limestone church whose leaded windows show the reverse sides of Biblical scenes to the street. He can’t make out what the figures are doing. From a high window in the Y.M.C.A. fall the clicks of a billiard game; otherwise the building’s broad side is lifeless. Through the glass side door he sees an old Negro sweeping up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy seeds of some tree are under his feet. Its tropically narrow leaves are black spikes against the dark yellow sky. Imported from China or Brazil or somewhere because it can endure soot and fumes. The St. Joseph’s parking lot is a striped asphalt square whose sides are lined with such city trees; and above their tops, in this hard open space, he sees the moon, and for a second stops and communes with its mournful face, stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin. Make it be all right, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance.
He walks down a linoleum hall perfumed with ether to the front desk. “Angstrom,” he tells the nun behind the typewriter. “I think my wife is here.”
Her plump face is rimmed like a cupcake with scalloped linen. She surveys her cards and says “Yes” and smiles. Her little wire spectacles perch way out from her eyes on the pads of fat at the top of her cheeks. “You may wait over there.” She points with a pink ball-point pen. Her other hand rests, beside the typewriter, on a string of black beads the size of the necklace of beads carved in Java he once got Janice for Christmas. He stands there staring, expecting to hear her say, She’s been here hours, where were you? He can’t believe she’ll just accept him. As he stares, her nerveless white hand, that has never seen the sun, slides the black necklace off the desktop into her lap.
Two other men are already established in the waiting end of the room. This is the front entrance hall; people drift in and out. Rabbit sits down on an imitation leather chair with chrome arms and gets the idea he’s in a police court and these other two men are the cops who made the arrest. In his nervousness he plucks a magazine from the table. It’s a Catholic magazine the size of The Reader’s Digest. He tries to read a story about a lawyer in England who becomes so interested in how legally unfair it was for Henry VIII to confiscate the property of the monasteries that he becomes a Roman Catholic convert and eventually a monk. The two men whisper together; one maybe is the other’s father. The younger one keeps kneading his hands together and nodding to what the older man whispers.
Eccles comes in, blinking and looking scrawny in his collar. He greets the sister behind the desk by name, Sister Bernard. Rabbit stands up on ankles of air and Eccles comes over with that familiar frown in his eyebrows made harsh by the hospital light. His forehead is etched in purple. He’s had a haircut that day; as he turns his skull, the shaved planes above his ears shine like the blue throat feathers of a pigeon.
Rabbit asks, “Does she know I’m here?” He wouldn’t have predicted that he would whisper too. He hates the panicked sound of his voice.
“I’ll see that she’s told if she’s still conscious,” Eccles says in a loud voice that makes the whispering men look up. He goes over to Sister Bernard. The nun seems happy to chat, and both laugh, Eccles in the startled guffaw Rabbit knows well and Sister Bernard with a pure and girlish fat woman’s fluting that springs from her throat slightly retracted, curbed by the frame of stiff frills around her face. When Eccles moves away she lifts the phone by her skirted elbow.
Eccles comes back and looks him in the face, sighs, and offers him a cigarette. The effect is somehow of a wafer of repentance and Rabbit accepts. The first drag, after so many clean months, unhinges his muscles and he has to sit down. Eccles takes a hard chair nearby and makes no effort at conversation. Rabbit can’t think of much to say to him off the golf course and, shifting the smoking cigarette awkwardly to his left hand, pulls another magazine off the table,