But I must walk carefully. Perhaps I had better stick to my tale, try only to tell it simply, as he did.
Anyway he got off the bed, there in the upper room of that strangely disorganized and impotent household, and standing in the centre of the room took off his clothes. There was a towel hanging on a hook on the wall but it wasn’t very clean.
By chance he did have, however, a white nightgown that had not been worn and he now got it out of the drawer of a small rickety dresser that stood by the wall and recklessly tore off a part of it to serve as a washcloth. Then he stood up and with the tin washbasin on the floor at his feet washed himself carefully in the icy cold water.
No matter what illusions I may have had regarding him when he told me the tale, that night in Wells Street, surely on that night of his youth he must have been, as I have already described him, something young hard clean and white. Surely and at that moment his body was a temple.
As for the matter of his holding his own life in his hands—that came later, when he had got back into the bed, and that part of his tale I do not exactly understand. Perhaps he fumbled it in the telling and perhaps my own understanding fumbled.
I remember that he kept his hand lying on the table in the Wells Street place and that he kept opening and closing the fingers as though that would explain everything. It didn’t for me, not then at any rate. Perhaps it will for you who read.
“I got back into bed,” he said, “and taking my own life into my hand tried to decide whether I wanted to hold on to it or not. All that night I held it like that, my own life I mean,” he said.
There was some notion, he was evidently trying to explain, concerning other lives being things outside his own, things not to be touched, not to be fooled with. How much of that could have been in his mind that night of his youth, long ago, and how much came later I do not know and one takes it for granted he did not know either.
He seemed however to have had the notion that for some hours that night, after his father’s wife came upstairs and the two elder people got into bed and the house was silent, that there came certain hours when his own life belonged to him to hold or to drop as easily as one spreads out the fingers of a hand lying on a table in a saloon in Wells Street, Chicago.