Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,90

changed.” He doesn’t take this in fully; he is concentrating on her skin, trying to see if it does look like a lot of little lizard skins sewed together. Just her hands and neck show.

Tothero is in a room alone. White curtains seem to hang expectantly around his bed. Green plants on the windowsills dutifully exhale oxygen. Canted panes of glass lift the smells of summer into the room. Footsteps crunch on the gravel below.

“Dear, I’ve brought you someone. He was waiting outside in the most miraculous way.”

“Hello, Mr. Tothero. My wife’s had her baby.” He speaks these words and goes toward the bed with blank momentum; the sight of the old man lying there shrunken, his tongue sliding in his lopsided mouth, has stunned him. Tothero’s face, spotted with white stubble, is yellow in the pillows, and his thin wrists stick out from candy-striped pajama sleeves beside the shallow lump of his body. Rabbit offers his hand.

“He can’t lift his arms, Harry,” Mrs. Tothero says. “He is helpless. But talk to him. He can see and hear.” Her sweet patient enunciation has a singing quality that is sinister, like a voice humming in empty rooms.

Since he has extended his hand, Harry presses it down on the back of one of Tothero’s. For all its dryness, the hand, under a faint scratchy fleece, is warm, and to Harry’s horror moves, revolves stubbornly, so the palm is presented upward to Harry’s touch. Harry takes his fingers back and sinks into the bedside chair. His old coach’s eyeballs shift with scattered quickness as he turns his head an inch toward the visitor. The flesh under them has been so scooped that they are weakly protrusive. Talk, he must talk. “It’s a little girl. I want to thank you”—he speaks loudly—“for the help you gave in getting me and Janice back together again. You were very kind.”

Tothero retracts his tongue and shifts his face to look at his wife. A muscle under his jaw jumps, his lips pucker, and his chin crinkles repeatedly, like a pulse, as he tries to say something. A few dragged vowels come out; Harry turns to see if Mrs. Tothero can decipher them, but to his surprise she is looking elsewhere. She is looking out the window, toward an empty green courtyard. Her face is like a photograph.

Is it that she doesn’t care? If so, should he tell Tothero about Margaret? But there was nothing to say about Margaret that might make Tothero happy. “I’m straightened out now, Mr. Tothero, and I hope you’re up and out of this bed soon.”

Tothero’s head turns back with an annoyed quickness, the mouth closed, the eyes in a half-squint, and for this moment he looks so coherent Harry thinks he will speak, that the pause is just his old disciplinarian’s trick of holding silent until your attention is complete. But the pause stretches, inflates, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words. Yet in the first moments of the silence a certain force flows forth, a human soul emits its invisible and scentless rays with urgency. Then the point in the eyes fades, the brown lids lift and expose pink jelly, the lips part, the tip of the tongue appears.

“I better go down and visit my wife,” Harry shouts. “She just had the baby last night. It’s a girl.” He feels claustrophobic, as if he’s inside Tothero’s skull; when he stands up, he has the fear he will bump his head, though the white ceiling is yards away.

“Thank you very much, Harry. I know he’s enjoyed seeing you,” Mrs. Tothero says. Nevertheless from her tone he feels he’s flunked a recitation. He walks down the hall springingly, dismissed. His health, his reformed life, make space, even the antiseptic space in the hospital corridors, delicious. Yet his visit with Janice is disappointing. Perhaps he is still choked by seeing poor Tothero stretched out as good as dead; perhaps out of ether Janice is choked by thinking of how he’s treated her. She complains a lot about how much her stitches hurt, and when he tries to express his repentance again she seems to find it boring. The difficulty of pleasing someone begins to hem him in. She asks why he hasn’t brought flowers. He had no time; he tells her how he spent the night and, sure enough, she asks him to describe Mrs.