Rabbit, Run (23 page)

“My wife’s having her baby. I got to go see her through it I guess. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I love you.”

Still the body under the covers and the frizzy crescent of hair peeking over the top edge of the blanket don’t move. He is so sure she is not asleep he thinks,
I’ve killed her
. It’s ridiculous, such a thing wouldn’t kill her, it has nothing to do with death; but the thought paralyzes him from going forward to touch her and make her listen.

“Ruth. I got to go this once, it’s my baby she’s having and she’s such a mutt I don’t think she can do it by herself. Our first one came awfully hard. It’s the least I owe her.”

Perhaps this wasn’t the best way to say it but he’s trying to explain and her stillness frightens him and is beginning to make him sore.

“Ruth. Hey. If you don’t say anything I’m not coming back. Ruth.”

She lies there like some dead animal or somebody after a car accident when they put a tarpaulin over. He feels if he went over and lifted her she would come to life but he doesn’t like being manipulated and is angry. He puts on his shirt and doesn’t bother with a coat and necktie but it seems to take forever putting on his socks; the soles of his feet are tacky.

When the door closes the taste of seawater in her mouth is swallowed by the thick grief that mounts in her throat so fully she has to sit up to breathe. Tears slide from her blind eyes and salt the corners of her mouth as the empty walls of the room become real and then dense. It’s like when she was fourteen and the whole world trees sun and stars would have swung into place if she could lose twenty pounds just twenty pounds what difference would it make to God Who guided every flower in the fields into shape? Only now it’s not that she’s asking she knows now that’s superstitious all she wants is what she had a minute ago
him
in the room him who when he was good could make her into a flower who could undress her of her flesh and turn her into sweet air Sweet Ruth he called her and if he had just said “sweet” talking to her she might have answered and he’d still be between these walls. No. She had known from the first night the wife would win they have the hooks and anyway she feels really lousy: a wave of wanting to throw up comes over her and washes away caring much about anything. She goes into the john and kneels on the tiles and watches the still oval of water in the toilet as if
it’s
going to do something. She doesn’t think after all she has it in her to throw up but stays there anyway because it pleases her, her bare arm resting on the icy porcelain lip, and grows used to the threat in her stomach, which doesn’t dissolve, which stays with her, so in her faint state it comes to seem that this thing that’s making her sick is some kind of friend.

He runs most of the way to the hospital. Up Summer one block, then down Youngquist, a street parallel to Weiser on the north, a street of brick tenements and leftover business places, shoe-repair nooks smelling secretively of leather, darkened candy stores, insurance agencies with photographs of tornado damage in the windows, real-estate offices lettered in gold, a bookshop. On an old-fashioned wooden bridge Youngquist Street crosses the railroad tracks, which slide between walls of blackened stone soft with soot like moss through the center of the city, threads of metal deep below in a darkness like a river, taking narrow sunset tints of pink from the neon lights of the dives along Railway Street. Music rises to him. The heavy boards of the old bridge, waxed black with locomotive smoke, rumble under his feet. Being a small-town boy, he always has a fear of being knifed in a city slum. He runs harder; the pavement widens, parking meters begin, and a new drive-in bank faces the antique Y.M.C.A. He cuts up the alley between the Y. and a limestone church whose leaded windows show the reverse sides of Biblical scenes to the street. He can’t make out what the figures are doing. From a high window in the Y.M.C.A. fall the clicks of a billiard game; otherwise the building’s broad side is lifeless. Through the glass side door he sees an old Negro sweeping up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy seeds of some tree are under his feet. Its tropically narrow leaves are black spikes against the dark yellow sky. Imported from China or Brazil or somewhere because it can endure soot and fumes. The St. Joseph’s parking lot is a striped asphalt square whose sides are lined with such city trees; and above their tops, in this hard open space, he sees the moon, and for a second stops and communes with its mournful face, stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin.
Make it be all right
, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance.

He walks down a linoleum hall perfumed with ether to the front desk. “Angstrom,” he tells the nun behind the typewriter. “I think my wife is here.”

Her plump face is rimmed like a cupcake with scalloped linen. She surveys her cards and says “Yes” and smiles. Her little wire spectacles perch way out from her eyes on the pads of fat at the top of her cheeks. “You may wait over there.” She points with a pink ball-point pen. Her other hand rests, beside the typewriter, on a string of black beads the size of the necklace of beads carved in Java he once got Janice for Christmas. He stands there staring, expecting to hear her say,
She’s been here hours, where were you?
He can’t believe she’ll just accept him. As he stares, her nerveless white hand, that has never seen the sun, slides the black necklace off the desktop into her lap.

Two other men are already established in the waiting end of the room. This is the front entrance hall; people drift in and out. Rabbit sits down on an imitation leather chair with chrome arms and gets the idea he’s in a police court and these other two men are the cops who made the arrest. In his nervousness he plucks a magazine from the table. It’s a Catholic magazine the size of
The Reader’s Digest
. He tries to read a story about a lawyer in England who becomes so interested in how legally un
fair
it was for Henry VIII to confiscate the property of the monasteries that he becomes a Roman Catholic convert and eventually a monk. The two men whisper together; one maybe is the other’s father. The younger one keeps kneading his hands together and nodding to what the older man whispers.

Eccles comes in, blinking and looking scrawny in his collar. He greets the sister behind the desk by name, Sister Bernard. Rabbit stands up on ankles of air and Eccles comes over with that familiar frown in his eyebrows made harsh by the hospital light. His forehead is etched in purple. He’s had a haircut that day; as he turns his skull, the shaved planes above his ears shine like the blue throat feathers of a pigeon.

Rabbit asks, “Does she know I’m here?” He wouldn’t have predicted that he would whisper too. He hates the panicked sound of his voice.

“I’ll see that she’s told if she’s still conscious,” Eccles says in a loud voice that makes the whispering men look up. He goes over to Sister Bernard. The nun seems happy to chat, and both laugh, Eccles in the startled guffaw Rabbit knows well and Sister Bernard with a pure and girlish fat woman’s fluting that springs from her throat slightly retracted, curbed by the frame of stiff frills around her face. When Eccles moves away she lifts the phone by her skirted elbow.

Eccles comes back and looks him in the face, sighs, and offers him a cigarette. The effect is somehow of a wafer of repentance and Rabbit accepts. The first drag, after so many clean months, unhinges his muscles and he has to sit down. Eccles takes a hard chair nearby and makes no effort at conversation. Rabbit can’t think of much to say to him off the golf course and, shifting the smoking cigarette awkwardly to his left hand, pulls another magazine off the table, making sure it’s unreligious,
The Saturday Evening Post
. It opens to an article in which the author, who from the photograph looks Italian, tells how he took his wife and four children
and
mother-in-law on a three-week camping trip to the Canadian Rockies that only cost them $120 not counting the initial investment of a Piper Cub. His mind can’t keep with the words but keeps skidding up and branching away and flowering into little soft visions of Janice screaming, of the baby’s head blooming out of blood, of the wicked ridged blue light Janice must be looking into if she’s conscious,
if she’s conscious
Eccles said, of the surgeon’s red rubber hands and gauze face and Janice’s babyish black nostrils widening to take in the antiseptic smell he smells, the smell running everywhere along the whitewashed walls, of being washed, washed, blood washed, retching washed until every surface smells like the inside of a bucket but it will never come clean because we will always fill it up again with our filth. A damp warm cloth seems wrapped around his heart. He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die. His sin a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of the birth. Though his bowels twist with the will to dismiss this clot, to retract, to turn back and undo, he does not turn to the priest beside him, but instead reads the same sentence about delicious fried trout again and again.

On the extreme edge of his tree of fear Eccles perches, black bird, flipping the pages of magazines and making frowning faces to himself. He seems unreal to Rabbit, everything seems unreal that is outside of his sensations. His palms tingle; a strange impression of pressure darts over his body, seizing now his legs, now the base of his neck. His armpits itch the way they used to when he was little and late for school, running up Jackson Road.

“Where’s her parents?” he asks Eccles.

Eccles looks surprised. “I don’t know. I’ll ask the sister.” He moves to get up.

“No no, sit still for Chrissake.” Eccles’ acting like he half-owns the place annoys him. Harry wants to be unnoticed; Eccles makes noise. He rattles the magazine so it sounds like he’s tearing orange crates apart. And flips cigarettes around like a juggler.

A woman in white, not a man, comes into the waiting-room and asks Sister Bernard, “Did I leave a can of furniture polish in here? I can’t find it anywhere. A green can, with one of those pushy things on top that makes it spritz.”

“No, dear.”

She looks for it and goes out and after a minute comes back and announces, “Well that’s the mystery of the world.”

To the distant music of pans, wagons, and doors, one day turns through midnight into another. Sister Bernard is relieved by another nun, a very old one, dressed in dark blue, signifying some mysterious inferiority of holiness. The two whispering men go to the desk, talk, and leave, their crisis unresolved. Eccles and he are left alone. Rabbit strains his ears to catch the cry of his child somewhere deep in the hushed hospital maze. Often he thinks he hears it; the scrape of a shoe, a dog in the street, a nurse giggling—any of these are enough to fool him. He does not expect the fruit of Janice’s pain to make a very human noise. His idea grows, that it will be a monster, a monster of his making. The thrust whereby it was conceived becomes confused in his mind with the perverted entry a few hours ago he made into Ruth. Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it had driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.
There is no God; Janice can die:
the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

Mary Ann. Tired and stiff and tough somehow after a game he would find her hanging on the front steps under the school motto and they would walk across mulching wet leaves through white November fog to his father’s car and drive to get the heater warmed and park. Her body a branched tree of warm nests yet always this touch of timidity, As if she wasn’t sure but he was much bigger, a winner. He came to her as a winner and that was the feeling he missed since. In the same way she was the best of them all because she was the one he brought most to, so tired. Some times the shouting glare of the gym would darken behind his sweat-burned eyes into a shadowed anticipation of the careful touchings that would come under the padded gray car roof and once there the bright triumph of the past game flashed across her quiet skin streaked with the shadows of rain on the windshield. So that the two kinds of triumph were united in his mind. She married when he was in the Army; a P.S. in a letter from his mother shoved him out from shore. That day he was launched.

But he feels joy now; cramped from sitting on the eroded chrome-armed chair sick with cigarettes he feels joy in remembering his girl; the water of his heart has been poured into a thin vase of joy that Eccles’ voice jars and breaks.

“Well I’ve read this article by Jackie Jensen all the way to the end and I don’t know what he said,” Eccles says.

“Huh?”

“This piece by Jackie Jensen on why he wants to quit baseball. As far as I can tell the problems of being a baseball player are the same as those of the ministry.”

“Say, don’t you want to go home? What time is it?”

“Around two. I’d like to stay, if I may.”

“I won’t run off if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

Eccles laughs and keeps sitting there. Harry’s first impression of him had been tenacity and now all the intervening companionship has been erased and it’s gone back to that.

Harry tells him, “When she had Nelson the poor kid was at it for twelve hours.”

Eccles says, “The second child is usually easier,” and looks at his watch. “It hasn’t quite been six hours.”

Events create events. Mrs. Springer passes through from the privileged room where she has been waiting and stiffly nods at Eccles; seeing Harry in the corner of her eye makes her stumble on her sore legs and tumbledown saddle shoes. Eccles gets up and goes with her through the door to the outside. After a while the two of them come back in along with Mr. Springer, who wears a tiny-knotted necktie and a spandy-fresh shirt. At two a.m. he looks like he just came from the tailor’s. His little sandy mustache has been trimmed so often his upper lip has turned gray under it. He says, “Hello, Harry.”

This acknowledgment from her husband, despite some talking-to they’ve probably had from Eccles, goads the old lady into turning on Harry and telling him, “If you’re sitting there like a buzzard young man hoping she’s going to die, you might as well go back to where you’ve been living because she’s doing fine without you and has been all along.”

The two men hustle her away while the old nun peers with a smile across her desk, deaf? Mrs. Springer’s attack, though it ached to hurt him, is the first thing anybody has said to Harry since this began that seems to fit the enormity of the event going on somewhere behind the screen of hospital soap-smell. Until her words he felt alone on a dead planet encircling the great gaseous sun of Janice’s labor; her cry, though a cry of hate, pierced his solitude. The dreadful thought of Janice’s death: hearing it voiced aloud had halved its weight. The strange scent of death Janice breathed: Mrs. Springer also smelled it, and this sharing seems the most precious connection he has with anybody in the world.

Mr. Springer returns and passes through to the outside, bestowing upon his son-in-law a painfully complex smile, compounded of a wish to apologize for his wife (we’re both men; I know), a wish to keep distant (nevertheless you’ve behaved unforgivably; don’t touch me), and the car salesman’s mechanical reflex of politeness. Harry thinks,
You crumb;
hurls the thought at the slammed door.
You slave
. Where is everybody going? Where are they coming from? Eccles comes back and feeds him another cigarette and goes away again. Smoking it makes the floor of his stomach tremble. His throat feels like it does when you wake up after sleeping all night with your mouth open. His own bad breath now and then brushes his nostrils. A doctor with a barrel chest and unimaginably soft small hands, held curled in front of the pouch of his smock, comes into the anteroom uncertainly. He asks Harry, “Mr. Angstrom?” This would be Dr. Crowe. Harry has never met him. Janice used to go off and visit him once a month, bringing home tales of how gentle be was, how delicate.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations. You have a beautiful little daughter.”

He offers his hand so hastily Harry has only time to half-rise, and so absorbs the news in a crouching position. The scrubbed pink of the doctor’s face—his sterile mask is unknotted and hangs from one ear, exposing pallid beefy lips—becomes enmeshed in the process of trying to give shape and tint to the unexpected word “daughter.”

“I do? It’s O.K.?”

“Seven pounds ten ounces. Your wife was conscious throughout and held the baby for a minute after delivery.”

“Really? She held it? Was it—did she have a hard time?”

“No-o. It was normal. In the beginning she seemed tense, but it was normal.”

“That’s wonderful. Thank you. Good grief, thank you.”

Crowe stands there smiling uneasily. Coming up from the pit of creation, he stammers in the open air. Strange: here he has been for the last hours closer to Janice than Harry ever was, has been grubbing right in her roots, yet he has brought back no secret, no wisdom to confide; just a bland sterile blessing. Harry dreads that the doctor’s eyes will release with thunder the horror they have seen; but Crowe’s gaze contains no wrath. Not even a reprimand. He seems to see Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to reap.

Harry asks, “Can I see her?”

“Who?”

Who? That “her” is a forked word now startles him. The world is thickening. “My my wife.”

“Of course, surely.” Crowe seems in his soft way puzzled that Harry asks for permission. He must know the facts, yet seems oblivious of the gap of guilt between Harry and humanity. “I thought you might mean the baby. I’d rather you waited until visiting hours tomorrow for that; there’s not a nurse to show her right now. But your wife is conscious, as I say. We’ve given her some Equanil. That’s just a tranquillizer. Meprobamate. Tell me”—he moves closer gently, pink skin and clean cloth—“is it all right if her mother sees her for a moment? She’s been on our necks all night.” He’s asking
him
, him, the runner, the fornicator, the monster. He must be blind. Or maybe just being a father makes everyone forgive you.

“Sure. She can go in.”

“Before or after you?”

Harry hesitates, and remembers the way Mrs. Springer came and visited him on his empty planet. “She can go in before.”

“Thank you. Good. Then she can go home. Well get her out in a minute. It’ll be about ten minutes all told. Your wife is being prepared by the nurses.”

“Swell” He sits down to show how docile he is and rises again. “Say, thanks by the way. Thank you very much. I don’t see how you doctors do it.”

Crowe shrugs. “She was a good girl.”

“When we had the other kid I was scared silly. It took ages.”

“Where did she have it?”

“At the other hospital. Homeopathic.”

“Nn-
huh
.” And the doctor, who had gone into the pit and brought back no thunder, emits a spark of spite at the thought of the rival hospital, and utters his grunt of disapproval with a sharp wag of his scrubbed head and, still wagging it, walks away.

Eccles comes into the room grinning like a schoolboy and Rabbit can’t keep his attention on his silly face. He suggests thanksgiving and Rabbit bows his head blankly into his friend’s silence. Each heartbeat seems to flatten against a wide white wall. When he looks up, objects seem infinitely solid and somehow tip, seem so full they are about to leap. His real happiness is a ladder from whose top rung he keeps trying to jump still higher, because he knows he should.

Crowe’s phrase about nurses “preparing” Janice has a weird May Queen sound. When they lead him to her room he expects to find her with ribbons in her hair and paper flowers twined into the bedposts. But it’s just old Janice, lying between two smooth sheets on a high metal bed. She turns her face and says, “Well look who it isn’t.”

“Hey,” he says, and goes over to kiss her; he intends it so gently. Her mouth swims in the sweet stink of ether. To his surprise her arms come out from the sheets and she puts them around his head and presses his face down into her soft happy swimming mouth. “Hey take it easy,” he says.

“I have no legs,” she says, “it’s the funniest feeling.” Her hair is drawn against her skull in a sanitary knot and she has no makeup. Her small skull is dark against the pillow.

“No legs?” He looks down and there they are under the sheets, stretched out flat in a motionless V.

“They gave me a spinal or whatever at the end and I didn’t feel anything. I was lying there hearing them say push and the next thing here’s this teeny flubbly
baby
with this big moon face looking cross at me. I told Mother it looks like you and she didn’t want to hear it.”

“She gave me hell out there.”

“I wish they hadn’t let her in. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to see
you
.”

“Did you, God. Why, baby? After I’ve been so crummy.” “No you haven’t. They told me you were here and all the while I was thinking then it was your baby and it was like I was having
you
. I’m so full of ether it’s just like I’m floating; without any legs. I could just talk and talk.” She puts her hands on her stomach and closes her eyes and smiles. “I’m really quite drunk. See, I’m flat.”

“Now you can wear your bathing suit,” he says, smiling and entering the drift of her ether-talk, feeling himself as if he has no legs and is floating on his back on a great sea of cleanness light as a bubble amid the starched sheets and germless surfaces before dawn. Fear and regret are dissolved, and gratitude is blown so large it has no cutting edge. “The doctor said you were a good girl.”

“Well isn’t that silly; I wasn’t. I was horrible. I cried and screamed and told him to keep his hands to himself. Though the thing I minded worst was when this horrible old nun shaved me with a dry razor.”

“Poor Janice.”

“No it was wonderful. I tried to count her toes but I was so dizzy I couldn’t so I counted her eyes. Two. Did we want a girl? Say we did.”

“I did.” He discovers this is true, though the words discover the desire.

“Now I’ll have somebody to side with me against you and Nelson.”

“How is Nelson?”

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.

“Oh, damn,” he says, and his own tears, that it seemed didn’t exist, sting the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe it was me. I don’t know why I left.”

“Vnnn.” She sinks deeper into the pillow as a lush grin spreads her cheeks apart. “I had a little baby.”

“It’s terrific.”

“You’re lovely. You look so tall.” She says this with her eyes shut, and when she opens them, they brim with an inebriated idea; he has never seen them sparkle so. She whispers, “Harry. The girl in the other bed in here went home today so why don’t you sneak around when you go and come in the window and we can lie awake all night and tell each other stories? Just like you’ve come back from the Army or somewhere. Did you make love to other women?”