Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,89

have his shirt on?” the child asks distinctly.

“I don’t know,” her mother says. “I suppose he thinks he has a nice chest.”

“I have a T shirt on,” he protests. It’s as if neither of them see it.

“Is that his boo-zim?” Joyce asks.

“No, darling: only ladies have bosoms. We’ve been through that.”

“Hell, if it makes everybody nervous,” Rabbit says, and puts on his shirt. It’s rumpled and at the collar and cuffs gray; he puts it on clean to go to the Club Castanet. He has no coat, he left Ruth too hastily. “O.K.,” he says, tucking in the tail. “Thank you very much.”

“You’re very welcome,” Lucy says. “Be good now.” The two girls walk with him down the hall. Lucy’s white legs mix in pallor with the child’s naked chest. Little Joyce keeps staring up at him. He wonders what she’s puzzling about. Children and dogs smell things. He tries to calculate how much sarcasm was in that “Be good now” and what it meant, if anything. He wishes she could drive him; he wants, he really wants, to get into a car with her. Not so much to do anything as just feel how things set. His reluctance to leave pulls the air between them taut.

They stand at the door, he and Eccles’ baby-skinned wife and under them Joyce’s face looking up with her father’s wide lips and arched eyebrows and under them all Lucy’s painted toenails, tiny scarlet shells in a row on the carpet. He strums the air with a vague disclaimer and puts his hand on the hard doorknob. The thought that only ladies have bosoms haunts him foolishly. He looks up from the toenails to Joyce’s watching face and from there to her mother’s bosom, two pointed bumps under a buttoned blouse that shows through its airy summer weave and white shadow of the bra. When his eyes reach Lucy’s an amazing thing enters the silence. The woman winks. Quick as light: maybe he imagined it. He turns the knob and retreats down the sunny walk with a murmur in his chest as if a string in there had snapped.

At the hospital they say Janice has the baby with her for a moment and would he please wait? He is sitting in the chair with chrome arms leafing through a Woman’s Day backwards when a tall woman with beautiful gray hair and somehow silver, finely wrinkled skin comes in and looks so familiar he stares. She sees this and has to speak; he feels she would have preferred to ignore him. Who is she? Her familiarity has touched him across a great distance. She looks into his face reluctantly and tells him, “You’re an old student of Marty’s. I’m Harriet Tothero. We had you to dinner once, I can almost think of your name.”

Yes, of course, but it wasn’t from that dinner he remembers her, it was from noticing her on the streets. The students at Mt. Judge High knew, most of them, that Tothero played around, and his wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr, a breathing shadow of sin. It was less pity than morbid fascination that singled her out; Tothero was himself such a clown and windbag, such a speechifier, that the stain of his own actions slid from him, oil off a duck. It was the tall, silver, serious figure of his wife that accumulated the charge of his wrongdoing, and released it to their young minds with an electrical shock that snapped their eyes away from the sight of her, in fear as much as embarrassment. Harry stands up, surprised to feel that the world she walks in is his world now. “I’m Harry Angstrom,” he says.

“Yes, that’s your name. He was so proud of you. He often talked to me about you. Even recently.”

Recently. What did he tell her? Does she know about him? Does she blame him? Her long schoolmarmish face, as always, keeps its secrets in. “I’ve heard that he was sick.”

“Yes, he is, Harry. Quite sick. He’s had two strokes, one since he came into the hospital.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes. Would you like to visit him? I know it would make him very happy. For just a moment. He’s had very few visitors; I suppose that’s the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you.”

“I’d like to see him, sure.”

“Come with me, then.” As they walk down the halls she says, “I’m afraid you’ll find him much