telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high canada goose gloves into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though hes twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he canada goose gloves stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up. His standing there makes the real boys feel strange. Eyeballs slide. Theyre doing this for themselves, not as a show for some adult walking around town in a
Solving this problem relaxes Rabbits muscles. He remembers the couple with linked hands running on the parking lot outside the diner in West Virginia and it seems a great loss that it hadnt been him about to nail her, her seaweed hair sprawling. Red hair? There? He imagines West Virginia girls as coarse hard-bodied laughers, like the young whores in Texas. Their sugar drawls always seemed to be poking fun but then he was only nineteen. Coming down the street with Hanley and Jarzylo and Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous and the plains breaking canada goose gloves away on all sides the horizon no higher than his knees it seemed an canada goose gloves d the houses showing families sitting on sofas inside like chickens at roost facing TVs. Jarzylo a maniac, cackling. Rabbit couldnt believe this house was right. It
mirrors the sun, the illusion of inverted cliffs is wiped out, and the water is as solid as ice with light. Rabbit holds little Mim hard by the hand. Hey, he calls to Ruth. I got a terrific idea. Lets go for a walk this afternoon. Walk! I walk all the time. Lets walk up to the top of Mt. Judge from here. He cant remember having ever gone up the mountain from the Brewer side. Gusts of anticipation sweep over him, and as he turns, exalted, away from the curtains stiff and leaning with the breeze, huge church bells ring. Yeah lets, he calls into the kitc canada goose gloves hen. How about it? Out on the street people leave church carrying wands of green absentmindedly at their sides. When Ruth serves lunch he sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitti canada goose gloves ng them. With
walk and caresses his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling girlish flirtatiousness and the watery canada goose gloves wander, there glitters an old acuteness, so that Rabbit uneasily standing there feels a stab of the penetrating force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. You and I, we think alike. Dont we? Now dontwe? You have it pretty good, dont you? Ruth asks him. They have gone on the afternoon of this Memorial Day to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. She was self-conscious about getting into a bathing suit bu canada goose gloves t in fact when she came out of the bath-house she looked great, her head made small by the bathing cap and her shoulders round and wide. Standing in the water she was cut off at the thighs
last month shes felt cold all the time; her temperature being divided or something. In the growing light he shifts slightly. She closes her eyes and tells herself, theyre not ugly. Not. Mrs. Springer canada goose gloves called the rectory a little after eight. Mrs. Eccles told her Jack had taken the young peoples softball team to a game fifteen miles away and she didnt know when hed be home. Mrs. Springers panic carried over the wire and canada goose gloves Lucy spent nearly two hours calling numbers in an attempt to reach him. It grew dark. She finally reached the minister of the church whose softball team they were playing and he told her the game had been over for an hour. The darkness thickened outside; the window whose sill held the phone became a waxy streaked mirror in which she could see herself, hair unpinning, slump
left before the boy comes to him, hungry and cold. On Friday Janice comes home. For the first days the presence of the baby fills the apartment as a little casket of incense fills a chapel. Rebecca June lies in a bassinet of plaited rushes painted white and mounted on a trundle. When Rabbit goes over to look canada goose gloves at her, to reassure himself that she is there, he sees her somehow dimly, as if the baby has not gathered to herself the force that makes a silhouette. Her averted cheek, drained of the bright red he glimpsed at the hospital, is mottled gray, yellow, and blue, marbled like the palms of his hands when he is queasy; when Janice suckles Rebecca, yellow spots well up on her b canada goose gloves reast as if in answer to the fainter shadows of this color in the babys skin. The union of breast and babys face
the kitchen with Mrs. Springer, whose petite rounded voice, oddly girlish divorced from the si canada goose gloves ght of her body, sighs on and canada goose gloves on like an indistinct, rising and falling song. Peggy Fosnacht comes, her sunglasses off, her walleyes wide to the world, and goes upstairs. Her son Billy plays with Nelson, and no one moves to halt their squeals of anger and pain in the back yard, which, neglected, in time die away. Even Harry has a visitor. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Springer goes and comes into the dim room where Harry is sitting looking at magazines and says, in a surprised and injured voice, A man for you. She leaves the doorway and he gets up and walks a few steps forward to greet the man coming into the room, Tothero, leaning on a cane and his face half-paralyzed; but talking, walking, alive.
dating from 1888 to 1890, a sort of calm despair seems to have settled down upon De Maupassants attitude toward life. Psychologically acute as ever, and as perfect in st canada goose gloves yle and sincerity as before, we miss the note of anger. Fatality is the keynote, and yet, sounding low, we detect a genuine subtone of sorrow. Was it a prescience of 1893? So much work to be done, so muc canada goose gloves h work demanded of him, the world of Paris, in all its brilliant and attractive phases, at his feet, and yetinevitable, ever advancing death, with the question of life still unanswered. This may account for some of the strained situations we find in his later romances. Vigorous in frame and hearty as he was, the atmosphere of his mental processes must have been vitiated to produce the dainty but dangerous pessimism that