by James Purdy
“And the man you have been waiting for,” Eustace would reply and Amos would shrug and say, “Amen, Ace, on that.” Climbing the stairs now two at a time, Amos smiled and talked aloud as if to prepare himself for the joy of seeing his beloved’s face.
The odd thing about Daniel Haws was not his dark coloring, but the striking difference in his character awake and asleep. Awake, he not only never made a single pass at Amos Ratcliffe but seemed to keep a gulf between them all the time. He once said of a newspaper scandal story about two men who had killed themselves over their love that he was opposed to physical relations between members of the male sex, and they ought to electrocute faggots.
The very night Amos moved into the rooming house, the mystery of Daniel was revealed—he turned out to be an incurable sleepwalker. There were no locks or bolts on any of the roomers’ doors (Daniel had explained that he must have access to quarters at any time, otherwise they would all be burned to death some fine day on account of the careless habits of his transients), and at two o’clock in the morning of his first night Amos was awakened by the squeak of the opening door. In the feeble hallway light, he saw someone standing on his threshold. The man advanced toward Amos with his eyes open, but the expression in their pupils was so changed that Amos did not at once recognize his landlord. Daniel came directly to Amos’s cot, sat down in the manner of a regular visitor, lifted the boy’s head casually, touched his hair and, leaning over him close enough for Amos to feel the warmth of his breath, said, without expression or feeling: “Promise me you’ll want to stay.” A few seconds after saying this, he rose and returned to his own room, having closed the shell of a door behind him.
That had been two months ago. Hardly a night now went by that Daniel did not return, with words and actions nearly identical to those of his first night’s visit. Amos knew that his nighttime caller was as different from the daytime Daniel Haws as a dream is from everyday reality. Amos also remembered a description Cousin Ida had given of sleepwalkers: “People who walk in their sleep don’t remember a thing, especially where they have walked.”
Amos was pitifully aware that the other tenants knew the landlord sleepwalked into his room late at night and he felt sudden hot shame that they knew, for they could construe it only one way; but then, as Eustace said to Amos, “Who after all are the roomers—an unknowable, vague assortment of homeless scarecrows, transients of a night or two.” And keeping this in mind, Amos had cheered up considerably, after one sleepless night, when in the kitchen Daniel Haws, preparing him some food “to piece on” between meals, had grinned and said:
“Looks like you’re my star boarder, Rat.”
And leaving Amos to finish his “piece” on the oilcloth spread, Daniel Haws would go into the adjoining cubicle to do his accounts. One could smell the freshly-sharpened lead pencils and hear the weight of Daniel’s army ledgers as he flopped them open on the roll-top desk.
Had Eustace seen them in the morning breakfasting on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, he would have conjectured they were total strangers forced together by circumstances, without the slightest trait or characteristic in common. Yet there was one similarity between the cold morning meetings and the passionate encounters of darkness—it was always Amos who looked at Daniel. Daniel’s eyes remained as they were when he walked in his sleep—averted.
One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy’s eyes on him, and said:
“Tryin’ to burn holes starin’ like that?”
“Guess I was just resting my eyes on you so as not to look at your wallpaper,” Amos gave a sour apology.
Daniel closed the book he was reading, a volume of Rhodes’s history of the United States, and took a careful look at the kitchen wallpaper.
“Yes,” he admitted, “that wallpaper is goddam ancient.” He smiled. “But try and buy some new with prices what they are! Even if I was to paper it myself it would break me. Nobody papers his walls with paper any more, even the rich’ll have to quit before long. Know how many wallpaper stores have folded right on this street within the last year or so? All of ’em but one. Maybe a Greek scholar might not know about the cost of wallpaper, but Daniel Haws ain’t paperin’ his kitchen to please nobody.”
After saying this he looked desperately about the room, never once allowing his gaze to rest on Amos direct.
“But I don’t know what’s come over you the last few weeks, Amos. The way you stare. I won’t tell you to stop it, on account of it’s probably harmless, but I want you to know I’m aware of it, and I ignore it.”
Amos smoothed a deep fold in the oilcloth.
“I like to look at an American face, Daniel,” he said bravely.
Daniel touched his mouth with the back of his hand, and shook his head.
“Do you have some little strain of Indian blood in you by chance, or don’t you know?” Amos inquired in a sudden flight of boldness that surprised even himself.
Calm under the onslaught, however, Daniel got out: “Don’t know rightly who my ancestors were, to tell the truth.”
Daniel rose, pushed out his chest, and having stretched out his arms until the billowing folds of Old Glory tattooed on his forearms were visible through the openings in his sleeves, swiftly strode into his cubicle to occupy himself with tasks Amos described to his face as “doing your arithmetic.”
A moment later, suddenly peeping out from amid his ledgers and record books, Daniel taunted: “Stare way, kewpie, if it gives you any pleasure!”
Amos wilted under the remark and turned a dead white. The puzzled landlord looked him in the eye this time, then suddenly angered, wheeled and slammed the door of his office between them.
“Does the son-of-a-bitch know he sleepwalks?” Amos mumbled to himself. But he shook his head immediately. If Daniel had known, he couldn’t have made a remark like that. Amos smiled now at the words.
There was another place and time during which Amos could stare at his loved one, unreproved and immune. Every evening for a few hours Daniel Haws got all dolled up and worked as “seater” in the fashionable men’s club patronized largely by university professors and trustees. Daniel would stand at the entrance to the huge oak-panelled room, near the cashier, in his black tie, and nod to one distinguished old man after another, usher him to his plate and fork, and then go back to the entrance and wait for the next club member. The rest of the time he spent being the landlord of the top of the 1887 building.
So almost every evening, rain or shine, starlight or fog, Amos walked slowly past the gentlemen’s club and paused, looking in. When he located Daniel Haws at last standing there transformed by “evening clothes,” Amos felt his heart begin to pound so rapidly that he held on to an iron fence post, while tears came to his eyes. He knew that in about six hours a sleepwalker wearing Daniel Haws’s face and body, but with a different soul, would visit him in his cubicle, smooth his hair, mumble words of blind affection, and the visit concluded, stumble cautiously back to his own room for the rest of the sleeping night.
Facing one another now across the dark, here again in the raw November drizzle, only Amos saw and understood. Daniel, looking out into the blackness, perceived only the streetlamp, just as later in his sleepwalking he would gaze at the one he loved with unseeing eyes.
WHEN AMOS TURNED to Eustace Chisholm for advice, Ace said there was no question of doubt that Amos, alias Rat, enjoyed these nocturnal visits more than the landlord. Sleepwalking must take an awful lot out of a man like Daniel Haws, he said, while it gave Amos an excuse for hope and the only kind of love he could accept.
“You’re too proud,” Ace preached at Amos, “to make any offer of love or declare yourself to anybody. One fine day you’ve got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a full-fledged zombie. Don’t think this is a bid for your favors on my part, incidentally. You’re not my type, as the pros say. What if you are only sixteen or seventeen? Old enough to have had your sausage cured a dozen times. Ye
t you’re satisfied with a man who walks in his sleep and gives you a father’s touch on the crown of your head.”
Offended perhaps by the taunts concerning his virginity, Amos pulled out a suspicious-looking handmade cigarette and lit it, perhaps to draw attention away from the tears of anger in his eyes. Ace, however, while not missing the tears, took pains to sniff the cigarette, pronouncing it with a condescending sneer, Mexican marijuana, which he called the “schoolboy’s consolation.”
“You don’t give me no credit.” Amos offered to crush the cigarette, then thought better and inhaled deeply.
“And all I can say in conclusion,” Eustace suddenly warned, “and hark to this: never let Daniel find out he visits you!”
Turning white, Amos mumbled, “Why ever not, Ace?”
Ace smiled, Amos crushed his cigarette, there was the cruel kind of Eustace silence, and then instead of the answer, as was his usual custom, this time there was only a grinding prolongation of silence.
“Well, when you do say something in reply, Ace, don’t come up with no more of that talk about his being colored.” Amos spoke more out of exasperation at not getting an answer from Eustace than a feeling he must claim Daniel for the white race.
“I have my own definition of nigger and I’ll keep it,” Eustace said sourly. But his amusement had gone and he warned again: “If you don’t do another thing the rest of your life, my young Attic Greek professor, don’t let D. Haws know he visits you in the dead of night. Better tattoo that on your fists.” Then Eustace lay down on the floor and pulled his knees up under his chin in his “thinking pose.”
Scarcely conscious of Eustace, Amos spoke moonily, “Maybe I should come right out and tell him, then.”
Again there was a long uncharacteristic silence from Eustace, during which his tongue and mouth moved as they rejected certain words, moved to take others, then rejected those also.
“Maybe, Ace, I should tell him that I love him, I said.” Amos forced out the words not looking anywhere, like a blind man who has lost the direction of where his interlocutor has placed himself.
“Well, Ace Chisholm,” Amos’s voice rose now against the wall of silence, “No cheap cunt-loving cynic like you is going to say that what I feel I am not feeling. I’m not ashamed to say it, I’m in love with Daniel Haws and I’m going to tell him.”
“I’ll disregard that little old title you just gave me, Amos, on account of it don’t describe me to a T at all, and I’m also honest enough to admit I’m afraid of your fists when you’re in a state like this . . . But as to your confession of love, Rat, in all sincerity I allow it and I praise it in you.”
“I testify to love on account of I treasure love,” Amos intoned, releasing the words reluctantly, as a suspect at last admits a crime to some threatening police sergeant.
Coming to a sitting position on the floor, Eustace began creeping slowly toward the chair where Amos had delivered his testimonial, and got directly in front of him where he could look up into the boy’s face.
“Christ, you really got it, Amos,” Eustace began, “but let an old married friend tell you something straight from the shoulder. You need your Daddy, Rat, and I don’t mean me. Your flesh-and-blood sire. You need him, that’s the long and the short of it. Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you’d die of apoplexy . . .”
Amos played with the loose nail in his shoe sole.
“And if he was to find out you were in love with him and he with you, well . . .” Here Eustace’s vocabulary must have failed him for he waved his left hand, and then rose to a standing position, his face averted from Rat. “I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million bucks,” Eustace mumbled.
“On account of the death cross in my palm?” Amos grinned deeply, perhaps fancying that he resembled Daniel Haws at that moment.
“On account of that, yes,” Eustace replied, “and on account of a lot of things. I feel a millionaire is coming to buy you. Did I tell you—it’s told right in your palm also? Then we’ll see if Daniel Haws loves you or not. We’ll see if Daniel Haws can walk in the daytime too, if it’s a question of losing you to a millionaire. Yes, we’ll see a lot of history if your palm is telling even a bit of the truth of what life’s got in store for you . . . Yes, sir, Amos Ratcliffe, you’ve a full schedule ahead.”
And so with Eustace’s warning, “Don’t let him find out he visits you,” ringing in his ear like some jammed burglar alarm in a deserted warehouse, Amos Ratcliffe drifted on in his situation. He lived only for the late evening visits of Daniel, incapable of rest until they met together on the borderline of slumber. But because Eustace’s warnings had made him apprehensive, Amos quailed now under the touch he so desired. His dread communicated itself to the sleepwalker and Daniel Haws, noting a change, spoke more volubly, more uncautiously than before, as he bent over the army cot.
“What’s come over you now when I touch you?” he would complain. Since Amos never replied to him in return, he would look ruefully at the boy with sightless eyes and wearily give him the benediction, “Go to sleep then if you’re that scared,” and would leave sooner than usual.
4
Stumbling on his way back from his vigil (for a glimpse of Daniel) before the windows of the men’s club, Amos ran into the painter, Maureen O’Dell, who acted glad to see him. Her face, from which jutted a nose like Pinocchio’s and a vermilion line of mouth, contained a pair of large blue eyes red and puffy from crying.
“You’re in trouble, Maureen,” Amos volunteered.
Maureen studied him pokerface and did not reply. She had been kind to Amos in a sisterly way in times gone by, had counselled him, and had lent him money which he never returned. She had not seen him since he had moved in with Daniel Haws, and she recalled that it had been at her studio that Amos had first “clapped up a friendship” with Daniel. Though she had been “soft” on the landlord at that time, she had not seen either of them since that fatal introduction.
When Amos repeated his concern for her, “What’s your trouble?,” Maureen scowled, then regaining her good humor, spoke banteringly.
“I should be mad at you. Taking my fellow away from me.” She feigned anger.
Amos looked away sheepishly. He had nearly forgotten all about meeting Daniel Haws at her studio. And as to “taking him,” well! He shifted from one poorly shod foot to the other.
Then Maureen laughed her old hearty laugh. “Oh come along, Rat. I’m on my way to Eustace’s house. Going to have the whole thing out with him. My sorrow, as you call it. You can hear it there in full . . . and you’re indirectly connected in any case . . .”
They purposely then tried to talk about indifferent matters, or about topics such as politics and war, and Maureen mentioned that some Nazis were living in her building.
Having arrived at the corner of Fifth-fifth Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Maureen pointed up to Eustace’s lighted window, exclaiming: “God’s got his lamp lit and is waiting for me.”
Still snickering over this joke, on the way upstairs, Maureen suddenly stopped, seemed to break down, and grasping Amos’s hand and guiding it to her belly, said, “Listen honey, before we go up, old Maureen’s knocked up. That’s what I’ve come to talk to Eustace about.”
After she had cried a bit more, she burst out into her customary hilarity and laughed boisterously, filling the building with echoes.
“Do you think old Ace will know a good solution?” Maureen asked Amos.
“He’s a muller, Maureen, not a solver,” Amos said thoughtfully.
Laughing still more exuberantly at his reply, Maureen studied Amos’s face carefully and when he smiled at her, said:
“Amos, talk about pearls for teeth . . . you got ’em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I’d be first in line.”
Amos drew back from her then not so much because of the wounding effect of the remark as of her breath’s smelling strong of
whiskey.
“Give old Maureen a nice kiss,” she asked, and she began kissing him inside the mouth industriously. Her hand strayed to his trousers and with professional speed unbuttoned him, pulled out his penis, and fondled it absentmindedly.
“Small but sculpturesque,” she pronounced.
When Amos bashfully put his peter back into his trousers, Maureen’s laughter again filled the building.
At that moment—they had reached the top of the flight of stairs leading to their destination—Eustace suddenly advanced down the hall.
“A raucous company if I ever heard one!” he sneered.
He looked bilious and quite put out. He was wearing only some underwear and because a draft from the street door blew down the hall (and he had also satisfied his curiosity as to who was making all the noise), he hurried back to his apartment.
When they entered, Eustace was seated on the floor playing solitaire, having flung a Scottish plaid bathrobe about his shoulders. He did not look up as they came in.
“I reckon you two have been out doing the streets together,” Eustace commented, studying his playing cards closely. “You two sure can holler when you come up the stairs, especially old Maureen, so that all my God-fearing Irish neighbors get the picture of my life reviewed good so they can report me again to the building superintendent.”
Eustace looked up at that moment direct at Maureen’s stomach. His eyes lingered there for a moment, then moved back to his card game.
“Somebody’s in an ornery temper,” Maureen grunted, sitting down in an easy chair with her coat still on.
“I hadn’t been informed, however,” Ace went on, dealing from a new deck of cards, “that you two cronies were friends again. It always was an odd friendship, but being resumed for a second time like this, I’d call it passing queer.”