Rabbit is rich by John Updike Page B

little smile" -tears now stain her own voice too - " `The sound of young voices does my old heart good."'

    That slippery-quick salesman's smile of his, Rabbit can see it still. Like a switchblade without the click.

    "A cookout in the back yard is one thing," Mrs. Springer says, thumping herself in her dirty aqua sneakers down the last three steps of the stairs and looking her daughter level in the eye. "A slut in the boy's bed is another."

    Harry thinks this is pretty jazzy for an old lady and laughs aloud. Janice and her mother are both short women; like two doll's heads mounted on the same set of levers they turn identically chocolateeyed, slot-mouthed faces to glare at his laugh. "We don't know the girl is a slut," Harry apologizes. "All we know is her name is Melanie instead of Sue."

    "You said you were on my side," Mrs. Springer says.

    "I am, Ma, I am. I don't see why the kid has to come storming home; we gave him enough money to get him started out there, I'd- like to see him get some kind of grip on the world. He's not going to get it hanging around here all summer."

    "Oh, money," Janice says. "That's all you ever think about. And what have you ever done except hang around here? Your father got you one job and my father got you another, I don't call that any great adventure."

    "That's not all I think about," he begins lamely, of money, before his mother-in-law interrupts.

    "Harry doesn't want a home of his own," Ma Springer tells her daughter. When she gets excited and fearful of not making herself understood her face puffs up and goes mottled. "He has such disagreeable associations from the last time you two went out on your own."

    Janice is firm, younger, in control. "Mother, you know nothing about it. You know nothing about life period. You sit in this house and watch idiotic game shows and talk on the phone to what friends you have that are still alive and then sit in judgment on Harry and me. You know nothing of life now. You have no idea."

    "As if playing games at a country club with the nickel rich and coming home tiddled every night is enough to make you wise," the old lady comes back, holding on with one hand to the knob of the newel post as if to ease the pain in her ankles. "You come home," she goes on, "too silly to make your husband a decent supper and then want to bring this tramp into a house where I do all the housekeeping, even if I can scarcely stand to stand. I'm the one that would be here with them, you'd be off in that convertible. What will the neighbors make of it? What about the people in the church?"

    "I don't care even if they care, which I dare say they won't," Janice says. "And to bring the church into it is ridiculous. The last minister at St. John's ran off with Mrs. Eckenroth and this one now is so gay I wouldn't let my boy go to his Sunday school, if I had a boy that age."

    "Nellie didn't go that much anyway," Harry recalls. "He said it gave him headaches." He wants to lower the heat between the two women before it boils over into grief. He sees he must break this up, get a house of his own, before he runs out of gas. Stone outside, exposed beams inside, and a sunken living room: that is his dream.

    "Melanie," his mother-in-law is saying, "what kind of name is that? It sounds colored."

    "Oh Mother, don't drag out all your prejudices. You sit and giggle at the Jeffersons as if you're one of them and Harry and Charlie unload all their old gas-hogs on the blacks and if we take their money we can take what else they have to offer too."

    Can Melanie actually be black? Harry is asking himself, thrilled. Little cocoa babies. Skeeter would be so pleased.

    "Anyway," Janice is going on, looking frazzled suddenly, "nobody's said the girl is black, all we know is she hang glides."

    "Or is that the other one?" Harry asks.

    "If she comes, I go," Bessie Springer says. "Grace Stuhl has all those empty rooms now that Ralph's passed on and she's more than once said we should team