Rabbit, Run - John Updike [71]
With raw sudsy hands Mrs. Angstrom has set about heating coffee for her husband. This small act of service seems to bring her into harmony with him; they begin, in the sudden way of old couples apparently at odds, to speak as one. “It was the Army,” she says. “When he came back from Texas he was a different boy.”
“He didn’t want to come into the shop,” Angstrom says. “He didn’t want to get dirty.”
“Reverend Eccles, would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Angstrom asks.
At last, his chance. “No, thank you. What I would love, though, is a glass of water.”
“Just water? With ice?”
“Any way. Any way would be lovely.”
“Yes, Earl is right,” she says. “People now say how lazy Hassy is, but he’s not. He never was. When you’d be proud of his basketball in high school you know, people would say, ‘Yes well but he’s so tall, it’s easy for him.’ But they didn’t know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see.”
“From about twelve years old on,” Angstrom says, “he was at that night and day. I put a pole up for him out back; the garage wasn’t high enough.”
“When he set his mind to something,” Mrs. Angstrom says, “there was no stopping him.” She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice-cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose. “He wanted to be best at that and I honestly believe he was.”
“I know what you mean,” Eccles says. “I play a little golf with him and already he’s been better than I am.”
She puts the cubes in a glass and holds the glass under a spigot and brings it to him. He tilts it at his lips and Earl Angstrom’s palely vehement voice wavers through the liquid. “Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass. He won’t come work in the print shop because it’ll get his fingernails dirty.” Eccles lowers the glass and Angstrom says full in his face across the table, “He’s become the worst kind of Brewer bum. If I could get my hands on him, Father, I’d try to thrash him if he killed me in the process.” His ashen face bunches defiantly at the mouth; his colorless eyes swarm with glitter.
“Your language, Earl,” his wife says, setting coffee in a flowered cup on the table between his hands.
He looks down into the steam and says, “Excuse me. When I think of what that boy’s doing my stomach does somersaults.”
Eccles lifts his glass and says “No” into it like a megaphone and then drinks until no more water can be sucked from under the ice cubes that bump under his nose. He wipes the moisture from his mouth and says, “There’s a great deal of goodness in your son. When I’m with him—it’s rather unfortunate, really—I feel so cheerful I quite forget what the point of my seeing him is.” He laughs, first at Mr., and, failing here to rouse a smile, at Mrs.
“This golf you play,” Angstrom says. “What is the point? Why don’t the girls parents get the police after him? In my opinion a good swift kick is what he needs.”
Eccles glances toward Mrs. Angstrom and feels the arch of his eyebrows like drying paste on his forehead. He didn’t expect, a minute ago, to be looking toward her as an ally and toward this worn-out good man as a rather vulgar and disappointing foe.
“Mrs. Springer wants to,” he tells Angstrom. “The girl and her father want to wait.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Earl,” Mrs. Angstrom says. “What does old Springer want with his name in the papers? The way you talk you’d think poor Harry was your enemy.”
“He is my enemy,” Angstrom says. He touches the saucer from both sides with his stained fingertips. “That night I spent walking the streets looking for him he became my enemy. You can’t talk. You didn’t see the girl’s face.”
“What do I care about her face? You talk about tarts: they don’t become ivory-white saints in my book just by having a marriage license. That girl wanted Harry and got him with the only trick she knew and now she’s run out of tricks.”
“Don’t talk that way, Mary. It’s just words with