Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Bread. Bread from his father’s table. He couldn’t eat his father’s bread... now. He couldn’t eat at his father’s table... now. He couldn’t. It would be unclean if he did. Something about it... would be unclean if he did. He didn’t understand why, but he knew that it was so.

He swung from his chair abruptly, and ran out of the room, and ran fleetly up the stairs, two at a time. He could still run fleetly, possessed as he now was. He went into the little bathroom connected with his room, and got the door closed after him.

He was jarringly sick, and then again, and then again. Finally he couldn’t be sick any more, could only choke and gag. But the incessant psychic nausea still kept on. And cowering there, trembling, exhausted, he could only whisper, “I’m ashamed—! I’m ashamed—!”

It wasn’t the act itself. He knew it wasn’t that. He’d known ever since he was a small boy that all men did it. He’d known his father did it. He’d even known that he must expect to do it too, once he started, from then on. No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the girl that mattered, either. She was just sponge-rubber, something that gave when you pressed it, came out again when you released it. A figurine.

It was the terrible closeness between them that lurked in it, that was where the horror lay. Moments apart. It was the seed, he kept thinking, it was the seed. Something secret to yourself. Sacred to yourself. It shouldn’t mingle with... blend with... come near... That was like an indirect form of incest. It was foul, it was defiling, it was against nature. There was in it a horror of insanity, and an insanity of horror.

He held his stomach, where the muscles ached from throwing up so much. “I’m ashamed...” he coughed, slowly bending over. “Ashamed...”

Then he heard his father’s tread, and he ran and locked the outside room-door. The tread stopped just outside the door. The knob was tried, then there was a rap. Then his father’s voice, soft, friendly: “Bru. Are you all right in there?”

“I’m all right,” he said quietly, sniffling back the drip from his nose that had accompanied the vomiting.

“Want me to send for the doctor?”

“No, nothing like that,” he answered weakly. “I’ll be all right. Please go ’way and leave me alone. I’ll be all right.”

“Okay, if you say so,” his father said, and he sounded a little hurt. Bruce heard him go on down the stairs again. Then he went out on the porch, where the Sunday papers were, and sat down. Bruce could hear his chair scrape in the stillness of the house.

To be under the same roof with him, across the same table from him, near him all the time from now on. Always thinking of it. Always. Every time he looked at him, every time they spoke.

He wrenched the handle of the shower-faucet around, using both hands as though it were the lock on a door to cleanliness. Stood there without his clothes under the stinging downpour of water, drenching himself, keeping up an incessant, slow chafing-motion down his sides. Over and over again, as though there were some unclean stain to be gotten off.

Then he stepped aside with the drops of water all over him like little glass beads, but the stain wouldn’t come off. It wasn’t on his body, it was on his mind, on his soul, no water would take it off.

The feeling of shame wouldn’t let him be. He wanted to hide from it. But there was only one place to hide and never be found again, never be dragged forth again into the shaming light of day. Only one place dark enough and deep enough.

He put his clothes back on, and took out two of his neckties. They were both new; they’d given him one on his birthday and one at Easter. He knotted them together. They were both silk, and they knotted fast and firm. He opened the closet-door and looked up. Then he brought a straight-backed chair over and set it in there.

But first he wanted to write to his mother. He took a piece of paper from his school-work desk, and his mechanical pencil, and sat down to it, composing it painstakingly and laboriously, with the tip of his tongue peering out at the corner of his mouth, as it so often did when he wrote anything.

“Dearest Mom :

I have to do this. I don’t know why, but I do.

I’m ashamed. I don’t know why, but I am.

And then he signed it “Love,” because you always did that at the end of a letter.

And then he put his name, “Bruce,” because you always did that too, at the end of a letter. Or at the end of your life.

Mrs. Stevens, downstairs in the kitchen, stopped what she was doing and glanced up at the ceiling when she heard the sharp crack the chair made as it turned over directly above her head. Why was it boys his age, she thought, were so awkward and clumsy about everything they did? Then she went back to paring vegetables again.

But aren’t you always awkward and clumsy, when you try to leave life before your time?

Then she went back to where the cushions were, and quite simply and unstudiedly she lay down there, resting the back of her head on them.

There were no symptoms yet. To take her mind off it, she pulled a cigarette out of the package and lit it. Then, as was invariably the case whenever she smoked one, she took no more than two or three slow, thoughtful draws before putting it down on the ashtray and not going back to it again.

She thought of home. “Back home” she always called it whenever she thought of it. But there was no one there to go back to any more. Her mother had died since she’d left. Her father and she had never been very close. He had a housekeeper now, she understood. In any case, she had an idea he much preferred the unfettered company of his cronies to having her back with him again. Her sister was married and had a houseful of kids (three by actual count, but they seemed to fill the place to spilling over point), Her brother was doing his military hitch in West Germany, and he wasn’t much more than a kid anyway.

No, there was no one for her to go to, anywhere.

It was beginning now. This was it. She wasn’t drowsy yet, but she had entered that lulled state just preceding drowsiness. There was a slight hum in her ears, as if a tiny mosquito were jazzing around outside her head. It was too much effort to go ahead thinking things out any longer. She wouldn’t beg the masked faces in the crowd for a friendly look any more. She wouldn’t hope for the slot in the letterbox to show white any more. She wouldn’t wish for the telephone to ring any more. Let the world have its wakefulness — she’d have her sleep. She turned her face to one side, pressed her cheek against the cushions. Her eyes drooped closed. She reached for the soaked cloth, to put it across them, so that they would stay that way.

Then she heard the bell ringing. First she thought it was part of the symptoms. It was like a railroad-crossing signal-bell, far down a distant track, warning when a train is coming. She contorted her body to try to get away from it, and found herself sitting up dazedly, propped backward on her hands. Consciousness peeled all the way back to its outermost limits like the tattered paper opening up on some circus-hoop that has just been jumped through.

It burst into sudden, crashing clarity then. It was right in the room with her. It was over there in the corner. It was the bell on the telephone.

She managed to get up onto her feet. The room swirled about her, then steadied itself. She felt like being sick for a moment. She wanted to breathe, even more than she did just to live, as though they were two separate processes and one could go on without the other. She threw the two windows open one after the other. The fresh air suddenly swept into her stagnant mind tingling like pine-needles in a stuffy place. She remembered to close off the key under the gas-burner in the kitchen-alcove.