Narrow Rooms Page 5

  He offered to leave then by rising, and she put her hand on his sleeve.

  “Never doubt me, Sidney,” she gave him her last word then.

  “My back was to the wall until Sidney came.”

  Irene Vaisey had confided this sentiment to a yellowing mass of papers which a more ordinary woman might have called her diary. (A lengthy description of the De Lakes boy followed in her fine meticulous hand.)

  “What will Vance say about my hands?” Sidney wondered aloud as he was being driven home so that the chauffeur, who was not sure he had heard the question correctly, asked him to repeat it.

  Sidney’s hands were covered with teeth marks.

  “You need not keep your hands hidden, Sidney,” Vance had said as they were finishing their supper that evening. “I noticed them at once.”

  “I belong there, Vance,” his brother raised his voice edgily. “Both Mrs. Vaisey and I are in the same boat, if you ask me.”

  Vance put down his knife and fork with a bang.

  “All right, then,” Sidney began shamefacedly. “My hands are bitten from when I feed Gareth . . . He can’t feed himself . . .”

  A look of almost lordly disgust came over Vance’s flushed face.

  “Look, Vance . . . It’s what I want to do . . . It quiets me down . . .”

  “Getting bit quiets you down?”

  “I’m helping someone.”

  “Does he know you’re helping? Does he know anything? I ask you. Of course he doesn’t. You might as well feed a corpse . . .”

  “Vance, don’t say anymore. . . . I think you are angry with me really because I told you I was . . . that way . . .”

  “I’m not at all,” Vance interrupted him passionately. “I don’t believe you’re queer anyhow, or gay, or whatever they call it . . . Prison made you think that . . .”

  “Oh, Vance, Vance . . . I am, I am, I am.”

  Suddenly Sidney sobbed and put his hands over his eyes so that the bite marks at last were clearly put up for show.

  Vance excused himself, took his plate, and walked to the kitchen. He let the water faucet run full force so that he would not hear anything from the dining room.

  When he reentered the room, Sidney had taken his hands down from his eyes and was looking blindly at his bread pudding which had been made that day by Dr. Ulric’s cook.

  “Sidney, it’s all right,” Vance said, and went over to his brother and put his hand on his shoulder. “Forgive my bad temper.”

  “It’s the only thing I’m good for, Vance . . . To feed a dead boy.”

  At this Vance turned his own face away, and pressed his fingers hard into Sidney’s shoulder, allowing finally his hand to rest there.

  Irene was waiting for him the next day, dressed in a billowing gauzelike gown with little blue flowers designed all over it, and a kind of satin bow round her narrow waist. A perfume almost like that of peonies came bearing down upon Sidney as he took her hand.

  “I thought if you would care to I would show you a film I made of Garey just two years ago . . . It takes only a few minutes . . . Would you want to see it, Sidney?”

  “Oh, you know me, you know I do.”

  There were times when she looked extraordinarily like her son. It was uncanny.

  They went immediately into a small room which adjoined the rather oversumptuous—but forlorn from disuse—parlor, and Irene beckoned him to come sit in a mammoth flowered upholstered chair. She had already set up the projector, and she called now for the servant who seemed always to be waiting nearby for her summons. His name was Damon. He almost never showed any emotion, interest or even indication he saw or recognized anybody. Damon immediately adjusted the projector, and the single word, in black-­purplish letters,

  GARETH

  streamed across the somewhat oval-­shaped screen which Sidney had not at first observed against the back wall.

  Mrs. Vaisey sat directly behind him on a kind of camp stool. Sidney was not certain whether Damon had left the room or not. He suspected he had not, but turned his head, was smiled at by Irene, and then caught a glimpse of Damon working the projector with contemptuous competence.

  There was first a picture of the “former” Gareth in the horse stables, currying a white gelding spotted with gold markings. Next one saw him riding another more-­spirited horse about the track which was about a mile or more from the Vaisey house. There was a close-­up finally of Gareth standing with his one hand holding the reins and his other forming a tightly clenched fist. It was this close-­up which struck a kind of desperate unease in Sidney. The handsome boyish face, certainly full of health and even good humor, nonetheless had something in it—perhaps the expression lay in his mouth—which hinted at, what was it? Disaster probably. The disaster which Sidney knew had overtaken him, and which perhaps he was after all reading into the film itself. No, he thought, disaster still to come, and he shivered.

  Then one caught a view of Gareth sitting alone near a haystack. Evening was falling; and since the film now unexpectedly had sound, one could hear the distant baying of dogs and then, almost as though the real Gareth, that is the Gareth upstairs, had suddenly decided to attend his own showing, one heard his speaking voice. However what he said was so garbled and unconnected with anything he was doing or which the film had shown before that Sidney, in extreme discomfiture, half rose, and then remembering where he was as quickly sat down. Gareth said:

  I promised to meet him over near Warrior Creek, but my horse never liked to go that far for some reason. So I finally had to go on foot. The creek had gone dry though, and I wasn’t sure I had reached the right place after all. But he was waiting for me all right, and he said he would have waited if necessary till the ice caps had melted and the mountains turned to dust.

  There was a great deal of noise now like static on the sound track, and though Gareth went on speaking one heard nothing more audible from him.

  “Where is Warrior Creek, ma’am?” Sidney inquired, looking behind him, but Irene had her head down in her hands and evidently either did not hear him or was too upset to reply.

  Then came a final shot of Gareth with his then rather long curly hair blowing in the considerable wind, with a merging close-­up of his eyes and forehead, both now serene. His mouth came open at the very end, but no sound emerged. But he had said something, and Sidney tried to form the lines of his own lips as he had seen Gareth do in order to refashion what he had pronounced. He had no success.

  Damon turned on the lights, and Irene was smiling now.

  They left the room together. The perfume of the peonies had vanished, and all around them one could inhale now a kind of strong leather odor, as though the reins and the bridle and the saddle depicted in the film had been brought into the room and set down somewhere. Outside too one heard dogs barking vociferously.

  “He’s a bit under the weather today, so that I thought we would not ask you to go upstairs, Sidney . . .”

  Vance’s brother showed such deep disappointment that she went on:

  “Unless of course you do wish to.”

  “I do.” He spoke to his own surprise in a kind of rude, loud, almost angry tone.

  “I didn’t quite feel you should have to do what has to be done today. And which Damon is quite prepared to do until you are a bit more settled.”

  “But I thought,” Sidney kept the angry tone in his voice predominant, “that I was to learn everything from the outset. . . . Have you had second thoughts about me, Mrs. Vaisey?”

  “Please say Irene.”

  He was silent.

  “Second thoughts, never,” she spoke like one injured, and her gaze moved toward the upstairs. “But the task we have to do now is so unpleasant,” she defended her position.

  “Then I welcome the unpleasantness, ma’am.”

  She looked at him with considerable wonder.

  “Did the film . . . help you in any way?” she inquired, like one who is stalling for time.

  “He was, and he is a won
derful young man. . . . He rides like . . . he was the air itself, like . . . a spirit,” he concluded painfully. He had been going to say like a god, but he was shamed or timid of his great admiration for his charge.

  “He won a good many awards at the rodeo,” the mother spoke with a kind of indifference now like one reading by request a newspaper write-­up.

  “What task then is so unpleasant for me,” he chided her.

  She waited some while. “His bowels haven’t moved for several days,” Irene said at last sharply. “Usually Damon and I . . .”

  “No,” Sidney began, and at the same time he felt frightened at his own vigorous eagerness, “you should trust him to me . . . I mean I am the one to do it, Irene. It’s my duty, as he is my charge now . . .”

  “But he isn’t perhaps quite at ease with you yet . . . I’m so troubled he . . . put his teeth on you.”

  “No, no, don’t you see,” he tried to keep down his own eloquence, “it was after all not meant to hurt me . . . I’m glad in fact that . . .”

  “Let us sit on a little before we go up,” Irene suggested now in the face of his growing eagerness.

  “As you wish. Of course.”

  They went into the interior now of the parlor and took seats directly in front of one another in two heavy wooden chairs with sharp brass ornaments adorning their tops.

  She began again: “It’s a very trying thing to get his bowels to move now.” She forced these words out. “He nearly died last winter. They feared in fact obstruction. . . . He neither wants to eat . . . or to void.” She used this “hospital” word in some dismay, unclear as to what word might be appropriate for Sidney.

  “He will be better under my care,” he spoke almost boastfully.

  “I am sure of that, Sidney.”

  Gareth was standing when they entered his room. He at once rushed toward Sidney and placed himself protectively behind the latter, and then cried out in his hoarse animal-­like voice, but this time framing the voice into words: “Don’t let her touch me, keep her away!”

  “Gareth, Gareth!” came the anguished but also now angry voice of his mother, while Sidney had to call into question his own recollection, for he had thought Gareth never spoke, and now he had spoken as clear as could be, although the actual sound of the words themselves were so little like that of a human being, quivers went again up and down his spine.

  Sidney held his charge’s hand, and could feel the rapid pulse coming and going under his fingertips.

  “Gareth, listen to me,” she began again. “The only reason we hurt you the last time was because we were too nervous, too afraid in fact of hurting you. . . . Today, Sidney will do it all for you . . . If you will only allow him to, I know that in his hands you will feel no pain . . . So please, my dear . . .”

  Meanwhile Mrs. Vaisey had spread out thick sheets over the bed, had pulled out a chamberpot of huge size from under it, and a tube of salve, and an enema apparatus.

  Gareth emerged now from behind Sidney’s protection, and stared at the ongoing preparations.

  “I have already gone to the bathroom, Mother, and you know it,” he spoke clearly and collectedly.

  “Then this will be no trouble for you at all,” she replied. “Sidney will help you take off your clothing.”

  Mrs. Vaisey had to call Sidney to attention, for his thoughts were far away, that is as far as prison. He felt he was about to inflict on this boy who appeared so trapped and helpless what the prisoners, the serious criminals, had so often inflicted on him so many times in the toilet and the shower and which he had wanted to tell Vance about, but Vance, who always appeared white-­robed and immaculate, as in a church choir, had forbidden him to speak.

  “Sidney!” Mrs. Vaisey’s concerned voice, coming, it seemed, from miles away, brought him back to the present. “What is it, Sidney . . . ?”

  She had come over to him and put her arm about him. “I can take over, you know,” she spoke more soothingly to him than she had to her son. “You look so distressed . . .”

  “No whispering over there at my expense!” Gareth’s angry voice rose from the bed, where he lay completely disrobed by his own hands.

  “Perhaps if you left the room, Mrs. Vaisey, it would be better this time . . .”

  She gave Sidney a peculiar searching look. She turned her eyes slowly to Gareth, then gave one last glance at Sidney, and went out the door. But she returned almost immediately. “The warm water is here,” she pointed to a huge basin sitting on a table, “ready to be put in the bag. I’ll remain directly outside should anything more be needed.”

  “I would just go downstairs if I were you,” Sidney advised her. He was entirely in possession of himself now.

  “Very well, then, if you say so,” she agreed. She avoided looking at Gareth again.

  Sidney waited until he heard her footsteps descending the stairs.

  “Now then, Gareth, you won’t mind me, I know.” He put his hand on the sufferer’s forehead.

  “Hands like a cake of ice,” Gareth remarked as he watched the new “caretaker” with dilated pupils.

  Sidney rubbed his hands vigorously to warm them while never taking his eyes off his charge.

  “Now let me, Garey, and don’t fight it.” As he said this his lips almost grazed those of the patient. “Turn over and we’ll soon be done.” Gareth flopped over petulantly.

  As he inserted the tube in him, Gareth responded with angry beastlike cries and clenched and gnashed his teeth. A cold sweat had broken all over his back and he shivered almost like a person in a paroxysm.

  “Tell me when you’ve taken all the warm water you can . . . Gareth, do you mind me? . . . Tell me when you can’t hold no more.”

  Sidney could not resist touching his lips to the firm pink pair of buttocks, which caused his charge to thrash angrily and as a result the tube caused him pain. He howled.

  “You hold that in until you can’t take any more now,” Sidney spoke sharply.

  A lengthy silence followed.

  “Then, now, for cripes sake, now, you idiot, pull it out now!” Gareth scolded viciously. Sidney pulled out the tube as gently as possible and picking him up bodily he carried him to the chamber pot and held him down on it.

  Gareth shot looks of fury, humiliation, grief and even sardonic humor with his new attendant, and then as the sounds of his bowels loosening filled the room, he shouted:

  “I will get even if it takes me a hundred years!”

  Looking down into the pot, after Gareth had risen and Sidney was wiping him with—at Irene’s special insistence—a very expensive thin linen cloth, he saw that what had come out of the boy was flecked with blood.

  “Gareth,” Sidney pointed to this.

  “Clothe me,” his charge said in sullen contempt, “and be quick about it.”

  He was putting his socks on last when Gareth pulled his feet loose hastily and said, “Why don’t you lick my toes for a stretch, go on . . . Go on, I won’t tell on you, murderer . . .”

  Sidney blinked, coughed, and then his mouth fell over the toes, which had an odor about them like preserved cherries.

  After a few moments of these caresses Gareth kicked him violently away.

  “No brother of mine is going to empty used chamber pots!”

  Vance had hurled this statement at Sidney as his last word on the subject during their two-­hour bickering and quarreling over “everything,” and then had rushed out the door, and driven off in Dr. Ulric’s new car.

  It had never occurred to Sidney that his brother would go straight to Mrs. Vaisey’s house.

  Vance had never known himself to be so angry, but he knew from some experience of his flying off the handle in the past that it would have been wiser to have waited until morning before taking any “action”; and even as he was ringing the doorbell—it was ten-­thirty at night—he realized he was probably making a bad mistake.

  Late as it was, Mrs. Vaisey was only just then taking her supper, seated alone at the end of a
n eighteen-­foot dining table illuminated now only by a single tall drooping white candle. She did not rise or, indeed, speak when Vance was ushered in by Peter Damon, who had announced the visitor’s name and that the purpose of his visit was urgent.

  “Sidney is all right, I hope,” she greeted him with alarm, for she could only construe his coming as being dictated by bad news.

  When her visitor still failed to speak, she rose:

  “There’s nothing seriously wrong, is there?”

  “I had no idea you would be dining, Mrs. Vaisey. . . . You’ll have to forgive me coming so late too . . . I will leave and return.” He moved toward the door.

  “But what is your news?” She was convinced by now something terrible had happened to her new “hope.”

  “I have no news, I’m afraid.” His anger, his courage, and his belief in his own mission had all but collapsed in the face of his meeting with his “enemy.” He slumped unbidden into a chair.

  “I dine late,” she told him. A self-­deprecating smile passed over her lips and, seating herself again and drinking hastily from a glass of white wine, “Because this is almost the only hour in the entire twenty-­four that is free from hustle and bustle, confusion, and even terror. . . . Do please remain seated” (he had risen as she said this). “Can’t I offer you something to eat or drink . . . ?”

  “No, no, please,” Vance began while she studied his face anxiously trying to see if there was any resemblance between the brothers, and finding to her disappointment very little if any, for Vance had fair hair and brown eyes, and there was a certain smug and satisfied look about his mouth and brow.

  “My brother and I have had a terrible row, Mrs. Vaisey. We almost came to blows . . . I may as well tell you, I do not approve of his being . . . a drudge.”

  “Indeed,” she stared at him loftily. “Does he think so poorly then of his position here.”