"I'm sure you can find somebody else. Vacation's started; it'd be a perfect job for some high—school kid."
"No," she says, "no. I won't think about it. I won't be here next year to see Harry's rhodies come in again. You kept me alive, Harry; it's the truth; you did. All winter I was fighting the grave and then in April I looked out the window and here was this tall young man burning my old stalks and I knew life hadn't left me. That's what you have, Harry: life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one." Her crystal eyes have filmed with a liquid thicker than tears and she grabs his arms above his elbows with hard brown claws. "Fine strong young man," she murmurs, and her eyes come back into focus as she adds, "You have a proud son; take care."
She must mean he should be proud of his son and take care of him. He is moved by her embrace; he wants to respond and did moan "No" at her prediction of death. But his right hand is full of melting mashed candy, and he stands helpless and rigid hearing her quaver, "Goodbye. I wish you well. I wish you well."
In the week that follows this blessing, he and Nelson are often happy. They go for walks around the town. One day they watch a softball game played on the high—school lot by men with dark creased faces like millworkers, dressed in gaudy felt—and—flannel uniforms, one team bearing the name of a fire hall in Brewer and the other the name of the Sunshine Athletic Association, the same uniforms, he guesses, that he saw hanging in the attic the time he slept in Tothero's bedroom. The number of spectators sitting on the dismantleable bleachers is no greater than the number of players. All around, behind the bleachers and the chicken—wire—and—pipe backstop, kids in sneakers scuffle and run and argue. He and Nelson watch a few innings, while the sun lowers into the trees. It floods Rabbit with an ancient, papery warmth, the oblique sun on his cheeks, the sparse inattentive crowd, the snarled pepper chatter, the spurts of dust on the yellow infield, the girls in shorts strolling past with chocolate popsicles. Brown adolescent legs thick at the ankle and smooth at the thigh. They know so much, at least their skins do. Boys their age scrawny sticks in dungarees and Keds arguing frantically if Williams was washed up or not. Mantle ten thousand times better. Williams ten million times better. Harry and Nelson share an orange soda bought from a man in a Boosters' Club apron who has established a bin in the shade. The smoke of dry ice leaking from the ice—cream section, the ffp of the cap being pulled from the orange. The artificial sweetness fills his heart. Nelson spills some on himself trying to get it to his lips.
Another day they go to the playground. Nelson acts frightened of the swings. Rabbit tells him to hold on and pushes very gently, from the front so the kid can see. Laughs, pleads, "Me out," begins to cry, "me out, me out, Da—dee." Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of roof ball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle—chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
They visit Mom—mom Springer. The child is delighted; Nelson loves her, and this makes Rabbit like her. Though she tries to pick a fight with him he refuses to fight back, just admits everything; he was a crumb, a dope, he behaved terribly, he's lucky not to be in jail. Actually there's no real bite in her attack. Nelson is there for one thing, and for another she is relieved he has come back and is afraid of scaring him off. For a third, your wife's parents can't get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there's something relaxing and even comic about them. He and the old lady sit on the screened sunporch with iced tea; her bandaged legs are up on a stool and her little groans as she shifts' her weight make him smile. It feels like one of those silly girls in high school you kind of liked without there ever being a question of love. Nelson and Billy Fosnacht are inside the house playing quietly. They're too quiet. Mrs. Springer wants to see what's happening but doesn't want to move her legs; in her torment she starts to complain about what a crude child little Billy Fosnacht is, and from this shifts over to the kid's mother. Mrs. Springer doesn't much like her, doesn't trust her around the comer; it isn't just the sunglasses, though she thinks that's a ridiculous affectation; it's the girl's whole manner, the way she came cozying around to Janice just because it looked like juicy gossip. "Why, she came around here so much that I had more charge of Nelson than Janice did, with those two off to the movies every day like high—school girls that don't have the responsibility of being mothers." Now Rabbit knows from school that Peggy Fosnacht, then Peggy Gring, wears sunglasses because she is freakishly, humiliatingly walleyed. And Eccles has told him that her company was a great comfort to Janice during the trying period now past. But he does not make either of these objections; he listens contentedly, pleased to be united with Ma Springer, the two of them against the world. The cubes in the iced tea melt, making the beverage doubly bland; his mother—in—law's talk laves his ears like the swirling mutter of a brook. Lulled, he lets his lids lower and a smile creeps into his face; he sleeps badly at nights, alone, and drowses now on the grassy breadth of day, idly blissful, snug on the right side at last.
It is quite different at his own parents' home. He and Nelson go there once. His mother is angry about something; her anger hits his nostrils as soon as he's in the door, like the smell of age on everything. This house looks shabby and small after the Springers. What ails her? He assumes she's always been on his side and tells her in a quick gust of confiding how terrific the Springers have been; how Mrs. Springer is really quite warmhearted and seems to have forgiven him everything, how Mr. Springer kept up the rent on their apartment and now has promised him a job selling cars in one of his lots. He owns four lots in Brewer and vicinity; Rabbit had no idea he was that much of an operator. He's really kind of a jerk but a successful jerk at least; at any rate he thinks he, Harry Angstrom, has got off pretty easily. His mother's hard arched nose and steamed spectacles glitter bitterly. Her disapproval nicks him whenever she turns from the sink. At first he thinks it's that he never got in touch with her but if that's so she should be getting less sore instead of more because he's in touch with her now. Then he thinks it's that she's disgusted he slept with Ruth, and committed adultery, but out of a clear sky she explodes that by asking him abruptly, "And what's going to happen to this poor girl you lived with in Brewer?"
"Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn't expect anything." But as he says this he tastes the lie in it. Nobody expects nothing. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother's mouth.
Her mouth goes thin and she answers with a smug flirt of her head, "I'm not saying anything, Harry. I'm not saying one word."
But of course she is saying a great deal only he doesn't know what it is. There's some kind of clue in the way she treats Nelson. She as good as ignores him, doesn't offer him toys or hug him, just says, "Hello, Nelson," with a little nod, her glasses snapping into white circles. After Mrs. Springer's warmth this coolness seems brutal. Nelson feels it and acts hushed and frightened and leans against his father's legs. Now Rabbit doesn't know what's eating his mother but she certainly shouldn't take it out on a two—yearold kid. He never heard of a grandmother acting this way. It's true, just the poor kid's being there keeps them from having the kind of conversation they used to have, where his mother tells him something pretty funny that happened in the neighborhood and they go on to talk about him, the way he used to be as a kid, how he dribbled the basketball all afternoon until after dark and was always looking after Mim. Nelson's being half Springer seems to kill all that. For the moment he stops liking his mother; it takes a hard heart to snub a tiny kid that just learned to talk. He wants to say to her, What is this, anyway? You act like I've gone over to the other side. Don't you know it's the right side and why don't you praise me?
But he doesn't say this; he has a stubbornness to match hers. He doesn't say much at all to her, after telling her what good sports the Springers are falls flat. He just hangs around, him and Nelson rolling a lemon back and forth in the kitchen. Whenever the lemon wobbles over toward his mother's feet he has to get it; Nelson won't. The silence makes Rabbit blush, for himself or for his mother he doesn't know. When his father comes home it isn't much better. The old man isn't angry but he looks at Harry like there isn't anything there. His weary hunch and filthy fingernails annoy his son; it's as if he's willfully aging them all. Why doesn't he get false teeth that fit? His mouth works like an old woman's. But one thing at least, his father pays some attention to Nelson, who hopefully rolls the lemon toward him. He rolls it back. "You going to be a ballplayer like your Dad?"
"He can't, Earl," Mom interrupts, and Rabbit is happy to hear her voice, believing the ice has broken, until he hears what she says. "He has those little Springer hands."
"For Chrissake, Mom, lay off," he says, and regrets it, being trapped. It shouldn't matter what size hands Nelson has. Now he discovers it does matter; he doesn't want the boy to have Springer hands, and, if he does – and if Mom noticed it he probably does – he likes the kid a little less. He likes the kid a little less, but he hates his mother for making him do it. It's as if she wants to pull down everything, even if it falls on her. And he admires this, her willingness to have him hate her, so long as he gets her message. But he rejects her message: he feels it poking at his mind and rejects it. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to hear her say another word. He just wants to get out with a little piece of his love of her left.
At the door he asks his father, "Where's MIM?"
"We don't see much of Mim any more," the old man says. His blurred eyes sink and he touches the pocket of his shirt, which holds two ballpoint pens and a little soiled packet of cards and papers. just in these last few years his father has been making little bundles of things, cards and lists and receipts and tiny calendars that he wraps rubber bands around and tucks into different pockets with an elderly fussiness. Rabbit leaves his old home depressed, with a feeling of his heart having slumped off center.
The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear. The child's sleep is so heavy he fears it might break the membrane of life and fall through to oblivion. Sometimes he reaches into the crib and lifts the boy's body out, just to reassure himself with its warmth and the responsive fumbling protest of the tumbled limp limbs.
He rattles around in the apartment, turning on all the lights and television, drinking ginger ale and leafing through old Lifes, grabbing anything to stuff into the emptiness. Before going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toilet, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee—wee springs from the child's irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl. Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson's middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the moment when in the furry slant of morning sun the boy will appear, resurrected, in sopping diapers, beside the big bed, patting his father's face experimentally. Sometimes he gets into the bed, and then the clammy cold cloth shocking Rabbit's skin is like retouching a wet solid shore. The time in between is of no use to Harry. But the urgency of his wish to glide over it balks him. He lies in bed, diagonally, so his feet do not hang over, and fights the tipping sensation inside him. Like an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother's ugly behavior, his father's gaze of desertion, Ruth's silence the last time he saw her, his mother's oppressive not saying a word, what ails her? He rolls over on his stomach and seems to look down into a bottomless sea, down and down, to where crusty crags gesture amid blind depths. Good old Ruth in the swimming pool. That poor jerk Harrison sweating it out Ivy—League style the ass—crazy son of a bitch. Margaret's weak little dirty hand flipping over into Tothero's mouth and Tothero lying there with his tongue floating around under twittering jellied eyes: No. He doesn't want to think about that. He rolls over on his back in the hot dry bed and the tipping sensation returns severely. Think of something pleasant. Basketball and cider at that little school down at the end of the county Oriole High but it's too far back he can't remember more than the cider and the way the crowd sat up on the stage. Ruth at the swimming pool; the way she lay in the water without weight, rounded by the water, slipping backwards through it, eyes shut and then out of the water with the towel, him looking up her legs at the secret hair and then her face lying beside him huge and burnished and mute. No. He must blot Tothero and Ruth out of his mind both remind him of death. They make on one side this vacuum of death and on the other side the threat of Janice coming home grows: that's what makes him feel tipped, lopsided. Though he's lying there alone he feels crowded, all these people troubling about him not so much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water and under everything like a faint high hum Eccles' wife's wink. That wink. What was it? Just a little joke in the tangle at the door, the kid coming down in her underpants and maybe she conscious of him looking at her toenails, a little click of the eye saying On your way Good luck or was it a chink of light in a dark hall saying Come in? Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her, that wink bothering him ever since, she wanted him to really nail her. The shadow of her bra. Tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the child—skin thighs sassy butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white—painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father what a nice chest you have and here and here and here. He rolls over and the dry sheet is the touch of her anxious hands, himself tapering tall up from his fur, ridges through which the thick vein strains, and he does what he must with a tight knowing hand to stop the high hum and make himself slack for sleep. A woman's sweet froth. Nails her. Passes through the diamond standing on his head and comes out on the other side wet. How silly. He feels sorry. Queer where the wet is, nowhere near where you'd think, on the top sheet instead of the bottom. He puts his cheek on a fresh patch of pillow. He tips less, Lucy undone. Her white lines drift off like unraveled string. He must sleep; the thought of the far shore approaching makes a stubborn lump in his glide. Think of things pleasant. Out of all his remembered life the one place that comes forward where he can stand without the ground turning into faces he is treading on is that lot outside the diner in West Virginia after he went in and had a cup of coffee the night he drove down there. He remembers the mountains around him like a ring of cutouts against the moon—bleached blue of the night sky. He remembers the diner, with its golden windows like the windows of the trolley cars that used to run from Mt. Judge into Brewer when he was a kid, and the air, cold but alive with the beginnings of spring. He hears the footsteps tapping behind him on the asphalt, and sees the couple running toward their car, hands linked. One of the red—haired girls that sat inside with her hair hanging down like wiggly seaweed. And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, that they meant to lead him and he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he is following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place. On this note he carries into sleep.
But awakes before dawn being tipped again, frightened on the empty bed, with the fear that Nelson has died. He tries to sneak back into the dream he was having but his nightmare fear dilates and he at last gets up and goes to hear the boy breathe and then urinates with slight pain from having come and returns to a bed whose wrinkles the first stirrings of light are etching into black lines. On this net he lies down and steals the hour left before the boy comes to him, hungry and cold.
On Friday Janice comes home. For the first days the presence of the baby fills the apartment as a little casket of incense fills a chapel. Rebecca June lies in a bassinet of plaited rushes painted white and mounted on a trundle. When Rabbit goes over to look at her, to reassure himself that she is there, he sees her somehow dimly, as if the baby has not gathered to herself the force that makes a silhouette. Her averted cheek, drained of the bright red he glimpsed at the hospital, is mottled gray, yellow, and blue, marbled like the palms of his hands when he is queasy; when Janice suckles Rebecca, yellow spots well up on her breast as if in answer to the fainter shadows of this color in the baby's skin. The union of breast and baby's face makes a globular symmetry to which both he and Nelson want to attach themselves. When Rebecca nurses, Nelson becomes agitated, climbs against them, pokes his fingers into the seam between the baby's lips and his mother's udder and, scolded and pushed away, wanders around the bed intoning, a promise he has heard on television; "Mighty Mouse is on the way." Rabbit himself loves to lie beside them watching Janice manipulate her swollen breasts, the white skin shiny from fullness. She thrusts the thick nipples like a weapon into the blind blistered mouth, that opens and grips with birdy quickness. "Ow!" Janice winces, and then the nerves within the baby's lips begin to work in tune with her milk—making glands; the symmetry is established; her face relaxes into a downward smile. She holds a diaper against the other breast, mopping the waste milk it exudes in sympathy. Those first days, full of rest and hospital health, she has more milk than the baby takes. Between feedings she leaks, the bodices of all her nighties bear two stiff stains. When he sees her naked, naked all but for the elastic belt that holds her Modess pad in place, her belly shaved and puffed and marked with the vertical brown line only mothers have, his whole stomach stirs at the fierce sight of her breasts, braced high by the tension of their milk, jutting from her slim body like glossy green—veined fruit with coarse purple tips. Top—heavy, bandaged, Janice moves gingerly, as if she might spill, jarred. Though with the baby her breasts are used without shame, tools like her hands, before his eyes she is still shy, and quick to cover herself if he watches too openly. But he feels a difference between now and when they first loved, lying side by side on the borrowed bed, his eyes closed, together making the filmy sideways descent into one another. Now, she is intermittently careless, walks out of the bathroom naked, lets her straps hang down while she burps the baby, seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for fucking, hatching, feeding. He, too, leaks; thick sweet love burdens his chest, and he wants her —just a touch, he knows she's a bleeding wound, but just a touch, just enough to get rid of his milk, to give it to her. Though in her ether trance she spoke of making love, she turns away from him in bed, and sleeps with a forbidding heaviness. He is too grateful, too proud of her, to disobey. He in a way, this week, worships her.
Eccles comes calling and says he hopes to see them in church. Their debt to him is such that they agree it would be nice of them, at least one of them, to go. The one must be Harry. Janice can't; she has been, by this Sunday, out of the hospital nine days and, with Harry off at his new job since Monday, is beginning to feel worn—out, weak, and abused. Harry is happy to go to Eccles' church. Not merely out of uneasy affection for Eccles, though there's that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it. He dresses in his new pale—gray suit to sell cars in and steps out at quarter of eleven into a broad blue Sunday morning a day before the summer solstice. He always enjoyed those people parading into church across from Ruth's place and now he is one of them. Ahead of him is the first hour in over a week when he won't be with a Springer, either Janice at home or her father at work. The job at the lot is easy enough, if it isn't any work for you to bend the truth. He feels exhausted by midafternoon. You see these clunkers come in with 80,000 miles on them and the pistons so loose the oil just pours through and they get a washing and the speedometer tweaked back and you hear yourself saying this represents a real bargain. He'll ask forgiveness.
He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly he loves the ones dressed for church: the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible, the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest walk in Rabbit's eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief. He could kiss their feet in gratitude, they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated with happiness to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, God, Rebecca, thank you bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. People who know God rustle and stir about him, upholding him in the dark. When he sinks back into sitting position the head in front of him takes his eye. A woman in a wide straw hat. She is smaller than average with narrow freckled shoulders, probably young, though women tend to look young from the back. The wide hat graciously broadcasts the gentlest tilt of her head and turns the twist of blond hair at the nape of her neck into a kind of peeping secret he alone knows. Her neck and shoulders are given a faint, shifting lambency by their coat of fine white hairs, invisible except where the grain lies with the light. He smiles, remembering Tothero talking about women being covered all over with hair. He wonders if Tothero is dead now and quickly prays not. He becomes impatient for the woman to turn so he can see her profile under the rim of the hat, a great woven sun—wheel, garnished with an arc of paper violets. She turns to look down at something beside her; his breath catches; the thinnest crescent of cheek gleams, and is eclipsed again. Something in a pink ribbon pops up beside her shoulder. He stares into the inquisitive tan face of little Joyce Eccles. His fingers fumble for the hymnal as the organ heaves into the service; it is Eccles' wife rising within reach of his arm.
Eccles comes down the aisle shuffling behind a flood of acolytes and choristers. Up behind the altar rail he looks absentminded and grouchy, remote and insubstantial and stiff, like a Japanese doll in his vestments. The affected voice, nasal—pious, in which he intones prayers affects Rabbit disagreeably; there is something disagreeable about the whole Episcopal service, with its strenuous ups and downs, its canned petitions, its cursory little chants. He has trouble with the kneeling pad; the small of his back aches; he hooks his elbows over the back of the pew in front of him to keep from falling backward. He misses the familiar Lutheran liturgy, scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription. In this service he blunders absurdly, balked by what seem willful dislocations of worship. He feels too much is made of collecting the money. He scarcely listens to the sermon at all.
It concerns the forty days in the Wilderness and Christ's conversation with the Devil. Does this story have any relevance to us, here, now? In the twentieth century, in the United States of America? Yes. There exists a sense in which all Christians must have conversations with the Devil, must learn his ways, must hear his voice. The tradition behind this legend is very ancient, was passed from mouth to mouth among the early Christians. Its larger significance, its greater meaning, Eccles takes to be this: suffering, deprivation, barrenness, hardship, lack are all an indispensable part of the education, the initiation, as it were, of any of those who would follow Jesus Christ. Eccles wrestles in the pulpit with the squeak in his voice: His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks. It is an unpleasant and strained performance, contorted, somehow; he drives his car with an easier piety. In his robes he seems a sinister man—woman. Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it catches his retinas.
Lucy Eccles' bright cheek ducks in and out of view under its shield of straw. The child, hidden – all but her ribbon – behind the back of the pew, whispers to her, presumably that the naughty man is behind them. Yet the woman never turns her head directly to see. This needless snub excites him. The most he gets is her profile; the soft tuck of doubleness in her chin deepens as she frowns down at the child beside her. She wears a dress whose narrow blue stripes meet at the seams at sharp angles. There is something sexed in her stillness in the church, in her obedience to its man—centered, rigid procedure. Rabbit flatters himself that her true attention radiates backward at him. Against the dour patchwork of subdued heads, stained glass, yellowing memorial plaques on the wall, and laboriously knobbed and beaded woodwork, her hair and skin and hat glow singly, their differences in tint like the shades of brilliance within one flame.
So that when the sermon yields to a hymn, and her bright nape bows to receive the benediction, and the nervous moment of silence passes, and she stands and faces him, it is anticlimactic to see her face, with its pointed collection of dots – eyes and nostrils and freckles and the tight faint dimples that bring a sarcastic tension to the corners of her mouth. That she wears a facial expression at all shocks him slightly; the luminous view he had enjoyed for an hour did not seem capable ofbeing so swiftly narrowed into one small person.
"Hey. Hi," he says.
"Hello," she says. "You're the last person I ever expected to see here."
"Why?" He is pleased that she thinks of him as an ultimate.
"I don't know. You just don't seem the institutional type."
He watches her eyes for another wink. He has lost belief in that first one, weeks ago. She returns his gaze until his eyes drop. "Hello, Joyce," he says. "How are you?"
The little girl halts and hides behind her mother, who continues to maneuver down the aisle, walking with small smooth steps while distributing smiles to the faces of the sheep. He has to admire her social coordination.
At the door Eccles clasps Harry's hand with his broad grip, a warm grip that tightens at the moment it should loosen. "It's exhilarating to see you here," he says, hanging on. Rabbit feels the whole line behind him bunch and push.
"Nice to be here," he says. "Nifty sermon."
Eccles, who has been peering at him with a feverish smile and a blush that seems apologetic, laughs; the roof of his mouth glimmers a second and he lets go.
Harry hears him tell Lucy, "In about an hour."
"The roast's in now. Do you want it cold or overdone?"
"Overdone," he says. He solemnly takes Joyce's tiny hand and says, "How do you do, Mrs. Pettigrew? How splendid you look this morning!"
Startled, Rabbit turns and sees that the fat lady next in line is startled also. His wife is right, Eccles is indiscreet. Lucy, Joyce behind her, walks up beside him. Her straw hat comes up to his shoulder. "Do you have a car?"
"No. Do you?"
"No. Walk along with us."
"O.K." Her proposition is so bold there must be nothing in it; nevertheless the harpstring in his chest tuned to her starts trembling. Sunshine quivers through the trees; in the streets and along unshaded sections of the pavement it leans down with a broad dry weight. It has lost the grainy milkiness of morning sun. Mica fragments in the pavement glitter; the hoods and windows of hurrying cars smear the air with white reflections. Lucy pulls off her hat and shakes her hair. The church crowd thins behind them. The waxy leaves, freshly thick, of the maples planted between the pavement and curb embower them rhythmically; in the broad gaps of sun her face, his shirt, feel white, white; the rush of motors, the squeak of a tricycle, the touch of a cup and saucer inside a house are sounds conveyed to him as if along a bright steel bar. As they walk along he trembles in light that seems her light.
"How are your wife and baby?" she asks.
"Fine. They're just fine."
"Good. Do you like your new job?"
"Not much."
"Oh. That's a bad sign, isn't it?"
"I don't know. I don't suppose you're supposed to like your job. If you did, then it wouldn't be a job."
"Jack likes his job."
"Then it's not a job."