One of the cable channels has cartoons all morning. Gangs of outlined superheroes, who move one body part at a time and talk with just their lower lips, do battle in space with cackling villains from other galaxies. Roy falls asleep watching, one of Pru’s oatbran low-sugar cookies broken in two wet crumbling halves in his hands. This house where Janice lived so long - the potted violets, the knickknacks, the cracked brown Barcalounger Daddy loved to relax on, to wait with closed eyes for one of his headaches to subside, the dining-room table Mother used to complain was being ruined by the lazy cleaning women who like to spray on Pledge every time and ruin the finish with gummy wax build-up deepens her guilt in regard to Nelson. His pale frightened face seems still to glow in the dark living room: she pulls up the shade, surprising the sleepy wasps crawling on the sill like arthritic old men. Across the street, at what used to be the Schmehlings’ house, a pink dogwood has grown higher than the porch roof its shape in bloom drifts sideways like those old photos of atomic bomb-test clouds in the days when we were still scared of the Russians. To think that she could be so cruel to Nelson just because of money. The memory of her hardness with him makes her shake, chilling the something soft still left in the center of her bones, giving her a little physical convulsion of self-disgust such as after you vomit.
Yet no one will share these feelings with her. Not Harry, not Pru. Pru comes back not at noon but after one o’clock. She says traffic was worse than anyone would imagine, miles of the Turnpike reduced to one lane, North Philadelphia enormous, block after block of row houses. And then the rehab place took its own sweet time about signing Nelson in; when she complained, they let her know that they turned down three for every one they admitted. Pru seems a semi-stranger, taller in stature and fiercer in expression than Janice remembered as a mother-in-law. The link between them has been removed.
“How did he seem?” Janice asks her.
“Angry but sane. Full of practical instructions about the lot he wanted me to pass on to his father. He made me write them all down. It’s as if he doesn’t realize he’s not running the show any more.”
“I feel so terrible about it all I couldn’t eat any lunch. Roy fell asleep in the TV chair and I didn’t know if I should wake him or not.”
Pru pokes back her hair wearily. “Nelson kept the kids up too late last night, running around kissing them, wanting them to play card games. He gets manicky on the stuff, so he can’t let anybody alone. Roy has his play group at one, I better quick take him.”
“I’m sorry, I knew he had the play group but didn’t know where it was or if Wednesday was one of the days.”
“I should have told you, but who would have thought driving to Philadelphia and back would be such a big deal? In Ohio you just zip up to Cleveland and back without any trouble.” She doesn’t directly blame Janice for missing Roy’s play group, but her triangular brow expresses irritation nevertheless.
Janice still seeks absolution from this younger woman, asking, “Do you think I should feel so terrible?”
Pru, whose eyes have been shuttling from detail to detail of what is, after all, as far as use and occupancy go, her house, now for a moment focuses on Janice a look of full cold clarity. “Of course not,” she says. “This is the only chance Nelson has. And you’re the only one who could make him do it. Thank God you did. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”
Yet the words are so harshly stated Janice finds herself unreassured. She licks the center of her upper lip, which feels dry. There is a little crack in the center of it that never quite heals. “But I feel so - what’s the word? -mercenary. As if I care more about the company than my son.”
Pru shrugs. “It’s the way things are structured. You have the clout. Me, Harry, the kids - Nelson just laughs at us. To him we’re negligible. He’s sick, Janice. He’s not your son, he’s a monster con artist who used to be your son.”
And this seems so harsh that Janice starts to cry; but her daughter-in-law, instead of offering to lend comfort, turns and sets about, with her air of irritated efficiency, waking up Roy and putting him in clean corduroy pants for play school.
“I’m late too. We’ll be back,” Janice says, feeling dismissed. She and Pru have previously agreed that, rather than risk leaving Harry alone in the Penn Park house while she does her three hours at the Penn State extension, she will bring him back here for his first night out of the hospital. As she drives into Brewer she looks forward to seeing him on his feet again, and to sharing with him her guilt over Nelson.
But he disappoints her just as Pru did. His five nights in St. Joseph’s have left him self-obsessed and lackadaisical. He seems brittle and puffy, suddenly; his hair, still a dull blond color, has been combed by him in the same comb-ridged pompadour he used to wear coming out of the locker room in high school. His hair has very little gray, but his temples are higher and the skin there, in the hollow at the corner of the eyebrows, has a crinkly dryness. He is like a balloon the air just slowly goes out of over days it wrinkles and sinks to the floor. His russet slacks and blue cotton sports coat look loose on him; the hospital diet has squeezed pounds of water out of his system. Drained of spirit as well, he seems halting and blinky the way her father became in his last five years, closing his eyes in the Barcalounger, waiting for the headache to pass. It feels wrong: in their marriage in the past Harry’s vitality always towered over hers - his impulsive needs, his sense of being generally cherished, his casual ability to hurt her, his unspoken threat to leave at any moment. It feels wrong that she is picking him up in her car, when he is dressed and wet-combed like the boy that comes for you on a date. He was sitting meekly in the chair by his bed, with his old gym bag, holding medicine and dirty underwear, between his feet in their big suede Hush Puppies. She took his arm and with cautious steps he moved to the elevator, as the nurses called goodbye. One plump younger one seemed especially sad to see him go, and the Hispanic culinary aide said to Janice with flashing eyes, “Make him eat right!”
She expects Harry to be more grateful; but a man even slightly sick assumes that women will uphold him, and in this direction, men to women, the flow of gratitude is never great. In the car, his first words are insulting: “You have on your policeman’s uniform.”
“I need to feel presentable for my quiz tonight. I’m afraid I won’t be able to concentrate. I can’t stop thinking about Nelson.”
He has slumped down in the passenger seat, his knees pressed against the dashboard, his head laid back against the headrest in a conceited way. “What’s to think?” he asks. “Did he wriggle out of going? I thought he’d run.”
“He didn’t run at all, that was one of the things that made it so sad. He went off just the way he used to go to school. Harry, I wonder if we’re doing the right thing.”
Harry’s eyes are closed, as if against the battering of sights to see through the car windows - Brewer, its painted brick buildings, its heavy sandstone churches, its mighty courthouse, its new little green-glass skyscraper, and the overgrown park where Weiser Square had once been and which is now the home of drug addicts and the homeless who live in cardboard boxes and keep their clothes in stolen shopping carts. “What else can we do?” he asks indolently. “What does Pru think?”
“Oh, she’s for it. It gets him off her hands. I’m sure he’s been a handful lately. You can see in her mind she’s single already, all independent and brisk and a little rude to me, I thought.”
“Don’t get touchy. What does Charlie think? How was your Vietnamese dinner last night?”
“I’m not sure I understand Vietnamese food, but it was nice. Short but sweet. I even got home in time to catch the end of thirtysomething. It was the season finale - Gary tried to protect Susannah from a magazine exposé being written by Hope, who found out that Susannah was stealing from the social-service center.” All this in case he thinks she slept with Charlie, to show there wasn’t time. Poor Harry, he doesn’t believe you can grow beyond that.
He groans, still keep
ing his eyes shut. “Sounds awful. Sounds like life.”
“Charlie’s real proud of me,” she says, “for standing up to Nelson. We had a grim little talk this morning, Nelson and me, where he said I loved the company more than him. I wonder if he isn’t right, if we haven’t become very materialistic since you first knew me. He seemed so little, Harry, so hurt and defiant, just the way he was the time I went off to live with Charlie. Abandoning a twelve-year-old like that, I’m the one should have been put in jail, what was I thinking of? It’s true what he says, who am I to lecture him, to send him off to this dreary place? I was just about the age he is now when I did it, too. So young, really.” She is crying again; she wonders ifyou can become addicted to tears like everything else. All the darkness and fumbling and unthinkable shames ofher life feel regurgitated in this unstoppable salty outpour. She can hardly see to drive, and laughs at her own snufing.
Harry’s head rolls loosely on the headrest, as if he is basking in an invisible sun. The clouds are crowding out the hazy sky, their dark hearts merging into an overcast. “You were trying something out,” Harry tells her. “You were trying to live while you were still alive.”
“But I had no right, you had no right either, to do the things we did!”
“For Chrissake, don’t bawl. It was the times,” he says. “The Sixties. The whole country was flipping out back then. We weren’t so bad. We got back together.”
“Yes, and sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t just more selfindulgence. We haven’t made each other happy, Harry.”
She wants to face this with him but he smiles as if in his sleep. “You’ve made me happy,” he says. “I’m sorry to hear it didn’t work both ways.”
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t just score points. I’m trying to be serious. You know I’ve always loved you, or wanted to, if you’d let me. Ever since high school, at least ever since Kroll’s. That’s one of the things Charlie was telling me last night, how crazy about you I’ve always been.” Her face heats; his failure to respond embarrasses her; she hurries on, turning left on Eisenhower. A gap in the clouds makes the hood of the Carnry glare; then it is dipped deeper into cloud shadow. “It really was a pretty restaurant,” she says, “the way they’ve fixed it up and everything, these little Vietnamese women so petite they made me feel like a horse. But they spoke perfect English, with Pennsylvania accents - second generation, can it be? Has it been that long since the war? We should go there sometime.”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding. It’s your and Charlie’s place.” He opens his eyes and sits up. “Hey. Where’re we going? This is the way to Mt. judge.”
She says, “Harry, now don’t get mad. You know I have to go to class and take the quiz tonight, and I’d feel too funny leaving you alone for three hours just out of the hospital, so Pru and I worked it out that you and I would sleep in Mother’s old bed, which they moved across the hall into the old sewing room when Mother’s room became Judy’s room. This way you’ll have babysitters while I’m off.”
“Why can’t I go to my own fucking house? I was looking forward to it. I lived in that damn barn of your mother’s for ten years and that was enough.”
“Just for one night, honey. Please - otherwise I’ll be sick with worry and flunk my quiz. There are all those Latin and funny old English words you’re expected to know.”
“My heart’s fine. Better than ever. It’s like a sink trap after all the hair and old toothpaste has been cleaned out. I saw the bastards do it. Nothing will happen ifyou leave me alone, I promise.”
“That nice Dr. Breit told me before they did it there was a chance of a coronary occlusion.”
“That was while they were doing it, with the catheter in. The catheter’s out now. It’s been out nearly a week. Come on, honey. Take me home.”
“Just one night, Harry, please. It’s a kindness to everybody. Pru and I thought it would distract the children from their father’s not being there.”
He sinks back into his seat, giving up. “What about my pajamas? What about my toothbrush?”
“They’re there. I brought them over this morning. I tell you, this day. I’ve really had to plan. Now, after we’ve got you settled, I must study, absolutely.”
“I don’t want to be in the same house with Roy,” he says, sulking humorously, resigned to what after all is a tiny adventure, a night back in Mt. Judge. “He’ll hurt me. Down in Florida he yanked the oxygen tube right out of my nose.”
Janice remembers Roy stamping on all those ants but nevertheless says, “I spent the whole morning with him and he couldn’t have been sweeter.”
Pru and Roy are not there. Janice leads Rabbit upstairs and suggests he lie down. Ma’s old bed has been freshly made up; his offwhite pajamas are folded nicely on his pillow. He sees in the murky far comer next to an old wooden-cased Singer sewing machine the dressmaker’s dummy, dust-colored, eternally headless and erect. Ma’s big bed crowds the room so there are just a few inches of space on one side next to the window and on the other beside the wall with its wainscoting. The sewing room has a wainscoting of vamished beaded boards, set upright and trimmed at chest-level with a strip of molding. The door of a shallow closet in the corner is made of the same boards. When he opens it, the door bumps annoyingly on the bedpost of Ma’s old bed, a bedpost turned with a flattened knob at the top like a hard, brownpainted mushroom, and the paint on it has crackled into small rectangles, like a puddle that has dried. He opens the door to hang up his blue coat, among cobwebby crammed old irons and toasters, coverlets folded and preserved in yellowing cellophane moth bags, and a rack of Fred Springer’s dead neckties. Harry folds back his shirtsleeves and begins to feel like himself, the idea of spending a day back in Mt. Judge is beginning to amuse him. “Maybe I’ll take a little walk.”
“Should you?” Janice asks.
“Absolutely. It’s the best thing for you, that’s what everybody at the hospital says. They had me walking the halls.”
“I thought you might want to lie down.”
“Later, maybe. You go study. Go on, this quiz ofyours is making me nervous.”
He leaves her at the dining-room table with her book and her photocopies and heads up Joseph Street to Potter Avenue, where the ice-plant water used to run down in the gutter. The gutter has been long dry but the cement was permanently tinged green. Rabbit walks away from the center of the borough with its dry cleaners and Turkey Hill Minit Market and Pizza Hut and Sunoco and discount stereo and new video store that used to be a shoe store and aerobics class above what had been a bakery when he was a boy. The smell of warm dough and icing out of its doors would make him drool. He walks uphill to where Potter Avenue meets Wilbur Street; here a green mailbox used to lean on a concrete post and now the bigger boxy kind with the rounded top stands instead, painted blue. A fire hydrant painted red, white, and blue for the Bicentennial in the Seventies has been given a fresh and garish coat of the orange you see on life jackets and joggers’ vests and hunters’ outfits, as if a fog creeping into our way of life is making everything harder to see. He walks up Wilbur, feeling the steep slope tug at his heart. The street in its lower blocks holds pretentious large houses like the Springers’, stucco and brick and slate, fortresslike, with gables and acres of roof, some of them now split up into condos reached by wooden outside stairs that look tacky. Beyond the alley where long ago there used to be a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it, Rabbit’s chest has that full feeling, his ribs like bands of pressure, and he pops a Nitrostat under his tongue and waits for the relief and the tingle, while cool cloud shadows slide rapidly across the forested edge of the mountain above him. He had hoped he would need to take fewer pills but maybe it takes time for the operation to sink in.