Rabbit Remembered

Annabelle feels Georgie at her side cringe but muster mettle to reply, "Probably. If it's Giuliani she runs against. He's an uptight control freak who really blew it with this Brooklyn Museum flap. He tried to withhold city funds, it's as bad as art under Communism."

Doris says, the bracelets on her arm jingling as she props her elbow and pulls a smoking cigarette from her mouth, "The city is safer to visit than it's been for twenty years. Deet and I used to be scared to go there and now we're not."

"Maybe that's just demographics," Nelson says. "There are fewer young black men. And thanks to Clinton's boom more of them have jobs."

Alex announces, "Clinton in my book gets no credit whatsoever for the prosperity. It's all due to the American electronics industry. If anything his taxes have held it back. And now the Department of Justice is going after Microsoft-talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."

"And Alan Greenspan," Deet announces, having caught some of the drift.

"Nelson is defending Clinton, dear," Doris calls down the length of the table to him.

"And Mrs. Clinton, too," Nelson says. He has a defiant streak, Annabelle sees-a disregard that might be their father in him.

"I think they're both disgusting," Ron Junior's chubby wife puts it, having returned from the direction of the kitchen to check on her two noisy sons. "I blame her as much as him for the Monica mess."

"How so?" Nelson asks.

"Don't play naive, Nelson. She's been enabling his affairs for years -without her defending him over Gennifer Flowers he wouldn't have ever got elected."

"She keeps him hard up," their host says at the head of the table. There is a flushed pinkness to Ronnie's head, in the scalp that shows through his skimpy hair, in the tint of his tender-looking eyelids, in the color that glows through his protuberant ears. "Like they used to do for prizefighters." It's another generation speaking, Annabelle thinks. A coarser, more physical, rust-belt mentality. This man knew her biological father-played the same auditorium-gyms, inhaled the same coal-smoky air.

"And what about her and Vince Foster?" Ron Junior asks. "Don't think that's not going to come up again if she runs."

"The king and queen of sleaze," his wife goes on in a kind of rapture. "I can't stand them!" This is marriage, Annabelle sees, this joint rapture.

"Yes,"Georgie breaks in, his voice tense, having been coiled within him, "I will vote for her. She has her heart in the right place, unlike all you Republicans. She's for choice, for freedom of expression, for g-giving the p-poor a break." He is starting to stammer in his excitement; the other Harrisons narrow their eyes and sigh in an old reflex of pity and contempt; he is not the scapegoat they want today.

"Like the poor Palestinians. Like Mrs. Arafat. They loved that in New York. 'Here, honey, have a hug,'" Ron Junior runs on.

"You New Yorkers," Alex says to his brother loftily, "you're all-" He hangs on what seems to be an "f," and Georgie jumps in:

"Fags, you're trying to say."

"Full of shit, I was going to say, and then thought better of it. We have ladies and a little girl at this table." He pinches his mouth smaller yet.

"He has no coat-tails," Ron Senior says, still thinking practically. "The jerk should have been impeached and we all know it."

"He was impeached," Nelson says to his stepfather. "What he shouldn't have been was convicted, and he wasn't, if you'll recall."

But Nelson isn't the scapegoat they want either. His stepfather says patiently, "Nellie, he lied to us, the American people. He said right out on television, 'I did not have sex with that woman, what's-hername.'"

Annabelle feels compelled to speak up. "I think he's an excellent President," she says.

Her voice, though shy, is clean and pure, startling. The agitated table, smelling of food eaten and uneaten, falls into a hush. She is their guest, just barely. Who is she, come back from nowhere with her pale round face?

"How so, dear?" Doris Dietrich asks, from the other corner of the table. Her gaudy earrings, strips of copper, twitter as she brings her head forward to hear the answer.

Annabelle fights the blush she feels beginning. She elongates her neck to spread the heat. She loves Clinton, she realizes, from all those hours at the television set, letting his A-student earnestness wash over her, his lip-biting pauses for the judicious word, his gently raspy hillbilly accent. "Oh, the usual things people say," she says. "He really does make you feel he cares-that he sees you. He's been there, poor in a crummy town, with an abusive stepfather. And his cleverness, knowing all those facts, and being always right. All those experts on television like George Will saying bombing Kosovo would never work and then it did. And the way he went into Haiti. And has brought peace to Ireland."

"He's a draft dodger!" Ron Junior cannot keep in. "If I was a soldier I'd tell him to stuff his orders. Don't send me to Bosnia!"