all afternoon until after dark and was always looking after Mim. Nelson’s being half Springer seems to kill all that. For the moment he stops liking his mother; it takes insanity to snub a tiny kid that just learned to talk. He wants to say to her, What is this anyway? You act like I’ve gone over to the other side. You’re acting insane. Don’t you know it’s the right side and why don’t you praise me?
But he doesn’t say this; he has a stubbornness to match hers. He doesn’t say much at all to her, after telling her what good sports the Springers are doesn’t go over. He just hangs around, him and Nelson rolling a lemon back and forth in the kitchen. Whenever the lemon wobbles over toward his mother’s feet he has to get it; Nelson won’t. The silence makes Rabbit blush, for himself or for her he doesn’t know. When his father comes home it isn’t much better. The old man isn’t angry but he looks at Harry like there isn’t anything there. His weary hunch and filthy fingernails annoy his son; it’s as if he’s willfully aging them all. Why doesn’t he get false teeth that fit? His mouth works like an old woman’s. But one thing at least, his father pays some attention to Nelson, who hopefully rolls the lemon toward him. He rolls it back. “You going to be a ballplayer like your Dad?”
“He can’t, Earl,” Mom interrupts, and Rabbit is happy to hear her voice, thinks the ice has broken, until he hears what she says. “He has those little Springer hands.” These words, spoken hard as steel, strike a flurry of sparks off Rabbit’s heart.
“The hell he does,” he says, and regrets it, being trapped. It shouldn’t matter what size hands Nelson has. Now he discovers it does matter; he doesn’t want the boy to have his mother’s hands, and, if he does—and if Mom noticed it he probably does—he likes the kid a little less. He likes the kid a little less but he hates his mother for making him do it. It’s as if she wants to pull down everything, even if it falls on her. And he admires this, her willingness to have him hate her, so long as he gets her message. But he rejects her message, he feels it probing at his heart and rejects it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to hear her say another word. He just wants to get out with a little piece of his love of her left.
At the door he asks his father, “Where’s Mim?”
“We don’t see much of Mim any more,” the old man says. His blurred eyes sink and he touches the pocket of his shirt, which holds two ballpoint pens and a little soiled packet of cards and papers. Just in these last few years his father has been making little bundles of things, cards and lists and receipts and tiny calendars that he wraps rubber bands around and tucks into different pockets with an elderly fussiness. Rabbit leaves his old home depressed, with a feeling of his heart having slumped off center.
The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and, the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear. The child’s sleep is so heavy he fears it might break the membrane of life and fall through to oblivion. Sometimes he reaches into the crib and lifts the boy’s body out, just to reassure himself with its warmth and the responsive fumbling protest of the tumbled limp limbs.
He rattles around in the apartment, turning on all the lights and television, drinking ginger ale and leafing through old Life’s, grabbing anything to stuff into the emptiness. Before going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toilet, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee-wee springs from the child’s irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl. Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson’s middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the moment when in the furry slant