"At least the Jehovah's Witnesses put into practice what they say they believe." When Eccles turns to Harry to guffaw conspiratorially after this dig, bitterness cripples his laugh, turns his lips in tightly, so his small jawed head shows its teeth like a skull.
"I don't know what that's supposed to mean," Lucy says, "but when you asked me to marry you I told you what I felt and you said all right fine."
"I said as long as your heart remained open for Grace." Eccles pours these words on her in a high strained blast that burns his broad forehead, soils it with a blush.
"Mommy I had a rest." The little voice, shyly penetrating, surprises them from above. At the head of the carpeted stairs a small tan girl in underpants hangs in suspense. She seems to Rabbit too dark for her parents, braced on silhouetted legs of baby fat knotted on longer stalks. Her hands rub and pluck her naked chest in exasperation. She hears her mother's answer before it comes.
"Joyce. You go right back into your own bed and have a nap."
"I can't. There's too many noises."
"We've been screaming right under her head," Eccles tells his wife.
"You've been screaming. About Grace."
"I had a scary dream," Joyce says, and thumpingly descends two steps.
"You did not. You were never asleep." Mrs. Eccles walks to the foot of the stairs, holding her throat as if to keep some emotion down.
"What was the dream about?" Eccles asks his child.
"A lion ate a boy."
"That's not a dream at all," the woman snaps, and turns on her husband: "It's those hateful Belloc poems you insist on reading her."
"She asks for them."
"They're hateful. They give her traumas."
"Joyce and I think they're funny."
"Well you both have perverted senses of humor. Every night she asks me about that damn pony Tom and what does `die' mean?"
"Tell her what it means. If you had Belloc's and my faith in the afterlife these perfectly natural questions wouldn't upset you."
"Don't harp, Jack. You're awful when you harp."
"I'm awful when I take myself seriously, you mean."
"Hey. I smell cake burning," Rabbit says.
She looks at him and recognition frosts her eyes. That there is some kind of cold call in her glance, a faint shout from the midst of her enemies, he feels but ignores, letting his gaze go limp on the top of her head, showing her the sensitive nostrils that sniffed the cake.
"If only you would take yourself seriously," she says to her husband, and on glimpsey bare legs flies down the sullen hall of the rectory.
Eccles calls, "Joyce, go back to your room and put on a shirt and you can come down."
The child instead thumps down three more steps.
"Joyce, did you hear me?"
"You get it, Dayud—dee."
"Why should I get it? Daddy's all the way downstairs."
"I don't know where it is."
"You do too. Right on your bureau."
`I don't know where my bruro is."
"In your room, sweet. Of course you know where it is. You get your shirt and I'll let you downstairs."
But she is already halfway down.
"I'm frightened of the li—un," she sighs with a little smile that betrays consciousness of her own impudence. Her voice has a spaced, testing quality; Rabbit heard this note of care in her mother's voice too, when she was teasing the same man.
"There's no lion up there. There's nobody up there but Bonnie sleeping. Bonnie's not afraid."
"Please, Daddy. Please please please please please." She has reached the foot of the stairs and seizes and squeezes her father's knees.
Eccles laughs, bracing his unbalanced weight on the child's head, which is rather broad and flat—topped, like his own. "All right," he says. "You wait here and talk to this funny man." And bounds up the stairs with that unexpected athleticism.
Called into action, Rabbit says, `Joyce, are you a good girl?"
She waggles her stomach and pulls her head into her shoulders. The motion forces a little guttural noise, "cukk," out of her throat. She shakes her head; he has the impression she is trying to hide behind a screen of dimples. But then she says with unexpectedly firm enunciation, "Yes."
"And is your mommy good?"
"Yes."
"What makes her so good?" He hopes Mrs. Eccles hears this in the kitchen. The hurried oven sounds have stopped.
Joyce looks up at him and like a sheet being rippled fear tugs a corner of the surface of her face. Really tears seem close. She scampers from him down the hall, the way her mother went. Fled from, Rabbit wanders uneasily in the hall, trying to attach his excited heart to the pictures hanging there. Surfaces of foreign capitals, a woman in white beneath a tree whose every leaf is rimmed in gold, a laborious pen rendering, brick by brick, of the St. John's Episcopal Church, dated 1927 and signed large by Mildred L. Kramer. Above a small table halfway down the hall hangs a studio photograph of some old rock with white hair above his ears and a clerical collar staring over your shoulder as if square into the heart of things; stuck into the frame is a yellowed photo clipped from a newspaper showing in coarse dots the same old gent gripping a cigar and laughing like a madman with three others in robes. He looks a little like Jack but fatter and stronger. He holds the cigar in a fist. Further on is a colored print of a painted scene in a workshop where the carpenter works in the light given off by his Helper's head: the glass this print is protected by gives back to Rabbit the shadow of his own head. There is a tangy scent in the hallway of, spot cleaner? new varnish? mothballs? old wallpaper? He hovers among these possibilities, "the one who disappeared." Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth – what a bitch, really. Yet with a nice low flame in her, lighting up her legs. Those bright white legs. She'd have an anxious little edge and want her own. A cookie. A sharp little vanilla cookie. In spite of herself he loves her.
There must be a back stairs, because he next hears Eccles' voice in the kitchen, arguing Joyce into her sweater, asking Lucy if the cake was ruined, explaining, not knowing Rabbit's ears were around the corner, "Don't think this is pleasure for me. It's work."
"There's no other way to talk to him?"
"He's frightened."
"Sweetie, everybody's frightened to you."
"But he's even frightened of me."
"Well he came through that door cocky enough."
This was the place for, And he slapped my sweet ass, that's yours to defend.
What! Your sweet ass! I'll murder the rogue. I'll call the police.
In reality Lucy's voice stopped at "enough," and Eccles is talking about if so—and—so telephoned, where are those new golfballs?, Joyce you had a cookie ten minutes ago, and at last calling, in a voice that has healed too smooth over the scratches of their quarrel, "Goodbye, my dears." Rabbit pads up the hall and is leaning on the front radiator when Eccles, looking like a young owl – awkward, cross – pops out of the kitchen.
They go to his car. Under the threat of rain the skin of the Buick has a greasy waxiness. Eccles lights a cigarette and they go down, across Route 422, into the valley toward the golf course. Eccles says, after getting several deep drags settled in his chest, "So your trouble isn't really lack of religion."
"Huh?"
"I was remembering our other conversation. About the waterfall and the tree."
"Yeah welclass="underline" I stole that from Mickey Mouse."
Eccles laughs, puzzled; Rabbit notices how his mouth stays open after he laughs, the little inturned rows of teeth waiting a moment while his eyebrows go up and down expectantly. "It stopped me short," he admits, closing this flirtatious cave. "Then you said you know what's inside you. I've been wondering all weekend what that was. Can you tell me?"