Rabbit, Run - John Updike [74]
The man comes up the stairs into his den, angry at being taken from his lawn-mowing. He wears old black pants and an undershirt soaked with sweat. His shoulders are coated with wiry gray wool and a wide tangled bush of black-speckled hair bubbles out of the U of the undershirt neck and froths across the wet red skin of his chest.
“Hello, Chack,” he says at pulpit volume, with no intonation of greeting. His German accent makes his words seem stones, set angrily one on top of another. “What is it?”
Eccles doesn’t dare “Fritz” with the older man, and instead laughs and exclaims, “Hello!”
Kruppenbach grimaces. He has a massive square head, crew-cut. He is a man of brick. As if he was born as a baby literally of clay and decades of exposure have baked him to the color and hardness of brick. He repeats, “What?”
“You have a family called Angstrom.”
“Yes.”
“The father’s a printer.”
“Yes.”
“Their son, Harry, deserted his wife over two months ago; her people, the Springers, are in my church.”
“Yes, well. The boy. The boy’s a Schussel.”
Eccles isn’t certain what that means. He supposes that Kruppenbach doesn’t sit down because he doesn’t want to stain his furniture with his own sweat. His continuing to stand puts Eccles in a petitionary position, sitting on the bench like a choirboy. The odor of meat cooking grows more insistent as he explains what he thinks happened: how Harry has been in a sense spoiled by his athletic successes; how the wife, to be fair, had perhaps showed little imagination in their marriage; how he himself, as minister, had tried to keep the boy’s conscience in touch with his wife without pressing him into a premature reunion—for the boy’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of feeling as an uncontrolled excess of it; how the four parents, for various reasons, were of little help; how he had witnessed, just minutes ago, a quarrel between the Angstroms that perhaps offered a clue as to why their son—
“Do you think,” Kruppenbach interrupts; Jack hadn’t expected him to be quiet this long—the man certainly was no listener; even in his undershirt he somehow wore vestments—“do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.”
“I only—”
“No now let me finish. I’ve been in Mt. Judge twenty-seven years and you’ve been here two. I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that?”
“No, of course not. But it seems to me our role in a situation like this—”
“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human good nature. Isn’t it right? Don’t answer, just think if I’m not right. Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.”
“I agree, up to a point—”
“There is no up to a point! There is no reason or measure in what we must do.” His thick forefinger, woolly between the knuckles, has begun to tap emphasis on the back of a leather chair. “If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” Jack feels a blush begin to burn on his face. “How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself