The Locked Door

Abstract

The door to the room next to my bedroom when I was grow - ing up was always locked. It was the only door in the house that locked from the outside. Not once did I see Mom or Dad-or anyone else-open it. I must have been six or seven when I first asked what was on the other side. "A room" was the flippant response. I persisted, and the answer was a parental cliche: "We'll tell you when you're older."We lived in central New Jersey, a stone's throw from Cranbury, a town whose history dates back to colonial days. I was an only child, unusual for a family in the nineteen-fifties, especially one that was Italian-American. The window of my second-floor bedroom looked out onto our backyard and the woods behind it. The scenery was serene and destined for elegiac recollections a half century later. My attention, however, didn't fall on summer's luxuriant foliage or winter's quilts of snow, but on the mysterious room to the right of mine.I remember-maybe I was ten-trying to turn the doorknob and suddenly feeling Dad's Golden Glove-boxer grip on my left shoulder. Startled, I winced and spun around. How had I not heard his approach? Dad shook his head and with an extended arm pointed to my room. He seemed at that moment to have grown much taller. I returned to the security of my model airplanes and science-fiction magazines.After Mom's broiled swordfish steak and buttered rice one Friday night, Dad took me to see a new movie, Psycho. The outing was a reward for my latest report card: three As, two Bs, and three Cs, but for the first time the Cs weren't grades, but letters in our last name. Despite Dad's multiple inquiries, Mom decided to stay home and read Hawaii. James Michener's latest novel aside, she disliked suspense films and certainly didn't care to see one with that morbid title. Mom wasn't convinced it was appropriate for me, but Dad replied, "Joey's thirteen," as if my age alone validated his decision. He later could assure her I wasn't the only boy in the theater.It takes little to function as a match against the striking surface of an adolescent's imagination. When my two real eyes saw the decomposed and skeletal Mrs. Bates, my mind's eye saw an imagined interior. A mummified body was roped to a chair, hollow eyed and emaciated, dressed in outdated clothes, and facing the window with the never-opened curtain. But whose body was it? Both sets of grandparents were alive and a happy part of my life. I had aunts and uncles and cousins-Mom's family was larger, so her side supplied the greater share-so my fevered, newly teenaged brain came to three conclusions in the two-dimensional presence of Anthony Perkins in deranged drag: There was a lost family member who died before I was born, the room I never saw was a mausoleum for that person, and every morning I awoke only a few feet from a corpse.At lunch the next day, I sat at the kitchen table dipping my grilled American cheese in a dollop of ketchup. As she poured me a glass of milk, I asked Mom if there was a dead relative she and Dad didn't want me to know about. I thought she was going to drop the milk bottle. She raced out of the kitchen, bottle in hand. She hollered to Dad, who was in the cellar, "You had to take him to that horrid movie. You wouldn't believe the question your son just asked me."While Mom and Dad were at the Gallaghers' annual Christmas party two houses away, Sean and John, the Gallagher twins, kept me company. We grew up together. They were seven months older than I, which put them at age fourteen and in their freshman year of high school.I was better friends with Sean. We were Little League team - mates. He was a catcher; I played second base. John preferred to spend his time outside of school working on his ham radio, a hobby that led to a career in electrical engineering. …