Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  The bell-bottom trousers with their broad red stripes have to be left unbuttoned at the stomach, but since they are held up by tricolor suspenders, and a pale-blue vest patterned in stars comes down over the belt area, it doesn’t much matter. Harry and Janice fuss a good deal at the costume in the week before the Fourth. They actually go buy a formal shirt with French cuffs and a wing collar to go with the floppy red cravat, and decide that somehow his suede Hush Puppies go better with the red-striped trousers, look more like boots, than the formal black shoes he keeps for weddings and funerals. The swallowtail coat, of a wool darker blue than the vest, with three unbuttonable brass buttons on both sides, fits well enough, but the fuzzy flared top hat with its hatband of big silver stars perches on his high head unsteadily, a touch tight with the white nylon wig, so it feels like it might totter and fall off.

  Janice bites the tip of her tongue thoughtfully. “Do you need the wig? Your hair’s so pale anyway.”

  “But it’s cut too short for Uncle Sam. I would have let it grow out if I’d known.”

  “Well,” she says, “why wouldn’t Uncle Sam have a modern haircut? He’s not dead, is he?”

  He tests the hat without the wig and says, “It does feel better, actually.”

  “And frankly, Harry, the wig on you is somehow alarming. It makes you look like a very big red-faced woman.”

  “Look, I’m doing this for our granddaughter, there’s no need to get insulting.”

  “It’s not insulting, it’s interesting. I never saw your female side before. I bet you would have made a nicer woman than either your mother or Mim. They should have been men, both of them.”

  Mom was mean to Janice from the moment he first brought her home from Kroll’s, and Mim once stole Charlie Stavros from her, or so Janice interpreted it. “I’m getting hot and itchy in this outfit,” Harry says. “Let’s try the goatee.”

  The goatee in place, Janice says, “Oh, yes. It slims your face right down. I wonder why you never grew a beard.” There is this subtle past tense that keeps creeping into her remarks about him. “Mr. Lister is growing a beard now, and it makes him look a lot less doleful. He has these sagging jowls.”

  “I don’t want to hear about that creep.” He adds, “When I talk, the stickum doesn’t feel like enough.”

  “It must be, it’s gone through a lot of other parades.”

  “That’s its problem, you dope. Is there any way to renew the stickum?”

  “Just don’t move your chin too much. I could call up Doris Eberhardt; when she was married to Kaufmann they were big into amateur theatricals.”

  “Don’t get that pushy bitch on my case. Maybe somebody at the parade will have some spare stickum.”

  But the mustering of the parade is a confused and scattered business, held on the grounds of the old Mt. Judge High School, now the junior high school and slated to be torn down because of the asbestos in it everywhere and the insurance rates on the wooden floors. When Harry went there, they all just breathed the asbestos and took their chances on the floors catching fire. There are marching bands and antique cars and 4-H floats and veterans in their old uniforms all milling around on the asphalt of the parking lot and the brown grass of the baseball outfield, with the only organizing principle provided by men and women in green T-shirts stencilled MT. JUDGE INDEPENDENCE DAY COMMITTEE and those plastic truck-driver caps with a bill in front and a panel of mesh at the back. Looking to be told where to go, Rabbit wanders in this area where long ago he had roamed with wet-combed duck-tailed hair and a corduroy shirt tight across his back, the sleeves folded back and, out of basketball season, a cigarette pack squaring the shirt pocket. He expects to come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader’s skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled between the skirt and the socks, and her face, with the dimple in one cheek and the touch of acne on her forehead, springing into joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them he doesn’t know anything.

  The old high school, built in the Twenties of orange brick, had a tall windowless wall at the back, across from a board-and-tarpaper equipment shed long since torn down, and this black and gravelly area has profound associations for him, a power in its mute bricks and secluding space, for it was here after school and until twilight called you home that the more questing and footloose of the town’s children tended to gather, girls as well as boys, hanging out, shooting baskets at the hoop attached to the blank brickwork (flat on the wall like those in the gym in Oriole), necking against the torn-tarpaper boards of the equipment shed, talking (the girls held by the boys’ braced arms as in a row of soft cages), teasing, passing secrets, feeling their way, avoiding going home, so that the gritty leftover space here behind the school was charged with a solemn excitement, the questing energy of adolescents. Now in this area, repaved and cleaned up, the shed and backboards gone, Rabbit comes upon Judy’s Girl Scout troop, some of them in uniform and some posed in costume on a flatbed truck, a float illustrating Liberty, the tallest and prettiest girl in a white bedsheet and spiked crown holding a big bronze book and gilded torch, and others grouped around her cardboard pedestal with their faces painted red and brown and black and yellow to represent the races of mankind, the faces painted because there aren’t any Indian or Negro or Asian little girls in Mt. Judge, at least any that have joined the Girl Scouts.

  Judy is one of those in badged and braided khaki uniform around the truck, and she is so amazed to see her grandfather in his towering costume that she takes his hand, as if to tie him to the earth, to reality. He has difficulty bending his head to see her, for fear that his top hat might fall off. As if addressing the distant backstop of the baseball diamond, he asks her, “How does the goatee look? The little beard, Judy.”

  “Fine, Grandpa. You scared me at first. I didn’t know who you were.”

  “It feels to me like it might fall off any second.”

  “It doesn’t look that way. I love the big stripy pants. Doesn’t the vest squeeze your tummy?”

  “That’s the least of my problems. Judy, listen. Think you could do me a favor? It just occurred to me, they make a Scotch tape now that’s sticky on both sides. If I gave you a couple dollars think you could run over to the little store across Central and get me some?” Always, under names and managements that shift with the years, there has been a store across from the school to sell its students bubble gum and candy and cap-guns and caps and tablets and cigarettes and skin magazines and whatever else young people thought they had to have. With difficulty, keeping his head stiffly upright, he digs through the layers of his costume to his wallet in a pouchy side pocket of the striped pants and, holding it up to his face, digs out two one-dollar bills. Just in case, he adds another. Things these days always cost more than he expects.

  “Suppose it’s not open because of the holiday!”

  “It’ll be open. It was always open.”

  “Suppose the parade starts; I got to be on the truck!”

  “No it won’t, the parade can’t start without me. Come on, Judy. Think of all I’ve done for you. Think of how I saved you on the boat that time. Who got me into this damn parade in the first place? You did!”

  He doesn’t dare look down, lest his hat come off, but he can hear from her voice she is near tears. Her hair makes a reddish blur in the bottom of his vision. “O.K., I’ll try, but…”

  “Remember,” he says, and as his chin stiffens in admonishment. he feels his goatee loosen, “sticky on both sides. Scotch makes it. Run, honey!” His heart is racing; he gropes through his clothes to make sure he remembered to bring the little bottle of nitroglycerin. He finds its life-giving nugget deep in the pouchy pocket. When he brings his fingers to his face, to tamp down the goatee, he sees they are trembling. If his goatee doesn’t stick, he won’t be Uncle S
am, and the entire parade will flounder; it will jam up here on the school grounds forever. He walks around with little steps, ignoring everybody, trying to quiet his heart. This is aggravating.

  When Judy at last comes back, panting, she tells him, “They were dumb. They mostly sell only food now. Junky things like Cheez Doodles. The only Scotch tape they have is sticky on one side only. I got some anyway. Was that O.K.?”

  Drum rolls sound on the parking lot, scattered at first, a few kids impatiently clowning around, and then in unison, gathering mass, an implacable momentum. The motors of antique cars and trucks bearing floats are starting up, filling the holiday air with blue exhaust. “O.K.,” Harry says, unable to look down at his granddaughter lest his hat fall off, pocketing the tape and the change from three dollars, pressed upon him from below. Estranged from his costumed body, he feels on stilts, his feet impossibly small.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpa. I did the best I could.” Judy’s little light voice, out of sight beneath him, wobbles and crackles with tears, like water sloshing in sun.

  “You did great,” he tells her.

  A frantic stocky woman in a green committee T-shirt and truck-driver hat comes and hustles him away, to the head of the parade, past floats and drum-and-bugle corps, Model A Fords and civic leaders in neckties and a white limousine. A Mt. Judge patrol car with its blue light twirling and its siren silent will be the spearhead, then Harry at a distance. As if he doesn’t know the route: as a child he used to participate in parades, in the crowd of town kids riding bicycles with red, white, and blue crépe paper threaded through the spokes. Down Central to Market a block short of 422, through the heart of the little slanting diagonal downtown, then left and uphill along Potter Avenue, through blocks of brick semidetached houses up on their terraced lawns behind the retaining walls, then downhill past Kegerise Alley as they used to call it, Kegerise Street it is now, with its small former hosiery factories and machine shops renamed Lynnex and Data Development and Business Logistical Systems, up to Jackson, the high end, a block from his old house, and on down to Joseph and past the big Baptist church, and sharp right on Myrtle past the post office and the gaunt old Oddfellows’ Hall to end at the reviewing stand set up in front of the Borough Hall, in the little park that was full in the Sixties of kids smoking pot and playing guitars but now on a normal day holds just a few old retired persons and homeless drifters with million-dollar tans. The green-chested woman, along with a marshal with a big cardboard badge, a squinty stooped jeweller called Himmelreich - Rabbit was in school a few grades behind his father, whom everybody said was Jewish - makes sure he delays enough to let a distance build between him and the lead car, so Uncle Sam doesn’t look too associated with the police. Immediately next in the parade is the white limousine carrying the Mt. Judge burgess and what borough councilmen aren’t off in the Poconos or at the Jersey Shore. From further behind come the sounds of the drum-and-bugle corps and some bagpipers hired from Chester County and the scratchy pop tunes playing on the floats to help illustrate Liberty and the Spirit of 1776 and ONE WORLD/UN MUNDO and Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, and at the tail end a local rock singer doing ecstatic imitations of Presley and Orbison and Lennon while a megawatt electric fan loudly blows on all the amplifying equipment stacked on his flatbed truck. But up front, at the head of the parade, it is oddly silent, hushed. What a precarious weird feeling it is for Harry at last to put his suede-booted feet on the yellow double line of the town’s main street and start walking! He feels giddy, ridiculous, enormous. Behind him there is the white limousine purring along in low gear, so he cannot stop walking, and far ahead, so far ahead it twinkles out of sight around corners and bends in the route, the police car; but immediately ahead there is nothing but the eerie emptiness of normally busy Central Street under a dazed July sky blue above the telephone wires. He is the traffic, his solitary upright body. The stilled street has its lunar details, its pockmarks, its scars, its ancient metal lids. The tremor in his heart and hands becomes an exalted sacrificial feeling as he takes those few steps into the asphalt void, rimmed at this end of the route with only a few spectators, a few bare bodies in shorts and sneakers and tinted shirts along the curb.

  They call to him. They wave ironically, calling “Yaaaay” at the idea of Uncle Sam, this walking flag, this incorrigible taxer and frisky international mischief-maker. He has nothing to do but wave back, carefully nodding so as not to spill his hat or shake loose his goatee. The crowd as it thickens calls out more and more his name, “Harry,” or “Rabbit” - “Hey, Rabbit! Hey, hotshot!” They remember him. He hasn’t heard his old nickname so often in many years; nobody in Florida uses it, and his grandchildren would be puzzled to hear it. But suddenly from these curbstones there it is again, alive, affectionate. This crowd seems a strung-out recycled version of the crowd that used to jam the old auditorium-gym Tuesday and Friday nights, basketball nights, in the dead of the winter, making their own summer heat with their bodies, so that out on the floor sweat kept burning your eyes and trickling down from under your hair, behind your ears, down your neck to the hollow between your collar bones. Now the sweat builds under his wool swallowtail coat, on his back and his belly, which indeed is squeezed as Judy said, and under his hat even without the wig; thank God Janice got him out of that, she isn’t always a dumb mutt.

  His sweat, as with increasing ease and eagerness he waves at the crowd that clusters at the corners and in the shade of the Norway maples and on the sandstone retaining walls and terraced lawns up into the cool shadow of the porches, loosens his goatee, undermines the adhesive. He feels one side of it softly separate from his chin and without breaking stride - Uncle Sam has a bent-kneed, cranky stride not quite Harry’s loping own - he digs out the Scotch tape from the pouchy pocket and tears off an inch, with the tab of red plaid paper. It wants to stick to his fingers; after several increasingly angry flicks it flutters away onto the street. Then he pulls off another piece, which he presses onto his own face and the detaching edge of synthetic white beard; the tape holds, though it must make a rectangular gleam on his face. The spectators who see him improvise this repair cheer. He takes to doffing his tall heavy hat, with a cautious bow to either side, and this stirs more applause and friendly salutation.

  The crowd he sees from behind his wave, his smile, his adhesive gleam amazes him. The people of Mt. Judge are dressed for summer, with a bareness that since Harry’s childhood has crept up from children into the old. White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided slips of spandex that leave half their asses and boobs exposed. On their cocked hips they hold heat-flushed babies in nothing but diapers and rubber pants. There seem so many young - babies, tots, a bubbling up of generation on generation since the town brought him forth. Then it was full of the old: as he walked to school of a morning, severe and scolding women would come out of their houses shaking brooms and wearing thick dark stockings and housedresses with buttons all down the front. Now a cheerful innocent froth of flesh lines Jackson Road. Bare knees are bunched like grapes, and barrels of naked brown shoulders hulk in the dappled curbside shade. There are American flags on gilded sticks, and balloons, balloons in all colors, even metallic balloons shaped like hearts and pillows, held in hands and tied to bushes, to the handles of strollers containing yet more babies. A spirit of indulgence, a conspiring to be amused, surrounds and upholds his parade as he leads it down the stunning emptiness at the center of the familiar slanting streets.

  Harry puts some Scotch tape on the other side of his goatee and out of the same pocket fishes his pill vial and pops a Nitrostat. The uphill section of the route tested him, and now turning downhill jars his heels and knees. When he draws too close to the cop car up ahead, carbon monoxide washes i
nto his lungs. Mingled music from behind pushes him on: the gaps of “American Patrol” are filled with strains of “Yesterday.” He concentrates on the painted yellow line, besmirched here and there by skid marks, dotted for stretches where passing is permitted but mostly double like the inflexible old trolley tracks, long buried or torn up for scrap. Cameras click at him. Voices call his several names. They know him, but he sees no face he knows, not one, not even Pru’s wry red-haired heart-shape or Roy’s black-eyed stare or Janice’s brown little stubborn nut of a face. They said they would be at the corner of Joseph and Myrtle, but here near the Borough Hall the crowd is thickest, the summer-cooked bodies four and five deep, and his loved ones have been swallowed up.

  The whole town he knew has been swallowed up, by the decades, but another has taken its place, younger, more naked, less fearful, better. And it still loves him, as it did when he would score forty-two points for them in a single home game. He is a legend, a walking cloud. Inside him a droplet of explosive has opened his veins like flower petals uncurling in the sun. His eyes are burning with sweat or something allergic, his head aches under the pressure cooker of the tall top hat. The greenhouse effect, he thinks. The hole in the ozone. When the ice in Antarctica goes, we’ll all be drowned. Scanning the human melt for the glint of a familiar face, Harry sees instead a beer can being brazenly passed back and forth, the flash of a myopic child’s earnest spectacles, a silver hoop earring in the lobe of a Hispanic-looking girl. Along the march he noticed a few black faces in the crowd, as cheerful and upholding as the rest, and some Orientals - an adopted Vietnamese orphan, a chunky Filipino wife. From far back in the still-unwinding parade the bagpipers keen a Highland killing song and the rock impersonator whimpers “… imagine all the people” and, closer to the front, on a scratchy tape through crackling speakers, Kate Smith belts out, dead as she is, dragged into the grave by sheer gangrenous weight, “God Bless America” - … to the oceans, white with foam.” Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily - as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history - grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.