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

I’m Ashamed

Every Saturday night he and Warren used to get together after supper and go downtown. Downtown was a special sort of place, a grown-up sort of place. Just like Saturday night was a special sort of night. Downtown was a Saturday night sort of place.

They’d meet on the next corner, where Hillside Avenue cut through Pomeroy Street and ran down the hill, and on into downtown. Warren lived over on one side of Hillside Avenue, and he on the other, so this meeting-place was about equidistant from both their houses and served conveniently. You had to go along Hillside Avenue to get downtown, anyway: there was no other way. At least not from up there on the Heights, the residential section, where they both lived.

Warren was usually already there waiting for him when he got there. That was because they started supper a little earlier at Warren’s house than they did at his, and therefore they got through a little earlier. The difference was not much, only about ten or fifteen minutes. Just long-standing family habits. And that being the case, the small gap between the two never had a chance to close up, be eliminated. Therefore, Warren was always there first. As he was now.

Warren was lounging with his back against a tree smoking a cigarette with an aplomb it had taken him some pains to acquire. He now had it down pat, however, and was a perfected smoker. All the earlier unevennesses of gesture, the raggednesses of manipulation, had been smoothed out now. The one remaining vestige of the ingénue (and this would go too, very shortly) was one that was not visible to the eye; he was still inwardly impressed by the act himself each time he performed it, entire matter-of-factness was yet to come. Bruce knew this because he felt that way too; they had kept pace in this as in everything else.

Warren’s spare elongated form and the young tree-trunk he had his shoulders tilted against bore an odd similarity of outline when viewed from a distance. It looked like one of those trees with a bow-shaped double trunk; one ash-gray, the other piebald tan, white and pink.

They exchanged no greeting whatever. They had parted less than an hour before, after being together the greater part of the afternoon, so there was no real reason to. Warren simply detached himself from the tree and fell into stride alongside Bruce, trailing an occasional gauzy kerchief of cigarette-smoke over his shoulder.

The night was splendid, but like the young they were, they had no time to contemplate it. Only the other young interested them. Prismatically it was mostly blues of all shades, from the indigo of the sweeping arch overhead, down the chromatic scale through the marine blue of the leafy coverage over them and of the lawns and hedges they passed, the periwinkle of their own stilt-walking shadows as they moved on past a light, the cobalt that in the daytime was the white trim of doorways and of window-frames, to finally the azure of Warren’s cigarette-smoke; all sprinkled above with crystals that were stars, and streaked below with gold and garnet stripes that were the passing to and fro of cars. And before and below them a heliotrope haze where the lights of downtown lay bedded on the depression-floor they were descending toward. It was a night as though there had never been night before, and never would be again; only this once, to show the supreme beauty of its face.

Warren’s first remark came after nearly a block of lithe, effortless striding. “How much’ll you bring with you?”

“Eight bucks,” answered Bruce. “How much’d you?”

“Three.”

“That’s eleven between us,” said Bruce arithmetically.

“How’d you get so much?” Warren asked him, impressed. “Borrow it from your father?”

“My father isn’t home, he’s entertaining a customer from out of town,” Bruce told him. “I saved it up myself.”

The conversation lagged again. They were together so constantly that there was very little, actually, for them to talk about. Warren began whistling. A new song that was starting to come on the records and over the air. Bruce joined in as soon as he had recognized it. They whistled well together, ebulliently, carefree, unself-conscious as only the young can be. Only, they didn’t know the whole song, so they had to go back each time and repeal the few bars they did know.

Thus the walk passed. It was a fairly long walk, for it made a slow, wheeling turn as it descended toward downtown, but it seemed to fly by on dazzling wings of promise, for this was the greatest half-hour of their week, this Saturday night walk downtown. Fulfilment, the actuality at the end of it, never seemed to quite catch up to the anticipation produced along the way, somehow. Bruce wondered why that was. He used to wonder, coming back afterward with Warren, if it was always going to be that way, later on in life. Or was it only now, when you were young?

The street-lamps on their tall hooked posts spit violet-white needles of light drowsily down upon the roadway. Cars went shushing by, hilarity-bound. A cricket chirping behind a billboard seemed to say, “You’re grown-ups now, you’re going downtown, you’re going to have the same kind of fun the older people do,” as they passed by it. The whole world spun on a new axis.

Saturday night, this was Saturday night. Only a few brief months ago, less than a year, a night distinguished from the other six simply by a few minor concessions: no homework to do, latitude to stay out a little later than on week-day nights, perhaps a movie-show. Home by half-past eleven, no other wishes, no other horizon. And then suddenly, as if overnight, it had become something esoteric, set apart, had taken on the same meaning to them it had to the older world — celebration, deviltry, love-adventure. Downtown to do things, things you didn’t talk about at home.

They hadn’t spoken about it in that way, between themselves. They hadn’t spoken about it at all. They wouldn’t have known how to express it. Too many words wasn’t for boys, too many words was for girls. It was just something that they’d felt between them: and that each knew the other was feeling along with him. Just that, no more than that. A wordless spark between two kindred identities — and childhood had given up the ghost.

The last of the genteel, spaced, lawn-surrounded houses, windows glowing topaze and amber, dropped behind them. Hillside Avenue crossed the tracks over a sleek, white, stone viaduct and became Main Street.

A preliminary block or two of chunky, less-genteel flats, buzzing with radios and television-sets, and suddenly downtown had engulfed them, swept over their heads like a mercurial, incandescent tide. They were in its midst, its glare and its sounds and its bustle were all around them. They both began to breathe quicker, without knowing it or knowing why.

These lights blazed like a solid field of fireflies, or a bed of white-hot coals. They made the buildings seem to be burning, made the sidewalks seem to be noon. People walking cast no shadows. And pleasure was everywhere, but only if you bought it, not given away free. The marquee-sign of the Acme moved continuously around in a long oblong, like a belt studded with golden nails. The marquee-sign of the Paradise Hashed off and on. The marquee-sign of the State was the cleverest of the lot. First it was out altogether for a few short seconds. Then the letters came on in white. Then a red frame came on around them. Then a green frame came on around the red frame. Then everything went out at once and started over again.

There was magic in the air.

They strolled Main Street through to its opposite end, where again there were railroad tracks to bisect it, but this time on the same level between two protective zebra-striped barriers. It continued on beyond, but there the lights began to dim and dinginess to set in.

They turned and started back again on the opposite side. The show-windows for the most part left them uninterested, except for an occasional sporting-goods display. They paused briefly to listen to the blare of a record emitted through a loudspeaker from a music-store, went on again. “We have that one at home,” Bruce mentioned dispraisingly.

A girl passed them. A girl who was older than they were and whom neither of them knew. She paid no slightest attention to them, her eyes didn’t even glance their way, although they both gazed lingeringly at her. They were evidently of an age-bracket beneath her interest.

“She puts out,” said Warren, glancing back after her.

“Aw, how do you know so much about it?” said Bruce irritably. He resented his friend’s assumption of a vaster and superior knowledge to his own in such matters, particularly when he knew it could not possibly have been gained at first hand.

“I c’n tell,” said Warren, still pontificating.

Somewhere behind them a car-horn gave a little interrogative tap. This brought both their heads around. A tar had glided to an insinuating halt with its door open. The girl veered aside and got in. The door made a sound (from where they were) like a twig snapping and the car went on again, with a great red coruscation of its tail-light panels.

“See? What did I tell you?” crowed Warren, as jubilantly as though he himself had been the car-owner favored.

“Yeah,” agreed Bruce grudgingly. But he found the trifling incident, non-personal as it had been, a stimulant to his already overcharged and brimming sensory condition, and he sensed that Warren did too.

They began looking into the faces of girls with a new boldness and avidity after that. The few return-looks that this drew were without exception indignant, forbidding or supercilious.

“What’s the matter with us?” Bruce wondered to himself.

The truth was there were no girls their own age abroad on the street. Or just under their own age, for they would have had to be that for Warren and himself to draw their interest. Feminine interest in their opposites seemed to ascend to the successive age-bracket just above their own. Bruce wondered briefly why that was, then gave it up as one of those enigmas of the laws of selectivity and attraction.

Finally they met two girls whom they knew, from the high school. The four of them came together and stopped in a little group.

“Hi.” Warren and Bruce each said.

“Hi,” the two girls said.

“Whatch’ doing?” Warren now asked.

“We went to the early show at the Acme.”

“Want a soda?” Bruce invited.

“We just now had one,” one of the girls answered. “We just came out of Riker’s a minute ago.”

“Where you going now?” Warren wanted to know.

“We have to go home.” Both girls took a tentative step backward. Regretful but obedient to orders. “We’re late now.”

“See you,” Bruce and Warren said.

“See you,” both girls said, and turned and went on their way.

“Man, I wouldn’t mind her,” said Warren wishfully.

“She wouldn’t do it,” said Bruce.

“I know she wouldn’t,” Warren agreed.

Since her family knew both their families well, this would have been suicidal territory in any event, not even to be contemplated.

They were back again at where they had started, the nearer edge of downtown. They halted uncertainly, stood huddled together on the corner. They were at a loss; nothing much had happened, and now they were beginning not to know what to do with themselves. The magic had commenced to thin a little.

They turned a trifle disconsolately and started back a third time, more slowly than before. The money was burning a hole in their pockets. It looked as though the expedition was going to be a complete fiasco. Adventure, carnival, call it what you will — and they had no specific name for it themselves — was keeping resolutely out of their reach.

Warren’s face brightened suddenly. “What d’ya say we go and have some beer?”

In this, as they both already well knew from several unsuccessful former attempts, the big difficulty was to get waited on at all. Most bartenders were afraid of risking their licenses if they served them, the age-stipulations of the State Liquor Commission being what they were.

They came abreast of a fairly ostentatious-looking taproom, stopped to look in at the crowd of men standing before the bar, then slunk on, badly stricken with stage-fright. “Too packed in there, we’d never get near the bar,” remarked Warren. The real reason, of course, being that they dreaded the ignominy of being refused service in from of all those people. Such a humiliation would have been like a small death to both of them.

Pretty much the same thing happened a second, then a third time. One of the places even had a small but conspicuous placard affixed to a corner of its show-window: “No Minors Served.” (Insulting word!) Before they knew it they were suddenly back at the railroad-crossing again, its barriers tilted vertical.

“Let’s go over on the other side of the tracks,” Warren suggested. “Maybe they’re not so particular over there.”

They crossed to the déclassé half of town, glancing about them with a mixture of self-consciousness (at their own daring) and boldness. Adventure suddenly seemed much closer now than it had back there in all those lights. Especially the love-adventure. The shabbiness, the furtiveness almost, that even seemed to cling to the very buildings themselves gave them a gratifying sense of risk and gameness. They plunged forthwith into the first bar they came to without any further misgivings, but their abrupt manner of entering, almost as though they were pushing away physical opposition from in front of them, betrayed them as novices.

It was perhaps still too early in the evening or it was not held in high regard in the vicinity: there was nobody in it but a woman standing chatting with the bartender over a glass of port or some such dark wine. She was slatternly in the extreme, and certainly far older than any of the girls they had been eying out on the street just now. She glanced at them curiously, but they were both too preoccupied at first staring at their own reflections in the sparkling bar-mirror, which was still a good deal of a novelty to them, to reciprocate her attention.

The bartender edged over, said with hypocritical respect: “Yessir, young gentlemen, what’ll it be?”

“I’ll have a beer,” Warren said in a husky voice, which was probably due to nervousness but (Bruce thought) created a very good effect.

“Same here,” Bruce said with what he hoped was the proper sangfroid. He tried to put his foot on the brass rail below the bar, didn’t set it in far enough, and it slapped down to the floor again with an embarrassing crash that rang out in the silence. He was glad there were no other customers than the woman in the place.

They sipped, found it tangy; they took ever deeper draughts.

“Beats a Coke, any day,” Bruce remarked sophisticatedly.

“Sure, what did you think?” Warren replied with some scorn.

They drained their glasses and the barman refilled them without being asked. Bruce was beginning to glow pleasantly. The unfamiliarity of the flavor had worn off by now — or at least he had gotten used to it.

A man came in, stood midway between them and the woman, and ordered a beer. She said something to him in a slurred voice and he turned his head the other way, away from her. He’d evidently only come in to quench his thirst, and not for dalliance. He gulped his beer down and went out again.

Warren suddenly left the bar, went over into a corner, and dropped a coin into a jukebox standing there. It made a preliminary whirring sound and then began to throb out a loose-jointed, clattering tune, much as though a quantity of detached nuts, bolts, and nails were being stirred about in a tin pan. As he returned to the bar again, the woman edged up to them with a sort of cringing, sidewise-motion. “Chances of a drink, boys?” she mumbled half-furtively. At closer range she looked even more unkempt than she had at a distance.

Bruce felt very much the man of the world to be accosted that way. Warren probably did too, he knew, but between the two of them they just nodded dumbly, unable to find their voices in time to answer her. In any case, the barman, his eye always open to business, went ahead and refilled the wine-glass for her without waiting for them to become vocal. They wouldn’t have known how to adroitly refuse the request, anyway, even if they had wanted to.

She did not return however to where her glass had been standing all along and still remained, but kept her new proximity, thus plainly indicating to them that the drink had been only an excuse after all.

She smiled ingratiatingly and they both stared. Suddenly she blurted out: “You boys out for a good time tonight?”

They both knew right away what she meant. Bruce could feel the warmth as his color started mounting slowly upward from his neck. At the same time his breathing quickened a little, and he wondered why. Their stares became hypnotized, almost dilated. Was she really offering to—

The bartender broke the spell. He turned ugly all at once, hard. “Come on, none of that in here!” he rasped at her angrily. “Think I want the police closing me down? On your way, now!” And he flicked his bar-rag in the direction of the entrance.

“Then why don’t you get some customers in here once in a while?” she snarled as she sidled off. “This place is as dead as a burying-ground!” She flounced out into the street and was lost to sight, leaving her wine standing untouched on the counter.

Their two heads had turned as if pulled by wires, and they were still staring after her, even after she’d gone, almost mucilaginously. Bruce was conscious of a sense of loss, as though a supreme adventure had been almost within reach and then been snatched away again.

He turned to Warren with bated breath. “Should we go after her?”

But it was the bartender who answered, while he thriftily returned the wine she had left back into its gallon-jug. “Don’t ever take up with somebody like that, you don’t know nothing about, or you’ll only get yourselves in all kinds of trouble! I got nothing against her,” he went on broad-mindedly. He felt sorry for her, he said. “But she’s got no right picking on youngsters like you. Let her hustle somebody that’s older.” And then, some unsuspected protective streak cropping up in him, he shook an admonishing finger at them. “You got time enough!” he told them sternly. “Don’t be in such a hurry for it!”

But his psychology was that of the adult; he had forgotten himself as he was twenty years before. He had long passed the stage of their smouldering curiosity, himself. His well-meant admonitions were simply wasted.

He turned around to wait on some more mature customer who had just come in, and before he knew it they were gone.

They couldn’t find her again. That, by unspoken common consent, had been their purpose in leaving, though neither one would admit it. They turned back first toward the railroad-crossing, their eyes busy along both sides of the street. Then when they had reached it, turned a second time and retraced their steps toward the bar where they had first seen her. This time they went on past it and deeper into the Tenderloin than they had before. She was nowhere to be seen.

“The old bag!” exclaimed Warren bitterly, giving voice at last to the real reason for their roaming aimlessly about as they had been doing.

Now they continued to progress no longer with a purpose but almost, it seemed, from sheer habit, they’d been doing it so long. They came upon a byway that struck off at right-angles to the direction they had been following. It could hardly be called a street, for it was only one short block long, and had no name-plate and no lights. There were only three or four houses on it, all on a single side.

They knew it at once, though they had never been near it before.

It was called Willow Lane, and though at first sight the daintiness of such a designation might seem ridiculous, there was indeed a dejected tree to be seen glimmering palely in the murk at the other end of it. Palely, because its trailing foliage was a light-green or gray. They’d heard of it before, this Willow Lane; it had figured in the whispers and the rumors exchanged in the high-school corridors and in the candy-stores that had been their habitat in their pre-beer days. “Pillow Lane” it was nicknamed by some, and sometimes other, worse things.

Bruce discovered that, rather childishly, he had half-expected to find some visual evidence of the reputation that it had. Like perhaps a red lantern hanging over it (“red-light district”) or staggering, brawling silhouettes to be seen against drawn, light-colored shades (“disorderly houses”). But there was nothing about these houses that showed what they were. If indeed they all were, or even any of them were. They were dark, shade-drawn, tranquil, no different from any other houses. Even quieter, if anything, than those beehive flats at the other end of Main Street, for no electronic music was pouring from them.

“D’you think all of them are?” Bruce wondered aloud as they stood staring.

“The one in the middle is, boy, you can bet on that!” Warren brayed jeeringly with that irritating omniscience he was always so ready to assume.

But this time, as a matter of fact, there was some evidence to support him. It was somewhat larger than the others, it looked better cared for, and there was a car standing suggestively waiting in front of it. A car that even in the dark looked entirely too sleek and expensive for these surroundings.

Fantastic images filled their minds. It seemed impossible that feverish, panting, sprawling things like that could take place behind such quiet, well-mannered facades. Then even as they watched, a fan of orange light spread open across the sidewalk, slowly, panel by panel, just as a real fan would have in a woman’s hand, and a man came out of the house. And behind him was the outflung shadow of a second man, also about to leave. But it was a woman’s voice that spoke. “Good night, gentlemen,” it said hospitably. “Come back and see us again.”

For some unknown reason that they couldn’t have explained themselves, they had instinctively shrunk back from sight for a moment, Warren and he, though it was not they who had anything to be guilty or chary about. Perhaps because it was like peeping or prying at something they weren’t supposed to.

They heard the door close, and when they looked again, the car had gone.

“That’s a dead give-away,” Warren commented judiciously. They drew nearer as though magnetized. Suddenly he said: “Let’s go up and ring the bell.”

“You mean go in?” Bruce said skittishly.

“Sure, go in. What else?”

“Have we got enough on us?” said Bruce, trying to find a loophole.

“We’ll find out how much it is. Well, are you game or aren’t you?” he urged with nervous intensity.

That always compelled capitulation. You had to be game when that was said to you, you couldn’t afford not to be. Bruce promptly gave him back the twin to the stencil, from boyhood’s early days: “I’m game if you are!”

Forthwith, Warren reached out and poked jerkily at the bell.

The door opened with dismaying suddenness, the same orange fan of light as before spread out, this time full in their faces, and a colored woman confronted them on the threshold.

Her face was as black as her taffeta dress, but relieved by a postage-stamp frilled apron and frilled cuffs, as if she were a parlor maid in some genteel household. She looked them over but noticeably made no move to make way for them to enter. “Yes?” she said finally.

“Can we come in?” Warren asked daringly.

“I’m not sure you boys old enough,” she told them. “Who sent you here?”

“Why, nobody,” said Warren, who seemed to have become the spokesman for the two of them.

“Then how come you come here?” she wanted to know. Then before he could answer, she added, “I think you better go ’long now,” and closed the door.

“What d’ya have to be, a hundred years old to get in there?” groused Warren as they came reluctantly down off the doorstep again.

But before they’d had time to move very far away, the door unexpectedly opened a second time, this time far less widely than the first, so that only a sliver of orange showed through, and an imperative hiss recalled them. It had to repeat itself before they knew enough to turn and go back. The same colored woman’s face was visible in the opening, though with its full width constricted now between door and door-frame.

“She say go ’round the back door, you can come in from there,” she whispered tersely when they stood before her once more.

“Huh?” said Warren stupidly.

“Go ’round the back, you be let in from there,” she repeated impatiently, and snuffed the door closed.

They went without any further discussion between themselves. They had to go down as far as the tree was, then turn and go along the side of the last house clown, then turn once more into an alley that ran along the backs of all these houses. It was dark and none too confidence-inspiring, and a cat, first staring at them with low-crouched phosphorescent green eyes, then skittering away before them for dear life, did nothing to buck up their courage. But they were side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and each one was held fast and kept from turning back by the other’s very presence.

They were guided by a parallelogram of light from a curtained back window that could not be looked into, and as they came up to it, a door opened alongside of it without waiting for their knock. In it stood this time, not the colored housemaid, but a middle-aged woman of a rather prim and even ascetic aspect. She reminded Bruce of the old-fashioned type of school-teacher (no longer to be met with), or of a maiden aunt they had in his family. Even down to the pince-nez glasses attached to a fine gold chain.

She smiled, but even her smile (he thought) was a little forbidding and severe. “Come inside quickly,” she said. “Don’t stand back. The sooner I can get this door shut, the better for all of us.” It was more of a curt reprimand than an invitation, the way it sounded to Bruce.

“Follow me,” she said briskly when she’d closed it, and went back across the room and out at the opposite side.

They crossed it after her, one behind the other, getting a glimpse as they went by of a sleek haired young man sitting in his shirt-sleeves beside a kitchen table, which was covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth and held two mugs of coffee on it. A cigarette had been left burning over its edge, but seemed not to belong to the young man, as he already had one inserted at the extreme corner of his mouth, as far over as it could go.

He gave them an indecipherable glance as they passed. The colored woman, who was standing doing something at the stove, turned to look at them too. But in her expression Bruce thought he could detect a sort of thinly veiled contempt.

The lady of the house had halted in the front hall, at the foot of a staircase leading upward. The flight of stairs was long and carpeted, the carpet had big faded flowers all over it, and each step had a thin brass rod across it holding the carpet down.

“Mae. Rose. Somebody down here,” she called up musically.

A door opened above and a girl appeared on the stairs, but came only part way down them. A moment later a second one appeared at the head of them, but remained standing there without coming down at all.

The first girl glanced at them, then gave the lady of the house a sort of quizzical look that Bruce found it difficult to interpret. The lady shrugged slightly, and said to her: “Well, what’re y’ going to do? It’s been slow all night tonight, anyway. I let ’em in the back, and they can go out that way too.”

She turned to the two of them and said, very businesslike: “That’ll be five dollars each, boys. Pay me now, please, before you go up. You can tip the girls yourselves afterward.” And to the girls: “Don’t keep them too long, we’re closing up in a few minutes.”

Warren moved over toward him and conferred in a confidential undertone. “You’ll have to lend me three, one for the tip.”

The transfer was made, the lady of the house was paid, and they both started to go up. Warren, who was ahead of him on the stairs as he usually was in everything they did together, took the first girl, the one standing midway down them, along with him. The other one, waiting at the top, turned away before Bruce had reached her and went down the upper hall, saying to him: “Right this way.” An open door, when he had started down it himself, showed which room she had gone into. By the time he reached the door, she was already all prepared, with her head on the pillow.

As he came in toward her, she said scowlingly: “You want the door closed, don’t you?”

He turned and closed it after him.

He sat down next to her on the edge of the bed at first, embarrassed. Then presently, growing a little bolder, reclined alongside of her, but with his legs still on the floor. Then at last, as he became more confident, drew them up and lay there full length beside her. Both staring upward at the ceiling.

Wanting to say something, and not knowing what to say, he asked her: “You like it here?”

It wasn’t so bad, she said resignedly.

They talked a little then, she doing most of it. Until finally, excited more by the drift of her conversation than by her proximity, he began to make ultimate love to her, still without looking into her face.

She sighed at first with age-old professional boredom. Then, compassionately, she laughed a little. “I’ll show you. You’re a real young ’un, aren’t you! Wait, I’ll show you.”

Then it was already over, and he was sitting bent over on the edge of the bed retying the laces of his shoes, which were the only thing he had discarded. On the floor before his eyes, something glistened against the light. He picked it up, and she saw him do it and said instantly, “Whatch’ got there?” thinking perhaps it was a coin.

But it was only a cuff-link, and he showed it to her. There was a small light-red stone in the center of it, opaque not vitreous, on the order of a carnelian, and around it an oblong of perhaps silver, perhaps some lesser metal.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said admiringly.

“Wonder whose it is. Got any idea?” he asked her.

“Party just before you,” she answered laconically. “I noticed them on him.” She chuckled. “Must’ve torn off his shirt in too much of a hurry.”

She held out her hand for it, and he gave it to her.

“I’ll turn it over to Miss Norma when I go downstairs,” she said. “We have to do that with anything we find in the rooms, she’s very strict about it. She’ll hold it for him in case he comes back for it.” Then she added, as though this honesty on her part had its flexibility at times, “It’s no good to me, one half of a pair of cuff-links.”

He tipped her, she thanked him casually (“Much obliged, sonny”), then let him know point-blank that it was time for him to go. “You’d better leave now, or Miss Norma’ll start calling up the stairs. She blames us if a visitor overstays his time.”

He came down the stairs feeling much older than when he’d gone up them.

The sleek-haired young man was still beside the table, but the coffee mugs had disappeared. Opposite him now sat the lady of the house, shuffling a deck of cards in a very smooth way. Again a cigarette burned over the edge of the table, but this time it was indubitably his, for the lady of the house had one stuck into the extreme corner of her mouth, as far over as it could go. The colored woman was no longer in there.

“Your friend’s waiting for you outside,” she told Bruce when he came into the room. “You can let yourself out through here, only be sure to close the door quickly behind you.”

They laughed as he passed through the kitchen. Not to him, but to one another. He heard the young man remark, “First time out. Just the same, I wouldn’t mind being back there again myself.”

The lady said, “Ah, come on now, what’re you giving us?”, and freeing one hand momentarily from her card-deck, flung it toward him loosely.

The door closed behind him and he was out. And much as he’d wanted at first to go in, he was awfully glad to be outside again. A square of cobwebbed light from the lace-curtained pane in the lower half of the window settled across his head and shoulders like a dusting of ashes for a moment, and then as he moved on away, it fell flat on the gritty floor of the alley and lay there inert and out of true.

The red wink of a cigarette was Warren waiting for him at the end of the alley, and he was very glad to go leaving this place and starting home together side by side.

“What took you so long?” Warren wanted to know when he’d come up to him. “Did you go around twice?”

“Na. We were talking a little at first,” he answered glumly.

“Talking?” was all Warren said to that, taken back.

The lights of downtown were fewer now, and the people on the sidewalk were fewer too. There were still lights and there were still people, but the edge had been taken off the pristine dazzle of the earlier part of the evening. All three theatre-marquees were dark now, but the lobbies were still dimly lighted, and there were still audiences inside watching the last of the late showings.

Saturday night was about over.

They said hardly a thing the whole way back. They only spoke twice to one another, as a matter of fact. After they’d left Main Street behind and gone across the viaduct, Warren rebuked: “Don’t walk so fast, this is uphill.” Bruce had been unconsciously straining to get home as quickly as he could.

And a little while later Warren remarked: “I’ll get you back that three you lent me by the end of next week.” It was said as ungraciously as though Bruce had asked him for it.

“I know you will,” Bruce said. But he felt wearied and resentful, and that was the way it sounded when he said it: weariedly and resentfully.

Warren and he parted in a strained, almost painful silence. They parted at the corner of Hillside and Pomeroy, where they’d originally joined each other, and neither said a word as they turned away from each other. They were both oddly self-conscious now, for some inexplicable reason. Bruce was glad to get away from his friend. He didn’t know why. He’d had enough of him for one evening. Warren would have represented a continuation of his earlier mood, if he’d stayed with him, and it was over now. He was emotionally tired, drained. He’d always thought he’d be elated when this thing first happened to him. He wasn’t at all. He found he was depressed, instead. A sense of futility, of listlessness, seemed to hang over him. The melancholy of youth, its haunted wistfulness.

He could tell his father was home by the light shining under his parents’ bedroom-door, but he walked up the stairs quietly and didn’t make himself known to his father. His mother, of course, would be away still one more week at the bedside of her own ailing mother.

Even as he passed the door, the thread of light went out.

He went into his own room and closed the door softly. Sat on the edge of his bed, took off his shoes, and then remained there that way, morosely thinking about it, his hands dangling loosely down between the insides of his legs.

It was a disappointment in more ways than one, that was the sum of his thinking about it. It hadn’t been at all what he’d expected it to be. It was brief to the point of a mockery. Not much longer than a long-drawn sneeze. The instant after it was over, it could not be remembered any more. You were not sure you’d done it. You could remember it mentally, on the plane of the mind, but you could not remember it physically, on the plane of the senses. It was therefore a sleight-of-hand, a swindle, an illusion. And yet the whole world came back to be cheated, over and over again.

His eyes began to droop blurrily closed at last. Still sitting, without rising to his feet, he pulled himself out of his clothes, tucked both legs sidewise up onto the bed, and rolled over under the covers.

His father’s door was open when he came out in the morning and he stopped before it to say, “Up yet, Dad?”

“Morning,” his father’s voice answered, but he couldn’t see him there in the room anywhere.

He stepped inside in surprise, looking around, and then he saw his father down on hands and knees, in the space between the bureau and the bed.

“What’s matter?” he asked.

“I can’t find one of my cuff-links,” his father answered, crouching lower to peer under the bureau.

“Have you looked over here, on this side?” Bruce asked, stooping to help in the search.

“I’ve looked all over,” his father grumbled. “I might have dropped it in Ed’s car last night.”

Mrs. Stevens, the woman who kept house for them by the day while his mother was away, called up from downstairs: “Mr. Neil. Bruce. Breakfast is ready.”

His father straightened up and started toward the door, muttering something about having to put in another pair as he went past him. It was Sunday morning, and he always came down to the breakfast-table in semideshabille anyway.

Bruce saw it when he turned around to go after him. The mate to the one they’d been looking for. It was on the bureau. He’d had his back to it until then, looking around underneath on the floor.

There was a small light-red stone in the center of it, opaque not vitreous, on the order of a carnelian, and around it an oblong of perhaps silver, perhaps some lesser metal.

For a moment there was nothing. Just it, lying there; he, looking at it there. Some terrible thought was trying to overtake him. A hideous, nameless thought was hovering over him. Then it burst shatteringly, sent a shower of horror all over him. From last night came a voice, saying over and over: “The party before you. The party just before you. The party before you. Party just before you.”

One of his knees gave under him and he dipped down on it, clinging to the bureau-edge with both hands to keep from going all the way.

Mrs. Stevens called up a second time, more insistently: “Bruce! Your eggs are on the table.”

And his father joined his voice to hers. “Bruce! What’re you doing up there?”

He squirmed agonizedly erect, almost as though his faulty leg were in a cast, and took a tottering step. A sort of blindness fell on him, as though he were enmeshed in dirty, gray mosquito-netting. He lurched toward where he had last seen the door, and his outstretched arms must have guided him, for suddenly he knew he must be outside it, and suddenly he knew he must be on the stairs.

Then he was at the table, and his father’s face was opposite. He couldn’t look at it, turned his own face deeply downward, so that his chin almost lay upon his chest.

“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.

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?