“No, really, I couldn’t put you to the trouble.” He has already made up his mind to accept. Every bone in his body feels soft.
“It’s no trouble; I’m not asking you to live with us,” Eccles says. The long night is baring his nerves. “We have scads of room”
“O.K. O.K. Good. Thanks.”
They drive back to Mt. Judge along the familiar highway. At this hour it is empty even of trucks. Harry sits wordless staring through the windshield, rigid in body, rigid in spirit. The curving highway seems a wide straight road that has opened up in front of him. There is nothing he wants to do but go down it.
He is taken to a room that has tassels on the bedspread. He uses the bathroom stealthily and in underclothes curls up between the sheets, making the smallest possible volume of himself. Thus curled near one edge, he draws backward into sleep like a turtle drawing into his shell. Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside.
Sunshine, the old clown, rims the room. Two pink chairs flank the gauze-filled window buttered with light that smears a writing desk furry with envelope-ends. Above it a picture of a lady in pink stepping toward you. A woman’s voice is tapping the door. “Mr. Angstrom. Mr. Angstrom.”
“Yeah. Hi,” he calls, hoarse.
“It’s twelve-twenty. Jack told me to tell you the visiting hours at the hospital are one to three.” He recognizes Eccles’ wife’s crisp little curly tone, like she was adding, “And what the hell are you doing in my house anyway?”
“Yeah. O.K. I’ll be right out.” He puts on the cocoa-colored trousers he wore last night and, displeased by the sense of these things being dirty, he carries his shoes and socks and shirt into the bathroom with him, postponing putting them against his skin, giving them another minute to air. Still foggy despite splashing water all around, he carries them out of the bathroom and goes downstairs in his bare feet and a T shirt.
Eccles’ little wife is in her big kitchen, wearing khaki shorts this time and sandals and painted toenails. “How did you sleep?” she asks from behind the refrigerator door.
“Like death. Not a dream or anything.”
“It’s the effect of a clear conscience,” she says, and puts a glass of orange juice on the table with a smart click. He imagines that seeing how he’s dressed, with just the T shirt over his chest, makes her look away quickly.
“Hey don’t go to any bother. I’ll get something in Brewer.”
“I won’t give you eggs or anything. Do you like Cheerios?”
“Love ‘em.”
“All right.”
The orange juice burns away some of the fuzz in his mouth. He watches the backs of her legs; the white tendons behind her knees jump as she assembles things at the counter. “How’s Freud?” he asks her. He knows this could be bad, because if he brings back that afternoon he’ll bring back how he nicked her fanny; but he has this ridiculous feeling with Mrs. Eccles, that he’s in charge and can’t make mistakes.
She turns with her tongue against her side teeth, making her mouth lopsided and thoughtful, and looks at him levelly. He smiles; her expression is that of a high-school tootsie who wants to seem to know more than she’s telling. “He’s the same. Do you want milk or cream on the Cheerios?”
“Milk. Cream is too sticky. Where is everybody?”
“Jack’s at the church, probably playing ping-pong with one of his boys. Joyce and Bonnie are asleep, Heaven knows why. They kept wanting to look at the naughty man in the guest room all morning. It took real love to keep them out.”
“Who told them I was a naughty man?”
“Jack did. He said to them at breakfast, ‘I brought home a naughty man last night who’s going to stop being naughty. The children have names for all of Jack’s problems—you’re the Naughty Man, Mr. Carson, an alcoholic, is the Silly Man, Mrs. MacDaniel is the Woman Who Calls Up in the Night. Then there’s the Droopsy Lady, Mr. Hearing-Aid, Mrs. Side-Door, and Happy Beans. Happy Beans is just about the least happy man you ever wanted to see, but once he brought the children some of those celluloid capsules with a weight in them, so they jiggle