Breaking storm windows

Breaking storm windows is the earliest remembered act of willful destruction by Charles Decker, occurring in the fall of 1962 when he was four years old. The incident crystallizes the family dynamics that would shape his later violence: a father obsessed with order, a mother who intervenes, and a child who discovers the power of breaking things. Charlie himself later reflects that this moment marked the beginning of his losing his mind, and the memory resurfaces during the hostage crisis as a touchstone for understanding his own rage.

The Act and Its Setting

On a fine October Saturday, Charlie's father Carl Decker was preparing to install the storm windows for winter. He had lined them up against the house with step-by-step precision, one beside each window, after having painted them green the previous spring to match the house trim. Charlie sat on the front porch steps playing Quiet, watching his father work, while his mother Rita played the piano inside—something minor, Bach-like, which Charlie later called "Bach Fugue for Storm Windows in A Minor." The day was beautiful, with a cool October air and a robin pecking through fallen leaves by the elm tree that threw shadows on Charlie's bedroom wall at night. Without any conscious resentment toward his father, Charlie was struck by the idea that it would be wonderful to break all the storm windows, one by one. He got up, picked stones from the soft shoulder, stuffed them into the pockets of his short pants, and began throwing. He missed the first window, then moved right on top of it and could not miss. He went around the house breaking every window: the living-room window, the music-room window propped against the brick side of the house, and finally the one outside the den. Through the music-room window he looked in at his mother playing the piano in a sheer blue slip; she jumped at the sight of him and hit a sour note, then gave him a big sweet smile and went on playing, having not even heard the glass break. Charlie felt no sense of doing wrong, only of doing something pleasurable—a child's selective perception that if the windows had been fastened on, he never would have dreamed of breaking them.

The Violent Confrontation

As Charlie regarded the last window, a hand fell on his shoulder and turned him around. It was his father, madder than Charlie had ever seen him, his eyes big and his tongue bitten between his teeth as if having a fit. Charlie cried out, scared so badly it was like his mother coming to the breakfast table with a Halloween mask on. Carl called him "Bastard," picked him up in both hands—right hand holding his legs at the ankles, left hand holding his left arm against his chest—and threw him on the ground as hard as he could. Charlie lay there with all the breath knocked out of him, unable to cry or speak or move his diaphragm, a paralyzing pain in his chest and crotch. Dismay and realization crept over Carl's face, dissolving the flash of his anger. He knelt and asked if Charlie was all right, calling him "Chuck," the nickname he used when they played toss in the backyard. When Charlie finally let out a huge, screaming bray, Carl's anger returned: "You shouldn't have broken those windows. Now, shut up. Be a man, for God's sake." He jerked Charlie roughly to his feet just as Rita flew around the corner of the house, still in her slip. She asked if Charlie was cut; Carl said he wasn't cut, just afraid of getting licked, and he damned well was. Charlie ran to his mother, pressing his face into the soft, comforting silk of her slip, smelling her sweet smell, his whole head feeling swollen and pulpy like a turnip.

The Aftermath and Family Division

Rita Decker confronted her husband, accusing him of hurting Charlie and pointing out that he was purple. Carl claimed Charlie had started to cry when he saw him coming. When a car approached, Carl told Rita to go inside. She wiped Charlie's tears and told him Daddy didn't mean to be cross. Carl, furious that the neighbor Sam Castinguay and his wife had seen the scene, said they now had something for that motor-mouth to talk about. Rita took Charlie's hand to go have chocolate in her sewing room. Carl curtly refused, saying Charlie would just puke it up when he "whale[d] the tar out of him." He grabbed Rita's shoulder, pointed at the jagged kitchen storm window, and accused her of wanting to give Charlie chocolate when he was no baby anymore, telling her it was time to stop giving him the tit. White fingermarks stood out on her flesh for a moment and then filled in red. Rita calmly told Carl he was being quite foolish, then shouted at him to go inside, to go find some of his friends and have drinks, to get out of her sight. Carl responded with a lecture about punishment and wanton destruction, but Rita screamed "Get out!" and he turned and stomped away like a surly little boy. Charlie, watching, began to dare to hate him back. Later, while having cocoa in her sewing room, Charlie told his mother how Dad had thrown him on the ground and lied about it. It made him feel quite wonderful and strong.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The storm-window incident becomes a recurring reference point in Charlie's life. During the hostage crisis, when Susan Brooks suggests his parents are the cause of his actions, Charlie thinks about the hunting trip with his father but then remembers this earlier event—waking up, seeing the moving branches on the tent canvas, needing to whiz, feeling like a little kid again, and remembering something that had happened long ago. He had not talked about it with Mr. Grace. The memory surfaces again when he confronts his father in the garage after the assault on Mr. Carlson: Charlie explicitly cites the storm-window incident as one of the reasons he will fight back, telling his father he will take the belt away from him "for the time you threw me on the ground when I was little and then lied about it to Mom." The incident also connects to Charlie's earliest memory: waking up in the dark as a three-year-old, watching the shadows of the elm tree branches moving on the walls and ceiling like great moving fingers, and hearing the Creaking Thing—which he later realized was his father—coming down the hall. The storm windows, the tree shadows, and the Creaking Thing all belong to the same childhood landscape of fear and dawning hatred. Charlie's act of breaking the windows was his first assertion of destructive power, and his father's violent response taught him that the world was divided between those who break and those who are broken. The memory of that October day, with its Bach fugue and its shattered glass, haunts him as the origin of the rage that would eventually explode in Room 16.