John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich

"Nobody says it. Pru seems a fine girl, if you're ready for marriage."

"You don't think I'm ready. You don't think I'm ready for anything."

He lets the hostility pass, trying to talk meditatively, like Webb Murkett. "You know, Nelson, I'm not sure any man is ever a hundred per cent ready for marriage. I sure as hell know I wasn't, from the way I acted toward your mother."

"Yeah, well," the boy says, in a voice a little crumbled, from his father's not taking the bait. "She got her own back."

"I never could hold that against her. Or Charlie either. You ought to understand. After we got back together that time, we've both been pretty straight. We've even had a fair amount of fun together, in our dotage. I'm just sorry we had so much working out to do, with you still on the scene."

"Yeah, well." Nelson's voice sounds breathy and tight, and he keeps looking at his knees, even when Harry hangs that tricky left turn onto Eisenhower Avenue. The boy clears his throat and volunteers, "It's the times, I guess. A lot of the kids I got to know at Kent, they had horror stories worse than any of mine."

"Except that thing with Jill. They couldn't top that, I bet." He doesn't quite chuckle. Jill is a sacred name to the boy; he will never talk about it. Harry goes on clumsily, as the car gains momentum downhill and the spic and black kids strolling uphill to school insolently flirt with danger, daring him to hit them, his fenders brushing their bodies, "There's something that doesn't feel right to me in this new development. The girl gets knocked up, O.K., it takes two to tango, you have some responsibility there, nobody can deny it. But then as I understand it she flat out refuses to get the abortion, when one of the good things that's come along in twenty years along with a lot that's not so good is you can go have an abortion now right out in the open, in a hospital, safe and clean as having your appendix out."

So?"

"So why didn't she?"

The boy makes a gesture that Rabbit fears might be an attempt to grab the wheel; his grip tightens. But Nelson is merely waving to indicate a breadth of possibilities. "She had a lot of reasons. I forget what all they were."

"I'd like to hear them."

"Well for one thing she said she knew of women who had their insides all screwed up by abortions, so they could never have a baby. You say it's easy as an appendix but you've never had it done. She didn't believe in it."

"I thought she wasn't that much of a Catholic."

"She wasn't, she isn't, but still. She said it wasn't natural."

"What's natural? In this day and age with all these contraceptives getting knocked up like that isn't natural."

"Well she's shy, Dad. They don't call her Pru for nothing. Going to a doctor like that, and having him scrape you out, she just didn't want to do it."

"You bet she didn't. Shy. She wanted to have a baby, and she wasn't too shy to manage that. How much younger're you than she?"

"A year. A little more. What does it matter? It wasn't just a baby she wanted to have, it was my baby. Or so she said."

"That's sweet. I guess. What did you think about it?"

"I thought it was O.K., probably. It was her body. That's what they all tell you now, it's their body. I didn't see much I could do about it."

"Then it's sort of her funeral, isn't it?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean," Harry says, in his indignation honking at some kids at the intersection of Plum Street who saunter right out toward him, this early in the school year the crossing guards aren't organized yet, "so she decides to keep pregnant till there's no correcting it while this other girl babysits for you, and your mother and grandmother and now this nance of a minister all decide when and how you're going to marry the poor broad. I mean, where do you come in? Nelson Angstrom. I mean, what do you want? Do you know?" In his frustration he hits the rim of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, as the avenue dips down beneath the blackened nineteenth-century stones of the underpass at Eisenhower and Seventh, that in a bad rainstorm is flooded but not today. The arch of this underpass, built without a keystone, by masons all long dead, is famous, and from his earliest childhood has reminded Rabbit of a crypt, of death. They emerge among the drooping wet pennants of low-cost factory outlets.

"Well, I want -"

Fearing the kid is going to say he wants a job at Springer Motors, Harry interrupts: "You look scared, is all I see. Scared to say, No to any of these women. I've never been that great at saying No either, but just because it runs in the family doesn't mean you have to get stuck. You don't necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say."

"Your life seems pretty comfy to me, frankly." They turn down Weiser, the forest of the inner-city mall a fogged green smear in the rearview mirror.

"Yeah, well," Harry says, "it's taken me a fair amount of time to get there. And by the time you get there you're pooped. The world," he tells his son, "is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up."

"Dad, you keep talking about yourself but I don't see what it has to do with me. What can I do with Pru except marry her? She's not so bad, I mean I've known enough girls to know they all have their limits. But she's a person, she's a friend. It's as if you want to deny her to me, as if you're jealous or something. The way you keep mentioning her baby."

This kid should have been spanked at some point. "I'm not jealous, Nelson. Just the opposite. I feel sorry for you."

"Don't feel sorry for me. Don't waste your feelings on me."

They pass Schoenbaum Funeral Directors. Nobody out front in this rain. Harry swallows and asks, "Don't you want out, if we could rig it somehow?"

"How could we rig it? She's in her fifth month."

"She could go ahead have the baby without you marrying her. These adoption agencies are crying for white babies, you'd be doing somebody else a favor."

"Pru would never consent."

"Don't be too sure. We could ease the pain. She's one of seven, she knows the value of a dollar."

"Dad, this is crazy talk. You're forgetting this baby is a person. An Angstrom!"

"Jesus, how could I forget that?"

The light at the foot of Weiser, before the bridge, is red. Harry looks over at his son and gets an impression of something freshly hatched, wet and not quite unfolded. The light turns green. A bronze plaque on a pillar of pebbled concrete names the mayor for whom the bridge was named but it is raining too hard to read it.

He starts up again, "Or you could just, I don't know, not make any decision, just disappear for a while. I'd give you the money for that."

"Money, you're always offering me money to stay away."

"Maybe because when I was your age I wanted to get away and I couldn't. I didn't have the money. I didn't have the sense. We tried to send you away to get some sense and you've thumbed your nose at it."

"I haven't thumbed my nose, it's just that there's not that much out there. It isn't what you think, Dad. College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they're getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don't give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It's all phony, they're there because parents don't want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. `My little Johnny's at Haavahd.' `My little Nellie's at Kent."'

"Really, that's how you see it? In my day kids wanted to get out in the world. We were scared but not so scared we kept running back to Mama. And Grandmama. What're you going to do when you run out of women to tell you what to do?"

"Same thing you'll do. Drop dead."