When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn't know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone?booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is rereading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two bottles of vitamins. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It's a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone facades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with some sweating footsore shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16n; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from doubling up with the kink inside. Curved posters advertise filtered cigarettes and suntan lotion and C.A.R.E.
He had ridden one of these buses last night into Brewer and gone to Ruth's apartment but there was no light on and nobody answered his ring, though there was a dim light behind the frosted glass lettered F. X. PELLIGRINI. He sat around on the steps, looking down at the delicatessen until the lights went out and then looking at the bright church window. When the lights went out behind that he felt alone and hopeless and thought of going home. He wandered up to Weiser Street and looked down at all the lights and the great sunflower and couldn't see a bus and kept walking, down to the south side, and became afraid by himself and went into a low?looking hotel and bought a room. He didn't sleep very well; a neon tube with a taped connection fizzled outside the window and some woman kept laughing in another room. He woke up early enough to go back to Mt. Judge and get a suit and go to work but something held him back. Something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn't there probably off to Atlantic City with some prick and still he wandered around Brewer, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and dime and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see the fat shoulders he used to kiss jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds were totally against him and anyway there was tons of time, he could find her another day. No, what kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and down between counters of perfumed lingerie and tinny jewelry and salted nuts (poor old Jan) and up into the park along paths he walked once with Ruth to watch from under a horsechestnut tree five mangy kids play cat with a tennis ball and a broomstick and then finally back down Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he'd find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn't so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realized that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame. What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used?car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it. The kink in his stomach starts to take the form of nausea and he clings to the icy bar bitterly as the bus swings around the mountain.
He gets off, in a sweat, blocks too soon. Here in Mt. Judge the shadows have begun to grow deep, the sun baking Brewer rides the crest of the mountain, and his sweat congeals, shortening his breath. He runs to keep his body occupied, to joggle his mind blank. Past a dry?cleaning plant with a little pipe hissing steam at the side. Through the oil and rubber smells riding above the asphalt pond around the red pumps of an Esso station. Past the Mt. Judge town?hall lawn and the World War II honor roll with the name plaques crumbled and blistered behind glass. His chest begins to hurt and he slows to a walk.
When he gets to the Springers' house Mrs. comes to the door and shuts it in his face. But he knows from the gray Buick parked outside big as a battleship that Eccles is in there and in a little while Jack comes to the door and lets him in. He says conspiratorially in the dim hall, "Your wife has been given a sedative and is asleep."
"The baby. . .
"The undertaker has her."
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.
Eccles goes upstairs and Harry sits in a chair and watches the light from the window play across an iron table of ferns and African violets and baby cacti. Where it hits the leaves they are bright yellow?green; the leaves in shadow in front of them look like black?green holes cut in this golden color. Somebody comes down the stairs with an erratic step. He doesn't turn his head to see who it is; he doesn't want to risk looking anybody in the face. A furry touch on his forearm and he meets Nelson's eyes. The child's face is stretched shiny with curiosity. "Mommy sleep," he says in a deep voice imitating the tragedy?struck voices he has been hearing.
Rabbit pulls him up into his lap. He's heavier and longer than he used to be. His body acts as a covering; he pulls the boy's head down against his neck. Nelson asks, "Baby sick?"
"Baby sick."
"Big, big water in tub," Nelson says, and straggles to sit up so he can explain with his amts, which go wide. "Mom?mom came and took Mommy away." What all did the poor kid see? He wants to get off his father's lap but Harry holds him fast with a kind of terror; the house is thick with a grief that seems to threaten the boy. Also the boy's body wriggles with an energy that threatens the grief, might tip it and bring the whole house crashing down on them. It is himself he is protecting by imprisoning the child.
Eccles comes downstairs and stands there studying them. "Why don't you take him outside?" he asks. "He's had a nightmare of a day. >,
They all three go outdoors. Eccles takes Harry's hand in a long quiet grip and says, "Stay here. You're needed, even if they don't tell you." After Eccles pulls away in his car, he and Nelson sit in the grass by the driveway and throw bits of gravel down toward the pavement. The boy laughs and talks in excitement but out here the sound is not so loud. Harry feels thinly protected by the fact that this is what Eccles told him to do. Men are walking home from work along the pavement; Nelson tosses a pebble too near the feet of one and the man looks up. This unknown face seems to stare at Harry from deep in another world, the world of the blameless, the world outside the bubble of Becky's death. He and Nelson change their target to a green lawn?seeder leaning against the wall of the garage. Harry hits it four times running. Though the air is still light the sunshine has shrunk to a few scraps in the tops of trees. The grass is growing damp and he wonders if he should sneak Nelson in the door and go.
Mr. Springer comes to the door and calls, "Harry." They go over. "Becky's made a few sandwiches in place of supper," he says. "You and the boy come in." They go into the kitchen and Nelson eats. Harry refuses everything except a glass of water. Mrs. Springer is not in the kitchen and Harry is grateful for her absence. "Harry," Mr. Springer says, and stands up, patting his mustache with two fingers, like he's about to make a financial concession, "Reverend Eccles and Becky and I have had a talk. I won't say I don't blame you because of course I do. But you're not the only one to blame. Her mother and I somehow never made her feel secure, never perhaps you might say made her welcome, I don't know" ? his little pink crafty eyes are not crafty now, blurred and chafed ? "we gave her all we had, I'd like to think. At any rate" ? this comes out harsh and crackly; he pauses to regain quietness in his voice ? "life must go on. Am I making any sense to you?"
"Yes sir."
"Life must go on. We must go ahead with what we have left. Though Becky's too upset to see you now, she agrees. We had a talk and agree that it's the only way. I mean, what I mean to say, I can see you're puzzled, is that we consider you in our family, Harry, despite" ? he lifts an arm vaguely toward the stairs ? "this." His arm slumps back and he adds the word "accident."
Harry shields his eyes with his hand. They feel hot and vulnerable to light. "Thank you," he says, and almost moans in his gratitude to this man, whom he has always despised, for making a speech so generous. He tries to frame, in accordance with an etiquette that continues to operate in the thick of grief as if underwater, a counter?speech. "I promise I'll keep my end of the bargain," he brings out, and stops, stifled by the abject sound of his voice. What made him say bargain?
"I know you will," Springer says. "Reverend Eccles assures us you will."
"Dessert," Nelson says distinctly.
"Nelly, why don't you take a cookie to bed?" Springer speaks with a familiar jollity that, though strained, reminds Rabbit that the kid lived here for months. "Isn't it your bedtime? Shall Mommom take you up?"
"Daddy," Nelson says, and slides off his chair and comes to his father.
Both men are embarrassed. "O.K.," Rabbit says. "You show me your room."
Springer gets two Oreo cookies out of the pantry and unexpectedly Nelson runs forward to hug him. He stoops to accept the hug and his withered dandy's face goes blank against the boy's cheek; big black square cufflinks, thinly rimmed and initialed S in gold, creep out of his coat sleeves as his amts tighten the hug.
As Nelson leads his father to the stairs they pass the room where Mrs. Springer is sitting. Rabbit has a glimpse of a puffed face slippery with tears, like an interior organ surgically exposed, and averts his eyes. He whispers to Nelson to go in and kiss her good night. When the boy returns to him they go upstairs and down a smooth corridor papered with a design of old?style cars into a little room whose white curtains are tinted green by a tree outside. On either side of the window symmetrical pictures, one of kittens and one of puppies, are hung. He wonders if this was the room where Janice was little. It has a musty innocence, and a suspense, as if it stood empty for years. An old teddy bear, the fur worn down to cloth and one eye void, sits in a broken child's rocker. Has it been Janice's? Who pulled the eye out? Nelson becomes queerly passive in this room. Harry undresses the sleepy body, tanned brown all but the narrow bottom, puts it into pajamas and into bed and arranges the covers over it. He tells him, "You're a good boy." "Yop. > &quo............