John Updike: Rabbit, Run

Of the things he dreads, seeing his parents is foremost. He hasn't had the courage to call them or see them since it happened; Mrs. Springer called Mom Monday night and asked her to the funeral. The silence from his home since then has frightened him. It's one thing to get hell from other people and another from your own parents. Ever since he came back from the Army Pop had been nibbling at a grudge because he wouldn't go to work in the print shop and in a way had nibbled himself right into nothing in Harry's heart. All the mildness and kindness the old man had ever shown him had faded into nothing. But his mother was something else; she was still alive and still attached to his life by some cord. If she comes in and gives him hell he thinks he'll die rather than take it. And of course what else is there to give him? Whatever Mrs. Springer says he can slip away from because in the end she has to stick with him and anyway he feels somehow she wants to like him but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Of all the people in the world he wants to see her least. Sitting there by himself he comes to the conclusion that either he or his mother must die. It is a weird conclusion, but he keeps coming to it, again and again, until the sounds of stirring above him, of the Springers getting dressed, lift his mind out of himself a little.

He wonders if he should go up but he doesn't want to surprise anyone undressed and one by one they come down, dressed, Mr. Springer in a spiffy graphite—gray drip—and—dry and Nelson in a corduroy sissy suit with straps and Mrs. in a black felt hat with a veil and a stiff stem of artificial berries and Janice looking lost and shapeless in the pinned and tucked dress of her mother's. "You look fine," he tells her again.

"Whez big black cah?" Nelson asks in a loud voice.

There is something undignified about waiting and as they mill around in the living room watching the minutes ebb in the silverfaced clock they become uncomfortably costumed children nervous for the party to begin. They all press around the window when the undertaker's Cadillac stops out front, though by the time the man has come up the walk and rings the doorbell they have scattered to the corners of the room as if a bomb of contagion has been dropped among them.

The funeral parlor was once a home but now is furnished the way no home ever was. Unworn carpets of a very pale green deaden their footsteps. Little silver half—tubes on the walls shield a weak glow. The colors of the curtains and walls are atonal halfcolors, colors no one would live with, salmon and aqua and a violet like the violet that kills germs on toilet seats in gas stations. They are ushered into a little pink side room. Harry can see into the main room; on a few rows of auditorium chairs about six people sit, five of them women. The only one he knows is Peggy Gring. Her little boy wriggling beside her makes seven. It was meant to be at first nobody but the families, but the Springers then asked a few close friends. His parents are not here. Invisible hands bonelessly trail up and down the keys of an electric organ. The unnatural coloring of the interior comes to a violent head in the hothouse flowers arranged around a little white coffin. The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform draped with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician's trick, the living baby underneath. Janice looks in and yields a whimper and an undertaker's man, blond and young with an unnaturally red face, conjures a bottle of spirits of ammonia out of his side pocket. Her mother holds it under her nose and Janice suppresses a face of disgust; her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane. Harry takes her arm and turns her so she can't see into the next room.

The side room has a window through which they can look at the street, where children and cars are running. "Hope the minister hasn't forgotten," the young red—faced man says, and to his own embarrassment chuckles. He can't help being at his ease here. His face seems lightly rouged.

"Does that happen often?" Mr. Springer asks. He is standing behind his wife, and his face tips forward with curiosity, his mouth a birdy black gash beneath his sandy mustache. Mrs. Springer has sat down on a chair and is pressing her palms against her face through the veil. The purple berries quiver on their stem of wire.

"About twice a year," is the answer.

A familiar old blue Plymouth slows against the curb outside. Rabbit's mother gets out and looks up and down the sidewalk angrily. His heart leaps and trips his tongue: "Here come my parents." They all come to attention. Mrs. Springer gets up and Harry places himself between her and Janice. Standing in formation with the Springers like this, he can at least show his mother that he's reformed, that he's accepted and been accepted. The undertaker's man goes out to bring them in; Harry can see them standing on the bright sidewalk, arguing which door to go into, Mim a little to one side. Dressed in a church sort of dress and with no makeup, she reminds him of the little sister he once had. The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them.

His mother comes through the door first; her eyes sweep the line of them and she steps toward him with reaching curved arms. "Hassy, what have they done to you?" She asks this out loud and wraps him in a hug as if she would carry him back to the sky from which they have fallen.

This quick it opens, and seals shut again. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he pushes her away and stands to his full height. As if unaware of what she has said, his mother turns and embraces Janice. Pop, murmuring, shakes Springer's hand. Mim comes and touches Harry on the shoulder and then squats and whispers to Nelson, these two the youngest. All under him Harry feels these humans knit together. His wife and mother cling together. His mother began the embrace automatically but has breathed a great life of grief into it. Her face creases in pain; Janice, rumpled and smothered, yet responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the big—boned frame yearning against her. Mary Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height understands. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a woman like her and then had sensed that she too, having restored her son to himself, must be deserted.

He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her amts tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness. They of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, "My daughter," recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.

And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.

Eccles has arrived by some other entrance and from a far doorway beckons them. The seven of them file with Nelson into the room where the flowers wait, and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. Eccles reads. "I am the resurrection and the life, with the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die."