The Comforts of Home
Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his head between the wall and the curtain he looked down on the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the little slut were getting out of it. His mother emerged slowly, stolid and awkward, and then the little slut’s long slightly bowed legs slid out, the dress pulled above the knees. With a shriek of laughter she ran to meet the dog, who bounded, overjoyed, shaking with pleasure, to welcome her. Rage gathered throughout Thomas’s large frame with a silent ominous intensity, like a mob assembling.
It was now up to him to pack a suitcase, go to the hotel, and stay there until the house should be cleared.
He did not know where a suitcase was, he disliked to pack, he needed his books, his typewriter was not portable, he was used to an electric blanket, he could not bear to eat in restaurants. His mother, with her daredevil charity, was about to wreck the peace of the house.
The back door slammed and the girl’s laugh shot up from the kitchen, through the back hall, up the stairwell and into his room, making for him like a bolt of electricity. He jumped to the side and stood glaring about him. His words of the morning had been unequivocal: “If you bring that girl back into this house, I leave. You can choose—her or me.”
She had made her choice. An intense pain gripped his throat. It was the first time in his thirty-five years . . . He felt a sudden burning moisture behind his eyes. Then he steadied himself, overcome by rage. On the contrary: she had not made any choice. She was counting on his attachment to his electric blanket. She would have to be shown.
The girl’s laughter rang upward a second time and Thomas winced. He saw again her look of the night before. She had invaded his room. He had waked to find his door open and her in it. There was enough light from the hall to make her visible as she turned toward him. The face was like a comedienne’s in a musical comedy—a pointed chin, wide apple cheeks and feline empty eyes. He had sprung out of his bed and snatched a straight chair and then he had backed her out the door, holding the chair in front of him like an animal trainer driving out a dangerous cat. He had driven her silently down the hall, pausing when he reached it to beat on his mother’s door. The girl, with a gasp, turned and fled into the guest room.
In a moment his mother had opened her door and peered out apprehensively. Her face, greasy with whatever she put on it at night, was framed in pink rubber curlers. She looked down the hall where the girl had disappeared. Thomas stood before her, the chair still lifted in front of him as if he were about to quell another beast. “She tried to get in my room,” he hissed, pushing in. “I woke up and she was trying to get in my room.” He closed the door behind him and his voice rose in outrage. “I won’t put up with this! I won’t put up with it another day!”
His mother, backed by him to her bed, sat down on the edge of it. She had a heavy body on which sat a thin, mysteriously gaunt and incongruous head.
“I’m telling you for the last time,” Thomas said, “I won’t put up with this another day.” There was an observable tendency in all of her actions. This was, with the best intentions in the world, to make a mockery of virtue, to pursue it with such a mindless intensity that everyone involved was made a fool of and virtue itself became ridiculous. “Not another day,” he repeated.
His mother shook her head emphatically, her eyes still on the door.
Thomas put the chair on the floor in front of her and sat down on it. He leaned forward as if he were about to explain something to a defective child.
“That’s just another way she’s unfortunate,” his mother said. “So awful, so awful. She told me the name of it but I forget what it is but it’s something she can’t help. Something she was born with. Thomas,” she said and put her hand to her jaw, “suppose it were you?”
Exasperation blocked his windpipe. “Can’t I make you see,” he croaked, “that if she can’t help herself you can’t help her?”
His mother’s eyes, intimate but untouchable, were the blue of great distances after sunset. “Nimpemaniac,” she murmured.
“Nymphomaniac,” he said fiercely. “She doesn’t need to supply you with any fancy names. She’s a moral moron. That’s all you need to know. Born without the moral faculty—like somebody else would be born without a kidney or a leg. Do you understand?”
“I keep thinking it might be you,” she said, her hand still on her jaw. “If it were you, how do you think I’d feel if nobody took you in? What if you were a nimpermaniac and not a brilliant smart person and you did what you couldn’t help and . . .”
Thomas felt a deep unbearable loathing for himself as if he were turning slowly into the girl.
“What did she have on?” she asked abruptly, her eyes narrowing.
“Nothing!” he roared. “Now will you get her out of here!”
“How can I turn her out in the cold?” she said. “This morning she was threatening to kill herself again.”
“Send her back to jail,” Thomas said.
“I would not send you back to jail, Thomas,” she said.
He got up and snatched the chair and fled the room while he was still able to control himself.
Thomas loved his mother. He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery and he sensed about him forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control. She proceeded always from the tritest of considerations—it was the nice thing to do—into the most foolhardy engagements with the devil, whom, of course, she never recognized.
The devil for Thomas was only a manner of speaking, but it was a manner appropriate to the situations his mother got into. Had she been in any degree intellectual, he could have proved to her from early Christian history that no excess of virtue is justified, that a moderation of good produces likewise a moderation in evil, that if Antony of Egypt had stayed at home and attended to his sister, no devils would have plagued him.
Thomas was not cynical and so far from being opposed to virtue, he saw it as the principle of order and the only thing that makes life bearable. His own life was made bearable by the fruits of his mother’s saner virtues—by the well-regulated house she kept and the excellent meals she served. But when virtue got out of hand with her, as now, a sense of devils grew upon him, and these were not mental quirks in himself or the old lady, they were denizens with personalities, present though not visible, who might any moment be expected to shriek or rattle a pot.
The girl had landed in the county jail a month ago on a bad check charge and his mother had seen her picture in the paper. At the breakfast table she had gazed at it for a long time and then had passed it over the coffee pot to him. “Imagine,” she said, “only nineteen years old and in that filthy jail. And she doesn’t look like a bad girl.”
Thomas glanced at the picture. It showed the face of a shrewd ragamuffin. He observed that the average age for criminality was steadily lowering.
“She looks like a wholesome girl,” his mother said.
“Wholesome people don’t pass bad checks,” Thomas said.
“You don’t know what you’d do in a pinch.”
“I wouldn’t pass a bad check,” Thomas said.
“I think,” his mother said, “I’ll take her a little box of candy.”
If then and there he had put his foot down, nothing else would have happened. His father, had he been living, would have put his foot down at that point. Taking a box of candy was her favorite nice thing to do. When anyone within her social station moved to town, she called and took a box of candy; when any of her friend’s children had babies or won a scholarship, she called and took a box of candy; when an old person broke his hip, she was at his bedside with a box of candy. He had been amused at the idea of her taking a box of candy to the jail.
He stood now in his room with the girl’s lau
gh rocketing away in his head and cursed his amusement.
When his mother returned from the visit to the jail, she had burst into his study without knocking and had collapsed full-length on his couch, lifting her small swollen feet up on the arm of it. After a moment, she recovered herself enough to sit up and put a newspaper under them. Then she fell back again. “We don’t know how the other half lives,” she said.
Thomas knew that though her conversation moved from cliché to cliché there were real experiences behind them. He was less sorry for the girl’s being in jail than for his mother having to see her there. He would have spared her all unpleasant sights. “Well,” he said and put away his journal, “you had better forget it now. The girl has ample reason to be in jail.”
“You can’t imagine what all she’s been through,” she said, sitting up again, “listen.” The poor girl, Star, had been brought up by a stepmother with three children of her own, one an almost grown boy who had taken advantage of her in such dreadful ways that she had been forced to run away and find her real mother. Once found, her real mother had sent her to various boarding schools to get rid of her. At each of these she had been forced to run away by the presence of perverts and sadists so monstrous that their acts defied description. Thomas could tell that his mother had not been spared the details that she was sparing him. Now and again when she spoke vaguely, her voice shook and he could tell that she was remembering some horror that had been put to her graphically. He had hoped that in a few days the memory of all this would wear off, but it did not. The next day she returned to the jail with Kleenex and cold cream and a few days later, she announced that she had consulted a lawyer.
It was at these times that Thomas truly mourned the death of his father though he had not been able to endure him in life. The old man would have had none of this foolishness. Untouched by useless compassion, he would (behind her back) have pulled the necessary strings with his crony, the sheriff, and the girl would have been packed off to the state penitentiary to serve her time. He had always been engaged in some enraged action until one morning when (with an angry glance at his wife as if she alone were responsible) he had dropped dead at the breakfast table. Thomas had inherited his father’s reason without his ruthlessness and his mother’s love of good without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what developed.
The lawyer found that the story of the repeated atrocities was for the most part untrue, but when he explained to her that the girl was a psychopathic personality, not insane enough for the asylum, not criminal enough for the jail, not stable enough for society, Thomas’s mother was more deeply affected than ever. The girl readily admitted that her story was untrue on account of her being a congenital liar; she lied, she said, because she was insecure. She had passed through the hands of several psychiatrists who had put the finishing touches to her education. She knew there was no hope for her. In the presence of such an affliction as this, his mother seemed bowed down by some painful mystery that nothing would make endurable but a redoubling of effort. To his annoyance, she appeared to look on him with compassion, as if her hazy charity no longer made distinctions.
A few days later she burst in and said that the lawyer had got the girl paroled—to her.
Thomas rose from his Morris chair, dropping the review he had been reading. His large bland face contracted in anticipated pain. “You are not,” he said, “going to bring that girl here!”
“No, no,” she said, “calm yourself, Thomas.” She had managed with difficulty to get the girl a job in a pet shop in town and a place to board with a crotchety old lady of her acquaintance. People were not kind. They did not put themselves in the place of someone like Star who had everything against her.
Thomas sat down again and retrieved his review. He seemed just to have escaped some danger which he did not care to make clear to himself. “Nobody can tell you anything,” he said, “but in a few days that girl will have left town, having got what she could out of you. You’ll never hear from her again.”
Two nights later he came home and opened the parlor door and was speared by a shrill depthless laugh. His mother and the girl sat close to the fireplace where the gas logs were lit. The girl gave the immediate impression of being physically crooked. Her hair was cut like a dog’s or an elf’s and she was dressed in the latest fashion. She was training on him a long familiar sparkling stare that turned after a second into an intimate grin.
“Thomas!” his mother said, her voice firm with the injunction not to bolt, “this is Star you’ve heard so much about. Star is going to have supper with us.”
The girl called herself Star Drake. The lawyer had found that her real name was Sarah Ham.
Thomas neither moved nor spoke but hung in the door in what seemed a savage perplexity. Finally he said, “How do you do, Sarah,” in a tone of such loathing that he was shocked at the sound of it. He reddened, feeling it beneath him to show contempt for any creature so pathetic. He advanced into the room, determined at least on a decent politeness and sat down heavily in a straight chair.
“Thomas writes history,” his mother said with a threatening look at him. “He’s president of the local historical society this year.”
The girl leaned forward and gave Thomas an even more pointed attention. “Fabulous!” she said in a throaty voice.
“Right now Thomas is writing about the first settlers in this county,” his mother said.
“Fabulous!” the girl repeated.
Thomas by an effort of will managed to look as if he were alone in the room.
“Say, you know who he looks like?” Star asked, her head on one side, taking him in at an angle.
“Oh, someone very distinguished!” his mother said archly.
“This cop I saw in the movie I went to last night,” Star said.
“Star,” his mother said, “I think you ought to be careful about the kind of movies you go to. I think you ought to see only the best ones. I don’t think crime stories would be good for you.”
“Oh this was a crime-does-not-pay,” Star said, “and I swear this cop looked exactly like him. They were always putting something over on the guy. He would look like he couldn’t stand it a minute longer or he would blow up. He was a riot. And not bad looking,” she added with an appreciative leer at Thomas.
“Star,” his mother said, “I think it would be grand if you developed a taste for music.”
Thomas sighed. His mother rattled on and the girl, paying no attention to her, let her eyes play over him. The quality of her look was such that it might have been her hands, resting now on his knees, now on his neck. Her eyes had a mocking glitter and he knew that she was well aware he could not stand the sight of her. He needed nothing to tell him he was in the presence of the very stuff of corruption, but blameless corruption because there was no responsible faculty behind it. He was looking at the most unendurable form of innocence. Absently he asked himself what the attitude of God was to this, meaning if possible to adopt it.
His mother’s behavior throughout the meal was so idiotic that he could barely stand to look at her and since he could less stand to look at Sarah Ham, he fixed on the sideboard across the room a continuous gaze of disapproval and disgust. Every remark of the girl’s his mother met as if it deserved serious attention. She advanced several plans for the wholesome use of Star’s spare time. Sarah Ham paid no more attention to this advice than if it came from a parrot. Once when Thomas inadvertently looked in her direction, she winked. As soon as he had swallowed the last spoonful of dessert, he rose and muttered, “I have to go, I have a meeting.”
“Thomas,” his mother said, “I want you to take Star home on your way. I don’t want her riding in taxis by herself at night.”
For a moment Thomas remained furiously silent. Then he turned and left the room. Presently he came back with a look of obscure determination on his face. The girl wa
s ready, meekly waiting at the parlor door. She cast up at him a great look of admiration and confidence. Thomas did not offer his arm but she took it anyway and moved out of the house and down the steps, attached to what might have been a miraculously moving monument.
“Be good!” his mother called.
Sarah Ham snickered and poked him in the ribs.
While getting his coat he had decided that this would be his opportunity to tell the girl that unless she ceased to be a parasite on his mother, he would see to it, personally, that she was returned to jail. He would let her know that he understood what she was up to, that he was not an innocent and that there were certain things he would not put up with. At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.
She curled her feet up under her and said, “Alone at last,” and giggled.
Thomas swerved the car away from the house and drove fast toward the gate. Once on the highway, he shot forward as if he were being pursued.
“Jesus!” Sarah Ham said, swinging her feet off the seat, “where’s the fire?”