Harry snorts; he loves it when women sass him, and any sign of life from this one is gratefully received. "It'll all work out," he promises, though Teresa's aura of fright remains intense and threatens to spread to him. When the girl dares a full smile you see her teeth needed braces and didn't get them. The taste of champagne keeps reminding him ofpoor Pop. Beer and rusty water and canned mushroom soup.
"Try to have some fun," he tells Pru, and cuts across the jammed room, around the boisterous Murkett-Fosnacht-Janice crowd, to the sofa where Mim sits between the two old ladies. "Are you being a bad influence on my little sister?" he asks Amy Gehringer.
While Grace Stuhl laughs at this Amy struggles to get to her feet. "Don't get up on my account," Rabbit tells her. "I just came over to see if I could get any of you anything."
"What I need," Amy grunts, still floundering, so he pulls her up, "I must get for myself."
"What's that?" he asks.
She looks at him a little glassily, like Melame when he told her to drink milk. "A call of nature," Amy answers, "you could say."
Grace Stuhl holds up a hand that when he takes it, to pull her up, feels like a set ofwom stones in a sack of the finest driest paper, strangely warm. "I better say goodbye to Becky," she says.
"She's over there talking the ear off Charlie Stavros," Harry tells her.
"Yes, and probably saying too much by now." She seems to know the subject; or does he imagine that? He drops down onto the sofa beside Mim wearily.
"So," she says.
"Next I gotta marry you off" he says.
"I've been asked, actually, now and then."
"And whajja say?"
"At my age it seemed like too much trouble."
"Your health good?"
"I make it good. No more smoking, notice?"
"How about those crazy hours you keep, staying up to watch Ol' Blue Eyes? I knew he was called Ol' Blue Eyes, by the way. I just didn't know which 01' Blue Eyes, I thought a new one might have come along." When he had called her long-distance to invite her to the wedding she said she had a date with a very dear friend to see 01' Blue Eyes and he had asked, Who's Ol' Blue Eyes? She said Sinatra, ya dummy, where've you been all your life? and he answered, You know where I've been, right here and she said, Yeah, it shows. God, he loves Mim; in the end there's nothing to understand you like your own blood.
Mim says, "You sleep it off during the day. Anyway I'm out of the fast lane now, I'm a businesswoman." She gestures toward the other side of the room. "What's Bessie trying to do, keep me from talking to Charlie? She's been at him an hour."
"I don't know what's going on."
"You never did. We all love you for it."
"Drop dead. Hey how do you like the new Janice?"
"What's new about her?"
"Don't you see it? More confident. More of a woman, somehow."
"Hard as a nut, Harry, and always will be. You were always feeling sorry for her. It was a wasted effort."
"I miss Pop," he suddenly says.
"You're getting more and more like him. Especially from the side."
"He never got a gut like mine."
"He didn't have the teeth for all those munchies you like."
"You notice how this Pru looks like him a little? And Mom's big red hands. I mean, she seems more of an Angstrom than Nelson."
"You guys like tough ladies. She's pulled off a trick I didn't think could be pulled off anymore."
He nods, imagining through her eyes his father's toothless profile closing in upon his own. "She's running scared."
"And how about you?" Mim asks. "What're you doing these days, to feed the inner man?"
"I play golf."
"And still fuck Janice?"
"Sometimes."
"You two. Mother and I didn't give it six months, the way she trapped you."
"Maybe I trapped myself. And what's up with you? How does money work, out in Vegas? You really own a beauty parlor, or you just a front for the big guys?"
"I own thirty-five per cent. That's what I got for being a front for the big guys."
He nods again. "Sounds familiar."
"You fucking anybody else? You can tell me, I'll be on that plane tomorrow. How about the broad bottom over there with the Chinesey eyes?"
He shakes his head. "Nope. Not since Jill. That shook me up."
"O.K., but ten years, that's not normal, Harry. You're letting them turn you into a patsy."
"Remember," he asks, "how we used to go sledding on Jackson Road? I often think about it."
"That happened maybe once or twice, it never snows around here, for Cry-eye. Come out to Lake Tahoe; now there's snow. We'll go over to Alta or Taos; you should see me ski. Come on out by yourself, we'll fix you up with somebody really nice. Blonde, brunette, redhead, you name it. Good clean small-town girl too; nothing crude."
"Mim," he says, blushing, "you're the limit," and thinks of telling her how much he loves her, but there is a commotion at the front door.
Slim and the organist are leaving together and they encounter there a dowdy couple who have been ringing the disconnected doorbell for some time. From the look of them they are selling encyclopaedias, except that people don't do that in pairs, or going door-to-door for the Jehovah's Witnesses, except that instead of The Watchtower they are holding on to a big silver-wrapped wedding present. This is the couple from Binghamton. They took the wrong turn off the Northeast Extension and found themselves lost in West Philadelphia. The woman sheds tears of relief and exhaustion once inside the foyer. "Blocks and blocks of blacks," the man says, telling their story, still staggered by the wonder of it.
"Oh," Pru cries from across the room, "Uncle Rob!" and throws herself into his arms, home at last.
Ma Springer has made the Poconos place available to the young couple for a honeymoon in these golden last weeks of warm weather – the birches beginning to turn, the floats and canoes pulled in from the lake. All ofit wasted on the kid, they'll be lucky if he doesn't bum the cottage down frying his brain and his genes with pot. But it's not Harry's funeral. Now that Nelson is married it's like a door has been shut in his mind, a debt has been finally paid, and his thoughts are turning again to that farm south of here where another child of his may be walking, walking and waiting for her life to begin.
One evening when nothing she likes is on television Ma calls a little conference in the living room, easing her legs wrapped around with flesh-colored bandages (a new thing her doctor has prescribed; when Harry tries to visualize an entire creature made out of the flesh the bandage manufacturers are matching, it would make the Hulk look healthy) up on the hassock and letting the man of the house have the Barcalounger. Janice sits on the sofa with a post-dinner nip of some white creamy poison fermented from coconut milk the kids have brought into the house, looking girlish beside her mother, with her legs tucked up under her. Nice taut legs. She's kept those and he has to take his hat off to her, tiddly half the time or not. What more can you ask of a wife in a way than that she stick around and see with you what happens next?
Ma Springer announces, "We must settle now what to do with Nelson."
"Send him back to college," Harry says. "She had an apartment out there, they can both move into one."
"He doesn't want to go," Janice tells them, not for the first time.
"And why the hell not?" Harry asks, the question still exciting to him, though he knows he's beaten.
"Oh Harry," Janice says wearily, "nobody knows. You didn't go to college, why should he?"
"That's the reason. Look at me. I don't want him to live my life. I'm living it and that's enough."
"Darling, I said that from his point of view, not to argue with you. Of course Mother and I would have preferred he had graduated from Kent and not got so involved with this secretary. But that's not the way it is."