stands there holding on and looking at him, smiling crookedly, the nose bent, one eye wide open and the other heavy-lidded. His face has grown more lopsided with the years. He is not going bald evenly; brushed strands of gray and pale brown patch his skull.
“I need your advice,” Rabbit says, and corrects himself. “What I really need is a place to sleep.”
Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; other men hasten to respond instantly, as if they were always embarrassed, but Tothero has the disciplinarian’s trick of waiting a moment. As if he considers everything. It gives him great weight. At last he asks, “What’s happened to your home?”
“Well it kind of went.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was no good. I’ve run out. I really have.”
Another pause. Rabbit narrows his eyes against the sunlight that rebounds off the asphalt. His left ear aches. His teeth on that side feel as if they might start hurting.
“That doesn’t sound like very mature behavior,” Tothero states.
“It was a mess as it was.”
“What sort of mess?”
“I don’t know. My wife’s an alcoholic.”
“And have you tried to help her?”
“Sure. How?”
“Did you drink with her?”
“No sir, never. I can’t stand the stuff, I just don’t like the taste.” He says this readily, proud to be able to report to- his old coach that he has not abused his body.
“Perhaps you should have,” Tothero offers after a moment. “Perhaps if you had shared this pleasure with her, she could have controlled it.”
Rabbit, dazed by the sun, numb through weariness, can’t follow this thought.
“It’s Janice Springer, isn’t it?” Tothero asks.
“Yeah. God she’s dumb. She really is.”
“Harry, that’s a harsh thing to say. Of any human soul.”
Rabbit nods because Tothero himself seems certain of this. He is beginning to feel weak under the weight of the man’s pauses. These pauses seem longer than he remembered them, as if Tothero too feels their weight. Fear touches Rabbit again; he suspects his old coach is addled, and begins all over. “I thought maybe I could sleep a couple hours somewhere in the Sunshine. Otherwise I might as well go home. I’ve had it.”
To his relief Tothero becomes all bustling action, taking his elbow, steering him back along the alley, saying, “Yes of course, Harry, you look terrible, Harry. Terrible.” His hand holds Rabbit’s arm with metallic inflexibility and as he pushes him along Rabbit’s bones jolt, pinned at this point. Something frantic in so tight a grip diminishes the comfort of its firmness. Tothero’s voice, too, having turned precise, hasty, and gay, cuts into Rabbit’s woolly state too sharply. “You asked me for two things,” he says. “Two things. A place to sleep, and advice. Now, Harry, I’ll give you the place to sleep provided, provided, Harry, that when you wake up the two of us have a serious, a long and serious talk about this crisis in your marriage. I’ll tell you this now, it’s not so much you I’m worried about, I know you well enough to know you always land on your feet, Harry; it’s not so much you as Janice. She doesn’t have your co-ordination. Do you promise?”
“Sure. Promise what?”
“Promise, Harry, we’ll thrash out a way between us to help her.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I can. I mean I’m not that interested in her.”
They reach the cement steps and the wood weather-box of the entrance. Tothero opens the door with a key he has. The place is empty, the silent bar shadowy and the small round tables looking rickety and weak without men sitting at them. The electrical advertisements behind the bar are unplugged and dead: dusty tubing and tinsel. Tothero says, in a voice too loud, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that my greatest boy would grow into such a monster.”
Monster: the word seems to clatter after them as they climb the stairs to the second floor. Rabbit apologizes “I’ll try to think when I get some sleep.”
“Good boy. That’s all we want.” What does he mean, we? All these tables are empty. Sunlight strikes blond squares into the drawn tan shades above a low radiator dyed black with dust. Men’s steps have zoom paths in the narrow bare floorboards.
Tothero leads him to a door he has never entered; they go up a steep flight of attic stairs, a kind of nailed-down ladder between whose steps he sees sections of insulated wire and ragged gaps of carpentry. They climb into comparative light. “Here’s my mansion,” Tothero says, and