Rabbit Remembered

"There you have it," Aunt Mim interrupts. "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend." He has used up her patience. She can only give so much time to the past. She lives in a hustling world. "Come on out and see me, Nellie. Bring your sister if you want. They've got the airfares down to nothing, to keep the moron-catchers booked up. If you want to wait till Judy flies the skies, it'll be cheaper yet. I'll keep. I never smoked except for show. Charlie Stavros still above ground?"

So it falls to him to break the news. "No, I'm sorry to say. He had this triple bypass, and there was a murmur or something, a bad valve, and they opened him up again, but this time an infection set in-"

"You're scaring me, kid. He was a good guy. He had a touch of it. Class. You, you're lovable. Your Aunt Mim loves you, and don't you forget it." And she hangs up, without saying goodbye or seeing if he had a last word. He hadn't even asked her how her beauty parlor was doing, or if she had a husband.

One night in early November, Nelson dreams he is lying in his bedroom, which is true, although it is somehow smaller, like the little front room where Ron's computer sits. He gets out of bed when he hears a distant clicking noise. He goes to the window and sees out in the back yard a tall man practicing chip shots in the moonlight. The man is bent over and intent and a certain sorrow emanates from him in the gray-blue light. His back is turned and he doesn't turn his head to look up at Nelson though Nelson dreads that this will happen-a staring white mask in moonlight. Instead there is just that patient concentration, as if on a task he has been assigned for eternity-the little studied half-swing, a slump-shouldered contemplation of the result, a disconsolate trundling another ball with the face of the club into position at the man's feet, and another studied swing. Nelson feels indignation that this mournful tall middle-aged stranger, in nondescript trousers and a long-sleeved blue-gray shirt, should have wandered into their yard from Joseph Street and be trespassing so brazenly, making that irritating, repeating noise in the middle of the night. Neither in his dream nor when woken by it does Nelson announce to himself who the homeless man is.

He has passed into wakefulness. The door to the hallway, the latch not quite seated, has been swinging back and forth as if at a ghostly touch, clicking, nudged by the drafts that circulate through the house now that the cooling weather has turned on the furnace. Ronnie is always trying to turn the thermostat down; he says the lousy Arabs are putting the screws on oil again and the price of a barrel has more than doubled in a year.

Nelson forces himself from the warm bed, glancing out the window to see if a tall man is really there practicing chipping, and pushes the door so the latch decisively clicks. The sharp noise rings through the silent house. Not quite silent: the furnace sighs, the refrigerator throbs. His mother in the next room sleeps with a man not his father. It used to be his parents' room, he used to hear them cutting up some nights, making more noise than they thought. The two front bedrooms are empty, staring out at a Joseph Street bare of traffic. Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong-you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

Next morning he calls Annabelle at her apartment. She sounds sleepy; he guesses she had been on night duty and he woke her up. Apologetically, he asks her to have lunch with him again, at the same place if that was all right with her. "Oh yes," she says, "that was a lovely place," in the overly sincere voice of someone who is groping to remember. Had she been failing to think of him as much as he had been thinking of her?

This time, The Greenery is crowded. They have to wait for a booth, and his head jangles with the angry, forlorn, earnest voices of a Relationships group he had led at the Center at ten this morning. The motherly waitress is not here, replaced by a girl young enough to be a clumsy, overworked teen-aged child of their own. Annabelle wears an outfit, blue jeans and a purple turtleneck, that seems to announce to him a new, careless, on-my-own side of her. Maybe she hadn't been up recovering from late duty when she sounded sleepy. She has never claimed to have no men friends.