Janice breaks in: "Really, Mother, it makes much more sense for Harry and me at this point of our lives."
"But I had to talk her into it, Ma; it was my idea. When you and Fred very kindly took us in after we got back together I never thought of it as for forever. I thought of it as more of a stop-gap thing, until we got our feet back under us."
What he had liked about it, he sees now, was that it would have made it easy for him to leave Janice: just walk out under the streetlights and leave her with her parents. But he hadn't left her, and now cannot. She is his fortune.
She is trying to soften her mother's silence. "Also as an investment, Mother. Every couple we know owns their own house, even this bachelor we were with last night, and a lot of the men earn less than Harry. Property's the only place to put money ifyou have any, what with inflation and all."
Ma Springer at last does speak, in a voice that keeps rising in spite of herself. "You'll have this place when I'm gone, if you could just wait. Why can't you wait a little yet?"
"Mother, that's ghoulish when you talk like that. We don't want to wait for your house; Harry and I want our house now." Janice lights a cigarette, and has to press her elbow onto the tabletop to hold the match steady.
Harry assures the old lady, "Bessie, you're going to live forever." But having seen what's happening to her skin he knows this isn't true.
Wide-eyed suddenly, she asks, "What's going to happen to this house then?"
Rabbit nearly laughs, the old lady's expression is so childlike, taken with the pitch of her voice. "It'll be fine," he tells her. "When they built places like this they built 'em to last. Not like the shacks they slap up now."
"Fred always wanted Janice to have this house," Ma Springer states, staring with eyes narrowed again at a place just between Harry's and Janice's heads. "For her security."
Janice laughs now. "Mother, I have plenty of security. We told you about the gold and silver."
"Playing with money like that is a good way to lose it," Ma says. "I don't want to leave this house to be auctioned off to some Brewer Jew. They're heading out this way, you know, now that the blacks and Puerto Ricans are trickling into the north side of town."
"Come on, Bessie," Harry says, "what do you care? Like I said, you got a lot of life ahead of you, but when you're gone, you're gone. Let go, you got to let some things go for other people to worry about. The Bible tells you that, it says it on every page. Let -go; the Lord knows best."
Janice from her twitchy manner thinks he is saying too much. "Mother, we might come back to the house -"
"When the old crow is dead. Why didn't you and Harry tell me my presence was such a burden? I tried to stay in my room as much as I could. I went into the kitchen only when it looked like nobody else was going to make the meal -"
"Mother, stop it. You've been lovely. We both love you."
"Grace Stuhl would have taken me in, many's the times she offered. Though her house isn't half the size of this and has all those front steps." She sniffs, so loudly it seems a cry for help.
Nelson shouts in from the living room, "Mom-mom, when's lunch?"
Janice says urgently, "See, Mother. You're forgetting Nelson. He'll be here, with his family."
The old lady sniffs again, less tragically, and replies with pinched lips and a level red-rimmed gaze, "He may be or he may not be. The young can't be depended on."
Harry tells her, "You're right about that all right. They won't fight and they won't learn, just sit on their asses and get stoned."
Nelson comes into the kitchen holding a newspaper, today's Brewer Standard. He looks cheerful for once, on his good night's sleep. He has folded the paper to a quiz on Seventies trivia and asks them all, "How many of these people can you identify? Renée Richards, Stephen Weed, Megan Marshack, Marjoe Gortner, Greta Rideout, Spider Sabich, D. B. Cooper. I got six out of seven, Pru got only four."
"Renée Richards was Patty Hearst's boyfriend," Rabbit begins.
Nelson sees the state his grandmother's face is in and asks, "What's happening here?"
Janice says, "We'll explain later, sweetie."
Harry tells him, "Your mother and I have found a house we're going to move to."
Nelson stares from one to the other of his parents and it seems he might scream, the way he goes white around the gills. But instead he pronounces quietly, "What a copout. What a fucking pair of copout artists. Well screw you both. Mom, Dad. Screw you."
And he returns to the living room where the rumble of drums and trombones merges with the mumble of unheard words as he and Pru confer within the tunnel of their young marriage. The kid had felt frightened. He felt left. Things are getting too big for him. Rabbit knows the feeling. For all that is wrong between them there are moments when his heart and Nelson's might be opposite ends of a single short steel bar, he knows so exactly what the kid is feeling. Still, just because people are frightened of being alone doesn't mean he has to sit still and be everybody's big fat patsy like Mim said.
Janice and her mother are holding hands, tears blurring both faces. When Janice cries, her face loses shape, dissolves to the ugly child she was. Her mother is saying, moaning as if to herself, "Oh I knew you were looking but I guess I didn't believe you'd actually go ahead and buy one when you have this free. Isn't there any adjustment we could make here so you could change your minds or at least let me get adjusted first? I'm too old, is the thing, too old to take on responsibility. The boy means well in his way but he's all ferhuddled for now, and the girl, I don't know. She wants to do it all but I'm not sure she can. To be honest, I've been dreading the baby, I've been trying to remember how it was with you and Nelson, and for the life of me I can't. I remember the milk didn't come the way they thought it should, and the doctor was so ride to you about it Fred had to step in and have a word."
Janice is nodding, nodding, tears making the side of her nose shine, the cords on her throat jumping out with every sob. "Maybe we could wait, though we said we'd pass papers, if you feel that way at least wait until the baby comes."
There is a rhythm the two of them are rocking to, hands clasped on the table, heads touching. "Do what you must, for your own happiness," Ma Springer is saying, "the ones left behind will manage. It can't do worse than kill me, and that might be a blessing."
She is turning Janice into a mess: face blubbery and melting, the pockets beneath her eyes liverish with guilt, Janice is leaning hard into her mother, giving in on the house, begging for forgiveness, "Mother we thought, Harry was certain, you'd feel less alone, with -"
"With a worry like Nelson in the house?"
Tough old turkey. Harry better step in before Janice gives it all away. His throat hardens. "Listen, Bessie. You asked for him, you got him."
Free! Macadam falls away beneath the wheels, a tawny old fort can be glimpsed as they lift off the runway beneath the rounded riveted edge of one great wing, the gas tanks of South Philadelphia are reduced to a set of white checkers. The wheels thump, retracted, and cruel photons glitter on the aluminum motionless beside the window. The swift ascent of the plane makes their blood weighty; Janice's hand sweats in his. She had wanted him to have the window seat, so she wouldn't have to look. There is marsh below, withered tan and blue with saltwater. Harry marvels at the industrial buildings beyond the Delaware: flat gravel roofs vast as parking lots and parking lots all inlaid with glittering automobile roofs like bathroom floors tiled with jewels. And in junkyards of cars the effect is almost as brilliant. The NO SMOKING sign goes off. Behind the Angstroms the voices of the Murketts and the Harrisons begin to chatter. They all had a drink at an airport bar, though the hour was eleven in the morning. Harry has flown before, but to Texas with the Army and dealers' conferences in Cleveland and Albany: never aloft on vacation like this, due east into the sun.