Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,93

that do not take him out of the room, understands that his toys belong in the bushel basket, and feels the happiness in cleanness, order, and light. The June breeze sighs at the screens of the long-closed windows. The sun dots the mesh with hundreds of sparkling T’s and L’s. Beyond the windows Wilbur Street falls away. The flat tin-and-tar roofs of their neighbors, weathered into gentle corrugations, glitter with mysterious twists of rubble, candy-bar wrappers and a pool of glass flakes, litter that must have fallen from the clouds or been brought by birds to this street in the sky, planted with television aerials and hooded chimneys the size of fire hydrants. There are three of these roofs on the down side, tipped like terraces for drainage, three broad dirty steps leading to a brink below which the better homes begin, the stucco and brick forts, rugged with porches and dormer windows and lightning rods, guarded by conifers, protected by treaties with banks and firms of lawyers. It was strange that a row of tenements had been set above them; they had been tricked by growth. But in a town built against a mountain, height was too common to be precious; above them all there was the primitive ridge, the dark slum of forest, separated from the decent part of town by a band of unpaved lanes, derelict farmhouses, a cemetery, and a few raw young developments. Wilbur Street was paved for a block past Rabbit’s door, and then became a street of mud and gravel between two short rows of ranch-houses of alternating color erected in 1953 on scraped red earth that even now gives scant support to the blades of grass that speckle it. The land grows steeper still, and the woods begin.

Straight out from the windows Rabbit can look in the opposite direction across the town into the wide farm valley, with its golf course. He thinks, My valley, my home. The blemished green-papered walls, the scatter-rugs whose corners keep turning under, the closet whose door bumps the television set, absent from his senses for months, have returned with unexpected force. Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick already in his brain. This adds another dimension of neatness to his housecleaning.

Under the sofa and chairs and behind doors and in the footspace under the kitchen cabinets he finds old fragments of toys that delight Nelson. The child has a perfect memory for his own possessions. “Mom-mom gay me dis.” Holding up a plastic duck that had lost its wheels.

“She did?”

“Yop. Mom-mom did.”

“Wasn’t that nice of Mom-mom?”

“Yop.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“Mom-mom is Mommy’s mommy!”

“Yop. Where Mommy?”

“At the hospital.”

“At hop-pital? Come back Fi-day?”

“That’s right. She’ll come back Friday. Won’t she be happy to see how clean we make everything?”

“Yop. Daddy at hop-pital?”

“No. Daddy wasn’t at the hospital. Daddy was away.”

“Daddy away”—the boy’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open as he stares into the familiar concept of “away”; his voice deepens with the seriousness of it—“very, very long.” His arms go out to measure the length, so far his fingers bend backward. It is as long as he can measure.

“But Daddy’s not away now, is he?”

“Nope.”

He takes Nelson with him in the car the day he goes to tell Mrs. Smith he has to quit working in her garden. Old man Springer has offered him a job in one of his lots. The rhododendron trees by the crunching driveway look dusty and barren with a few brown corsages still pinned to their branches by fronds of light green new growth. Mrs. Smith herself comes to the door. “Yes, yes,” she croons, her brown face beaming.

“Mrs. Smith, this is my son Nelson.”

“Yes, yes, how do you do, Nelson? You have your father’s head.” She pats the small head with a hand withered like a tobacco leaf. “Now let me think. Where did I put that jar of old candy? He can eat candy, can’t he?”

“I guess a little but don’t go looking for it.”

“I will too, if I want to. The trouble with you, young man, you never gave me credit for any competence whatsoever.” She totters off, plucking with one hand at the front of her dress and poking the other into the air before her, as if she’s brushing away cobwebs.

While she’s out of the room he and Nelson stand looking at the high ceiling of this parlor, at the tall windows with mullions as