Rabbit at rest (54 page)

It was the sort of foolish revelation he might have once shared
with Thelma, in the soft-speaking unembarrassment that
follows making love. Thelma was suddenly dead. Dead of kidney
failure, thrombocytopenia, and endocarditis, toward the end of
July, as the cool dawn of another hot blue-gray day broke on
the ornamental roof-level brickwork opposite St. Joseph's
Hospital in Brewer. Poor Thelma, her body had just been plain worn
out by her long struggle. Ronnie tried to keep her at home to the
end, but that last week she was too much to handle. Hallucinations,
raving, sarcastic anger. Quite a lot of anger, at Ron of all
people, who had been so devoted a husband, after being such a
scapegrace in his young unmarried days. She was only
fifty-five -a year younger than Harry, two years older
than Janice. She died the same week the DC-10 bringing people
from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago crashed in Sioux
City, Iowa, trying to land at two hundred miles an hour, running on
no controls but the thrust of the two remaining engines,
cartwheeling on the runway, breaking up in a giant fireball, and
yet well over a hundred surviving, some of them dangling upside
down from the seat belts in a section of fuselage, some of them
walking away and getting lost in the cornfields next to the runway.
It seemed to Rabbit the first piece of news that summer that wasn't
a twentieth anniversary of something - of Woodstock, the
Manson murders, Chappaquidick, the moon landing. The TV news has
been full of resurrected footage.

The funeral service is in a sort of no-brand-name
church about a mile beyond Arrowdale. Looking for it, Harry and
Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs, where a
six-theater cineplex advertised on its crammed display board
HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT
BALLS. The lazy girl in the booth didn't know where the church
might be, nor did the pimply usher inside, in the big empty scarlet
lobby smelling of buttered popcorn and melting M&Ms. Harry was
angry with himself all those times he sneaked out to Arrowdale to
visit Thelma, now he can't find her goddamn church. When finally,
hot, embarrassed, and furious at each other's incompetence, the
Angstroms arrive, the church is just a plain raw building, a
warehouse with windows and a stump of an, anodized aluminum
steeple, set in a treeless acre of red soil sown skimpily with
grass and crisscrossed by car ruts. Inside, the walls are
cinder-block, and the light through the tall clear windows
bald and merciless. Folding chairs do instead of pews, and childish
felt banners hang from the metal beams overhead, showing crosses,
trumpets, crowns of thorns mixed in with Biblical verse numbers
- Mark 15:32, Rev. 1:10, John 19:2. The minister wears a
brown suit and necktie and shirt with an ordinary collar, and looks
rather mussed, and breathless, like the plump young manager of an
appliance store who sometimes has to help out in handling the heavy
cartons. His voice is amplified by a tiny stalk of a microphone
almost invisible at the oak lectern. He talks of Thelma as a model
housewife, mother, churchgoer, sufferer. The description describes
no one, it is like a dress with no one in it. The minister senses
this, for he goes on to mention her "special" sense of humor, her
particular way of regarding things which enabled her to bear
herself so courageously throughout her long struggle with her
physical affliction. During a pastoral visit to Thelma in her last
tragic week in the hospital, the minister had ventured to speculate
with her on the eternal mystery of why the Lord visits afflictions
upon some and not upon others, and cures some and lets many remain
uncured. Even in the divine Gospel, let us remind ourselves, this
is so, for what of the many lepers and souls possessed who did
not
happen to be placed in Jesus' path, or were
not
aggressive enough to press themselves forward in the
vast crowds that flocked to Him on the Plain and on the Mount, at
Capernaum and at Galilee? And what was Thelma's reply? She said,
there in that hospital bed of pain and suffering, that she guessed
she deserved it as much as the next. This woman was truly humble,
truly uncomplaining. On an earlier, less stressful occasion, the
minister recalls with a quickening of his voice that indicates an
anecdote is coming, he was visiting her in her immaculate home, and
she had explained her physical affliction to him as a minor
misunderstanding, as a matter of some tiny wires in her system
being crossed. Then she had suggested, with that gentle humorous
expression that all of us here who loved her remember - and
yet in all grievous seriousness as well - that perhaps God
was responsible only for what we ourselves could experience and
see, and not responsible for anything at the microscopic level.

He looks up, uncertain of the effect this reminiscence has made,
and the little congregation of mourners, perhaps hearing Thelma's
voice in the odd remark and thus enabled to conjure up the
something schoolteacherish and sardonic and strict in her living
manner, or perhaps sensing the minister's need to be rescued from
the spectre of unjustifiable suffering, politely titters. With
relief, the brown-suited man, like a talk-show host
wrapping up, rolls on to the rote assurances, the psalm about green
pastures, the verses from Ecclesiastes about a time for everything,
the hymn that says now the day is over.

Harry sits there beside snuffly Janice in her policeman's outfit
thinking of the wanton naked Thelma he knew, how little she had to
do with the woman the minister described; but maybe the minister's
Thelma was as real as Harry's. Women are actresses, tuning their
part to each little audience. Her part with him was to adore him,
to place her body at his service as if disposing of it. Her body
was ill and sallow and held death within it like a silky black box.
There was a faint insult, a kind of dismissal, in her attitude of
helpless captivity to the awkward need to love. He could not love
her as she did him, there was a satisfying self-punishment in
his relative distraction, an irony she relished. Yet however often
he left her she never wanted him to leave. The glazed ghost of her
leans up against him when he stands for the blessing, stands close
to his chest with sour-milk breath silently begging him not
to go. Janice snuffles again but Harry keeps his own grief for
Thelma tight against his heart, knowing Janice doesn't want to see
it.

Outside, in the embarrassing sunlight, Webb Murkett, his face
smilingly creased more deeply than ever, a cigarette still dangling
from his long upper lip like a camel's, goes from group to group
introducing his new wife, a shy girl in her twenties, younger than
Nelson, younger than Annabelle, a fluffy small blonde dressed in
dark ruffles and shaped like a seal, like a teenaged swimming
champ, with no pronounced indentations. Webb does like them zaftig.
Harry feels sorry for her, dragged up to this religious warehouse
to bury the wife of an old golf partner of her husband's. Cindy,
Webb's last wife, whom Harry adored not so many years ago, is also
here, alone, looking dumpy and irritated and unsteady on black
heels skimpy as sandals, as she takes a pose on the thickly grassed
ruts of red earth that do for a church parking lot. While Janice
sticks with Webb and his bride, Harry gallantly goes over to Cindy
standing there like a lump, squinting in the hot hazed sun.

"Hi," he says, wondering how she could let herself go so badly.
She has taken on the standard Diamond County female build bosom
like a shelf and ass like you're carrying your own bench around
with you. Her dear little precise-featured face, in the old
days enigmatic in its boyish pertness, with its snub nose and
wideapart eyes, is framed by fat and underlined by chins; she has
no neck, like those Russian dolls that nest one inside the other.
Her hair that used to be cut short has been teased and permed into
that big-headed look young women favor now. It adds to her
bulk.

"Harry. How are you?" Her voice has a funereal caution and she
extends a soft hand, wide as a bear's paw, for him to shake; he
takes it in his but also under cover of the sad occasion bends down
and plants a kiss on her damp and ample cheek. Her look of
irritated lumpiness slightly eases. "Isn't it awful about Thel?"
she asks.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But it was coming a long time. She saw it
coming." He figures it's all right to suggest he knew the dead
woman's mind; Cindy was there in the Caribbean the night they
swapped. He had wanted Cindy and wound up with Thelma. Now both are
beyond desiring.

"You know, don't you?" Cindy says. "I mean, you sense when the
time is near if you're sick like that. You sense everything."
Rabbit remembers a little cross in the hollow of her throat you
could see when she wore a bathing suit, and how, like a lot of
people of her generation, she was into spookiness -astrology,
premonitions - though not as bad as Buddy Inglefinger's
girlfriend Valerie, a real old-style hippie, six feet tall
and dripping beads.

"Maybe women more than men," he says to Cindy tactfully. He
lurches a bit deeper into frankness. "I've had some physical
problems lately and they give me the feeling I've walked through my
entire life in a daze."

This is too deep for her, too confessional. There was always in
his relations with Cindy a wall, just behind her bright
butterscotch-brown eyes, a barrier where the signals stopped.
Silly
Cindy,
Thelma called her.

"Somebody told me," he tells her, "you're with a boutique over
in that new mall near Oriole."

"I'm thinking of quitting, actually. Whatever I earn is taken
off Webb's alimony so why should I bother? You can see how welfare
mothers get that way."

"Well," he says, "a job gets you out in the world. Meet people."
Meet a guy, get married again, is
his unspoken thought.
But who would want to hitch up with such a slab of beef? She'd sink
any Sunfish you'd try to sail with her now.

"I'm thinking of maybe becoming a physical therapist. Another
girl at the boutique is learning to do holistic massage."

"Sounds nice," Harry says. "Which holes?"

This is crude enough that she dares begin, "You and Thelma -"
But she stops and looks at the ground.

"Yeah?" That old barrier keeps him from encouraging her. She is
not the audience for which he wants to play the part of Thelma's
bereft lover.

"You'll miss her, I know," Cindy says weakly.

He feigns innocence. "Frankly, Janice and I haven't been seeing
that much of the Harrisons lately - Ronnie's resigned from
the club, too much money he says, and I've hardly had a chance this
summer to get over there myself. It's not the same, the old gang is
gone. A lot of young twerps. They hit the ball a mile and win all
the weekend sweeps. My daughter-in-law uses the pool,
with the kids."

"I hear you're back at the lot."

"Yeah," he says, in case she knows anyway, "Nelson screwed up.
I'm just holding the fort."

He wonders if he is saying too much, but she is looking past
him. "I must go, Harry. I can't stand another second of watching
Webb cavort with that simpering ridiculous baby doll of his. He's
over sixty!"

The lucky stiff. He made it to sixty. In the little silence that
her indignant remark imposes on the air, an airplane goes over,
dragging its high dull roar behind it. With a smile not fully
friendly he tells her, "You've all kept him young." A woman you've
endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a
little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

A number of people are making their escapes and Harry thinks he
should go over and say a word to Ronnie. His old nemesis is
standing in a loose group with his three sons and their women.
Alex, the computer whiz, has a close haircut and a nerdy
nearsighted look. Georgie has a would-be actor's long
pampered hair and the coat and tie he put on for his mother's
funeral look like a costume. Ron junior has the pleasantest face
- Thelma's smile and the muscle and tan of an outdoor worker.
Shaking their hands, Harry startles them by knowing their names.
When you're sexually involved with a woman, some of the magic
spills down into her children, that she also spread her legs
for.

"How's Nelson doing?" Ron junior asks him, from the look on his
face not trying to be nasty. It must have been this boy, around
Brewer as he is, who told Thelma about Nelson's habit.

Harry answers him man to man. "Good, Ron. He went through the
detox treatment for a month and now he's living with about twenty
other, what do they say, substance abusers, at what they call a
`concept house,' a halfway house in North Philly. He's got a
volunteer job working with inner-city kids at a
playground."

"That's great, Mr. Angstrom. Nelson's a great guy,
basically."

"I don't go visit him any more, I couldn't stand this family
therapy they try to give you, but his mother and Pru swear he loves
it, working with these tough black kids."

Georgie, the prettiest boy and Thelma's favorite, has been
overhearing and volunteers, "The only trouble with Nelson, he's too
sensitive. He lets things get to him. In show business you learn to
let it slide off your back. You know, fuck'em. Otherwise you'd kill
yourself." He pats the back of his hairdo.

Alex, the oldest, adds in his nerdy prim way, "Well I tell you,
the drugs out in California were getting to me, that's why I was
happy when this job in Fairfax came through. I mean, everybody does
it. All weekend they do it, on the beaches, on the thruways;
everybody's stoned. How can you raise a family? Or save any
money?"

Her boys are men now, with flecks of gray hair and little wise
wrinkles around their mouths, with wives and small children,
Thelma's grandchildren, looking to their fathers for shelter in the
weedy tangle of the world. Her boys look more mature in Harry's
eyes than Ronnie, in whom he must always see the obnoxious brat
from Wenrich Alley, and the loud-mouthed locker-room
showoff of high-school days. People he once loved slide from
him but Ronnie is always there, like the smelly underside of his
own body, like the jockey underpants that get dirty every day.