drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms’ address.
Mrs. Angstrom has four-cornered nostrils. Lozenge-shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra-anatomical; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day; their home is the dark side of a two-family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer’s fat, soft, aching excess, had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a girl like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom’s is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry’s size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small.
“I don’t know why you come to me,” she says. “Harold’s one and twenty. I have no control over him.”
“He hasn’t been to see you?”
“No sir.” She displays her profile above her left shoulder. “You’ve made him so ashamed I suppose he’s embarrassed to.”
“He should be ashamed, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she’s two-thirds crazy.”
“Oh now, that’s not true, is it?”
“Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was Why don’t I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life.”
“Surely you don’t think she meant anything?”
“No, she didn’t mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run-down half-house when she came from a great big barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and Wasn’t I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well-equipped little trick? I never liked that girl’s eyes. They never met your face full-on.” She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles—an old-fashioned type, circles of steel-rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light—her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that’s it, it’s the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn’t really see him at all. Her confrontation is with the whole world, and secure under the breadth of her satire, he can say what he pleases.
He bluntly defends Janice. “The girl is shy.”
“Shy! She wasn’t too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirttail in.”
“He was one and twenty, as you say.”
“Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”
Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn’t acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. “About as shy as a snake,” she says, “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc.”
He laughs again; but isn’t she? “Well uh, what does Mr. Angstrom think Harry should do?”
“Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He’s just like his father underneath. All soft heart. I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.”
“That’s an unusual view.”
“Is it? It’s what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don’t know who’s supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.”
He smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps—overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Deep fundamental hopelessness in such