Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  You see, this experience, even with all the ugly and self-doubting and humiliating moments, has done me a lot of good, I was right to come here, even though I had no idea what it was really like. I think I needed the experience of war to complete me, and I tell you this even though I know that you will detest any such idea. In fact, I have to tell you that a big part of me loves being here, and that in some way, even with all this trouble, this year will always be one of the high points of my life. Pat, as you see I’m determined to be honest—to be an honest man. If I’m going to be a lawyer, I ought to be honest, don’t you think? (Or maybe the reverse is the reality!) One thing that has meant a lot to me here has been what I can only call the close comradeship of my friends and my men—I actually like the grunts more than the usual officer types, which of course means that I get more loyalty and better performance from my men than the usual lieutenant. Someday I’d like you to meet Mike Poole and Tim Underhill and Pumo the Puma and the most amazing of all, M.O. Dengler, who of course was involved with me in the Ia Thuc cave incident. These guys stuck by me. I even have a nickname, “Beans.” They call me “Beans” Beevers, and I like it.

  There was no way my court-martial could have really put me in any trouble, because all the facts, and my own men, were on my side. Beside, could you see me actually killing children? This is Vietnam and you kill people, that’s what we’re doing here—we kill Charlies. But we don’t kill babies and children. Not even in the heat of wartime—and Ia Thuc was pretty hot!

  Well, this is my way of letting you know that at the court-marital of course I received a complete and utter vindication. Dengler did too. There were even unofficial mutterings about giving us medals for all the BS we put up with for the past six weeks—including that amazing story in Time magazine. Before people start yelling about atrocities, they ought to have all the facts straight. Fortunately, last week’s magazines go out with the rest of the trash.

  Besides, I already knew too much about what death does to people.

  I never told you that I once had a little brother named Edward. When I was ten, my little brother wandered up into the top floor of our house one night and suffered a fatal epileptic fit.

  This event virtually destroyed my family. It led directly to my father’s leaving home. (He had been a hero in WWII, something else I never told you.) It deeply changed, I would say even damaged, my older brother Albert. Albert tried to enlist in 1964, but they wouldn’t take him because they said he was psychologically unfit. My mom too almost came apart for a while. She used to go up in the attic and cry and wouldn’t come down. So you could say that my family was pretty well destroyed, or ruined, or whatever you want to call it, by a sudden death. I took it, and my dad’s desertion, pretty hard myself. You don’t get over these things easily.

  The court-martial lasted exactly four hours. Big deal, hey?, as we used to say back in Palmyra. We used to have a neighbor named Pete Petrosian who said things like that, and against what must have been million-to-one odds, died exactly the same way my brother did, about two weeks after—lightning really did strike twice. I guess it’s dumb to think about him now, but maybe one thing war does is to make you conversant with death. How it happens, what it does to people, what it means, how all the dead in your life are somehow united, joined, part of your eternal family. This is a profound feeling, Pat, and no damn whipped-up failed court-martial can touch it. If there were any innocent children in that cave, then they are in my family forever, like little Edward and Pete Petrosian, and the rest of, my life is a poem to them. But the Army says there weren’t, and so do I.

  I love you and love you and love you. You can stop worrying now and start thinking about being married to a. Columbia Law student with one hell of a good future. I won’t tell you any more war stories than you want to hear. And that’s a promise, whether the stories are about Nam or Palmyra.

  Always yours,

  Harry

  (aka “Beans!”)

  INTERLUDE:

  IN THE REALM

  OF DREAMS

  For a long time after the war, he dreamed about his childhood. He heard screams from the bedroom or the bathroom of the little duplex where they had lived when he was a small boy, and when he turned in panic to look out of the window, he knew that the street with its rising lawns and tall elms was only a picture over the face of a terrible fire. In the dreams, he knew that none of this had anything at all to do with the war. It had all happened before. Screams floated inside the brown and yellow house, and smoke and fire billowed beneath the streets.

  The screams would stop as soon as he touched the bathroom doorknob. When he opened the door, he would see the shower curtain pulled across the tub. It was splashed with blood, and curls and loops of blood lay scattered on the floor and the white toilet seat. The hard part was pushing back the shower curtain, but there was never anybody in the tub—only a big bloodstain moving toward the drain like a living thing. That was exactly what had happened, in and before the war.

  THE JUNIPER TREE

  It is a school yard in my Midwest of empty lots, waving green and brilliant with tiger lilies, of ugly new “ranch” houses set down in rows in glistening clay, of treeless avenues cooking in the sun. Our school yard is black asphalt—on June days, patches of the asphalt loosen and stick like gum to the soles of our high-top basketball shoes.

  Most of the playground is black empty space from which heat radiates up like the wavery images on the screen of a faulty television set. Tall wire mesh surrounds it. A new boy named Paul is standing beside me.

  Though it is now nearly the final month of the semester, Paul came to us, carroty-haired, pale-eyed, too shy to ask even the whereabouts of the lavatory, only six weeks ago. The lessons baffle him, and his Southern accent is a fatal error of style. The popular students broadcast in hushed, giggling whispers the terrible news that Paul “talks like a nigger.” Their voices are almost awed—they are conscious of the enormity of what they are saying, of the enormity of its consequences.

  Paul is wearing a brilliant red shirt too heavy, too enveloping, for the weather. He and I stand in the shade at the rear of the school, before the cream-colored brick wall in which is placed at eye level a newly broken window of pebbly green glass reinforced with strands of copper wire. At our feet is a little scatter of green, edible-looking pebbles. The pebbles dig into the soles of our shoes, too hard to shatter against the softer asphalt. Paul is singing to me in his slow, lilting voice that he will never have friends in this school. I put my foot down on one of the green candy pebbles and feel it push up, hard as a bullet, against my foot. “Children are so cruel,” Paul casually sings. I think of sliding the pebble of broken glass across my throat, slicing myself wide open to let death in.

  ——

  Paul did not return to school in the fall. His father, who had beaten a man to death down in Mississippi, had been arrested while leaving a movie theater near my house named the Orpheum-Oriental. Paul’s father had taken his family to see an Esther Williams movie costarring Fernando Lamas, and when they came out, their mouths raw from salty popcorn, the baby’s hands sticky with spilled Coca-Cola, the police were waiting for them. They were Mississippi people, and I think of Paul now, seated at a desk on a floor of an office building in Jackson filled with men like him at desks: his tie perfectly knotted, a good shine on his cordovan shoes, a necessary but unconscious restraint in the set of his mouth.

  ——

  In those days I used to spend whole days in the Orpheum-Oriental.

  ——

  I was seven. I held within me the idea of a disappearance like Paul’s, of never having to be seen again. Of being an absence, a shadow, a place where something no longer visible used to be.

  ——

  Before I met that young-old man whose name was “Frank” or “Stan” or “Jimmy,” when I sat in the rapture of education before the movies at the Orpheum-Oriental, I watched Alan Ladd and Richard Widmark and Glenn Ford and Dane Clark. Chicago Deadline.
Martin and Lewis, tangled up in the same parachute in At War With the Army. William Boyd and Roy Rogers. Openmouthed, I drank down movies about spies and criminals, wanting the passionate and shadowy ones to fulfill themselves, to gorge themselves on what they needed. The feverish gaze of Richard Widmark, the anger of Alan Ladd, Berry Kroeger’s sneaky eyes, girlish and watchful—vivid, total elegance.

  When I was seven, my father walked into the bathroom and saw me looking at my face in the mirror. He slapped me, not with his whole strength, but hard, raging instantly. “What do you think you’re looking at?” His hand cocked and ready. “What do you think you see?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing is right.”

  A carpenter, he worked furiously, already defeated, and never had enough money—as if, permanently beyond reach, some quantity of money existed that would have satisfied him. In the mornings he went to the job site hardened like cement into anger he barely knew he had. Sometimes he brought men from the taverns home with him at night. They carried transparent bottles of Miller High Life in paper bags and set them down on the table with a bang that said: men are here! My mother, who had returned from her secretary’s job a few hours earlier, fed my brothers and me, washed the dishes, and put the three of us to bed while the men shouted and laughed in the kitchen.

  He was considered an excellent carpenter. He worked slowly, patiently; and I see now that he spent whatever love he had in the rented garage that was his workshop. In his spare time he listened to baseball games on the radio. He had professional, but not personal, vanity, and he thought that a face like mine should not be examined.

  Because I saw “Jimmy” in the mirror, I thought my father, too, had seen him.

  ——

  One Saturday my mother took the twins and me on the ferry across Lake Michigan to Saginaw—the point of the journey was the journey, and at Saginaw the boat docked for twenty minutes before wallowing back out into the lake and returning. With us were women like my mother, her friends, freed by the weekend from their jobs, some of them accompanied by men like my father, with their felt hats and baggy weekend trousers flaring over their weekend shoes. The women wore blood-bright lipstick that printed itself onto their cigarettes and smeared across their front teeth. They laughed a great deal and repeated the words that had made them laugh. “Hot dog,” “slippin’ ‘n’ slidin’,” “opera singer.” Thirty minutes after departure, the men disappeared into the enclosed deck bar; the women, my mother among them, arranged deck chairs into a long oval tied together by laughter, attention, gossip. They waved their cigarettes in the air. My brothers raced around the deck, their shirts flapping, their hair glued to their skulls with sweat—when they squabbled, my mother ordered them into empty deck chairs. I sat on the deck, leaning against the railings, quiet. If someone had asked me: What do you want to do this afternoon, what do you want to do for the rest of your life? I would have said, I want to stay right here, I want to stay here forever.

  After a while I stood up and left the women. I went across the deck and stepped through a hatch into the bar. Dark, deeply grained imitation wood covered the walls. The odors of beer and cigarettes and the sound of men’s voices filled the enclosed space. About twenty men stood at the bar, talking and gesturing with half-filled glasses. Then one man broke away from the others with a flash of dirty blond hair. I saw his shoulders move, and my scalp tingled and my stomach froze and I thought: Jimmy. “Jimmy.” But he turned all the way around, dipping his shoulders in some ecstasy of beer and male company, and I saw that he was a stranger, not “Jimmy,” after all.

  ——

  I was thinking: Someday when I am free, when I am out of this body and in some city whose name I do not even know now, I will remember this from beginning to end and then I will be free of it. The women floated over the empty lake, laughing out clouds of cigarette smoke, the men, too, as boisterous as the children on the sticky asphalt playground with its small green spray of glass like candy.

  ——

  In those days I knew I was set apart from the rest of my family, an island between my parents and the twins. Those pairs that bracketed me slept in double beds in adjacent rooms at the back of the ground floor of the duplex owned by the blind man who lived above us. My bed, a cot coveted by the twins, stood in their room. An invisible line of great authority divided my territory and possessions from theirs.

  ——

  This is what happened in the mornings in our half of the duplex. My mother got up first—we heard her showering, heard drawers closing, the sounds of bowls and milk being set out on the table. The smell of bacon frying for my father, who banged on the door and called out my brothers’ names. “Don’t you make me come in there, now!” The noisy, puppyish turmoil of my brothers getting out of bed. All three of us scramble into the bathroom as soon as my father leaves it. The bathroom was steamy, heavy with the odor of shit and the more piercing, almost palpable smell of shaving— lather and amputated whiskers. We all pee into the toilet at the same time. My mother frets and frets, pulling the twins into their clothes so that she can take them down the street to Mrs. Candee, who is given a five-dollar bill every week for taking care of them. I am supposed to be running back and forth on the playground in Summer Play School, supervised by two teenage girls who live a block away from us. (I went to Play School only twice.) After I dress myself in clean underwear and socks and put on my everyday shirt and pants, I come into the kitchen while my father finishes his breakfast. He is eating strips of bacon and golden-brown pieces of toast shiny with butter. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray before him. Everybody else has already left the house. My father and I can hear the blind man banging on the piano in his living room. I sit down before a bowl of cereal. My father looks at me, looks away. Angry at the blind man for banging at the piano this early in the morning, he is sweating already. His cheeks and forehead shine like the golden toast. My father glances at me, knowing he can postpone this no longer, and reaches wearily into his pocket and drops two quarters on the table. The high-school girls charge twenty-five cents a day, and the other quarter is for my lunch. “Don’t lose that money,” he says as I take the coins. My father dumps coffee into his mouth, puts the cup and his plate into the crowded sink, looks at me again, pats his pockets for his keys, and says, “Close the door behind you.” I tell him that I will close the door. He picks up his gray toolbox and his black lunch pail, claps his hat on his head, and goes out, banging his toolbox against the door frame. It leaves a broad gray mark like a smear left by the passing of some angry creature’s hide.

  ——

  Then I am alone in the house. I go back to the bedroom, close the door and push a chair beneath the knob, and read Blackhawk and Henry and Captain Marvel comic books until at last it is time to go to the theater.

  While I read, everything in the house seems alive and dangerous. I can hear the telephone in the hall rattling on its hook, the radio clicking as it tries to turn itself on and talk to me. The dishes stir and chime in the sink. At these times all objects, even the heavy chairs and sofa, become their true selves, violent as the fire that fills the sky I cannot see, and races through the secret ways and passages beneath the streets. At these times other people vanish like smoke.

  When I pull the chair away from the door, the house immediately goes quiet, like a wild animal feigning sleep. Everything inside and out slips cunningly back into place, the fires bank, men and women reappear on the sidewalks. I must open the door and I do. I walk swiftly through the kitchen and the living room to the front door, knowing that if I look too carefully at any one thing, I will wake it up again. My mouth is so dry, my tongue feels fat. “I’m leaving,” I say to no one. Everything in the house hears me.

  ——

  The quarter goes through the slot at the bottom of the window, the ticket leaps from its slot. For a long time, before “Jimmy,” I thought that unless you kept your stub unfolded and safe in a shirt pocket, the usher could rush down the aisle in t
he middle of the movie, seize you, and throw you out. So into the pocket it goes, and I slip through the big doors into the cool, cross the lobby, and pass through a swinging door with a porthole window.

  Most of the regular daytime patrons of the Orpheum-Oriental sit in the same seats every day—I am one of those who comes here every day. A small, talkative gathering of bums sits far to the right of the theater, in the rows beneath the sconces fastened like bronze torches to the walls. The bums choose these seats so that they can examine their bits of paper, their “documents,” and show them to each other during the movies. Always on their minds is the possibility that they might have lost one of these documents, and they frequently consult the tattered envelopes in which they are kept.

  I take the end seat, left side of the central block of seats, just before the broad horizontal middle aisle. There I can stretch out.

  At other times I sit in the middle of the last row, or the first; sometimes when the balcony is open I go up and sit in its first row. From the first row of the balcony, seeing a movie is like being a bird and flying down into the movie from above. To be alone*in the theater is delicious. The curtains hang heavy, red, anticipatory; the mock torches glow on the walls. Swirls of gilt wind through the red paint. On days when I sit near a wall, I reach out toward the red, which seems warm and soft, and find my fingers resting on a chill dampness. The carpet of the Orpheum-Oriental must once have been a bot-tomlessly rich brown; now it is a dark noncolor, mottled with the pink and gray smears, like melted Band-Aids, of chewing gum. From about a third of the seats dirty gray wool foams from slashes in the worn plush.