persuaded Ma Springer to take the Barcalounger, where Harry had anticipated sitting, and to raise up its padded extension for her legs. “I must say,” she says, “that does wonders for the pressure in my ankles.”

  Thus laid back the old lady looks vulnerable, and absurdly . reduced in importance within the family circle. Janice, seeing her mother stretched out helpless, volunteers, “Mother, I’ll fetch you your coffee.”

  “And that plate of chocolate-chip cookies I set out. Though I don’t suppose anybody with liquor wants cookies too.”

  “I do, Mom-mom,” Nelson says. He wears a different expression since Pru arrived - the surly clotted look has relaxed into an expectant emptiness, a wide-eyed docility that Harry finds just as irritating.

  Since the minister declined to take the gray easy chair, Harry must. As he sinks into it his legs stretch out, and Campbell without rising jumps the hassock and himself together a few feet to one side, like a bullfrog hopping, pad and all, to avoid being touched by Harry’s big suede shoes. Grinning at his own agility, the little man resonantly announces, “Well now. I understand somebody here wants to get married.”

  “Not me, I’m married already,” Rabbit says quickly, as a joke of his own. He has the funny fear that Campbell, one of whose little hands (they look grubby, like his teeth) rests on the edge of the hassock inches from the tips of Harry’s shoes, will suddenly reach down and undo the laces. He moves his feet over, some more inches away.

  Pru had smiled sadly at his joke, gazing down, her green-filled glass as yet untouched. Seated beside her, Nelson stares forward, solemnly unaware of the dabs of beer on his upper lip. A baby eating: Rabbit remembers how Nelson used to batter with the spoon, held left-handed in his fist though they tried to get him to take it in his right, on the tray of the high chair in the old apartment on Wilbur Street, high above the town. He was never one of the messier babies, though - always wanting to be good. Harry wants to cry, gazing at the innocently ignored mustache of foam on the kid’s face. They’re selling him down the river. Pru touches her glass furtively, without giving it aglance.

  Ma Springer’s voice sounds weary, rising from the Barcalounger. “Yes they’d like to have it be in the church, but it won’t be one of your dressy weddings. Just family. And as soon as convenient, even next week we were thinking.” Her feet in their dirty aqua sneakers, with rounded toes and scuffed rims of white rubber, look childish and small off the floor, up on the padded extension.

  Janice’s voice sounds hard, cutting in. “Mother there’s no need for such a rush. Pru’s parents will need time to make arrangements to come from Ohio.”

  Her mother says, with a flip of her tired hand toward Pru, “She says her folks may not be bothering to come.”

  The girl blushes, and tightens her touch on the glass, as if to pick it up when attention has moved past her. “We’re not as close as this family is,” she says. She lifts her eyes, with their translucent green, to the face of the minister, to explain, “I’m one of seven. Four of my sisters are married already, and two of those marriages are on the rocks. My father’s sour about it.”

  Ma Springer explains, “She was raised Catholic.”

  The minister smiles broadly. “Prudence seems such a Protestant name.”

  The blush, as if quickened by a fitful wind, deepens again. “I was baptized Teresa. My friends in high school used to think I was prudish, that’s where Pru came from.”

  Campbell giggles. “Really! That’s fascinating!” The hair on the top of his head, Rabbit sees, is getting thin, young as he is. Thank God that’s one aspect of aging Harry doesn’t have to worry about: good lasting heads of hair on both sides of his family, though Pop’s toward the end had gone through gray to yellow, finer than cornsilk, and too dry to comb. They say the mother’s genes determine. One of the things he never liked about Janice was her high forehead, like she might start to go bald. Nelson’s too young to tell yet. Old man Springer used to slick his hair back so he always looked like a guy in a shirt collar ad, even on Saturday mornings, and in the coffin they got the parting all wrong; the newspaper obituary had reversed the photo in doing the halftone and the mortician had worked from that. With Mim, one of the first signs of her rebellion as he remembers was she bleached stripes into her hair, “Protestant rat” she used to call the natural color, in tenth grade, and Mom would get after her saying, “Better that than look like a skunk.” It was true, with those blonde pieces Mim did look tough, suddenly - besmirched. That’s life, besmirching yourself. The young clergyman’s voice is sliding from syllable to syllable smoothly, his surprising high giggle resettled in the back of his throat. “Bessie, before we firm up particulars like the date and the guest list, I think we should investigate some basics. Nelson and Teresa: do you love one another, and are you both prepared to make the -eternal commitment that the church understands to exist at the heart of Christian marriage?”

  The question is a stunner. Pru says “Yes” in a whisper and takes the first sip from her glass of créme de menthe.

  Nelson looks so glazed his mother prompts, “Nelson.”

  He wipes his mouth and whines, “I said I’d do it, didn’t I? I’ve been here all summer trying to work things out. I’m not going back to school, I’ll never graduate now, because of this. What more do you people want?”

  All flinch into silence but Harry, who says, “I thought you didn’t like Kent.”

  “I didn’t, much. But I’d put in my time and would just as soon have gotten the degree, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much. All summer, Dad, you kept bugging me about college and I wanted to say, O.K., O.K., you’re right, but you didn’t know the story, you didn’t know about Pru.”

  “Don’t marry me then,” Pru says quickly, quietly.

  The boy looks sideways at her on the sofa and sinks lower into the cushions. “I’d just as soon,” he says. “It’s time I got serious.”

  “We can get married and still go back for a year and have you finish.” Pru has transferred her hands to her lap and with them the little glass of green; she gazes down into it and speaks steadily, as if she is drawing up out of its tiny well words often rehearsed, her responses to Nelson’s complaints.

  “Naa,” Nelson says, shamed. “That seems silly. If I’m gonna be married, let’s really do it, with a job and clunky old station wagon and a crummy ranch house and all that drill. There’s nothing I can get at Kent’ll make me better at pushing Dad’s little Japanese kiddy cars off on people. If Mom and Mom-mom can twist his arm so he’ll take me in.”

  “Jesus, how you distort!” Harry cries. “We’ll all take you in, how can we help but? But you’d be worth a helluva lot more to the company and what’s more to yoursef if you’d finish up at college. Because I keep saying this I’m treated around here like a monster.” He turns to Archie Campbell, forgetting how low the man is sitting and saying over his head, “Sorry about all this chitchat, it’s
hardly up your alley.”

  “No,” the young man mellifluously disagrees, “it’s part of the picture.” Of Pru he asks, “What would be your preference, of where to live for the coming year? The first year of married life, all the little books say, sets the tone for all the rest.”

  With one hand Pru brushes back her long hair from her shoulders as if angry. “I don’t have such happy associations with Kent,” she allows. “I’d be happy to begin in a fresh place.”

  Campbell’s pipe is filling the room with a sweetish tweedy perfume. Probably less than thirty and there’s nothing they can throw at him that he hasn’t fielded before. A pro: Rabbit can respect that. But how did he let himself get queer?

  Ma Springer says in a spiteful voice, “You may wonder now why they don’t wait that year.”

  The small man’s big head turns and he beams. “No, I hadn’t wondered at that.”

  “She’s got herself in a family way,” the old lady declares, needlessly.