"How do you like the weather?" he asks.
"I love it, I love it; Palm Sunday is always blue. It makes the sap rise in my legs." She laughs and he follows; she stands rooted to the hot cement between the feathery shade of two young maples. She knows nothing, he becomes certain.
"Yes," he says, for her eyes have fixed on his arms. "I seem to be doing spring cleaning." He shrugs the bundle to clarify.
"Good," she says, with a surprising sarcastic snarl. "You young husbands, you certainly take the bit in your teeth." Then she twists, and exclaims, "Why, there's a clergyman in there!"
The gray car has come back, even more slowly, down the center of the street. With a dismay that makes the bundle of clothes double its weight in his arms, Rabbit realizes he is pinned. He lurches from the porch and strides past Miss Arndt saying, "I got to run," right on top of her considered remark, "It's not Reverend Kruppenbach."
No, of course not Kruppenbach; Rabbit knows who it is, though he doesn't know his name. The Episcopalian. The Springers were Episcopalians, more of the old phony's social climbing, they were originally Reformeds. Rabbit doesn't quite run. The downhill pavement jars his heels at every stride. He can't see the cement under the bundle he carries. If he can just make the alley. His one hope is the minister can't be sure it's him. He feels the gray car crawling behind him; he thinks of throwing the clothes away and really running. If he could get into the old ice plant. But it's a block away. He feels Ruth, the dishes done, waiting on the other side of the mountain.
As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it, the gray fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit's knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break. Behind his ear a childishly twanging voice pipes, "I beg your pardon. Are you Harry Angstrom?"
With a falling sensation of telling a lie Rabbit turns and halfwhispers, "Yes."
The fair young man with his throat manacled in white lets his car glide diagonally against the curb, yanks on the handbrake, and shuts off the motor, thus parking on the wrong side of the street, cockeyed. Funny how ministers ignore small laws. Rabbit remembers how Kruppenbach's son used to tear around town on a motorcycle. It seemed somehow blasphemous. "Well, I'm Jack Eccles," this minister says, and inconsequently laughs a syllable. The white stripe of an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips makes with the echoing collar a comic picture in the car window. He gets out of his car, a '58 Buick four—door Special, with those canted fins and that rocket—arc of chrome on the side, and offers his hand. To accept it Rabbit has to put his big ball of clothes down in the strip of grass between the pavement and curb.
Eccles' handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to symbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go. He feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation. He senses tenacity in his captor.
The minister is about his age or a little older and a good bit shorter. But not small; a sort of needless muscularity runs under his black coat. He stands edgily, with his chest faintly cupped. He has long reddish eyebrows that push a worried wrinkle around above the bridge of his nose, and a little pale pointed knob of a chin tucked under his mouth. Despite his looking vexed there is something friendly and silly about him.
"Where are you going?" he asks.
"Huh? Nowhere." Rabbit is distracted by the man's suit; it only feigns black. It is really blue, a sober but elegant, lightweight, midnight blue. While his little vest or bib or whatever is black as a stove. The effort of keeping the cigarette between his lips twists Eccles' laugh into a snort. He slaps the breasts of his coat. "Do you have a match by any chance?"
"Gee I'm sorry, no. I quit smoking."
"You're a better man than I am." He pauses and thinks, then looks at Harry with startled, arched eyebrows. The distention makes his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. "Can I give you a lift?"
"No. Hell. Don't bother."
"I'd like to talk to you."
"No; you don't really want to, do you?"
"I do, yes. Very much."
"Yeah. O.K." Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new—car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and it cools his fear. "This is about Janice?"
Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes. Sunday would be his heavy day.
"How is she? What did she do?"
"She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning." They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.
"I thought she'd be with them," Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn't bawling him out or something; he doesn't seem to know his job.
The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. "Evidently," he says, "when you didn't come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game."
"Where was old man Springer?"
"She didn't call them. She didn't call them until two o'clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope." "Poor thing" is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
Harry asks, "Not until two?" Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.
"Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me."
"Why you?"
"I don't know. People do." Eccles laughs. "They're supposed to; it's comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn't been to church in months." As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.
"This was around two in the morning?"
"Between two and three."
"Gee, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you out of bed."
The minister shakes his head irritably. "That's not a consideration"
"Well I feel terrible about this."
"Do you? That's hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?"
"I don't really have a plan. I'm sort of playing it by ear."
Eccles' laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is an expert on affairs like this – broken homes, fleeing husbands – and that "playing it by ear" has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered. Eccles has this knack.
"Your mother has an interesting viewpoint," the minister says. "She thinks it's all an illusion your wife and I have, that you've deserted. She says you're much too good a boy to do anything of the sort."
"You've been busy on this, haven't you?"
"This, and a death yesterday."
"Gee, I'm sorry."
They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley to the next ridge of hills. "Say, if you really want to give me a lift," Rabbit says, "you could drive over into Brewer."
"You don't want me to take you to your wife?"
"No. Good grief. I mean I don't think it would do any good, do you?"
For a long time it seems that the other man didn't hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, "Not if you don't want good to come of it."
The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday—school clothes. Little girls wear pastel organdy dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.
Eccles asks, "What did she do that made you leave?"