Rabbit, Run - John Updike [70]
He bluntly defends Janice. “The girl is shy.”
“Shy! She wasn’t too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirttail in.”
“He was one and twenty, as you say.”
“Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”
Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn’t acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. “About as shy as a snake,” she says, “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc.”
He laughs again; but isn’t she? “Well uh, what does Mr. Angstrom think Harry should do?”
“Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He’s just like his father underneath. All soft heart. I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.”
“That’s an unusual view.”
“Is it? It’s what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don’t know who’s supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.”
He smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps—overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Deep fundamental hopelessness in such a mind. Hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he’s forgotten much theology. It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.
Mrs. Angstrom picks up a dropped thread. “Now my daughter Miriam is as old as the hills and always was; I’ve never worried about her. I remember, on Sundays long ago when we’d walk out by the quarry Harold was so afraid-he wasn’t more than twelve then—he was so afraid she’d fall over the edge. I knew she wouldn’t. You watch her. She won’t marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out.”
“I don’t think the world has jumped on him. The girl’s mother and I were just discussing that it seemed quite the contrary.”
“Don’t you think it. That girl gets no sympathy from me. She has everybody on her side from Eisenhower down. They’ll talk him around. You’ll talk him around. And there’s another.”
The front door has opened with a softness she alone hears. Her husband comes into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and a tie but with his fingernails ringed in black; he’s a printer. He’s as tall as his wife but seems shorter. His mouth works self-deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth. His nose is Harry’s, a neat smooth button. “How do you do, Father,” he says; either he was raised as a Catholic or among Catholics.
“Mr. Angstrom, it’s very nice to meet you.” The man’s hand has tough ridges but a soft, dry palm. “We’ve been discussing your son.”
“I feel terrible about that.” Eccles believes him. Earl Angstrom has a gray, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips over his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.
“He goes on and on about that girl as if she was the mother of Christ,” Mrs. Angstrom says.
“That’s not true,” Angstrom says mildly, and sits down in his white shirt at the porcelain kitchen table. Four settings, year after year, have worn black blurs through the enamel. “I just don’t see how Harry could make such a mess.