same man, and wonders why Eccles doesn’t go for it; drive a wedge in this chink of fear and make discipline. Not that he could do it either.
“There’s no lion up there. There’s nobody up there but Bonnie sleeping. Bonnie’s not afraid.”
“Please, Daddy. Please please please please please.” She has reached the foot of the stairs and seizes and squeezes her father’s knees.
Eccles laughs, bracing his unbalanced weight on the child’s head, which is rather broad and flat-topped, like his own. “All right,” he says. “You wait here and talk to this funny man.” And bounds up the stairs with that unexpected athleticism.
Rabbit says, “Joyce, are you a good girl?”
She waggles her stomach and pulls her head into her shoulders. The motion forces a little guttural noise, “cukk,” out of her throat. She shakes her head; he has the impression she is trying to hide behind a screen of dimples. But’ she says with unexpectedly prim and positive enunciation, “Yes.”
“And is your mommy good?”
“Yes.”
“What makes her so good?” He hopes Lucy hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.
Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hanging there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a laborious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John’s Episcopal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer, the letters interlocked artistically. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of Things; stuck into the frame is a yellow photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper’s head: the glass this is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head; this half-mirroring glass rejects his attention, which slips back and forth clinging nowhere. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibilities, “the man who disappeared.” “Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.” What a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She’d have an anxious little edge and want her own. Cookie. A sharp vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.
There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles’ voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit’s ears were around the corner, “Don’t think this is pleasure for me. It’s work.”
“There’s no other way to talk to him?”
“He’s frightened.”
“Sweetie, everybody’s frightened to you.”
“But he’s even frightened of me.”
“Well, he came through that door cocky enough.”
This was the place for, And he slapped my sweet ass, that’s yours to defend.
What! Your sweet ass! I’ll murder the rogue. I’ll call the police.
In reality Lucy’s voice stopped at “enough,” and Eccles is talking about if so-and-so called, where are those new golf balls?, Joyce you had a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, good-by. Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl, awkward, cross, pops out of the kitchen.
They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the green skin of the Buick has a tropical waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest. “So your trouble isn’t really lack of religion.”
“Huh?”
“I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree.”
“Yeah well: I stole that from Mickey Mouse.”
Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the