Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,115
through the window above the sill where the phone rests he can see his neighbor unpinning her wash from the line.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jack? This is Harry Angstrom. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You don’t have any old ladies sitting around sewing or anything, do you?”
“No.”
“Why, I’ve been trying to call my apartment and nobody answers and I’m kind of nervous about it. I didn’t spend last night there and I’m getting sort of a prickly feeling. I want to go home but I want to know if Janice has done anything like call the cops or anything. Do you know?”
“Harry, where are you?”
“Oh, at some drugstore in Brewer.”
The neighbor has bundled the last sheet into her arms and Jack’s sight leans on the bare white line. One of the uses society seems to have for him is to break tragic news and the cave of his mouth goes dry as he braces for the familiar duty. No man, having put his hand to the plough … He keeps his eyes wide open so he will not seem too close to the presence by his ear. “I guess to save time I’d better tell you over the phone,” he begins. “Harry. A terrible thing has happened to us.”
When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn’t know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone-booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is rereading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two boxes of Kleenex. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It’s a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone façades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with some red sweating shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16A; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from doubling up with the kink inside. Curved posters advertise filtered cigarettes and sun-tan lotion and an international charity.
He had ridden one of these buses last night into Brewer and gone to Ruth’s apartment but there was no light on and nobody answered his ring, though there was a dim light behind the frosted glass lettered F. X. Pelligrini. He sat around on the steps, looking down at the delicatessen until the lights went out and then looking at the bright church window. When the lights went out behind that he felt cramped and hopeless and thought of going home. He wandered up to Weiser Street and looked down at all the lights and the great sunflower and couldn’t see a bus and kept walking, over to the south side, and became afraid of getting knifed and robbed and went into a low-looking hotel and bought a room. He didn’t sleep very well with a neon tube with a taped connection buzzing outside and some woman laughing and woke up early enough to go back to Mt. Judge and get a suit and go to work but something held him back. Something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn’t there probably off to Atlantic City with some madman and still he wandered around Brewer, going in and out of