"What makes her so good?" He hopes Mrs. Eccles hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.
Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hanging there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a laborious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John's Episcopal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of things; stuck into the frame is a yellowed photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper's head: the glass this print is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibilities, "the one who disappeared." Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth – what a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She'd have an anxious little edge and want her own. A cookie. A sharp little vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.
There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles' voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit's ears were around the corner, "Don't think this is pleasure for me. It's work."
"There's no other way to talk to him?"
"He's frightened."
"Sweetie, everybody's frightened to you."
"But he's even frightened of me."
"Well he came through that door cocky enough."
This was the place for, And he slapped my sweet ass, that's yours to defend.
What! Your sweet ass! I'll murder the rogue. I'll call the police.
In reality Lucy's voice stopped at "enough," and Eccles is talking about if so—and—so telephoned, where are those new golfballs?, Joyce you had a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, "Goodbye, my dears." Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl – awkward, cross – pops out of the kitchen.
They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the skin of the Buick has a greasy waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest, "So your trouble isn't really lack of religion."
"Huh?"
"I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree."
"Yeah well: I stole that from Mickey Mouse."
Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. "It stopped me short," he admits, closing this flirtatious cave. "Then you said you know what's inside you. I've been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?"
Rabbit doesn't want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He's safe inside his own skin, he doesn't want to come out. This guy's whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit's lips. "Hell, it's nothing much," he says. "It's just that, well, it's all there is. Don't you think?"
Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. In his way he's very sure of himself.
"How's Janice now?" Rabbit asks.
Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. "I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs. – Foster? Fogleman?"
"What did she look like?"
"I don't really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces."
"Oh, Peggy Gring. She's walleyed. She was in Janice's highschool class and married that jerk Ollie Fosnacht."
"Fosnacht. That's right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something local about the name."
"You'd never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?"
"Never. Not in Norwalk."
"The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn't be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then." Rabbit hasn't thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.
"What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?"
"I forget. It was just something you didn't want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn't like it and I guess I cried, I don't know. Anyway that's why the old man stayed up."
"He was your father's father?"
"My mother's. He lived with us."
"I remember my father's father," Eccles says. "He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo—Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to."
"About the lion?"
"Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can't appreciate. He mocks children, which she can't forgive. It's her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered—down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious practice a certain color and a, a rigor that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was extremely remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn't want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living room? `You don't think God is in the forest?' my grandfather would say. Just behind stained glass?' And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy into a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. A little dried—up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, `Has he made you believe in Hell?' "
Harry laughs; Eccles' imitation is good; being an old man fits him. "Did he? Do you?"
"Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God."
"Well then we're all more or less in it."
"I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call" – he looks at Harry and laughs – "inner darkness."
Eccles' volunteering all this melts Rabbit's caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and jiggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, "Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this" – he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half—wood half—brick one—and—a—half—stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three—year—old trees, the un—grandest landscape in the world – "there's something that wants me to find it."
Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny crossnotched cup in the car ashtray. "Of course, all vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first."
Rabbit doesn't see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserved this slap. He supposes this is what ministers need, to cut everybody down to the same miserable size. He says, "Well I guess that makes your friend Jesus look pretty foolish."
Mention of the holy name incites pink spots high on Eccles' cheeks. "He did say," the minister says, "that saints shouldn't marry."
They turn off the road and go up the winding drive to the clubhouse, a big cinder—block building fronted with a long sign that has CHESTNUT GROVE GOLF COURSE lettered between two Coca-Cola insignia. When Harry caddied here it was just a clapboard shack holding a wood—burning stove and charts of old tournaments and two armchairs and a counter for candy bars and golf balls you fished out of the swamp and that Mrs. Wenrich resold. He supposes Mrs. Wenrich is dead. She was a delicate old rouged widow like a doll with white hair and it always seemed funny to hear talk about greens and divots and tourneys and par come out of her mouth. Eccles parks the long Buick on the asphalt lot and says, "Before I forget."
Rabbit's hand is on the door handle. "What?"
"Do you want a job?"
"What kind?"
"A parishioner of mine, a Mrs. Horace Smith, has about eight acres of garden around her home, toward Appleboro. Her husband was an incredible rhododendron enthusiast. I shouldn't say incredible; he was a terribly dear old man."
"I don't know beans about gardening."
"Nobody does, that's what Mrs. Smith says. There are no gardeners left. For forty dollars a week, I believe her."