"Hello."
"Harry, I've been down at Town Hall talking to Al Horst. He's the coroner. Al looked the little body over and he's satisfied. No marks. Accidental drowning. He promised there won't be a manslaughter charge. He's been talking to just about everybody and wants to talk to you sometime. Unofficially."
"O.K." Springer hangs there, expecting some kind of congratulation. "Why don't they just lock me up?" Harry adds.
"Harry, that's a very negative way to think. The question I always ask myself in a bad situation is, How do we cut the losses from here on in?"
"You're right. I'm sorry." It disgusts him to feel the net of law slither from him. They just won't do it for you, they just won't take you off the hook.
Springer trots upstairs to his women. Footfalls pad above. Fancy dishes in the glass—fronted cupboard behind Harry vibrate. It's not yet two o'clock, he sees by the little silver—faced clock on the mantel of the fake fireplace.
He wonders if the pain in his stomach comes from eating so little in the last two days and goes out to the kitchen and eats two crackers. He can feel each bite hit a scraped floor inside. The pain increases. The bright porcelain fixtures and metal surfaces seem charged with a negative magnetism that pushes against him and makes him extremely thin. He goes into the shadowy living room and pulls the shade and at the front window watches two teenage girls in snug shorts shuffle by on the sunny sidewalk. Their bodies are already there but their faces are still this side of being good. Funny about girls about fourteen, their faces have this kind of eager bunchy business. Too much candy, sours their skin. They walk as slowly as time to the funeral passes, as if if they go slow enough some magic transformation will meet them at the corner. Daughters, these are daughters, would June —? He chokes the thought. The two girls passing, with their perky butts and twopointed T—shirts, seem distasteful morsels. He himself; watching them behind the window, seems a smudge on the glass. He wonders why the universe doesn't just erase a thing so dirty and small. He looks at his hands and they seem ugly, worse than claws.
He goes upstairs and with intense care washes his hands and face and neck. He doesn't dare use one of their fancy towels. Coming out with wet hands he meets Springer in the muted hallway and says, "I don't have a clean shirt." Springer whispers "Wait" and brings him a shirt and black cufflinks. Harry dresses in the room where Nelson sleeps. Sunlight creeps under the drawn shades, which flap softly back and forth almost in time to the boy's heavy breathing. Though he spaces the stages of dressing carefully, and fumbles for minutes with the unaccustomed cufflinks, it takes less time to dress than he hoped it would. The wool suit is uncomfortably hot, and doesn't fit as well as he remembered. But he refuses to take off the coat, refuses to give somebody, he doesn't know who, the satisfaction. He tiptoes downstairs and sits, immaculately dressed, the shirt too tight, in the living room looking at the tropical plants on the glass table, moving his head so that now this leaf eclipses that, now that this, and wondering if he is going to throw up. His insides are a clenched mass of dread, a tough bubble that can't be pricked. The clock says only 2:25.
Of the things he dreads, seeing his parents is foremost. He hasn't had the courage to call them or see them since it happened; Mrs. Springer called Mom Monday night and asked her to the funeral. The silence from his home since then has frightened him. It's one thing to get hell from other people and another from your own parents. Ever since he came back from the Army Pop had been nibbling at a grudge because he wouldn't go to work in the print shop and in a way had nibbled himself right into nothing in Harry's heart. All the mildness and kindness the old man had ever shown him had faded into nothing. But his mother was something else; she was still alive and still attached to his life by some cord. If she comes in and gives him hell he thinks he'll die rather than take it. And of course what else is there to give him? Whatever Mrs. Springer says he can slip away from because in the end she has to stick with him and anyway he feels somehow she wants to like him but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Of all the people in the world he wants to see her least. Sitting there by himself he comes to the conclusion that either he or his mother must die. It is a weird conclusion, but he keeps coming to it, again and again, until the sounds of stirring above him, of the Springers getting dressed, lift his mind out of himself a little.
He wonders if he should go up but he doesn't want to surprise anyone undressed and one by one they come down, dressed, Mr. Springer in a spiffy graphite—gray drip—and—dry and Nelson in a corduroy sissy suit with straps and Mrs. in a black felt hat with a veil and a stiff stem of artificial berries and Janice looking lost and shapeless in the pinned and tucked dress of her mother's. "You look fine," he tells her again.
"Whez big black cah?" Nelson asks in a loud voice.
There is something undignified about waiting and as they mill around in the living room watching the minutes ebb in the silverfaced clock they become uncomfortably costumed children nervous for the party to begin. They all press around the window when the undertaker's Cadillac stops out front, though by the time the man has come up the walk and rings the doorbell they have scattered to the corners of the room as if a bomb of contagion has been dropped among them.
The funeral parlor was once a home but now is furnished the way no home ever was. Unworn carpets of a very pale green deaden their footsteps. Little silver half—tubes on the walls shield a weak glow. The colors of the curtains and walls are atonal halfcolors, colors no one would live with, salmon and aqua and a violet like the violet that kills germs on toilet seats in gas stations. They are ushered into a little pink side room. Harry can see into the main room; on a few rows of auditorium chairs about six people sit, five of them women. The only one he knows is Peggy Gring. Her little boy wriggling beside her makes seven. It was meant to be at first nobody but the families, but the Springers then asked a few close friends. His parents are not here. Invisible hands bonelessly trail up and down the keys of an electric organ. The unnatural coloring of the interior comes to a violent head in the hothouse flowers arranged around a little white coffin. The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform draped with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician's trick, the living baby underneath. Janice looks in and yields a whimper and an undertaker's man, blond and young with an unnaturally red face, conjures a bottle of spirits of ammonia out of his side pocket. Her mother holds it under her nose and Janice suppresses a face of disgust; her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane. Harry takes her arm and turns her so she can't see into the next room.
The side room has a window through which they can look at the street, where children and cars are running. "Hope the minister hasn't forgotten," the young red—faced man says, and to his own embarrassment chuckles. He can't help being at his ease here. His face seems lightly rouged.
"Does that happen often?" Mr. Springer asks. He is standing behind his wife, and his face tips forward with curiosity, his mouth a birdy black gash beneath his sandy mustache. Mrs. Springer has sat down on a chair and is pressing her palms against her face through the veil. The purple berries quiver on their stem of wire.
"About twice a year," is the answer.
A familiar old blue Plymouth slows against the curb outside. Rabbit's mother gets out and looks up and down the sidewalk angrily. His heart leaps and trips his tongue: "Here come my parents." They all come to attention. Mrs. Springer gets up and Harry places himself between her and Janice. Standing in formation with the Springers like this, he can at least show his mother that he's reformed, that he's accepted and been accepted. The undertaker's man goes out to bring them in; Harry can see them standing on the bright sidewalk, arguing which door to go into, Mim a little to one side. Dressed in a church sort of dress and with no makeup, she reminds him of the little sister he once had. The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them.