Rabbit, Run - John Updike [127]
Of the things he dreads, he is most conscious of seeing his parents. He hasn’t had the courage to call them or see them since the thing happened; Mrs. Springer called Mom Monday night and asked her to the funeral. The silence from his home since then has frightened him. It’s one thing to get hell from other people and another from your own parents. Ever since he came back from the Army Pop had been nibbling at a grudge because he wouldn’t go to work in the shop and in a way had nibbled himself right into nothing in Harry’s heart. All the mildness and kindness the old man had ever shown him had faded into nothing. But his mother was something else; she was still alive, and was still attached to the cord of his life. If she comes in and gives him hell he thinks he’ll die rather than take it. And of course what else is there to give him? Whatever Mrs. Springer says he can slip away from because in the end she has to stick with him and anyway he feels somehow she wants to like him but with his mother there’s no question of liking him they’re not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Of all the people in the world he wants to see her least. He wishes she’d die.
At last they’re ready, Mr. Springer in a spiffy dark gray drip-and-dry and Nelson in a sissy suit with straps and Mrs. in a black felt hat with a veil and a stem of purple berries and Janice all pinned and hemmed in but still looking broad and sooty in her mother’s fat dress. She doesn’t wear a hat. The undertaker’s black Cadillac comes and takes them to the funeral parlor. It was once a house but now is carpeted the way no house ever was, pale green carpets that deaden your steps like an inch of dust on the floor. Little silver tubes on the wall shield a yellowish light and the colors everywhere, on all the walls and curtains you can see, are colors no one would live with, salmon and aqua and the violet that kills germs on toilet seats. They come up a flagstone walk in the sunshine past frothy green bushes into this, and wait in a little pink side-room. Harry can see into the main room; on a few rows of auditorium chairs about six people sit, five of them women. The only one be knows is Peggy Gring. Her little boy wriggling beside her makes seven. It was meant to be at first nobody but the families, but the Springers then asked a few close friends. His parents are not here. Somewhere someone’s boneless hands trail up and down the keys of an electric organ. The unnatural coloring of the interior comes to a head in the hothouse flowers arranged around a little white coffin. The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform covered with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician’s trick, the living baby underneath. Janice looks in and yields a startled whimper and an undertaker’s man, blond and young with an unnaturally red face, conjures a bottle of spirits of ammonia out of his side pocket. Her mother holds it under her nose and she suppresses a face of disgust; her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane. Harry takes her arm and turns her so she can’t see into the next room.
The side-room has a window through which they can look at the street, where children and cars are running. “Hope the minister hasn’t forgotten,” the young red-faced man says, and to his own embarrassment chuckles. He can’t help being at his ease here.
“Does that happen often?” Mr. Springer asks. He is standing behind his wife, and his face tips forward with curiosity, a birdy black gash below his pale mustache. Mrs. Springer has sat