Rabbit, Run - John Updike [72]
“Ah,” she says, and turns, and Eccles flinches, seeing her face taut to release a special missile. “I didn’t want you; you wanted me. Or wasn’t it that way?”
“Yes of course it was that way,” Angstrom mutters.
“Well then: there’s no comparison.”
Angstrom has hunched his shoulders over the coffee, drawn himself in very small; as if she has painted him into a tiny corner. “Oh Mary,” he sighs, not daring move with words.
Eccles tries to defend him; he goes to the weaker side of a fight almost automatically. “I don’t think you can say,” he tells Mrs. Angstrom, “that Janice didn’t imagine that her marriage was built on mutual attraction. If the girl was such a clever schemer she wouldn’t have let Harry slip away so easily.”
Mrs. Angstrom’s interest in this discussion, now that she knows she pressed her husband too hard, has waned; she maintains a position—that Janice is in control—so obviously false that it amounts to a concession. “She hasn’t let him slip away,” she says. “She’ll have him back, you watch.”
Eccles turns to the man; if he will agree they will all three be united and he can leave. “Do you think too that Harry will come around?”
“No,” Angstrom says, looking down, “never. He’s too far gone. He’ll just slide deeper and deeper now until we might as well forget him. If he was twenty, or twenty-two; but at his age … In the shop sometimes you see these young Brewer bums. They can’t stick it. They’re like cripples only they don’t limp. Human garbage, they call them. And I sit there at the machine for two months wondering how the hell it could be my Harry, that used to hate a mess so much.”
Eccles looks over at Harry’s mother and is jarred to see her leaning against the sink with soaked cheeks gleaming under the glasses. He gets up in shock. Is she crying because she thinks her husband is speaking the truth, or because she thinks he is saying this just to hurt her, in revenge for making him admit that he had wanted her? “I hope you’re wrong,” Eccles says. “I must go now; I thank you both for discussing this with me. I realize it’s painful.”
Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining-room touches his arm. “He liked things just so,” he says. “I never saw a boy like him. Any rumpus in the family he’d take hard out of all reason—when Mary and I, you know would have our fun.” Eccles nods, but doubts that “fun” describes what he’s seen.
In the living-room shadows a girl stands in a bare-armed summer dress. “Mim! Did you just get in?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Father—I mean Reverend—”
“Eccles.”
“Eccles, he came to talk about Harry. My daughter Miriam.”
“Hello, Miriam. I’ve heard Harry speak very fondly of you.”
“Hi.”
With that word the big window behind her takes on the intimate glaze of the big window in a luncheonette. Flip greetings seem to trail behind her with wisps of cigarette smoke and drugstore perfume. Mrs. Angstrom’s nose has delicacy on the girl’s face, a sharpness Saracen or even more ancient, barbaric. Taken with the prominent nose her height at first glance seems her mother’s, but when her father stands beside her, Eccles sees that it is his height; their bodies, the beautiful girl’s and the weary man’s, are the same. They have the same narrowness; a durable edge that, Eccles knows after seeing the wounds open under Mrs. Angstrom’s spectacles, can cut. That narrowness, and a manageable vulgarity that offends him. They’ll get through. They know what they’re doing. It’s a weakness of his, to prefer people who don’t know what they’re doing. The helpless: these, and the people on top, beyond help. The ones who maneuver more or less well in the middle seem to his feudal instincts to be thieving from both ends. When they bunch at the door, Angstrom puts his arm around his daughter’s waist and Eccles thinks of Mrs. Angstrom silent in the kitchen with her wet cheeks and red arms.
It’s just a flash; an impression. From the pavement turning to wave at the two of them in the doorway he is grateful for the fine picture they make and laughs at