Narrow Rooms

by James Purdy

  “Quite the contrary . . . He is disgustingly happy here, I’m afraid.”

  “Why be afraid then of happiness?” A wave of triumph suffused her features, which the flickering light from the candle emphasized.

  “But it is the wrong kind of happiness, Mrs. Vaisey, don’t you see.”

  “Isn’t happiness always just happiness, Mr. De Lakes . . . Unless happiness itself is a sin.”

  He smiled in spite of himself.

  “Let us go into the parlor and talk, for I can see you are very upset, and I have no appetite at all tonight . . . Have been sitting here staring at my plate for what seems hours . . . Come on, please, shall we?”

  She took him by the hand and led him into the spacious adjoining room.

  “You’ll have some after-­dinner coffee at least,” she proposed, and her visitor nodded.

  His anger had gone, but he still felt compelled to get Sidney released. He must not empty slop jars!

  “You should realize that what your brother has accomplished for my son is far greater than any specialist or doctor could or did achieve. So that your fear Sidney is in a demeaning kind of position can’t stand scrutiny, Mr. De Lakes . . . And I am prepared to pay him a fee as high as that of any specialist . . . Don’t you see, he is changing our whole life here. . . .”

  He found his own argument cut from under him and was bereft all at once both of a rejoinder and a mission.

  “All that I feared,” he was now all apology, “is that his life here would continue what he calls the shame and humiliation of his prison experiences, where I fear he lost a great deal of his self-­respect and dignity, his belief in himself. . . . He says, Mrs. Vaisey, that ‘terrible things’ happened to him behind bars . . . I have not listened to what happened because I felt it would not be to either of our advantages.”

  “Advantage?” She was shocked by the use of this word. She scowled, then went on:

  “But don’t you think you should have listened?” she asked with some heat. “After all to whom could he turn but his own brother . . . I mean after all whom could he unburden himself to but you?”

  Vance stared at her lengthily.

  “He did not ask to be unburdened,” he went on. “He simply told me prison had . . . well . . . unmanned him I think the word was . . . That he had been used.”

  The last word had slipped out without his wishing it to, and immediately he had betrayed to her how much more he was leaving out in the background of their quarrel.

  “There!” she cried. “You see he does need someone to unburden to . . . And you are the one naturally he must go to . . . Of course . . .”

  “But I feel, you see,” he made a last attempt now to get her to understand his point and the meaning of his call, “that if he goes on working here, though he is happy, you say, in his post, it will only add to his feeling of . . .”

  “. . . being used!” Mrs. Vaisey immediately poured him a cup of coffee on saying this and handed it to him.

  “To tell the truth, Mrs. Vaisey, I don’t know what I think now.”

  He was close to tears.

  “I don’t suppose for a minute that Sidney thinks he will be in what you call his ‘post’ forever,” Mrs. Vaisey went on. “But there is one person I am afraid who expects him to stay forever . . .”

  “I see,” Vance could barely get these words out.

  “Gareth expects him to remain permanently.”

  A look of blinding displeasure crossed Vance’s face.

  “Their relationship is that successful?” he inquired huskily.

  “I’ve never seen a relationship . . . so beautiful,” she triumphed over him now. “Your brother has already worked a miracle on the boy . . . Gareth was dying until Sidney came.”

  All Vance’s planned speech, argument, his fulmination and judgment were ground to powder by this statement.

  “I think it would be a crime now to keep them apart!” she pressed even further now, although she saw her enemy was crushed.

  “But,” she went on from the height of her advantage, “I think I could let my own boy die if I thought that his happiness and well-­being were earned at the expense of another human being’s humiliation . . . or his being used. Yes, I could easily let him die. . . . But you see you are wrong . . . Neither of these two young men feel they are being humiliated or used by needing one another . . .”

  “Needing one another!” Vance’s earlier anger had turned suddenly to outrage.

  “Why do you think Gareth has suddenly found his speech? None of his other ‘attendants’ restored it to him! And haven’t you noticed a change in your brother too?”

  Vance bowed his head.

  “Mr. De Lakes, answer me.”

  “Yes, yes.” He clenched his fists and simultaneously two tears stood in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Vaisey quieted down, “if we have been quarreling.”

  “Why shouldn’t we quarrel? . . . After all I spent nearly five years trying to get my brother to come home to me, only to lose him to . . .”

  “. . . a mindless invalid! Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  She rose.

  “I did not say that, Mrs. Vaisey . . . Please excuse me . . .” He unconsciously extended his two hands toward her.

  “Sidney may leave any time he wishes . . . Nobody is forcing him to remain here . . .”

  A sudden fear now came over Vance that Sidney might lose his place with Gareth. His whole earlier position seemed about to be reversed, and his fear made him stutter badly before he could get out:

  “I have only come here because I want the best for Sidney.

  “I understand . . . But you will forgive me if I say that in Gareth he has found just that.”

  Vance came to his feet. His mouth struggling with a whole army of words which he resolutely refused to release.

  “We will leave everything just the way it is,” he said at last, “and part friends, then?”

  She took his hands then in hers, and held them firmly in assent.

  One afternoon, a week or so after Vance’s unsuccessful visit, Mrs. Vaisey, full of gloomy thoughts, absent-­minded and hardly knowing what she was doing, had come noiselessly upstairs. The door to Gareth’s room was open and the great billowing curtain, like one of her mother’s old brocade dresses, was fluttering in the pre-­twilight breeze. She looked within. She was as unprepared for the sight which met her eyes as she would have been to see her own face and form in her casket. Without knowing she was doing so, she entered the room.

  Both Gareth and Sidney were naked, holding one another in furious embrace, their bodies covered with their mutual saliva from their kisses, each holding the sex of the other in open, abandoned, furiously moving mouths. Their immoderate pleasure, their almost unconscious bliss made them for some time unaware she stood there. It was Sidney who first loosened his hold on her son, but Gareth went on with his famished caressing of Sidney’s body.

  “Ma’am,” Sidney said at last. “Irene . . .” He gave a frozen idiotic smile.

  She had the strength to get out of the room without falling, the ability somehow to walk down the stairs, and into her private writing room. She closed and locked the door. The passage of time seemed endless to her. She barely thought, she did not weep, she was mindless as a stunned bird. She had grown up, she realized, despite her marriage, and her having been educated at fashionable colleges, having studied Greek and French, ignorant of men, ignorant too of women, ignorant of life. She understood though now Vance’s “mission.”

  She had just enough self-­knowledge also to realize that it was her jealousy and envy which were making her so sick at this moment.

  Then she heard the knock. It could be only one person.

  She admired Sidney’s manner. He had dressed almost formally, and was wearing one of her son’s neckties, which irritated her.

  “Mrs. Vaisey,” he began, as she rose and greeted him with a cold nod. “I suppose you wish me to leave . . .”
/>   “I never told you, Sidney, that your brother was here a week ago.”

  “Vance came here?”

  “Evidently he knows you better than I do . . .”

  She sat down at her spinet desk and began writing out a check. She handed it to him.

  “What is this?” he cried on seeing the excessive amount of the denomination. “I won’t take it,” he said, handing it back to her.

  “You have deceived me,” she spoke tunelessly and without expression.

  “No, ma’am, I have not,” he replied. “I’m not ashamed of love, either, though,” he told her, both decisive and faltering in his speech.

  “Love?” she thundered now at him.

  “Yes,” he replied, and offered to go.

  “Wait a moment,” she said, but as the gnarled old ancient clock ticked away in the study, she could think of nothing to utter. “Very well, then . . .” she was able to say, “the less spoken the better . . .”

  “And he’s better because of what is between us, Mrs. Vaisey . . . Do you hear? I won’t share your and Vance’s views on it . . . I’ll be damned if I will . . . You’ll see.”

  He went out.

  She swallowed one of the strong capsules Dr. Ulric had prescribed for her when under stress, then she walked with the little force she could summon up the sixty steps or so to her boy’s room. The door was shut as if hammered closed. She knocked. There was no answer. She rapped again, then pressed open the door a small crack. “May I come in, Gareth?” As there was no answer, she opened the door wide and stood on the threshold.

  Gareth sat in his best suit, with a silver cravat she had never seen him wear before, his hands folded, appearing much the way he had the time Sidney had made his first appearance.

  “Are you all right?” she wondered, going over to him and touching his right hand. “Gareth, will you please speak to Mother?”

  His eyes had no more expression than those of a doll, and she wondered if he breathed or could move.

  “Gareth, Gareth, do not do this to one who loves you best . . . I can’t bear your terrible silence. I know you do it to punish me. I know you hear me. . . . Gareth, I had to send him away. . . . Why do you not speak to me? Haven’t I given you my own life, sacrificed all for you . . . Oh, Gareth . . .”

  She felt that at least on his lips there was some semblance of life, and though she could detect no movement on them, she felt an expression of both scorn and venom issuing therefrom, so that she winced as if struck by a corrosive liquid.

  Then seeing it was useless to remain with one who was again prepared to live as dead, she went shaken and bent out from his room.

  Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

  Sidney had told his brother Vance that he was queer and loved men, but he could never have begun to tell him about the son of the renderer, or the scissors-­grinder as he was even more commonly called; he certainly could never have made Vance believe that the “renderer” had been dictating his life from at least the time of the eighth grade on. For Roy had had his eyes on Sidney that long. And he had marked Sidney for his own since then. Sidney knew it, had resisted it, and thereby tightened the cord about both of them. It was Roy Sturtevant, after all, who had sent Brian McFee to him, and then, when this plan had worked out all it was supposed to, he had, angered at the fact they had fallen in love with one another, commanded Brian to shoot Sidney, while meantime having suggested to Sidney by means of an unsigned note that Brian would soon try to kill him somewhere near the Bent Ridge Tavern.

  No, it was not surprising that Sidney had not told his brother such a secret. It was too big a secret for one man to tell another and be believed.

  But in their constant wrangling and arguing, one statement would come from Sidney again and again, “I tell you I’m afraid of Roy Sturtevant.”

  “A big strapping fellow like you fear him!”

  “All right, Vance . . . No use talking to you then . . .”

  But when Mrs. Vaisey had allowed Sidney to leave her service, he found he had nowhere to go. The very thought of returning to Vance and telling him the circumstances of his having lost “the only job he had ever wanted” was insupportable. Neither could he go to Dr. Ulric.

  It was then that the chilling awareness came over him that he could go only to one person, his enemy. And at that moment it did not seem too strange to him that he could go confess to the renderer his failing and predicament, rather than Vance; as in prison he had found to his own queer wonder he was more comfortable at last in the company of hardened murderers than with psychiatrists and clergymen.

  It was better to eat humble pie with Roy Sturtevant than face Vance’s pure and noble wrath and bloodless judging forgiveness.

  He had begun, nonetheless, spending the night in the open, but August is cold in the mountains and frost not uncommon, and after lying down for a few hours in a meadow that is not too far from the cemetery, aching and shivering, he started over toward Roy’s place, thinking bitterly how his enemy might treat him more kindly in the face of this new disgrace than his own brother.

  So when Roy Sturtevant had looked up from sewing on a button on his pants pocket, which had come off endangering his losing his money, and saw the man who had given him no peace since he had fallen in love with him as a boy of fourteen in the eighth grade, he realized all over again what he had always known, that the one who had been in jail all those years was himself, the “scissors-­grinder,” and not Sidney. He was not sorry Sidney had killed little Brian McFee, not at all, he was glad to be rid of a young man who had wanted to go on by his side for the rest of his life. For imagine having somebody beside you day and night loving you and forgiving you and petting you forever and ever, that must be a better description of hell than being put into a boiling lake or cauldron of ice that burnt you black. So reckoned the scissors-­grinder.

  But as long as Sid was in jail, he felt all right for he was safe in jail with him, so to speak, for that is what he felt, they were both imprisoned together, and so he had felt good, but now that Sid was out and free, forgiven by everybody, and what is worse installed in Mrs. Vaisey’s mansion, all his old sorrow and responsibility and hell were to begin all over again, for he knew as he had known ever since they had set eyes on one another, though from such different social backgrounds, that Sidney now as he had when they had met in the seventh or eighth grade, Sidney was waiting for him to command him again. He did not want to command any more boys, but Sidney would require him to.

  “So you have come back then,” Roy said at last, having sewed the button on almost too tight to go through the hole.

  “I’ve lost my place at Mrs. Vaisey’s.” Sidney sat down on the furthest chair away from his host.

  “I wondered how long that would last. What did you do wrong this time?”

  Every time he looked at Sidney’s mouth and wanted to kiss it of course he saw something written on the mouth which stopped him from pressing his lips at once against Sid’s, for the lips appeared to be forming the words all over again Command me, I am waiting for your orders.

  Roy did not know yet what the orders were this time, that was what made him angry all over again. But he knew Sidney had not been punished enough for all the years he had mistreated him with his sullen and constant tempting him in school, while every so often yielding to him in some dark corridor, or isolated stretch of country woods, only to have this followed by more refusal to speak to him when other boys were present, often cutting him in the halls or on the street, and finally his last refusal to shake hands with him on the night of the high school graduation exercises, when it was Roy who was valedictorian, and treating him to a slap in the face when he had attempted to force Sidney to shake his hand.

  His being the son of the renderer and a scissors-­grinder, his having risen first as valedictorian of his class and then later becoming through indefatigable labor and
sacrifice richer than old Doc Ulric or Mrs. Vaisey or the snots of the De Lakes brothers, nothing of any of his accomplishments made him content or confident. Something was burning in his veins, having its origin perhaps from even before birth, and now it was the sight of Sidney De Lakes which made the fire burn again in his blood. He was glad his blood was burning, for all the time Sidney had been in jail he had been dormant, cold, lifeless clay. He could be himself in any case only when he hated, when he plotted murder, or, better, when he commanded others to murder.

  “She caught me touching Gareth.”

  That was the only sentence in many sentences coming from a usually laconic (near illiterate, when the truth is told) Sid De Lakes which his ears had picked up, immersed as he was in his own cogitations.

  The sound of the name Gareth was enough to set his plan formulating. For he knew all at once he could get Sidney again through the Vaisey boy. And this time his plan must work, and Sidney must be crossed off.

  “And supposin’ I was to go to Mrs. Vaisey and get you took back,” the renderer said, putting his needle and thread away in a fancy genuine-­leather box and snapping the lid shut with a sharp little bang.

  The expression on Sid’s face maddened him for it said, Would she even open the door on your kind?

  “You forget,” Roy answered that look of his, “that I taught Gareth how to ride . . .”

  “And race to his ruin and the death of his brothers and Dad.”

  “She complained about that, did she?”

  “She only told it.”

  “She only told her half of the story . . . What about my half, huh?”

  Sid put his face in his hands and leaned over low, almost to his boots.

  “Fuck my half, is that what you mean by sticking your face inside your palms. . . . He hounded me to race from sunup to sundown. How did I know there was a train, it never even whistled. I don’t live over there with the quality and don’t know trains . . . Only,” he added, “I didn’t race Gareth. Brian did.”

  Sidney took his face out of his hands and looked the renderer straight in the eye and said deep in his throat: “You think you could manage to have her take me back . . . ? Well, say so if you can do so . . .”