by John Updike
“Your language, Earl,” his wife says, setting coffee in a flowered cup on the table between his hands.
He looks down into the steam and says, “Excuse me. When I think of what that boy’s doing my stomach does somersaults.”
Eccles lifts his glass and says “No” into it like a megaphone and then drinks until no more water can be sucked from under the ice cubes that bump under his nose. He wipes the moisture from his mouth and says, “There’s a great deal of goodness in your son. When I’m with him—it’s rather unfortunate, really—I feel so cheerful I quite forget what the point of my seeing him is.” He laughs, first at Mr., and, failing here to rouse a smile, at Mrs.
“This golf you play,” Angstrom says. “What is the point? Why don’t the girls parents get the police after him? In my opinion a good swift kick is what he needs.”
Eccles glances toward Mrs. Angstrom and feels the arch of his eyebrows like drying paste on his forehead. He didn’t expect, a minute ago, to be looking toward her as an ally and toward this worn-out good man as a rather vulgar and disappointing foe.
“Mrs. Springer wants to,” he tells Angstrom. “The girl and her father want to wait.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Earl,” Mrs. Angstrom says. “What does old Springer want with his name in the papers? The way you talk you’d think poor Harry was your enemy.”
“He is my enemy,” Angstrom says. He touches the saucer from both sides with his stained fingertips. “That night I spent walking the streets looking for him he became my enemy. You can’t talk. You didn’t see the girl’s face.”
“What do I care about her face? You talk about tarts: they don’t become ivory-white saints in my book just by having a marriage license. That girl wanted Harry and got him with the only trick she knew and now she’s run out of tricks.”
“Don’t talk that way, Mary. It’s just words with you. Suppose I had acted the way Harry has.”
“Ah,” she says, and turns, and Eccles flinches, seeing her face taut to release a special missile. “I didn’t want you; you wanted me. Or wasn’t it that way?”
“Yes of course it was that way,” Angstrom mutters.
“Well then: there’s no comparison.”
Angstrom has hunched his shoulders over the coffee, drawn himself in very small; as if she has painted him into a tiny corner. “Oh Mary,” he sighs, not daring move with words.
Eccles tries to defend him; he goes to the weaker side of a fight almost automatically. “I don’t think you can say,” he tells Mrs. Angstrom, “that Janice didn’t imagine that her marriage was built on mutual attraction. If the girl was such a clever schemer she wouldn’t have let Harry slip away so easily.”
Mrs. Angstrom’s interest in this discussion, now that she knows she pressed her husband too hard, has waned; she maintains a position—that Janice is in control—so obviously false that it amounts to a concession. “She hasn’t let him slip away,” she says. “She’ll have him back, you watch.”
Eccles turns to the man; if he will agree they will all three be united and he can leave. “Do you think too that Harry will come around?”
“No,” Angstrom says, looking down, “never. He’s too far gone. He’ll just slide deeper and deeper now until we might as well forget him. If he was twenty, or twenty-two; but at his age … In the shop sometimes you see these young Brewer bums. They can’t stick it. They’re like cripples only they don’t limp. Human garbage, they call them. And I sit there at the machine for two months wondering how the hell it could be my Harry, that used to hate a mess so much.”
Eccles looks over at Harry’s mother and is jarred to see her leaning against the sink with soaked cheeks gleaming under the glasses. He gets up in shock. Is she crying because she thinks her husband is speaking the truth, or because she thinks he is saying this just to hurt her, in revenge for making him admit that he had wanted her? “I hope you’re wrong,” Eccles says. “I must go now; I thank you both for discussing this with me. I realize it’s painful.”
Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining-room touches his arm. “He liked things just so,” he says. “I never saw a boy like him. Any rumpus in the family he’d take hard out of all reason—when Mary and I, you know would have our fun.” Eccles nods, but doubts that “fun” describes what he’s seen.
In the living-room shadows a girl stands in a bare-armed summer dress. “Mim! Did you just get in?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Father—I mean Reverend—”
“Eccles.”
“Eccles, he came to talk about Harry. My daughter Miriam.”
“Hello, Miriam. I’ve heard Harry speak very fondly of you.”
“Hi.”
With that word the big window behind her takes on the intimate glaze of the big window in a luncheonette. Flip greetings seem to trail behind her with wisps of cigarette smoke and drugstore perfume. Mrs. Angstrom’s nose has delicacy on the girl’s face, a sharpness Saracen or even more ancient, barbaric. Taken with the prominent nose her height at first glance seems her mother’s, but when her father stands beside her, Eccles sees that it is his height; their bodies, the beautiful girl’s and the weary man’s, are the same. They have the same narrowness; a durable edge that, Eccles knows after seeing the wounds open under Mrs. Angstrom’s spectacles, can cut. That narrowness, and a manageable vulgarity that offends him. They’ll get through. They know what they’re doing. It’s a weakness of his, to prefer people who don’t know what they’re doing. The helpless: these, and the people on top, beyond help. The ones who maneuver more or less well in the middle seem to his feudal instincts to be thieving from both ends. When they bunch at the door, Angstrom puts his arm around his daughter’s waist and Eccles thinks of Mrs. Angstrom silent in the kitchen with her wet cheeks and red arms.
It’s just a flash; an impression. From the pavement turning to wave at the two of them in the doorway he is grateful for the fine picture they make and laughs at their incongruous symmetry, the earringed Arab boy with her innocent contempt for his Christian collar and the limp-faced old woman of a printer, paired in slenderness, interlocked.
He gets into the car thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half-hour but he can’t remember what it was. He’s scratched, hot, confused, and dry; he’s spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. He’s seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year’s dead stalks. Mrs. Angstrom’s ice water has left him thirstier than before; his palate seems coated with cobwebs. The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window. Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du. Cars are whispering home from work. He drives across the town, tacking on the diagonal streets along a course parallel to the distant ridge of the mountain. Fritz Kruppenbach, Mt. Judge’s Lutheran minister for twenty-seven years, lives in a high brick house not far from the cemetery. The motorcycle belonging to his college-age son is on its side in the driveway, partly dismantled. The sloping lawn, graded in fussy terraces, has the unnatural chartreuse evenness that comes with much fertilizing, much weed-killing, and much mowing. Mrs. Kruppenbach—will Lucy ever achieve that dimpled, obedient look?—comes to the door in a gray dress that makes no compromise with the season. Her gray hair girdles her head with braids of great compactness. When she lets all that hair down, she must be a witch. “He’s mowing out back” she says.
“I’d like to talk to him for just a few minutes. It’s a problem that involves our two congregations.”
“Go up to his room, why do-an tcha? I’ll fetch him.”
The house—foyer, halls, staircase, even the minister’s leathery den upstairs—is flooded with the smell of beef roasting. As if every d
ay, when the house is cleaned, the odor is rubbed into the wood with a damp rag. Eccles sits by the window of Kruppenbach’s den on an oak-backed choir pew left over from some renovation. Seated on the bench he feels an adolescent compulsion to pray but instead peers across the valley at the pale green fragments of the golf course where he would like to be, with Harry. He lied somewhat to Mrs. Angstrom. Harry does not play golf better than he. He seems to have trouble in making the club part of himself, to be tense with the fear that this stick of steel will betray him. Between Harry’s alternately fine and terrible shots and his own consistent weakness there is a rough equality that makes each match unpredictable. Eccles has found other partners either better or worse than he; only Harry is both, and only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible, startling, bottomless quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green. And for Eccles there is an additional hope, a secret determination to trounce Harry. He feels that the thing that makes Harry unsteady, that makes him unable to repeat his beautiful effortless swing every time, is the thing at the root of all the problems that he has created; and that by beating him decisively he, Eccles, will get on top of this weakness, this flaw, and hence solve the problems. In the meantime there is the pleasure of hearing Harry now and then cry, “Yes, yes,” or “That’s the one!” Their rapport at moments attains for Eccles a pitch of pleasure, a harmless ecstasy, that makes the world with its endless circumstantiality seem remote and spherical and green.
The house shudders to the master’s step. Of the ministers in the town, he likes Kruppenbach least. The man is rigid in his creed and a bully in manner. Eccles loves rectories; he grew up in one. But in this one he feels all the humorlessness, the pious oppression, that people falsely imagine. Yet Kruppenbach’s son must not have found it so: witness the motorcycle.
The man comes up the stairs into his den, angry at being taken from his lawn-mowing. He wears old black pants and an undershirt soaked with sweat. His shoulders are coated with wiry gray wool and a wide tangled bush of black-speckled hair bubbles out of the U of the undershirt neck and froths across the wet red skin of his chest.
“Hello, Chack,” he says at pulpit volume, with no intonation of greeting. His German accent makes his words seem stones, set angrily one on top of another. “What is it?”
Eccles doesn’t dare “Fritz” with the older man, and instead laughs and exclaims, “Hello!”
Kruppenbach grimaces. He has a massive square head, crew-cut. He is a man of brick. As if he was born as a baby literally of clay and decades of exposure have baked him to the color and hardness of brick. He repeats, “What?”
“You have a family called Angstrom.”
“Yes.”
“The father’s a printer.”
“Yes.”
“Their son, Harry, deserted his wife over two months ago; her people, the Springers, are in my church.”
“Yes, well. The boy. The boy’s a Schussel.”
Eccles isn’t certain what that means. He supposes that Kruppenbach doesn’t sit down because he doesn’t want to stain his furniture with his own sweat. His continuing to stand puts Eccles in a petitionary position, sitting on the bench like a choirboy. The odor of meat cooking grows more insistent as he explains what he thinks happened: how Harry has been in a sense spoiled by his athletic successes; how the wife, to be fair, had perhaps showed little imagination in their marriage; how he himself, as minister, had tried to keep the boy’s conscience in touch with his wife without pressing him into a premature reunion—for the boy’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of feeling as an uncontrolled excess of it; how the four parents, for various reasons, were of little help; how he had witnessed, just minutes ago, a quarrel between the Angstroms that perhaps offered a clue as to why their son—
“Do you think,” Kruppenbach interrupts; Jack hadn’t expected him to be quiet this long—the man certainly was no listener; even in his undershirt he somehow wore vestments—“do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.”
“I only—”
“No now let me finish. I’ve been in Mt. Judge twenty-seven years and you’ve been here two. I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that?”
“No, of course not. But it seems to me our role in a situation like this—”
“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human good nature. Isn’t it right? Don’t answer, just think if I’m not right. Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.”
“I agree, up to a point—”
“There is no up to a point! There is no reason or measure in what we must do.” His thick forefinger, woolly between the knuckles, has begun to tap emphasis on the back of a leather chair. “If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” Jack feels a blush begin to burn on his face. “How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ’s pain.’ When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot”—he clenches his hairy fists—“with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book—a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”
“Fritz,” Mrs. Kruppenbach’s voice calls carefully up the stairs. “Supper.”
The red man in his undershirt looks down at Eccles and asks, “Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?”
“No. No. I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?” In the brick skin of his face his eyes seem small imperfections, pink and glazed with water as if smarting in intense heat.
He turns without waiting for Jack to answer and goes downstairs for supper. Jack descends behind him and continues out the door. His heart is beating like a frightened child’s and his knees are weak with fury. He had come for an exchange of information and been flagellated with an insane spiel. Unctuous old thundering Hun had no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light and probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop. Jack realizes that these are spiteful and unworthy thoughts but he can’t stop them. His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telli
ng himself He’s right, he’s right and thus springing tears and purging himself, however absurdly, above the perfect green circle of the Buick steering wheel. But he can’t cry; he’s parched. His shame and failure hang downward in him heavy but fruitless.
Though he knows that Lucy wants him home—if dinner is not quite ready he will be in time to give the children their baths—he instead drives to the drugstore in the center of town. The poodle-cut girl behind the counter is in his Youth Group and two parishioners buying medicine or contraceptives or Kleenex hail him gaily. He feels at home in public places; he rests his wrists on the cold clean marble and orders a vanilla ice-cream soda with a scoop of maple-walnut ice cream, and drinks two Coca-Cola glasses full of delicious clear water before it comes.
Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit doesn’t like it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piping soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. We drink it and then we’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly, look very clean, and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.
