"The baby. . .
"The undertaker has her."
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.
Eccles goes upstairs and Harry sits in a chair and watches the light from the window play across an iron table of ferns and African violets and baby cacti. Where it hits the leaves they are bright yellow—green; the leaves in shadow in front of them look like black—green holes cut in this golden color. Somebody comes down the stairs with an erratic step. He doesn't turn his head to see who it is; he doesn't want to risk looking anybody in the face. A furry touch on his forearm and he meets Nelson's eyes. The child's face is stretched shiny with curiosity. "Mommy sleep," he says in a deep voice imitating the tragedy—struck voices he has been hearing.
Rabbit pulls him up into his lap. He's heavier and longer than he used to be. His body acts as a covering; he pulls the boy's head down against his neck. Nelson asks, "Baby sick?"
"Baby sick."
"Big, big water in tub," Nelson says, and straggles to sit up so he can explain with his amts, which go wide. "Mom—mom came and took Mommy away." What all did the poor kid see? He wants to get off his father's lap but Harry holds him fast with a kind of terror; the house is thick with a grief that seems to threaten the boy. Also the boy's body wriggles with an energy that threatens the grief, might tip it and bring the whole house crashing down on them. It is himself he is protecting by imprisoning the child.
Eccles comes downstairs and stands there studying them. "Why don't you take him outside?" he asks. "He's had a nightmare of a day. >,
They all three go outdoors. Eccles takes Harry's hand in a long quiet grip and says, "Stay here. You're needed, even if they don't tell you." After Eccles pulls away in his car, he and Nelson sit in the grass by the driveway and throw bits of gravel down toward the pavement. The boy laughs and talks in excitement but out here the sound is not so loud. Harry feels thinly protected by the fact that this is what Eccles told him to do. Men are walking home from work along the pavement; Nelson tosses a pebble too near the feet of one and the man looks up. This unknown face seems to stare at Harry from deep in another world, the world of the blameless, the world outside the bubble of Becky's death. He and Nelson change their target to a green lawn—seeder leaning against the wall of the garage. Harry hits it four times running. Though the air is still light the sunshine has shrunk to a few scraps in the tops of trees. The grass is growing damp and he wonders if he should sneak Nelson in the door and go.
Mr. Springer comes to the door and calls, "Harry." They go over. "Becky's made a few sandwiches in place of supper," he says. "You and the boy come in." They go into the kitchen and Nelson eats. Harry refuses everything except a glass of water. Mrs. Springer is not in the kitchen and Harry is grateful for her absence. "Harry," Mr. Springer says, and stands up, patting his mustache with two fingers, like he's about to make a financial concession, "Reverend Eccles and Becky and I have had a talk. I won't say I don't blame you because of course I do. But you're not the only one to blame. Her mother and I somehow never made her feel secure, never perhaps you might say made her welcome, I don't know" – his little pink crafty eyes are not crafty now, blurred and chafed – "we gave her all we had, I'd like to think. At any rate" – this comes out harsh and crackly; he pauses to regain quietness in his voice – "life must go on. Am I making any sense to you?"
"Yes sir."
"Life must go on. We must go ahead with what we have left. Though Becky's too upset to see you now, she agrees. We had a talk and agree that it's the only way. I mean, what I mean to say, I can see you're puzzled, is that we consider you in our family, Harry, despite" – he lifts an arm vaguely toward the stairs – "this." His arm slumps back and he adds the word "accident."
Harry shields his eyes with his hand. They feel hot and vulnerable to light. "Thank you," he says, and almost moans in his gratitude to this man, whom he has always despised, for making a speech so generous. He tries to frame, in accordance with an etiquette that continues to operate in the thick of grief as if underwater, a counter—speech. "I promise I'll keep my end of the bargain," he brings out, and stops, stifled by the abject sound of his voice. What made him say bargain?
"I know you will," Springer says. "Reverend Eccles assures us you will."
"Dessert," Nelson says distinctly.
"Nelly, why don't you take a cookie to bed?" Springer speaks with a familiar jollity that, though strained, reminds Rabbit that the kid lived here for months. "Isn't it your bedtime? Shall Mommom take you up?"
"Daddy," Nelson says, and slides off his chair and comes to his father.
Both men are embarrassed. "O.K.," Rabbit says. "You show me your room."
Springer gets two Oreo cookies out of the pantry and unexpectedly Nelson runs forward to hug him. He stoops to accept the hug and his withered dandy's face goes blank against the boy's cheek; big black square cufflinks, thinly rimmed and initialed S in gold, creep out of his coat sleeves as his amts tighten the hug.
As Nelson leads his father to the stairs they pass the room where Mrs. Springer is sitting. Rabbit has a glimpse of a puffed face slippery with tears, like an interior organ surgically exposed, and averts his eyes. He whispers to Nelson to go in and kiss her good night. When the boy returns to him they go upstairs and down a smooth corridor papered with a design of old—style cars into a little room whose white curtains are tinted green by a tree outside. On either side of the window symmetrical pictures, one of kittens and one of puppies, are hung. He wonders if this was the room where Janice was little. It has a musty innocence, and a suspense, as if it stood empty for years. An old teddy bear, the fur worn down to cloth and one eye void, sits in a broken child's rocker. Has it been Janice's? Who pulled the eye out? Nelson becomes queerly passive in this room. Harry undresses the sleepy body, tanned brown all but the narrow bottom, puts it into pajamas and into bed and arranges the covers over it. He tells him, "You're a good boy." "Yop. > "I'm going to go now. Don't be scared." "Daddy go way?" "So you can sleep. I'll be back." "O.K. Good." "Good." "Daddy?" "What?" "Is baby Becky dead?" "Yes." "Was she scared?" "Oh no. No. She wasn't scared." "Is she happy?" "Yeah, she's very happy now." "Good." "Don't you worry about it." "O.K."
"You snuggle up." "Yop." "Think about throwing stones." "When I grow up, I'll throw them very far." "That's right. You can throw them pretty far now." "I know it." "O.K. Go to sleep." Downstairs he asks Springer, who is washing dishes in the kitchen, "You don't want me to stay here tonight, do you?" "Not tonight, Harry. I'm sorry. I think it would be better not tonight."
"O.K., sure. I'll go back to the apartment. Shall I come over in the morning?"
"Yes, please. We'll give you breakfast."
"No, I don't want any. I mean, to see Janice when she wakes up.'
"Yes of course."
"You think she'll sleep the night through."
"I think so."
"Uh – I'm sorry I wasn't at the lot today."
"Oh, that's nothing. That's negligible."
"You don't want me to work tomorrow, do you?"
"Of course not."
"I still have the job, don't I?"
"Of course." His talk is gingerly; his eyes fidget; he feels his wife is listening.
"You're being awfully good to me."
Springer doesn't answer; Harry goes out through the sunporch, so he won't have to glimpse Mrs. Springer's face again, and around the house and walks home in the soupy summer dark, which tinkles with the sounds of dishes being washed. He climbs Wilbur Street and goes in his old door and up the stairs. There is still that faint smell of something like cabbage cooking. He lets himself into the apartment with his key and turns on all the lights as rapidly as he can. He goes into the bathroom and the water is still in the tub. Some of it has seeped away so the top of the water is an inch below a faint gray line on the porcelain but the tub is still more than half full. A heavy, calm volume, odorless, tasteless, colorless, the water shocks him like the presence of a silent person in the bathroom. Stillness makes a dead skin on its unstirred surface. There's even a kind of dust on it. He rolls back his sleeve and reaches down and pulls the plug; the water swings and the drain gasps. He watches the line of water slide slowly and evenly down the wall of the tub, and then with a crazed vortical cry the last of it is sucked away. He thinks how easy it was, yet in all His strength God did nothing. Just that little rubber stopper to lift.
In bed he discovers that his legs ache from all the walking he did in Brewer today. His shins feel splintered; no matter how he twists, the pain, after a moment of relief gained by the movement, sneaks back. He tries praying to relax him but it doesn't do it. There's no connection. He opens his eyes to look at the ceiling and the darkness is mottled with an unsteady network of veins like the net of yellow and blue that mottled the skin of his baby. He remembers seeing her neat red profile through the window at the hospital and a great draft of grief sweeps through him, brings him struggling out of bed to turn on the lights. The electric glare seems thin. His groin aches to weep. He is afraid to stick even his hand into the bathroom; he fears if he turns on the light he will see a tiny wrinkled blue corpse lying face up on the floor of the drained tub. The pressure in his bladder grows until he is at last forced to dare; the dark bottom of the tub leaps up blank and white.
He expects never to go to sleep and, awaking with the slant of sunshine and the noise of doors slamming downstairs, feels his body has betrayed his soul. He dresses in haste, more panicked now than at any time yesterday. The event is realer. Invisible cushions press against his throat and slow his legs and arms; the kink in his chest has grown thick and crusty. Forgive me, forgive me, he keeps saying silently to no one.
He goes over to the Springers' and the tone of the house has changed; he feels everything has been rearranged slightly to make a space into which he can fit by making himself small. Mrs. Springer serves him orange juice and coffee and even speaks, cautiously.
"Do you want cream?"
"No. No. I'll drink it black."
"We have cream if you want it."
"No, really. It's fine."
Janice is awake. He goes upstairs and lies down beside her on the bed; she clings to him and sobs into the cup between his neck and jaw and the sheet. Her face has been shrunk; her body seems small as a child's, and hot and hard. She tells him, "I can't stand to look at anyone except you. I can't bear to look at the others."
"It wasn't your fault," he tells her. "It was mine."
"I've got my milk back," Janice says, "and every time my breasts sting I think she must be in the next room."
They cling together in a common darkness; he feels the walls between them dissolve in a flood of black; but the heavy knot of apprehension remains in his chest, his own.
He stays in the house all that day. Visitors come, and tiptoe about. Their manner suggests that Janice upstairs is very sick. They sit, these women, over coffee in the kitchen with Mrs. Springer, whose petite rounded voice, oddly girlish divorced from the sight of her body, sighs on and on like an indistinct, rising and falling song. Peggy Fosnacht comes, her sunglasses off, her walleyes wide to the world, and goes upstairs. Her son Billy plays with Nelson, and no one moves to halt their squeals of anger and pain in the back yard, which, neglected, in time die away. Even Harry has a visitor. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Springer goes and comes into the dim room where Harry is sitting looking at magazines and says, in a surprised and injured voice, "A man for you."
She leaves the doorway and he gets up and walks a few steps forward to greet the man coming into the room, Tothero, leaning on a cane and his face half—paralyzed; but talking, walking, alive. And the baby dead. "Hi! Gee, how are you?"
"Harry." With the hand that is not on the cane he grips Harry's arm. He brings a long look to bear on Harry's face; his mouth is tweaked downward on one side and the skin over his eye on this side is dragged down diagonally so it nearly curtains the glitter. The gouging grip of his fingers trembles.