Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,100

touch, just enough to get rid of his milk, give it to her. Though in her ether trance she spoke of making love, she turns away from him in bed, and sleeps with a heaviness that feels sullen. He is too grateful, too proud of her, to disobey. He in a way, this week, worships her.

Eccles comes calling and says he hopes to see them in church. Their debt to him is such that they agree it would be nice of them, at least one of them, to go. The one must be Harry. Janice can’t; she has been, by this Sunday, out of the hospital nine days, and, with Harry off at his new job since Monday, is beginning to feel worn out, weak, and abused. Harry is happy to go to Eccles’ church. Not merely out of affection for Eccles, though there’s that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it. He dresses in his new gray suit and steps out at quarter of eleven into a broad blue Sunday morning a day before the summer solstice. He always envied those people parading into church across from Ruth’s place and now he is one of them. Ahead of him is the first hour in over a week when he won’t be with a Springer, either Janice at home or her father at work. The job at the lot is easy enough, if it isn’t any work for you to lie. He feels exhausted by midafternoon. You see these clunkers come in with 80,000 miles on them and the pistons so loose the oil just pours through and they get a washing and the speedometer turned back and you hear yourself saying this represents a real bargain, owned by a man with two cars and not 30,000 miles of wear in it. He’ll ask forgiveness.

He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly he loves the ones dressed for church; the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest, sandwiched between their parents with olive complexions and bony arms, walk in Rabbit’s eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of relief, he could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated with happiness to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, “God,” “Rebecca,” “thank you,” bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. He is surrounded by people who know God; he has come into a field of flowers. When he sinks back into sitting position the head in front of him takes his eye. A woman in a wide straw hat. Smaller than average with narrow freckled shoulders, probably young, though women tend to look young from the back. The straw hat is so fresh, so pleasing. The way it broadcasts the gentlest tilt of her head, the way it turns the twist of blond hair at the nape of her neck into a kind of peeping secret he alone knows. She is young; her neck and shoulders are given a faint, shifting lambency by their coat of fine white hairs, invisible except where the grain lies with the light. He smiles, remembering Tothero talking about women being covered all over with hair. He wonders if Tothero is dead now and quickly prays not. He becomes impatient for the woman to turn so he can see her profile under the rim of the hat, a great woven sun-wheel, garnished with an arc of paper violets. She turns to look down at something beside her; his breath catches; the thinnest crescent of cheek gleams, and is eclipsed again. Something in a pink ribbon pops up