and Mrs. Landis. The same old safe ones. What about the Ferrys? You’ve been talking about the Ferrys for six months.”
“What’s so sacred about the Ferrys? They never do anything for the church. She came on Christmas Sunday and went out by the choir door so she wouldn’t have to speak to me.”
“Of course they don’t do anything for the church and that’s why you should call as you know perfectly well. I don’t think anything’s sacred about the Ferrys except that you’ve been brooding about her going out the side door and making everybody’s life miserable for months. Now if she comes on Easter it’ll be the same thing. To tell you my honest opinion you and Mrs. Ferry would hit it off splendidly, you’re both equally childish.”
“Lucy, just because Mr. Ferry owns a shoe factory doesn’t make them more important Christians than somebody who works in a shoe factory.”
“Oh Jack, you’re too tiresome. You’re just afraid of being snubbed and don’t quote Scripture to justify yourself. I don’t care if the Ferrys come to church or stay away or become Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“At least the Jehovah’s Witnesses put into practice what they say they believe.” When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small-jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Lucy says, “but when you asked me to marry you I told you what I felt and you said all right fine.”
“I said as long as your heart remained open for Grace.” Eccles pours these words on her in a high strained blast that burns his broad forehead, soils it with a blush.
“Mommy I had a rest.” The little voice, shyly penetrating, ambushes them from above. At the head of the carpeted stairs a small brown girl in underpants hangs in suspense. She seems to Rabbit too dark for her parents, too somber in the shadows, braced on silhouetted stout legs, baby fat knotted on longer stalks. Her hands rub and pluck her naked chest in exasperation. She hears her mother’s answer before it comes.
“Joyce. You go right back into your own bed and have a nap.”
“I can’t. There’s too many noises.”
“We’ve been screaming right under her head,” Eccles tells his wife.
“You’ve been screaming. About Grace.”
“I had a scary dream,” Joyce says, and clumsily descends two steps.
“You did not. You were never asleep.” Mrs. Eccles walks to the foot of the stairs, holding her own throat gently.
“What was the dream about?” Eccles asks his child.
“A lion ate a boy.”
“That’s not a dream at all,” the woman snaps, and turns on her husband: “It’s those hateful Belloc poems you insist on reading her.”
“She asks for them.”
“They’re hateful. They give her traumas.”
“Joyce and I think they’re funny.”
“Well, you both have perverted senses of humor. Every night she asks me about that damn pony Tom and what does ‘die’ means?”
“Tell her what it means. If you had Belloc’s and my faith in the supernatural these perfectly natural questions wouldn’t upset you.”
“Don’t harp, Jack. You’re awful when you harp.”
“I’m awful when I take myself seriously, you mean.”
“Hey. I smell cake burning,” Rabbit says.
She looks at him and recognition frosts her eyes. That there is some kind of cold call in her glance, a faint shout from the midst of her enemies, he feels but ignores, letting his gaze go limp on the top of her head, showing her the sensitive nostrils that sniffed the smoking case. The compact arc of her skull under her short-clipped fluffed hairdo suggests that she’s been turned on an exceptionally precise lathe.
“If only you would take yourself seriously,” she says to Eccles, and on glimpsey bare legs flies down the sullen hall of the rectory.
Eccles calls, “Joyce, go back to your room and put on a shirt and you can come down.”
The child instead thumps down three more steps.
“Joyce, did you hear me?”
“You get it, Dayud-dee.”
“Why should I get it? Daddy’s all the way downstairs.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“You do too. Right on your bureau.”
“I don’t know where my bruro is.”
“In your room, sweet. Of course you know where it is. You get your shirt and I’ll let you downstairs.”
But she is already halfway down.
“I’m frightened of the li-un,” she sings with a little smile that betrays consciousness of her own impudence. Her voice has a spaced, testing quality; Rabbit heard this note of care in her mother’s voice too, when she was teasing the