Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “Well, I want -“

  Fearing the kid is going to say he wants a job at Springer Motors, Harry interrupts: “You look scared, is all I see. Scared to say, No to any of these women. I’ve never been that great at saying No either, but just because it runs in the family doesn’t mean you have to get stuck. You don’t necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say.”

  “Your life seems pretty comfy to me, frankly.” They turn down Weiser, the forest of the inner-city mall a fogged green smear in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, well,” Harry says, “it’s taken me a fair amount of time to get there. And by the time you get there you’re pooped. The world,” he tells his son, “is full of people who never knew what hit ‘em, their lives are over before they wake up.”

  “Dad, you keep talking about yourself but I don’t see what it has to do with me. What can I do with Pru except marry her? She’s not so bad, I mean I’ve known enough girls to know they all have their limits. But she’s a person, she’s a friend. It’s as if you want to deny her to me, as if you’re jealous or something. The way you keep mentioning her baby.”

  This kid should have been spanked at some point. “I’m not jealous, Nelson. Just the opposite. I feel sorry for you.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t waste your feelings on me.”

  They pass Schoenbaum Funeral Directors. Nobody out front in this rain. Harry swallows and asks, “Don’t you want out, if we could rig it somehow?”

  “How could we rig it? She’s in her fifth month.”

  “She could go ahead have the baby without you marrying her. These adoption agencies are crying for white babies, you’d be doing somebody else a favor.”

  “Pru would never consent.”

  “Don’t be too sure. We could ease the pain. She’s one of seven, she knows the value of a dollar.”

  “Dad, this is crazy talk. You’re forgetting this baby is a person. An Angstrom!”

  “Jesus, how could I forget that?”

  The light at the foot of Weiser, before the bridge, is red. Harry looks over at his son and gets an impression of something freshly hatched, wet and not quite unfolded. The light turns green. A bronze plaque on a pillar of pebbled concrete names the mayor for whom the bridge was named but it is raining too hard to read it.

  He starts up again, “Or you could just, I don’t know, not make any decision, just disappear for a while. I’d give you the money for that.”

  “Money, you’re always offering me money to stay away.”

  “Maybe because when I was your age I wanted to get away and I couldn’t. I didn’t have the money. I didn’t have the sense. We tried to send you away to get some sense and you’ve thumbed your nose at it.”

  “I haven’t thumbed my nose, it’s just that there’s not that much out there. It isn’t what you think, Dad. College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they’re getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don’t give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It’s all phony, they’re there because parents don’t want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. `My little Johnny’s at Haavahd.’ `My little Nellie’s at Kent.”’

  “Really, that’s how you see it? In my day kids wanted to get out in the world. We were scared but not so scared we kept running back to Mama. And Grandmama. What’re you going to do when you run out of women to tell you what to do?”

  “Same thing you’ll do. Drop dead.”

  D I S C O. DATSUN. FUEL ECONOMY. Route 111 has a certain beauty in the rain, the colors and the banners and the bluish asphalt of the parking lots all run together through the swish of traffic, the beat of wipers. Rubbery hands flailing, Help, help. Rabbit has always liked rain, it puts a roof on the world. “I just don’t like seeing you caught,” he blurts out to Nelson. “You’re too much me.”

  Nelson gets loud. “I’m not you! I’m not caught!”

  “Nellie, you’re caught. They’ve got you. and you didn’t even squeak. I hate to see it, is all. All I’m trying to say is, as far as I’m concerned you don’t have to go through with it. If you want to get out of it, I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t want to be helped that way! I like Pru. I like the way she looks. She’s great in bed. She needs me, she thinks I’m neat. She doesn’t think I’m a baby. You say I’m caught but I don’t feel caught, I feel like I’m becoming a man!”

  Help, help.

  “Good,” Harry says then. “Good luck.”

  “Where I want your help, Dad, you won’t give it.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Here. Stop making it so hard for me to fit in at the lot.”

  They turn into the lot. The tires of the Corona splash in the gutter water rushing toward its grate along the highway curb. Stonily Rabbit says nothing.

  III

  A NEW SHOP has opened on Weiser Street in one of those scruffy blocks between the bridge and the mall, opposite the enduring old variety store that sells out-of-town newspapers, warm unshelled peanuts, and dirty magazines for queers as well as straights. From the look of it the new store too might be peddling smut, for its showcase front window is thoroughly masked by long thin blond Venetian blinds, and the lettering on its windows is strikingly discreet. Gold letters rimmed in black and very small simply say FISCAL ALTERNATIVES and below that, smaller yet, Old Coins, Silver and Gold Bought and Sold. Harry passes the place by car every day, and one day, there being two empty metered spaces he can slide into without holding up traffic, he parks and goes in. The next day, after some business at his bank, the Brewer Trust two blocks away, he comes out of Fiscal Alternatives with thirty Krugerrands purchased for $377.14 each, including commission and sales tax, coming to $11,314.20. These figures had been run off inside by a girl with platinum hair; her long scarlet fingernails didn’t seem to hamper her touch on the hand computer. She was the only person visible, at her long glass-topped desk, with beige sides and swivel chair to match. But there were voices and monitoring presences in other rooms, back rooms into which she vanished and from which she emerged with his gold. The coins came in cunning plastic cylinders of fifteen each, with round bluetinted lids that suggested dollhouse toilet seats; indeed, bits of what seemed toilet paper were stuffed into the hole of this lid to make the fit tight and to conceal even a glimmer of the sacred metal. So heavy, the cylinders threaten to tear the pockets off his coat as Harry hops up Ma Springer’s front steps to face his family. Inside the front door, Pru sits knitting on the gray sofa and Ma Springer has taken over the Barcalounger to keep her legs up while some quick-upped high yellow from Philly is giving her the six-o’clock news. Mayor Frank Rizzo has once again denied charges of police brutality, he says, in a rapid dry voice that pulls the rug out from every word. Used to be Philadelphia was a distant place where no one dared visit, but television has pulled it closer, put its muggy murders and politics right next door. “Where’s Janice?” Harry asks.

  Ma Springer says, “Shh.”

  Pru says, ` Janice took Nelson over to the club, to fill in with some ladies’ doubles, and then I think they were going to go shopping for a suit.”

  “I thought he bought a new suit this summer.”

  “That was a business suit. They think he needs a three-piece suit for the wedding.”

  “Jesus, the wedding. How’re you liking your sessions with what’s-his-name?”

  “I don’t mind them. Nelson hates them.”

  “He says that just to get his grandmother going,” Ma Springer calls, twisting to push her voice around the headrest. “I think they’re really doing him good.” Neither woman notices the hang of his coat, though it feels like a bull’s balls tugging at his pockets. It’s Janice he wants. He goes upstairs and snuggles the two dense, immaculate cylinders into the back of his bedside table, in the drawer where he keeps a spare pair of reading glasses and the rubber tip on a plastic handle he is supposed to massage his
gums with to keep out of the hands of the periodontist and the pink wax earplugs he stuffs in sometimes when he has the jitters and can’t tune out the house noise. In this same drawer he used to keep condoms, in that interval between when Janice decided the Pill was bad for her and when she went and had her tubes burned, but that was a long while ago and he threw them all away, the whole tidy tin box of them, after an indication, the lid not quite closed, perhaps he imagined it, that Nelson or somebody had been into the box and filched a couple. From about that time on he began to feel crowded, living with the kid. As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit’s own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood. Two glimpses mark the limits of his comfort in this matter of men descending from men. When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents’ bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father’s bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn’t been ironed; and then when Nelson was about the same age, a year older he must have been for they were living in this house already and they moved when the kid was thirteen, Harry had wandered into the bathroom not realizing Nelson would be stepping out of the shower and had seen the child frontally: he had pubic hair and, though his body was still slim and pint-sized, a man-sized prick, heavy and oval, unlike Rabbit’s circumcised and perhaps because of this looking brutal, and big. Big. This was years before the condoms were stolen. The drawer rattles, stuck, and Harry tries to ease it in, hearing that Janice and Nelson have come into the house, making the downstairs resound with news of tennis and clothing stores and of the outer world. Harry wants to save his news for Janice. To knock her out with it. The drawer suddenly eases shut and he smiles, anticipating her astonished reception of his precious, lustrous, lead-heavy secret.

  As with many anticipated joys it does not come exactly as envisioned. By the time they climb the stairs together it is. later than it should be, and they feel unsettled and high. Dinner had to be early because Nelson and Pru were going over to Soupy, as they both call Campbell, for their third session of counseling. They returned around nine-thirty with Nelson in such a rage they had to break out the dinner wine again while with a beer can in hand he did an imitation of the young minister urging the church’s way into the intimate space between these two. “He keeps talking about the church being the be-riide of Ke-riist. I kept wanting to ask him, Whose little bride are you?”

  “Nelson,” Janice said, glancing toward the kitchen, where her mother was making herself Ovaltine.

  “I mean, it’s obscene,” Nelson insisted. “What does He do, fuck the church up the ass?”

  Pru laughed, Harry noticed. Did Nelson do that to her? It was about the last thing left a little out of the ordinary for these kids, blowing all over the magazines these days, giving head they call it, there was that movie Shampoo where Julie Christie who you associate with costume dramas all decked out in bonnets announced right on the screen she wanted to blow Warren Beatty, actually said it, and it wasn’t even an X, it was a simple R, with all these teen-age dating couples sitting there holding hands as sweetly as if it was a return of Showboat with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, the girls laughing along with the boys. Pru’s long-boned mute body does not declare what it does, nor her pale lips, that in repose have a dry, pursed look, an expression maybe you learn in secretarial school. Great in bed, Nelson had said.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but he really pisses me off. He gets me to say these things I don’t believe and then he grins and acts jolly like it’s all some kind of crappy joke. Mom-mom, how can you and those other old ladies stand him?”

  Bessie had come in from the kitchen, her mug of Ovaltine steaming as she stared it steady and her hair pinned tight up against her skull with a net over it all, for bed. “Oh,” she said, “he’s higher than some, and lower than others. At least he doesn’t choke us on all the incense like the one that became a Greek Orthodox priest finally. And he did a good job of getting the diehards to accept the new form. My tongue still sticks at some of the responses.”

  Pru offered, “Soupy seemed quite proud that the new service doesn’t have `obey.”’

  “People never did obey, I guess they might as well leave it out,” Ma said.

  Janice seemed detennined to have a go at Nelson herself. “Really you shouldn’t put up such resistance, Nelson. The man is leaning over backwards to give us a church service, and I think from the way he acts he sincerely likes you. He really does have a feel for young people.”

  “Does he ever,” Nelson said, soft enough for Ma Springer not to hear, then mimicking loudly, “Dear Mater and Pater were aincient. It’s such a whunder I got here at all. In case you whunder why I have this toadstool look.”

  “You shouldn’t mind people’s physical appearance,” Janice said.

  “Oh but Mater, one simply does.” For some while they went on in this way, it was as good as television, Nelson imitating Soupy’s mellow voice, Janice pleading for reason and charity, Ma Springer drifting in some world of her own where the Episcopal Church has presided since Creation; but Harry felt above them all, a golden man waiting to take his wife upstairs and show her their treasure. When the joking died, and a rerun of M*A*S*H came on that Nelson wanted to see, the young couple looked tired and harried suddenly, sitting there on the sofa, being beaten into one. Already each took an accustomed place, Pru over on the end with the little cherry side table for her créme de menthe and her knitting, and Nelson on the middle cushion with his feet in their button-soled Adidas up on the reproduction cobbler’s bench. Now that he didn’t go to the lot he didn’t bother to shave every day, and the whiskers came in as reddish bristle on his chin and upper lip but his cheeks were still downy. To hell with this scruffy kid. Rabbit has decided to live for himself, selfishly at last.

  When Janice comes back from the bathroom naked and damp inside her terrycloth robe, he has locked their bedroom door and arranged himself in his underpants on the bed. He calls in a husky and insinuating voice, “Hey. Janice. Look. I bought us something today.”

  Her dark eyes are glazed from all that drinking and parenting downstairs; she took the shower to help clear her head. Slowly her eyes focus on his face, which must show an intensity of pleasure that puzzles her.

  He tugs open the sticky drawer and is himself startled to see the two tinted cylinders sliding toward him, still upright, still there. He would have thought something so dense with preciousness would broadcast signals bringing burglars like dogs to a bitch in heat. He lifts one roll out and places it in Janice’s hand; her arm dips with the unexpected weight, and her robe, untied, falls open. Her thin brown used body is more alluring in this lapsed sheath of rough bright cloth than a girl’s; he wants to reach in, to where the shadows keep the damp fresh.

  “What is it, Harry?” she asks, her eyes widening.

  “Open it,” he tells her, and when she fumbles too long at the transparent tape holding on the toilet-seat-shaped little lid he pries it off for her with his big fingernails. He removes the wad of tissue paper and spills out upon the quilted bedspread the fifteen Krugerrands. Their color is redder than gold in his mind had been. “Gold,” he whispers, holding up close to her face, paired in his palm, two coins, showing the two sides, the profile of some old Boer on one and a kind of antelope on the other. “Each of these is worth about three hundred sixty dollars,” he tells her. “Don’t tell your mother or Nelson or anybody.”

  She does se
em bewitched, taking one into her fingers. Her nails scratch his palm as she lifts the coin off. Her brown eyes pick up flecks of yellow. “Is it all right?” Janice asks. “Where on earth did you get them?”

  “A new place on Weiser across from the peanut store that sells precious metals, buys and sells. It was simple. All you got to do is produce a certified check within twenty-four hours after they quote you a price. They guarantee to buy them back at the going rate any time, so all you lose is their six per cent commission and the sales tax, which at the rate gold is going up I’ll have made back by next week. Here. I bought two stacks. Look.” He takes the other thrillingly hefty cylinder from the drawer and undoes the lid and spills those fifteen antelopes slippingly upon the bedspread, thus doubling the riches displayed. The spread is a lightweight Pennsylvania Dutch quilt, small rectangular patches sewed together by patient biddies, graded from pale to dark to form a kind of dimensional effect, of four large boxes having a lighter and darker side. He lies down upon its illusion and places a Krugerrand each in the sockets of his eyes. Through the chill red pressure of the gold he hears Janice say, “My God. I thought only the government could have gold. Don’t you need a license or anything?”