"My wife brought me. In the car. Outside, Harry. We heard your terrible news. Didn't I warn you?" Already his eyes are bulging with water.
"When?"
"When?" The stricken side of his face is turned away, perhaps consciously, into shadow, so his smile seems wholly alive, wise, and sure. "That first night. I said go back. I begged you."
"I guess you did. I've forgotten."
"No you haven't. No you haven't, Harry." His breath chuffs on the "Ha" of "Harry." "Let me tell you something. Will you listen?"
"Sure."
"Right and wrong," he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. "Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably" – he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words —"misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you've had an example of that in your own life." Rabbit wonders when the tear—trails appeared on Tothero's cheeks; there they are, like snail—tracks. "Do you believe me?"
"Sure. Sure. Look, I know this has been my fault. I've felt like a, like an insect ever since it happened."
Tothero's tranquil smile deepens; a faint rasping purr comes out of his face. "I warned you," he says, "I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless."
Harry blurts, "But what can I do?"
Tothero doesn't seem to hear. "Don't you remember? My begging you to go back?"
"I don't know, I guess so."
"Good. Ali. You're still a fine man, Harry. You have a healthy body. When I'm dead and gone, remember how your old coach told you to avoid suffering. Remember." The last word is intoned coyly, with a little wag of the head; on the thrust of this incongruous vivacity he rises from his chair, and prevents himself from pitching forward by quick use of his cane. Harry jumps up in alarm, and the two of them stand for the moment very close. The old man's big head breathes a distressing scent, not so much medicine as a vegetable staleness. "You young people," he says with a rising intonation, a schoolteacher's tone, scolding yet sly, "tend to forget. Don't you? Now don't you?"
He wants this admission mysteriously much. "Sure," Rabbit says, praying he'll go.
Harry helps him to his car, a '57 blue—and—cream Dodge waiting in front of the orange fire hydrant. Mrs. Tothero offers, rather coolly, her regrets at the death of his infant daughter. She looks harried and noble. Gray hair straggles down across her finely wrinkled silver temple. She wants to get away from here, away with her prize. Beside her on the front seat Tothero looks like a smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curve of his cane. Rabbit returns to the house feeling depressed and dirtied by the visit. Tothero's revelation chilled him. He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all dictates.
Eccles comes later in the afternoon, to complete the arrangements for the funeral: it will be held tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday. As he leaves Rabbit catches his attention and they talk in the front hall a moment. "What do you think?" Rabbit asks.
"About what?"
"What shall I do?"
Eccles glances up nervously. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. "Do what you are doing," he says. "Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left."
"And that's enough?"
"You mean to earn forgiveness? I'm sure it is, carried out through a lifetime."
"I mean" – he's never before felt pleading with Eccles "remember that thing we used to talk about? The thing behind everything?"
"Harry, you know I don't think that thing exists in the way you think it does."
"O.K." He realizes that Eccles wants to get away too, that the sight of himself is painful, disgusting.
Eccles must see that he senses this, for he curtly summons up merry and makes an attempt. "Harry, it's not for me to forgive you. You've done nothing to me to forgive. I'm equal with you in guilt. We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything. Harry, I know that people are brought to Christ. I've seen it with my eyes and tasted it with my mouth. And I do think this. I think marriage is a sacrament, and that this tragedy, terrible as it is, has at last united you and Janice in a sacred way."
Through the next hours Rabbit clings to this belief, though it seems to bear no relation to the colors and sounds of the big sorrowing house, the dabs and arcs of late sunshine in the little jungle of plants on the glass table, or the almost wordless supper he and Janice share in her bedroom.
He spends that night in the Springers' house, sleeping with Janice. Her sleep is so solid. A thin snore out of her black mouth sharpens the moonlight and keeps him awake. He gets up on an elbow and studies her face; it is frightening in the moonlight, small and so vague in the dark it could be anybody. He resents her sleep. When, in first light, he feels her weight stir and slide off the bed, he turns his face deeper into the pillow, retracts his head half under the covers, and goes back to sleep stubbornly. The thought that today is the day of the funeral somehow drugs him.
During this stolen doze he has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect discs, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, "The cowslip swallows up the elder." The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: "the cowslip" is the moon, and "the elder" the sun, and that what he has witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. Intensely relieved and excited, he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the discs, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world. The knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.
She makes him breakfast, the cereal drowned in milk, the coffee scalded in her style. With Nelson they walk over to the apartment to get clothes for the funeral. Rabbit resents her being able to walk; he liked her best when she was unconscious. What kind of second—rate grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him. They walk with their child through streets they walked as children. The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime—rimmed ice—plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces stem in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery – the mystery of "any place," prelude to the ultimate, "Why am I me?" – re—ignites panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body. The details of the street – the ragged margin where the pavement and grass struggle, the tarry scarred trunks of the telephone poles – no longer speak to him. He is no one; it is as if he stepped outside of his body and brain a moment to watch the engine run and stepped into nothingness, for this "he" had been merely a refraction, a vibration within the engine, and now can't get back in. He feels he is behind the windows of the houses they walk by, watching this three—cornered family stroll along solidly with no sign that their universe has convulsed other than the woman's quiet tears. Janice's tears have come as gently as dew comes; the sight of the morning—fresh streets seems to have sprung them.
When they get inside the apartment she gives a sharp sigh and collapses against him. Perhaps she didn't expect the place to be full of sunshine; buttresses of dust drifting in milky light slant from the middle of the floor to the tops of the windows. The door to his closet is near the entry door so they needn't go very deep into the apartment at first. He opens the closet door as far as he can without bumping the television set and reaches far in and unzips a plastic zippered storage bag and takes out his blue suit, a winter suit made of wool, but the only dark one he owns. His gray carsalesman's suit is too pale. Nelson, happy to be here, ranges through the apartment, going into the bathroom, finding an old rubber panda in his bedroom that he wants to take along. His exploring drains enough of the menace from the rooms for them to go into their bedroom, where Janice's clothes hang. On the way she indicates a chair. "Here I sat," she tells him, "Monday morning, watching the sun come up." Her voice is lifeless; he doesn't know what she wants him to say and says nothing. He is holding his breath.
Yet in the bedroom there is a pretty moment. She takes off her skin and blouse to try on an old black suit she has, and as she moves about in her slip, barefoot on the carpet, she reminds him of the girl he knew, with her narrow ankles and wrists and small shy head. The black suit, bought when she was in high school, doesn't fit; her stomach is still too big from having the baby. And maybe her mother's plumpness is beginning. Standing there trying to get the waist of the suit skirt to link at her side, the tops of her breasts, swollen with untaken milk, pushing above her bra, she does have a plumpness, a fullness that call to him. He thinks Mine, my woman, but then she turns and her smeared frantic face blots out his pride of possession. She becomes a liability that painfully weights the knot below his chest. This is the wild woman he must steer with care down a lifelong path, away from Monday morning. "It won't do it!" she screams, and jerks her legs out of the skirt and flings it, great twirling bat, across the room.
"You have nothing else?"
"What am I going to do?"
"Come on. Let's get out of here and go back to your place. This place is making you nervous."
"But we're going to have to live here!"
"Yeah, but not today. Come on."
"We can't live here," she says.
"I know we can't."
"But where can we live?"
"We'll figure it out. Come on."
She stumbles into her skirt and puts her blouse over her arms and turns away from him meekly and asks, "Button my back." Buttoning the pink cloth down her quiet spine makes him cry; the hotness in his eyes works up to a sting and he sees the little babyish buttons through a cluster of discs of watery light like petals of apple blossoms. Water hesitates on his lids and then runs down his cheeks; the wetness is delicious. He wishes he could cry for hours, for just this tiny spill relieves him. But a man's tears are grudging and his stop before they are out of the apartment. As he closes the door he feels he has spent his whole life opening and closing this door.
Nelson takes the rubber panda along and every time he makes it squeak Rabbit's stomach aches. The town now is bleached by a sun nearing the height of noon.
The hours that follow are so long they seem to contain the same incidents over and over. Back in the house, Janice and her mother merge and re—merge in soft little conversations that take them from room to room. They seem to be worrying what Janice will wear. The two of them go upstairs and in half an hour Janice comes down in a pinned—in black dress of her mother's that makes her look like her mother. "Harry. Does it look all right?"
"What in hell do you think this is going to be? A fashion show?" He adds regretfully, "You look fine," but the damage is done. Janice emits a long startled whimper and goes upstairs and collapses into her mother. Mrs. Springer revokes the small measure of pardon she had extended him. The house again fills with the unspoken thought that he is a murderer. He accepts the thought gratefully; it's true, he is, he is, and hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
It becomes one o'clock. Mrs. Springer comes into the room where he is sitting and asks, "Do you want a sandwich?"
"Thanks, I can't eat anything."
"You better have something." He finds this insistence so strange he goes into the kitchen to see what is there. Nelson is having soup and raw carrots and a Lebanon baloney sandwich by himself at the table. He seems uncertain if he should smile at his father or not. Mrs. Springer keeps her back turned.
Harry asks, "Has the kid had a nap?"
"You might take him up," she says, without turning. Upstairs in the room with the one—eyed teddy bear Harry reads the boy a Little Golden Book about a little choo—choo who was afraid of tunnels. By the time the choo—choo has proved he is no longer afraid Nelson has fallen asleep under his father's arm. Harry goes downstairs again. Janice is having a rest in her room and the sound of Mrs. Springer's sewing machine, as it adjusts the dress for Janice to wear, spins out into the birdsong and murmur of the early afternoon.