On the extreme edge of his tree of fear Eccles perches, black bird, flipping the pages of magazines and making frowning faces to himself. He seems unreal to Rabbit, everything seems unreal that is outside of his sensations. His palms tingle; a strange impression of pressure darts over his body, seizing now his legs, now the base of his neck. His armpits itch the way they used to when he was little and late for school, running up Jackson Road.

"Where's her parents?" he asks Eccles.

Eccles looks surprised. "I don't know. I'll ask the sister." He moves to get up.

"No no, sit still for Chrissake." Eccles' acting like he half—owns the place annoys him. Harry wants to be unnoticed; Eccles makes noise. He rattles the magazines so it sounds like he's tearing orange crates apart, and flips cigarettes around like a juggler.

A woman in white, not a nun, comes into the waiting—room and asks Sister Bernard, "Did I leave a can of furniture polish in here? I can't find it anywhere. A green can, with one of those pushy things on top that makes it spritz."

"No, dear."

She looks for it and goes out and after a minute comes back and announces, "Well that's the mystery of the world."

To the distant music of pans, wagons, and doors, one day turns through midnight into another. Sister Bernard is relieved by another nun, a very old one, dressed in sky blue. As if in her climb toward holiness she got stalled in the sky. The two whispering men go to the desk, talk, and leave, their crisis unresolved. Eccles and he are left alone. Rabbit strains his ears to catch the cry of his child somewhere deep in the hushed hospital maze. Often he thinks he hears it; the scrape of a shoe, a dog in the street, a nurse giggling—any of these are enough to fool him. He does not expect the fruit of Janice's pain to make a very human noise. His idea grows, that it will be a monster, a monster of his making. The thrust whereby it was conceived becomes confused in his mind with the perverted entry he forced, a few hours ago, into Ruth. Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

Mary Ann. Tired and stiff and lazily tough after a game he would find her hanging on the front steps under the school motto and they would walk across mulching wet leaves through white November fog to his father's new blue Plymouth and drive to get the heater warmed and park. Her body a branched tree of warm nests yet always this touch of timidity. As if she wasn't sure but he was much bigger, a winner. He came to her as a winner and that's the feeling he's missed since. In the same way she was the best of them all because she was the one he brought most to, so tired. Sometimes the shouting glare of the gym would darken behind his sweat—burned eyes into a shadowed anticipation of the careful touchings that would come under the padded gray car roof and once there the bright triumph of the past game flashed across her quiet skin streaked with the shadows of rain on the windshield. So that the two kinds of triumph were united in his mind. She married when he was in the Army; a P.S. in a letter from his mother shoved him out from shore. That day he was launched.

But he feels joy now; cramped from sitting on the eroded chrome—armed chair sick with cigarettes he feels joy in remembering his first girl; the water of his heart has been poured into a thin vase of joy that Eccles' voice jars and breaks.

"Well I've read this article by Jackie Jensen all the way to the end and I don't know what he said," Eccles says.

"Huh?"

"This piece by Jackie Jensen on why he wants to quit baseball. As far as I can tell the problems of being a baseball player are the same as those of the ministry."

"Say, don't you want to go home? What time is it?"

"Around two. I'd like to stay, if I may."

"I won't run off if that's what you're afraid of."

Eccles laughs and keeps sitting there. Harry's first impression of him had been tenacity and now all the intervening companionship has been erased and it's gone back to that.

Harry tells him, "When she had Nelson the poor kid was at it for twelve hours."

Eccles says, "The second child is usually easier," and looks at his watch. "It hasn't quite been six hours."

Events create events. Mrs. Springer passes through from the privileged room where she has been waiting and stiffly nods at Eccles; seeing Harry in the corner of her eye makes her stumble on her sore legs and tumbledown saddle shoes. Eccles gets up and goes with her through the door to the outside. After a while the two of them come back in along with Mr. Springer, who wears a tiny—knotted necktie and a laundry—fresh shirt. His little sandy mustache has been trimmed so often his upper lip has kind of shrivelled under it. He says, "Hello, Harry."

This acknowledgment from her husband, despite some talkingto they've probably had from Eccles, goads the fat hag into turning on Harry and telling him, "If you're sitting there like a buzzard young man hoping she's going to die, you might as well go back to where you've been living because she's doing fine without you and has been all along."

The two men hustle her away while the old nun peers with a quaint smile across her desk, deaf ? Mrs. Springer's attack, though it ached to hurt him, is the first thing anybody has said to Harry since this began that seems to fit the enormity of the event going on somewhere behind the screen of hospital soap—smell. Until her words he felt alone on a dead planet encircling the great gaseous sun of Janice's labor; her cry, though a cry of hate, pierced his solitude. The thought of Janice's death: hearing it voiced aloud has halved its terror. That strange scent of death Janice breathed: Mrs. Springer also smelled it, and this sharing seems the most precious connection he has with anybody in the world.

Mr. Springer returns and passes through to the outside, bestowing upon his son—in—law a painfully complex smile, compounded of a wish to apologize for his wife (we're both men; I know), a wish to keep distant (nevertheless you've behaved unforgivably; don't touch me), and the car salesman's mechanical reflex of politeness. Harry thinks, You crumb; hurls the thought at the slammed door. You slave. Where is everybody going? Where are they coming from? Why can't anybody rest? Eccles comes back and feeds him another cigarette and goes away again. Smoking it makes the floor of his stomach tremble. His throat feels like it does when you wake up after sleeping all night with your mouth open. His own bad breath brushes his nostrils. A doctor with a barrel chest and skinned—looking hands held curled in front of the pouch of his smock comes into the anteroom uncertainly. He asks Harry, "Mr. Angstrom? I'm Dr. Crowe." Harry has never met him; Janice used another obstetrician for the first baby and after her hard time her father made her switch to this one. Janice used to visit him once a month and bring home tales of how gentle he was, how wonderfully soft his hands were, how he seemed to know exactly what it was like to be a pregnant woman.

"How —?"

"Congratulations. You have a beautiful little daughter."

He offers his hand so hastily Harry has only time partly to rise, and thus absorbs the news in a crouching position. The scrubbed pink of the doctor's face – his sterile mask is unknotted and hangs from one ear, exposing pallid beefy lips – becomes involved in Rabbit's process of trying to give shape and tint to the unexpected word "daughter."