Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,52

little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. “It stopped me short,” be admits, closing this flirtatious cave. “Then you said you know what’s inside you. I’ve been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?”

Rabbit doesn’t want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He’s safe inside his own skin, he doesn’t want to come out. This guy’s whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit’s lips. “Hell, it’s nothing much,” he says. “It’s just that, well, it’s all there is. Don’t you think?”

Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. The trap is there waiting; damn him, he’s so sure I’ll come down the path. “How’s Janice now?” Rabbit asks.

Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. “I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs.—Foster? Fogleman?”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces.”

“Oh Peggy Gring. That moron. She married that hick Morris Fosnacht.”

“Fosnacht. That’s right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something very local about the name.”

“You’d never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?”

“Never. Not in Norwalk.”

“The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn’t be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then.” He hasn’t thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.

“What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?”

“I forget. It was just something you didn’t want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn’t like it and I guess I cried, I don’t know. Anyway that’s why the old man stayed up.”

“He was your father’s father?”

“My mother’s. He lived with us.”

“I remember my father’s father,” Eccles says. “He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo-Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to.”

“About the lion?”

“Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can’t appreciate. He mocks children, which she can’t forgive. It’s her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered-down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious practice a certain color and a, a rigor that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was extremely remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn’t want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living-room? ‘You don’t think God is in the woods?’ my grandfather would say. ‘Just behind stained glass?’ And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy in a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never get rid of the idea that maybe after all they’re right. A little dried-up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, ‘Has he made you believe in Hell?’ ” Harry laughs; Eccles’ imitation is good; being an old man fits him.

“Did he? Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.”

“Well then we’re all more or less in it.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call”—he looks at Harry and laughs—“inner darkness.”

Eccles’ volunteering all this melts Rabbit’s caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space