Rabbit Remembered

Nelson does not remember when he realized that his father and Mrs. Harrison were having an affair. He had his own family and problems back then and his parents' friends to him were a bunch of aging crocks who hung out at the Flying Eagle and thought having a third g-and-t was a real trip and saying "fuck" in mixed company a real break-through. Buddy Inglefinger was the worst asshole, but Webb Murkett and his zaftig little child bride were right up there for repulsiveness. Mrs. Harrison he hardly ever looked at, she was so drab, so quiet, so naggingly ill. Yet, when made extra alert by coke, Nelson could feel currents-just the way the grown-ups grouped when he saw them together, Mom standing next to gawky Mr. Murkett or maybe stocky Mr. Harrison and Dad and Mrs. Harrison just hanging back a half-step together, talking so nobody else could hear, a funny tingling sort of extra peacefulness between them. She was nice to Nelson, too, a little too nice, as if to a much discussed problem child. This sallow, schoolmarmy, calm-voiced woman knew too many things about him, and liked him a shade more than on his own he deserved. It was eerie, the way she was already under his skin. The Murketts split up and the Inglefingers moved away-Buddy had found a woman as flaky as he-but the Harrisons and the Angstroms still would see one another, the six months when Mom and Dad were back from Florida, going out to a movie or a Blasts game, though Dad always said he couldn't stand Ronnie and never had, not since Ronnie was a tough kid from Wenrich Alley. And Nelson would notice that in this quartet his father was less noisy than usual, less frisky and skittish in the way he put on to annoy Mom, more subdued and contented: he seemed more grown-up. It was hard to associate this different man with Mrs. Harrison, but what else would explain it? And then she died. And his father showed less grief than he should have, even scrapped with the grieving widower at the funeral. What a hard-hearted thick-skinned showboat his father had been, just as Ronnie said.

The fact of the affair has long since leaked out and poisons any get-together with his stepbrothers. Not that they say anything. But they know, and they see him as heir to his father's guilt, to the pollution of their otherwise perfect mother.

"Alex, it's great to see you up here," Nelson lies. "Are you getting a Southern accent yet?"

"It's infectious," agrees the former computer whiz, now a middle-management tool. "Virginia's a funny state-half hillbilly and half megalopolis, at the Washington end."

"Like Pennsylvania and Philly," Nelson offers.

"It has a better sense of itself than Pennsylvania. It had all those Presidents, and the Confederate capital, and now the economy is taking off. The skyscrapers they can't build over in the District are being built across the river in Virginia." His words issue from his little mouth grudgingly, as if his brain is being made to perform an uncongenial function.

"Have you met my sister Annabelle? Half-sister, actually."

"I heard she would be here. How do you do?"

"Hi," says Annabelle, wondering if this is the brother Nelson wants her to get to know. It must be: of the other two, one is gay and the other already married, she can see. But why does Nelson assume that if she had wanted to marry she wouldn't have, ages ago? It's insulting, for him to think she couldn't have landed a doctor for herself, back when she was younger. This pale man in bifocals, the pride of the Harrisons, reminds her of a doctor-the same chilly neatness, the same superior air of having mastered a language only a few can speak.

"And what do you do?" he asks her, as if everybody knows what he does.

"Oh, hang out," she says, to tease, he seems so prissy, so glassily impervious.

Nelson at her side intervenes: "She's a licensed practical nurse, in private practice for now, mostly the elderly."

"Mmm, impressive," Alex says. "The geriatric is a real growth sector."

"They're more lonely than sick, a lot of them," she offers, not sure whether he is being hostile or merely thinks in terms of sectors.

"You wonder how much dead weight society can carry," he goes on. "At some point in the next millennium, governments will have to establish a cut-off point. Eskimos did it, when they were a viable population. Native American tribes did it. In Sicily, they used to make a party of it-everybody piled on with pillows, so when the old person smothered there was no single person who had, so to speak, 'done it.'"