Rabbit, Run - John Updike [55]
“Did he? Do you?”
“Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.”
“Well then we’re all more or less in it.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call”—he looks at Harry and laughs—“inner darkness.”
Eccles’ volunteering all this melts Rabbit’s caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and jiggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, “Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you. I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this”—he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards with tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world—“there’s something that wants me to find it.”
Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny cross-notched cup in the car ashtray. “Of course, all vagrants think they’re on a quest. At least at first.”
Rabbit doesn’t see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserves this slap. He supposes this is what ministers need, to cut everybody down to the same miserable size. He says, “Well I guess that makes your friend Jesus look pretty foolish.”
Mention of the holy name incites pink spots high on Eccles’ cheeks. “He did say,” the minister says, “that saints shouldn’t marry.”
They turn off the road and go up the winding drive to the clubhouse, a big cinder-block building fronted with a long sign that has CHESTNUT GROVE GOLF COURSE lettered between two Coca-Cola insignia. When Harry caddied here it was just a clapboard shack holding a wood-burning stove and charts of old tournaments and two armchairs and a counter for candy bars and golf balls you fished out of the swamp and that Mrs. Wenrich resold. He supposes Mrs. Wenrich is dead. She was a delicate old rouged widow like a doll with white hair and it always seemed funny to hear talk about greens and turf and tourneys and par come out of her mouth. Eccles parks the Buick on the asphalt lot and says, “Before I forget.”
Rabbit’s hand is on the door handle. “What?”
“Do you want a job?”
“What kind?”
“A parishioner of mine, a Mrs. Horace Smith, has about eight acres of garden around her home, toward Appleboro. Her husband was an incredible rhododendron enthusiast. I shouldn’t say incredible; he was a terribly dear old man.”
“I don’t know anything about gardening.”
“Nobody does, that’s what Mrs. Smith says. There are no gardeners left. For forty dollars a week, I believe her.”
“A buck an hour. That’s pretty poor.”
“It wouldn’t be forty hours. Flexible time. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Flexibility? So you can be free to preach to the multitudes.”
Eccles really does have a mean streak. Him and Belloc. Without the collar around his throat, he kind of lets go. Rabbit gets out of the car. Eccles does the same, and his head across the top of the car looks like a head on a platter. The wide mouth moves. “Please consider it.”
“I can’t. I may not even stay in the county.”
“Is the girl going to kick you out?”
“What girl?”
“What is her name? Leonard. Ruth Leonard.”
“Well. Aren’t you smart?” Who could have told him? Peggy Gring? By way of Tothero? More likely Tothero’s girl Whatsername. She looked like Janice. It doesn’t matter; the world’s such a web anyway, things just trickle through. “I never heard of her,” Rabbit says.
The head on the platter grins weirdly in the sunglare off the metal.
They walk side by side to the cement-block clubhouse. On the way Eccles remarks, “It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”
“Say. I didn’t have to show up today, you know.”
“I know. Forgive me. I’m in a very depressed mood.”
There’s nothing