Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,71

from some renovation. Seated on the bench he feels an adolescent compulsion to pray but instead peers across the valley at the pale green fragments of the golf course where he would like to be, with Harry. He lied somewhat to Mrs. Angstrom. Harry does not play golf better than he. He seems to have trouble in making the club part of himself, to be tense with the fear that this stick of steel will betray him. Between Harry’s alternately fine and terrible shots and his own consistent weakness there is a rough equality that makes each match unpredictable. Eccles has found other partners either better or worse than he; only Harry is both, and only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible, startling, bottomless quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green. And for Eccles there is an additional hope, a secret determination to trounce Harry. He feels that the thing that makes Harry unsteady, that makes him unable to repeat his beautiful effortless swing every time, is the thing at the root of all the problems that he has created; and that by beating him decisively he, Eccles, will get on top of this weakness, this flaw, and hence solve the problems. In the meantime there is the pleasure of hearing Harry now and then cry, “Yes, yes,” or “That’s the one!” Their rapport at moments attains for Eccles a pitch of pleasure, a harmless ecstasy, that makes the world with its endless circumstantiality seem remote and spherical and green.

The house shudders to the master’s step. Of the ministers in the town, he likes Kruppenbach least. The man is rigid in his creed and a bully in manner. Eccles loves rectories; he grew up in one. But in this one he feels all the humorlessness, the pious oppression, that people falsely imagine. Yet Kruppenbach’s son must not have found it so: witness the motorcycle.

The man comes up the stairs into his den, angry at being taken from his lawn-mowing. He wears old black pants and an undershirt soaked with sweat. His shoulders are coated with wiry gray wool and a wide tangled bush of black-speckled hair bubbles out of the U of the undershirt neck and froths across the wet red skin of his chest.

“Hello, Chack,” he says at pulpit volume, with no intonation of greeting. His German accent makes his words seem stones, set angrily one on top of another. “What is it?”

Eccles doesn’t dare “Fritz” with the older man, and instead laughs and exclaims, “Hello!”

Kruppenbach grimaces. He has a massive square head, crew-cut. He is a man of brick. As if he was born as a baby literally of clay and decades of exposure have baked him to the color and hardness of brick. He repeats, “What?”

“You have a family called Angstrom.”

“Yes.”

“The father’s a printer.”

“Yes.”

“Their son, Harry, deserted his wife over two months ago; her people, the Springers, are in my church.”

“Yes, well. The boy. The boy’s a Schussel.”

Eccles isn’t certain what that means. He supposes that Kruppenbach doesn’t sit down because he doesn’t want to stain his furniture with his own sweat. His continuing to stand puts Eccles in a petitionary position, sitting on the bench like a choirboy. The odor of meat cooking grows more insistent as he explains what he thinks happened: how Harry has been in a sense spoiled by his athletic successes; how the wife, to be fair, had perhaps showed little imagination in their marriage; how he himself, as minister, had tried to keep the boy’s conscience in touch with his wife without pressing him into a premature reunion—for the boy’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of feeling as an uncontrolled excess of it; how the four parents, for various reasons, were of little help; how he had witnessed, just minutes ago, a quarrel between the Angstroms that perhaps offered a clue as to why their son—

“Do you think,” Kruppenbach interrupts; Jack hadn’t expected him to be quiet this long—the man certainly was no listener; even in his undershirt he somehow wore vestments—“do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run