Rabbit doesn't want to tell him anything. The more he tells, the more he loses. He's safe inside his own skin, he doesn't want to come out. This guy's whole game is to get him out into the open where he can be manipulated. But the fierce convention of courtesy pries open Rabbit's lips. "Hell, it's nothing much," he says. "It's just that, well, it's all there is. Don't you think?"
Eccles nods and blinks and drives without saying a word. In his way he's very sure of himself.
"How's Janice now?" Rabbit asks.
Eccles is startled to feel him veer off. "I dropped by Monday morning to tell them you were in the county. Your wife was in the back yard with your boy and what I took to be an old girl friend, a Mrs. – Foster? Fogleman?"
"What did she look like?"
"I don't really know. I was distracted by her sunglasses. They were the mirror kind, with very wide sidepieces."
"Oh, Peggy Gring. She's walleyed. She was in Janice's highschool class and married that jerk Ollie Fosnacht."
"Fosnacht. That's right. Like the doughnut. I knew there was something local about the name."
"You'd never heard of Fosnacht Day before you came here?"
"Never. Not in Norwalk."
"The thing I remember about it, when I was, oh I must have been six or seven, because he died in 1940, my grandfather would wait upstairs until I came down so I wouldn't be the Fosnacht. He lived with us then." Rabbit hasn't thought or spoken of his grandfather in years, it seems; a mild dry taste comes into his mouth.
"What was the penalty for being a Fosnacht?"
"I forget. It was just something you didn't want to be. Wait. I remember, one year I was the last downstairs and my parents or somebody teased me and I didn't like it and I guess I cried, I don't know. Anyway that's why the old man stayed up."
"He was your father's father?"
"My mother's. He lived with us."
"I remember my father's father," Eccles says. "He used to come to Connecticut and have dreadful arguments with my father. My grandfather was the Bishop of Providence, and had kept his church from going under to the Unitarians by becoming almost Unitarian himself. He used to call himself a Darwinian Deist. My father, in reaction I suppose, became very orthodox; almost Anglo—Catholic. He loved Belloc and Chesterton. In fact he used to read to us those poems you heard my wife objecting to."
"About the lion?"
"Yes. Belloc has this bitter mocking streak my wife can't appreciate. He mocks children, which she can't forgive. It's her psychology. Children are very sacred in psychology. Where was I? Yes; along with his watered—down theology my grandfather had kept in his religious practice a certain color and a, a rigor that my father had lost. Grandpa felt Daddy was extremely remiss in not having a family worship service every night. My father would say he didn't want to bore his children the way he had been bored with God and anyway what was the good of worshipping a jungle god in the living room? `You don't think God is in the forest?' my grandfather would say. Just behind stained glass?' And so on. My brothers and I used to tremble, because it put Daddy into a terrible depression, ultimately, to argue with him. You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. A little dried—up old man with a Yankee accent who was really awfully dear. I remember he used to grab us by the knee at mealtimes with this brown bony hand and croak, `Has he made you believe in Hell?' "
Harry laughs; Eccles' imitation is good; being an old man fits him. "Did he? Do you?"
"Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God."
"Well then we're all more or less in it."
"I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call" – he looks at Harry and laughs – "inner darkness."
Eccles' volunteering all this melts Rabbit's caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and jiggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, "Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this" – he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half—wood half—brick one—and—a—half—stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three—year—old trees, the un—grandest landscape in the world – "there's something that wants me to find it."
Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny crossnotched cup in the car ashtray. "Of course, all vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first."
Rabbit doesn't see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserved this slap. He supposes this is what ministers need, to cut everybody down to the same miserable size. He says, "Well I guess that makes your friend Jesus look pretty foolish."
Mention of the holy name incites pink spots high on Eccles' cheeks. "He did say," the minister says, "that saints shouldn't marry."
They turn off the road and go up the winding drive to the clubhouse, a big cinder—block building fronted with a long sign that has CHESTNUT GROVE GOLF COURSE lettered between two Coca-Cola insignia. When Harry caddied here it was just a clapboard shack holding a wood—burning stove and charts of old tournaments and two armchairs and a counter for candy bars and golf balls you fished out of the swamp and that Mrs. Wenrich resold. He supposes Mrs. Wenrich is dead. She was a delicate old rouged widow like a doll with white hair and it always seemed funny to hear talk about greens and divots and tourneys and par come out of her mouth. Eccles parks the long Buick on the asphalt lot and says, "Before I forget."
Rabbit's hand is on the door handle. "What?"
"Do you want a job?"
"What kind?"
"A parishioner of mine, a Mrs. Horace Smith, has about eight acres of garden around her home, toward Appleboro. Her husband was an incredible rhododendron enthusiast. I shouldn't say incredible; he was a terribly dear old man."
"I don't know beans about gardening."
"Nobody does, that's what Mrs. Smith says. There are no gardeners left. For forty dollars a week, I believe her."
"A buck an hour. That's pretty poor."
"It wouldn't be forty hours. Flexible time. That's what you want, isn't it? Flexibility? So you can be free to preach to the multitudes."
Eccles really does have a mean streak. Him and Belloc. Without the collar around his throat, he kind of lets go. Rabbit gets out of the car. Eccles does the same, and his head across the top of the car looks like a head on a platter. The wide mouth moves: "Please consider it."
"I can't. I may not even stay in the county."
"Is the girl going to kick you out?"
"What girl?"
"What is her name? Leonard. Ruth Leonard."
"Well. Aren't you smart?" Who could have told him? Peggy Gring? By way of Tothero? More likely Tothero's girl Whatsername. She looked like Janice. It doesn't matter; the world's such a web anyway, things just tremble through. "I never heard of her," Rabbit says.
The head on the platter grins weirdly in the sunglare off the grease—gray metal.
They walk side by side to the cement—block clubhouse. On the way Eccles remarks, "It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt."
"Say. I didn't have to show up today, you know."
"I know. Forgive me. I'm in a very depressed mood."
There's nothing exactly wrong with his saying this, but it rubs Harry's inner hair the wrong way. It kind of clings. It says, Pity me. Love me. The prickly sensation makes his lips sticky; he is unable to open them to respond. When Eccles pays his way, he carp scarcely negotiate thanking him. When they pick out a set of clubs for him to rent, he is so indifferent and silent the freckled kid in charge stares at him as if he's a moron. The thought flits through his brain that Eccles is known as a fag and he has become the new pet. As he and Eccles walk together toward the first tee he feels dragged down, lame.