Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  Ruth’s gaze, her lids half-closed as if she were reading a book, rests on the city. The hard silhouette of her cheek­bone in the high vigilant air is still. Is she feeling like an Indian? She said she might be Mexican.

  O.K. He brought them up here. To see what? The city stretches from dollhouse rows at the base of the park through a broad blurred belly of flowerpot red patched with tar roofs and twinkling cars and ends as a rose tint in the mist that hangs above the distant river. Gas tanks glimmer in this smoke. Suburbs lie like scarves in it. But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only im­mensity can give us a sensible taste. Air dries his mouth.

  His day has been bothered by God: Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking—why did they teach you such things if no one believed them? It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space. Someone is dying. In this great stretch of brick someone is dying. The thought comes from nowhere: simple percentages. Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be. He moves his eyes to find the spot; perhaps he can see the cancer-blackened soul of an old man mount through the blue like a monkey on a string. He strains his ears to hear the pang of release as this ruddy illusion at his feet gives up this reality. Silence blasts him. Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door. What is he doing here, standing on air? Why isn’t he home? He becomes frightened and begs Ruth, “Put your arm around me.”

  She carelessly obliges, taking a step and swinging her haunch against his. He clasps her tighter and feels better. Brewer at their feet seems to warm in the sloping sunlight; its vast red cloth seems to lift from the valley in which it is sunk concavely, to fill like a breast with a breath, Brewer the mother of a hundred thousand, shelter of love, ingenious and luminous artifact. So it is in an access of security that he asks, voicing like a loved child a teasing doubt, “Were you really a whore?”

  To his surprise she turns hard under his arm and twists away and stands beside the railing menacingly. Her eyes narrow; her chin changes shape. In his nervousness he no­tices three Boy Scouts grinning at them across the asphalt. She asks, “Are you really a rat?”

  He feels the need of care in his answer. “In a way.”

  “All right then.”

  They take a bus down.

  “Tuesday afternoon, overcast, he takes a bus to Mt. Judge. Eccles’ address is at the north end of town; he rides past his own neighborhood in safety, gets off at Spruce, and walks along singing in a high voice to himself the phrase, “Oh, I’m just wild about Har-ry”—not the beginning of the song, but the place at the end where the girl, repeating, goes way up on “I’m.”

  He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it at the end of February. They have gone bowling once and have seen four movies—Gigi, Bell, Book and Candle, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and The Shaggy Dog. He saw so many snippets from The Shaggy Dog on the Mickey Mouse Club that he was curious to see the whole thing. It was like looking through a photograph album with about half familiar faces. The scene where the rocket goes through the roof and Fred MacMurray runs out with the coffee pot he knew as well as his own face.

  Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball. Plok. Every time, in Gigi, the stereophonic-sound loudspeaker behind them in the theater would blare out she turned around and said “Shh” as if it were somebody in the theater talking too loud. In The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, every time Ingrid Bergman’s face appeared on the screen she leaned over to Rabbit and asked him in a whisper, “Is she really a whore?” He was upset by Robert Donat; he looked awful. He knew he was dying. Imagine knowing you’re dying and going ahead pretending you’re a mandarin. Ruth’s comment about Bell, Book and Candle last night was, “Why don’t you ever see any bongo drums around here?” He vowed secretly to get some. A half-hour ago, waiting for the bus on Weiser Street, he priced a set in the window of the Chords ‘n’ Records music store. $19.95. All the way out on the bus he beat bongo patterns on his knees.

  “For I’m just wild about Harry-ree—”

  Number 61 is a big brick place with white wood trim, a little porch imitating a Greek temple, and a slate roof that shines under the clouds’ sullen luster. Out back a wire fence encloses a yellow swing frame and a sandbox. A puppy yaps in this pen as Harry goes up the walk. The grass wears that intense greasy green that promises rain, the color of grass in color snapshots. The place looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in black shingled castles. But a small plate above the fish-shaped door-knocker says in engraved script The Rectory. He bangs the fish twice and, after waiting, twice again.

  A crisp little number with speckled green eyes opens the door. “What is it?” Her voice as good as says, “How dare you?” As she adjusts her face to his height her eyes enlarge, displaying more of the vividly clear whites to which her moss-colored irises are buttoned.

  At once, absurdly, he feels in control of her, feels she likes him. Freckles dot her little bumpy nose, kind of a pinched nose, narrow and pale under the dots of tan. Her skin is fair, and fine-grained as a child’s. She is wearing orange shorts. With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Say, is Reverend Eccles in?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “In the middle of the day?”

  “He was up much of the night.”

  “Oh gosh. The poor guy.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Well gee, I don’t know. He told me to be here. He really did.”

  “He might well have. Please come in.”

  She leads him past a hall and staircase into a cool room with a high ceiling and silver wallpaper, a piano, watercolors of scenery, a lot of sets of books in a recessed bookcase, a fireplace whose mantel supports one of those clocks with a pendulum of four gold balls that are supposed to run prac­tically forever. Photographs in frames all around. Furniture heavy green and red except for a long sofa with a scrolling back and arms whose cushions are cream white. The room smells coldly kept. From far off comes the warmer odor of cake baking. She stops in the center of the rug and says, “Listen.”

  He stops. The faint bump that he also heard is not re­peated. She explains, “I thought that brat was asleep.”

  “Are you the babysitter?”

  “I’m the wife,” she says, and sits down in the center of the white sofa, to prove it.

  He takes a padded wing chair opposite. The plum fabric feels softly gritty against his naked forearms. He is wearing a checked sports shirt, with the sleeves turned back to his el­bows. “Oh, I’m sorry.” Of course. Her bare legs, crossed, show the blue dabs of varicose veins. Her face, when she sits, is not as young as at the door. Double chin when she relaxes, head tucked back. Smug little cookie. Firm little knockers. He asks, “How old is your child?”

  “Two children. Two girls, one and three.”

  “I have a boy who’s two.”

  “I’d like a boy,” she says. “The girls and I have personal­ity problems; we’re too much alike. We know exactly what the other’s thinking.”

  Dislikes her own children! Rabbit is shocked, this from a minister’s wife. “Does your husband notice this?”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful for Jack. He loves to have women fight­ing over him. It’s his little harem. I think a boy would threaten him. Do you feel threatened?”

  “Not by the kid, no. He’s only two.”

  “It starts earlier than two, believe
me. Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Good for you. I expect you’re a primitive father. I think Freud is like God; you make it true.”

  Rabbit smiles, supposing that Freud has some connection with the silver wallpaper and the watercolor of a palace and a canal above her head. Class. She brings her fingertips to her temples, pushes her head back, shuts her lids, and through plump open lips sighs. He is struck; she seems at this mo­ment a fine-grained Ruth.

  Eccles’ thin voice, oddly amplified in his home, cries down the stairs. “Lucy! Joyce is getting into bed with me!”

  Lucy opens her eyes and says to Rabbit proudly, “See?”

  “She says you told her it’s all right,” the voice whines on, piercing bannisters, walls, and layers of wallpaper.

  Mrs. Eccles gets up and goes to the archway. The seat of her orange shorts is wrinkled from sitting; the hitched-up legs expose most of the oval backs of her thighs. Whiter than the sofa; the blush of pink from the pressure of sitting fades from the skin. “I told her no such thing!” she calls upward while one fair hand tugs the shorts down and smoothes the cloth around her mussed but smug rump, a pocket stitched with black thread to the right half. “Jack,” she goes on, “you have a visitor! A very tall young man who says you invited him!”

  At the mention of himself Rabbit has risen and right be­hind her says, “To play golf.”

  “To play golf!” she echoes in a yell.

  “Oh, dear,” the voice upstairs says to itself, then shouts, “Hello, Harry! I’ll be right down.”

  A child up there is crying, “Mommy did too! Mommy did too!”

  Rabbit shouts in answer, “Hello!”

  Mrs. Eccles turns her head with an inviting twist. “Har­ry—?”

  “Angstrom.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Angstrom?”

  “Well. I’m kind of out of work.”

  “Angstrom. Of course. Aren’t you the one who disappeared? The Springers’ son-in-law?”

  “Right,” he says smartly and, in a mindless follow-through, a kind of flower of co-ordination, she having on the drop of his answer turned with prim dismissal away from him again, slaps! her sassy fanny. Not hard; a cupping hit, rebuke and fond pat both, well-placed on the pocket.

  She swiftly wheels, swinging her backside to safety behind her. Her freckles dart sharp as pinpricks from her shock-bleached face. Her leaping blood freezes her skin, and this rigid effect, of superbly severe stone, is so incongruous with the lazy condescending warmth he feels toward her, that he makes a funny face, pushing his upper lip over his lower in a burlesque of penitence.

  A chaotic tumble on the stairs shakes the walls. Eccles jolts to a stop in front of them, off-balance, tucking a dirty white shirt into rumpled suntans. His shadowed eyes weep between his furry lids. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hadn’t really forgotten.”

  “It’s kind of cloudy anyway,” Rabbit says, and smiles in­voluntarily. Her ass had felt so good, just right, dense yet springy, kind of smacked back. He supposes she’ll tell, which will finish him here. Just as well. He doesn’t know why he’s here anyway.

  Maybe she would have told, but her husband starts an­noying her immediately. “Oh, I’m sure we can get nine in before it rains,” he tells Rabbit.

  “Jack, you aren’t really going to play golf again. You said you had all those calls to make this afternoon.”

  “I made calls this morning.”

  “Two. You made two. On Freddy Davis and Mrs. Landis. The same old safe ones. What about the Ferrys? You’ve been talking about the Ferrys for six months.”

  “What’s so sacred about the Ferrys? They never do any­thing for the church. She came on Christmas Sunday and went out by the choir door so she wouldn’t have to speak to me.”

  “Of course they don’t do anything for the church and that’s why you should call as you know perfectly well. I don’t think anything’s sacred about the Ferrys except that you’ve been brooding about her going out the side door and making everybody’s life miserable for months. Now if she comes on Easter it’ll be the same thing. To tell you my honest opinion you and Mrs. Ferry would hit it off splendidly, you’re both equally childish.”

  “Lucy, just because Mr. Ferry owns a shoe factory doesn’t make them more important Christians than somebody who works in a shoe factory.”

  “Oh Jack, you’re too tiresome. You’re just afraid of being snubbed and don’t quote Scripture to justify yourself. I don’t care if the Ferrys come to church or stay away or become Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “At least the Jehovah’s Witnesses put into practice what they say they believe.” When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small-jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Lucy says, “but when you asked me to marry you I told you what I felt and you said all right fine.”

  “I said as long as your heart remained open for Grace.” Eccles pours these words on her in a high strained blast that burns his broad forehead, soils it with a blush.

  “Mommy I had a rest.” The little voice, shyly penetrating, ambushes them from above. At the head of the carpeted stairs a small brown girl in underpants hangs in suspense. She seems to Rabbit too dark for her parents, too somber in the shadows, braced on silhouetted stout legs, baby fat knotted on longer stalks. Her hands rub and pluck her naked chest in exasperation. She hears her mother’s answer before it comes.

  “Joyce. You go right back into your own bed and have a nap.”

  “I can’t. There’s too many noises.”

  “We’ve been screaming right under her head,” Eccles tells his wife.

  “You’ve been screaming. About Grace.”

  “I had a scary dream,” Joyce says, and clumsily descends two steps.

  “You did not. You were never asleep.” Mrs. Eccles walks to the foot of the stairs, holding her own throat gently.

  “What was the dream about?” Eccles asks his child.

  “A lion ate a boy.”

  “That’s not a dream at all,” the woman snaps, and turns on her husband: “It’s those hateful Belloc poems you insist on reading her.”

  “She asks for them.”

  “They’re hateful. They give her traumas.”

  “Joyce and I think they’re funny.”

  “Well, you both have perverted senses of humor. Every night she asks me about that damn pony Tom and what does ‘die’ means?”

  “Tell her what it means. If you had Belloc’s and my faith in the supernatural these perfectly natural questions wouldn’t upset you.”

  “Don’t harp, Jack. You’re awful when you harp.”

  “I’m awful when I take myself seriously, you mean.”

  “Hey. I smell cake burning,” Rabbit says.

  She looks at him and recognition frosts her eyes. That there is some kind of cold call in her glance, a faint shout from the midst of her enemies, he feels but ignores, letting his gaze go limp on the top of her head, showing her the sensi­tive nostrils that sniffed the smoking case. The compact arc of her skull under her short-clipped fluffed hairdo suggests that she’s been turned on an exceptionally precise lathe.

  “If only you would take yourself seriously,” she says to Eccles, and on glimpsey bare legs flies down the sullen hall of the rectory.

  Eccles calls, “Joyce, go back to your room and put on a shirt and you can come down.”

  The child instead thumps down three more steps.

  “Joyce, did you hear me?”

  “You get it, Dayud-dee.”

  “Why should I get it? Daddy’s all the way downstairs.”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  “You do too. Right on your bureau.”

  “I don’t know where my bruro is.”

  “In your room, sweet. Of course you know where it is. You get your shirt and I�
��ll let you downstairs.”

  But she is already halfway down.

  “I’m frightened of the li-un,” she sings with a little smile that betrays consciousness of her own impudence. Her voice has a spaced, testing quality; Rabbit heard this note of care in her mother’s voice too, when she was teasing the same man, and wonders why Eccles doesn’t go for it; drive a wedge in this chink of fear and make discipline. Not that he could do it either.

  “There’s no lion up there. There’s nobody up there but Bonnie sleeping. Bonnie’s not afraid.”

  “Please, Daddy. Please please please please please.” She has reached the foot of the stairs and seizes and squeezes her father’s knees.

  Eccles laughs, bracing his unbalanced weight on the child’s head, which is rather broad and flat-topped, like his own. “All right,” he says. “You wait here and talk to this funny man.” And bounds up the stairs with that unexpected athleticism.

  Rabbit says, “Joyce, are you a good girl?”

  She waggles her stomach and pulls her head into her shoul­ders. The motion forces a little guttural noise, “cukk,” out of her throat. She shakes her head; he has the impression she is trying to hide behind a screen of dimples. But’ she says with unexpectedly prim and positive enunciation, “Yes.”

  “And is your mommy good?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes her so good?” He hopes Lucy hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.

  Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hang­ing there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a labor­ious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John’s Epis­copal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer, the letters interlocked artistically. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of Things; stuck into the frame is a yellow photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper’s head: the glass this is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head; this half-mirroring glass rejects his attention, which slips back and forth clinging nowhere. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibili­ties, “the man who disappeared.” “Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.” What a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She’d have an anxious little edge and want her own. Cookie. A sharp vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.