Rabbit at rest (58 page)

"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 wrapping
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."