it’ll get his fingernails dirty.” Eccles lowers the glass and Angstrom says full in his face across the table, “He’s become the worst kind of Brewer bum. If I could get my hands on him, Father, I’d try to thrash him if he killed me in the process.” His ashen face bunches defiantly at the mouth; his colorless eyes swarm with glitter.
“Your language, Earl,” his wife says, setting coffee in a flowered cup on the table between his hands.
He looks down into the steam and says, “Excuse me. When I think of what that boy’s doing my stomach does somersaults.”
Eccles lifts his glass and says “No” into it like a megaphone and then drinks until no more water can be sucked from under the ice cubes that bump under his nose. He wipes the moisture from his mouth and says, “There’s a great deal of goodness in your son. When I’m with him—it’s rather unfortunate, really—I feel so cheerful I quite forget what the point of my seeing him is.” He laughs, first at Mr., and, failing here to rouse a smile, at Mrs.
“This golf you play,” Angstrom says. “What is the point? Why don’t the girls parents get the police after him? In my opinion a good swift kick is what he needs.”
Eccles glances toward Mrs. Angstrom and feels the arch of his eyebrows like drying paste on his forehead. He didn’t expect, a minute ago, to be looking toward her as an ally and toward this worn-out good man as a rather vulgar and disappointing foe.
“Mrs. Springer wants to,” he tells Angstrom. “The girl and her father want to wait.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Earl,” Mrs. Angstrom says. “What does old Springer want with his name in the papers? The way you talk you’d think poor Harry was your enemy.”
“He is my enemy,” Angstrom says. He touches the saucer from both sides with his stained fingertips. “That night I spent walking the streets looking for him he became my enemy. You can’t talk. You didn’t see the girl’s face.”
“What do I care about her face? You talk about tarts: they don’t become ivory-white saints in my book just by having a marriage license. That girl wanted Harry and got him with the only trick she knew and now she’s run out of tricks.”
“Don’t talk that way, Mary. It’s just words with you. Suppose I had acted the way Harry has.”
“Ah,” she says, and turns, and Eccles flinches, seeing her face taut to release a special missile. “I didn’t want you; you wanted me. Or wasn’t it that way?”
“Yes of course it was that way,” Angstrom mutters.
“Well then: there’s no comparison.”
Angstrom has hunched his shoulders over the coffee, drawn himself in very small; as if she has painted him into a tiny corner. “Oh Mary,” he sighs, not daring move with words.
Eccles tries to defend him; he goes to the weaker side of a fight almost automatically. “I don’t think you can say,” he tells Mrs. Angstrom, “that Janice didn’t imagine that her marriage was built on mutual attraction. If the girl was such a clever schemer she wouldn’t have let Harry slip away so easily.”
Mrs. Angstrom’s interest in this discussion, now that she knows she pressed her husband too hard, has waned; she maintains a position—that Janice is in control—so obviously false that it amounts to a concession. “She hasn’t let him slip away,” she says. “She’ll have him back, you watch.”
Eccles turns to the man; if he will agree they will all three be united and he can leave. “Do you think too that Harry will come around?”
“No,” Angstrom says, looking down, “never. He’s too far gone. He’ll just slide deeper and deeper now until we might as well forget him. If he was twenty, or twenty-two; but at his age … In the shop sometimes you see these young Brewer bums. They can’t stick it. They’re like cripples only they don’t limp. Human garbage, they call them. And I sit there at the machine for two months wondering how the hell it could be my Harry, that used to hate a mess so much.”
Eccles looks over at Harry’s mother and is jarred to see her leaning against the sink with soaked cheeks gleaming under the glasses. He gets up in shock. Is she crying because she thinks her husband is speaking the truth, or because she thinks he is saying this just to hurt her, in revenge for making him admit that he had wanted her? “I hope