"So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?"
"Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school."
"Our son was killed."
"Gee. I'm sorry."
"Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off."
"Still -"
"I know. You think of only young men being killed."
"Yeah, you do."
"It was a good war. It wasn't like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things, but that one was satisfying to win." She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. "The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn't in flower that late in the summer so it looked just like foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a" —she realizes she is repeating herself, falters, but goes on – "like a prince of the realm." In her almost transparent blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing, she snaps roughly, "It's the only one."
"The only Bianchi?"
"Yes! Right! There's not another in the United States. There's not another good pink from the Golden Gate to – wherever. The Brooklyn Bridge, I suppose they say. All the truly good pink in the nation is right here under our eyes. A florist from Lancaster took some cuttings but they died. Probably smothered them in lime. Stupid man. A Greek."
She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide ofblossom, and a furtively bitter odor breathes from the fresh walls of green. Maples, poplars, oaks, elms, and horsechestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property—line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in pale neat lines, along the edge of the grass paths. "1° don't like it, I don't like it," Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down past the overblown blooms. "I appreciate the beauty but I'd rather see alfalfa. A woman – I don't know why it should vex me so – Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down the hill in a little brick shack with a metal cat climbing up the shutters, used to invariably say, turn to me with lipstick halfway up to her nose and say" – she mimics a too—sweet voice with a spirited spite that shakes her frame – " `My, Mrs. Smith, this must be what Heaven is like!' One year I said to her, I couldn't hold my tongue any longer, I said, `Well if I'm driving six miles back and forth to St. John's Episcopal Church every Sunday just to get into another splash of rhodies, I might as well save the mileage because I don't want to go.' Now wasn't that a dreadful thing for an old sinner to say?"
"Oh, I don't know -"
"To this poor woman who was only trying to be civil? Hadn't a bean of a brain in her head, of course; painting her face like a young fool. She's passed on now, poor soul; Alma Foster passed on two or three winters back. Now she knows the truth and I don't."
"Well, maybe what looks like rhododendrons to her will look like alfalfa to you."
"Heh! Eh—HA! Exactly! Exactly! You know, Mr. Angstrom, it's such a pleasure =" She stops them in the walk and caresses his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling girlish flirtatiousness and the watery wander, there glitters an old acuteness, so that Rabbit uneasily standing there feels a stab of the penetrating force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. "You and I, we think alike. Don't we? Now don't we?"
"You have it pretty good, don't you?" Ruth asks him. They have gone on the afternoon of this Memorial Day to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. She was self—conscious about getting into a bathing suit but in fact when she came out of the bath—house she looked great, her head made small by the bathing cap and her shoulders round and wide. Standing in the water she was cut off at the thighs like a broken statue. She swam easily, her big legs kicking slowly and her clean arms lifting and her back and bottom shimmering black under the jiggled green. Once she stopped and floated, putting her face down in the water in a motion that quickened his heart with its slight danger. Her bottom of its own buoyance floated up and broke the surface, a round black island glistening there, a clear image suddenly in the water wavering like a blooey television set: the solid sight swelled his heart with pride, made him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she was his, he knew her as well as the water, like the water has been everywhere on her body. When she did the backstroke the water bubbled and broke and poured down her front into her breastcups, flooding her breasts with touch; the arch of her submerged body tightened; she closed her eyes and moved blindly. Two skinny boys dabbling at the shallow end of the pool splashed away from her headfirst approach. She brushed one with a backsweep of her arm, awoke, and squatted smiling in the water; her arms waved bonelessly to keep her balance in the nervous tides of the crowded pool. The air sparkled with the scent of chlorine. Clean, clean: it came to him what clean was. It was nothing touching you that is not your element. Ruth in water, him in grass and air. He is not a water animal. Wet is cold to him. Having dunked, he prefers to sit on the tile edge dipping his feet and imagining that high—school girls behind him are admiring the muscle—play of his broad back; he revolves his shoulders and feels the blades stretch his skin in the sun. Ruth wades to the end, through water so shallow the checked pattern of the pool floor is refracted to its surface. She climbs the little ladder, shedding water in great palegreen grape—bunches. He scrambles back to their blanket and lies down so that when she comes over he sees her standing above him straddling the sky, the black hair high on the insides of her thighs pasted into swirls by the water. She tears off her cap and shakes out her hair and bends over for the towel. Water on her back drips over her shoulders. As he watches her rub her arms the smell of grass rises through the blanket and shouts shake the crystalline air. She lies down beside him and closes her eyes and submits to the sun. Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good."
"How so?"
"Oh" – her words seem slightly delayed in passage from her lips; he sees them move, and then hears – "look at all you've got. You've got Eccles to play golf with every week and to keep your wife from doing anything to you. You've got your flowers, and you've got Mrs. Smith in love with you. You've got me."
"You think she really is in love with me? Mrs. Smith."
"All I know is what I get from you. You say she is."
"No, I never actually said that. Did I?"
She doesn't bother to answer him out of her huge face, magnified by his drowsy contentment.
He repeats, "Did I?" and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn't meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. The sullen way it yielded.
"Ow. You son of a bitch."
Still she lies there, paying more attention to the sun than him. He gets up on an elbow and looks across her dead body to the lighter figures of two sixteen—year—olds standing sipping orange crush from cardboard cones. The one in a white strapless peeks up at him from sucking her straw with a brown glance, her skinny legs dark as a Negro's. Her hipbones make gaunt peaks on either side of her flat belly.
"Oh all the world loves you," Ruth says suddenly. "What I wonder is why?"
"I'm lovable," he says.
"I mean why the hell you. What's so special about you?"
"I'm a saint," he says. "I give people faith." Eccles has told him this. Once, with a laugh, probably meaning it sarcastically. You never knew what Eccles was really meaning; you had to take what you wanted to. Rabbit took this to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn't think that much about what he gives other people.
"You give me a pain," she says.
"Well I'll be damned." The injustice: after he was so proud of her in the pool, loved her so much.
"What in hell makes you think you don't have to pull your own weight?"
"What's your kick? I support you."
"The hell you do. I have a job." It's true. A little after he went to work for Mrs. Smith she got a job as a stenographer with an insurance company that has a branch in Brewer. He wanted her to; he was nervous about how she'd spend her afternoons with him away. She said she never enjoyed turning tricks; he wasn't so sure. She wasn't exactly suffering when he met her.
"Quit it," he says. "I don't care. Sit around all day reading mysteries. I'll support ja."
"You'll support me. If you're so big why don't you support your wife?"
"Why should I? Her father's rolling in it."
"You're so smug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" She looks at him now, squarely with eyes bloodshot from being in the water. She shades them with her hand. These aren't the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale discs like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instincts, disturbs him.
These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to keep down the tears, thinking, That's one of the signs, crying easily. God, at work she has to get up from the typewriter and rush into the john like she had the runs and sob, sob, sob. Standing there in a booth looking down at a toilet laughing at herself and sobbing till her chest hurts. And sleepy. God, after coming back from lunch it's all she can do to keep from stretching out in the aisle right there on the linoleum floor between Lilly Orff and Rita Fiorvante where slimy—eyed old Honig would have to step over her. And hungry. For lunch an ice—cream soda with the sandwich and then a doughnut with the coffee and still she has to buy a candy bar at the cash register. After she's been trying to slim down for him and had lost six pounds, at least one scale said. For him, that was what was rich, changing herself in one direction for him when in his stupidity he was changing her in just the other. He was a menace, for all his mildness. Still he did have the mildness and was the first man she ever met who did. You felt at least you were there for him instead of being something pasted on the inside of their dirty heads. God she used to hate them with their wet mouths and little laughs but when she had it with Harry she kind of forgave them all, it was only half their fault, they were a kind of wall she kept battering against because she knew there was something there and all of a sudden with Harry there it was and it made everything that had gone before seem pretty unreal. After all nobody had ever really hurt her, left her scarred or anything, and when she tries to remember it it sometimes seems it happened to somebody else. They seemed sort of vague, as if she had kept her eyes shut, vague and pathetic and eager, wanting some business their wives wouldn't give, a few dirty words or a whimper or that business with the mouth. That. What do they see in it? It can't be as deep, she doesn't know. After all it's no worse than them at your bees and why not be generous, the first time it was Harrison and she was drunk as a monkey anyway but when she woke up the next morning wondered what the taste in her mouth was. But that was just being a superstitious kid there isn't much taste to it a little like seawater, just harder work than they probably think, women are always working harder than they think. The thing was, they wanted to be admired there. They really did want that. They weren't that ugly but they thought they were. That was the thing that surprised her in high school how ashamed they were really, how grateful they were if you just touched them there and how quick word got around that you would. What did they think, they were monsters? If they'd just thought, they might have known you were curious too, that you could like that strangeness there like they liked yours, no worse than women in their way, all red wrinkles, my God, what was it in the end? No mystery. That was the great thing she discovered, that it was no mystery, just a stuckon—looking bit that made them king and if you went along with it could be good or not so good and anyway put you with them against those others, those little snips running around her at hockey in gym like a cow in that blue uniform like a baby suit, she wouldn't wear it in the twelfth grade and took the demerits. God she hated some of those girls with their contractors and druggists for fathers. But she got it back at night, taking what they didn't know existed like a queen. Boy, there wasn't any fancy business then, you didn't even need to take off your clothes, just a little rubbing through the cloth, your mouths tasting of the onion on the hamburgers you'd just had at the diner and the car heater ticking as it cooled, through all the cloth, everything, off they'd go. They couldn't have felt much it must have been just the idea of you. All their ideas. Sometimes just French kissing not that she ever really got with that, sloppy tongues and nobody can breathe, but all of a sudden you knew from the way their lips went hard and opened and then eased shut and away that it was over. That there was no more push for you and you better back off if you wanted to keep your dress dry. They wrote her name on the lavatory walls; she became a song in the school. Allie told her about that, kindly. But she had some sweet things with Allie; once after school with the sun still up they drove along a country road and up an old lane and stopped in a leafy place where they could see Mt. Judge, the town against the mountain, both dim in the distance, and he put his head in her lap, her sweater rolled up and her bra undone, and it was like a baby gently, her bees (who called them her bees? not Allie) firmer and rounder then, more sensitive; his waiting wet mouth so happy and blind and the birds making their warm noises overhead in the sunshine. Allie blabbed. He had to blab. She forgave him but it made her wiser. She began the older ones; the mistake if there was one but why not? Why not? was the question and still held; wondering if there was a mistake makes her tired just thinking, lying wet from swimming and seeing red through her eyelids, trying to move back through all that red wondering if she was wrong. She was wise. With them, being young did for being pretty, and them being older it wasn't such a rush. Boy some bastards you think never, like their little contribution's the greatest thing the world's ever going to see if it ever gets here.
But this one. What a nut. She wonders what he has. He's beautiful for a man, soft and uncircumcised lying sideways in his fleece and then like an angel's horn, he fits her tight but it must be more than that, and it isn't just him being so boyish and bringing her bongo drums and saying sweet grateful things because he has a funny power over her too; when they're good together she feels like next to nothing with him and that must be it, that must be what she was looking for. To feel like next to nothing with a man. Boy that first night when he said that so sort of proudly "Hey" she didn't mind so much going under in fact it felt like she should. She forgave them all then, his face all their faces gathered into a scared blur and it felt like she was falling under to something better than she was. But then after all it turns out he's not so different, hanging on you all depressed and lovey and then when he's had it turning his back to think of something else. Men don't live by it the way a woman must. It's getting quicker and quicker more like a habit, he really hurries now when he senses or she tells him she's lost it. Then she can just lie there and in a way listen and it's soothing; but then she can't go to sleep afterwards. Some nights he tries to bring her up but she's just so sleepy and so heavy down there it's nothing; sometimes she just wants to push him off and shake him and shout, I can't, you dope, don't you know you're a father! But no. She mustn't tell him. Saying a word would make it final; it's just been one period and the next is coming up in a day maybe she'll have it and then she won't have anything. As much of a mess as it is she doesn't know how happy that would make her really. At least this way she's doing something, sending those candy bars down. God she isn't even sure she doesn't want it because he wants it from the way he acts, with his damn no stripper just a nice clean piece. She isn't even sure she didn't just deliberately bring it on by falling asleep under his arm just to show the smug bastard. For the thing about him he didn't mind her getting up when he was asleep and crawling into the cold bathroom just so long as he didn't have to watch anything or do anything. That was the thing about him, he just lived in his skin and didn't give a thought to the consequences of anything. Tell him about the candy bars and feeling sleepy he'll probably get scared and off he'll go, him and his good clean piece and his cute little God and his cute little minister playing golf every Tuesday. For the damnedest thing about that minister was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea he was acting wrong but now he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace. Filling poor Rabbit full of something nobody can get at and even now, filling her ear, his soft cocksure voice answers her question with an idle remote smugness that infuriates her so the tears do come.
"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool—water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price."
Making awkward calls is agony for Eccles; at least anticipation of them is. Usually, the dream is worse than the reality: God rules reality. The actual presences of people are always bearable. Mrs. Springer is a plump, dark, small—boned woman with a gypsy look about her. Both the mother and the daughter have a sinister aura, but in the mother this ability to create uneasiness is a settled gift, thoroughly meshed into the strategies of middle—class life. With the daughter it is a floating thing, useless and as dangerous to herself as to others. Eccles is relieved that Janice is out of the house; he feels guiltiest in her presence. She and Mrs. Fosnacht have gone into Brewer to a matinee of Some Like It Hot. Their two sons are in the Springers' back yard. Mrs. Springer takes him through the house to the screened—in porch, where she can keep an eye on the children. Her house is expensively but confusedly famished; each room seems to contain one more easy chair than necessary. To get from the front door to the back they take a crooked path in the packed rooms. She leads him slowly; both of her ankles are bound in elastic bandages. The pained littleness of her steps reinforces his illusion that her hips are encased in a plaster cast. She gently lowers herself onto the cushions of the porch glider and startles Eccles by kicking up her legs as, with a squeak and sharp sway, the glider takes her weight. The action seems to express pleasure; her bald pale calves stick out stiff and her saddle shoes are for a moment lifted from the floor. These shoes are cracked and rounded, as if they've been revolved in a damp tub for years. He sits down in a trickily hinged aluminumand—plastic lawn chair. Through the porch screen at his side, he can see Nelson Angstrom and the slightly older Fosnacht boy play in the sun around a swing—slide—and—sandbox set. Eccles once bought one of those and when it came, all in pieces in a long cardboard box, was humiliated to find himself unable to put it together; Angus, the old deaf sexton, finally had to do it for him.
"It's nice to see you," Mrs. Springer says. "It's been so long since you came last."
`Just three weeks, isn't it?" he says. The chair presses against his back and he hooks his heels around the pipe at the bottom to keep it from folding. "It's been a busy time, with the confirmation classes and the Youth Group deciding to have a softball team this year and a number of deaths in the parish." His previous contacts with this woman have not disposed him to be apologetic. Her having so large a home offends his aristocratic sense of caste; he would like her better, and she would be more comfortable, if her place were smaller.
"Yes I wouldn't want your job for the world."
"I enjoy it most of the time."
"They say you do. They say you're becoming quite an expert golf player."
Oh dear. And he thought she was relaxing. He thought for the moment they were on the porch of a shabby peeling house and she was a long—suffering fat factory wife who had learned to take fife as it came. That is what she looked like; that is easily what she might have been. Fred Springer when he married her was probably less likely—looking than Harry Angstrom when her daughter married him. He tries to imagine Harry four years ago, and gets a presentable picture: tall, fair, famous in his school days, clever enough – a son of the morning. His air of confidence must have especially appealed to Janice. David and Michal. Defraud ye not one the other …. He scratches his forehead and says, "Playing golf with someone is a good way to get to know him. That's what I try to do, you understand – get to know people. I don't think you can lead someone to Christ unless you know him."