Rabbit, Run - John Updike [123]
“Harry.” With the hand that is not on the cane he grips Harry’s arm. He brings a long look to bear on Harry’s face; his mouth is tweaked downward on one side, the skin over his eye on this side is dragged down diagonally so it nearly curtains the glitter, and it may be the bad light but this whole side looks the color of stone. The gouging grip of his fingers trembles.
“Let’s sit down,” Rabbit says, and helps him into an easy chair. Tothero knocks off a doily in arranging his arms. Rabbit brings over a straight chair and sits close so he won’t have to raise his voice. “Should you be running around?” he asks when Tothero says nothing.
“My wife brought me. In the car. Outside, Harry. We heard your terrible news. Didn’t I warn you?” Already his eyes are bulging with water.
“When?”
“When?” The stricken side of his face is turned away, perhaps consciously, into shadow, so his smile seems wholly alive, wise, and sure. “That fight night. I said go back. I begged you.”
“I guess you did. I’ve forgotten.”
“No you haven’t. No you haven’t, Harry.” His breath chuffs on the “Ha” of “Harry.” “Let me tell you something. Will you listen?”
“Sure.”
“Right and wrong,” he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. “Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—his pride at negotiating the long word shows, simple as a boy’s—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.” Rabbit wonders when the tear-trails appeared on Tothero’s cheeks; there they are. “Do you believe me?”
“Sure. Sure. Look, I know this has been my fault. I’ve felt like a, like an insect ever since the thing happened.” Tothero’s tranquil smile deepens; a faint rasping purr comes out of his face. “I warned you,” he says, his diction quickening, “I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”
Harry blurts, “But what can I do?”
Tothero doesn’t seem to hear. “Don’t you remember? My begging you to go back?”
“I don’t know, I guess so.”
“Good. Ah. You’re still a fine man, Harry. You have a healthy body. When I’m dead and gone, remember how your old coach told you to avoid suffering. Remember.” The last word is intoned coyly, with a little wag of the head; on the thrust of this incongruous vivacity he rises from his chair, and prevents himself from pitching forward by quick use of his cane. Harry jumps up in alarm, and the two of them stand for the moment very close. The old man’s big head breathes a distressing scent, not so much medicine as a sweet vegetable staleness. “You young people,” he says with a rising intonation, a schoolteacher’s tone, scolding yet sly, even encouraging, “tend to forget. Don’t you? Now don’t you?”
He wants this admission mysteriously much. “Sure,” Rabbit says, praying he’ll go.
Harry helps him to his car, a ‘57 blue-and-cream Dodge waiting in front of the orange fire hydrant. Mrs. Tothero offers, rather coolly, her regrets at the death of his infant daughter. She looks harried and noble. Gray hair straggles down across her finely wrinkled silver temple. She wants to get away from him, away with her prize. Beside her on the front seat Tothero looks like a smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curve of his cane. Rabbit returns to the house feeling depressed and dirtied by the visit. Tothero’s revelation chilled him. He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all things.
Eccles comes in the late afternoon, to complete the arrangements for the funeral: it will be held tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday. As he leaves Rabbit catches his attention and they talk in the front hall a moment. “What do you think?” Rabbit asks.
“About what?”
“What shall I do?”
Eccles glances up nervously. He is very tired; Harry has never seen him look so tired. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. “Do what you are doing,” he says. “Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left.”
“And that’s