230
PARTISAN REVIEW
behind which he would have made sure
if
finding nothing, a door into a room shut–
tered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect
confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him
through the dark ...
It was he himself James's Brydon was in terror tracking
down, the other self he might have been. Our own little man would have
found himself quite unable to say what he might be tracking, if that was
what he was doing and perhaps in terror. We can scarcely imagine it our–
selves. Haunting or being haunted?
More suitable to his slight age perhaps that we call it as we did only
some vestige of a game at hide-and-seek, such as on a night after the inno–
cent real twilight neighborhood game was called to its close by parents
singing names-such as one might in a dream fearfully play again in sleep.
Was it Dick himself who gave that paneled door the nudge to send it
swaying open on its hinges? Quicker than startled birds his small fingers
flew to his eyes and sealed them.
But then, when he breathes and dares there is nothing, nothing at all,
nothing is there.
Mr. Truck is now highballing due East along Sherman Street, defend–
ed against interruption by STOP signs at the crossways of leafy
innocently-named Bemis, Ethel, Shirley, Norwood.
Our tender juvenile we next see as he descends the basement steps.
Whether or not he is purged of his fancies by the non-revelation of the
sewing room, we couldn't tell by his glancing demeanor. Something draws
him,
even as it strongly drew James's proper hero, to the cellar,
to the parts
at the back,
as the author has it in his tale of narcissism:
You don't care for any–
thing but yourself,
says faithful Alice to Brydon. What if that were true too
of Dick? Or perhaps he is only beginning to learn that the world he must
explore and handle is something different from himself, apart-may we not
claim then that he is not merely self-regarding but rather in a pristine state
of monistic or cosmotheistic innocence.
Down there, it is dim, dim rough-sawn timbers overhead atop square
posts, dim brick chimney base, next it squats the enormous cold furnace
with its branching ducts, in the far end the jointed cast iron soil drain
to the sewer. There is space enough for a hundred boxes and tins and
tools to hide in. Sink; washing machine. In those things are tears. The
dus
ty
twilight of the coal bin's small window reveals it hoards a las t heap
in its corner.
Dick unlatches the cast iron furnace door, one worn hinge lets it hang
