"All right then."
They take a bus down.
Tuesday afternoon, overcast, he takes a bus to Mt. judge. Eccles' address is at the north end of town; he rides past his own neighborhood in safety, gets off at Spruce, and walks along singing in a high voice to himself the phrase, "Oh I'm just wild about Harry" – not the beginning of the song, but the place at the end where the girl, repeating, goes way up on "I'm."
He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous s checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it at the end of February. They have gone bowling once and have seen four movies – Gigi; Bell, Book and Candle; The Inn of the Sixth Happiness; and The Shaggy Dog. He saw so many snippets from The Shaggy Dog on the Mickey Mouse Club that he was curious to see the whole thing. It was like looking through a photograph album with about half familiar faces. The scene where the rocket goes through the roof and Fred MacMurray runs out with the coffee pot he knew as well as his own face.
Ruth was funny. Her bowling was awful; she just sort of paddled up to the line and dropped the ball. Plok. Every time, in Gígi, the stereophonic—sound loudspeaker behind them in the theater would blare out she turned around and said "Shh" as if it were somebody in the theater talking too loud. In The Inn of the Sixth Happiness every time Ingrid Bergman's face appeared on the screen she leaned over to Rabbit and asked him in a whisper, "Is she really a hooer?" He was upset by Robert Donat; he looked awful. He knew he was dying. Imagine knowing you're dying and going ahead pretending you're a mandarin. Ruth's comment about Bell, Book and Candle last night was, "Why don't you ever see any bongo drums around here?" He vowed secretly to get her some. A half—hour ago, waiting for the bus on Weiser Street, he priced a set in the window of the Chords 'n' Records music store. $19.95. All the way out on the bus he was beating bongo patterns on his knees.
"For I'm just wild about Harrr—ree—"
Number 61 is a big brick place with white wood trim, a little porch imitating a Greek temple, and a slate roof that shines like the scales of a big fish. Out back a wire fence encloses a yellow swing frame and a sandbox. A puppy yaps in this pen as Harry goes up the walk. The grass wears that intense greasy green that promises rain, the color of grass in color snapshots. The place looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in gloomy Lutheran houses. But a small plate above the fish—shaped door—knocker says in engraved script The Rectory. He bangs the fish twice and, after waiting, twice again.
A crisp little number with speckled green eyes opens the door. "What is it?" Her voice as good as says, "How dare you?" As she adjusts her face to his height her eyes enlarge, displaying more of the vividly clear whites to which her bright irises are buttoned.
At once, absurdly, he feels in control of her, feels she likes him. Freckles dot her little bumpy nose, kind of a pinched nose, narrow and pale under the dots of tan. Her skin is fair, and fine—grained as a child's. She is wearing orange shorts. With a pleasantness that amounts to arrogance he says, "Hi."
"Hello."
"Say, is Reverend Eccles in?"
"He's asleep."
"In the middle of the day?"
"He was up much of the night."
"Oh gosh. The poor guy."
"Do you want to come in?"
"Well gee, I don't know. He told me to be here. He really did."
"He might well have. Please come in."
She leads him past a hall and staircase into a cool room with a high ceiling and silver wallpaper, a piano, watercolors of scenery, a lot of sets of books in a recessed bookcase, a fireplace whose mantel supports one of those clocks with a pendulum of four gold balls that are supposed to run practically for ever. Photographs in frames all around. Furniture heavy brown and red except for a long sofa with a scrolling back and arms whose cushions are cream white. The room smells coldly kept. From far off comes the warmer odor of cake baking. She stops in the center of the rug and says, "Listen."
He stops. The faint bump that he also heard is not repeated. She explains, "I thought that brat was asleep."
"Are you the babysitter?"
"I'm the wife," she says, and sits down in the center of the white sofa, to prove it.
He takes a padded wing chair opposite. The plum fabric feels softly gritty against his naked forearms. He is wearing a checked sports shirt, with the sleeves turned back to his elbows. "Oh, I'm sorry." Of course. Her bare legs, crossed, show the blue dabs of varicose veins. Her face, when she sits, is not as young as at the door. Double chin when she relaxes, head tucked back. Smug little cookie. Firm little knockers. He asks, "How old is your child?"
"Two children. Two girls, one and three."
"I have a boy who's two."
"I'd like a boy," she says. "The girls and I have personality problems; we're too much alike. We know exactly what the other's thinking."
Dislikes her own children! Rabbit is shocked, this from a minister's wife. "Does your husband notice this?"
"Oh, it's wonderful for Jack. He loves to have women fighting over him. It's his little harem. I think a boy would threaten him. Do you feel threatened?"
"Not by the kid, no. He's only two."
"It starts earlier than two, believe me. Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth."
"I hadn't noticed."
"Good for you. I expect you're a primitive father. I think Freud is like God; you make it true."
Rabbit smiles, supposing that Freud has some connection with the silver wallpaper and the watercolor of a palace and a canal above her head. Class. She brings her fingertips to her temples, pushes her head back, shuts her lids, and through plump open lips sighs. He is struck; she seems at this moment a fine—grained Ruth. There is a world of women beyond Janice.
Eccles' thin voice, oddly amplified in his home, cries down the stairs, "Lucy! Joyce is getting into bed with me!"
Lucy opens her eyes and says to Rabbit proudly, "See?"
"She says you told her it's all right," the voice whines on, piercing banisters, walls, and layers of wallpaper.
Mrs. Eccles gets up and goes to the archway. The seat of her orange shorts is wrinkled from sitting; the hitched—up legs expose most of the oval backs of her thighs. Whiter than the sofa. The blush of pink from the pressure of sitting fades from her skin. "I told her no such thing!" she calls upward while an aware hand tugs the shorts down and smooths the cloth around her mussed rump. A pocket is stitched with black thread to the right half. "Jack," she goes on, "you have a visitor! A very tall young man who says you invited him!"
At the mention of himself Rabbit has risen, and right behind her he says, "To play golf."
"To play golf!" she echoes in a yell.
"Oh, dear," the voice upstairs says to itself, then shouts, "Hello, Harry! I'll be right down."
A child up there is crying, "Mommy did too! Mommy did too!"
Rabbit shouts in answer, "Hello!"
Mrs. Eccles turns her head with an inviting twist. "Harry —?"
"Angstrom."
"What do you do, Mr. Angstrom?"
"Well. I'm kind of out of work."
"Angstrom. Of course. Aren't you the one who disappeared? The Springers' son—in—law?"
"Right," he replies smartly and, in a mindless follow—through, an overflow of coordination, she having on the drop of his answer turned with prim dismissal away from him again, slaps! her sassy ass. Not hard: a cupping hit, rebuke and fond pat both, well=placed on the pocket.
She swiftly pivots, swinging her backside to safety behind her. Her freckles dart sharp as pinpricks from her shocked face. Her leaping blood bleaches her skin, and her rigidly cold stare is so incongruous with the lazy condescending warmth he feels toward her, that he pushes his upper lip over his lower in a burlesque expression of penitence.