Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,101
beside her shoulder. He stares into the inquisitive, delighted face of little Joyce Eccles. His fingers fumble for the hymnal as the organ heaves into the service; it is Eccles’ wife rising within reach of his arm.
Eccles comes down the aisle shuffling behind a flood of acolytes and choristers. Up behind the altar rail he looks absentminded and grouchy, remote and insubstantial and stiff, like a Japanese doll in his vestments. The affected voice, nasal-pious, in which he intones prayers affects Rabbit disagreeably; there is something disagreeable about the whole Episcopal service, with its strenuous ups and downs, its canned petitions, its cursory little chants. He has trouble with the kneeling pad; the small of his back aches; he hooks his elbows over the back of the pew in front of him to keep from falling backward. He misses the familiar Lutheran liturgy, scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription. In this service he blunders absurdly, balked by what seem willful dislocations of worship. He feels too much is made of collecting the money. He scarcely listens to the sermon at all.
It concerns the forty days in the Wilderness and Christ’s conversation with the Devil. Does this story have any relevance to us, here, now? In the Twentieth Century, in the United States of America. Yes. There exists a sense in which all Christians must have conversations with the Devil, must learn his ways, must hear his voice. The tradition behind this legend is very ancient, was passed from mouth to mouth among the early Christians. Its larger significance, its greater meaning, Eccles takes to be this: suffering, deprivation, barrenness, hardship, lack are all an indispensable part of the education, the initiation, as it were, of any of those who would follow Jesus Christ. Eccles wrestles in the pulpit with the squeak in his voice. His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks. It is an unpleasant and strained performance, contorted, somehow; he drives his car with an easier piety. In his robes he seems the sinister priest of a drab mystery. Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it glances into his retina.
Lucy Eccles’ bright cheek ducks in and out of view under its shield of straw. The child, hidden—all but her ribbon—behind the back of the pew, whispers to her, presumably that he is behind them. Yet the woman never turns her head directly to see. This needless snub excites him. The most he gets is her profile; the soft tuck of doubleness in her chin deepens as she frowns down at the child beside her. She wears a dress whose narrow blue stripes meet at the seams in numerous sharp V’s. The smart fabric and cut of the cloth on her shoulders clash with the church yet submit to it; there is something sexed in her stillness in the church, in her obedience to its manly, crusted, rigid procedure. He flatters himself that her true attention radiates backwards at him. Against the dour patchwork of subdued heads, stained glass, yellowing memorial plaques on the wall, and laboriously knobbed and beaded woodwork, her hair and skin and hat glow singly, their differences in tint like the shades of brilliance within one flame.
So that when the sermon yields to a hymn, and her bright nape bows to receive the benediction, and the nervous moment of silence passes, and she stands and faces him, it is anticlimactic to see her face, with its pointed collection of dots—eyes and nostrils and freckles and the tight faint dimples that bring a sarcastic tension to the corners of her mouth. That she wears a facial expression at all shocks him slightly; the luminous view he had enjoyed for an hour did not seem capable of being so swiftly narrowed into one small person.
“Hey. Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” she says. “You’re the last person I ever expected to see here.”
“Why?” He is pleased that she thinks of him as an ultimate.
“I don’t know. You just don’t seem the institutional type.”
He watches her eyes for another wink. He has lost belief in that first one, weeks ago. She returns his gaze until his eyes drop. “Hello, Joyce,” he says. “How are you?”
The little girl halts and hides