Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

“With Nelson’s help, of course,” the minister smiles.

  Janice tries to intervene: “Mother, these things happen.”

  Ma snaps back, “Don’t tell me. I haven’t forgotten it happened to you.”

  “Mother.”

  “This is horrible,” Nelson announces from the sofa. “What’d we drag this poor guy in here for anyway? Pru and I didn’t ask to be married in a church, I don’t believe any of that stuff anyway.”

  “You don’t?” Harry is shocked, hurt.

  “No, Dad. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

  “You are?”

  “Come off it, you know you are, everybody knows it down deep.”

  “Nobody knows for sure,” Pru points out in a quiet voice.

  Nelson asks her furiously, “How many dead people have you seen?”

  Even as a child, Harry remembers, Nelson’s face would get white around the gills when he was angry. He would get nervous stomach aches, and clutch at the edge of the banister on his way upstairs to get his books. They would send him off to school anyway. Harry still had his job at Verity and Janice was working part-time at the lot and they had no babysitter. School was the babysitter.

  Reverend Campbell, puffing unrufed on his aromatic pipe, asks Pru another question. “How do your parents feel about your being married outside of the Roman faith?”

  That tender blush returns, deepening the green of her eyes. “Only my mother was a Catholic actually, and I think by the time I came along she had pretty much given up. I was baptized but never confirmed, though there was this confirmation dress my sisters had worn. Daddy had beaten it out of her I guess you could say. He didn’t like having all the children to feed.”

  “What was his denomination?”

  “He was a nothing.”

  Harry remembers out loud, “Nelson’s grandfather came from a Catholic background. His mother was Irish. My dad’s side, I’m talking about. Hell, what I think about religion is -‘

  All eyes are upon him.

  “- is without a little of it, you’ll sink.”

  Saying this, he gazes toward Nelson, mostly because the child’s vivid pale-gilled face falls at the center of his field of vision. That muskrat haircut: it suggests to Harry a convict’s shaved head that has grown out. The boy sneers. “Well don’t sink, Dad, whatever you do.”

  Janice leans forward to speak to Pru in that mannerly mature woman’s bosomy voice she can produce now. “I wish you could persuade your parents to come to the wedding.”

  Ma Springer says, trying a more placating tone, since she has got the minister here and the conference is not delivering for her, “Around here the Episcopalians are thought the next thing to the Catholics anyway.”

  Pru shakes her head, her red hair flicking, a creature at bay. She says, “My parents and I don’t talk much. They didn’t approve of something I did before I met Nelson, and they wouldn’t approve of this, the way I am now.”

  “What did you do?” Harry asks.

  She doesn’t seem to have heard, saying as if to herself, “I’ve learned to take care of myself without them.”

  “I’ll say this,” Campbell says pleasantly, his pipe having gone dead and its relighting having occupied his attention for the last minute. “I’m experiencing some difficulty wrapping my mind around” - the phrase brings out his mischievous grin, stretched like that guy’s on Mad - “performing a church ceremony for two persons one of whom belongs to the Church of Rome and the other, he has just told us, is an atheist.” He gives a nod to Nelson. “Now the bishop gives us more latitude in these matters than we used to have. The other day I married a divorced Japanese man, but with an Episcopal background, to a young woman who originally wanted the words `Universal Mother’ substituted for `God’ in the service. We talked her out of that. But in this case, good people, I really don’t see much indication that Nelson and his very charming fiancée are at all prepared for, or desirous of, what you might call our brand of magic.” He releases a great cloud of smoke and closes his lips in that prissy satisfied way of pipe-smokers, waiting to be contradicted.

  Ma Springer is struggling as if to rise from the Barcalounger. “Well no grandson of Fred Springer is going to get married in a Roman Catholic church!” Her head falls back on the padded headrest. Her gills look purple.

  “Oh,” Archie Campbell says cheerfully. “I don’t think my dear friend Father McGahern could handle them either. The young lady was never even confirmed. You know,” he adds, knitting his hands at one knee and gazing into space, “a lot of wonderful, dynamic marriages have been made in City Hall. Or a UnitarianUniversalist service. My friend Jim Hancock of the fellowship in Maiden Springs has more than once taken some of our problem betrothals.”

  Rabbit jumps up. Something awful is being done here, he doesn’t know exactly what, or to whom. “Anybody besides me for another drink?”

  Without looking at Harry, Campbell holds out a glass which has become empty, as has Pru’s little glass of créme de menthe. The green of it has all gone into her eyes. The minister is telling her, and Nelson, “Truly, under some circumstances, even for the most devout it can be the appropriate recourse. At a later date, the wedding can be consecrated in a church; we see a number now of these reaffirmations of wedding vows.”

  “Why don’t they just keep living in sin right here?” Harry asks. “We don’t mind.”

  “We do indeed,” Ma says, sounding smothered.

  “Hey Dad,” Nelson calls, “could you bring me another beer?”

  “Get it yourself. My hands are full.” Yet he stops in front of Pru and takes up the little liqueur glass. “Sure it’s good for the baby?”

  She looks up with an unexpected coldness. He was feeling so fatherly and fond and from her eyes he is a dumb traffic cop. “Oh her eyes yes,” she tells him. “It’s the beer and wine that are bad; they bloat you.”

  By the time Rabbit returns from the kitchen, Campbell is allowing himself to be brought around. He has what they want: a church wedding, a service acceptable in the eyes of the Grace Stuhls of this world. Knowing this, he is in no hurry. Beneath the girlish lashes his eyes are as dark as Janice’s and Ma’s, the Koerner eyes. Ma Springer is holding forth, the little rounded toes of her aqua sneakers bouncing. “You must take what the boy says with a grain of salt. At his age I didn’t know what I believed myself, I thought the government was foolish and the gangsters had the right idea. This was back in Prohibition days.”

  Nelson looks at her with his own dark eyes, sullen. “Mommom, if it matters so much to you, I don’t care that much, one way or another.”

  “What does Pru think?” Harry asks, giving her her poison. He wonders if the girl’s frozen stiffness of manner, and those little waits while her smile gets unstuck, aren’t simply fear: it is she who is growing another life within her body, and nobody else.

  “I think,” she responds slowly, so quietly the room goes motionless to hear, “it would be nicer in a church.”

  Nelson says, “I know I sure don’t want to go down to that awful new concrete City Hall they’ve built behind where the Bijou used to be, some guy I know was telling me the contractor raked off a million and there’s cracks in the cement already.”

  Janice in her relief says, “Harry, I could use some more Campari.”

  Campbell lifts his replenished glass from his low place on the hassock. “Cheers, good people.” He states his terms: “The customary procedure consists of at least three sessions of counseling and Christian instruction after the initial interview. This I suppose we can consider the interview.” As he addresses Nelson particularly, Harry hears a seductive note enrich the great mellow voice. “Nelson, the church does not expect that every couple it marries be a pair of Christian saints. It does ask that the participants have some understanding of what they are undertaking. I don’t take the vows; you and Teresa do. Marriage is not merely a rite; it is a sacrament, an invitation from God to participate in the divine. And the invitation is not for one moment o
nly. Every day you share is meant to be sacramental. Can you feel a meaning in that? There were wonderful words in the old prayer book; they said that marriage was not `to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.’ ” He grins, having intoned this, and adds, “The new prayer book omits the fear of God.”

  Nelson whines, “I said, I’d go along.”

  Janice asks, a little prim, “How long would these sessions of instructions take?” It is like she is sitting, in that straight-backed dining-room chair, on an egg that might hatch too soon.

  “Oh,” Campbell says, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, “I should think, considering the various factors, we could get three of them in in two weeks. I just happen, the officious clergyman said, to have my appointment book here.” Before reaching into the breast pocket of the seersucker coat, Campbell taps out the bowl of his pipe with a finicky calm that conveys to Harry the advantages of being queer: the world is just a gag to this guy. He walks on water; the mud of women and making babies never dirties his shoes. You got to take off your hat: nothing touches him. That’s real religion.

  Some rebellious wish to give him a poke, to protest the smooth bargain that has been struck, prompts Harry to say, “Yeah, we want to get ‘em in before the baby comes. He’ll be here by Christmas.”

  “God willing,” Campbell smiles, adding, “He or she.”

  “January,” Pru says in a whisper, after putting down her glass. Harry can’t tell if she is pleased or displeased by the gallant way he keeps mentioning the baby that everybody else wants to ignore. While the appointments are being set up she and Nelson sit on that sofa like a pair of big limp Muppets, with invisible arms coming up through the cushions into their torsos and heads.

  “Fred had his birthday in January,” Ma Springer announces, grunting as she tries to get out of the Barcalounger, to see the minister off.

  “Oh Mother,” Janice says. “One twelfth of the world has January birthdays.”

  “I was born in January,” Archie Campbell says, rising. He grins to show his seedy teeth. “In my case, after much prayerful effort. My parents were ancient. It’s a wonder I’m here at all.”

  The next day a warm rain is beginning to batter the yellowing leaves down from the trees in the park along Cityview Drive as Harry and Nelson drive through Brewer to the lot. The kid is still persona non grata but he’s asked to check on the two convertibles he crunched, one of which, the Royale, Manny is repairing. The ‘72 Mercury, hit twice from the side, was more severely damaged, and parts are harder to get. Rabbit’s idea had been when the kid went off to school to sell it for junk and write off the loss. But he didn’t have the heart not to let the boy look at the wrecks at least. Then Nelson is going to borrow the Corona and visit Billy Fosnacht before he goes back to Boston to become an endodontist. Harry had a root canal job once; it felt like they were tickling the underside of his eyeball. What a hellish way to make a living. Maybe there’s no entirely good way. The Toyota’s windshield wipers keep up a steady rubbery singsong as the Brewer traffic slows, brake lights burning red all along Locust Boulevard. The Castle has started up again and yellow school buses loom ahead in the jam. Harry switches the wipers from Fast to Intermittent and wishes he still smoked cigarettes. He wants to talk to the kid.

  “Nelson.”

  “Unhh?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “O.K. I woke up with a soreness in my throat but I took two of those five-hundred-milligram vitamin Cs Melanie talked Bessie into getting.”

  “She was really a health nut, wasn’t she? Melanie. We still have all that Granola in the kitchen.”

  “Yeah, well. It was part of her act. You know, mystical gypsy. She was always reading this guru, I forget his name. It sounded like a sneeze.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Melanie? No, why would I?”

  “Weren’t you kind of close?”

  Nelson avoids the implied question. “She was getting pretty grouchy toward the end.”

  “You think she and Charlie went off together?” _ “Beats me,” the boy says.

  The wipers, now on Intermittent, startle Rabbit each time they switch across, as if someone other than he is making decisions in this car. A ghost. Like in that movie about Encounters of the Third Kind the way the truck with Richard Dreyfuss in it begins to shake all over and the headlights behind rise up in the air instead of pulling off to one side. He readjusts the knob from Intermittent to Slow. “I didn’t mean your physical health, exactly. I meant more your state of mind. After last night.”

  “You mean about that sappy minister? I don’t mind going over to listen to his garbage a couple times if it’ll satisfy the Springer honor or whatever.”

  “I guess I mean more about the marriage in general. Nellie, I don’t want to see you railroaded into anything.”

  The boy sits up a little in the side of Harry’s vision; the yellow buses ahead pull into the Brewer High driveway and the line of cars begins to move again, slowly, beside a line of parked cars whose rooftops are spattered with leaves the rain has brought down. “Who says I’m being railroaded?”

  “Nobody says it. Pru seems a fine girl, if you’re ready for marriage.”

  “You don’t think I’m ready. You don’t think I’m ready for anything.”

  He lets the hostility pass, trying to talk meditatively, like Webb Murkett. “You know, Nelson, I’m not sure any man is ever a hundred per cent ready for marriage. I sure as hell know I wasn’t, from the way I acted toward your mother.”

  “Yeah, well,” the boy says, in a voice a little crumbled, from his father’s not taking the bait. “She got her own back.”

  “I never could hold that against her. Or Charlie either. You ought to understand. After we got back together that time, we’ve both been pretty straight. We’ve even had a fair amount of fun together, in our dotage. I’m just sorry we had so much working out to do, with you still on the scene.”

  “Yeah, well.” Nelson’s voice sounds breathy and tight, and he keeps looking at his knees, even when Harry hangs that tricky left turn onto Eisenhower Avenue. The boy clears his throat and volunteers, “It’s the times, I guess. A lot of the kids I got to know at Kent, they had horror stories worse than any of mine.”

  “Except that thing with Jill. They couldn’t top that, I bet.” He doesn’t quite chuckle. Jill is a sacred name to the boy; he will never talk about it. Harry goes on clumsily, as the car gains momentum downhill and the spic and black kids strolling uphill to school insolently flirt with danger, daring him to hit them, his fenders brushing their bodies, “There’s something that doesn’t feel right to me in this new development. The girl gets knocked up, O.K., it takes two to tango, you have some responsibility there, nobody can deny it. But then as I understand it she flat out refuses to get the abortion, when one of the good things that’s come along in twenty years along with a lot that’s not so good is you can go have an abortion

  now right out in the open, in a hospital, safe and clean as having your appendix out.”

  So?”

  “So why didn’t she?”

  The boy makes a gesture that Rabbit fears might be an attempt to grab the wheel; his grip tightens. But Nelson is merely waving to indicate a breadth of possibilities. “She had a lot of reasons. I forget what all they were.”

  “I’d like to hear them.”

  “Well for one thing she said she knew of women who had their insides all screwed up by abortions, so they could never have a baby. You say it’s easy as an appendix but you’ve never had it done. She didn’t believe in it.”

  “I thought she wasn’t that much of a Catholic.”

  “She wasn’t, she isn’t, but still. She said it wasn’t natural.”

  “What’s natural? In this day and age with all these contraceptives getting knocked up like that isn’t natural.”

  “Well she’s shy, Dad. They don’t call her Pru for nothing. Going to a doctor lik
e that, and having him scrape you out, she just didn’t want to do it.”

  “You bet she didn’t. Shy. She wanted to have a baby, and she wasn’t too shy to manage that. How much younger’re you than she?”

  “A year. A little more. What does it matter? It wasn’t just a baby she wanted to have, it was my baby. Or so she said.”

  “That’s sweet. I guess. What did you think about it?”

  “I thought it was O.K., probably. It was her body. That’s what they all tell you now, it’s their body. I didn’t see much I could do about it.”

  “Then it’s sort of her funeral, isn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Harry says, in his indignation honking at some kids at the intersection of Plum Street who saunter right out toward him, this early in the school year the crossing guards aren’t organized yet, “so she decides to keep pregnant till there’s no correcting it while this other girl babysits for you, and your mother and grandmother and now this nance of a minister all decide when and how you’re going to marry the poor broad. I mean, where do you come in? Nelson Angstrom. I mean, what do you want? Do you know?” In his frustration he hits the rim of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, as the avenue dips down beneath the blackened nineteenth-century stones of the underpass at Eisenhower and Seventh, that in a bad rainstorm is flooded but not today. The arch of this underpass, built without a keystone, by masons all long dead, is famous, and from his earliest childhood has reminded Rabbit of a crypt, of death. They emerge among the drooping wet pennants of low-cost factory outlets.