your own life.” Rabbit wonders when the tear-trails appeared on Tothero’s cheeks; there they are. “Do you believe me?”
“Sure. Sure. Look, I know this has been my fault. I’ve felt like a, like an insect ever since the thing happened.” Tothero’s tranquil smile deepens; a faint rasping purr comes out of his face. “I warned you,” he says, his diction quickening, “I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”
Harry blurts, “But what can I do?”
Tothero doesn’t seem to hear. “Don’t you remember? My begging you to go back?”
“I don’t know, I guess so.”
“Good. Ah. You’re still a fine man, Harry. You have a healthy body. When I’m dead and gone, remember how your old coach told you to avoid suffering. Remember.” The last word is intoned coyly, with a little wag of the head; on the thrust of this incongruous vivacity he rises from his chair, and prevents himself from pitching forward by quick use of his cane. Harry jumps up in alarm, and the two of them stand for the moment very close. The old man’s big head breathes a distressing scent, not so much medicine as a sweet vegetable staleness. “You young people,” he says with a rising intonation, a schoolteacher’s tone, scolding yet sly, even encouraging, “tend to forget. Don’t you? Now don’t you?”
He wants this admission mysteriously much. “Sure,” Rabbit says, praying he’ll go.
Harry helps him to his car, a ‘57 blue-and-cream Dodge waiting in front of the orange fire hydrant. Mrs. Tothero offers, rather coolly, her regrets at the death of his infant daughter. She looks harried and noble. Gray hair straggles down across her finely wrinkled silver temple. She wants to get away from him, away with her prize. Beside her on the front seat Tothero looks like a smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curve of his cane. Rabbit returns to the house feeling depressed and dirtied by the visit. Tothero’s revelation chilled him. He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all things.
Eccles comes in the late afternoon, to complete the arrangements for the funeral: it will be held tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday. As he leaves Rabbit catches his attention and they talk in the front hall a moment. “What do you think?” Rabbit asks.
“About what?”
“What shall I do?”
Eccles glances up nervously. He is very tired; Harry has never seen him look so tired. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. “Do what you are doing,” he says. “Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left.”
“And that’s enough?”
“You mean to earn forgiveness? I’m sure it is, carried out through a lifetime.”
“I mean”—he’s never before felt pleading with Eccles—“remember that thing we used to talk about? The thing behind everything.”
“Harry, you know I don’t think that thing exists in the way you think it does.”
“O.K.” He realizes that Eccles wants to get away too, that the sight of himself is painful, disgusting.
Eccles must see that he senses this, for he abruptly summons up mercy and makes an attempt. “Harry, it’s not for me to forgive you. You’ve done nothing to me to forgive. I’m equal with you in guilt. We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything. Harry, I know that people are brought to Christ. I’ve seen it with my eyes and tasted it with my mouth. And I do think this. I think marriage is a sacrament, and that this tragedy, terrible as it is, has at last united you and Janice in a sacred way.”
Through the next hours Rabbit clings to this belief, though it seems to bear no relation to the colors and sounds of the big sorrowing house, the dabs and arcs of late sunshine in the little jungle of plants on the glass table, or the almost wordless supper he and Janice share in her bedroom.
He spends that night in the Springers’ house, sleeping with Janice. Her sleep is so solid. A thin snore out of her black mouth sharpens the moonlight and keeps him awake. He gets up on an elbow and studies her face; it is frightening in the moonlight, small and smeared by patches of dark cut it seems in a soft substance that lacks the edges of a human presence. He resents her sleep. When, in sunlight, he feels her weight stir and slide off the bed, he turns his face deeper into the pillow, retracts his head half under