Soupy is amused, his twinkling eyes tell Mrs. Lubell. Toward Harry he slides these eyes with mock severity and asks, "Are you trying to sell me a Toyota?"
Mom getting to be a skeleton too, come to think of it. Those big bones in the earth like dinosaur bones.
"Well," Harry says, "we have a new little front-wheel drive called the Tercel, don't know where they get these names from but never mind, it gets over forty m.p.g. on the highway and is plenty of car for a single man."
Waiting for the Resurrection. Suppose it never comes?
"But suppose I get married," the small man protests, "and have an enormous brood!"
"And indeed you should," Mrs. Lubell unexpectedly pipes up. "The priests are leaving the church in droves because they've got the itch. All this sex, in the movies, books, everywhere, even on the television if you stay up late enough, no wonder they can't resist. Be grateful you don't have that conflict."
"I have often thought," Soupy tells her in a muted return of his great marrying voice, "I might have made an excellent priest. I adore structure."
Rabbit says, `Just now in the car we heard that Annenberg down in Philadelphia gave the Catholics fifty thousand so they could put up this platform for the Pope without all this squawking from the civil liberties people."
Soupy sniffs. "Do you know how much publicity that fifty thousand is going to get him? It's a bargain."
Slim and the organist seem to be discussing clothes, fingering each other's shirts. If he has to talk to the organist Harry can ask why he didn't play "Here Comes the Bride."
Mrs. Lubell says, "They wanted the Pope to come to Cleveland but I guess he had to draw the line somewhere."
"I hear he's going to some farm way out in nowhere," Harry says.
Soupy touches the mother of the bride on the wrist and tips his head so as to show to Harry the beginnings of his bald spot. "Mr. Annenberg is our former ambassador to the Court of St. James in England. The story goes that when presenting his credentials to the Queen she held out her hand to be kissed and he shook it instead and said, `How're ya doin', Queen?"'
His growl is good. Mrs. Lubell laughs outright, a titter jumps from her to her shame, for she quickly covers her mouth with her knuckles. Soupy loves it, giving her back a deep laugh as from a barrel-chested old fart. If that's the way they're going to carry on Rabbit figures he can leave them to it, and using Soupy as a pick makes his move away. He scouts over the gathered heads looking for an opening. It's always slightly dark in the living room, no matter how many lights are on or what the time of day; the trees and the porch cut down the sun. He'd like a house some day with lots of light, splashing in across smart square surfaces. Why bury yourself alive?
Ma Springer has Charlie locked in a one-on-one over by the breakfront, her face puffy and purplish like a grape with the force of the unheard words she is urging into his ear; he politely bows his tidy head, once broad like a ram's but now whittled to an old goat's, nodding almost greedily, like a chicken pecking up grains of corn. Up front, silhouetted against the picture window, the Murketts are holding forth with the Fosnachts, old Ollie no doubt letting these new folks know what a clever musical fellow he is and Peggy gushing, backing him up, holding within herself the knowledge of what a shiftless rat he amounts to domestically. The Murketts belong to the new circle in Harry's life and the Fosnachts to the old and he hates to see them overlap; even if Peggy was a pretty good lay that time he doesn't want those dismal old highschool tagalongs creeping into his country-club set, yet he can see flattery is doing it, flattery and champagne, Ollie ogling Cindy (don't you wish) and Peggy making cow-eyed moos all over Murkett, she'll flop for anybody, Ollie must be very unsatisfying, one of those very thin reedy pricks probably. Harry wonders if he'd better not go over there and break it up, but foresees a wall of razzing he feels too delicate to push through, after all those tears in church, and remembering Becky and Pop and Mom and even old Fred who aren't here. Mim is on the sofa with Grace Stuhl and that other old biddy Amy, and Christ if they aren't having a quiet little ball, the two of them recalling Mim as a child to herself, the Diamond County accent and manner of expressing things making her laugh every minute, and she reminding them, all painted and done up in flowerpot foil, of the floozies they sit and watch all day and night on television, the old souls don't even know they are floozies, these celebrity women playing Beat the Clock or Hollywood Squares or giving Merv or Mike or Phil the wink sitting in those talk show soft chairs with their knees sticking up naked, they all got there on their backs, nobody cares anymore, the times have caught up with Mim and put her on the gray sofa with the church folk. Nelson and Melanie and Grace Stuhl's lout of a grandson are still in the kitchen and the girlfriend, after going around with the teeny weenies under her tits in a tricky little warmer with a ketchup dip, seems to have given up and joined them; they have in there the little portable Sony Janice sometimes watches the Carol Burnett reruns on as she makes supper, and from the sound of it – cheers, band music – these useless drunken kids have turned on the Penn State-Nebraska game. Meanwhile there's Pru in her champagne-colored wedding dress, the little wreath off her head now, standing alone over by the three-way lamp examining that heavy green glass bauble of Ma Springer's, with the teardrop of air sealed inside, turning it over and over under the wan light with her long pink hands, where a wedding ring now gleams. Laughter explodes from the Fosnacht-Murkett group, which Janice has joined. Webb pushes past Harry toward the kitchen, his fingers full of plastic glasses. "How about that crazy Rose?" he says, going by, to say something.
Pete Rose has been hitting over.600 lately and only needs four more hits to be the first player ever to get two hundred hits in ten major league seasons. But it doesn't mean that much, the Phillies are twelve and a half games out. "What a showboat," Rabbit says, what they used to say about him, nearly thirty years ago.
Perhaps in her conspicuous pregnancy Pru is shy of pushing through the crowd to join the others of her generation in the kitchen. Harry goes to her side and stoops down to kiss her demure warm cheek before she is aware; champagne makes it easy. "Aren't you supposed to kiss the bride?" he asks her.
She turns her head and gives him that smile that hesitates and then suddenly spreads, one corner tucked awry. Her eyes have taken green from contemplating the glass, that strange glossy egg Harry has more than once thought would be good to pound into Janice's skull. "Of course," she says. Held against her belly the bauble throws from its central teardrop a pale blade of light. He senses that she had been aware of his approaching in the side of her vision but had held still like a deer in danger. Among these strange people, her fate sealed by a ceremony, of course she is afraid. Rabbit tries to comfort his daughter-in-law: "I bet you're beat. Don't you get sleepy as hell? As I remember it Janice did."
"You feel clumsy," Pru allows, and with both hands replaces the green glass orb on the round table that is like a wooden leaf all around the stem of the standing lamp. Abruptly she asks, "Do you think I'll make Nelson happy?"
"Oh sure. The kid and I had a good long talk about it once. He thinks the world of you."
"He doesn't feel trapped?"
"Well, frankly, that's what I was curious about, 'cause in his position I might. But honest to God, Teresa, it doesn't seem to bother him. From little on up he's always had this sense of fairness and in this case he seems to feel fair is fair. Listen. Don't you worry yourself. The only thing bothering Nelson these days is his old man."
"He thinks the world of you," she says, her voice very small, in case this echo is too impudent.