Rabbit, Run - John Updike [87]
But he feels joy now; cramped from sitting on the eroded chrome-armed chair sick with cigarettes he feels joy in remembering his girl; the water of his heart has been poured into a thin vase of joy that Eccles’ voice jars and breaks.
“Well I’ve read this article by Jackie Jensen all the way to the end and I don’t know what he said,” Eccles says.
“Huh?”
“This piece by Jackie Jensen on why he wants to quit baseball. As far as I can tell the problems of being a baseball player are the same as those of the ministry.”
“Say, don’t you want to go home? What time is it?”
“Around two. I’d like to stay, if I may.”
“I won’t run off if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
Eccles laughs and keeps sitting there. Harry’s first impression of him had been tenacity and now all the intervening companionship has been erased and it’s gone back to that.
Harry tells him, “When she had Nelson the poor kid was at it for twelve hours.”
Eccles says, “The second child is usually easier,” and looks at his watch. “It hasn’t quite been six hours.”
Events create events. Mrs. Springer passes through from the privileged room where she has been waiting and stiffly nods at Eccles; seeing Harry in the corner of her eye makes her stumble on her sore legs and tumbledown saddle shoes. Eccles gets up and goes with her through the door to the outside. After a while the two of them come back in along with Mr. Springer, who wears a tiny-knotted necktie and a spandy-fresh shirt. At two a.m. he looks like he just came from the tailor’s. His little sandy mustache has been trimmed so often his upper lip has turned gray under it. He says, “Hello, Harry.”
This acknowledgment from her husband, despite some talking-to they’ve probably had from Eccles, goads the old lady into turning on Harry and telling him, “If you’re sitting there like a buzzard young man hoping she’s going to die, you might as well go back to where you’ve been living because she’s doing fine without you and has been all along.”
The two men hustle her away while the old nun peers with a smile across her desk, deaf? Mrs. Springer’s attack, though it ached to hurt him, is the first thing anybody has said to Harry since this began that seems to fit the enormity of the event going on somewhere behind the screen of hospital soap-smell. Until her words he felt alone on a dead planet encircling the great gaseous sun of Janice’s labor; her cry, though a cry of hate, pierced his solitude. The dreadful thought of Janice’s death: hearing it voiced aloud had halved its weight. The strange scent of death Janice breathed: Mrs. Springer also smelled it, and this sharing seems the most precious connection he has with anybody in the world.
Mr. Springer returns and passes through to the outside, bestowing upon his son-in-law a painfully complex smile, compounded of a wish to apologize for his wife (we’re both men; I know), a wish to keep distant (nevertheless you’ve behaved unforgivably; don’t touch me), and the car salesman’s mechanical reflex of politeness. Harry thinks, You crumb; hurls the thought at the slammed door. You slave. Where is everybody going? Where are they coming from? Eccles comes back and feeds him another cigarette and goes away again. Smoking it makes the floor of his stomach tremble. His throat feels like it does when you wake up after sleeping all night with your mouth open. His own bad breath now and then brushes his nostrils. A doctor with a barrel chest and unimaginably soft small hands, held curled in front of the pouch of his smock, comes into the anteroom uncertainly.