by John Updike
“Well, Frank had legs too. Until he let himself get out of shape, he was on the lanky side. Over six foot, when he straightened up, I’m a -sucker for the big ones I guess. Then neither of the boys inherited his height.”
“Yeah, Nelson didn’t get mine, either. A shrimp just like his mother.”
“You’re still with Janice. You used to call her a mutt,” Ruth reminds him. She has settled into this situation comfortably now, leaning back in the rocker and rocking, her stocking feet going up on tiptoe, then down on the heels, then back on tiptoe. “Why am I telling you all about my life when you don’t say a thing about yours?”
“It’s pretty standard,” he says. “Don’t be sore at me because I stayed with Janice. “
“Oh Christ no. I just feel sorry for her.”
“A sister,” he says, smiling. Women are all sisters, they tell us now.
Fat has been added to Ruth’s face not in smooth scoops but in lumps, so when she lifts her head her eye sockets seem built of bony welts. A certain forgiving mischief has lifted her armored glance. “Annie was fascinated by you,” she volunteers. “She several times asked me if I’d ever heard of you, this basketball hero. I said we went to different high schools. She was disappointed when you weren’t there when she and Jamie went back to pick up the car finally. Jamie had been leaning to a Fiesta.”
“So you don’t think Jamie is the answer for her?”
“For now. But you’ve seen him. He’s common.”
“I hope she doesn’t -“
“Go my way? No, it’ll be all right. There aren’t whores anymore, just healthy young women. I’ve raised her very innocent. I always felt 1 was very innocent, actually.”
“We all are, Ruth.”
She likes his saying her name, he should be careful about saying it. He puts the photograph back and studies it in place, Annabelle between her brothers. “How about money?” he asks, trying to keep it light. “Would some help her? I could give it to you so it, you know, wouldn’t come out of the blue or anything. If she wants an education, for instance.” He is blushing, and Ruth’s silence doesn’t help. The rocker has stopped rocking.
At last she says, “I guess this is what they call deferred payments.”
“It’s not for you, it would be for her. I can’t give a lot. I mean, I’m not that rich. But if a couple thousand would make a difference -“
He lets the sentence hang, expecting to be interrupted. He can’t look at her, that strange expanded face. Her voice when it comes has the contemptuous confident huskiness he heard from her ages ago, in bed. “Relax. You don’t have to worry, I’m not going to take you up on it. If I ever get really hard up here I can sell off apiece of road frontage, five thousand an acre is what they’ve been getting locally. Anyway, Rabbit. Believe me. She’s not yours.”
“O.K., Ruth. If you say so.” In his surge of relief he stands.
She stands too, and having risen together their ghosts feel their inflated flesh fall away; the young man and woman who lived illicitly together one flight up on Summer Street, across from a big limestone church, stand close again, sequestered from the world, and as before the room is hers. “Listen,” she hisses up at him, radiantly is his impression, her distorted face gleaming. “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of that girl being yours if there was a million dollars at stake. I raised her. She and I put in a lot of time together here and where the fuck were you? You saw me in Kroll’s that time and there was no follow-up, I’ve known where you were all these years and you didn’t give a simple shit what had happened to me, or my kid, or anything.”
“You were married,” he says mildly. My kid: something odd here.
“You bet I was,” she rushes on. “To a better man than you’ll ever be, sneer all you want. The kids have had a wonderful father and they know it. When he died we just carried on as if he was still around, he was that strong. Now I don’t know what the hell is going on with you in your little life up there in Mt. Judge -“
“We’re moving,” he tells her. “To Penn Park.”
“Swell. That’s just where you belong, with those phonies. You should have left that mutt of yours twenty years ago for her good as well as your own, but you didn’t and now you can stew in it; stew in it but leave my Annie alone. It’s creepy, Harry. When I think of you thinking she’s your daughter it’s like rubbing her all over with shit.”
He sighs through his nose. “You still have a sweet tongue,” he says.
She is embarrassed; her iron hair has gone straggly and she presses it flat with the heels of her hands as if trying to crush something inside her skull. “I shouldn’t say something like that but it’s frightening, having you show up in your fancy clothes wanting to claim my daughter. You make me think, if I hadn’t had the abortion, if I hadn’t let my parents have their way, it might have all worked out differently, and we could have a daughter now. But you
“I know. You did the right thing.” He feels her fighting the impulse to touch him, to cling to him, to let herself be crushed into his clumsy arms as once. He looks for a last topic. Awkwardly he asks, “What’re you going to do, when Morris grows up and leaves home?” He remembers his hat and picks it up, pinching the soft new crown in three fingers.
“I don’t know. Hang on a little more. Whatever happens, land won’t go down. Every year I last it out here is money in the bank.”
He sighs through his nose again. “O.K., if that’s how it is. I’ll run then. Really no soap on the girl?”
“Of course not. Think it through. Suppose she was yours. At this stage it’d just confuse her.”
He blinks. Is this an admission? He says, “I never was too good at thinking things through.”
Ruth smiles at the floor. The squarish dent above her cheekbone, seen this way from above, was one of the first things he noticed about her. Chunky and tough but kindly, somehow. Another human heart, telling him he was a big bunny, out by the parking meters in the neon light, the first time they met. Trains still ran through the center of Brewer then. “Men don’t have to be,” she says. “They don’t get pregnant.”
The dog became agitated when they both stood and Ruth’s voice became louder and angry, and now Fritzie leads them from the room and waits, tail inquisitively wagging, with her nose at the crack of the door leading outside. Ruth opens it and the storm door wide enough for the dog to pass through but not Harry. “Want a cup of coffee?” she asks.
He told Janice one o’clock at Schaechner’s. “Oh Jesus, thanks, but I ought to get back to work.”
“You came here just about Annabelle? You don’t want to hear about me?”
“I have heard about you, haven’t I?”
“Whether I have a boyfriend or not, whether I ever thought about you?”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure that’d be interesting. From the sound of it you’ve done terrifically. Frank and Morris and, who’s the other one?”
“Scott.”
“Right. And you have all this land. Sorry, you know, to have left you in such a mess way back then.”
“Well,” Ruth says, with a considering slowness in which he imagines he can hear her late husband speaking. “I guess we make our own messes.”
She seems now not merely fat and gray but baffled: straw on her sweater, hair on her cheeks. A shaggy monster, lonely. He longs to be out that double door into the winter air, where nothing is growing. Once he escaped by telling her, I’ll be right back, but now there is not even that to say. Both know, what people should never know, that they will not meet again. He notices on the hand of hers that grips the doorknob a thin gold ring all but lost in the flesh of one finger. His heart races, trapped.
She has mercy on him. “Take care, Rabbit,” she says. “I was just kidding about the outfit, you look good.” Harry ducks his head as if to kiss her cheek but she says, “No.” By the time he has taken a step off the concrete porch, her shadow has vanished from the double door’s black glass. The gray of the day has intensified, releasing
a few dry flakes of snow that will not amount to anything, that float sideways like flecks of ash. Fritzie trots beside him to the glossy grape-blue Cebca, and has to be discouraged from jumping into the back seat.
Once on his way, out the driveway and past the mailboxes that say BLANKENBILLER and MUTH, Harry pops a Life Saver into his mouth and wonders if he should have called her bluff on the birth certificates. Or suppose Frank had had another wife, and Scott was his child by that marriage? If the girl was as young as Ruth said, wouldn’t she still be in high school? But no. Let go. Let it go. God doesn’t want him to have a daughter.
Waiting in the overheated front room of Schaechner’s surrounded by plush new furniture, Janice looks petite and prosperous and, with her Caribbean tan, younger than forty-three. When he kisses her, on the lips, she says, “Mmm. Butter Rum. What are you hiding?”
“Onions for lunch.”
She dips her nose close to his lapel. “You smell of smoke.”
“Uh, Manny gave me a cigar.”
She hardly listens to his lies, she is breathy and electric with news of her own. “Harry, Melanie called Mother from Ohio. Nelson is with her. Everything’s all right.”
As Janice continues, he can see her mouth move, her bangs tremble, her eyes widen and narrow, and her fingers tug in excitement at the pearl strand the lapels of her coat disclose, but Rabbit is distracted from the exact sense of what she is saying by remembering, when he bent his face close to old Ruth’s in the light of the door, a glitter there, on the tired skin beneath her eyes, and by the idiotic thought, which it seems he should bottle and sell, that our tears are always young, the saltwater stays the same from cradle, as she said, to grave.
The little stone house that Harry and Janice bought for $78,000, with $15,600 down, sits on a quarter-acre of bushy land tucked in off a macadamized dead end behind two larger examples of what is locally known as Penn Park Pretentious: a tall mockTudor with gables like spires and red-tiled roofs and clinker bricks sticking out at crazy melted angles, and a sort of neo-plantation manse of serene thin bricks the pale yellow of lemonade, with a glassed-in sunporch and on the other side a row of Palladian windows, where Harry guesses the dining room is. He has been out surveying his property, looking for a sunny patch where a garden might be dug in this spring. The spot behind Ma Springer’s house on Joseph Street had been too shady. He finds a corner that might -do, with some cutting back of oak limbs that belong to his neighbor. The earth generally in this overgrown, mature suburb is wellshaded; his lawn is half moss, which this mild winter has dried but left exposed and resilient still. He also finds a little cement fish pond with a blue-painted bottom, dry and drifted with pine needles. Someone had once sunk seashells in the wet cement of the slanting rim. The things you buy when you buy a house. Doorknobs, windowsills, radiators. All his. If he were a fish he could swim in this pond, come spring. He tries to picture that moment when whoever it was, man, woman, or child or all three, had set these shells here, in the summer shade of trees a little less tall than these above him now. The weak winter light falls everywhere in his yard, webbed by the shadows from leafless twigs. He senses standing here a silt of caring that has fallen from purchaser to purchaser. The house was built in that depressed but scrupulous decade when Harry was born. Suave gray limestone had been hauled from the quarries in the far north of Diamond County and dressed and fitted by men who took the time to do it right. At a later date, after the war, some owner broke through the wall facing away from the curb and built an addition of clapboards and white-blotched brick. Paint is peeling from the clapboards beneath the Andersen windows of what is now Janice’s kitchen. Harry makes a mental note to trim back the branches that brush against the house, to cut down the dampness. Indeed there are several trees here that might be turned altogether into firewood, but until they leaf out in the spring he can’t be sure which should go. The house has two fireplaces, one in the big long living room and the other, off the same flue, in the little room behind, that Harry thinks of as a den. His den.
He and Janice moved in yesterday, a Saturday. Pru was coming home from the hospital with the baby and if they were not there she could take their Joseph Street bedroom, with its own bathroom, away from the street. Also they thought the confusion might mask for Janice’s mother the pain of their escape. Webb Murkett and the others got back from the Caribbean Thursday night as planned, and Saturday morning Webb brought one of his roofer’s trucks with extension ladders roped to both sides and helped them move. Ronnie Harrison, that fink, said he had to go into the office to tackle the backlog of paperwork that had built up during his vacation; he had worked Friday night to midnight. But Buddy Inglefinger came over with Webb, and it didn’t take the three men more than two hours to move the Angstroms. There wasn’t much furniture they could call their own, mostly clothes, and Janice’s mahogany bureau, and some cardboard boxes of kitchen equipment that had been salvaged when the previous house they could call their own had burned down in 1969. All of Nelson’s stuff, they left. One of the butch women came out onto her porch and waved goodbye; so news travels in a neighborhood, even when the people aren’t friendly. Harry had always meant to ask them what it was like, and why. He can see not liking men, he doesn’t like them much himself, but why would you like women any better, ifyou were one? Especially women who hammer all the time, just like men.
From Schaechner’s on Thursday afternoon he and Janice had bought, and got them to deliver on Friday, a new color Sony TV (Rabbit hates to put any more money into Japanese pockets but he knows from Consumer Reports that in this particular line they can’t be touched for quality) and a pair of big padded silvery-pink wing chairs (he has always wanted a wing chair, he hates drafts on his neck, people have died from drafts on their necks) and a Queen-size mattress and box springs on a metal frame, without headboard. This bed he and Webb and Buddy carry upstairs to the room at the back, with a partially slanted ceiling but space for a mirror if they want it on the blank wall next to the closet door, and the chairs and TV go not into the living room, which is too big to think about furnishing at first, but into the much cozier room just off it, the den. Always he has wanted a den, a room where people would have trouble getting at him. What he especially loves about this little room, besides the fireplace and the built-in shelves where you could keep either books or Ma’s knickknacks and china when she dies, with liquor in the cabinets below, and even room for a little refrigerator when they get around to it, are the wall-to-wall carpeting of a kind of greenand-orange mix that reminds him of cheerleaders’ tassels and the little high windows whose sashes crank open and shut and are composed of leaded lozenge-panes such as you see in books of fairy tales. He thinks in this room he might begin to read books, instead of just magazines and newspapers, and begin to learn about history, say. You have to step down into the den, one step down from the hardwood floor of the living room, and this small difference in plane hints to him of many reforms and consolidations now possible in his life, like new shoots on a tree cropped back.
Franklin Drive is the elegant street their dead-end spur cuts off of 14VZ Franklin Drive is their postal address, and the spur itself has no street name, they should call it Angstrom Way. Webb suggested Angstrom Alley, but Harry has had enough of alleys in his Mt. Judge years, and resents Webb’s saying this. First he tells you to sell gold too soon, then he fucks your wife, and now he puts your house down. Harry has never lived at so low a number as 14Y2 before. But the mailman in his little red, white, and blue jeep knows where they are. Already they’ve received mail here: flyers to RESIDENT collected while they were in the Caribbean, and Saturday around one-thirty, after Webb and Buddy were gone, while Janice and Harry in the kitchen were arranging spoons and pans they’d forgotten they owned, the letter slot clacked and a postcard and a white envelope lay on the front hall’s bare floor. The envelope, one of the long plain stamped ones you buy at the post office, had no return address and was postmarked Brewer. It was addressed to just MR. HARRY ANGSTROM in t
he same slanting block printing that had sent him last April the clipping about Skeeter. Inside this new envelope the clipping was very small, and the same precise hand that had addressed it had schoolteacherishly inscribed in ballpoint along the top edge, From “Golf Magazine” Annual “Roundup.” The item read:
A COSTLY BIRDIE
Dr. Sherman Thomas cooked his own goose when he killed one of the Canadian variety at Congressional CC. The court levied a $500 fine for the act.
Janice forced a laugh, reading at his side, there in the echoing bare hallway, that led through a white arch into the long living room.
He looked over at her guiltily and agreed with her unspoken thought. “Thelma.”
Her color had risen. A minute before, they had been in sentimental raptures over an old Mixmaster that, plugged in again after ten years in Ma Springer’s attic, had whirred. Now she blurted, “She’ll never let us alone. Never.”
“Thelma? Of course she will, that was the deal. She was very definite about it. Weren’t you, with Webb?”
