Rabbit, Run - John Updike [117]
With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can’t seize the solid of; it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.
She lifts the living thing into air and hugs it against her sopping chest. Water pours off them onto the bathroom tiles. The little weightless body flops against her neck and a quick look of relief at the baby’s face gives a fantastic clotted impression. A contorted memory of how they give artificial respiration pumps Janice’s cold wet arms in frantic rhythmic hugs; under her clenched lids great scarlet prayers arise, wordless, monotonous, and she seems to be clasping the knees of a vast third person whose name, Father, Father, beats against her head like physical blows. Though her wild heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers she doesn’t feel the faintest tremor of an answer in the darkness against her. Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
3
JACK comes back from the telephone a shocking color.
“Janice Angstrom has accidentally drowned their baby.”
“How could she?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid she was drunk. She’s unconscious now.”
“Where was he?”
“Nobody knows. I’m supposed to find him. That was Mrs. Springer.”
He sits down in the great walnut-armed chair that had been his father’s and Lucy realizes with resentment that her husband is middle-aged. His hair is thinning, his skin is dry, he looks exhausted. She cries, “Why must you spend your life chasing after that worthless heel?”
“He’s not worthless. I love him.”
“You love him. That’s sickening. Oh I think that’s sickening, Jack. Why don’t you try loving me, or your children?”
“I do.”
“You don’t, Jack. Let’s face it, you don’t. You couldn’t bear to love anybody who might return it. You’re afraid of that, aren’t you? Aren’t you afraid?”
They had been drinking tea in the library when the phone rang and he picks his empty cup off the floor between his feet and looks into the center. “Don’t be fancy, Lucy,” he says. “I feel too sick.”
“You feel sick, yes, and I feel sick. I’ve felt sick ever since you got involved with that animal. He’s not even in your church.”
“Any Christian is in my church.”
“Christian! If he’s a Christian thank God I’m not one. Christian. Kills his baby and that’s what you call him.”
“He didn’t kill the baby. He wasn’t there, it was an accident.”
“Well he as good as did. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The girl had adjusted and something like this never would have happened.”
Eccles blinks; shock has put a great analytic distance between him and things. He’s rather impressed by the way she has reconstructed what must have happened. He wonders a little why her speech is so vengeful. “Heel” was a strange word for her to have used. “So you’re saying I really killed the baby,” he says.
“Of course not. I didn’t mean to say that at all.”
“No. I think you’re probably right,” he says, and lifts himself out of the chair. He goes into the hall to the telephone and again draws out of his wallet the number written in pencil below the faint name, Ruth Leonard. The number worked once but this time the mouse of electricity gnaws at the remote membrance of metal in vain. He lets it ring twelve times, hangs up, dials the number again, and hangs up after seven rings. When he returns to the study Lucy is ready for him.
“Jack, I’m sorry.