Narrow Rooms Read online

  “Vance must never know about us now,” Sidney said one evening as Brian and he lay together on the big davenport in the den that had belonged to Brian’s Grandpa.

  They had just come back from a short hunting trip, but had killed nothing. Brian did not like to kill animals, and Sidney had no real interest in hunting. They both used the sport as an excuse to be outdoors and in one another’s company. They would fire their guns from time to time mostly to give each other the feeling they really knew how to shoot.

  “Yeah, I bet Vance wouldn’t understand what we do together if we was to draw him pictures,” Brian retorted. “All he likes to do is study and go to church.”

  Sidney scowled morosely as he took in this remark, and removed his hands out of Brian’s grasp.

  “Well, it would kill him I think if he found out I sleep with you,” Sidney was emphatic. Then too low to be heard: “He don’t actually even know I am into men . . .”

  “So it’s him I guess you respect, huh, is that it?” Brian rose and glared at the man he had just poured out so much affection on.

  “It’s got nothing to do with respect, Brian,” Sidney colored. “But we must keep it a secret from him. That’s why your house is so good.” He stammered badly as he got this out. “That’s why hunting is such a good dodge.”

  “Maybe your love is a dodge, too, then,” Brian almost whined.

  When there was no reply to this statement, he went on lamely: “You do love me, though, Sidney, don’t you? Say you do.”

  Even as he said this (though he felt love for Sidney, even a lot) he felt cheap and bad even asking such a question because the one he owed all his allegiance to was Roy Sturte­vant. In fact when he told Sidney he loved him, he was only mouthing, he feared, what Roy had asked him to say. . . . And so though he did love Sidney in some ways more than he did the scissors-­grinder himself, he felt more and more shamed and guilty and badly confused. He felt as a matter of fact, like a thief, and that he was constantly stealing.

  “I told you how happy I was with you,” Sidney spoke after a long pause during which he had thought over whether he loved Brian or not. . . . As a matter of fact he did not think he had ever loved anybody. The closest to it in a funny way was Vance, but that was because Vance was so perfect and their relationship while deep was so distant.

  Sidney began kissing Brian earnestly (actually it was Brian who had taught him how to surrender to kisses, and Brian was the first man ever to kiss him passionately), but without warning the younger man suddenly tore away from him and leaped up, for the thought of how he had promised to betray Sidney struck him full in his conscience at that moment.

  “Brian, Brian, what’s wrong now . . . ? Are you mad I didn’t say I love you the most?”

  “It’s just as well I guess you didn’t.” The boy showed on his face all the anguish and pain he felt at that moment. “Fact is, Sid, I belong to somebody else . . . I am, to come down to it, somebody’s ‘slave.’ ”

  Sidney put on his shorts and got up from the davenport. He was not sure now whether Brian had reference to the sex magazines he had been showing to him in which there were photos depicting older men having power over younger ones and beating them with chains and so forth, or whether he meant something even more sinister and real.

  “What’s come over you, Brian,” Sidney wondered protectively. He took him in his arms, but that only made him tremble all the more violently.

  “I’ve lied to you, Sid . . . I belong to Roy Sturtevant. . . .”

  “Roy Sturtevant?”

  He let loose of Brian as if he had touched a live wire. He wiped his mouth involuntarily.

  “You mean to tell me you have been letting him make love to you and then you come over here and mix the kisses you’ve had from him with mine . . . Why, you double-­crossing little . . .”

  But Sidney was too thunderstruck to finish the sentence, and could besides not think of anything bad enough to call Brian.

  At the same time, looking at Brian who stood before him naked as a jay, he wanted him terribly all over again.

  “There is no worse person in the whole wide world than the scissors-­grinder,” Sidney reported, looking down at the carpet.

  “Why did you have to haul off and hit him at the Graduation Exercises that time?” Brian spoke accusingly.

  “Oh, that.” Sidney thought back. “He still remembers that, does he?. . . . Well, see here, he had badgered me all that evening, wanting me to autograph his Annual, wanting this and that . . . Wouldn’t let me alone. . . . Matter of fact he has been pursuing me back as far as I can recall . . . Used to stare at me in the eighth grade like he seen Jesus. . . . Later on, always followed me into the shower after gym class . . . I knowed he had it bad for me, and I hated him for it . . . And once, well . . .” Sidney suddenly spoke like one who talks in his sleep, and Brian felt he had all at once forgotten he was even present, for Sid’s eyes moved out toward the direction of the corn field. “Once, then,” he went on, “it was after gym class, everybody had left the shower room but him and me. . . . In the shower he looked sort of handsome, certainly strong because he had been climbing ropes and doing the horse and the rings . . . Anyhow, he stepped over to me and says right out, ‘Let me have you, Sid, right here. ’Twill only take a minute, and you’ll like it.’ I don’t know what come over me, I let him suck me . . . I thought he would pull my guts and soul out of me he pulled so hard. I felt my cock had been swallowed by a shark. The pain and pleasure, confound him, was too much. . . . Then when he had finished me, I pushed him down on the floor and kicked him, and run out of the shower without my towel wrapped about me, stark mother bare-­assed into the hall where the teachers and students were milling about. . . . I was that non-­composed, you might say . . .”

  Then turning to Brian and keeping his eyes fiercely on Brian’s eyes, he concluded:

  “But I never meant to hit him the night of the Graduation Exercises. I swear. I was proud too he was valedictorian. I don’t know what come over me. He wouldn’t keep his eyes off me that night either . . . I felt a funny fear . . . I felt eventually he was coming to . . . take me over, take . . . all of me . . .”

  “Well, for your information,” Brian spoke somehow with indignation now, “he is my lover.”

  “And that turns my stomach, Brian I think you and me are quits if you are sleeping with him too. I tell you, it’s enough to make me want to puke!”

  Brian began to put on his clothes. Sidney paced the room with growing agitation. He did not want Brian to leave him, and yet . . . What was it with him, he wondered . . . Brian was the only man he had ever really been close with, and in this God-­forsaken part of the world he could not hope to find anybody to take his place.

  But the thought of the scissors-­grinder as his rival!

  “Goodbye, Sid.”

  “Brian,” Sidney spoke without conviction but with a certain sleepy stubbornness, “you wait now . . .”

  “Goodbye I said . . . I mean it.”

  “Brian,” he called to the retreating boy who was deserting him, he realized, ridiculously enough, in his own house, “you’ll come back to me one day, you see . . . You’ll find out about Roy Sturtevant sure enough . . . You’ll see I’m right in time . . .”

  “So, Brian, you made two bad mistakes. What of it?”

  Roy Sturtevant was too calm and collected for Brian McFee’s comfort. He had expected Roy to fly into a passion when he told he had “broken” with Sidney and, what was worse, had let slip their secret that Roy was actually Brian’s lover.

  But instead of screaming at him or beating him or, as he had one day when he had been particularly angry with him, holding his head in the toilet bowl and keep flushing the toilet, today all he did was stand like a sentry before an army outpost with his arms folded and his face again like Leatherstocking, a brown, motionless mask.

  “I would undo it if I could, Roy,” Brian spoke, beginning to quail under this glacial calm.

  “What do you
mean if you can . . . You know and I know you can, and what’s more you’re gonna . . .”

  “Now, Roy,” Brian relaxed a little, hoping real anger would come for it would be better than this weird quiet and reasonableness.

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” Roy began, letting his arms fall to his sides and then turning his back on Brian. “You use some pretext to see him. Go to the gas pump, or even write him a letter. Did you get far enough in school to write a letter so as one can read it? Whatever method you use, tell him you have broken with me. Tell him you are only his, nobody else’s, and what’s more, you was always his . . .” Turning around now he finished: “You can always meet me on the sly.”

  Unbeknownst to either of them, the cords were tightening around both Brian and Sidney from that day.

  The idea of writing letters to Sidney appealed to McFee somehow, despite his poor penmanship and his absence of ideas or power of expression, for he realized now that he cared deeply only for Sid, more than he ever could for the scissors-­grinder, and so the daily letters to his love began.

  Sidney was frightened nearly to hysteria when the letters began to arrive. He could not bear to see his secret life put down in black and white, as if pictures of him naked were circulating through the mail or posted on billboards. And once Vance had nearly opened one of the Brian letters by mistake.

  Brian’s letters were delirious, rhapsodic, idiotic, and implicating. Sidney burned them at once, swallowing hard as he held the match to them over the toilet bowl as if he was the flame that was swallowing them. He saved one letter, nonetheless, a very short one which he kept from then on in his graduation-­present billfold. It read:

  Take me back, and forgive me, or I won’t last the winter. You know I love only you. You know I was meant for you from the beginning and I will always be yours.

  This letter was not signed, and was written on a piece of Christmas wrapping paper.

  The night Brian McFee was shot to death the sheriff extricated another unsent letter, though already stamped, from Brian’s breast pocket, which fortunately for his slayer was not yet addressed to Sidney and did not have his name in the salutation of the letter proper.

  This “discovered” letter had puzzled the sheriff enough for him to go to Dr. Ulric, and show it to him in the hopes, according to the pained reluctant words of the officer, “It might throw light on the motive.” The letter read:

  There will come the day when you will see I loved you best, and though I was maybe sent to betray you and was in the hire, in your terrible words, of your life-­long enemy, you should know in your heart that my feelings for you were the strongest. I have never wrote such a letter before, and I have the funny feeling somehow I won’t never write another like it again maybe to anybody. If you will reconsider your decision I will do all in my power to change myself and make myself worthy of you. My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won’t need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day. Brian.

  The sheriff had studied Dr. Ulric’s face as he read the letter, but the officer learned nothing from the old man’s countenance; not a muscle moved during his perusal except for the steady blinking of his eyes, which was one of his constant and characteristic mannerisms for as far back as anybody could remember.

  “So you don’t have any idea a-­tall as to who wrote this, Doc?”

  “Couldn’t even begin to guess,” the Doc had replied, handing back the thin stained and now torn sheet of writing paper.

  “It’s a right odd letter, if you ask me,” the sheriff persisted.

  Dr. Ulric looked out toward the cornfield and the late afternoon sun.

  That letter had been read at Sidney’s trial of course, not once, but maybe three or four times, in an attempt on the part of the prosecution to make Sidney confess as to what it meant. But the defendant was steadfast in denying any knowledge of its meaning. It was only when he was back in his cell that he collapsed and fell unconscious to the hard cement of the floor. He was revived by a bucket of cold water, and then given a sleeping powder.

  While the sheriff had been questioning the Doctor about the letter, getting nowhere with him, and knowing he was getting nowhere, he had suddenly nonetheless got a rise out of him from another quarter, and whereas he had encountered only the Doc’s usual poker face and stony silence when discussing the “terrible” epistle from the hand of a young man already dead and buried, when the officer had said quite innocently, “Do you perchance remember the Ruthanna Elder case, Doc?”, the Doc had dropped his brown cigarette (and the sheriff had picked it up for him) and closed his eyelids tight.

  “Like yesterday,” Charles Ulric had replied.

  “This case reminds me of it somehow . . . Doesn’t it you?”

  “Oh, no,” the Doc almost gasped. “That was a story out of my time and day . . . Yours, too, Johnson . . .”

  “I wish you could remember this handwritin’ as well,” the officer said rising.

  “Ruthanna Elder!” the Doctor exclaimed to himself, and then aloud as soon as the sheriff had left. After having made the Doc lie about Brian’s letter, the officer had given him back, perhaps as a reward, the memory of a story of “his own day.”

  “Ruthanna Elder!” he repeated time and again.

  Toward the end of her life (she had died only last year, aged 60), she was called the “Sleepy-­Time Gal” because she looked younger to the end than people half her age, and did nothing but sit summer and winter on the front porch of her house. Thinking, some people said. Ruthanna Elder who had been the high school graduation queen of a long-­ago year!

  That night, after the sheriff’s visit, sleepless, Charles Ulric mixed and blended in his mind the story of Ruthanna Elder with that of Brian McFee and Sidney De Lakes, irrelevantly, perhaps, but inextricably, yes. He recalled that long-­ago afternoon just before the graduation ball when Ruthanna had cautiously entered his office where so many babies had been delivered, where he had removed bullets from wounded men, had bandaged cuts and wounds, where he had pronounced men dead.

  “No, you are not pregnant, Ruthanna,” the doctor heard his own voice speak again in somber tones. “But why don’t you marry your young man, Jesse Ference, in any case, if you’re so worried, my dear . . . Get married, my dear . . .”

  Ruthanna had cried then a lot, but had finally forced out: “It was not Jesse, Doctor . . . That is why I am worried. . . .”

  “Did you want to tell me then who it was?” the Doctor had finally inquired after she had wept so hard and refused to get up and depart.

  “It was my uncle, Dr. Ulric . . . That is why I worry so perhaps. . . . You see he approached me after he had invited me to his room to get a good view of the river and see where it had broken down the old bridge the spring before when it was at its crest. There was this fine view from the parapet of his Dad’s house he claimed, and his Dad was gone . . .”

  She stopped.

  “Go on, Ruthanna, this is in confidence . . .”

  Unlike most uncles, the Doctor recalled his own musing that afternoon, this uncle was two years younger than she, making him sixteen.

  The uncle had closed and then locked the door leading to the parapet.

  “But don’t you see,” Dr. Ulric had interrupted her story again, “You are not going to have a baby, Ruthanna . . . My examination has proved that . . . You did not conceive from your uncle’s being with you . . . You’ll be fine now for Jesse Ference. . . .”

  “But why, then, doctor, can’t I give Jesse my promise to be his wife? When it is after all Jesse that I love. . . . But no, the words stick in my throat . . .”

  “But have you really tried to tell Jesse you love him and wish to be his?”

  “Oh yes, of course, we have been sweethearts since childhood you know. . . . But as I say . . . I keep back the final words of promise . . . It is as though my uncle held my
tongue. . . .”

  “That is wrong,” Dr. Ulric had almost scolded. “You must tell Jesse you are free now. And you need not give away what happened with a blood relation . . . Tell Jesse yes, that’s all. Or tell him no . . . But you must not vacillate. . . .”

  At the graduation ball, Jesse’s face had blurred as she felt him hold her, and she could only see the uncle closing and then locking the door even as she was held close now to her fiancé’s breast. . . . Yes, much as she loved Jesse, with all her heart, she could think of nothing but the closed door. Her uncle had removed her blouse and placed his young lips on her untouched breasts. She had melted under his arms like a river freed from ice.

  Jesse had looked hurt as he had danced with her that night. He had looked like a man who has been slapped with a wet towel. He had always feared there might be someone else, but now, tonight, he was sure . . .

  But there was nobody else of course, her uncle was not Ruthanna’s love, her uncle had only taken her, he was not a real uncle after all but a boy, almost a child, but still, out of all the boys who had wanted her, had waited for her, he was the winner, and it was he who had first possessed her.

  Jesse had walked away from the dance like a man in a dream, to the young uncle’s house, the music drifting away now in the distance. A chance word from somebody had fanned his suspicions into flame. He had waked the boy after midnight. Jesse had asked him if it was true he loved Ruthanna. The young man had not denied anything; he had added all the missing details. It was the details that had done it all, people later said. Had the uncle only told the fiancé “yes” and said no more, what had happened would never have happened. But the uncle told it all so lovingly as if he were confiding to a kind brother, a brother whom he loved as much as he loved Ruthanna. He held Jesse’s hand in his as he talked, he wept and admitted everything, he touched his face to Jesse’s cheeks, perhaps he even added details which were not precisely consonant with the truth in order to please his visitor.