by John Updike
“Well,” Harry blurts to him. “What’s done is done, huh?”
Becky a skeleton by now, strange to think. The nightie they buried her in turned to cobwebs. Her little toenails and fingernails bits of confetti scattered on the satin.
Reverend Campbell’s many small tobacco-darkened teeth display themselves in a complacent smile. “The bride looked lovely,” he tells Mrs. Lubell.
“She gets her height from her father’s people,” she says. “And her straight hair. Mine just curls naturally, where Frank’s sticks up all over his head, he can never get it to lay down. Teresa’s isn’t quite that stubborn, since she’s a girl.”
“Just lovely,” Soupy says, his smile getting a glaze.
Harry asks the man, “How does that Opel of yours do for mileage?”
He takes out his pipe to address the question. “Up and down on these hills isn’t exactly optimum, is it? I’d say twenty-five, twenty-six at best. I do a lot of stopping and starting and with nothing but short trips the carbon builds up.”
Harry tells him, “You know the Japanese make these cars even though Buick sells ‘em. I heard they may not be importing any after the 1980 model. That’s going to put a squeeze on parts.”
Soupy is amused, his twinkling eyes tell Mrs. Lubell. Toward Harry he slides these eyes with mock severity and asks, “Are you trying to sell me a Toyota?”
Mom getting to be a skeleton too, come to think of it. Those big bones in the earth like dinosaur bones.
“Well,” Harry says, “we have a new little front-wheel drive called the Tercel, don’t know where they get these names from but never mind, it gets over forty m.p.g. on the highway and is plenty of car for a single man.”
Waiting for the Resurrection. Suppose it never comes?
“But suppose I get married,” the small man protests, “and have an enormous brood!”
“And indeed you should,” Mrs. Lubell unexpectedly pipes up. “The priests are leaving the church in droves because they’ve got the itch. All this sex, in the movies, books, everywhere, even on the television if you stay up late enough, no wonder they can’t resist. Be grateful you don’t have that conflict.”
“I have often thought,” Soupy tells her in a muted return of his great marrying voice, “I might have made an excellent priest. I adore structure.”
Rabbit says, `Just now in the car we heard that Annenberg down in Philadelphia gave the Catholics fifty thousand so they could put up this platform for the Pope without all this squawking from the civil liberties people.”
Soupy sniffs. “Do you know how much publicity that fifty thousand is going to get him? It’s a bargain.”
Slim and the organist seem to be discussing clothes, fingering each other’s shirts. If he has to talk to the organist Harry can ask why he didn’t play “Here Comes the Bride.”
Mrs. Lubell says, “They wanted the Pope to come to Cleveland but I guess he had to draw the line somewhere.”
“I hear he’s going to some farm way out in nowhere,” Harry says.
Soupy touches the mother of the bride on the wrist and tips his head so as to show to Harry the beginnings of his bald spot. “Mr. Annenberg is our former ambassador to the Court of St. James in England. The story goes that when presenting his credentials to the Queen she held out her hand to be kissed and he shook it instead and said, `How’re ya doin’, Queen?”’
His growl is good. Mrs. Lubell laughs outright, a titter jumps from her to her shame, for she quickly covers her mouth with her knuckles. Soupy loves it, giving her back a deep laugh as from a barrel-chested old fart. If that’s the way they’re going to carry on Rabbit figures he can leave them to it, and using Soupy as a pick makes his move away. He scouts over the gathered heads looking for an opening. It’s always slightly dark in the living room, no matter how many lights are on or what the time of day; the trees and the porch cut down the sun. He’d like a house some day with lots of light, splashing in across smart square surfaces. Why bury yourself alive?
Ma Springer has Charlie locked in a one-on-one over by the breakfront, her face puffy and purplish like a grape with the force of the unheard words she is urging into his ear; he politely bows his tidy head, once broad like a ram’s but now whittled to an old goat’s, nodding almost greedily, like a chicken pecking up grains of corn. Up front, silhouetted against the picture window, the Murketts are holding forth with the Fosnachts, old Ollie no doubt letting these new folks know what a clever musical fellow he is and Peggy gushing, backing him up, holding within herself the knowledge of what a shiftless rat he amounts to domestically. The Murketts belong to the new circle in Harry’s life and the Fosnachts to the old and he hates to see them overlap; even if Peggy was a pretty good lay that time he doesn’t want those dismal old highschool tagalongs creeping into his country-club set, yet he can see flattery is doing it, flattery and champagne, Ollie ogling Cindy (don’t you wish) and Peggy making cow-eyed moos all over Murkett, she’ll flop for anybody, Ollie must be very unsatisfying, one of those very thin reedy pricks probably. Harry wonders if he’d better not go over there and break it up, but foresees a wall of razzing he feels too delicate to push through, after all those tears in church, and remembering Becky and Pop and Mom and even old Fred who aren’t here. Mim is on the sofa with Grace Stuhl and that other old biddy Amy, and Christ if they aren’t having a quiet little ball, the two of them recalling Mim as a child to herself, the Diamond County accent and manner of expressing things making her laugh every minute, and she reminding them, all painted and done up in flowerpot foil, of the floozies they sit and watch all day and night on television, the old souls don’t even know they are floozies, these celebrity women playing Beat the Clock or Hollywood Squares or giving Merv or Mike or Phil the wink sitting in those talk show soft chairs with their knees sticking up naked, they all got there on their backs, nobody cares anymore, the times have caught up with Mim and put her on the gray sofa with the church folk. Nelson and Melanie and Grace Stuhl’s lout of a grandson are still in the kitchen and the girlfriend, after going around with the teeny weenies under her tits in a tricky little warmer with a ketchup dip, seems to have given up and joined them; they have in there the little portable Sony Janice sometimes watches the Carol Burnett reruns on as she makes supper, and from the sound of it - cheers, band music - these useless drunken kids have turned on the Penn State-Nebraska game. Meanwhile there’s Pru in her champagne-colored wedding dress, the little wreath off her head now, standing alone over by the three-way lamp examining that heavy green glass bauble of Ma Springer’s, with the teardrop of air sealed inside, turning it over and over under the wan light with her long pink hands, where a wedding ring now gleams. Laughter explodes from the Fosnacht-Murkett group, which Janice has joined. Webb pushes past Harry toward the kitchen, his fingers full of plastic glasses. “How about that crazy Rose?” he says, going by, to say something.
Pete Rose has been hitting over.600 lately and only needs four more hits to be the first player ever to get two hundred hits in ten major league seasons. But it doesn’t mean that much, the Phillies are twelve and a half games out. “What a showboat,” Rabbit says, what they used to say about him, nearly thirty years ago.
Perhaps in her conspicuous pregnancy Pru is shy of pushing through the crowd to join the others of her generation in the kitchen. Harry goes to her side and stoops down to kiss her demure warm cheek before she is aware; champagne makes it easy. “Aren’t you supposed to kiss the bride?” he asks her.
She turns her head and gives him that smile that hesitates and then suddenly spreads, one corner tucked awry. Her eyes have taken green from contemplating the glass, that strange glossy egg Harry has more than once thought would be good to pound into Janice’s skull. “Of course,” she says. Held against her belly the bauble throws from its central teardrop a pale blade of light. He senses that she had been aware of his approaching in the side of her vision but had held still like a deer in danger. Among these strange people, her fate sealed by a ceremo
ny, of course she is afraid. Rabbit tries to comfort his daughter-in-law: “I bet you’re beat. Don’t you get sleepy as hell? As I remember it Janice did.”
“You feel clumsy,” Pru allows, and with both hands replaces the green glass orb on the round table that is like a wooden leaf all around the stem of the standing lamp. Abruptly she asks, “Do you think I’ll make Nelson happy?”
“Oh sure. The kid and I had a good long talk about it once. He thinks the world of you.”
“He doesn’t feel trapped?”
“Well, frankly, that’s what I was curious about, ‘cause in his position I might. But honest to God, Teresa, it doesn’t seem to bother him. From little on up he’s always had this sense of fairness and in this case he seems to feel fair is fair. Listen. Don’t you worry yourself. The only thing bothering Nelson these days is his old man.”
“He thinks the world of you,” she says, her voice very small, in case this echo is too impudent.
Harry snorts; he loves it when women sass him, and any sign of life from this one is gratefully received. “It’ll all work out,” he promises, though Teresa’s aura of fright remains intense and threatens to spread to him. When the girl dares a full smile you see her teeth needed braces and didn’t get them. The taste of champagne keeps reminding him ofpoor Pop. Beer and rusty water and canned mushroom soup.
“Try to have some fun,” he tells Pru, and cuts across the jammed room, around the boisterous Murkett-Fosnacht-Janice crowd, to the sofa where Mim sits between the two old ladies. “Are you being a bad influence on my little sister?” he asks Amy Gehringer.
While Grace Stuhl laughs at this Amy struggles to get to her feet. “Don’t get up on my account,” Rabbit tells her. “I just came over to see if I could get any of you anything.”
“What I need,” Amy grunts, still floundering, so he pulls her up, “I must get for myself.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
She looks at him a little glassily, like Melame when he told her to drink milk. “A call of nature,” Amy answers, “you could say.”
Grace Stuhl holds up a hand that when he takes it, to pull her up, feels like a set ofwom stones in a sack of the finest driest paper, strangely warm. “I better say goodbye to Becky,” she says.
“She’s over there talking the ear off Charlie Stavros,” Harry tells her.
“Yes, and probably saying too much by now.” She seems to know the subject; or does he imagine that? He drops down onto the sofa beside Mim wearily.
“So,” she says.
“Next I gotta marry you off” he says.
“I’ve been asked, actually, now and then.”
“And whajja say?”
“At my age it seemed like too much trouble.”
“Your health good?”
“I make it good. No more smoking, notice?”
“How about those crazy hours you keep, staying up to watch Ol’ Blue Eyes? I knew he was called Ol’ Blue Eyes, by the way. I just didn’t know which 01’ Blue Eyes, I thought a new one might have come along.” When he had called her long-distance to invite her to the wedding she said she had a date with a very dear friend to see 01’ Blue Eyes and he had asked, Who’s Ol’ Blue Eyes? She said Sinatra, ya dummy, where’ve you been all your life? and he answered, You know where I’ve been, right here and she said, Yeah, it shows. God, he loves Mim; in the end there’s nothing to understand you like your own blood.
Mim says, “You sleep it off during the day. Anyway I’m out of the fast lane now, I’m a businesswoman.” She gestures toward the other side of the room. “What’s Bessie trying to do, keep me from talking to Charlie? She’s been at him an hour.”
“I don’t know what’s going on.”
“You never did. We all love you for it.”
“Drop dead. Hey how do you like the new Janice?”
“What’s new about her?”
“Don’t you see it? More confident. More of a woman, somehow.”
“Hard as a nut, Harry, and always will be. You were always feeling sorry for her. It was a wasted effort.”
“I miss Pop,” he suddenly says.
“You’re getting more and more like him. Especially from the side.”
“He never got a gut like mine.”
“He didn’t have the teeth for all those munchies you like.”
“You notice how this Pru looks like him a little? And Mom’s big red hands. I mean, she seems more of an Angstrom than Nelson.”
“You guys like tough ladies. She’s pulled off a trick I didn’t think could be pulled off anymore.”
He nods, imagining through her eyes his father’s toothless profile closing in upon his own. “She’s running scared.”
“And how about you?” Mim asks. “What’re you doing these days, to feed the inner man?”
“I play golf.”
“And still fuck Janice?”
“Sometimes.”
“You two. Mother and I didn’t give it six months, the way she trapped you.”
“Maybe I trapped myself. And what’s up with you? How does money work, out in Vegas? You really own a beauty parlor, or you just a front for the big guys?”
“I own thirty-five per cent. That’s what I got for being a front for the big guys.”
He nods again. “Sounds familiar.”
“You fucking anybody else? You can tell me, I’ll be on that plane tomorrow. How about the broad bottom over there with the Chinesey eyes?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. Not since Jill. That shook me up.”
“O.K., but ten years, that’s not normal, Harry. You’re letting them turn you into a patsy.”
“Remember,” he asks, “how we used to go sledding on Jackson Road? I often think about it.”
“That happened maybe once or twice, it never snows around here, for Cry-eye. Come out to Lake Tahoe; now there’s snow. We’ll go over to Alta or Taos; you should see me ski. Come on out by yourself, we’ll fix you up with somebody really nice. Blonde, brunette, redhead, you name it. Good clean small-town girl too; nothing crude.”
“Mim,” he says, blushing, “you’re the limit,” and thinks of telling her how much he loves her, but there is a commotion at the front door.
Slim and the organist are leaving together and they encounter there a dowdy couple who have been ringing the disconnected doorbell for some time. From the look of them they are selling encyclopaedias, except that people don’t do that in pairs, or going door-to-door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, except that instead of The Watchtower they are holding on to a big silver-wrapped wedding present. This is the couple from Binghamton. They took the wrong turn off the Northeast Extension and found themselves lost in West Philadelphia. The woman sheds tears of relief and exhaustion once inside the foyer. “Blocks and blocks of blacks,” the man says, telling their story, still staggered by the wonder of it.
“Oh,” Pru cries from across the room, “Uncle Rob!” and throws herself into his arms, home at last.
Ma Springer has made the Poconos place available to the young couple for a honeymoon in these golden last weeks of warm weather - the birches beginning to turn, the floats and canoes pulled in from the lake. All ofit wasted on the kid, they’ll be lucky if he doesn’t bum the cottage down frying his brain and his genes with pot. But it’s not Harry’s funeral. Now that Nelson is married it’s like a door has been shut in his mind, a debt has been finally paid, and his thoughts are turning again to that farm south of here where another child of his may be walking, walking and waiting for her life to begin.
One evening when nothing she likes is on television Ma calls a little conference in the living room, easing her legs wrapped around with flesh-colored bandages (a new thing her doctor has prescribed; when Harry tries to visualize an entire creature made out of the flesh the bandage manufacturers are matching, it would make the Hulk look healthy) up on the hassock and letting the man of the house have the Barcalounger. Janice sits on the sofa with a post-dinner nip of some white creamy poison fe
rmented from coconut milk the kids have brought into the house, looking girlish beside her mother, with her legs tucked up under her. Nice taut legs. She’s kept those and he has to take his hat off to her, tiddly half the time or not. What more can you ask of a wife in a way than that she stick around and see with you what happens next?
Ma Springer announces, “We must settle now what to do with Nelson.”
