Rabbit, Run - John Updike [97]
“Mrs. Smith, this is my son Nelson.”
“Yes, yes, how do you do, Nelson? You have your father’s head.” She pats the small head with a hand withered like a tobacco leaf. “Now let me think. Where did I put that jar of old candy? He can eat candy, can’t he?”
“I guess a little but don’t go looking for it.”
“I will too, if I want to. The trouble with you, young man, you never gave me credit for any competence whatsoever.” She totters off, plucking with one hand at the front of her dress and poking the other into the air before her, as if she’s brushing away cobwebs.
While she’s out of the room he and Nelson stand looking at the high ceiling of this parlor, at the tall windows with mullions as thin as chalk-lines, through whose panes, some of which are tinted lavender, they can see the pines and cypresses that guard the far rim of the estate. Paintings hang on the shining walls. One shows, in dark colors, a woman wrapped in a whipping strip of silk apparently having an argument, from the way her arms are flailing, with a big swan that just stands there pushing. On another wall there is a portrait of a young woman in a black gown sitting in a padded chair impatiently. Her face, though squarish, is fine-looking, with a triangular forehead caused by her hairdo. Round white arms curve into her lap. Rabbit moves a few steps closer to get a less oblique view. She has that short puffy little upper lip that is so good in a girl. The way it lifts to let a dab of dark come between her lips. Lifted like the top petal of a blossom. There is this readiness about her all over. He feels that she’s about to get out of the chair and step forward toward him with a frown on her triangular forehead. Mrs. Smith, returning with a crimson glass ball on a stem like a wineglass, sees where he’s looking and says, “What I always minded was Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn’t like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women. Here.” She has crossed to Nelson with the candy glass. “You try one of these. They’re old but good like a lot of old things in this world.” She takes off the lid, a knobbed hemisphere of turquoise glass, and holds it waggling in her hand. Nelson looks over and Rabbit nods at him to go ahead and he chooses a piece wrapped in colored tinfoil.
“You won’t like it,” Rabbit tells him. “That’s gonna have a cherry inside.”
“Shoosh,” Mrs. Smith says. “Let the boy have the one he wants.” So the poor kid goes ahead and takes it, bewitched by the tinfoil.
“Mrs. Smith,” Rabbit begins, “I don’t know if Reverend Eccles has told you, but my situation has kind of changed and I have to take another job. I won’t be able to help around here any more. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, alertly watching Nelson fumble at the tinfoil.
“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he goes on. “It was sort of like Heaven, like that woman said.”
“Oh that foolish woman Alma Foster,” Mrs. Smith says. “With her lipstick halfway up to her nose. I’ll never forget her, the dear soul. Not a brain in her body. Here, child. Give it to Mrs. Smith.” She sets the dish down on a round marble table holding only an oriental vase full of peonies and takes the piece of candy from Nelson and with a frantic needling motion of her fingers works the paper off. The kid stands there staring up with an open mouth; she thrusts her hand down jerkily and pops the ball of chocolate between his lips. With a crease of satisfaction in one cheek she turns, drops the tinfoil on the table, and says to Rabbit, “Well, Harry. At least we brought the rhodies in.”
“That’s right. We did.”
“It pleased my Harry, I know, wherever he is.”
Nelson bites through to the startling syrup of the cherry and his mouth curls open in dismay; a dribble of brown creeps out one corner and his eyes dart around the immaculate palace room. Rabbit