Rabbit is rich (57 page)

The hall inside smells decidedly of the past, the way these old farm houses do. Apples in the cellar, cinnamon in the cooking, a melding of the old plaster and wallpaper paste, he doesn't know. Muddy boots stand in a corner of the hall, on newspapers spread there, and he notices that Ruth is in stocking feet - thick gray men's work socks, but sexy nonetheless, the silence of her steps, though she is huge. She leads him to the right, into a small front parlor with an oval rug of braided rags on the floor and a folding wooden lawn chair mixed in with the other furniture. The only modem piece is the television set, its overbearing rectangular eye dead for the moment. A small wood fire smolders in a sandstone fireplace. Harry checks his shoes before stepping onto the rag rug, to make sure he is not tracking in dirt. He removes his fancy tittle sheepskin hat.

As if regretting this already, Ruth sits on the very edge of her chair, a cane-bottomed rocker, tipping it forward so her knees nearly touch the floor and her arm can reach down easily to scratch Fritzie's neck and keep her calm. Harry guesses he is supposed to sit opposite, on a cracked black leather settee beneath two depressing sepia studio portraits, a century old at least they must be, in matching carved frames, of a bearded type and his buttoned-up wife, both long turned to dust in their coffins. But before sitting down he sees across the room, by the light of a window whose deep sill teems with potted African violets and those broad-leafed plants people give for Mother's Days, a more contemporary set of photographs, color snapshots that line one shelf of a bookcase holding rows of the paperback mysteries and romances Ruth used to read and apparently still does. That used to hurt him about her in those months, how she would withdraw into one of those trashy thrillers set in England or Los Angeles though he was right there, in the flesh, a living lover. He crosses to the bookcase and sees her, younger but already stout, standing before a comer of this house within the arm of a man older, taller, and stouter than she: this must have been Byer. A big sheepish farmer in awkward Sunday clothes, squinting against the sunlight with an expression like that of the large old portraits, his mouth wistful in its attempt to satisfy the camera. Ruth looks amused, her hair up in a bouffant do and still gingery, amused that for this sheltering man she is a prize. Rabbit feels, for an instant as short and bright as the click of a shutter, jealous of these lives that others led: this stout plain country couple posing by a chipped corner of brown stucco, on earth that from the greening state of the grass suggests March or April. Nature's old tricks. There are other photographs, color prints of combed and smiling adolescents, in those cardboard frames high-school pictures come in. Before he can examine them, Ruth says sharply, "Who said you could look at those? Stop it."

"It's your family."

"You bet it is. Mine and not yours."

But he cannot tear himself away from the images in flashlit color of these children. They gaze not at him but past his right ear, each posed identically by the photographer as he worked his school circuit May after May. A boy and the girl at about the same age - the senior photo - and then in smaller format a younger boy with darker hair, cut longer and parted on the other side of his head from his brother. All have blue eyes. "Two boys and a girl," Harry says. "Who's the oldest?"

"What the hell do you care? God, I'd forgotten what a pushy obnoxious bastard you are. Stuck on yourself from cradle to grave."

"My guess is, the girl is the oldest. When did you have her, and when did you marry this old guy? How can you stand it, by the way, out here in the boondocks?"

"I stand it fine. It's more than anybody else ever offered me."

"I didn't have much to offer anybody in those days."

"But you've done fine since. You're dressed up like a pansy."

"And you're dressed up like a ditchdigger."

"I've been cutting wood."

"You operate one of those chain saws? Jesus, aren't you afraid you'll cut off a finger?"

"No, I'm not. The car you sold Jamie works fine, if that's what you came to ask."

"How long have you known I've been at Springer Motors?"

"Oh, always. And then it was in the papers when Springer died."

"Was that you drove past in the old station wagon the day Nelson got married?"

"It might have been," Ruth says, sitting back in her rocking chair, so it tips the other way. Fritzie has stretched out to sleep. The wood fire spits. "We pass through Mt. Judge from time to time. It's a free country still, isn't it?"

"Why would you do a crazy thing like that?" She loves him.

"I'm not saying I did anything. How would I know Nelson was getting married at that moment?"

"You saw it in the papers." He sees she means to torment him. "Ruth, the girl. She's mine. She's the baby you said you couldn't stand to have the abortion for. So you had it and then found this old chump of a farmer who was glad to get a piece of young ass and had these other two kids by him before he kicked the bucket."

"Don't talk so rude. You're not proving anything to me except what a sad case I must have been ever to take you in. You are Mr. 'Bad News, honest to God. You're nothing but me, me and gimme, gimme. When I
had
something to give you I gave it even though I knew I'd never get anything back. Now thank God I have nothing to give." She limply gestures to indicate the raggedly furnished little room. Her voice in these years has gained that country slowness, that stubborn calm with which the country withholds what the city wants.

"Tell me the truth," he begs.

"I just did."

"About the girl."

"She's younger than the older boy. Scott, Annabelle, and then Morris in '66. He was the afterthought. June 6, 1966. Four sixes."

"Don't stall, Ruth, I got to get back to Brewer. And don't lie. Your eyes get all watery when you lie."

"My eyes are watery because they can't stand looking at you. A regular Brewer sharpie. A dealer. The kind of person you used to hate, remember? And fat. At least when I knew you you had a body."

He laughs, enjoying the push of this; his night with Thelma has made his body harder to insult. "You," he says, "are calling me fat?"

"I am. And how did you get so red in the face?"

"That's my tan. We just got back from the islands."

"Oh Christ, the islands. I thought you were about to have a stroke."

"When did your old guy pack it in? Whajja do, screw him to death?"

She stares at him a time. "You better go."

"Soon," he promises.

"Frank passed away in August of '76, of cancer. Of the colon. He hadn't even reached retirement age. When I met him he was younger than we are now."

"O.K., sorry. Listen, stop making me be such a prick. Tell me about our girl."

"She's not our girl, Harry. I
did
have the abortion. My parents arranged it with a doctor in Pottsville. He did it right in his office and about a year later a girl died afterwards of complications and they put him in jail. Now the girls just walk into the hospital."

"And expect the taxpayer to pay," Harry says.

"Then I got a job as the day cook in a restaurant over toward Stogey's Quarry to the east of here and Frank's cousin was the hostess for that time and one thing led to another pretty fast. We had Scott in late 1960, he just turned nineteen last month, one of these Christmas babies that always get cheated on presents."

"Then the girl when? Annabelle."

"The next year. He was in a hurry for a family. His mother had never let him marry while she was alive, or anyway he blamed her."

"You're lying. I've seen the girl; she's older than you say."

"She's eighteen. Do you want to see birth certificates?"

This must be a bluff. But he says, "No."

Her voice softens. "Why're you so hepped on the girl anyway? Why don't you pretend the boy's yours?"

"I have one boy. He's enough" - the phrase just comes - "bad news." He asks, brusquely, "And where are they? Your boys."

"What's it to you?"

"Nothing much. I was just wondering how come they're not around, helping you with this place."

"Morris is at school, he gets home on the bus after three. Scott has a job in Maryland, working in a plant nursery. I told both him and Annie, Get out. This was a good place for me to come to and hide, but there's nothing here for young people. When she and Jamie Nunemacher got this scheme of going and living together in Brewer, I couldn't say No, though his people were dead set against it. We had a big conference, I told them that's how young people do now, they live together, and aren't they smart? They know I'm an old whore anyway, I don't give a fuck what they think. The neighbors always let us alone and we let them alone. Frank and old Blankenbiller hadn't talked for fifteen years, since he began to take me out." She sees she has wandered, and says, "Annabelle won't be with the boy forever. He's nice enough, but..."

"I agree," Rabbit says, as if consulted. Ruth is lonely, he sees, and willing to talk, and this makes him uneasy. He shifts his weight on the old black sofa. Its springs creak. A shift in the air outside has created a downdraft that sends smoke from the damp fire curling into the room.

She glances to the dead couple in their frames like carved coffins above his head and confides, "Even when Frank was healthy, he had to have the buses to make ends meet. Now I rent the big fields and just try to keep the bushes down. The bushes and the oil bills." And it is true, this room is so cold he has not thought of taking his heavy coat off.

"Yes well," he sighs. "It's hard." Fritzie, wakened by some turn in the dream that had been twitching the ends of her paws, stands and skulks over to him as if to bark, and instead drops down to the rug again, coiling herself trustfully at his feet. With his long arm Harry reaches to the bookcase and lifts out the photograph of the daughter. Ruth does not protest. He studies the pale illumined face in its frame of maroon cardboard: backed by a strange background of streaked blue like an imitation sky, the girl gazes beyond him. Round and polished like a fruit by the slick silk finish of the print, the head, instead of revealing its secret, becomes more enigmatic, a shape as strange as those forms of sea life spotlit beneath the casino boardwalk. The mouth is Ruth's, that upper lip he noticed at the lot. And around the eyes, that squared-off look, though her brow is rounder than Ruth's and her hair, brushed to a photogenic gloss, less stubborn. He looks at the ear, for a nick in the edge like Nelson has; her hair would have to be lifted. Her nose is so delicate and small, the nostrils displayed by a slight upturn of the tip, that the lower half of her face seems heavy, still babyish. There is a candor to her skin and a frosty light to the eyes that could go back to those Swedes in their world of snow; he glimpsed it in the Murketts' bathroom mirror. His blood. Harry finds himself reliving with Annabelle that moment when her turn came in the unruly school line to enter the curtained corner of the gym and, suddenly blinded, to pose for posterity, for the yearbook, for boyfriend and mother, for time itself as it wheels on unheeding by: the opportunity come to press your face up against blankness and, by thinking right thoughts, to become a star. "She looks like me."

Ruth laughs now. "You're seeing things."

"No kidding. When she came to the lot that first time, something hit me -her legs, maybe, I don't know. Those aren't your legs." Which had been thick, twisting like white flame as she moved naked about their room.

"Well, Frank had legs too. Until he let himself get out of shape, he was on the lanky side. Over six foot, when he straightened up, I'm a -sucker for the big ones I guess. Then neither of the boys inherited his height."

"Yeah, Nelson didn't get mine, either. A shrimp just like his mother."

"You're still with Janice. You used to call her a mutt," Ruth reminds him. She has settled into this situation comfortably now, leaning back in the rocker and rocking, her stocking feet going up on tiptoe, then down on the heels, then back on tiptoe. "Why am I telling you all about my life when you don't say a thing about yours?"

"It's pretty standard," he says. "Don't be sore at me because I stayed with Janice. "

"Oh Christ no. I just feel sorry for her."

"A sister," he says, smiling. Women are all sisters, they tell us now.

Fat has been added to Ruth's face not in smooth scoops but in lumps, so when she lifts her head her eye sockets seem built of bony welts. A certain forgiving mischief has lifted her armored glance. "Annie was fascinated by you," she volunteers. "She several times asked me if I'd ever heard of you, this basketball hero. I said we went to different high schools. She was disappointed when you weren't there when she and Jamie went back to pick up the car finally. Jamie had been leaning to a Fiesta."

"So you don't think Jamie is the answer for her?"

"For now. But you've seen him. He's common."

"I hope she doesn't -"

"Go my way? No, it'll be all right. There aren't whores anymore, just healthy young women. I've raised her very innocent. I always felt 1 was very innocent, actually."

"We all are, Ruth."

She likes his saying her name, he should be careful about saying it. He puts the photograph back and studies it in place, Annabelle between her brothers. "How about money?" he asks, trying to keep it light. "Would some help her? I could give it to you so it, you know, wouldn't come out of the blue or anything. If she wants an education, for instance." He is blushing, and Ruth's silence doesn't help. The rocker has stopped rocking.

At last she says, "I guess this is what they call deferred payments."

"It's not for you, it would be for her. I can't give a lot. I mean, I'm not that rich. But if a couple thousand would make a difference -"

He lets the sentence hang, expecting to be interrupted. He can't look at her, that strange expanded face. Her voice when it comes has the contemptuous confident huskiness he heard from her ages ago, in bed. "Relax. You don't have to worry, I'm not going to take you up on it. If I ever get really hard up here I can sell off apiece of road frontage, five thousand an acre is what they've been getting locally. Anyway, Rabbit. Believe me. She's not yours."