Rabbit Remembered

affair. She and my-she and your husband, Mr. Angstrom, lived together I guess on Summer Street for three months. He never knew if she had gone ahead and had me or not. I knew him, you know. I met him a few times, without knowing who he was. I mean, his relation to me. He was once a patient when I was still at St. Joe's. An angioplasty, I think it was. He was a charmer. Full of jokes.'

'He died in Florida,' Janice says accusingly, 'not six months later. Of a heart attack. He was only fifty-six.' As if these hard facts, so hard to her at the time, might force Harry and this girl apart.

'He should have had a bypass, it sounds like. They weren't quite as standard then.'

'He didn't want it. He didn't want to have his body meddled with. He was afraid of it.' Janice's voice startles her by cracking, and her eyes by burning near tears, as if accusing herself of not making Harry's life worth living. She hadn't called him down in Florida, when he had wanted her to. He had been begging for her forgiveness, and she hadn't given it.

'And then before that,' this girl insensitively is going on, 'when I was still an aide at Sunnyside, a boy I knew back in Galilee called Jamie and I-we were living together, actually, in a little apartment on Youngquist Boulevard, the building went condo and that broke us up, but that's I guess another story-went to look at Toyotas over on Route 111. We bought one, eventually, though not that day, when Mr. Angstrom was there. He seemed so nice, I was struck. He paid attention to me, he didn't just talk to the man, or try to pressure us the way car salesmen like to.'

'It wasn't exactly his calling, selling,' Janice volunteers. 'He didn't really have a calling, after high school.'

But how beautiful he had been, Janice remembers, in those high-school halls-the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail but trailing off in lank sexy strands like Alan Ladd's across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big graceful white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy half-mast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention of course to her, a ninth-grader, a runt. They didn't begin with each other until they both worked at Kroll's in Brewer, she behind the nut and candy cases and he back from his two years in the Army, having been in Texas and never sent to die in Korea after all. He often mentioned Korea as if he had missed out on something by not going there to fight and coming back home to a peaceful life instead. Nobody wants war but men don't want only peace either.

'Yes,' Annabelle hisses, too eager to agree, not really understanding how simple we all were back then, 'he was a wonderful athlete, I remember the clippings up in the showroom, and then my mother said. She had gone to another high school, that used to play his. She talked a lot about him, once she got started, before she…went. I know about you, and Nelson, and the time your house burnt down, my mother kept track of all that in the papers, I guess. She was interested. The way she spoke, at the end, she didn't have any grudge. It was the times, she said. He was caught, what else could he do? Anyway, I was no prize, she would tell me.'

Ruth and her views, beneath consideration these many years, have invaded the living room. 'My goodness' is all Janice can think to say, as the sherry moves into her veins and begins to tint this nightmare a more agreeable color. What harm could what happened forty years ago do her now?

'He visited her, you know,' this young woman goes on, her gestures growing freer, her body bigger as she crosses and recrosses her white legs on the sofa, the beige cotton dress riding higher on her thighs. Her hair, too, seems too short, and bounces a bit too much as her head comes forward. There is some vanity, some push, in that hair-its many-colored thickness, its trendy trampy cut, long and short mixed up together. 'The year he died, I guess. Somehow he had found our farm.'

'He did?' This is horrible. Harry's affair with Thelma she and Ronnie have together buried, never mentioning it once they were past the courtship stage of confessing everything. They had triumphed, they were the survivors, Harry and Thelma were shades, corpses, sinking deeper into bloodlessness in their buried coffins, their skins crumbling, drawing tight like that little sacrificed Peruvian girl they found on the mountaintop, unbearable to think about. But to hear now that at the same time he was seeing Thelma he was chasing that fat old slut all over Diamond County is as if Harry from beyond the grave is denying her peace just as he did when alive. He couldn't just be ordinary, respectable, dependable. He thought he was beyond that. This girl, both shy and sassy, pleasant yet with something not quite right about her, is his emissary from the grave. Janice wants nothing to do with it, with her. She asks, 'Why would he do that?'

The girl puts her knees together to lean forward for emphasis but her dress is so short the triangle of her panties shows anyway. 'To find out about me, my mother said. She wouldn't tell him. She wanted to keep me pure from him. Then I guess when she saw she would be, you know, leaving me, she had second thoughts and wanted me to know.' The girl's eyes are less milky now, here in the muted living-room light, and flash with importance, the importance her story gives her.

'Why?' Janice cries, fighting back a pressure. 'Why not let the past lie? Why stir up what can't be helped? Excuse me,' she says. 'I must refresh my tea.' She doesn't even pretend to go into the kitchen, she pours some more dry sherry into the cup right there at the sideboard, where the girl could see if she turned sideways to look. But back in the front room Annabelle sits staring across at the heavy green glass egg, with a bubble inside, on top of the dead television with the other knickknacks Bessie Springer had collected as a sign of her prosperity as Daddy's car business took hold. Mother and her fur coat, Mother and her blue Chrysler-it was a simpler world back then, when your pride was satisfied with such things. The girl, with all that leg bared by sitting low on the sofa and her navy sweater fallen off her naked arms, has a sluttish way of putting forth her body that must be her own mother living in her. And there is a blandness, a fatherless blankness, her face in profile taking the light as mutely as the egg of green glass.

She senses Janice's eye on her and turns her face and says, 'It's so embarrassing, isn't it? My turning up like this. Embarrassing to me, embarrassing to you.' She has a plump upper lip that gives her smile a childish, questioning quality. She looks easy to bruise.

'Well,' Janice pronounces, back in her wing chair with a fortified mug whose healing tang settles her more broadly in the pose of authority. She vowed years ago never to let herself run to fat like her mother did but she did admire the way in her last years, her husband gone, her generation dying off, Mother took charge of things, keeping a grip on the family pocketbook, standing up for her notions of decency and propriety. Living here in this house, Janice feels still surrounded by her-Bessie Springer's adamant unchanging furniture, her fixed sense of her own worth. Koerner mulishness, Mother would call it when being funny at her own expense. 'Maybe that was your mother's idea, to embarrass everybody,' Janice tells the girl. 'What earthly good did she think telling you all this would do, at your age? Make mischief, is the sum of it. And who's to say it's true, any of it?' Though she feels it is-a whiff of Harry, a pale glow, an unsettling drift comes off this girl, this thirty-nine-year-old piece of evidence.

'Oh, she wouldn't have made it up, it poured out of her. It wasn't her nature, to make things up. She used to say of these detective novels she was always reading, 'How do they make all this up? They must have a screw loose.' And she showed me my birth certificate, at a hospital in Pottstown. 'Father unknown,' it said.'

'Well, that's it, unknown,' Janice presses on, like a lawyer urging a case she knows is bad.

'You asked why,' Annabelle says. 'I think she thought'- suddenly tears reflect light in her eyes, the plump upper lip quivers out of control-'you people could help me, somehow.' She laughs at her own tears, quickly swipes at her face with expert hands, hands used to giving-rubbing, holding, patting, seizing- a nurse's care. 'I was so alone, she must have thought. I haven't had a serious relationship for years. And my brothers, Scott went to Seattle and Morris to Delaware-he was the angriest when she sold the farm and moved in with me in Brewer. He had thought he could work the place and live on it but it wouldn't have been fair for her to have left it all to him. Not that a farm that size could support anybody any more. Even my dad-even Frank-had to run the township school buses to make ends meet.'

'Is this about money, then?' Janice asks, alert now, the muddle showing its nub. Money is something she has a feel for; it's in her Springer veins. She acted as accountant for her father, and then for Nelson as best she could, until he had so much to hide. Ronnie has his own savings and pension but she handles her inheritance still, when the CDs come due and at what interest and how to keep capital-gains taxes from biting into the mutual funds: the managers of some run up gains just to make their annual reports look good. This girl won't get a penny from her. Janice sips from her mug and looks at the interloper levelly.

Annabelle considers the question, rolling her eyes upward. 'No-o, I don't think so. I clear twenty an hour from the agency and often work twelve-hour shifts. My mother left us a fair amount, even divided by three. The farm had only a tiny mortgage on it, in terms of today's money. And she held down a respectable job, the last fifteen years,