"What do you think she meant," he asks Janice, " `gone crazy'? How crazy can you go from cocaine?"
"Doris Kaufmann, I mean Eberhardt, has a brother-in-law whose stepson by his wife's first marriage had to go to a detox center out near the middle of the state. He got to be paranoid and thought Hitler was still alive and had agents everywhere to get just him. He was Jewish."
"Did he beat up his wife and children?"
"He didn't have a wife, I think. We don't know for sure Nelson's threatened the children."
"Pru said he did."
"Pru was very upset. It's the money I think upsets her, more than anything."
"It doesn't upset you?"
"Not as much as it seems to you and Pru. Money isn't something I worry about, Harry. Daddy always said, `If I don't have two nickels to rub together, I'll rub two pennies.' He had faith he could always make enough, and he did, and I guess I inherited his philosophy."
"Is that the reason you keep letting Nelson get away with murder?"
Janice sighs and sounds more than ever like her mother, Bessie Koerner Springer, who lived her whole life overweight, without a lick of exercise except housework, sitting in her big house with its shades down to protect the curtains and upholstery from sunlight and sighing about the pains in her legs. "Harry, what can I do, seriously? It's not as if he's still a child, he's thirty-two."
"You could fire him from the lot, for starters."
"Yes, and shall I fire him as my son, too – tell him I'm sorry, but he hasn't worked out? He's my father's grandson, don't forget. Daddy built that lot up out of nothing and he would have wanted Nelson to run it, run it even if he runs it into the ground."
"Really?" Such a ruinous vision startles him. Having money makes people reckless. Bet a million. Junk bonds. "Couldn't you fire him provisionally, until he shapes up?"
Janice's tone has the bite of impatience, of fatigue. "All this is so easy for you to say – you're just sore since Lyle told you I was the real boss, you're trying to make me suffer for it. You do it, you do whatever you think should be done at the lot and tell them I said you should. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of you and Nelson fighting your old wars through me."
Streetlights flicker more swiftly on his hands as the Celica moves more rapidly through the city park, above the tennis courts and the World War II tank painted a thick green to forestall rust, repainted so often they've lost the exact military green Harry remembers. What did they call it? Olive drab. He feels under the barrage of streetlights bombarded, and Brewer seems empty of life like those bombed-out German cities after the war. "They wouldn't believe me," he tells her spitefully, "they'd still come to you. And I'm like you," he tells her more gently, "scared of what I'll stir up."
After the park there is a stoplight that says red, and a locally famous old turreted house roofed in round fishscale slate shingles, and then a shopping mall where the cineplex sign advertises SEE YOU DREAM TEAM SAY ANYTHING OUT OF CONTROL. Then they're on 422 and a territory bred into their bones, streets they crossed and recrossed in all seasons as children, Central, Jackson, Joseph, the hydrants and mailboxes of the borough of Mt. Judge like buttons fastening down their lives, their real lives, everything drained of color at this nadir of the night, the streets under the burning blue mercury lights looking rounded like bread-loaves and crusted with snow, the brick-pillared porches treacherous emplacements up behind their little flat laps oflawn and tulip bed. Number 89 Joseph, the Springers' big stucco house where when Rabbit was courting Janice in his old Nash he used to hate to come because it made his own family's semi-detached house on Jackson Road look poor, has all its lights ablaze, like a ship going down amid the silent darkened treetops and roof peaks of the town. The huge spreading copper-beech tree on the left side where Harry and Janice's bedroom used to be, a tree so dense the sun never shone in and its beech nuts popping kept Harry awake all fall, is gone, leaving that side bare, its windows exposed and on fire. Nelson had it cut down. Dad, it was eating up the whole house. You couldn't keep paint on the woodwork on that side, it was so damp. The lawn wouldn't even grow. Harry couldn't argue, and couldn't tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot.
They park outside, under the maples that are shedding chartreuse fuzz and sticky stuff this time of year. He always hates that about parking here. He'll get the car washed Monday.
Pru has been watching for their arrival. She pulls the door open as their feet hit the porch, as if there's an electric eye. Like Thelma the other week. Judy is with her, in some fuzzy Oshkosh B'Gosh pajamas that are too small for her. The child's feet look surprisingly long and white and bony, with the inches of exposed ankle.
"Where's Roy?" Harry asks instantly.
"Nelson's putting him in bed," Pru says, with a wry downward tug of one side of her mouth, a kind of apology.
"To bed?" Harry says. "You trust him with the kid?"
She says, "Oh yes. He's calmed down since I called. I think he shocked himself, hitting me so hard. It did him good." In the illumination of the front hall they can see the pink welt along one cheekbone, the lopsided puffiness of her upper lip, the redness around her eyes as if rubbed and rubbed with a scouring pad. She is wearing that quilted shorty morning-glory bathrobe but not as in Florida over bare legs; under it she has on a long blue nightgown. But you can see the outline of her legs through the thin cloth, like fish moving through murky water. Fake-fur-lined bedroom slippers clothe her feet, so he can't check out her toenail polish.