Narrow Rooms

by James Purdy

  Vance had kept the tears back with the firmness and strength of a man who is determined to hang himself albeit with a poor cord, but now seated in the best chair in the house, with the doctor smoking peaceably nearby, and with the quiet of the countryside broken only by the songs of crickets and katydids, short convulsive sobs rose out of the corner he occupied.

  Dr. Ulric’s one pleasure in life outside of his dark imported cigarettes was, when he got started, talking—talking not so much to you as around you, it didn’t matter who the patient was when he got started. He had been known also to talk to his cat, and these lengthy speeches usually touched on medicine, and came helped by his having read most of the 5,000 books in his library which spilled all over his fifteen-­room pillared house.

  Vance had always been grateful that the doctor had talked that night not about the shooting and his brother but about bread, and that he had made no comment on his weeping until when it had got somewhat beyond control Doc stepped into the next room, fetching out some sort of surgical dressing “for you to bawl on, Vance.”

  The Doctor had then continued his speech about (and Vance listened while choking back his sobs) the uses of bread in medical dressings from earliest recorded history up to today. Bread was once applied in water and oil or rosewater to soften abscesses (Vance would nod after a sentence or two of these bits of information). Mixed in wine it was for centuries used to treat bruises and sprains; stale bread or sailor’s bread, pounded and then baked again, was a remedy for looseness of the bowels. In wine again it was applied to swollen eyes (a quick glance toward and then away from the inconsolable one). Persons suffering from palsy were given bread soaked in water, immediately after bathing or fasting . . . With strong vinegar, stale bread was used to dissolve calluses on the feet. . . .

  “Let me stay on with you, Doc!” Vance had burst forth at last. “I can’t go back to that house alone, can I?”

  And without waiting for a response to this plea, Sidney’s brother sang out: “Do you think they will send him to the electric chair?”

  “I do not,” the doctor replied immediately.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you for saying that,” Vance murmured.

  The first week he was back Sidney did not go out of the house at all. The beginning of the second week, around midnight, he came out of his sleeping room barefoot and walked through the parlor where Vance was mending a jacket belonging to his brother (he came out of jail with hardly a stitch to put on, and most of his old clothes didn’t look right on him anymore). Neither of the brothers exchanged a word. Vance could follow him with his eye as Sid strolled outdoors and passed into the little apple orchard, and finally sauntering over to a weathered bench he elected to sit down. After a long while he picked up a green eating apple resting at his feet, but did not offer to taste it, holding it gloomily and loosely in his hand.

  Vance stopped sewing on his brother’s jacket; he averted his face slightly so that he would not seem to be staring at Sidney. Then he put out the lamp, leaving only the hall light burning. He walked over to the fireplace and poked the moribund ashes.

  Almost before he knew it, Vance too had gone out to the apple orchard and seated himself next to Sidney on the bench.

  “You got to go out by daytime too, Sid,” he commenced.

  “Who says so?” came the crabby rejoinder.

  “You got to face them eventually . . .”

  “Why can’t we move from here?” Sidney wondered, touching Vance’s shoulder ever so lightly with his outstretched fingers. “Light out . . .”

  “And leave the house and everything . . . ?”

  “Sell it.”

  “Who’d buy it, Sid . . . It’s most finished . . . See how dilapidated it looks even by starlight . . . It’s all but turned to powder.”

  Vance waited in silence a while. Sid took his hand then in his, pressed it, then let it go.

  “We could go swimming tomorrow over at Barstow’s . . . Sid, you always was a good swimmer and diver.”

  “Yeah, I guess you thought so . . . anyhow. . . .”

  The next day they set off about ten o’clock for Barstow’s. They walked through the south end of the cornfield which eventually showed up on Doc Ulric’s property, then past a stretch of cottonwood trees, up quite a sandy bluff, and at last down to the river itself.

  Vance had stripped and had secured his clothes partly under some stones and was already in the water. Sidney, gazing at the river from the edge of the shore, dispiritedly undressed, but then at the last moment, although having already wet his feet to go in, he stood stock still, lifting his nose like a deer that smells danger.

  A young man, about Sidney’s age, had just crossed down the sloping path that led to the river in his truck, behind which was a trailer with two young horses inside who were whinnying and kicking vehemently, one of them making the attempt despite the cramped quarters and narrow confinement to rear on his hind legs. The truck driver came to a halt, and staring at Sidney thunderstruck, had jumped out of his vehicle and advanced a few steps still wearing the awestruck look on his countenance.

  Both Vance and Sidney recognized him as the “son of the renderer,” also called by the villagers the “scissors-­grinder,” and between whom and the De Lakes brothers there had always been “bad blood,” almost a kind of obscure and muted feud which many claimed was behind Brian McFee’s having been shot to death.

  Roy Sturtevant, the newcomer or “renderer,” had stopped then, his bewilderment, if anything, increasing, and he had stretched out his hands finally not to greet Sidney or embrace him but as a further, and involuntary, expression of his incredulity and amazement at seeing De Lakes.

  Sidney flinched and drew back several paces, for, as he was later to explain to Vance, the very sight of a man’s hands coming toward him since he had been in prison made him uneasy, but to see Roy Sturtevant approaching him in this fashion, unexpected as his coming had been also, was more than he could bear. It brought back to him in a dizzying rush all the terrible events which had led up to his having been convicted and imprisoned.

  The “renderer” (actually only his Grandfather had ever really been in such a distasteful occupation, but both his son and Roy Sturtevant went on being called thus) slowly dropped his hands at his sides, blinked his eyes, and got out: “So, it’s you after all!” and then having spoken this, perhaps only to himself, he rushed back to his truck and trailer and disappeared, rousing his horses by his violent hurry to whinny and kick and even threaten to bite one another.

  Vance slowly, almost mournfully, turned away from this brief spectacle of the meeting between two men who had long had some unspoken conflict between them which he had never begun to understand or wanted to understand, and he strove to swim out toward the direction of the little hills which he was always able to see from Dr. Ulric’s spacious back windows. When finally he turned round facing shore, he saw Sidney still listlessly stationed at the river’s edge, brooding and oblivious to anything around him.

  “What did he want?” Vance wondered, toweling his dripping body, and it was then he saw the marks on Sid. He quickly turned away from looking at them so as not to embarrass him any more than he was already embarrassed. The marks or scars looked like somebody had decorated him with razor thrusts about his chest, and on past to his back and up and down his spine; red wales such as come from scourging were visible.

  “Search me, Vance,” Sidney replied, a strange look both sad and almost ecstatic on his face. He began splashing the brown river water over his breast as if to draw attention now to the scars themselves, but then he held his hands and arms over the long row of irregularly healed wounds and blinked before he dove into the water. Vance watched him swim until his head was only a shiny black dot on the river.

  Sidney refused to go swimming again after that day, and Vance did not urge it again.

  “I do hate to leave you all alone by yourself,” Vance would say as their day’s routine began in earnest now, “but as I wrote you, I w
ork for the doctor in his office nowadays . . . Sort of an all-­round helper. I type up his prescriptions, chauffeur for him, and prepare some of his meals, and keep his out-­of-­town appointments straightened out.”

  Sidney nodded, but Vance was not certain his brother had even heard him.

  “This evening I thought we’d take a little stroll uptown after it cools off,” Vance finished with forced pleasantness.

  Sidney did not nod this time and appeared even further absorbed in his own musing, but just before Vance went out for the day the older boy smiled faintly and that cheered his brother so considerably that he went down the steps whistling.

  “We strolled down Main street,” Vance confided later to the doctor . . . “Sid tightened up the minute we began passing the shopwindows and he saw his reflection in the glass . . . I realized after a bit he didn’t at first recognize the reflection the windows was his own, he had changed so in every which way while he was in jail that he thought at first he was looking at the face of a stranger. He kept staring at himself in the glass. . . . We walked on then and pretty soon passed the Royal movie house which he had attended as a boy. Then we began to meet people we both half-­knew or knew casually, and they nodded and sort of grinned, sickly-­like, and that made things worse. . . . He walked like a man does through a gauntlet, with his mouth set and his jaw tight, and dim eyes. . . . Then we went into the Sweet Shop and seated ourselves clear in the back out of notice. . . . Oh, why did we do it after all? . . . We ordered sodas . . . well, he couldn’t drink his, and I wasn’t able to finish mine. . . . But anyhow he did it! He appeared! But on the way back he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to go to town again, hear?’ And then in rapid fire he says, ‘Did you see who was sittin’ in the seat directly facing ours? . . . No? Well, it was him . . .’ ”

  “Him?” Vance had replied totally in the dark.

  “Yes, him, the one who has always been doggin’ me ever since I can remember, Vance! You know very well who . . . The renderer!”

  “Oh Roy Sturtevant again! Yes, I guess I saw him. But he ain’t in that occupation, Sid.” Vance heard himself slipping into the bad grammar his brother used and which Vance blamed on jail, forgetting Sid had always used such grammar, had always been a poor “scholar,” and that only his glory, short-­lived as it had been, as a halfback on the high school football team and a champion swimmer and diver disguised the fact that in all other ways he had never, in the opinion and phraseology of Dr. Ulric’s village, “amounted to a hill of beans.”

  “His Grandfather was the renderer, Sid, a long, long time ago,” Vance heard himself repeating this worn bit of information to his brother’s deaf ears.

  “I never want to set eyes on him again as long as I live . . . I feel he brought me all my bad luck. He was somehow behind my fall!”

  Sidney gave his brother a look such as he had never given him before.

  Vance gazed in return at him, dumbfounded. And something deep stirred in him, fear, suspicion, dread, perhaps something more and probably worse. He reached for Sid’s hand then, but the latter withdrew it. Then aware of the younger fellow’s disappointment at his withholding his affection, Sid took his hand tight in his heavy, rough grasp and held it to the point of pain.

  “Sidney, why don’t you unburden yourself to me? Don’t you trust me? I know there probably was something between you and the renderer as you call him, and I have always wondered if maybe your quarrel with him had something to do with the trouble between you and Brian McFee. . . . I mean, Sid . . .”

  “Don’t, please, don’t!” Sidney implored. (He acted, you see, like the younger brother and always had.) “I can’t bear no more after what I’ve went through in prison. But yes, for your information, I guess Roy Sturtevant had a hand in all that happened to me and Brian. . . . Don’t ask me to explain it, Vance, for I can’t. I mean I don’t understand it myself . . . Yes, maybe he’s behind it all.”

  Sidney threw himself now into his brother’s arms and held onto him with might and main.

  “You know about me anyhow, don’t you, Vance?” came his smothered voice. “Don’t you?” he cried on, pressing his mouth against his brother’s mended jacket. “You’re so good, Vance, it’s hard to feel worthy of you. You’re so straight and upright. . . . I guess maybe you suspicioned about what I am, and must have guessed the truth about Brian and me, that we . . .” ■

  “It don’t matter now.” Vance broke away from his brother’s close embrace. His voice rose to a hysterical wail. “We won’t think about any of that . . . It’s over and done with. . . .”

  “No, Vance, it’s not over and done . . . I’m trying to level with you, see, to explain to you. . . .”

  “Sid, you’re all I’ve got.” Vance spoke now with almost the same fierce incoherence that had been Sidney’s a moment before. “It don’t matter to me what you’ve done anyhow . . . I’ve just waited for you to come back to me. I don’t have nothing else to live for. . . .”

  “Don’t say that, Vance. For God’s sake, don’t please . . . I’m not worth that much when all’s said and done. . . .”

  Going up to his brother, Sid spoke almost into the younger boy’s teeth: “You’ve got to find something worthy of you, Vance . . . You’re straight, and you ought to marry . . . Don’t bank your whole life on somebody like me, hear? . . . Forget me.”

  “You are my life, Sid.”

  “I hear . . . ,” Sidney began after a long struggle to find his voice. “I hear also you went to the Governor and that you got him to intercede for me.”

  Vance barely nodded, for his own emotions were so topsy-turvy he dared not risk speaking at that moment.

  “I would do it all again,” Vance managed finally to tell him, but in a voice so unlike his own Sidney turned quickly and gave him a look of eloquent wonder. “I would lie for you even, Sid, I reckon. Even if you had killed Brian McFee in cold blood . . .”

  “Christ, Vance,” Sidney turned away. He struggled to keep down all the feelings that had threatened to erupt ever since his return.

  “I know more than you give me credit for, Sid,” Vance was going on in this new voice, the voice of a stranger, imbued with and full of his new “knowledge.” “I was always pretty sure you thought an awful lot of Brian McFee too.”

  Sidney nodded many times, and with each nod he pressed Vance’s knee with his fingers.

  “Since you’re getting close, Vance, yes I did . . . I thought an awful lot of him, and he . . . me.” Then almost in fury: “Why do you think we went hunting so much anyhow? . . . But in cold blood,” he quieted down, “no, I never shot him in cold blood. . . . He felt, you see, I was turning against him . . . I wasn’t . . . I was, I mean, trying to gain time to understand my own feelings for him . . . But he couldn’t wait. . . . He felt he’d rather die or see me die than lose my caring for him. . . . So he kept shooting at me in the woods that day. . . . I run to the Bent Ridge Tavern . . . But you know it all, Vance . . . Cold blood, never . . .”

  “That’s all you need to say, Sid. . . . You know I believe you.”

  “I carry a terrible burden though in my heart, Vance . . . Cold blood, hot blood, whatever you call it . . .”

  Sidney buried his face in his hands as he said the last few words. Vance hesitated a long while, then bending over him he pressed his lips to his brother’s neck. It was more like he had whispered a secret to him than bestowed a kiss. Sid took Vance’s hand again in his, and pressed hard again and again.

  “There are these people I suppose who are destined to play parts in our lives,” Sidney had said to his brother later that night when Vance had come in to say goodnight to him.

  But the thought and the way he pronounced the words were as unlike the old Sidney as it was possible to be.

  “You won’t hold it against me now, Vance.” The older brother looked up then, perturbed. “For what I’ve told you tonight, I mean . . .”

  Vance shook his head morosely.

  “I shouldn’t have
told you,” he whispered in the face of Vance’s heavy silence.

  “No, no, Sid, you should have,” Vance forced a smile. “It’s my fault, Sid, for what Mama once explained it as my looking up to you too much. Remember?”

  “I guess nobody could look up to me now, Vance, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s not so, Sid. I didn’t mean that, and you mustn’t say it!”

  Sid reared up in bed and pushed his back against the bedstead with almost the same kind of wild and frenzied movement as he had the night of the shooting when he had pressed his back against the wall as he stood facing the dying Brian McFee.

  “I think more highly of you I believe than ever before,” Vance continued doggedly. “I know I am the last person on earth you would want to confide these things to, Sid. That’s my fault too. . . . But Sid,” and here Vance’s own voice took on some of the wildness of his brother’s, “promise me one thing, forget this Roy Sturtevant. Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to . . .”

  Sidney stared at his brother like thunderstruck. Then he took him in his arms and kissed him fiercely.

  “You don’t look on me as stained and dirty then?” Sidney cried in a kind of hopeful buoyance.

  “You know better, Sid.”

  Vance had not told Sidney he would confide in the doctor, but he had to tell somebody. He had to unburden himself and after all telling the Doc was like whispering it to the river by midnight. Yet he felt somehow he had done wrong. He should have kept Sidney’s secret locked in his own heart. He felt suddenly in the first wake of his disappointment and anger that Brian McFee deserved killing.

  “So now you know,” Vance said with some ill temper in his voice. “Or did you, judging by your expression, did you always know . . . I suppose you did.”

  “I don’t think of people as queer or straight,” the Doc said. “Not when you’re as old as I. And I don’t think God does either.”