A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“The matter, Bruce? Don’t you feel well?” It was Mrs. Stevens who asked it, looking at him from the doorway.

He turned toward her, She he could look at. “I’m all right,” he mumbled indistinctly. Then he turned back, again lowered his head in pulsing, purpled shame.

“Bru.” He raised his eyes, but only to the level of the cloth on the table. His father must have been holding the bread-plate extended toward him like that, unnoticed, for the past moment or two. He took a slice, tried to chew and swallow. It felt as if it wouldn’t go down, as if he couldn’t even salivate. He had to raise his coffee-cup and take a drink from it, to get rid of it.

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.