In response Janice looks as if she is about to cry, her darkbrown eyes warm and glassy-looking just like little Roy’s before he lets loose with one of his howls. “Harry, don’t confuse me,” she begs. “I can’t even take the license exam until October, I can’t believe you’d immediately make me go down to Florida where the license is no good just so you can play golf with some people older and worse than you. Who beat you anyway, and take twenty dollars every time.”
“Well what am 1 supposed to do around here while you run around showing off? The lot’s finished, kaput, or whatever the Japanese word is, finito, and even if it’s not, if the kid’s half-way straightened out you’ll want him back there and he can’t stand me around, we crowd each other, we get on each other’s nerves.”
“Maybe you won’t now. Maybe Nelson will just have to put up with you and you with him.”
Harry humbly tells her, “I’d be willing.” Father and son, together against the world, rebuilding the lot up from scratch: the vision excites him, for the moment. Shooting the bull with Benny and Elvira while Nelson skitters around out there in the lake of rooftops, selling used cars like hotcakes. Springer Motors back to what it used to be before Fred got the Toyota franchise. So they owe a few hundred thousand - the government owes trillions and nobody cares.
She sees hope in his face and touches his cheek a third time. At night now, Harry, having to arise at least once and sometimes, if there’s been more than one beer with television, twice, has learned to touch his way across the bedroom in the pitch dark, touching the glass top of the bedside table and then with an outreached arm after a few blind steps the slick varnished edge of the high bureau and from there to the knob of the bathroom door. Each touch, it occurs to him every night, leaves a little deposit of sweat and oil from the skin of his fingertips; eventually it will darken the varnished bureau edge as the hems of his golf-pants pockets have been rendered grimy by his reaching in and out for tees and ball markers, round after round, over the years; and that accumulated deposit of his groping touch, he sometimes thinks when the safety of the bathroom and its luminescent light switch has been attained, will still be there, a shadow on the varnish, a microscopic cloud of his body oils, when he is gone.
“Don’t push me, honey,” Janice says, in a rare tone of direct appeal that makes his hard old heart accelerate with revived husbandly feeling. “This horrible thing with Nelson really has been a stress, though I may not always show it. I’m his mother, I’m humiliated, I don’t know what’s going to happen, exactly. Everything’s in flux.”
His chest feels full; his left ribs cage a twinge. His vision of working side by side with Nelson has fled, a pipe dream. He tries to make Janice, so frighteningly, unusually somber and frontal, smile with a tired joke. “I’m too old for flux,” he tells her.
Nelson is scheduled to return from rehab the same day that the second U.S. Congressman in two weeks, a white Republican this time, is killed in a plane crash. One in Ethiopia, one in Louisiana; one a former Black Panther, and this one a former sheriff. You don’t think of being a politician as being such a hazardous profession; but it makes you fly. Pru drives to get her husband at the halfway house in North Philadelphia while Janice babysits. Soon after they arrive, Janice comes home to Penn Park. “I thought they should be alone with each other, the four of them,” she explains to Harry.
“How did he seem?”
She thoughtfully touches her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. “He seemed … serious. Very focused and calm. Not at all jittery like he was. I don’t know how much Pru told him about Toyota withdrawing the franchise and the hundred forty-five thousand you promised we’d pay so soon. I didn’t want to fling it at him right off the bat.”
“What did you say, then?”
“I said he looked wonderful - he looks a little heavy, actually - and told him you and I were very proud of him for sticking it out.”
“Huh. Did he ask about me? My health?”
“Not exactly, Harry - but he knows we’d have said something if anything more was wrong with you. He seemed mostly interested in the children. It was really very touching - he took them both off with him into the room where Mother used to have all the plants, what we called the sun parlor, and apologized for having been a bad father to them and explained about the drugs and how he had been to a place where they taught him how to never take drugs again.”
“Did he apologize to you for having been a bad son? To Pru for being a crappy husband?”
“I have no idea what he and Pru said to each other - they had hours in the car together, the traffic around Philadelphia is getting worse and worse, what with all the work on the Expressway. All the roads and bridges are falling apart at once.”
“He didn’t ask about me at all?”
“He did, of course he did, honey. You and I are supposed to go over there for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Oh. So I can admire the drugless wonder. Great.”
“You mustn’t talk like that. He needs all of our support. Returning to your milieu is the hardest part of recovery.”
“Milieu, huh? So that’s what we are.”
“That’s what they call it. He’s going to have to stay away from that druggy young people’s crowd that meets at the Laid-Back. So his immediate family must work very hard to fill in the gap.”
“Oh my God, don’t sound so fucking goody-goody,” he says. Resentment churns within him. He resents Nelson’s getting all this attention for being a prodigal son. He resents Janice’s learning new words and pushing outward into new fields, away from him. He resents the fact that the world is so full of debt and nobody has to pay - not Mexico or Brazil, not the sleazy S and L banks, not Nelson. Rabbit never had much use for old-fashioned ethics but their dissolution eats at him.
The night and the next day pass, in bed and at the lot. He tells Benny and Elvira that Nelson is back and he looked fat to his mother but didn’t announce any plans. Elvira has received a call from Rudy Krauss asking if she wanted to come over to Route 422 and sell for him. A Mr. Shimada spoke very highly of her. Also she hears that Jake is leaving the Volvo-Olds in Oriole and heading up a Lexus agency toward Pottstown. For now though she would rather hang loose here and see what Nelson has in mind. Benny’s been asking around at other agencies and isn’t too worried. “What happens happens, you know what I mean? As long as I got my health and my family - those are my priorities.” Harry has asked them not to tell anyone in Service yet about Mr. Shimada’s surprise attack. He feels increasingly detached; as he walks the plastic-tiled display floor, his head seems to float above it as dizzily high as his top-hatted head above the pitted, striped asphalt that day of the parade. He is growing. He drives home, catches the beginning of Brokaw on 10 (he may have a kind of hare lip, but at least he doesn’t say “aboot”) before Janice insists he get back in the Celica with her and drive across Brewer to Mt. Judge for the zillionth time in his life.
Nelson has shaved his mustache and taken off his earring. His face has a playground tan and he does look plump. His upper lip, exposed again, seems long and pufy and bulging outward, like Ma Springer’s used to. That’s who it turns out he resembles; she had a tight stuffed-skin sausage look that Harry can see now developing in Nelson. The boy moves with a certain old-lady stiffness, as if the rehab has squeezed the drugs and the jitters out of him but also his natural nervous quickness. For the first time, he seems to his father middle-aged, and his thinning hair and patches of exposed scalp part of him and not just a condition that will heal. He reminds Harry of a minister, a slightly sleek and portly representative of some no-name sect like that lamebrain who buried Thelma. A certain acquired formality extends to his clothes: though the evening is seasonably humid and warm, he wears a striped necktie with a white shirt, making Harry feel falsely youthful in his soft-collared polo shirt with the Flying Eagle emblem.
Nelson met his parents at the door and after embracing his mother attempted to do the same with his father, awkwardly wrappin
g both arms around the much taller man and pulling him down to rub scratchy cheeks. Harry was taken by surprise and not pleased: the embrace felt showy and queer and forced, the kind of thing these TV evangelists tell you to do to one another, before they run off screen and get their secretaries to lay them. He and Nelson have hardly touched since the boy’s age hit double digits. Some kind of reconciliation or amends was no doubt intended but to Harry it felt like a rite his son has learned elsewhere and that has nothing to do with being an Angstrom.
Pru in her turn seems bewildered by suddenly having a minister for a husband; when Harry bends down expecting the soft warn push of her lips on his, he gets instead her dry cheek, averted with a fearful quickness. He is hurt but can’t believe he has done anything wrong. Since their episode that wild and windy night, the silence from her side has indicated a wish to pretend it never happened, and with his silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn’t the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair - its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. He can’t bear to think of Nelson’s knowing, whereas Ronnie’s knowing he didn’t much mind. He even enjoyed it, like a sharp elbow given under the basket. Thelma and he had been two of a kind, each able to gauge the risks and benefits, able to construct together a stolen space in which they could feel free for an hour, free of everything but each other. Within your own generation - the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air - you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. So he doesn’t like to feel even this small alteration in Pru’s temperature, this coolness like a rebuke.
The children eat with them, Judy and Harry on one side of the Springers’ mahogany dining-room table, set as if for a holiday, Janice and Roy on the other, Pru and Nelson at the heads. Nelson offers grace; he makes them all hold hands and shut their eyes and after they’re ready to scream with embarrassment pronounces the words, “Peace. Health. Sanity. Love.”
“Amen,” says Pru, sounding scared.
Judy can’t stop staring up at Harry, to see what he makes of it. “Nice,” he tells his son. “That something you learned at the detox place?”
“Not detox, Dad, rehab.”
“Whatever it was, it was full of religion?”
“You got to admit you’re powerless and dependent on a higher power, that’s the first principle of AA and NA.”
“As I remember it, you didn’t use to go much for any higherpower stuff.”
“I didn’t, and still don’t, in the form that orthodox religion presents it in. All you have to believe in is a power greater than ourselves - God as we understand Him.”
Everything sounds so definite and pat, Harry has to fight the temptation to argue. “No, great,” he says. “Anything that gets you through the night, as Sinatra says.” Mim had quoted that to him once. In this Springer house tonight Harry feels a huge and regretful distance from Mim and Mom and Pop and all that sunken God-fearing Jackson Road Thirties-Forties world.
“You used to believe a lot of that stuff,” Nelson tells him.
“I did. I do,” Rabbit says, annoying the kid, he knows, with his amiability. But he has to add, “Hallelujah. When they stuck that catheter into my heart, I saw the light.”
Nelson announces, “They tell you at the center that there’ll be people who mock you for going straight, but they don’t say one of them will be your own father.”
“I’m not mocking anything. Jesus. Have all the peace and love and sanity you want. I’m all for it. We’re all all for it. Right, Roy?”
The little boy stares angrily at being suddenly singled out. His loose wet lower lip begins to tremble; he turns his face toward his mother’s side. Pru tells Harry, in a soft directed voice in which he does sense a certain mist of acknowledgment, of rain splashing at a screened window, “Roy’s been very upset, readjusting to Nelson’s coming back.”
“I know how he feels,” Harry says. “We’d all gotten used to his not being around.”
Nelson looks toward Janice in protest and appeal and she says, “Nelson, tell us about the counselling work you did,” in the fake tone of one who has already heard about it.
As Nelson speaks, he sits with a curious tranquillized stillness; Harry is used to the kid, from little on up, being full of nervous elusive twitches, that yet had something friendly and hopeful about them. “Mostly,” he says, “you just listen, and let them work it out through their own verbalization. You don’t have to say much, just show you’re willing to wait, and listen. The most hardened street kids eventually open up. Once in a while you have to remind them you’ve been there yourself, so their war stones don’t impress you. A lot have been dealers, and when they start bragging how much money they made all you have to do is ask, `Where is it now?’ They don’t have it,” Nelson tells the listening table, his own staring children. “They blew it.”
“Speaking of blowing it -” Harry begins.
Nelson overrides him with his steady-voiced sermon. “You try to get them to see themselves that they are addicts, that they weren’t outsmarting anybody. The realization has to come from them, from within, it’s not something they can accept imposed on them by you. Your job is to listen; it’s your silence, mostly, that leads them past their own internal traps. You start talking, they start resisting. It takes patience, and faith. Faith that the process will work. And it does. It invariably does. It’s thrilling to see it happen, again and again. People want to be helped. They know things are wrong.”
Harry still wants to speak but Janice intercedes by telling him, loudly for their audience at the table, “One of Nelson’s ideas about the lot is to make it a treatment center. Brewer doesn’t have anything like the facilities it needs to cope with the problem. The drug problem.”
“That’s the absolutely dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Harry says promptly. “Where’s the money in it? You’re dealing with people who have no money, they’ve blown it all for drugs.”
Nelson is goaded into sounding a bit more like his old self. He whines, “There’s grant money, Dad. Federal money. State. Even do-nothing Bush admits we got to do something.”
“You’ve got twenty employees you’ve fucked up over there at the lot, and most of’em have families. What happens to the mechanics in Service? What about your sales reps - poor little Elvira?”
“They can get other jobs. It’s not the end of the world. People don’t stick with jobs the way your scared generation did.”
“Yeah, scared - with your generation on the loose we got reason to be scared. How would you ever turn that cement-block shed over there into a hospital?”
“It wouldn’t be a hospital -“
“You’re already one hundred fifty thousand in the hole to Toyota Inc. and two weeks to pay it off in. Not to mention the seventy-five grand you owe Brewer Trust.”
“Those purchases in Slims name, the cars never left the lot, so there’s really no -“
“Not to mention the used you sold for cash you put in your own pocket.”
“Harry,” Janice says, gesturing toward their audience of listening children. “This isn’t the place.”
“There is no place where I can get a handle on what this lousy kid has done! Over two hundred thousand fucking shekels - where’s it going to come from?” Sparks of pain flicker beneath the muscles of his chest, he feels a dizziness in which the faces at the table float as in a sickening soup. Bad sensations have been worsening lately; it’s been over three months since that angioplasty opened his LAD. Dr. Breit warned that restenosis often sets in after three months.
Janice is saying, “But he’s learned so much, Harry. He’s so much wiser. It’s as if we sent him to graduate school with the money.”
“School, all this school! What’s so great about school all of
a sudden? School’s just another rip-off. All it teaches you is how to rip off dopes that haven’t been to school yet!”
“I don’t want to go back to school,” Judy pipes up. “Everybody there is stuck-up. Everybody says the fourth grade is hard.”
“I don’t mean your school, honey.” Rabbit can hardly breathe; his chest feels full of bits of Styrofoam that won’t dissolve. He must get himself unaggravated.
From the head of the table Nelson radiates calm and solidity. “Dad, I was an addict. I admit it,” he says. “I was doing crack, and a run of that gets to be expensive. You’re afraid to crash, and need a fresh hit every twenty minutes. If you go all night, you can run through thousands. But that money I stole didn’t all go to my habit. Lyle needed big money for some experimental stuff the FDA jerks are sitting on and has to be smuggled in from Europe and Mexico.”