Rabbit, Run - John Updike [45]
“She didn’t call them. She didn’t call them until two o’clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope.” “Poor thing” is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
Harry asks, “Not until two?” Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.
“Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know. People do.” Eccles laughs. “They’re supposed to; it’s comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn’t been to church in months.” As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.
“This was around two in the morning?”
“Between two and three.”
“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”
The minister shakes his head irritably. “That’s not to be considered.”
“Well I feel terrible about this.”
“Do you? That’s hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?”
“I don’t really have a plan. I’m sort of playing it by ear.”
Eccles’ laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is a connoisseur of affairs like this, broken homes, fleeing husbands, and that “playing it by ear” has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered; Eccles has this knack.
“Your mother has an interesting viewpoint,” Eccles says. “She thinks it’s all an illusion your wife and I have, that you’ve deserted. She says you’re much too good a boy to do anything of the sort.”
“You’ve been busy on this, haven’t you?”
“This, and a death yesterday.”
“Gee, I’m sorry.”
They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley. “Say, if you really want to give me a lift,” Rabbit says, “you could drive over into Brewer.”
“You don’t want me to take you to your wife?”
“No. Good grief. I mean I don’t think it would do any good, do you?”
For a long time it seems that the other man didn’t hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, “Not if you don’t want good to come of it.”
The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday-school clothes. Little girls in pink bell dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.
Eccles asks, “What did she do that made you leave?”
“She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.”
Eccles doesn’t laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. “It’s the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.”
“For less than two days, it’s been.”
“Oh. There’s the law I suppose—”
“I wasn’t thinking of that so much. Your mother-in-law thought of it immediately, but your wife and Mr. Springer are dead against it. I imagine for different reasons. Your wife seems almost paralyzed; she doesn’t want anyone to do anything.”
“Poor kid. She’s such a mutt.”
“Why are you here?”
“ ‘Cause you caught me.”
“I mean why were you in front of your home?”
“I came back to get clean clothes.”
“Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?”
Rabbit feels now the danger of talking; his words are coming back to him, little hooks and snares are being fashioned. “Also I was leaving her the car.”
“Why? Don’t you need it, to escape?”
“I just thought she should have it. Her father sold it to us cheap. Anyway it didn’t do me any good.”
“No?” Eccles stubs