Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  Boy, these boys do love misery, Harry thinks. Well, it’s a turf nobody else wants. St. Joseph’s Hospital is in the tatty northcentral part of Brewer where the old Y.M.C.A. was before they tore it down for yet another drive-in bank and where the old wooden railroad bridge has been rebuilt in concrete that started to crack immediately. They used to talk about burying the tracks along through here in a tunnel but then the trains pretty much stopped running and that solved that. Janice had had Rebecca June here when the nurses were all nuns, they may still be nuns but now there’s no way of telling. The receptionist for this floor wears a salmon-colored pants suit. Her swollen bottom and slumping shoulders lead the way. Half-open doors reveal people lying emaciated under white sheets staring at the white ceiling, ghosts already. Pru is in a four-bed room and two women in gauzy hospital johnnies scatter back into their beds, ambushed by early visitors. In the fourth bed an ancient black woman sleeps. Pru herself is all but asleep. She still wears flecks of last night’s mascara but the rest of her looks virginal, especially the fresh white cast from elbow to wrist. Nelson kisses her lightly on the lips and then, sitting in the one bedside chair while his elders stand, sockets his face in the space on the bed edge next to the curve of Pru’s hip. What a baby, Harry thinks.

  “Nelson was wonderful,” Pru is telling them. “So caring.” Her

  voice is more musical and throaty than Harry has ever heard it.

  He wonders if just lying down does that to a woman: changes the

  angle of her voice box.

  “Yeah, he felt sick about it,” Harry says. “We didn’t hear the story till this morning.”

  Nelson lifts his head. “They were at a strip joint, can you imagine?”

  “Jesus,” Harry says to Janice. “Who’s in charge here? What does he want us to do, sit around the house all the time aging gracefully?”

  Ma Springer says, “Now we can only stay a minute, I want to get to church. It wouldn’t look right I think just to go to the meeting like Reverend Campbell said.”

  “Go to that meeting, Ma,” Harry points out, “they’ll hit you up for a fortune. Tracker organs don’t grow on trees.”

  Janice says to Pru, “You poor sweetie. How bad is the arm?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t paying that much attention to what the doctor said.” Her voice floats, she must be full of tranquilizers. “There’s a bone on the outside, with a funny name -“

  “Femur,” Harry suggests. Something about all this has jazzed him up, made him feel nerved-up and defiant. Those strippers last night, some of them young enough to be his daughter. The Gold Cherry, the place was called.

  Nelson lifts his head again from burrowing in Pru’s side. “That’s in the thigh, Dad. She means the humerus.”

  “Ha ha,” Harry says.

  Pru seems to moan. “Ulna,” she supplies. “He said it was just a simple fracture.”

  “How long’s it gonna be on?” Harry asks.

  “He said six weeks if I do what he says.”

  “Off by Christmas,” Harry says. Christmas is a big thing in his mind this year, for beyond it, and the mop-up of New Year’s, they’re going to take their trip, they have the hotel, the plane reservations, they were discussing it all last night again, after the excitement of the strippers.

  “You poor sweetie,” Janice repeats.

  Pru begins to sing, without music. But the words come out as if sung. “Oh my God, I don’t mind, I’m glad for it, I deserve to be punished somehow. I honestly believe” - she keeps looking straight at Janice, with an authority they haven’t seen from her before - “it’s God telling me this is the price He asks for my not losing the baby. I’m glad to pay it, I’d be glad if every bone in my body was broken, I really wouldn’t care. Oh my God, when I felt my feet weren’t under me and I knew there wasn’t anything for me to do but fall down those horrible stairs, the thoughts that ran through my head! You must know.”

  Meaning Janice must know what it’s like to lose a baby. Janice kind of yelps and falls on the bedridden girl so hard Harry winces, and plucks at her back to pull her off. Feeling the rock of plaster against her breasts, Janice arches her spine under his hands; through the cloth her skin feels taut as a drum, and hot. But Pru shows no pain, smiling her crooked careful smile and keeping her eyelids with their traces of last night’s blue closed serenely, accepting the older woman’s weight upon her. The hand not captured in a cast Pru sneaks around to pat Janice’s back; her fingers come close to Harry’s own. Pat, they go, pat pat. He thinks of Cindy Murkett’s round fingers and marvels how much more childish and grublike they look than these, bony though young and reddened at the knuckles: his mother’s hands had that tough scrubbed look. Janice can’t stop sobbing, Pru can’t stop patting, the two other women patients awake in the room can’t stop glancing over. Moments this complicated rub Harry the wrong way. He feels rebuked, since the official family version is that the baby’s dying at Janice’s hands was all his fault. Yet now the truth seems declared that he was just a bystander. Nelson, pushed to one side by his mother’s assault of grief, sits up and stares, poor frazzled kid. These damn women so intent on communing should leave us out of it entirely. At last Janice rights herself, having snuffled so hard her upper lip is wet with snot.

  Harry hands her his handkerchief.

  “I’m so happy,” she says with a big runny sniff, “for Pru.”

  “Come on, shape up,” he mutters, taking back the handkerchief.

  Ma Springer soothes the waters with, “It does seem a miracle, all the way down those stairs and nothing worse. Up that high in those old Brewer houses the stairs were just for the servants.”

  “I didn’t go all the way down,” Pru says. “That’s how I broke my arm, stopping myself. I don’t remember any pain.”

  “Yeah,” Harry offers. “Nelson said you were feeling no pain.”

  “Oh no, no.” Her hair spread out across the pillow by Janice’s embrace makes her look like she is falling through white space, singing. “I’d hardly had anything, the doctors all say you shouldn’t, it was those terrible tall platforms they’re making us all wear. Isn’t that the dumbest style? I’m going to burn them up, absolutely, as soon as I get back.”

  “When will that be now?” Ma asks, shifting her black purse to the other hand. She has been dressed for church since before Nelson woke up and the fuss began. She’s a slave to that church, God knows what she gets out of it.

  “Up to a week, he said,” Pru says. “To keep me quiet and, you know, to make sure. The baby. I woke up this morning with what I thought were contractions and they scared me so I called Soupy. He was wonderful.”

  “Yes, well,” Ma says.

  Harry hates the way they all keep calling it the baby. More like a piglet or a wobbly big frog at this stage, as he pictures it. What if she had lost it, wouldn’t it have lived? They keep five-month preemies alive now and pretty soon you’ll have life in a test tube start to finish. “We gotta get Ma to church,” he announces. “Nelson, you want to wake up and come or stay here and sleep?” The boy’s head had gone back down onto the hospital mattress again. He used to fall asleep at the kitchen table that way.

  “Harry,” Janice says. “Don’t be so rough on everybody.”

  “He thinks we’re all silly about the baby,” Pru says dreamily, dimly teasing.

  “No, hey: I think it’s great about the baby.” He bends over to kiss her goodbye for now and wants to whisper in her ear about all the babies he has had, dead and alive, visible and invisible. Instead he tells her, straightening, “Keep cool. We’ll be back after this when we can stay longer.”

  “Don’t not play golf,” she says.

  “Golf’s shot. They don’t like you to walk on the greens after a certain point.”

  Nelson is asking her, “What do you want me to do, go or stay?”

  “Go, Nelson, for heaven’s sake. Let me get some sleep.”

  “You know, I’m sorry last night if I said anything. I was skunked. When the
y told me last night they didn’t think you’d lose the baby I was so relieved I cried. Honest.” He would cry again but his face clouds with embarrassed awareness that the others have listened. That’s why we love disaster, Harry sees, it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong we’re no better than animals. Suppose the baby had aborted at the very moment he was watching that olive chick with the rolling tongue tug down her tinsel underpants to her knees and peek at the audience from behind her shoulder while tickling her asshole with that ostrich feather: he’d feel terrible.

  Pru waves her husband’s quavery words and all their worried faces away. “I’m fine. I love all of you so much.” Her hair streams outward as she waits to sink into sleep, into more wild prayer, into the dreaming fluids of her own bruised belly. Her stumpy wing of snow-white plaster lifts a few inches from her chest in farewell. They leave her to the company of ex-nuns and shuffle back through the hospital corridors, their footsteps clamorous amid their silent determination to save their quarrels for the car.

  “A week!” Harry says, as soon as they’re rolling in the Mustang. “Does anybody have any idea how much a week in a hospital costs these days?”

  “Dad, how can you keep thinking about money all the time?”

  “Somebody has to. A week is a thousand dollars minimum. Minimum.”

  “You have Blue Cross.”

  “Not for daughter-in-laws I don’t. Not for you either, once you’re over nineteen.”

  “Well I don’t know,” Nelson says, “but I don’t like her being in a ward with all those other women barfing and moaning all night. One of ‘em was even black, did you notice?”

  “How did you get so prejudiced? Not from me. Anyway that’s not a ward, that’s what you call a semi-private,” Harry says.

  “I want my wife to have a private room,” Nelson says.

  “Is that a fact? You want, you want. And who’s going to foot the bill, big shot? Not you.”

  Ma Springer says, “I know when I had my diverticulitis, Fred wouldn’t hear of anything but a private room for me. And it was a corner room at that. A wonderful view of the arboretum, the magnolias just in bloom.”

  Janice asks, “How about at the lot, isn’t he under the group insurance there?”

  Harry tells her, “Maternity benefits don’t start till you’ve worked for Springer Motors nine months.”

  “A broken arm isn’t what I’d call maternity,” Nelson says.

  “Yeah but if it weren’t for her maternity she’d be out walking around with it.”

  “Maybe Mildred could look into it,” Janice suggests.

  “O.K.,” he concedes, with ill grace. “I don’t know what our exact policy is.”

  Nelson should let it go at that. Instead he says, leaning forward from the back seat so his voice presses on Harry’s ear, “Without Mildred and Charlie there isn’t much you do know exactly. I mean -“

  “I know what you mean and I know a lot more about the car business than you ever will at the rate you’re going, if you don’t stop futzing around with these old Detroit hotrods that lose us a bundle and start focusing on the line we carry.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if they were Datsuns or Hondas, but frankly Dad, Toyotas -“

  “The Toyota franchise is what old Fred Springer landed and Toyotas are what we sell. Bessie, why doncha slap the kid around a little? I can’t reach him.”

  His mother-in-law’s voice comes from the back seat after a pause. “I was wondering if I should go to church after all. I know his heart’s set on a big drive for the organ and there aren’t too many that enthusiastic. If I show up I might get made a committee head and I’m too old for that.”

  “Didn’t Teresa seem sweet?” Janice asks aloud. “It seemed like she’d grown up overnight.”

  “Yeah,” Harry says, “and if she’d fallen down all two flights she’d be older than we are.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” Nelson says. “Who do you like?”

  “I like everybody,” Harry says. “I just don’t like getting boxed in.”

  The way from St. Joseph’s to Mt. Judge is to keep going straight over the railroad tracks and then continue right on Locust past Brewer High and on through Cityview Park and then left past the shopping mall as usual. On a Sunday morning the people out in cars are mostly the older American type, the women with hair tinted blue or pink like the feathers of those Easter chicks before they outlawed it and the men gripping the steering wheel with two hands like the thing might start to buck and bray: with nolead up to a dollar thirteen at some city stations thanks to the old Ayatollah they have to try to squeeze value out of every drop. Actually, people’s philosophy seems to be they’ll burn it while it’s here and when it’s fourth down and twenty-seven Carter can punt. The four features at the mall cinema are BREAKING AWAY STARTING OVER RUNNING and “10.” He’d like to see “10,” he knows from the ads this Swedish-looking girl has her hair in corn rows like a black chick out of Zaire. One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there’s been in the world and all the fucking there’s going to be, and none ofit for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He’ll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road. His stomach, sour from last night’s fun, binds as it used to when he was running to school late. He says suddenly to Nelson, “How the hell could you let her fall, why didn’t you keep ahold of her? What were you doing out so late anyway? When your mother was pregnant with you we never went anywhere.”

  “Together at least,” the boy says. “You went a lot of places by yourself the way I heard it.”

  “Not when she was pregnant with you, we sat there night after night with the boob tube, 1 Love Lucy and all that family comedy, didn’t we Bessie? And we weren’t snorting any dope, either.”

  “You don’t snort dope, you smoke it. Coke is what you snort.”

  Ma Springer responds slowly to his question. “Oh I don’t know how you and Janice managed exactly,” she says wearily, in a voice that is looking out the window. “The young people are different now.”

  “I’ll say they are. You fire somebody to give ‘em a job and they knock the product.”

  “It’s an O.K. product if all you want is to get from here to there,” Nelson begins.

  Harry interrupts furiously, thinking of poor Pru lying there with a snivelling baby burying his head in her side instead of a husband, of Melanie slaving away at the Crépe House for all those creeps from the banks that lunch downtown, of his own sweet hopeful daughter stuck with that big red-faced Jamie, of poor little Cindy having to put on a grin at being fucked from behind so old Webb can have his kicks with his SX-70, of Mim going down on all those wop thugs out there all those years, of Mom plunging her old arms in gray suds and crying the kitchen blues until Parkinson’s at last took mercy and got her upstairs for a rest, of all the women put upon and wasted in the world as far as he can see so little punks like this can come along. “Let me tell you something about Toyotas,” he calls back at Nelson. “They’re put together by little yellow guys in white smocks that work in one plant cradle to grave and go crazy if there’s a fleck of dust in the fuel injector system and those jalopies Detroit puts out are slapped together by jigaboos wearing headphones pumping music into their ears and so zonked on drugs they don’t know a slothead screw from a lug nut and furthermore are taught by the NAACP -to hate the company. Half the cars come through the Ford assembly line are deliberately sabotaged, I forget where I read all this, it wasn’t Consumer Reports.”

  “Dad, you’re so prejudiced. What would Skeeter say?”