Rabbit, Run - John Updike [73]
He gets into the car thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half-hour but he can’t remember what it was. He’s scratched, hot, confused, and dry; he’s spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. He’s seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year’s dead stalks. Mrs. Angstrom’s ice water has left him thirstier than before; his palate seems coated with cobwebs. The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window. Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du. Cars are whispering home from work. He drives across the town, tacking on the diagonal streets along a course parallel to the distant ridge of the mountain. Fritz Kruppenbach, Mt. Judge’s Lutheran minister for twenty-seven years, lives in a high brick house not far from the cemetery. The motorcycle belonging to his college-age son is on its side in the driveway, partly dismantled. The sloping lawn, graded in fussy terraces, has the unnatural chartreuse evenness that comes with much fertilizing, much weed-killing, and much mowing. Mrs. Kruppenbach—will Lucy ever achieve that dimpled, obedient look?—comes to the door in a gray dress that makes no compromise with the season. Her gray hair girdles her head with braids of great compactness. When she lets all that hair down, she must be a witch. “He’s mowing out back” she says.
“I’d like to talk to him for just a few minutes. It’s a problem that involves our two congregations.”
“Go up to his room, why do-an tcha? I’ll fetch him.”
The house—foyer, halls, staircase, even the minister’s leathery den upstairs—is flooded with the smell of beef roasting. As if every day, when the house is cleaned, the odor is rubbed into the wood with a damp rag. Eccles sits by the window of Kruppenbach’s den on an oak-backed choir pew left over from some renovation. Seated on the bench he feels an adolescent compulsion to pray but instead peers across the valley at the pale green fragments of the golf course where he would like to be, with Harry. He lied somewhat to Mrs. Angstrom. Harry does not play golf better than he. He seems to have trouble in making the club part of himself, to be tense with the fear that this stick of steel will betray him. Between Harry’s alternately fine and terrible shots and his own consistent weakness there is a rough equality that makes each match unpredictable. Eccles has found other partners either better or worse than he; only Harry is both, and only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible, startling, bottomless quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green. And for Eccles there is an additional hope, a secret determination to trounce Harry. He feels that the thing that makes Harry unsteady, that makes him unable to repeat his beautiful effortless swing every time, is the thing at the root of all the problems that he has created; and that by beating him decisively he, Eccles, will get on top of this weakness, this flaw, and hence solve the problems. In the meantime there is the pleasure of hearing Harry now and then cry, “Yes, yes,” or “That’s the one!” Their rapport at moments attains for Eccles a pitch of pleasure, a harmless ecstasy, that makes the world with its endless circumstantiality seem remote and spherical and green.
The house shudders to the master’s step. Of the ministers in the town, he likes Kruppenbach least. The man is rigid in his creed and a bully in manner. Eccles loves rectories; he grew up in one. But in