"Do you want cream?"
"No. No. I'll drink it black."
"We have cream if you want it."
"No, really. It's fine."
Janice is awake. He goes upstairs and lies down beside her on the bed; she clings to him and sobs into the cup between his neck and jaw and the sheet. Her face has been shrunk; her body seems small as a child's, and hot and hard. She tells him, "I can't stand to look at anyone except you. I can't bear to look at the others."
"It wasn't your fault," he tells her. "It was mine."
"I've got my milk back," Janice says, "and every time my breasts sting I think she must be in the next room."
They cling together in a common darkness; he feels the walls between them dissolve in a flood of black; but the heavy knot of apprehension remains in his chest, his own.
He stays in the house all that day. Visitors come, and tiptoe about. Their manner suggests that Janice upstairs is very sick. They sit, these women, over coffee in the kitchen with Mrs. Springer, whose petite rounded voice, oddly girlish divorced from the sight of her body, sighs on and on like an indistinct, rising and falling song. Peggy Fosnacht comes, her sunglasses off, her walleyes wide to the world, and goes upstairs. Her son Billy plays with Nelson, and no one moves to halt their squeals of anger and pain in the back yard, which, neglected, in time die away. Even Harry has a visitor. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Springer goes and comes into the dim room where Harry is sitting looking at magazines and says, in a surprised and injured voice, "A man for you."
She leaves the doorway and he gets up and walks a few steps forward to greet the man coming into the room, Tothero, leaning on a cane and his face half—paralyzed; but talking, walking, alive. And the baby dead. "Hi! Gee, how are you?"
"Harry." With the hand that is not on the cane he grips Harry's arm. He brings a long look to bear on Harry's face; his mouth is tweaked downward on one side and the skin over his eye on this side is dragged down diagonally so it nearly curtains the glitter. The gouging grip of his fingers trembles.
"Let's sit down," Rabbit says, and helps him into an easy chair. Tothero knocks off a doily in arranging his arms. Rabbit brings over a straight chair and sits close so he won't have to raise his voice. "Should you be running around?" he asks when Tothero says nothing.
"My wife brought me. In the car. Outside, Harry. We heard your terrible news. Didn't I warn you?" Already his eyes are bulging with water.
"When?"
"When?" The stricken side of his face is turned away, perhaps consciously, into shadow, so his smile seems wholly alive, wise, and sure. "That first night. I said go back. I begged you."
"I guess you did. I've forgotten."
"No you haven't. No you haven't, Harry." His breath chuffs on the "Ha" of "Harry." "Let me tell you something. Will you listen?"
"Sure."
"Right and wrong," he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. "Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably" – he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words —"misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you've had an example of that in your own life." Rabbit wonders when the tear—trails appeared on Tothero's cheeks; there they are, like snail—tracks. "Do you believe me?"
"Sure. Sure. Look, I know this has been my fault. I've felt like a, like an insect ever since it happened."
Tothero's tranquil smile deepens; a faint rasping purr comes out of his face. "I warned you," he says, "I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless."
Harry blurts, "But what can I do?"
Tothero doesn't seem to hear. "Don't you remember? My begging you to go back?"
"I don't know, I guess so."
"Good. Ali. You're still a fine man, Harry. You have a healthy body. When I'm dead and gone, remember how your old coach told you to avoid suffering. Remember." The last word is intoned coyly, with a little wag of the head; on the thrust of this incongruous vivacity he rises from his chair, and prevents himself from pitching forward by quick use of his cane. Harry jumps up in alarm, and the two of them stand for the moment very close. The old man's big head breathes a distressing scent, not so much medicine as a vegetable staleness. "You young people," he says with a rising intonation, a schoolteacher's tone, scolding yet sly, "tend to forget. Don't you? Now don't you?"
He wants this admission mysteriously much. "Sure," Rabbit says, praying he'll go.
Harry helps him to his car, a '57 blue—and—cream Dodge waiting in front of the orange fire hydrant. Mrs. Tothero offers, rather coolly, her regrets at the death of his infant daughter. She looks harried and noble. Gray hair straggles down across her finely wrinkled silver temple. She wants to get away from here, away with her prize. Beside her on the front seat Tothero looks like a smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curve of his cane. Rabbit returns to the house feeling depressed and dirtied by the visit. Tothero's revelation chilled him. He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all dictates.
Eccles comes later in the afternoon, to complete the arrangements for the funeraclass="underline" it will be held tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday. As he leaves Rabbit catches his attention and they talk in the front hall a moment. "What do you think?" Rabbit asks.
"About what?"
"What shall I do?"
Eccles glances up nervously. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. "Do what you are doing," he says. "Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left."
"And that's enough?"
"You mean to earn forgiveness? I'm sure it is, carried out through a lifetime."
"I mean" – he's never before felt pleading with Eccles "remember that thing we used to talk about? The thing behind everything?"
"Harry, you know I don't think that thing exists in the way you think it does."
"O.K." He realizes that Eccles wants to get away too, that the sight of himself is painful, disgusting.
Eccles must see that he senses this, for he curtly summons up merry and makes an attempt. "Harry, it's not for me to forgive you. You've done nothing to me to forgive. I'm equal with you in guilt. We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything. Harry, I know that people are brought to Christ. I've seen it with my eyes and tasted it with my mouth. And I do think this. I think marriage is a sacrament, and that this tragedy, terrible as it is, has at last united you and Janice in a sacred way."
Through the next hours Rabbit clings to this belief, though it seems to bear no relation to the colors and sounds of the big sorrowing house, the dabs and arcs of late sunshine in the little jungle of plants on the glass table, or the almost wordless supper he and Janice share in her bedroom.
He spends that night in the Springers' house, sleeping with Janice. Her sleep is so solid. A thin snore out of her black mouth sharpens the moonlight and keeps him awake. He gets up on an elbow and studies her face; it is frightening in the moonlight, small and so vague in the dark it could be anybody. He resents her sleep. When, in first light, he feels her weight stir and slide off the bed, he turns his face deeper into the pillow, retracts his head half under the covers, and goes back to sleep stubbornly. The thought that today is the day of the funeral somehow drugs him.
During this stolen doze he has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect discs, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, "The cowslip swallows up the elder." The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: "the cowslip" is the moon, and "the elder" the sun, and that what he has witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. Intensely relieved and excited, he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the discs, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world. The knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.