He accelerates along Jackson as the streetlights come on, earlier each day now. Janice's Mustang is out along the curb with the top down, she must have gone somewhere after church, she wouldn't take Bessie to church with the top down. Inside the front door, a wealth of duffel bags and suitcases has been deposited in the living room as by a small army. In the kitchen there is laughter and light. The party comes to meet him halfway, in the shadowy no-man's land between the staircase and the breakfront. Ma Springer and Janice are overtopped by a new female, taller, with a smoothly parted head of hair from which the kitchen light strikes an arc of carrot color, where Melanie's hair would have caught in its curls a straggly halo. He had grown used to Melanie. It is Nelson who speaks. "Dad, this here is Pru," the "this here" a little scared joke.
"Nelson's fiancée," Janice amplifies in a voice tense but plump, firmly making the best of it.
"Is that a fact?" Harry hears himself ask. The young woman saunters forward, a slender slouching shape, and he takes the bony hand she extends. In the lingering daylight that the dining-room windows admit she stands plain, a young redhead past girlhood, with amts too long and hips too wide for the boniness of her face, an awkward beauty, her body helplessly not only hers but somehow theirs, overcommitted, with a look about her of wry, slightly twisted resignation, of having been battered by life young as she is, but the battering having not yet reached her eyes, which are clear green, though guarded. As she entrusts her hand to his her smile is a fraction slow, as if inside she must make certain there is something to smile at, but then comes forth eagerly enough, with a crimp in one comer. She wears a baggy brown sweater and the new looser style of jeans, bleach spattered across the thighs. Her hair, swept back behind her ears to form a single fanning sheaf down her back, looks ironed, it is so straight, and dyed, it is so vivid a pallid red.
"I wouldn't say fiancée exactly," Pru says, directly to Harry. "There's no ring, look." She holds up a naked trembling hand.
Harry in his need to get a fix on this new creature glances from Nelson right through Janice, whom he can grill later in bed, to Ma Springer. Her mouth is clamped shut; if you tapped her she'd ring like a gong, rigid in her purple church dress. Nelson's mouth is ajar. He is a sick man fascinated by the ministration of doctors around him, his illness at last confessed and laid open to cure. In Pru's presence he looks years younger than when Melanie was about, a nervous toughness melted all away. It occurs to Harry that this girl is older than the boy, and another, deeper, instinctive revelation pounds in upon him even as he hears himself saying, as humorous paternal host, "Well in any case it's nice to meet you, Pru. Any friend of Nelson's, we put up with around here." This maybe falls flat, so he adds, "I bet you're the girl's been sending all those letters."
Her eyes glance down, the demure plane of her cheek reddened as if he's slapped her. "Too many I suppose," she says.
"No bother to me," he assures her, "I'm not the mailman. He recently upped and died, by the way. Not your fault, though."
She lifts her eyes, a flourishing green.
Pru is pregnant. One of the few advantages of not having been born yesterday is that a man acquires, like a notion of tomorrow's weather from the taste of the evening air, some sense of the opposite sex's physiology, its climate. She has less waist than a woman so young should, and that uncanny green clarity of her eyes and a soft slowed something in her motions as she turns away from Harry's joke to take a cue from Nelson bespeak a burden beyond disturbing, a swell beneath the waves. In her third or fourth month, Rabbit guesses. And with this guess a backwards roll of light illumines the months past. And the walls of this house, papered with patterns sunk into them like stains, change meaning, containing this seed between them. The fuzzy gray sofa and the chair that matches and the Barcalounger and the TV set (an Admiral) and Ma Springer's pompous lamps of painted porcelain and tarnished brass and the old framed watercolors sunk to the tint of dust from never being looked at, the table runners Ma once crocheted and her collection of brittle bright knickknacks stored on treble corner shelves nicked and sanded to suggest antique wood but stemming from an era of basement carpentry in Fred Springer's long married life: all these souvenirs of the dead bristle with new point, with fresh mission, if as Harry imagines this intruder's secret is a child to come.
He feels swollen. His guess has been like a fist into him. As was not the case with Melanie he feels kinship with this girl, is touched by her, turned on: he wants to be giving her this baby.
In bed he asks Janice, "How long have you known?"
"Oh," she says, "about a month. Melanie let some of the cat out of the bag and then I confronted Nelson with it. He was relieved to talk, he cried even. He just didn't want you to know."
"Why not?" He is hurt. He is the boy's father.
Janice hesitates. "I don't know, I guess he was afraid you'd be mad. Or laugh at him."
"Why would I laugh at him? The same thing happened to me."
"He doesn't know that, Harry."
"How could he not? His birthday keeps coming around seven months after our anniversary."
"Well, yes." In her impatience she sounds much like her mother, setting the heel of her voice into each word. The bed creaks as she flounces in emphasis. "Children don't want to know these things, and by the time they're old enough to care it's all so long ago."
"When did he knock the girl up, does he remember that much?"
"Weren't you funny, guessing so quickly she was in a family way? We weren't going to tell you for a while."
"Thanks. It was the first thing that hit me. That baggy sweater. That, and that she's taller than Nelson."
"Harry, she isn't. He's an inch taller, he's told me himself, it's just that his posture is so poor."
"And how much older is she? You can see she's older."
"Well, a year or less. She was a secretary in the Registrar's office -"
"Yeah and why wasn't he fucking another student? What does he have to get mixed up in the secretarial pool for?"
"Harry, you should talk to them if you want to know every in and out ofit all. You know though how he used to say how phony these college girls were, he never felt comfortable in that atmosphere. He's from business people on my side and working people on yours and there hasn't been much college in his background."
"Or in his future from the way it looks."
"It's not such a bad thing the girl can do a job. You heard her say at supper she'd like him to go back to Kent and finish, and she could take in typing in their apartment."
"Yeah and I heard the little snot say he wanted no part of it."
"You won't get him to go back by shouting at him."
"I didn't shout."
"You got a look on your face."
"Well, Jesus. Because the kid gets a girl pregnant he thinks he's entitled to run Springer Motors."
"Harry, he doesn't want to run it, he just wants a place in it." "You can't give him a place without taking a place from somebody else."
"Mother and I think he should have a place," Janice says, so definitely it seems her mother has spoken, out of the dark air of this bedroom where the old lady's presence was always felt as a rumble of television or a series of snores coming through the wall.
He reverts to his question, "When did he get her pregnant?"
"Oh, when these things happen, in the spring. She missed her first period in May, but they waited till they got to Colorado to do the urine test. It was positive and Pru told him she wasn't going to get an abortion, she didn't believe in them and too many of her friends had had their insides messed up."