light he will see a tiny wrinkled blue corpse lying face up on the floor of the drained tub. Fear presses on his kidneys and he is at last forced to dare; the dark bottom of the tub leaps up blank and white.
He expects never to go to sleep and, awaking with the slant of sunshine and the noise of doors slamming downstairs, feels his body has betrayed his soul. He dresses in haste, more panicked now than at any time yesterday. The event is realer. Invisible cushions press against his throat and slow his legs and arms; the kink in his chest has grown thick and crusty. Forgive me, forgive me, he keeps saying silently to no one.
He goes over to the Springers’ and the tone of the house has changed; he feels everything has been rearranged slightly to make a space into which he can fit by making himself small. Mrs. Springer serves him orange juice and coffee and even speaks, cautiously.
“Do you want cream?”
“No. No. I’ll drink it black.”
“We have cream if you want it.”
“No, really. It’s fine.”
Janice is awake. He goes upstairs and lies down on the bed beside her; she clings to him and sobs into the cup between his neck and jaw and the sheet. Her face has been shrunk; her body seems small as a child’s, and hot and hard. She tells him, “I can’t stand to look at anyone except you. I can’t bear to look at the others.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he tells her. “It was mine.”
They cling together in a common darkness; he feels the walls between them dissolve in a flood of black; but the heavy knot of apprehension remains in his chest, his own.
He stays in the house all that day. Visitors come, and tiptoe about. Their manner suggests that Janice upstairs is very sick. They sit, these women, over coffee in the kitchen with Mrs. Springer, whose petite rounded voice, oddly girlish divorced from the sight of her body, sighs on and on in indistinct syllables, like the mourning chant of an ancient tribe. Peggy Fosnacht comes, her sunglasses off, her wall eyes wild, wide to the world, and goes upstairs. Her son Billy plays with Nelson, and no one moves to halt their squeals of anger and pain in the back yard, which, neglected, in time die, and revive, after a pause, in the form of laughter. Even Harry has a visitor. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Springer goes and comes into the dim room where Harry is sitting looking at magazines and says, in a surprised and injured voice, “A man for you.”
She leaves the doorway and he gets up and walks a few steps forward to greet the man coming into the room, Tothero, leaning on a cane his face half paralyzed; but talking, walking, alive. “Hi! Gee, how are you?”
“Harry.” With the hand that is not on the cane he grips Harry’s arm. He brings a long look to bear on Harry’s face; his mouth is tweaked downward on one side, the skin over his eye on this side is dragged down diagonally so it nearly curtains the glitter, and it may be the bad light but this whole side looks the color of stone. The gouging grip of his fingers trembles.
“Let’s sit down,” Rabbit says, and helps him into an easy chair. Tothero knocks off a doily in arranging his arms. Rabbit brings over a straight chair and sits close so he won’t have to raise his voice. “Should you be running around?” he asks when Tothero says nothing.
“My wife brought me. In the car. Outside, Harry. We heard your terrible news. Didn’t I warn you?” Already his eyes are bulging with water.
“When?”
“When?” The stricken side of his face is turned away, perhaps consciously, into shadow, so his smile seems wholly alive, wise, and sure. “That fight night. I said go back. I begged you.”
“I guess you did. I’ve forgotten.”
“No you haven’t. No you haven’t, Harry.” His breath chuffs on the “Ha” of “Harry.” “Let me tell you something. Will you listen?”
“Sure.”
“Right and wrong,” he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. “Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—his pride at negotiating the long word shows, simple as a boy’s—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in