With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can't seize the solid of—, it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.
She lifts the living thing into air and hugs it against her sopping chest. Water pours off them onto the bathroom tiles. The little weightless body flops against her neck and a quick look of relief at the baby's face gives a fantastic clotted impression. A contorted memory of how they give artificial respiration pumps Janice's cold wet arms in frantic rhythmic hugs; under her clenched lids great scarlet prayers arise, wordless, monotonous, and she seems to be clasping the knees of a vast third person whose name, Father, Father, beats against her head like physical blows. Though her wild heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers she doesn't feel the faintest tremor of an answer in the darkness against her. Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
JACK comes back from the telephone a shocking color. "Janice Angstrom has accidentally drowned their baby."
Lucy asks, "How could she?"
"I don't know. I'm afraid she was drunk. She's unconscious now."
"Where was he?"
"Nobody knows. I'm supposed to find out. That was Mrs. Springer. "
He sits down in the great walnut—armed chair that had been his father's and Lucy realizes with resentment that her husband is middle—aged. His hair is thinning, his skin is dry, he looks exhausted. She cries, "Why must you spend your life chasing after that worthless heel?"
"He's not worthless. I love him."
"You love him. That's sickening. Oh I think that's sickening, Jack. Why don't you try loving me, or your children?"
"I do."
"You don't, Jack. Let's face it, you don't. You couldn't bear to love anybody who might return it. You're afraid of that, aren't you? Aren't you afraid?"
They had been drinking tea in the library when the phone rang and he picks his empty cup off the floor between his feet and looks into the center. "Don't be clever, Lucy," he says. "I feel too sick."
"You feel sick, yes, and I feel sick. I've felt sick ever since you got involved with that animal. He's not even in your church."
"Any Christian is in my church."
"Christian! If he's a Christian thank God I'm not one. Christian. Kills his baby and that's what you call him."
"He didn't kill the baby. He wasn't there, it was an accident."
"Well he as good as did. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The woman had adjusted and something like this never would have happened."
Eccles blinks; shock has put a great analytic distance between him and things. He's rather impressed by the way she has reconstructed what must have happened. He wonders a little why her speech is so vengeful. "Heel" was a strange word for her to have used. "So you're saying I really killed the baby," he says.
"Of course not. I didn't mean to say that at all."
"No. I think you're probably right," he says, and lifts himself out of the chair. He goes into the hall to the telephone and again draws out of his wallet the number written in pencil below the faint name, Ruth Leonard. The number worked once but this time the mouse of electricity gnaws at the remote membrane of metal in vain. He lets it ring twelve times, hangs up, dials the number again, and hangs up after seven rings. When he returns to the study Lucy is ready for him.
"Jack, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest you were responsible at all. Of course you're not. Don't be silly."
"It's all right, Lucy. The truth shouldn't be able to hurt us." These words are a shadow of his idea that if faith is true, then nothing that is true is in conflict with faith.
"Oh mercy, the martyr. Well I can see it's an idea you have that it's your fault and nothing I can say will change your mind. I'll save my breath."
He keeps silent to help her save her breath but after a moment she asks in a softer voice, ` Jack?"
"What?"
"Why were you so anxious to get them back together?"
He picks the slice of lemon up from the saucer of his teacup and tries to squint through it into the room. "Marriage is a sacrament," he says.
He half—expects her to laugh but instead she asks earnestly, "Even a bad marriage?"
"Yes."
"But that's ridiculous. That's not common sense."
"I don't believe in common sense," he says. "If it'll make you happy, I don't believe in anything."
"That doesn't make me happy," she says. "You're being very neurotic. But I'm sorry this has happened. I'm truly sorry." She takes away their cups and swishes into the kitchen and leaves him alone. Afternoon shadows gather like cobwebs on the walls of books, most of them belonging not to him but to his predecessor in the rectory, the much—admired bachelor Randolph Langhorne. He sits waiting numbly but not too long. The phone rings. He hurries to answer it before Lucy can; through the window above the sill where the phone rests he can see his neighbor unpinning her wash from the line.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Jack? This is Harry Angstrom. I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
"No, you're not."
"You don't have any old ladies sitting around sewing or anything, do you?"
"No."
"Why, I've been trying to call my apartment and nobody
answers and I'm kind of nervous about it. I didn't spend last night
there and I'm getting sort of a prickly feeling. I want to go home
but I want to know if Janice has done anything like call the cops
or anything. Do you know?"
"Harry, where are you?"
"Oh, at some drugstore in Brewer."
The neighbor has bundled the last sheet into her arms and Jack's sight leans on the bare white line. One of the uses society seems to have for him is to break tragic news and the cave of his mouth goes dry as he braces for the familiar duty. No man, having put his hand to the plough . . . He keeps his eyes wide open so he will not seem too close to the presence by his ear. "I guess to save time I'd better tell you over the phone," he begins. "Harry. A terrible thing has happened to us."
When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn't know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone—booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is rereading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two bottles of vitamins. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It's a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone facades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with some sweating footsore shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16n; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from doubling up with the kink inside. Curved posters advertise filtered cigarettes and suntan lotion and C.A.R.E.
He had ridden one of these buses last night into Brewer and gone to Ruth's apartment but there was no light on and nobody answered his ring, though there was a dim light behind the frosted glass lettered F. X. PELLIGRINI. He sat around on the steps, looking down at the delicatessen until the lights went out and then looking at the bright church window. When the lights went out behind that he felt alone and hopeless and thought of going home. He wandered up to Weiser Street and looked down at all the lights and the great sunflower and couldn't see a bus and kept walking, down to the south side, and became afraid by himself and went into a low—looking hotel and bought a room. He didn't sleep very well; a neon tube with a taped connection fizzled outside the window and some woman kept laughing in another room. He woke up early enough to go back to Mt. Judge and get a suit and go to work but something held him back. Something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn't there probably off to Atlantic City with some prick and still he wandered around Brewer, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and dime and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see the fat shoulders he used to kiss jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds were totally against him and anyway there was tons of time, he could find her another day. No, what kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and down between counters of perfumed lingerie and tinny jewelry and salted nuts (poor old Jan) and up into the park along paths he walked once with Ruth to watch from under a horsechestnut tree five mangy kids play cat with a tennis ball and a broomstick and then finally back down Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he'd find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn't so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realized that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame. What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used—car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it. The kink in his stomach starts to take the form of nausea and he clings to the icy bar bitterly as the bus swings around the mountain.
He gets off, in a sweat, blocks too soon. Here in Mt. Judge the shadows have begun to grow deep, the sun baking Brewer rides the crest of the mountain, and his sweat congeals, shortening his breath. He runs to keep his body occupied, to joggle his mind blank. Past a dry—cleaning plant with a little pipe hissing steam at the side. Through the oil and rubber smells riding above the asphalt pond around the red pumps of an Esso station. Past the Mt. Judge town—hall lawn and the World War II honor roll with the name plaques crumbled and blistered behind glass. His chest begins to hurt and he slows to a walk.