Rabbit, Run - John Updike [75]
“Fritz,” Mrs. Kruppenbach’s voice calls carefully up the stairs. “Supper.”
The red man in his undershirt looks down at Eccles and asks, “Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?”
“No. No. I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?” In the brick skin of his face his eyes seem small imperfections, pink and glazed with water as if smarting in intense heat.
He turns without waiting for Jack to answer and goes downstairs for supper. Jack descends behind him and continues out the door. His heart is beating like a frightened child’s and his knees are weak with fury. He had come for an exchange of information and been flagellated with an insane spiel. Unctuous old thundering Hun had no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light and probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop. Jack realizes that these are spiteful and unworthy thoughts but he can’t stop them. His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telling himself He’s right, he’s right and thus springing tears and purging himself, however absurdly, above the perfect green circle of the Buick steering wheel. But he can’t cry; he’s parched. His shame and failure hang downward in him heavy but fruitless.
Though he knows that Lucy wants him home—if dinner is not quite ready he will be in time to give the children their baths—he instead drives to the drugstore in the center of town. The poodle-cut girl behind the counter is in his Youth Group and two parishioners buying medicine or contraceptives or Kleenex hail him gaily. He feels at home in public places; he rests his wrists on the cold clean marble and orders a vanilla ice-cream soda with a scoop of maple-walnut ice cream, and drinks two Coca-Cola glasses full of delicious clear water before it comes.
Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit doesn’t like it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piping soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. We drink it and then we’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly, look very clean, and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of