Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,63
a gypsy look about her. Both the mother and the daughter have a sinister aura, but in the mother this ability to create uneasiness is a settled gift, thoroughly meshed into the strategies of middle-class life. With the daughter it is a floating thing, useless and as dangerous to herself as to others. Eccles is relieved that Janice is out of the house; he feels guiltiest in her presence. She and Mrs. Fosnacht have gone into Brewer to a matinee of Some Like It Hot. Their two sons are in the Springers’ back yard. Mrs. Springer takes him through the house to the screened-in porch, where she can keep an eye on the children. Her house is expensively but confusedly furnished; each room seems to contain one more easy chair than necessary. To get from the front door to the back they take a crooked path in the packed rooms. She leads him slowly; both of her ankles are bound in elastic bandages. The pained littleness of her steps reinforces his illusion that her lower body is encased in a plaster cast. She gently lets herself sink onto the cushions of the porch glider and startles Eccles by kicking up her legs as with a squeak and sharp sway the glider takes her weight. The action seems to express childish pleasure; her bald pale calves stick out stiff and her saddle shoes are for a moment lifted from the floor. These shoes are cracked and rounded, as if they’ve been revolved in a damp tub for years. He sits down in a trickily hinged aluminum-and-plastic lawn chair. Through the porch screen at his side, he can see Nelson Angstrom and the slightly older Fosnacht boy play in the sun around a swing-slide-sandbox set.
“It’s nice to see you,” Mrs. Springer says. “It’s been so long since you came last.”
“Just three weeks, isn’t it?” he says. The chair presses against his back and he hooks his heels around the pipe at the bottom to keep it from folding. “It’s been a busy time, with the confirmation classes and the Youth Group deciding to have a softball team this year and a series of deaths in the parish.” His previous contacts with this woman have not disposed him to be apologetic. Her having so large a home offends his sense of place; he would like her better if this were the porch of a shanty.
“Yes I wouldn’t want your job for the world.”
“I enjoy it most of the time.”
“’They say you do. They say you’re becoming quite an expert golf player.”
Oh dear. And he thought she was relaxing. He thought for the moment they were on the porch of a shabby peeling house and she was a long-suffering fat factory wife who had learned to take things as they came. That is what she looked like; that is easily what she might have been. Fred Springer when he married her was probably less likely-looking than Harry Angstrom when her daughter married him. He tries to imagine Harry four years ago, and gets an attractive picture: tall, fair, famous in his school days, clever enough—a son of the morning. His air of confidence must have especially appealed to Janice. David and Michal. Husbands are a woeful lottery. He scratches his forehead and says, “Playing golf with someone is a good way to get to know him. That’s what I try to do, you understand—get to know people. I don’t think you can lead someone to Christ unless you know him.”
“Well now what do you know about my son-in-law that I don’t?”
“That he’s a good man, for one thing.”
“Good for what?”
“Must you be good for something?” He tries to think. “Yes, I suppose you must.”
“Nelson! Stop that this minute!” She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom’s son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy’s chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him. Young Fosnacht stands with the maddening invulnerability of the stupid, looking down at the flailing hand and contorted face of the smaller boy without even a smile of satisfaction, a true scientist, observing without passion the effect of his experiment. Mrs. Springer’s voice leaps to a frantic hardness and cuts through the screen: “Did you hear me I said