Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,58

dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in pink of penetrating purity, a color through whose raw simplicity, as through stained glass, you seem to look into the ideal subsoil of reality. “Harry’s Bianchi” Mrs. Smith says. “The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It’s the only true pink there is. When Harry first got it he set it among the other so-called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them out and backed the Bianchi with crimsons. The crimsons are by, aren’t they? Is today June?” Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Memorial Day’s next Saturday.”

“Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile traffic through Jersey City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren’t any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six-hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don’t suppose when I say ‘the war’ you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war.”

“No I think of the war as World War Two.”

“So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?”

“Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school.”

“Our son was killed.”

“Gee. I’m sorry.”

“Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off.”

“Still—”

“I know. You think of only young men being killed.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“It was a good war. It wasn’t like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things but that one was satisfying to win.” She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. “The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn’t in flower that late in the summer so it looked like just foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a”—she realizes she is repeating herself, falters, but goes on—“like a prince of the realm.” In her almost transparent blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing she snaps roughly, “It’s the only one.”

“The only Bianchi?”

“Yes! Right! There’s not another in the United States. There’s not another good pink from the Golden Gate to—wherever. The Brooklyn Bridge, I suppose they say. All the truly good pink in the nation is right here under our eyes. A florist from Lancaster took some cuttings but they died. Probably smothered them in lime. Stupid man. A Greek.”

She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide of blossom, and a furtively bitter smell breaths from the fresh walls of green. Maples, birches, oaks, elms, and horse-chestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property-line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in oddly neat rows, along the edge of the grass paths. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down such a trench of overblown brilliance. “I appreciate the beauty but I’d rather see alfalfa. A woman—I don’t know why it should vex me so—Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down