Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,57

to church on Easter. Harry has often wanted and never had a girl like that, a little Catholic from a shabby house, dressed in flashy bargain clothes; in the swarthy leaves under the pert soft cap of five-petaled flowers he can imagine her face, with its plucked eyebrows, its little black nostrils round as buttons, its eyes made surly by nuns. He can almost smell her perfume as she passes him on the concrete cathedral steps, head bowed, her mincing legs tucked into her tailored suit. Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl’s sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time. Close, he can go so close to the petals. Each flower wears on the roof of its mouth two fans of freckles where the anthers tap. He can smell her.

At this climax of her late husband’s garden, Mrs. Smith comes out of the house and on Rabbit’s arm walks deep into the rhododendron plantation. A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. He feels her body jolt with every step, and every word twitches her head. Not that the effort of speaking is so great; it is the excitement of communication that seizes her, wrinkling the arch of her nose fiercely, making her lips snarl above her snaggle-teeth with a comic over-expressiveness that is self-conscious, like the funny faces made by a thirteen-year-old girl in constant confession of the fact that she is not beautiful. She sharply tips her head to look up at Harry, and in tiny brown sockets afflicted by creases like so many drawstrings, her crackled blue eyes bulge frantically with captive life as she speaks: “Oh, I don’t like Mrs. R. S. Holford; she always looks so washed-out and flossy to me. Harry loved those salmon colors so; I’d say to him, ‘If I want red, give me red; a fat red rose. And if I want white, give me white, a tall white lily; and don’t bother me with all these in-betweens and would-be-pinks and almost-purples that don’t know what their mind is. Rhody’s a mealy-mouthed plant,’ I’d say to Harry, ‘she doesn’t have a brain, so she gives you some of everything’ just to tease him. But in truth I meant it.” The thought seems to strike her. She stops dead on the path of grass and her eyes, the irises a kind of broken-glass white within rings of persisting blue, roll nervously, looking from one side of him to the other. “In truth I meant every word of it. I’m a farmer’s daughter Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I’d say to him, ‘Why don’t you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there’s a real crop. You raise the wheat, I’ll bake the bread.’ I would have, too. ‘What do we want with all these corsages that after they’re gone we have to look at their ugly leaves all the year round?’ I’d say to him, ‘What pretty girl are you growing these for?’ He was younger than I, that’s why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won’t say by how much. What are we standing here for? Old body like mine stand still in one place you’ll be rooted fast.” She jabs the cane into the grass his signal to extend his arm. They move on down the alley of bloom. “Never thought I’d outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden he’d be forever sitting. A farmer’s daughter never learns the meaning of sit.”

Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the giant spruces. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. “Ah. Now here is a plant.” They stop at a corner and she lifts her