Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,117

He’s heavier and longer than he used to be. His body acts as a covering; he pulls the boy’s head down against his neck. Nelson asks, “Baby sick?”

“Baby sick.”

“Big, big water in tub,” Nelson says, and struggles to sit up so he can explain with his arms, which go wide. “Many, many water,” he says. He must have seen it. He wants to get off his father’s lap but Harry holds him fast with a kind of terror; the house is thick with a grief that seems to threaten the boy. Also the boy’s body wriggles with an energy that threatens the grief, might tip it and bring the whole house crashing down on them. It is himself he is protecting by imprisoning the child.

Eccles comes downstairs and stands there studying them. “Why don’t you take him outside?” he asks. “He’s had a nightmare of a day.”

They all three go outdoors. Eccles takes Harry’s hand in a long quiet grip and says, “Stay here. You’re needed, even if they don’t tell you.” After Eccles pulls away in his Buick, he and Nelson sit in the grass by the driveway and throw bits of gravel down toward the pavement. The boy laughs and talks in excitement but out here the sound is not so loud. Harry feels thinly protected by the fact that this is what Eccles told him to do. Men are walking home from work along the pavement; Nelson nearly gets one with a pebble. They change their target to a green lawn-seeder leaning against the wall of the garage. Harry hits it four times running. Though the air is still light the sunshine has shrunk to a few scraps in the tops of trees. The grass is growing damp and he wonders if he should sneak Nelson in the door and go.

Mr. Springer comes to the door and calls, “Harry.” They go over. “Becky’s made a few sandwiches in place of supper,” he says. “You and the boy come in.” They go into the kitchen and Nelson eats. Harry refuses everything except a glass of water. Mrs. Springer is not in the kitchen and Harry is grateful. Her hate of him lingers in the room like a smell. “Harry,” Mr. Springer says, and stands up, patting his mustache with two fingers, like he’s about to make a financial concession, “Reverend Eccles and Becky and I have had a talk. I won’t say I don’t blame you because of course I do. But you’re not the only one to blame. Her mother and I somehow never made her feel secure, never perhaps you might say made her welcome, I don’t know”—his little pink crafty eyes are not crafty now, blurred and chafed—“we tried, I’d like to think. At any rate”—this comes out harsh and crackly; he pauses to regain quietness in his voice—“life must go on. Am I making any sense to you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Life must go on. We must go ahead now with what we have left. Though Becky’s too upset to see you now, she agrees. We had a talk and agree that it’s the only way. I mean, what I meant to say, I can see you’re puzzled, is that we consider you in our family, Harry, despite”—he lifts an arm vaguely toward the stairs—“this.” His arm slumps back and he adds the word “accident.”

Harry shields his eyes with his hand. They feel hot and vulnerable to light. “Thank you,” he says, and almost moans in his gratitude to this man, whom he has always despised, for making a speech so generous. He tried to frame, in accordance with an etiquette that continues to operate in the thick of grief as if underwater, a counter-speech. “I promise I’ll keep my end of the bargain,” he brings out, and stops, stifled by the abject sound of his voice. What made him say bargain?

“I know you will,” Springer says. “Reverend Eccles assures us you will.”

“Dessert,” Nelson says distinctly.

“Nelly, why don’t you take a cookie to bed?” Springer speaks with a familiar jollity that, though strained, reminds Rabbit that the kid lived here for months. “Isn’t it your bedtime? Shall Mom-mom take you up?”

“Daddy,” Nelson says, and slides off his chair and comes to his father.

Both men are embarrassed. “O.K.,” Rabbit says. “You show me your room.”

Springer gets two Oreo cookies out of the pantry and unexpectedly Nelson runs forward to hug him. He stoops to accept the hug and his withered dandy’s face goes blank against the boy’s cheek;