As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct: the kitten's instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.
He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother's legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong – as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world – he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, "If he doesn't come back when she has the baby, then you should get the law after him. There are laws, of course; quite a few."
"Elsie snaps," Mrs. Springer says, "because you and Billy tease her."
"Naughty Elsie," Nelson says.
"Naughty Nelson," Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, "Yes well she's a week due now and I don't see him running in."
His moment of sympathy for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer's voice carries after him into the house, "Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you're going to get a whipping from your grandmom."
"No, Mom—mom," the child begs coyly, fright gone.
Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumble of rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms' number, 303.
Mrs. Angstrom has four—cornered nostrils. Lozenge—shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra—defined; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day: their home is the dark side of a two—family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer's fat – soft, aching excess – had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a woman like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom's is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry's size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small as a glass of water.
"I don't know why you come to me," she says. "Harold's one and twenty. I have no control over him."
"He hasn't been to see you?"
"No sir." She displays her profile above her left shoulder. "You've made him so ashamed I suppose he's embarrassed to."
"He should be ashamed, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she's two—thirds crazy."
"Oh now, that's not true, is it?"
"Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was, Why don't I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life."
"Surely you don't think she meant anything."
"No, she didn't mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run—down half—house when she came from a great big stucco barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and, Wasn't I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well—equipped little trick? I never liked that girl's eyes. They never met your face full—on." She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles – an old—fashioned type, circles of steel—rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light —her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't – whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that's it, it's the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn't really see him at all. Her confrontation is with everybody, and secure under the breadth of her satire he can say what he pleases.
He bluntly defends Janice. "The girl is shy."
"Shy! She wasn't too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirt—tail in."
"He was one and twenty, as you say."
"Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old."
Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn't acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. "About as shy as a snake," she says, "that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody's sympathy. Well she doesn't get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father—in—law talk she's the worst martyr since Joan of Arc."
He laughs again; but isn't she? "Well, uh, what does Mr. Angstrom think Harry should do?"
"Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He's just like his father underneath. All soft heart. I suppose that's why men rule the world. They're all heart."
"That's an unusual view."
"Is it? It's what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don't know who's supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose."
Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps overstating half—truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox—thumping maybe begins there. Helpless, predestined Man, the king of Creation. Utterly fallen: a hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he's forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb. It occurs to him that he should see the Angstroms' pastor.
Mrs. Angstrom picks up a dropped thread. "Now my daughter Miriam is as old as the hills and always was; I've never worried about her. I remember, on Sundays long ago when we'd walk out by the quarry Harold was so afraid —he wasn't more than twelve then – he was so afraid she'd fall over the edge. I knew she wouldn't. You watch her. She won't marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out."
"I'm not so sure the world has jumped on him. The girl's mother and I were just discussing that it seemed quite the contrary."
"Don't you think it. That girl gets no sympathy from me. She has everybody on her side from Eisenhower down. They'll talk him around. You'll talk him around. And there's another."
The front door has opened with a softness she alone hears. Her husband comes into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and a tie but with his fingernails outlined in black; he is a printer. He is as tall as his wife but seems shorter. His mouth works self—deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth. His nose is Harry's, a neat smooth button. "How do you do, Father," he says; either he was raised as a Catholic or among Catholics.
"Mr. Angstrom, it's very nice to meet you." The man's hand has tough ridges but a soft, dry palm. "We've been discussing your son."
"I feel terrible about that." Eccles believes him. Earl Angstrom has a gray, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips across his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica—stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.
"He goes on and on about the girl as if she was the mother of Christ," Mrs. Angstrom says.
"That's not true," Angstrom says mildly, and sits down in his white shirt at the porcelain kitchen table. Four settings, year after year, have worn black blurs through the enamel. "I just don't see how Harry could make such a mess. He wasn't like other boys, sloppy. He was a tidy worker."
With raw sudsy hands Mrs. Angstrom has set about heating coffee for her husband. This small act of service seems to bring her into harmony with him; they begin, in the sudden way of old couples apparently at odds, to speak as one. "It was the Army," she says. "When he came back from Texas he was a different boy."
"He didn't want to come into the shop," Angstrom says. "He didn't want to go into a dirty trade."
"Reverend Eccles, would you like some coffee?" Mrs. Angstrom asks.
At last, his chance. "No, thank you. What I would love, though, is a glass of water."
"Just water? With ice?"
"Any way. Any way would be lovely."
"Yes, Earl is right," she says. "People now say how lazy Hassy is, but he's not. He never was. When you'd be proud of his basketball in high school you know, people would say, `Yes well but he's so tall, it's easy for him.' But they didn't know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see."
"From about twelve years old on," Angstrom says, "he was at that night and day. I put a pole up for him out back; the garage wasn't high enough."
"When he set his mind to something," Mrs. Angstrom says, "there was no stopping him." She yanks powerfully at the lever of the ice—cube tray and with a brilliant multiple crunch that sends chips sparkling the cubes come loose. "He wanted to be best at that and I honestly believe he was."
"I know what you mean," Eccles says. "I play a little golf with him and already he's become better than I am."
She puts the cubes in a glass and holds the glass under a spigot and brings it to him. He tilts it at his lips and Earl Angstrom's palely vehement voice wavers through the liquid. "Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass."
"Your language, Earl," his wife says, setting coffee in a flowered cup on the table between his hands.
He looks down into the steam and says, "Excuse me. When I think of what that boy's doing my stomach does somersaults. He's become the worst kind of Brewer bum. If I could get my loving hands on him, Father, I'd try to thrash him if he killed me in the process." His ashen face bunches defiantly at the mouth; his colorless eyes swarm with glitter.