This Sweet Sickness Read Free

toothbrush, and razor. Actually, he would not have dreamed of taking any personal possessions that he used at Mrs. McCartney’s on his weekends. The little bag might contain books, a bottle of gin or wine, or a small thing for the house, but none of his possessions that he used from Monday to Friday. And really, he did not drop by on Friday afternoons for the duffel bag, which he might easily have taken with him to work on Friday mornings. He came back to the house to see if a letter had come from Annabelle in the 10 A.M. mail. It was a compulsion for him to see, though in the two years he had been living in the town, Annabelle had written him only twice. And he had written her only four times: it would be a serious mistake, he thought, to inundate her with letters.
    His room, like David himself, was orderly and curiously evocative of some forgotten past that one might have experienced, if one was old enough, or that one might only have read about or seen pictures of. People like Mr. Harris, the potbellied piano tuner who lived in the downstairs middle, or Mr. Muldaven, the widower, downstairs front, or Mrs. McCartney herself, when they happened to stand on David’s threshold for one reason or another, always stared at the room for a moment with dazed expressions before they opened their mouths to announce their business. (David discouraged visitors, kept his own broom and dust rags, and cleaned his room so well there was no need of Sarah the clean-up girl ever to enter his room, though he knew she sometimes did.) The room was of a general faded yellow color and its furniture was like the furniture of all the other rooms, a tasteless mixture of the old and new, providing the minimum necessities—bed, straight chair, armchair, chest of drawers, table. In David’s room the chest of drawers was absent but in lieu of it stood a tall, dark wardrobe with two drawers in its bottom. The carpet was large and worn out, brushed threadbare by brooms and carpet sweepers, its two holes more or less concealed by the hideous brown double bed with its too-short counterpane of machine-made crochet and by the plain writing table on which stood a row of David’s books. The maroon easy chair was the newest piece in the room and probably twenty years old. It was both the absence of clutter—David had no pictures at all on the walls—and its invariable order that might first have made people stare at the room, but then came a sense of déjà vu, an awareness of a peculiar antiquity which was even stronger when David’s tall, quiet figure was there. Mrs. McCartney spent little time savoring all this. She merely considered David Kelsey her ideal roomer, a fine young man, “a young man in a million.” He neither smoked nor drank, never had a girl visit him even before ten o’clock (by which time she liked them out and she never hesitated to tell her men roomers so before they even moved in), and he spent his weekends, Friday night to Monday morning, with an ailing mother in a nursing home. Mrs. McCartney’s only worry about David Kelsey was that he would never find a girl good enough to be his wife.
    When David answered a knock on his door at five-thirty, he saw that expression of dull surprise and curiosity on the face of Mrs. McCartney as she gazed past him into his room. Her lean, gray uprightness and efficiency irritated and repelled David. Behind her quick smile, as false as her teeth, David knew she was reassuring herself once more that his room, her property, every thread and splinter of it, was still intact in all its ugliness. It pained David most to think that two sons who lived in St. Louis had Mrs. McCartney for a mother.
    â€œI’m sorry to disturb you, David,” Mrs. McCartney said, “but Mrs. Beecham said she’d like you to go up and see her before you leave.” She leaned forward and whispered, “I think she’s got a little something for your mother, the