Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  Peggy Fosnacht’s last angry whisper dies. The organ has been silent this while. With both plump hands lifted, Soupy bids them all stand. To the music of their rustle Melanie leads in Pru, from another side room, along the altar rail. The secret knowledge shared by all that she is pregnant enriches her beauty. She wears an ankle-length crépey dress that Ma Springer calls oatmeal in color and Janice and Melanie call champagne, with a brown sash they decided to leave off her waist lest they have to tie it too high. It must have been Melanie who wove the little wreath of field flowers, already touched by wilt, that the bride wears as a crown. There is no train or veil save an invisible aura of victory. Pru’s face, downcast and purse-upped, is flushed, her carroty hair brushed slick down her back and tucked behind her ears to reveal their crimped soft shell shapes hung with tiny hoops of gold. Harry could halt her with his arm as she paces by but she does not look at him. Melanie gives all the old folks a merry eye; Pru’s long redknuckled fingers communicate a tremble to her little bouquet of baby’s breath. Now her bearing as she faces the minister is grave with that gorgeous slowed composure of women carrying more than themselves.

  Soupy calls them Dearly Beloved. The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, enriched by a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn’t noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. The union of husband and wife, he announces in his great considerate organ tones, ís intended by God for their mutual joy, and like layers of a wide concealing dust the syllables descend, prosperity, adversity, procreation, nurture. Soupy bats his eyelids between phrases, is his only flaw. Harry hears a faint groan behind him: Ma Springer standing on her legs too long. Mrs. Lubell over past Janice has removed a grubby-looking handkerchief from her purse and dabs at her face with it. Janice is smiling. There is a dark dent at the corner of her lips. With a little white hat on her head like a flower she looks Polynesian.

  Ringingly Soupy addresses the rafters: “If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace.”

  Peace. A pew creaks. The couple from Binghamton. Dead Fred Springer. Ruth. Rabbit fights down a crazy impulse to shout out. His throat feels raw.

  The minister now speaks to the couple direct. Nelson, from hanging lamely over on the side, his eyes murky in their sockets and the carnation crooked in his lapel, moves closer to the center, toward Pru. He is her height. The back of his neck looks so thin and bare above his collar. That whorl.

  Pru has been asked a question. In an exceedingly small voice she says she will.

  Now Nelson is being questioned and his father’s itch to shout out, to play the disruptive clown, has become something else, a prickling at the bridge of his nose, a pressure in the two small ducts there.

  Woman, wife, covenant, love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, sickness, health, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?

  Nelson in a voice midway in size between Soupy’s and Pru’s says he will.

  And the burning in his tear ducts and the rawness scraping at the back of his throat have become irresistible, all the forsaken poor ailing paltry witnesses to this marriage at Harry’s back roll forward in hoops of terrible knowing, an impalpable suddenly sensed mass of human sadness concentrated burningly upon the nape of Nelson’s neck as he and the girl stand there mute while the rest of them grope and fumble in their thick red new prayer books after the name and number of a psalm announced; Soupy booms angelically above their scattered responses, wife, a fruitful vine, to which Rabbit cannot contribute, the man who fears the Lord, because he is weeping, weeping, washing out the words, the page, which has become as white and blank as the nape of Nelson’s poor mute frail neck. Janice looks up at him in jaunty surprise under her white hat and Mrs. Lubell with that wistful cleaninglady smile passes over her grubby handkerchief. He shakes his head No, he is too big, he will overwhelm the cloth with his effluvia; then takes it anyway, and tries to blot this disruptive tide. There is this place the tears have unlocked that is endlessly rich, a spring.

  “May you live to see your children’s children,” Soupy intones in his huge mellow encompassing fairy’s voice. “May peace be upon Israel,” he adds.

  And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ’s space shot and the Lord’s Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn’t he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry’s face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she’s had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

  Oh this day, this holiday they have made just for themselves from a mundane Saturday, this last day of summer. What a great waste of gas it seems as they drive in procession to Ma Springer’s house through the slanted streets of the town. Harry and Janice in the Corona follow Bessie’s blue Chrysler in case the old dame plows into something, with Mim bringing Mrs. Lubell in Janice’s Mustang, its headlight still twisted, behind. “What made you cry so much?” Janice asks him. She has taken off her hat and fiddled her bangs even in the rearview mirror.

  “I don’t know. Everything. The way Nellie looked from the back. The way the backs of kids’ heads trust you. I mean they really liked that, this little dumb crowd of us gathered to watch.”

  He looks sideways at her silence. The tip of her little tongue rests on her lower lip, not wanting to say the wrong thing. She says, “If you’re so full of tears you might try being less mean about him and the lot.”

  “I’m not mean about him and the lot. He doesn’t give a fuck about the lot, he just wants to hang around having you and your mother support him and the easiest way to put a face on that is to go through some sort of motions over at the lot. You know how much that caper of his with the convertibles cost the firm? Guess.”

  “He says you got him so frustrated he went crazy. He says you knew you were doing it, too.”

  “Forty-five hundred bucks, that was what those shitboxes cost. Plus now all the parts Manny’s had to order and the garage time to fix ‘em, you can add another grand.”

  “Nelson said the TR sold right off.”

  “That was a fluke. They don’t make TRs anymore.”

  “He says Toyotas have had their run at the market, Datsun and Honda are outselling them all over the East.”

  “See, that’s why Charlie and me don’t want the kid over at the lot. He’s full of negative thinking.”

  “Has Charlie said he doesn’t want Nelson over at the lot?”

  “Not in so many words. He’s too much of a nice guy.”

  “I never noticed he was such a nice guy. Nice in that way. I’ll ask him over at the house.”

  “Now don’t go lighting into poor Charlie, just because he’s moved on to Melanie. I don’t know what he’s ever said about Nelson.”

  “Moved on! Harry, it’s been ten years. You must stop living in the past. If Charlie wants to
make a fool of himself chasing after some twenty-year-old it couldn’t matter to me less. Once you’ve achieved closure with somebody, all you have is good feelings for them.”

  “What’s this achieving closure? You’ve been looking at too many talk shows.”

  “It’s a phrase people use.”

  “Those hussies you hang out with over at the club. Doris Kaufinann. Fuck her.” It stung him, that she thinks he lives in the past. Why should he be the one to cry at the wedding? Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Tame Guy. To Hell with them. “Well at least Charlie’s avoiding marriage so that makes him less of a fool than Nelson,” he says, and switches on the radio to shut off their conversation. The four-thirty news: earthquake in Hawaii, kidnapping of two American businessmen in El Salvador, Soviet tanks patrolling the streets of Kabul in the wake of last Sunday’s mysterious change of leadership in Afghanistan. In Mexico, a natural-gas pact with the United States signals possible long-term relief for the energy crisis. In California, ten days of brush fire have destroyed more acres than any such fire since 1970. In Philadelphia, publishing magnate Walter Annenberg has donated fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic Archdiocese to help defray costs of the controversial platform from which Pope John Paul the Second is scheduled to celebrate Mass on October the third. Annenberg, the announcer gravely concludes, is a Jew.

  “Why did they tell us that?” Janice asks.

  God, she is dumb still. The realization comforts him. He tells her, “To make us alleged Christians feel lousy we’ve all been such cheapskates about the Pope’s platform.”

  “I must say,” Janice says, “it does seem extravagant, to build such a thing you’re only going to use once.”

  “That’s life,” Harry says, pulling up to the curb along Joseph Street. There are so many cars in front of number 89 he has to park halfway up the block, in front of the house where the butch ladies live. One of them, a hefty youngish woman wearing an Army surplus fatigue jacket, is lugging a big pink roll of foil-backed insulation up onto the front porch.

  “My son got married today,” Harry calls out to her, on impulse.

  His butch neighbor blinks and then calls back, “Good luck to her.”

  “Him.”

  “I meant the bride.”

  “O.K., I’ll tell her.”

  The expression on the woman’s face, slit-eyed like a cigar-store Indian, softens a little; she sees Janice getting out of the car on the other side, and calls to her, in a shouting mood now, “Jan, how do you feel about it?”

  Janice is so slow to answer Harry answers for her, “She feels great. Why wouldn’t she?” What he can’t figure out about these butch ladies is not why they don’t like him but why he wants them to, why just the distant sound of their hammering has the power to hurt him, to make him feel excluded.

  Somehow, this Slim person, driving a canary-yellow Le Car with its name printed a foot high on the side, has made it from the church with bride, groom, and Melanie ahead of Harry and Janice; and Ollie and Peggy too, in their cinnamon-brown ‘ 73 Dodge Dart with a Fiberglas-patched fender; and even Soupy has beat their time, because his snappy little black Opel Manta with vanity plate ST JOHN is also parked by the curb this side of the maple that Ma Springer has been seeing from her front bedroom for over thirty years. These guests already crowd the living room, while this flustered little fat girl in a stab at a waitress uniform tries to carry around those hors d’oeuvres that are costing a fortune, muddled things that look like cheese melted on Taco Chips with a sprig ofparsley added; Harry dodges through, elbows lifted out of old basketball habit in case somebody tries to put a move on him, to get the champagne in the kitchen. Bottles of Mumm’s at twelve dollars apiece even at case price fill the whole second shelf of the fridge, stacked 69-style, foil heads by heavy hollow butts, beautiful. CHAMPAGNE PROVIDED AT SHOTGUN WEDDING, he thinks. Angstrom Foots Bill. Grace Stuhl’s grandson turns out to be a big beefy kid, can’t weigh less than two hundred fifty, with a bushy pirate’s beard, and he has teeny weenies flying in a pan on the stove and something wrapped in bacon in the oven. Also a beer he took from the fridge open on the counter. The noise in the living room keeps growing, and the front door keeps opening, Stavros and the Murketts following Mim and Ma’s brood in, and all the fools come gabbling when the first cork pops. Boy, it’s like coming, it can’t stop, the plastic hollow-stemmed champagne glasses Janice found at the Acme are on the round Chinese tray on the counter behind Grace Stuhl’s grandson’s beer, too far away for Harry to reach without some of the tawny foam spilling onto the linoleum. The glasses as he fills them remind him of the gold coins, precious down through the ages, and a latch inside him lifts to let his sorrow out. What the hell, we’re all going down the chute together. Back in the living room, in front of the breakfront, Ma Springer proposes a nervous little toast she’s worked up, ending with the Pennsylvania Dutch, “Dir seid nur eins: halt es selle weg.”

  “What does that mean, Mom-mom?” Nelson asks, afraid something’s being put over on him, such a child beside the blushing full-grown woman he’s crazily gone and married.

  “I was going to say,” Bessie says irritably. “You are now one: keep it that way.”

  Everybody cheers, and drinks, if they haven’t already.

  Grace Stuhl glides a step forward, into the circle of space cleared by the breakfront, maybe she was a great dancer fifty years ago, a certain type of old lady keeps her ankles and her feet small, and she is one. “Or as they always used to say,” she proposes, “Bussie waiirt ows, kocha dut net. Kissing wears out, cooking don’t.”

  The cheers are louder. Harry pops another bottle and settles on getting drunk. Those melted Taco Chips aren’t so bad, if you can get them to your mouth before they break in your fingers, and the little fat girlfriend has an amazing bosom. All this ass, at least there’s no shortage of that, it just keeps arriving. It seems an age since he lay awake disturbed by the entrance into this house of Pru Lubell, now Teresa Angstrom. Harry finds himself standing next to her mother. He asks her, “Have you ever been to this part of the world before?”

  `Just passing through from time to time,” she says, in a wisp of a voice he has to bend over to hear, as at a deathbed. How softly Pru had spoken her vows at the ceremony! “My people are from Chicago, originally.”

  “Well, your daughter does you proud,” he tells her. “We love her already.” He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

  “Teresa tries to do the right thing,” her mother says. “But it’s never been easy for her.”

  “It hasn’t?”

  “She takes after her father’s people. You know, always going to extremes.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. Stubborn. You daren’t go against them.”

  Her eyes widen. He feels with this woman as if he and she have been set to making a paper chain together, with inadequate glue, and the links keep coming unstuck. It is not easy to hear in this room. Soupy and that Slim are giggling now together.

  “I’m sorry your husband can’t be here,” Harry says.

  “You wouldn’t be if you knew him,” Mrs. Lubell replies serenely, and waggles her plastic glass as if to indicate how empty it is.

  “Lemme get you some more.” Rabbit realizes with a shock that she is his proper date: old as she seems this woman is about his age and instead of naked in dreamland with stacked chicks like Cindy Murkett and Grace Stuhl’s grandson’s girlfriend he should be in mental bed with the likes of Mrs. Lubell. He retreats into the kitchen to look after the champagne supply and finds Nelson and Melanie busy at the bottles. The countertop is strewn with those little wire cages each cork comes trapped in.

  “Dad, there may not be enough,” Nelson whines.

  These two. “Why don’t you kids switch to milk?” he suggests, taking a bottle from the boy. Heavy and green and cold, like money. The label engraved. His own poor dead dad never drank such bubbly in his life. Seventy years of beer and rus
ty water. To Melanie he says, “That expensive bike of yours is still in the garage.”

  “Oh I know,” she says, innocently staring. “If I took it back to Kent someone would steal it.” Her bulging brown eyes show no awareness that he has been curt, feeling betrayed by her.

  He tells her, “You ought to go out and say hello to Charlie.”

  “Oh, we’ve said hello.” Did she leave the motel room he was paying for to go shack up with Charlie? Harry can’t follow it all. As if to make things right Melanie says, “I’ll tell Pru she can use the bike if she wants. It’s wonderful exercise for those muscles.”

  What muscles? Back in the living room, nobody has been kind enough to take his place beside the mother of the bride. As he refills her readily proffered glass he says to her, “Thanks for the handkerchief. Back in the church.”

  “It must be hard,” she says, looking up at him more cozily now, “when there’s only one.”

  There’s not only one, he wants to tell her, drunker than he intended. There’s a dead little sister lying buried in the hill above us, and a long-legged girl roaming the farmland south of Galilee. Who does she remind him of, Mrs. Lubell, when she flirts her head like that, looking up? Thelma Harrison, beside the pool. The Harrisons maybe should have been invited, but then you get into things like Buddy Inglefinger’s feelings being hurt. And Ronnie would have been gross. The organist with the goatee (who invited him?) has joined Soupy and Slim now and something in the gaiety there leads the minister to remember his duty to others. He comes and joins Harry and the mother, a Christian act.