Rabbit Redux

"Ca va. It goes. I've been buried; and yet I live. I've parted company with the ministry." And his jaw stays open, propped as if to emit a guffaw, though no sound comes, and those strangely purified eyes remain watchful.

"Why'd you do that?" Rabbit asks.

Eccles' chuckle, which always had something exploratory and quizzical about it, has become impudent, mocking, if not quite unafraid. "A variety of reasons. I was rather invited to, for one. I wanted to, for another."

"You no longer believe it?"

"In my fashion. I'm not sure I believed it then."

"No?" Rabbit is shocked.

"I believed," Eccles tells him, and his voice takes on an excessive modulation, a self-caressing timbre, "in certain kinds of human interrelation. I still do. If people want to call what happens in certain relationships Christ, I raise no objection. But it's not the word I choose to use anymore."

"How'd your father feel about this? Wasn't he a bishop?"

"My father – God rest his, et cetera – was dead when my decision was reached."

"And your wife? She was nifty, I forget her name."

"Lucy. Dear Lucy. She left me, actually. Yes, I've shed many skins." And the mouth of this pale-throated, long-haired man holds open on the possibility of a guffaw, but silently, watchfully.

"She left ya?"

"She fled my indiscretions. She remarried and lives in Wilmington. Her husband's a painfully ordinary fellow, a chemist of some sort. No indiscretions. My girls adore him. You remember my two girls."

"They were cute. Especially the older one. Since we're on the subject, Janice has left me, too."

Eccles' pale active eyebrows arch higher. "Really? Recently?"

"The day before the moon shot."

"She seemed more the left than the leaving type. Look, Harry, we should get together in a more, ah, stationary place and have a real conversation." In his leaning closer for emphasis, as the bus sways, his arm touches Rabbit's. He always had a certain surprising muscularity, but Eccles has become burlier, more himself. His fluffed-up head seems huge.

Rabbit asks him, "Uh, what do you do now?"

Again, the guffaw, the held jaw, the watchfulness. "I Eve in Philadelphia, basically. For a while I did youth work with the Y. M. C. A. I was a camp supervisor three summers in Vermont. Some winters, I've chosen just to read, to meditate. I think a very exciting thing is happening in Western consciousness and, laugh if you will, I'm making notes toward a book about it. What I think, in essence, is that, at long last, we're coming out of Plato's cave. How does `Out from Plato's Cave' strike you as a title?"

"Kind of spooky, but don't mind me. What brings you back to this dirty old burg then?"

"Well, it's rather curious, Harry. You don't mind my calling you Harry? That all is begi

"I've been there." With his high-school basketball team, a dozen years ago. Junior year. He had one of his great nights there.

"Well, they have a summer theater, called the Oriole Players."

"Sure. We run their ads."

"That's right – you're a printer. I've heard that."

"Linotyper, actually."

"Good for you. Well, a friend of mine, he's an absurd person, very egotistical, but nevertheless a wonderful man, is with them as co-director, and has talked me into helping with their P.R. Public relations. It's really being a fund raiser. I was in Mt. Judge just now seeing this impossible old Mahlon Youngerman, that's Sunflower Beer of course, for a donation. He said he'd think about it. That's code for he won't think about it."

"It sounds a little like what you used to do."

Eccles glances at him more sharply; a defensive sleepiness masks his face. "Pearls before swine, you mean? Pushing stumblingblocks at the Gentiles. Yes, a little, but I only do it eight hours a day. The other sixteen, I can be my own man."

Harry doesn't like the hungry way he says man, like it means too much. They are jerking and trembling down Weiser Street; Eccles looks past Harry out the window and blinks. "I must get off here. Could I ask you to get off with me and have me buy you a drink? There's a bar here on the corner that's not too depressing." "No, Jesus, thanks. I got to keep riding. I got to get home. I have a kid there alone."

"Nelson."

"Right! What a memory! So thanks a lot. You look great."

"Delightful to see you again, Harry. Let's do make a more leisurely occasion sometime. Where are you living?"

"Over in Pe

"I understand," Eccles says, quickly, for the bus is chuffing and groaning to a stop. Yet he finds time to put his hand on Harry's shoulder, up near the neck. His voice changes quality, beseeches, becomes again a preacher's: "I think these are marvellous times to be alive in, and I'd love to share my good news with you at your leisure."

To put distance between them, Rabbit rides the 16A six blocks further, to where it toms up Greely, and gets off there, walking back to the roasted-peanut place on Weiser to catch the bus to Pe

The dirty white Porsche is in the driveway, halfway into the garage, the way Janice used to do it, a

"Where'd you go so early this morning?"

"Out. Away from creeps like you."

"You drop the kid off?"

"Sure."

"When'd you get back?"

"Just now."

"Where'd you spend all day?"

"Maybe I went to Valley Forge anyway."

"Maybe you didn't."

"I did."

"How was it?"

"Beautiful. A gas, actually. George was a beautiful dude."

"Describe one room."

"You go in a door, and there's a four-poster bed, and a little tasselled pillow, and on it it says, `George Washington slept here.' On the bedside tables you can still see the pills he took, to make himself sleep, when the redcoats had got him all uptight. The walls have some kind of lineny stuff on them, and all the chairs have ropes across the arms so you can't sit down on them. That's why I'm sitting on this one. Because it didn't. O.K.?"

He hesitates among the many alternatives she seems to be presenting. Laughter, anger, battle, surrender. "O.K. Sounds interesting. I'm sorry we couldn't go."

"Where did you go?"

"I went to visit my mother, after doing the housework around here."

"How is she?"

"She talks better, but seems frailer."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry she has that disease. I guess I'll never meet your mother, will I?"

"Do you want to? You can see my father any time you want, just be in the Phoenix Bar at four-fifteen. You'd like him, he cares about politics. He thinks the System is shit, just like you do."

"And I'll never meet your wife."