"No, I'll walk it."
"All right. If you prefer. Harry?"
"Huh?"
"I'm very proud of you."
"Yeah. O.K. I'll see you."
Eccles had reached for him, it felt like, out of the ground. The minister's voice had sounded tinny and buried. Ruth's bedroom is dim; the streetlamp like a low moon burns shadows into the inner planes of the armchair, the burdened bed, the twisted sheet he tossed back finally when he realized the phone would never stop. The bright rose window of the church opposite is still lit: purple red blue gold like the notes of different bells struck. His body, his whole frame of nerves and bone, tingles, as if with the shaking of small bells hung up and down his silver skin. His spent groin tingles. He wonders if he had been asleep, and how long, ten minutes or five hours. He finds his underclothes and trousers draped on a chair and fumbles with them; his white shirt seems to crawl, like a cluster of glowworms in grass. He hesitates a second before poking his fingers into its illusion, that turns under his touch to safe cloth, dead. He carries it in his hand to the bed with its silent burden.
"Hey. Baby."
The long lump under the covers doesn't answer. Just the top of Ruth's hair peeks out. He doesn't feel she is asleep. When she is asleep her breathing is noisier.
"Hey. I got to go out."
No answer. If she wasn't asleep she heard everything he said on the phone, but what did he say? He remembers nothing except this sense of being reached. Ruth lies heavy and sullen and her body hidden. The night is hot enough for just a sheet but she put a blanket on the bed saying she felt cold. It was just about the only thing she did say. He shouldn't have made her do it. He doesn't know why he did except it felt right at the time. He thought it might be a breakthrough. She had done it for others, what was wrong with him? If she didn't want to, if it would spoil him for her, why didn't she say No? He kept touching her cheeks with his fingertips. He kept wanting to lift her up and hug her in simple thanks and say Enough you're mine again but somehow couldn't bring himself to have it stop and kept thinking the next moment, until it was too late, done. Right down her sweet red gullet. With it went instantly that strange floating feeling of high pride. Shame plunged in.
"My wife's having her baby. I got to go see her through it. I'll be back in a couple hours. I love you."
Still the body under the covers and the frizzy crescent of hair peeking over the top edge of the blanket don't move. He is so sure she is not asleep he thinks, I've killed her. It's ridiculous, such a thing wouldn't kill her, it has nothing to do with death; but the thought paralyzes him from going forward to touch her and make her listen.
"Ruth. I got to go this once, it's my baby she's having and she's such a mutt I don't think she can do it by herself. Our first one came awfully hard. It's the least I owe her."
Perhaps this wasn't the best way to say it but he's trying to explain and her stillness frightens him and is beginning to make him sore.
"Ruth. Hey. If you don't say anything I'm not coming back. Ruth."
She lies there like some dead animal or somebody after a car accident when they put a tarpaulin over. He feels if he went over and lifted her she would come to life but he doesn't like being manipulated and grows angry. He puts on his shirt and doesn't bother with a coat and necktie but it seems to take forever putting on his socks; the soles of his feet are tacky.
When the door closes the taste of seawater in her mouth is swallowed by the thick grief that mounts in her throat so fully she has to sit up to breathe. Tears slide from her blind eyes and salt the corners of her mouth as the empty walls of the room become real and then dense. It's like when she was fourteen and the whole world trees sun and stars would have swung into place if she could lose twenty pounds just twenty pounds what difference would it make to God Who guided every flower in the fields into shape? Only now it's not that she's asking she knows now that's superstitious all she wants is what she had a minute ago him in the room who when he was good could make her into a flower who could undress her of her flesh and turn her into sweet air Sweet Ruth he called her and if he had just said "sweet" talking to her she might have answered and he'd still be between these walls. No. She had known from the first night the wife would win they have the hooks and anyway she feels really lousy: a wave of wanting to throw up comes over her and washes away caring much about anything. She goes into the john and kneels on the tiles and watches the still oval of water in the toilet as if it's going to do something. She doesn't think after all she has it in her to throw up but stays there anyway because it pleases her, her bare arm resting on the icy porcelain lip; she grows used to the threat in her stomach, which doesn't dissolve, which stays with her, so in her faint state it comes to seem that this thing that's making her sick is some kind of friend.
He runs most of the way to the hospital. Up Summer one block, then down Youngquist, a street parallel to Weiser on the north, a street of brick tenements and leftover business places, shoe—repair nooks smelling secretively of leather, darkened candy stores, insurance agencies with photographs of tornado damage in the windows, real—estate offices lettered in gold, a bookshop. On an old—fashioned wooden bridge Youngquist Street crosses the railroad tracks, which slide between walls of blackened stone soft with soot like moss through the center of the city, threads of metal deep below in a darkness like a river, taking narrow sunset tints of pink from the neon lights of the dives along Railway Street. Music rises to him. The heavy boards of the old bridge, waxed black with locomotive smoke, rumble under his feet. Being a small—town boy, he always has a fear of being knifed in a city slum. He runs harder; the pavement widens, parking meters begin, and a new drive—in bank faces the antique Y. M. C. A. He cuts up the alley between the Y and a limestone church whose leaded windows show the reverse sides of Biblical scenes to the street. He can't make out what the figures are doing. From a high window in the Y. M. C. A. fall the clicks of a billiard game; otherwise the building's broad side is lifeless. Through the glass side door he sees an old Negro sweeping up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy seeds of some tree are under his feet. Its tropically narrow leaves are black spikes against the dark yellow sky. Imported from China or Brazil or somewhere because it can live in soot and fumes. The St. Joseph's parking lot is a striped asphalt square whose sides are lined with such city trees; and above their tops, in this hard open space, he sees the moon, and for a second stops and communes with its mournful face, stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin. Make it be all right, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance.
The hospital light is bright and blue and shadowless. He walks down a linoleum hall perfumed with ether to the front desk. "Angstrom," he tells the nun behind the typewriter. "I think my wife is here."
Her plump washerwoman's face is rimmed like a cupcake with scalloped linen. She surveys her cards and says "Yes" and smiles. Her little wire spectacles perch way out from her eyes on the pads of fat at the top of her cheeks. "You may wait over there." She points with a pink ballpoint pen. Her other hand rests, beside the typewriter, on a string of black beads the size of the necklace of beads carved in Java he once got Janice for Christmas. He stands there staring, expecting to hear her say, She's been here hours, where were you? He can't believe she'll just accept him as another aboutto—be father. As he stares, her nerveless white hand, that has never seen the sun, slides the black necklace off the desktop into her lap.
Two other men are already established in the waiting end of the room. This is the front entrance hall; people drift in and out. Rabbit sits down on an imitation leather chair with chrome arms and from this touch of metal and the furtive clicking quiet gets the idea he's in a police station and these other two men are the cops who made the arrest. It seems they ignore him pointedly. In his nervousness he plucks a magazine from the table. It's a Catholic magazine the size of the Reader's Digest . He tries to read a story about a lawyer in England who becomes so interested in how legally unfair it was for Henry VIII to confiscate the property of the monasteries that he becomes a Roman Catholic convert and eventually a monk. The two men whisper together; one maybe is the other's father. The younger one keeps kneading his hands together and nodding to what the older man whispers.
Eccles comes in, blinking and looking scrawny in his collar. He greets the sister behind the desk by name, Sister Bernard. Rabbit stands up on ankles of air and Eccles comes over with that familiar frown in his eyebrows. By the harsh hospital light his forehead is etched in purple. He's had a haircut that day; as he turns his skull, the shaved planes above his ears shine like the blue throat feathers of a pigeon.
Rabbit asks, "Does she know I'm here?" He wouldn't have predicted that he would whisper too. He hates the panicked choke in his voice.
"I'll see that she's told if she's still conscious," Eccles says in a loud voice that makes the whispering men look up. He goes over to Sister Bernard. The nun seems happy to chat, and both laugh, Eccles in the startled guffaw Rabbit knows well and Sister Bernard with a pure and girlish fat woman's fluting that springs from her throat slightly retracted, curbed by the frame of stiff frills around her face. When Eccles moves away she lifts the phone beside her skirted elbow.
Eccles comes back and looks him in the face, sighs, and offers him a cigarette. The effect is somehow of a wafer of repentance and Rabbit accepts. The first drag, after so many clean months, unhinges his muscles and he has to sit down. Eccles takes a hard chair nearby and makes no attempt at conversation. Rabbit can't think of much to say to him off the golf course and, shifting the smoking cigarette awkwardly to his left hand, pulls another magazine off the table, making sure it's unreligious, the Saturday Evening Post. It opens to an article in which the author, who from the photograph looks Italian, tells how he took his wife and four children and mother—in—law on a three—week camping trip to the Canadian Rockies that only cost them $120 not counting the initial investment of a Piper Cub. His mind can't keep with the words but keeps skidding up and branching away and flowering into little visions of Janice screaming, of the baby's head blooming out of blood, of the wicked ridged blue light Janice must be looking into if she's conscious, if she's conscious Eccles said, of the surgeon's red rubber hands and gauze face and Janice's babyish black nostrils widening to take in the antiseptic smell he smells, the smell running everywhere along the white walls of their having been washed, of blood being washed and shit washed and retching washed until every surface smells like the inside of a bucket but it will never come clean because we will always fill it up again with our filth. A damp warm cloth seems wrapped around his heart. He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die. His sin a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of the birth. Though his bowels twist with the will to dismiss this clot, to retract, to turn back and undo, he does not turn to the priest beside him but instead reads the same sentence about delicious fried trout again and again.
On the extreme edge of his tree of fear Eccles perches, black bird, flipping the pages of magazines and making frowning faces to himself. He seems unreal to Rabbit, everything seems unreal that is outside of his sensations. His palms tingle; a strange impression of pressure darts over his body, seizing now his legs, now the base of his neck. His armpits itch the way they used to when he was little and late for school, running up Jackson Road.
"Where's her parents?" he asks Eccles.
Eccles looks surprised. "I don't know. I'll ask the sister." He moves to get up.
"No no, sit still for Chrissake." Eccles' acting like he half—owns the place annoys him. Harry wants to be unnoticed; Eccles makes noise. He rattles the magazines so it sounds like he's tearing orange crates apart, and flips cigarettes around like a juggler.
A woman in white, not a nun, comes into the waiting—room and asks Sister Bernard, "Did I leave a can of furniture polish in here? I can't find it anywhere. A green can, with one of those pushy things on top that makes it spritz."
"No, dear."
She looks for it and goes out and after a minute comes back and announces, "Well that's the mystery of the world."
To the distant music of pans, wagons, and doors, one day turns through midnight into another. Sister Bernard is relieved by another nun, a very old one, dressed in sky blue. As if in her climb toward holiness she got stalled in the sky. The two whispering men go to the desk, talk, and leave, their crisis unresolved. Eccles and he are left alone. Rabbit strains his ears to catch the cry of his child somewhere deep in the hushed hospital maze. Often he thinks he hears it; the scrape of a shoe, a dog in the street, a nurse giggling—any of these are enough to fool him. He does not expect the fruit of Janice's pain to make a very human noise. His idea grows, that it will be a monster, a monster of his making. The thrust whereby it was conceived becomes confused in his mind with the perverted entry he forced, a few hours ago, into Ruth. Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.
Mary Ann. Tired and stiff and lazily tough after a game he would find her hanging on the front steps under the school motto and they would walk across mulching wet leaves through white November fog to his father's new blue Plymouth and drive to get the heater warmed and park. Her body a branched tree of warm nests yet always this touch of timidity. As if she wasn't sure but he was much bigger, a winner. He came to her as a winner and that's the feeling he's missed since. In the same way she was the best of them all because she was the one he brought most to, so tired. Sometimes the shouting glare of the gym would darken behind his sweat—burned eyes into a shadowed anticipation of the careful touchings that would come under the padded gray car roof and once there the bright triumph of the past game flashed across her quiet skin streaked with the shadows of rain on the windshield. So that the two kinds of triumph were united in his mind. She married when he was in the Army; a P.S. in a letter from his mother shoved him out from shore. That day he was launched.
But he feels joy now; cramped from sitting on the eroded chrome—armed chair sick with cigarettes he feels joy in remembering his first girl; the water of his heart has been poured into a thin vase of joy that Eccles' voice jars and breaks.
"Well I've read this article by Jackie Jensen all the way to the end and I don't know what he said," Eccles says.
"Huh?"
"This piece by Jackie Jensen on why he wants to quit baseball. As far as I can tell the problems of being a baseball player are the same as those of the ministry."
"Say, don't you want to go home? What time is it?"
"Around two. I'd like to stay, if I may."
"I won't run off if that's what you're afraid of."
Eccles laughs and keeps sitting there. Harry's first impression of him had been tenacity and now all the intervening companionship has been erased and it's gone back to that.
Harry tells him, "When she had Nelson the poor kid was at it for twelve hours."
Eccles says, "The second child is usually easier," and looks at his watch. "It hasn't quite been six hours."
Events create events. Mrs. Springer passes through from the privileged room where she has been waiting and stiffly nods at Eccles; seeing Harry in the corner of her eye makes her stumble on her sore legs and tumbledown saddle shoes. Eccles gets up and goes with her through the door to the outside. After a while the two of them come back in along with Mr. Springer, who wears a tiny—knotted necktie and a laundry—fresh shirt. His little sandy mustache has been trimmed so often his upper lip has kind of shrivelled under it. He says, "Hello, Harry."
This acknowledgment from her husband, despite some talkingto they've probably had from Eccles, goads the fat hag into turning on Harry and telling him, "If you're sitting there like a buzzard young man hoping she's going to die, you might as well go back to where you've been living because she's doing fine without you and has been all along."
The two men hustle her away while the old nun peers with a quaint smile across her desk, deaf ? Mrs. Springer's attack, though it ached to hurt him, is the first thing anybody has said to Harry since this began that seems to fit the enormity of the event going on somewhere behind the screen of hospital soap—smell. Until her words he felt alone on a dead planet encircling the great gaseous sun of Janice's labor; her cry, though a cry of hate, pierced his solitude. The thought of Janice's death: hearing it voiced aloud has halved its terror. That strange scent of death Janice breathed: Mrs. Springer also smelled it, and this sharing seems the most precious connection he has with anybody in the world.
Mr. Springer returns and passes through to the outside, bestowing upon his son—in—law a painfully complex smile, compounded of a wish to apologize for his wife (we're both men; I know), a wish to keep distant (nevertheless you've behaved unforgivably; don't touch me), and the car salesman's mechanical reflex of politeness. Harry thinks, You crumb; hurls the thought at the slammed door. You slave. Where is everybody going? Where are they coming from? Why can't anybody rest? Eccles comes back and feeds him another cigarette and goes away again. Smoking it makes the floor of his stomach tremble. His throat feels like it does when you wake up after sleeping all night with your mouth open. His own bad breath brushes his nostrils. A doctor with a barrel chest and skinned—looking hands held curled in front of the pouch of his smock comes into the anteroom uncertainly. He asks Harry, "Mr. Angstrom? I'm Dr. Crowe." Harry has never met him; Janice used another obstetrician for the first baby and after her hard time her father made her switch to this one. Janice used to visit him once a month and bring home tales of how gentle he was, how wonderfully soft his hands were, how he seemed to know exactly what it was like to be a pregnant woman.
"How —?"