"Hip, hip hooray," Nelson says, yanking his denim jacket from the clothes tree inside the front door and shrugging it on. He looks humpbacked and mean, a rat going out to be drowned.

"Now he's going out to wreck the Mustang." Harry struggles to his feet and stands, taller than them all.

Ma Springer slaps her knees with open palms. "Well this discussion has ruined my mood. I'm going to heat up water for a cup of tea, the damp has put the devil in my joints."

Janice says, "Harry, say goodnight to Nelson nicely."

He protests, "He hasn't said goodnight nicely to me. I was down here trying to talk nicely to him about college and it was like pulling teeth. What's everything such a secret for? I don't even know what he's majoring in now. First it was pre-med but the chemistry was too hard, then it was anthropology but there was too much to memorize, last I heard he'd switched to social science but it was too much bullshit."

"I'm majoring in geography," Nelson admits, nervous by the door, tense to scuttle.

"Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography."

"Apparently it's a great specialty out there," Janice says.

"Whadde they do all day, color maps?"

"Mom, I got to split. Where's your car keys?"

"Look in my raincoat pocket."

Harry can't stop getting after him. "Now remember the roads around here are slippery when wet," he says. "If you get lost just call up your geography professor."

"Charlie's taking Melanie out really bugs you, doesn't it?" Nelson says to him.

"Not at all. What bugs me is why it doesn't bug you."

"I'm queer," Nelson tells him.

` Janice, what have I done to this kid to deserve this?"

She sighs. "Oh, I expect you know."

He is sick of these allusions to his tainted past. "I took care of him, didn't I? While you were off screwing around who was it put his breakfast cereal on the table and got him off to school?"

"My daddy did," Nelson says in a bitter mincing voice.

Janice intervenes. "Nellie, why don't you go now if you're going to go? Did you find the keys?"

The child dangles them.

"You're committing automotive suicide," Rabbit tells her. "This kid is a car killer."

"It was just a fucking dent," Nelson cries to the ceiling, "and he's going to make me suffer and suffer." The door slams, having admitted a sharp gust of the aroma of the rain.

"Now who else would like some tea?" Ma Springer calls from the kitchen. They go in to her. Moving from the stuffy overfurnished living room to the kitchen with its clean enamelled surfaces provides a brighter perspective on the world. "Harry, you shouldn't be so hard on the boy," his mother-in-law advises. "He has a lot on his mind."

"Like what?" he asks sharply.

"Oh," Ma says, still mellow, setting out plates of comfort, Walton-style, "the things young people do."

Janice has on underpants beneath her nightie but no bra and in the bright light her nipples show inside the cloth with their own pink color, darker, more toward wine. She is saying, "It's a hard age. They seem to have so many choices and yet they don't. They've been taught by television all their lives to want this and that and yet when they get to be twenty they find money isn't so easy to come by after all. They don't have the opportunities even we had."

This doesn't sound like her. "Who have you been talking to?" Harry asks scornfully.

Janice is harder to put down than formerly; she tidies her bangs with a fiddling raking motion of her fingers and answers, "Some of the girls at the club, their children have come home too and don't know what to do with themselves. It even has a name now, the back-to-the-nest something."

"Syndrome," he says; he is being brought round. He and Pop and Mom sometimes after Mim had been put to bed would settle like this around the kitchen table, with cereal or cocoa if not tea. He feels safe enough to sound plaintive. "If he'd just ask for help," he says, "I'd try to give it. But he doesn't ask. He wants to take without asking."

"And isn't that just human nature," Ma Springer says, in a -spruced-up voice. The tea tastes to her satisfaction and she adds as if to conclude, "There's a lot of sweetness in Nelson, I think he's just a little overwhelmed for now."

"Who isn't?" Harry asks.

In bed, perhaps it's the rain that sexes him up, he insists they make love, though at first Janice is reluctant. "I would have taken a bath," she says, but she smells great, deep jungle smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns. When he won't stop, crazy to lose his face in this essence, the cool stem fury of it takes hold of her and combatively she comes, thrusting her hips up to grind her clitoris against his face and then letting him finish inside her beneath him. Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain's sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass, quicker than the throbbing in the iron gutter, where ropes of water twist.

"I like having Nelson in the house," Harry says to his wife. "It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses."

Murmurously beyond their windows, yet so close they might be in the cloud of it, the beech accepts, leaf upon leaf, shelves and stairs of continuous dripping, the rain.

"Nelson's not your enemy. He's your boy and needs you more now than ever though he can't say it."

Rain, the last proof left to him that God exists. "I feel," he says, "there's something I don't know."

Janice admits, "There is."

"What is it?" Receiving no answer, he asks then, "How do you know it?"

"Mother and Melanie talk."

"How bad is it? Drugs?"

"Oh Harry no." She has to hug him, his ignorance must make him seem so vulnerable. "Nothing like that. Nelson's like you are, underneath. He likes to keep himself pure."

"Then what the fuck's up? Why can't I be told?"

She hugs him again, and lightly laughs. "Because you're not a Springer."

Long after she has fallen into the steady soft rasping of sleep he lies awake listening to the rain, not willing to let it go, this sound of life. You don't have to be a Springer to have secrets. Blue eyes so pale in the light coming into the back seat of that Corolla. Janice's taste is still on his lips and he thinks maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for Sealtest. Twice as he lies awake a car stops outside and the front door opens: the first time from the quietness of the motor and the lightness of the steps on the porch boards, Stavros dropping off Melanie; the next time, not many minutes later, the motor brutally raced before cut-off and the footsteps loud and defiant, must be Nelson, having had more beers than was good for him. From the acoustical quality surrounding the sounds of this second car Rabbit gathers that the rain is letting up. He listens for the young footsteps to come upstairs but one set seems to trap the other in the kitchen, Melanie having a snack. The thing about vegetarians, they seem always hungry. You eat and eat and it's never the right food. Who told him that, once? Tothero, he seemed so old there at the end but how much older than Harry is now was he? Nelson and Melanie stay in the kitchen talking until the eavesdropper wearies and surrenders. In his dream, Harry is screaming at the boy over the telephone at the lot, but though his mouth is open so wide he can see all his own teeth spread open like in those dental charts they marked your cavities on that looked like a scream, no sound comes out; his jaws and eyes feel frozen open and when he awakes it seems it has been the morning sun, pouring in hungrily after the rain, that he has been aping.

The display windows at Springer Motors have been recently washed and Harry stands staring through them with not a fleck of dust to show him he is not standing outdoors, in an airconditioned outdoors, the world left rinsed and puddled by last night's rain, with yet a touch of weariness in the green of the tree across Route 111 behind the Chuck Wagon, a dead or yellow leaf here and there, at the tips of the crowded branches that are dying. The traffic this weekday flourishes. Carter keeps talking about a windfall tax on the oil companies' enormous profits but that won't happen, Harry feels. Carter is smart as a whip and prays a great deal but his gift seems to be the old Eisenhower one of keeping much from happening, just a little daily seepage.