JOHN THOMPSON
229
net too weak, too diffuse, for any compass? Overhead the lonely chambers
long for him and dread him.
Then let us get on with it. You will have foreseen that our little hero
has to explore the haunted house. No need to inventory the whole place
as he goes, although we could do it down to the cost of this and that scrap
and count over the contents of china closet and kitchen drawers; we stand
ready if challenged to produce the notarized accountings. But such inte–
riors are as well known to all of us as this one is to Dick. These houses,
new in his young days, still stand, if declined a bit in social status, and if
their lumpy mohair chairs and oak-plank Mission tables, fringed lamps,
taborets, upright pianos have long since been discarded, there remains for
us to see should we come visiting the paneled hall with its flanking stout
varnished pillars that draws him now to the stairwell.
We need not follow him step by step. Alone, he is free for his absent–
minded violations. What if he should be merely peopling as bes t he can this
emptiness, as an actor might "step in" to understudy a fellow gone miss–
ing? From the bathroom cupboard he lifts one of his father's two razors
from the fitted case, climbs atop the toilet seat to command the mirror and
in a way that certainly makes me anxious draws the long desperate bright
blade over his cheek. Without accident!
He snoops from ups tairs room to room. Among burglars, so we are
told, there are those drawn to their profession less by the booty than by the
thrilling impropriety of it, of the secret prowling through the revealed
effects precious or not of other and all-unsuspecting persons. From Sister's
dresser drawer he picks a white broad-strapped brassiere, for her a new
appurtenance, and holds it up over his sweater. Beneath it lay her latched
leather-bound Diary but it is no use to him, he has yet to connect his
ABC's in anything but their series. The wings of the triple mirror over the
dressing table show him the back of his head, and then fiddled with they
display the peculiar sight of a profile that might as well be the broadside
view of some schoolmate for all he can see in its pink cheek and indis–
criminate nose.
He has been hanging back, and once more he balks. Behind that closed
door lies his mother's sewing room. He knows its shade is drawn, knows
its machine that hummed to the treadle and pulley and halted, hummed
and halted, is shrouded now. No, he does not fancy he hears those mur–
murs again. Really, he is only playing at hide-and-seek!
How could he, a kindergarten truant, even in childish cartoon picture
anything like the world-instructed apparition the expatriate Spencer
Brydon found himself
thrilled and flushed with
when he prowled through
his own parents' emptied house on the Jolly Corner in old, or new, or oldly
new, New York-in James's ghost words:
His dread
if
his opening a door
