Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,80

He had been having far too happy a time in the drugstore. He loves kids; their belief is so real to them and sits so light.

Lucy delivers her message as sufficient rebuke, but it fails as that; for, with hardly a backward glance at the horrid evening she has, implicitly, spent, he rushes to the phone.

He takes his wallet out and between his driver’s license and his public-library card finds the telephone number he has been saving, the key that could be turned in the lock just once. He wonders, dialing it, if it will fit, if he was a fool to lean the entire weight of the case on the word of young Mrs. Fosnacht, with her mirroring, perhaps mocking sunglasses. The distant phone rings often, as if electricity, that amazingly trained mouse, has scurried through miles of wire only to gnaw at the end of its errand on an impenetrable plate of metal. He prays, but it is a bad prayer, a doubting prayer; he fails to superimpose God upon the complexities of electricity. He concedes them their inviolable laws. Hope has vanished, he is hanging on out of numbness, when the gnawing ringing stops, the metal is lifted, and openness, an impression of light and air, washes back through the wires to Eccles’ ear.

“Hello.” A man’s voice, but not Harry’s. It is heavier and more brutal than that of his friend.

“Is Harry Angstrom there?” Sunglasses mock his sunk heart; this is not the number.

“Who’s this?”

“My name is Jack Eccles.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“Is that you, Harry? It didn’t sound like you. Were you asleep?”

“In a way.”

“Harry, your wife has started to have the baby. Her mother called here around eight and I just got in.” Eccles closes his eyes; in the dark tipping silence he feels his ministry, sum and substance, being judged.

“Yeah,” the other breathes in the far corner of the darkness. “I guess I ought to go to her.”

“I wish you would.”

“I guess I should. It’s mine I mean too.”

“Exactly. I’ll meet you there. It’s St. Joseph’s in Brewer. You know where that is?”

“Yeah, sure. I can walk it in ten minutes.”

“You want me to pick you up in the car?”

“No, I’ll walk it.”

“All right. If you prefer. Harry?”

“Huh?”

“I’m very proud of you.”

“Yeah. O.K. I’ll see you.”

Eccles had reached for him, it felt like, out of the ground. Voice had sounded tinny. Ruth’s bedroom is dim; the street lamp like a low moon burns shadows into the inner planes of the armchair, the burdened bed, the twisted sheet be tossed back finally when it seemed the phone would never stop. The bright rose window of the church opposite is still lit: purple red blue gold like the notes of different bells struck. His body, his whole frame of nerves and bone, tingles, as if with the shaking of small bells hung up and down his silver skin. He wonders if he had been asleep, and how long, ten minutes or five hours. He finds his underclothes and trousers draped on a chair and fumbles with them; not only his fingers but his vision itself trembles in the luminous gloom. His white shirt seems to crawl, like a cluster of glow-worms in grass. He hesitates a second before poking his fingers into the nest, that turns under his touch to safe cloth, dead. He carries it in his hand to the sullen laden bed.

“Hey. Baby.”

The long lump under the covers doesn’t answer. Just the top of Ruth’s hair peeks up out of the pillow. He doesn’t feel she is asleep.

“Hey. I got to go out.”

No answer, no motion. If she wasn’t asleep she heard everything he said on the phone, but what did he say? He remembers nothing except this sense of being reached. Ruth lies heavy and silent and her body hidden. The night is hot enough for just a sheet but she put a blanket on the bed saying she felt cold. It was just about the only thing she did say. He shouldn’t have made her do it. He doesn’t know why he did except it felt right at the time. He thought she might like it or at least like the humbling. If she didn’t want to, if it made her sick, why didn’t she say no like he half-hoped she would anyway? He kept touching her cheeks with his fingertips. He kept wanting to lift her up and hug her in simple thanks and say Enough you’re mine again but somehow couldn’t bring himself