The Man in the Overstuffed Chair
by Tennessee Williams
He always enters the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it
down from inside. That is how he always enters it except when it's after midnight and
liquor has put out the fire in his nerves. Then he enters the house in a strikingly
different manner, almost guiltily, coughing a little, sighing louder than he coughs, and
sometimes talking to himself as someone talks to someone after a long, fierce argument has
exhausted the anger between them but not settled the problem. He takes off his shoes in
the living room before he goes upstairs where he has to go past my mother's closed door,
but she never fails to let him knows he hears him by clearing her throat very loudly or
saying, "Ah, me, ah, me!" Sometimes I hear him say "Ah, me" in
response as he goes on down the hall to where he sleeps, an alcove sunroom connected to
the bedroom of my young brother, Dakin, who is at this time, the fall and winter of1943,
with the Air Force in Burma.
These months, the time of this story, enclose the end of the life of my mother's
mother.
My father's behavior toward my maternal grandmother is scrupulously proper but his
attitude toward my grandfather Dakin is so insulting that I don't think the elderly
gentleman could have endured it without the insulation of deafness and near-blindness.
Although my grandmother is dying, she is still quite sound of sight and hearing, and
when it is approaching the time for my father to return from his office to the house, my
grandmother is always downstairs to warn her husband that Cornelius is about to storm in
the front door. She hears the Studebaker charging up the drive and cries out to my
grandfather," Walter, Cornelius is coming." She cries out this warning so loudly
that Grandfather can't help but hear it. My grandfather staggers up from his chair by the
radio and starts for the front stairs, but sometimes he doesn't make them in time and
there is an awkward encounter in the downstairs hall. My grandfather says, "Good
evening, Cornelius" and is lucky if he receives, in answer, a frigid "Hello, Mr.
Dakin" instead of a red-eyed glare and a grunt.
It takes him, now that he's in his eighties with cataracts on both eyes, quite a while
to get up the stairs, shepherded by his wife, and sometimes my father will come thundering
up the steps behind them as if he intended to knock the old couple down. What is he after?
A drink, of course, from a whiskey bottle under his bed in the sunroom or the bathroom
tub.
"Walter, watch out!"
"Excuse me, Mrs. Dakin," my father grunts breathlessly as he charges past
them on the stairs.
They go to their bedroom, close the door. I don't hear just what they say co each
other, but I know that "Grand" is outdone with Grandfather for lingering too
long downstairs to avoid this humiliating encounter. Of course Grandfather finds the
encounter distasteful, too, but he dearly loves to crouch by the downstairs radio at this
hour when the news broadcasters come on, now that he can't read newsprint.
They are living with us because my grandmother's strength is so rapidly failing. She
has been dying for ten years and her weight has dropped to eighty-six pounds. Any other
person would be confined to bed, if not the terminal ward of a hospital, but my
grandmother is resolved to remain on her feet, and actively helpful about the house. She
is. She still does most of the laundry in the basement and insists on washing the dishes.
My mother begs her to rest, but "Grand" is determined to show my father chat she
is not a dependent. And I have come home, this late autumn of 1943, because my mother
wrote me, "Your grandmother has had to give up the house in Memphis because she is
not strong enough to take care of it and your grandfather, too."
Between the lines of the letter, I read that my mother is expecting the imminent death
of her mother and I ought to stop in Saint Louis on my bus trip between the West and East
coasts, so I have stopped there. I arrive there late one night in November and as I go up
the front walk I see, through the curtains of the front room windows, my grandmother
stalking across the living room like a skeleton in clothes. It shocks me so that I have to
set down my luggage on the front walk and wait about five minutes before I can enter the
house.
Only my grandmother has stayed up to receive me at this midnight hour, the others
thinking that I had probably driven on through to New York, as I had so often before after
promising to come home. She makes light of her illness, and actually she manages to seem
almost well for my benefit. She has kept a dinner plate on the stove for me over a double
boiler and a low flame, and the living room fire is alive, and no reference is made to my
failure in Hollywood, the humiliating termination of my six-months option as a
screenwriter at MGM studios.
"Grand" says she's come here to help Edwina, my mother, who is suffering from
nervous exhaustion and is very disturbed over Cornelius's behavior. Cornelius has been
drinking heavily. Mother found five empty bottles under his bed and several more under the
bathtub, and his position as sales manager of a branch of The International Shoe Company
is in jeopardy due to a scandalous poker fight in which half of his left ear was bitten
off, yes, actually bitten off, so that he had to go to a hospital and have a
plastic-surgery operation, taking cartilage from a rib to be grafted onto the ear, and in
spite of elaborate precautions to keep it under wraps, the story has come out. Mr. J., the
head executive and my father's immediate superior, has at last lost all patience with my
father, who may have to retire in order to avoid being dismissed. But otherwise everything
is fine, she is telling me about these things because Edwina may be inclined to exaggerate
the seriousness of the family situation when we talk in the morning. And now I ought to go
up to bed after a long, hard trip. Yes, I ought to, indeed. I will have to sleep in
brother Dakin's old room rather than in my usual retreat in the attic, since the bed in
the attic has been dismantled so that I won't insist on sleeping up there and getting
pneumonia.
I don't like the idea of taking Dakin's room since it adjoins my father's doorless
appendage to it.
I enter the bedroom and undress in the dark.
Strange sounds come from my father's sunroom, great sighs and groans and inebriate
exclamations of sorrow such as, "Oh, God, oh, God!" He is unaware of my
sleepless presence in the room adjoining. From time to time, at half-hour intervals, he
lurches and stumbles out of bed to fetcha bottle of whiskey from some place of naive
concealment, remarking to himself, "How terrible!"
At last I take a sleeping pill so that my exhaustion can prevail over my tension and my
curiously mixed feelings of disgust and pity for my father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, the
Mississippi drummer who was removed from the wild and free road and put behind a desk like
a jungle animal put in a cage in a zoo.
At supper the following evening an awful domestic scene takes place.
My father is one of those drinkers who never stagger or stumble but turn savage with
liquor, and this next evening after my homecoming he comes home late and drunk for supper.
He sits at one end of the table, my mother at the other, and she fixes on him her look of
silent suffering like a bird dog drawing a bead on a covey of quail in the bushes.
All at once he explodes into maniacal fury.
His shouting goes something like this: "What the hell, why the hell do you feel so
sorry for yourself? I'm keeping your parents here, they're not paying board!"
The shout penetrates my grandfather's deafness and he says, "Rose, let's go to our
room." But my grandmother Rose remains at the table as Edwina and Grandfather retire
upstairs. I stay as if rooted or frozen to the dining-room chair, the food turning sick in
my stomach.
Silence.
My father crouches over his plate, eating like a wild beast eats his kill in the
jungle.
Then my grandmother's voice, quiet and gentle: "Cornelius, do you want us to pay
board here?"
Silence again.
My father stops eating, though. He doesn't look up as he says in a hoarse, shaky voice:
"No, I don't, Mrs. Dakin."
His inflamed blue eyes are suddenly filled with tears. He lurches up from the table and
goes to the overstuffed chair in the living room.
This overstuffed chair, I don't remember just when we got it. I suspect it was in the
furnished apartment that we took when we first came to Saint Louis. To take the apartment
we had to buy the furniture that was in it, and through this circumstance we acquired a
number of pieces of furniture that would be intriguing to set designers of films about
lower-middle-class life. Some of these pieces have been gradually weeded out through
successive changes of address, but my father was never willing to part with the
overstuffed chair. It really doesn't look like it could be removed. It seems too fat to
get through a doorway. Its color was originally blue, plain blue, but time has altered the
blue to something sadder than blue, as if it had absorbed in its fabric and stuffing all
the sorrows and anxieties of our family life and these emotions had become its stuffing
and its pigmentation (if chairs can be said to have a pigmentation). It doesn't really
seem like a chair, though. It seems more like a fat, silent person, not silent by choice
but simply unable to speak because if it spoke it would not gee through a sentence without
bursting into a self-pitying wail.
Over this chair soil stands another veteran piece of furniture, a floor lamp that must
have come with it. It rises from its round metal base on the floor to half a foot higher
than a call man sitting. Then it curves over his head one of the most ludicrous things a
man has ever sat under, a sort of Chinesey-looking silk lamp shade with a fringe about it,
so that it suggests a weeping willow. Which is presumably weeping for the occupant of the
chair.
I have never known whether Mother was afraid to deprive my father of his overstuffed
chair and weeping-willow floor lamp or if it simply amused her to see him with them. There
was a time, in her younger years, when she looked like a fairy-tale princess and had a
sense of style that exceeded by far her power to indulge it. But now she's tired, she's
about sixty now, and she lets things go. And the house is now filled not only with its
original furnishings but with the things inherited from my grandparents house in Memphis.
In fact, the living room is so full of furniture that you have to be quire sober to move
through it without a collision . . . . and still there is the overstuffed chair.
A few days after the awful scene at the dinner table, my dearly loved grandmother, Rose
Otte Dakin, bled to death in the house of my parents.
She had washed the dinner dishes, had played Chopin on the piano, which she'd brought
with her from Memphis, and had started upstairs when she was overtaken by a fit of
coughing and a lung hemorrhage that wouldn't stop.
She fought death for several hours, with almost no blood left in her body to fight
with.
Being a coward, I wouldn't enter the room where this agony was occurring. I stood in
the hall upstairs. My grandmother Rose was trying to deliver a message to my mother. She
kept flinging out a wasted arm to point at a bureau.
It was not till several days after this death in the house that my mother found out the
meaning of that gesture.
My grandmother was trying to tell my mother that all her savings were sewn up in a
corset in a drawer of the bureau.
Late that night, when my grandmother had been removed to a mortuary, my father came
home.
"Cornelius," said Mother, "I have lost my mother."
I saw him receive this announcement, and a look came over his face that was even more
deeply stricken than that of my mother when she closed the eyelids of "Grand"
after her last fight for breath. He went to his overstuffed chair, under the
weeping-willow floor lamp, like a man who has suddenly discovered the reality in a
nightmare, and he said, over and over again, "How awful, oh, God, oh, God, how
awful!"
He was talking to himself.
At the time of my grandmother's death I had been for ten years more an irregular and
reluctant visitor to the house than a member of the house-hold. Sometimes my visits would
last the better part of a year, sometimes, more usually, they would last no more than a
week. But for three years after my years at college I was sentenced to confinement in this
house and to hard labor in "The World's Largest Shoe Company" in which my father
was also serving rime, perhaps as unhappily as I was. We were serving time in quite
different capacities. My father was the sales manager of that branch that manufactures,
most notably, shoes and booties for kiddies, called "Red Goose Shoes," and never
before and probably not to this day has "The World's Largest" had so gifted a
manager of salesmen. As for me, I was officially a clerk-typist but what I actually did
was everything that no one else wanted to do, and since the boss wanted me to quit, he and
the straw boss made sure that I had these assignments. I was kept on my feet most of the
time, charging back and forth between the office and the connecting warehouse of this
world's largest wholesale shoe company, which gave me capable legs and a fast stride. The
lowliest of my assigned duties was the one I liked most, dusting off the sample shoes in
three brightly mirrored sample rooms each morning; dusting off the mirrors as well as the
shoes in these rooms that were intended to dazzle the eyes of retailers from all over the
States. I liked this job best because it was so private. It was performed before the
retailers came in: I had the rooms and the mirrors to myself, dusting off the sample shoes
with a chamois rag was something him, that I could do quickly and automatically, and the
job kept me off the noisy floor of the office. I regretted that it took only about an
hour, even when I was being most dreamily meticulous about it. That hour having been
stretched to its fullest, I would have to take my desk in the office and type out great
sheaves of factory orders. It was nearly all numerals, digits. I made many mistakes, but
for an amusing reason I couldn't be fired. The head of the department had gotten his job
through the influence of my father, which was still high at that time. I could commit the
most appalling goofs and boners and still I couldn't be fired, however much I might long t
o be fired from this sixty-five-dollar-a-month position. I left my desk more often than
anyone else. My branch of "The World's Largest" was on the top floor but I had
discovered a flight of stairs to the roof of the twelve-story building and every half hour
or so I would go up those stairs to have a cigarette, rather than retiring to the smelly
men's room. From this roof I could look across the Mississippi River to the golden wheat
fields of Illinois, and the air, especially in autumn, was bracingly above the smog of
Saint Louis, so I used to linger up there for longer than a cigarette to reflect upon a
poem or short story that I would finish that weekend.
I had several enemies in the office, especially the one called "The Straw
Boss," a tall, mincing creature who had acquired the valuable trick of doing nasty
things nicely. He was not at all bright, though. He didn't realize that I liked dusting
the shoes and running the errands that took me out of "The World's Largest." And
he always saw to it that the sample tasks that I had to carry about ten blocks from
"The World's Largest" to its largest buyer, which was J.C. Penney Company, were
almost too heavy for a small man to carry. So did I build up my chest and slightly damage
my arterial system, a damage that was soon to release me from my period of bondage. This
didn't bother me, though. (I've thought a good deal about death but doubt that I've feared
it very much, then or now.)
The thing I most want to tell you about is none of this, however; it is something much
stranger. It is the ride downtown chat my father and I would take every morning in his
Studebaker. This was a long ride, it took about half an hour, and seemed much longer for
neither my father nor I had anything to say to each other during the ride. I remember that
I would compose one sentence to deliver to my father, to break just once the intolerable
silence that existed between us, as intolerable to him, I suspect, as it was to me. I
would start composing this one sentence during breakfast and I would usually deliver it
halfway downtown. It was a shockingly uninteresting remark. It was delivered in a
shockingly strained voice, a voice that sounded choked. It would be a comment on the
traffic or the smog that enveloped the streets. The interesting thing about it was his
cone of answer. He would answer the remark as if he understood how hard it was for me to
make it. His answer would always be sad and gentle. "Yes, it's awful," he'd say.
And he didn't say it as if it was a response to my remark. He would say it as if it
referred to much larger matters than traffic or smog. And looking back on it, now, I feel
that he understood my fear of him and forgave me for it, and wished there was some way to
break the wall between us.
It would be false to say that he was ever outwardly kind to his fantastic older son,
myself. But I suspect, now, that he knew that I was more of a Williams than a Dakin, and
that I would be more and more like him as I grew older, and that he pitied me for it.
I often wonder many things about my father now, and understand things about him, such
as his anger at life, so much like my own, now that I'm old as he was.
I wonder for instance, if he didn't hate and despise "The World's Largest Shoe
Company" as much as I did. I wonder if he wouldn't have liked, as much as I did, to
climb the stairs to the roof.
I understand that he knew that my mother had made me a sissy, but that I had a chance,
bred in his blood and bone, to some day rise above it, as I had co and did.
His branch of "The World's Largest" was three floors down from the branch I
worked for, and sometimes an errand would take me down to his branch. He was always
dictating letters in a voice you could hear from the elevator before the door of it
opened.
It was a booming voice, delivered on his feet as he paced about his stenographer at the
desk. Occupants of the elevator, hearing his voice, would smile at each other as they
heard it booming out so fiercely.
Usually he would be dictating a letter to one of his salesmen, and not the kind of
letter that would flatter or please them.
Somehow he dominated the office with his loud dictation. The letters would not be
indulgent.
"Maybe you're eating fried chicken now," he'd boom out, "but I reckon
you remember the days when we'd go around the corner for a cigarette for breakfast. Don't
forget it. I don't. Those days can come back again...."
His boss, Mr. J., approved of C.C.'s letters, but had a soundproof glass enclosure
built about his corner in "The World's Largest."
. . .
A psychiatrist once said to me. You will begin to forgive the world when you've
forgiven your father.
I'm afraid it is true that my father taught me to hate, but I know that he didn't plan
to, and, terrible as it is to know how to hate, and to hate, I have forgiven him for it
and for a great deal else.
Sometimes I wonder if I have forgiven my mother for teaching me to expect more love
from the world, more softness in it, than I could ever offer?
The best of my work, as well as the impulse to work, was a gift from the man in the
overstuffed chair, and now I feel a very deep kinship to him, I almost feel as if I am
sitting in the overstuffed chair where he sat, exiled from those I should love and those
that ought to love me. For love I make characters in plays. To the world I give suspicion
and resentment, mostly. I am not cold. I am never deliberately cruel. But after my
morning's work, I have little to give but indifference to people. I try to excuse myself
with the pretense chat my work justifies this lack of caring much for almost everything
else. Sometimes I crack through the emotional block. I touch, I embrace, I hold tight to a
necessary companion. But the breakthrough is not long lasting. Morning returns, and only
work matters again.
Now a bit more about my father whom I have come to know and understand so much better.
My mother couldn't forgive him. A few years after the years that I have annotated a
little in this piece of writing, my mother became financially able to cut him out of her
life, and cut him out she did. He had been in a hospital for recovery from a drunken
spree. When he returned to the house, she refused to see him. My brother had returned from
the latest war, and he would go back and forth between them, arranging a legal separation.
I suspect it was not at all a thing that my father wanted. But once more he exhibited a
gallantry in his nature that I had not then expected. He gave my mother the house and half
of his stock in the International Shoe Company, although she was already well set up by my
gift to her of half of my earnings from The Glass Menagerie. He acquiesced
without protest to the terms of the separation, and then he went back to his native town
of Knoxville, Tennessee, to live with his spinster sister, our Aunt Ella. Aunt Ella wasn't
able to live with him, either, so after a while he moved into a hotel at a resort called
Whittle Springs, close to Knoxville, and somehow or other he became involved with a widow
from Toledo, Ohio, who became his late autumn love which lasted till the end of his life.
I've never seen this lady but I am grateful co her because she stuck with Dad through
chose last years.
Now and then, during those years, my brother would be called down to Knoxville to see
Dad through an illness brought on by his drinking, and I think it was the Toledo Widow who
would summon my brother.
My brother, Dakin, is more of a Puritan than I am, and so I think the fact that he
never spoke harshly of the Toledo Widow is a remarkable compliment to her. All I gathered
from his guarded references to this attachment between Dad and the Toledo Widow was that
she made him a faithful drinking companion. Now and then they would fly down to Biloxi and
Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad and Mother had spent their honeymoon, and it was just
after one of these returns to where he had been happy with Mother, and she with him, that
he had his final illness. I don't know what caused his death, if anything caused it but
one last spree. The Toledo Widow was with him at the end, in a Knoxville hospital. The
situation was delicate for Aunt Ella. She didn't approve of the widow and would only go to
my father's deathbed when assured there would be no encounter between the widow and
herself in the hospital room. She did pass by her once in the hospital corridor, but she
made no disparaging comment on her when I flew down to Knoxville for the funeral of my
father.
The funeral was an exceptionally beautiful service. My brother, Aunt Ella, and I sat in
a small room set apart for the nearest of kin and listened and looked on while the service
was performed.
Then we went out to "Old Gray," as they called the Knoxville Cemetery, and
there we sat in a sort of tent with the front of it open, to witness the interment of the
man of the overstuffed chair.
Behind us, on chairs in the open, was a very large congregation of more distant kinfolk
and surviving friends of his youth, and somewhere among them was the Toledo Widow, I've
heard.
After the interment, the kinfolk all came up to our little tent to offer condolences
that were unmistakably meant. The widow drove off in his car which he had bequeathed to
her, her only bequest, and I've heard of her nothing more.
He left his modest remainder of stock in the International Shoe Company in three parts
to his sister, and to his daughter and to my brother, a bequest which brought them each a
monthly income of a hundred dollars. He left me nothing because, as he had told Aunt Ella,
it didn't seem likely that I would ever have need of inherited money.
I wonder if he knew, and I suspect that he did, that he had left me something far more
important, which was his blood in my veins? And of course I wonder, too, if there wasn't
more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.
Aunt Ella is gone now, too, but while I was in Knoxville for Dad's funeral, she showed
me a newspaper photograph of him outside a movie house where a film of mine, Baby Doll,
was being shown. Along with the photograph of my father was his comment on the picture.
What he said was: "I think it's a very fine picture and I'm proud of
my son."