Rabbit, Run - John Updike [128]
“About twice a year,” is the answer.
A familiar old Plymouth slows against the curb outside and Rabbit’s mother gets out and looks up and down the sidewalk angrily. His heart leaps and trips his tongue: “Here come my parents.” As if giving a warning. And they do all come to attention, as if to withstand an attack. Mrs. Springer gets up and Harry places himself between her and Janice. Standing in formation with the Springers like this, he can at least show his mother that he’s reformed, that he’s accepted and been accepted. The undertaker’s man goes out to bring them in; Harry can see them standing on the bright sidewalk, arguing which door to go into; Mim a little to one side. Dressed in a quiet suit and with no make-up, she reminds him of the little sister he once had. The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them.
His mother comes through the door first; her eyes sweep the line of them and she steps toward him with reaching curved arms. “Hassy, what have they done to you?” She asks this out loud and wraps him in a hug as if she would carry him back to the sky from which they have fallen.
This quick it opens, and seals shut again. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he pushes her away and stands to his full height. As if unaware of what she has said, his mother turns and embraces Janice. He is relieved to see her act courteously, normally. Pop, murmuring, shakes Springer’s hand. Mini comes and touches Harry on the shoulder and then squats and whispers to Nelson, these two the youngest. All under him Harry feels these humans knit together. His wife and mother cling together. His mother began the embrace automatically but has breathed a great life of grief into it. Her face creases in pain; Janice, rumpled and smothered, yet responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the great frame yearning against her. Mrs. Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height sees. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a member with her of an ancient abused slave race, and then she had realized that, having restored her son to herself, she too must be deserted.
He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her arms tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness, they of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, “My daughter,” recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.
And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.
Eccles comes, panting from some drugstore or tormented home, and the seven of them file with Nelson into the room of flowers and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, with a strange deep soft probe of guilt, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
The angular words walk in Harry’s head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility. Eccles doesn’t; his face is humorless and taut. His voice is false. All these people are false: except his dead daughter, the white box with gold trim.
“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom.”
Shepherd, lamb, arms: Harry’s eyes fill with tears. It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at