Harry turned from the sight. The chief, leading him out the side door, said, "Rich bitch, if she'd given the girl half a reason to stay home she'd be alive today. I see things like this every week. All our bad checks are being cashed. Keep your nose clean, Angstrom, and take care ofyour own." A coach's paternal punch on the arm, and Harry was sent back into the world.
"Pop, how about a quick one?"
"Not today, Harry, not today. We have a surprise for you at home. Mim's coming."
"You sure?" The vigil for Mim is months old; she keeps sending postcards, always with a picture of a new hotel on them.
"Yep. She called your mother this morning from New York City, I talked to your mother this noon. I should have told you but you've had so much on your mind I thought, Might as well save it. Things come in bunches, that's the mysterious truth. We get numb and the Lord lets us have it, that's how His mercy works. You lose your wife, you lose your house, you lose your job. Mim comes in the same day your mother couldn't sleep a wink for nightmares, I bet she's been downstairs all day trying to tidy up if it kills her, you wonder what's next." But he has just said it: Mom's death is next. The number 16A bus joggles, sways, smells of exhaust. The Mt. Judge way, there are fewer Negroes than toward West Brewer. Rabbit sits on the aisle; Pop, by the window, suddenly hawks and spits. The spittle runs in a weak blur down the dirty glass. "Goddammit, but that burns me," he explains, and Rabbit sees they have passed a church, the big gray Presbyterian at Weiser and Park: on its steps cluster some women in overcoats, two young men with backwards collars, nuns and schoolchildren carrying signs and unlit candles protesting the war. This is Moratorium Day. "I don't have much use for Tricky Dick and never have," Pop is explaining, "but the poor devil, he's trying to do the decent thing over there, get us out so the roof doesn't fall in until after we leave, and these queer preachers so shortsighted they can't see across the pulpit go organizing these parades that all they do is convince the little yellow Reds over there they're winning. If I were Nixon I'd tax the bejesus out of the churches, it'd take some of the burden off the little man. Old Cushing up there in Boston must be worth a hundred million just by his lonesome."
"Pop, all they're saying is they want the killing to stop."
"They've got you too, have they? Killing's not the worst thing around. Rather shake the hand of a killer than a traitor."
So much passion, where he now feels none, amuses Harry, makes him feel protected, at home. It has been his salvation, to be home again. The same musty teddy-bear smells from the carpet, the same embrace of hot air when you open the cellar door, the same narrow stairs heading up off the living room with the same loose baluster that lost its dowel and has to be renailed again and again, drying out in the ebb of time; the same white-topped kitchen table with the four sets of worn spots where they used to eat. An appetite for boyish foods has returned: for banana slices on cereal, for sugar doughnuts though they come in boxes with cellophane windows now instead ofin waxpaper bags, for raw carrots and cocoa, at night. He sleeps late, so he has to be wakened for work; in Penn Villas, in the house where Janice never finished making curtains, he would be the one the sun would usually rouse first. Here in Mt. Judge familiar gloom encloses him. The distortions in Mom's face and speech, which used to distress him during his visits, quickly assimilate to the abiding reality of her presence, which has endured all these years he has been absent and which remains the same half of the sky, sealing him in – like the cellar bulkhead out back, of two heavy halves. As a child he used to crouch on the cement steps beneath them and listen to the rain. The patter above seemed to be pitting his consciousness lovingly and mixin g its sound with the brusque scrape and stride of Mom working in the kitchen. She still, for spells, can work in the kitchen. Harry's being home, she claims, is worth a hundred doses of L-dopa.
The one disturbing element, new and defiant of assimilation, is Nelson. Sullen, grieving, strangely large and loutish sprawled on the caneback davenport, his face glazed by some television of remembrance: none of them quite know what to do about him. He is not Harry, he is sadder than Harry ever was, yet he demands the privileges and indulgence of Harry's place. In the worn shadows of the poorly lit half-house on Jackson Road, the Angstroms keep being startled by Nelson's ungrateful presence, keep losing him. "Where's Nellie?" "Where did the kid get to?" "Is the child upstairs or down?" are questions the other three often put to one another. Nelson stays in his temporary room – Mim's old room -for hours of listening to rock-pop-folk turned down to a murmur. He skips meals without explaining or apologizing, and is making a scrapbook of news items the Brewer papers have carried about their fire. Rabbit discovered this scrapbook yesterday, snooping in the boy's room. Around the clippings the boy had drawn with various colors of ballpoint flowers, peace signs, Tao crosses, musical notes, psychedelic rainbows, those open-ended swirling doodles associated with insanity before they became commercial. Also there are two Polaroid snaps of the ruin; Billy took them Monday with a new camera his father had given him. The photos, brownish and curling, show a half-burned house, the burned half dark like a shadow but active in shape, eating the unburned half, the garage studs bent like matchsticks in an ashtray. Looking at the photographs, Rabbit smells ash. The smell is real and not remembered. In Nelson's closet he finds the source, a charred guitar. So that is why it wasn't in the garage when he looked for it, to give to Jill's mother. She is back in Connecticut now, let the poor kid keep it. His father can't reach him, and lives with him in his parents' house as an estranged, because too much older, brother.
He and his father see, walking up Jackson Road, a strange car parked in front of number 303, a white Toronado with orangeon-blue New York plates. His father's lope accelerates; "There's Mim!" he calls, and it is. She is upstairs and comes to the head of the stairs as they enter beneath the fanlight of stained glass; she descends and stands with them in the murky little foyer. It is Mim. It isn't. It has been years since Rabbit has seen her. "Hi," Mim says, and kisses her father dryly, on the cheek. They were never, even when the children were little, much of a family for kissing. She would kiss her brother the same way, dismissingly, but he holds her, wanting to feel the hundreds of men who have held her before, this his sister whose diapers he changed, who used to hold his thumb when they'd go for Sunday walks along the quarry, who once burst out oh I love you sledding with him, the runners whistling on the dark packed slick, the street waxy with snow still falling. Puzzled by his embrace, Mim kisses him again, another peck on the same cheek, and then finely shrugs his arms away. A competence in that. She feels lean, not an ounce extra but all woman; swimming must do it, in hotel pools, late hours carve the fat away and swimming smooths what's left. She appears to wear no makeup, no lipstick, except for her eyes, which are inhuman, Egyptian, drenched in peacock purple and blue, not merely outlined but re-created, and weighted with lashes he expects to stick fast when she blinks. These marvellously masked eyes force upon her pale mouth all expressiveness; each fractional smile, sardonic crimping, attentive pout, and abrupt broad laugh follows its predecessor so swiftly Harry imagines a coded tape is being fed into her head and producing, rapid as electronic images, this alphabet of expressions. She used to have buck teeth but that has been fixed. Her nose, her one flaw, that kept her off the screen, that perhaps kept her from fame, is still long, with a faceted lump of cartilage at the end, exactly like Mom's nose, but now that Mim is thirty and never going to be a screen beauty seems less a flaw, indeed saves her face from looking like others and gives it, between the peacock eyes and the actressy-fussy mouth, a lenient homeliness. And this, Rabbit guesses, would extend her appeal for men, though now she would get barroom criers, with broken careers and marriages, rather than hard-hearted comers who need an icy showpiece on their arm. In the style of the Sixties her clothes are clownish: bell-bottom slacks striped horizontally as if patched from three kinds of gingham; a pinstripe blouse, mannish but for the puff sleeves; shoes that in color and shape remind him of Donald Duck's bill; and hoop earrings three inches across. Even in high school Mim had liked big earrings; they made her look like a gypsy or Arab then, now, with the tan, Italian. Or Miami Jewish. Her hair is expensively tousled honey-white, which doesn't offend him; not since junior high has she worn it the color it was, the mild brown she once called, while he leaned in her doorway watching her study herself in the mirror, "Protestant rat."