a mind. Hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he’s forgotten much theology. It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.
Mrs. Angstrom picks up a dropped thread. “Now my daughter Miriam is as old as the hills and always was; I’ve never worried about her. I remember, on Sundays long ago when we’d walk out by the quarry Harold was so afraid-he wasn’t more than twelve then—he was so afraid she’d fall over the edge. I knew she wouldn’t. You watch her. She won’t marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out.”
“I don’t think the world has jumped on him. The girl’s mother and I were just discussing that it seemed quite the contrary.”
“Don’t you think it. That girl gets no sympathy from me. She has everybody on her side from Eisenhower down. They’ll talk him around. You’ll talk him around. And there’s another.”
The front door has opened with a softness she alone hears. Her husband comes into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and a tie but with his fingernails ringed in black; he’s a printer. He’s as tall as his wife but seems shorter. His mouth works self-deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth. His nose is Harry’s, a neat smooth button. “How do you do, Father,” he says; either he was raised as a Catholic or among Catholics.
“Mr. Angstrom, it’s very nice to meet you.” The man’s hand has tough ridges but a soft, dry palm. “We’ve been discussing your son.”
“I feel terrible about that.” Eccles believes him. Earl Angstrom has a gray, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips over his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.
“He goes on and on about that girl as if she was the mother of Christ,” Mrs. Angstrom says.
“That’s not true,” Angstrom says mildly, and sits down in his white shirt at the porcelain kitchen table. Four settings, year after year, have worn black blurs through the enamel. “I just don’t see how Harry could make such a mess. As a boy he was always so trim. He wasn’t like other boys, sloppy. He was a neat worker.”
With raw sudsy hands Mrs. Angstrom has set about heating coffee for her husband. This small act of service seems to bring her into harmony with him; they begin, in the sudden way of old couples apparently at odds, to speak as one. “It was the Army,” she says. “When he came back from Texas he was a different boy.”
“He didn’t want to come into the shop,” Angstrom says. “He didn’t want to get dirty.”
“Reverend Eccles, would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Angstrom asks.
At last, his chance. “No, thank you. What I would love, though, is a glass of water.”
“Just water? With ice?”
“Any way. Any way would be lovely.”
“Yes, Earl is right,” she says. “People now say how lazy Hassy is, but he’s not. He never was. When you’d be proud of his basketball in high school you know, people would say, ‘Yes well but he’s so tall, it’s easy for him.’ But they didn’t know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see.”
“From about twelve years old on,” Angstrom says, “he was at that night and day. I put a pole up for him out back; the garage wasn’t high enough.”
“When he set his mind to something,” Mrs. Angstrom says, “there was no stopping him.” She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice-cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose. “He wanted to be best at that and I honestly believe he was.”
“I know what you mean,” Eccles says. “I play a little golf with him and already he’s been better than I am.”
She puts the cubes in a glass and holds the glass under a spigot and brings it to him. He tilts it at his lips and Earl Angstrom’s palely vehement voice wavers through the liquid. “Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass. He won’t come work in the print shop because