Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,70

you’re wrong,” Eccles says. “I must go now; I thank you both for discussing this with me. I realize it’s painful.”

Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining-room touches his arm. “He liked things just so,” he says. “I never saw a boy like him. Any rumpus in the family he’d take hard out of all reason—when Mary and I, you know would have our fun.” Eccles nods, but doubts that “fun” describes what he’s seen.

In the living-room shadows a girl stands in a bare-armed summer dress. “Mim! Did you just get in?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Father—I mean Reverend—”

“Eccles.”

“Eccles, he came to talk about Harry. My daughter Miriam.”

“Hello, Miriam. I’ve heard Harry speak very fondly of you.”

“Hi.”

With that word the big window behind her takes on the intimate glaze of the big window in a luncheonette. Flip greetings seem to trail behind her with wisps of cigarette smoke and drugstore perfume. Mrs. Angstrom’s nose has delicacy on the girl’s face, a sharpness Saracen or even more ancient, barbaric. Taken with the prominent nose her height at first glance seems her mother’s, but when her father stands beside her, Eccles sees that it is his height; their bodies, the beautiful girl’s and the weary man’s, are the same. They have the same narrowness; a durable edge that, Eccles knows after seeing the wounds open under Mrs. Angstrom’s spectacles, can cut. That narrowness, and a manageable vulgarity that offends him. They’ll get through. They know what they’re doing. It’s a weakness of his, to prefer people who don’t know what they’re doing. The helpless: these, and the people on top, beyond help. The ones who maneuver more or less well in the middle seem to his feudal instincts to be thieving from both ends. When they bunch at the door, Angstrom puts his arm around his daughter’s waist and Eccles thinks of Mrs. Angstrom silent in the kitchen with her wet cheeks and red arms.

It’s just a flash; an impression. From the pavement turning to wave at the two of them in the doorway he is grateful for the fine picture they make and laughs at their incongruous symmetry, the earringed Arab boy with her innocent contempt for his Christian collar and the limp-faced old woman of a printer, paired in slenderness, interlocked.

He gets into the car thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half-hour but he can’t remember what it was. He’s scratched, hot, confused, and dry; he’s spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. He’s seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year’s dead stalks. Mrs. Angstrom’s ice water has left him thirstier than before; his palate seems coated with cobwebs. The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window. Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du. Cars are whispering home from work. He drives across the town, tacking on the diagonal streets along a course parallel to the distant ridge of the mountain. Fritz Kruppenbach, Mt. Judge’s Lutheran minister for twenty-seven years, lives in a high brick house not far from the cemetery. The motorcycle belonging to his college-age son is on its side in the driveway, partly dismantled. The sloping lawn, graded in fussy terraces, has the unnatural chartreuse evenness that comes with much fertilizing, much weed-killing, and much mowing. Mrs. Kruppenbach—will Lucy ever achieve that dimpled, obedient look?—comes to the door in a gray dress that makes no compromise with the season. Her gray hair girdles her head with braids of great compactness. When she lets all that hair down, she must be a witch. “He’s mowing out back” she says.

“I’d like to talk to him for just a few minutes. It’s a problem that involves our two congregations.”

“Go up to his room, why do-an tcha? I’ll fetch him.”

The house—foyer, halls, staircase, even the minister’s leathery den upstairs—is flooded with the smell of beef roasting. As if every day, when the house is cleaned, the odor is rubbed into the wood with a damp rag. Eccles sits by the window of Kruppenbach’s den on an oak-backed choir pew left over