Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,48

off at Spruce, and walks along singing in a high voice to himself the phrase, “Oh, I’m just wild about Har-ry”—not the beginning of the song, but the place at the end where the girl, repeating, goes way up on “I’m.”

He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it at the end of February. They have gone bowling once and have seen four movies—Gigi, Bell, Book and Candle, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and The Shaggy Dog. He saw so many snippets from The Shaggy Dog on the Mickey Mouse Club that he was curious to see the whole thing. It was like looking through a photograph album with about half familiar faces. The scene where the rocket goes through the roof and Fred MacMurray runs out with the coffee pot he knew as well as his own face.

Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball. Plok. Every time, in Gigi, the stereophonic-sound loudspeaker behind them in the theater would blare out she turned around and said “Shh” as if it were somebody in the theater talking too loud. In The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, every time Ingrid Bergman’s face appeared on the screen she leaned over to Rabbit and asked him in a whisper, “Is she really a whore?” He was upset by Robert Donat; he looked awful. He knew he was dying. Imagine knowing you’re dying and going ahead pretending you’re a mandarin. Ruth’s comment about Bell, Book and Candle last night was, “Why don’t you ever see any bongo drums around here?” He vowed secretly to get some. A half-hour ago, waiting for the bus on Weiser Street, he priced a set in the window of the Chords ‘n’ Records music store. $19.95. All the way out on the bus he beat bongo patterns on his knees.

“For I’m just wild about Harry-ree—”

Number 61 is a big brick place with white wood trim, a little porch imitating a Greek temple, and a slate roof that shines under the clouds’ sullen luster. Out back a wire fence encloses a yellow swing frame and a sandbox. A puppy yaps in this pen as Harry goes up the walk. The grass wears that intense greasy green that promises rain, the color of grass in color snapshots. The place looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in black shingled castles. But a small plate above the fish-shaped door-knocker says in engraved script The Rectory. He bangs the fish twice and, after waiting, twice again.

A crisp little number with speckled green eyes opens the door. “What is it?” Her voice as good as says, “How dare you?” As she adjusts her face to his height her eyes enlarge, displaying more of the vividly clear whites to which her moss-colored irises are buttoned.

At once, absurdly, he feels in control of her, feels she likes him. Freckles dot her little bumpy nose, kind of a pinched nose, narrow and pale under the dots of tan. Her skin is fair, and fine-grained as a child’s. She is wearing orange shorts. With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, “Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Say, is Reverend Eccles in?”

“He’s asleep.”

“In the middle of the day?”

“He was up much of the night.”

“Oh gosh. The poor guy.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“Well gee, I don’t know. He told me to be here. He really did.”

“He might well have. Please come in.”

She leads him past a hall and staircase into a cool room with a high ceiling and silver wallpaper, a piano, watercolors of scenery, a lot of sets of books in a recessed bookcase, a fireplace whose mantel supports one of those clocks with a pendulum of four gold balls that are supposed to run practically forever. Photographs in frames all around. Furniture heavy green and red except for a long sofa with a scrolling back and arms whose cushions are cream white. The room smells coldly kept. From far off comes the warmer odor of cake baking. She stops in the center of the rug and says, “Listen.”

He stops. The faint bump that he also heard is not repeated. She explains, “I thought that brat was asleep.”

“Are you the babysitter?”

“I’m