Making awkward calls is agony for Eccles; at least anticipation of them is. Usually, the dream is worse than the reality: God rules reality. The actual presences of people are always bearable. Mrs. Springer is a plump, dark, small?boned woman with a gypsy look about her. Both the mother and the daughter have a sinister aura, but in the mother this ability to create uneasiness is a settled gift, thoroughly meshed into the strategies of middle?class life. With the daughter it is a floating thing, useless and as dangerous to herself as to others. Eccles is relieved that Janice is out of the house; he feels guiltiest in her presence. She and Mrs. Fosnacht have gone into Brewer to a matinee of Some Like It Hot. Their two sons are in the Springers' back yard. Mrs. Springer takes him through the house to the screened?in porch, where she can keep an eye on the children. Her house is expensively but confusedly famished; each room seems to contain one more easy chair than necessary. To get from the front door to the back they take a crooked path in the packed rooms. She leads him slowly; both of her ankles are bound in elastic bandages. The pained littleness of her steps reinforces his illusion that her hips are encased in a plaster cast. She gently lowers herself onto the cushions of the porch glider and startles Eccles by kicking up her legs as, with a squeak and sharp sway, the glider takes her weight. The action seems to express pleasure; her bald pale calves stick out stiff and her saddle shoes are for a moment lifted from the floor. These shoes are cracked and rounded, as if they've been revolved in a damp tub for years. He sits down in a trickily hinged aluminumand?plastic lawn chair. Through the porch screen at his side, he can see Nelson Angstrom and the slightly older Fosnacht boy play in the sun around a swing?slide?and?sandbox set. Eccles once bought one of those and when it came, all in pieces in a long cardboard box, was humiliated to find himself unable to put it together; Angus, the old deaf sexton, finally had to do it for him.
"It's nice to see you," Mrs. Springer says. "It's been so long since you came last."
`Just three weeks, isn't it?" he says. The chair presses against his back and he hooks his heels around the pipe at the bottom to keep it from folding. "It's been a busy time, with the confirmation classes and the Youth Group deciding to have a softball team this year and a number of deaths in the parish." His previous contacts with this woman have not disposed him to be apologetic. Her having so large a home offends his aristocratic sense of caste; he would like her better, and she would be more comfortable, if her place were smaller.
"Yes I wouldn't want your job for the world."
"I enjoy it most of the time."
"They say you do. They say you're becoming quite an expert golf player."
Oh dear. And he thought she was relaxing. He thought for the moment they were on the porch of a shabby peeling house and she was a long?suffering fat factory wife who had learned to take fife as it came. That is what she looked like; that is easily what she might have been. Fred Springer when he married her was probably less likely?looking than Harry Angstrom when her daughter married him. He tries to imagine Harry four years ago, and gets a presentable picture: tall, fair, famous in his school days, clever enough ? a son of the morning. His air of confidence must have especially appealed to Janice. David and Michal. Defraud ye not one the other .... He scratches his forehead and says, "Playing golf with someone is a good way to get to know him. That's what I try to do, you understand ? get to know people. I don't think you can lead someone to Christ unless you know him."
"Well now what do you know about my son?in?law that I don't?"
"That he's a good man, for one thing."
"Good for what?"
"Must you be good for something?" He tries to think. "Yes, I suppose you must."
"Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom's son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy's chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him. Young Fosnacht stands fast, with the maddening invulnerability of the stupid, looking down at the flailing hand and contorted face of the smaller boy without even a smile of satisfaction, a true scientist, observing without passion the effect of his experiment. Mrs. Springer's voice leaps to a frantic hardness and cuts through the screen: "Did you hear me I said stop that bawling!"
Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have ?Pilly -" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.
"The boy's taken his truck," he tells Mrs. Springer.
"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."
"Billy." The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. "Give it back." Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately. "Now, please." Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.
The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his misery is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these comers seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.
"I don't know why the boy is such a sissy," Mrs. Springer says. "Or maybe I do."
Her sly adding this irks Eccles. "Why?"
The liverish skin under her eyes lifts and the corners of her mouth pull down in an appraising scowl. "Well, he's like his dad: spoiled. He's been made too much of and thinks the world owes him what he wants."
"It was the other boy; Nelson only wanted what was his."
"Yes and I suppose you think with his dad it was all Janice's fault." The way she pronounces ` Janice" makes the girl seem more substantial, precious, and important than the pathetic shadow in Eccles' mind. He wonders if she's not, after all, right: if he hasn't gone over to the other side.
"Nó I don't," he says. "I think his behavior has no justification. This isn't to say, though, that his behavior doesn't have reasons, reasons that in part your daughter could have controlled. With my Church, I believe that we are all responsible beings, responsible for ourselves and for each other." The words, so well turned?out, taste chalky in his mouth. He wishes she'd offer him something to drink. Spring is turning warm.
The old gypsy sees his uncertainty. "Well that's easy to say," she says. "It's not so easy maybe to take such a view if you're nine months expecting and from a respectable home and your husband's running around a few miles away with some bat and everybody thinks it's the funniest thing since I don't know what." The word "bat" darts into the air like one, quick and black.
"Nobody thinks it's funny, Mrs. Springer."
"You don't hear the talk I do. You don't see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can't keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, `A man has duty too. It isn't all one way.' It's women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world's just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half?believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they'll need your church?"
She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and abrades Eccles' face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his notes dissolve into nonsense. He fumbles through his memory and manages to bring out, "I feel Harry is in some respects a special case."
"The only thing special about him is he doesn't care who he hurts or how much. Now I mean no offense, Reverend Eccles, and I'm sure you've done your best considering how busy you are, but to be honest I wish that first night I had called the police like I wanted to."
He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest him. Why not? With his white collar he forges God's name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life, the God who smokes cigars. He asks her, "What can the police do?"
"Well I don't know but more than play golf I expect."
"I'm quite sure he will come back."
"You've been saying that for two months."
"I still believe it." But he doesn't, he doesn't believe anything. There is silence while Mrs. Springer seems to read this fact in his face.
"Could you" ? her voice is changed; it beseeches ? "bring me over that stool there in the corner? I have to get my legs up."
When he blinks, his eyelids scratch. He rouses from his daze and gets the stool and takes it to her. Her broad shins in their green childlike socks lift meekly, and as he places the stool under the heels, his bending, with its echo of religious?pamphlet paintings of Christ washing the feet ofbeggars, fits his body to receive a new flow of force. He straightens up and towers above her. She plucks at her skirt at the knees, tugging it down.
"Thank you," she says. "That's a real relief for me."
"I'm afraid it's the only sort of relief I've given you," he confesses with a simplicity that he finds, and mocks himself for finding, admirable.
"Ah," she sighs. "There's not much anybody can do I guess."
"No, there are things to do. Perhaps you're right about the police. Or at least a lawyer."
"Fred's against it."
"Mr. Springer has good reasons. I don't mean merely business reasons. All the law can extract from Harry is financial support; and I don't think, in this case, that money is really the point. In fact I'm not sure money is ever really the point."
"That's easy to say if you've always had enough." He doesn't mind. It seems to slip from her automatically, with less malice than lassitude; he is certain she wants to listen.
"That may be. I don't know. But at any rate my concern everyone's concern for that matter, I'm sure ? is with the general health of the situation. And if there's to be a true healing, it must be Harry and Janice who act. Really, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we try to do on the fringes, we're outside." In imitation of his father he has clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on his auditor; through the screen he watches the one other who, perhaps, is not outside, Nelson, lead the Fosnacht boy across the lawn in pursuit of a neighbor's dog. Nelson's laughter spills from his head as his clumsy tottering steps jar his body. The dog is old, reddish, small, and slow; the Fosnacht boy is puzzled yet pleased by his friend's cry of "Lion! Lion!" It interests Eccles to see that under conditions of peace Angstrom's boy leads the other. The green air seen through the muzzy screen seems to vibrate with Nelson's noise. Eccles feels the situation: this constant translucent outpour of selfless excitement must naturally now and then dam in the duller boy's narrower passages and produce a sullen backflow, a stubborn bullying act. He pities Nelson, who will be stranded in innocent surprise many times before he locates in himself the source of this strange reverse tide. It seems to Eccles that he himselfwas this way as a boy, always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped. The old dog's tail wags as the boys approach. It stops wagging and droops in an uncertain wary arc when they surround it like hunters, crowing. Nelson reaches out and beats the dog's back with both hands. Eccles wants to shout; the dog might bite; he can't bear to watch.
"Yes but he drifts further away," Mrs. Springer is whining. "He's well off. He has no reason to come back if we don't give him one."
Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. "No. He'll come back for the same reason he left. He's fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he's in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won't continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I've noticed a change."
"Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says she hears he's leading the life of Riley. I don't know how many women he has."
"Just one, I'm sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he's by nature a domestic creature. Oh dear."
There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched by fright.
Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, "Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more."
Eccles jumps up ? his chair collapses behind him ? and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. "Did the dog bite?"
The boy's sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.
"Did Elsie bite you?"
The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.
Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles' arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.
Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child's cheek. "Like that? Did the dog do that?"
The boy's face goes rapt at the pantomime. "Like dis," he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.
"No bite?" Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.
The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry's. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.
As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct: the kitten's instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.
He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grand-mother's legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong ? as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world ? he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, "If he doesn't come back when she has the baby, then you should get the law after him. There are laws, of course; quite a few."
"Elsie snaps," Mrs. Springer says, "because you and Billy tease her."
"Naughty Elsie," Nelson says.
"Naughty Nelson," Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, "Yes well she's a week due now and I don't see him running in."
His moment of sympathy for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer's voice carries after him into the house, "Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you're going to get a whipping from your grandmom."
"No, Mom?mom," the child begs coyly, fright gone.
Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumble of rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms' number, 303.
Mrs. Angstrom has four?cornered nostrils. Lozenge?shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra?defined; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day: their home is the dark side of a two?family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer's fat ? soft, aching excess ? had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a woman like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom's is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry's size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small as a glass of water.
"I don't know why you come to me," she says. "Harold's one and twenty. I have no control over him."
"He hasn't been to see you?"
"No sir." She displays her profile above her left shoulder. "You've made him so ashamed I suppose he's embarrassed to."
"He should be ashamed, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she's two?thirds crazy."
"Oh now, that's not true, is it?"
"Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was, Why don't I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life."
"Surely you don't think she meant anything."
"No, she didn't mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run?down half?house when she came from a great big stucco barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and, Wasn't I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well?equipped little trick? I never liked that girl's eyes. They never met your face full?on." She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles ? an old?fashioned type, circles of steel?rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light ?her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't ? whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that's it, it's the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn't really see him at all. Her confrontation is with everybody, and secure under the breadth of her satire he can say what he pleases.
He bluntly defends Janice. "The girl is shy."
"Shy! She wasn't too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirt?tail in."
"He was one and twenty, as you say."
"Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old."
Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn't acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. "About as shy as a snake," she says, "that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody's sympathy. Well she doesn't get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father?in?law talk she's the worst martyr since Joan of Arc."
