Nelson met his parents at the door and after embracing his mother attempted to do the same with his father, awkwardly wrapping both arms around the much taller man and pulling him down to rub scratchy cheeks. Harry was taken by surprise and not pleased: the embrace felt showy and queer and forced, the kind of thing these TV evangelists tell you to do to one another, before they run off screen and get their secretaries to lay them. He and Nelson have hardly touched since the boy's age hit double digits. Some kind of reconciliation or amends was no doubt intended but to Harry it felt like a rite his son has learned elsewhere and that has nothing to do with being an Angstrom.
Pru in her turn seems bewildered by suddenly having a minister for a husband; when Harry bends down expecting the soft warn push of her lips on his, he gets instead her dry cheek, averted with a fearful quickness. He is hurt but can't believe he has done anything wrong. Since their episode that wild and windy night, the silence from her side has indicated a wish to pretend it never happened, and with his silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair – its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. He can't bear to think of Nelson's knowing, whereas Ronnie's knowing he didn't much mind. He even enjoyed it, like a sharp elbow given under the basket. Thelma and he had been two of a kind, each able to gauge the risks and benefits, able to construct together a stolen space in which they could feel free for an hour, free of everything but each other. Within your own generation – the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air – you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. So he doesn't like to feel even this small alteration in Pru's temperature, this coolness like a rebuke.
The children eat with them, Judy and Harry on one side of the Springers' mahogany dining-room table, set as if for a holiday, Janice and Roy on the other, Pru and Nelson at the heads. Nelson offers grace; he makes them all hold hands and shut their eyes and after they're ready to scream with embarrassment pronounces the words, "Peace. Health. Sanity. Love."
"Amen," says Pru, sounding scared.
Judy can't stop staring up at Harry, to see what he makes of it. "Nice," he tells his son. "That something you learned at the detox place?"
"Not detox, Dad, rehab."
"Whatever it was, it was full of religion?"
"You got to admit you're powerless and dependent on a higher power, that's the first principle of AA and NA."
"As I remember it, you didn't use to go much for any higherpower stuff."
"I didn't, and still don't, in the form that orthodox religion presents it in. All you have to believe in is a power greater than ourselves – God as we understand Him."
Everything sounds so definite and pat, Harry has to fight the temptation to argue. "No, great," he says. "Anything that gets you through the night, as Sinatra says." Mim had quoted that to him once. In this Springer house tonight Harry feels a huge and regretful distance from Mim and Mom and Pop and all that sunken God-fearing Jackson Road Thirties-Forties world.
"You used to believe a lot of that stuff," Nelson tells him.
"I did. I do," Rabbit says, annoying the kid, he knows, with his amiability. But he has to add, "Hallelujah. When they stuck that catheter into my heart, I saw the light."
Nelson announces, "They tell you at the center that there'll be people who mock you for going straight, but they don't say one of them will be your own father."
"I'm not mocking anything. Jesus. Have all the peace and love and sanity you want. I'm all for it. We're all all for it. Right, Roy?"
The little boy stares angrily at being suddenly singled out. His loose wet lower lip begins to tremble; he turns his face toward his mother's side. Pru tells Harry, in a soft directed voice in which he does sense a certain mist of acknowledgment, of rain splashing at a screened window, "Roy's been very upset, readjusting to Nelson's coming back."
"I know how he feels," Harry says. "We'd all gotten used to his not being around."
Nelson looks toward Janice in protest and appeal and she says, "Nelson, tell us about the counselling work you did," in the fake tone of one who has already heard about it.
As Nelson speaks, he sits with a curious tranquillized stillness; Harry is used to the kid, from little on up, being full of nervous elusive twitches, that yet had something friendly and hopeful about them. "Mostly," he says, "you just listen, and let them work it out through their own verbalization. You don't have to say much, just show you're willing to wait, and listen. The most hardened street kids eventually open up. Once in a while you have to remind them you've been there yourself, so their war stones don't impress you. A lot have been dealers, and when they start bragging how much money they made all you have to do is ask, `Where is it now?' They don't have it," Nelson tells the listening table, his own staring children. "They blew it."
"Speaking of blowing it -" Harry begins.
Nelson overrides him with his steady-voiced sermon. "You try to get them to see themselves that they are addicts, that they weren't outsmarting anybody. The realization has to come from them, from within, it's not something they can accept imposed on them by you. Your job is to listen; it's your silence, mostly, that leads them past their own internal traps. You start talking, they start resisting. It takes patience, and faith. Faith that the process will work. And it does. It invariably does. It's thrilling to see it happen, again and again. People want to be helped. They know things are wrong."
Harry still wants to speak but Janice intercedes by telling him, loudly for their audience at the table, "One of Nelson's ideas about the lot is to make it a treatment center. Brewer doesn't have anything like the facilities it needs to cope with the problem. The drug problem."
"That's the absolutely dumbest idea I've ever heard," Harry says promptly. "Where's the money in it? You're dealing with people who have no money, they've blown it all for drugs."
Nelson is goaded into sounding a bit more like his old self. He whines, "There's grant money, Dad. Federal money. State. Even do-nothing Bush admits we got to do something."
"You've got twenty employees you've fucked up over there at the lot, and most of'em have families. What happens to the mechanics in Service? What about your sales reps – poor little Elvira?"
"They can get other jobs. It's not the end of the world. People don't stick with jobs the way your scared generation did."
"Yeah, scared – with your generation on the loose we got reason to be scared. How would you ever turn that cement-block shed over there into a hospital?"
"It wouldn't be a hospital -"
"You're already one hundred fifty thousand in the hole to Toyota Inc. and two weeks to pay it off in. Not to mention the seventy-five grand you owe Brewer Trust."
"Those purchases in Slims name, the cars never left the lot, so there's really no -"
"Not to mention the used you sold for cash you put in your own pocket."
"Harry," Janice says, gesturing toward their audience of listening children. "This isn't the place."
"There is no place where I can get a handle on what this lousy kid has done! Over two hundred thousand fucking shekels – where's it going to come from?" Sparks of pain flicker beneath the muscles of his chest, he feels a dizziness in which the faces at the table float as in a sickening soup. Bad sensations have been worsening lately; it's been over three months since that angioplasty opened his LAD. Dr. Breit warned that restenosis often sets in after three months.