Rabbit, Run - John Updike [67]
“Nobody thinks it’s funny, Mrs. Springer.”
“You don’t hear the talk I do. You don’t see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can’t keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, ‘A man has duty too. It isn’t all one way.’ It’s women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world’s just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half-believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?”
She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and scratches at Eccles’ face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his notes dissolve into nonsense. He fumbles through his memory and manages to bring out, “I feel Harry is in some respects a special case.”
“The only thing special about him is he doesn’t care who he hurts or how much. Now I mean no offense Reverend Eccles and I’m sure you’ve done your best considering how busy you are but to be honest I wish that first night I had called the police like I wanted to.”
He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest him. Why not? With his white collar he forges God’s name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life. When he asks her, “What can the police do?” he seems to himself to mean what can they do to him.
“Well I don’t know but more than play golf I expect.”
“I’m quite sure he will come back.”
“You’ve been saying that for two months.”
“I still believe it.” But he doesn’t, he doesn’t believe anything. Silence.
“Could you”—her voice is changed; it beseeches—“bring me over that stool there in the corner? I have to get my legs up.”
When he blinks, his eyelids scratch. He rouses from his daze and gets the stool and takes it to her. Her broad shins in their green childlike socks lift meekly, and as he places the stool under the heels, his bending, with its echo of religious-pamphlet paintings of Christ washing the feet of beggars, fits his body to receive a new flow of force. He straightens up and towers above her. She plucks at her skirt at the knees, tugging it down.
“Thank you,” she says. “That’s a real relief for me.”
“I’m afraid it’s the only sort of relief I’ve given you,” he confesses with a simplicity that he finds, and mocks himself for finding, admirable.
“Ah,” she sighs. “There’s not much anybody can do I guess.”
“No, there are things to do. Perhaps you’re right about the police. The law provides protection for wives; why not use it?”
“Fred’s against it.”
“Mr. Springer has good reasons. I don’t mean merely business reasons. All the law can extract from Harry is financial support; and I don’t think, in this case, that money is really the point. In fact I’m not sure money is ever really the point.”
“That’s easy to say if you’ve always had enough.” He doesn’t mind. It seemed to slip from her automatically, with less malice than lassitude; he is certain she wants to listen.
“That may be. I don’t know. But at any rate my concern—everyone’s concern for that matter, I’m sure—is with the general health of the situation. And if there’s to be a true healing, it must be Harry and Janice who act.