The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Maud did not know what to say to him. The tears were falling over her hands into the dishwater, for she knew Obie would never make as much money selling life insurance as he had made on the road as a traveling salesman, and she knew there wouldn’t be any more money for her for a long while. And all of a sudden she thought of the time when she had first begun getting stout and the high school boys had quit asking her for dances at the Rainbow Gardens and didn’t notice her anymore.

  The next time Maud saw Mamie was a week later, and Mamie was curious to know everything and asked how Obie was getting along these days.

  “He quit his sales work,” Maud said, and she felt the tears beginning to come, but she held them back by breathing deeper.

  “I’m not a bit surprised,” Mamie said. “I saw it coming all the time.”

  They walked over to the movie, and it was a very sad one. It was about a woman who had led, as Maud could see, not a very virtuous life. She had talked with three or four such women in her lifetime. The woman in the picture gave up the man she was in love with and went away to a bigger town. Mamie enjoyed it very much.

  On the way home Mamie wanted Maud to come and have a soda.

  “A strawberry soda?” Maud said, putting on some more lipstick and looking in at the green display windows with their headache ads and pictures of cornplasters. “I can’t afford it.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t afford it?” Mamie said.

  “Obie has to make good at his insurance first,” Maud told her.

  “Come on in and I will buy you one,” Mamie said in a hard firm voice, and though Maud knew Mamie did not want to spend money on her, she couldn’t bear to go home to an empty house without first having some refreshment, so she went in with her.

  As soon as they had finished having their sodas, Mr. Hannah came over to Maud and said he would like to have a few words in private with her.

  “I am paying for this,” Mamie said as if she suspected trouble of some sort.

  Maud made a motion with her hand and started to walk with Mr. Hannah toward the pharmacy room.

  “Do you want me to wait outside?” Mamie said, but she got no reply.

  An old woman with white gloves was sitting in a booth looking at Maud and Mr. Hannah. Maud knew her story and kept looking at her. She was to have married a young business man from Baltimore, but the day before the wedding the young man had died in a railroad accident. Ever since then, the old woman had not taken off her white wedding gloves.

  “Well, Maud,” said Mr. Hannah, his gray old eyes narrowing under his spectacles, “I’ve been meaning to talk over with you the little matter of your bill and have been wondering whether or not …”

  Maud could feel the red coming up over her face. She knew the old woman with the white gloves was hearing all of it. Maud feared perhaps she had put on too much rouge, for Mr. Hannah was giving her peculiar looks.

  “How much is the bill?” she managed to say.

  Mr. Hannah looked over his books, but he did not need to look to know how much Maud owed.

  “Thirty-five dollars,” he said.

  Maud moved slightly backwards. “Thirty-five?” she repeated without believing, and she looked over on the books where her account was listed in black purplish ink. “Surely,” Maud said, “that must be a mistake.”

  “Well, you have been having sodas on credit for more than six months,” Mr. Hannah said, grinning a little.

  “Not surely thirty-five dollars’ worth,” Maud told him working the clasp on her purse, “because,” she said, “I can’t pay it, Obie isn’t making full salary and I can’t give it to you now at all.”

  “No hurry to collect yet,” Mr. Hannah said and there was a little warmth coming into his voice. “Ain’t no hurry for that,” he said.

  Suddenly Maud could not control her tears. They were falling through her fingers into a small handkerchief embroidered with a bluebird and a rosebush.

  “Now, Maud,” Mr. Hannah said, “I will be real easy on you. Maybe you would like to talk it all over in the pharmacy room,” he said taking her arm, and before she knew her own mind he had led her into the back room.

  “Don’t in any case,” Maud begged him, sobbing a little, “don’t in any case, Mr. Hannah, tell my husband about this bill.”

  “No need at all, no need at all,” he said, turning on the light in the pharmacy room. Mr. Hannah was staring at her. Maud was not beautiful, really. Her powder-spotted mirror told her that, and she had a receding chin and large pores. But Mr. Hannah was looking. She remembered now how he had led a singing class at the First Presbyterian Church and he had directed some girls to sing “America the Beautiful” in such a revised improper way that the elders had asked him to leave the church, and he had, and soon after that his wife had divorced him.

  As Mamie Sucher was not there to prompt her, Maud did not know what more to say to him. She stood there looking at the bill. She knew it could not be thirty-five dollars. She knew she was being cheated and yet she could not tell him to his face he was lying. It was the only drug store in town where she could get sodas on credit. All the other stores made you pay on leaving or before you drank your soda. Maud stood there paralyzed, looking at the bill, and her face felt hot and sticky.

  Then Mr. Hannah said something that pleased her. She did not know why it pleased her so much. “Maud, you beautiful girl, you,” he said.

  He was holding her hand, the hand with her mother’s ruby ring. “Why don’t you ever come into the pharmacy room,” he said. “Why do you have to wait for an invitation, good friends like us?” And he clasped her hand so tightly that the ring pressed against her index finger, painfully. She had never been in the pharmacy room before but she did not like the whiffs of drugs and the smell of old cartons of patent medicines that came from there. “Maud, you beauty,” he said.

  Maud knew that she should say something cold and polite to Mr. Hannah, but suddenly she could not. She smiled and as she smiled the rouge cracked a little on her lips. Mr. Hannah was saying, “Maud, you know you don’t have to stand on form with an old friend of the family like me. You know, Maud, I knowed you when you was only a small girl. I knowed your mother well, too.”

  She laughed again and then she listened to the flies on the screen, the flies that were collecting there and would be let in.

  She tried to take the bill from his hand. “I will give it to my husband,” she said.

  “He will be very mad,” Mr. Hannah warned her.

  “Yes,” Maud breathed hard. It wasn’t possible for a man like Obie to believe that she could come into this drug store of Mr. Hannah’s and buy only strawberry sodas and make that large a bill, and she knew Obie would never believe her if she told him.

  “Well, give me the bill, Mr. Hannah,” she said, but Mr. Hannah was still muttering about how dangerous such little things were to the happiness of young married people. Maud thought right then of a time when her mother had gone walking with her and Maud had a new pink parasol and all of a sudden a dirty alley cur had jumped on her as if to spoil her new parasol, not purposely but only in play, and she had said, “Oh, hell,” and to hear her swear for the first time had given her mother a good laugh. And now she said so that Mr. Hannah could scarcely hear, “Oh, hell,” and he laughed suddenly and put his arm around her.

  She had thought everything like that was over for her and here was Mr. Hannah hugging her and calling her “beauty.”

  She knew it was not proper for her to be in this position with an old man like Mr. Hannah, but he wasn’t doing anything really bad and he was so old anyhow, so she let him hug her and kiss her a few times and then she pushed him away.

  “I ain’t in no hurry to collect, you know that, Maud,” Mr. Hannah said, and he had lost his breath and was standing there before her, his old faded eyes watering.

  “Of course, my husband ought to see this bill,” Maud said, but she just couldn’t make the words have any force to sound like she meant it.

  “You
just go home and forget about it for a while, why don’t you, Maud,” he said.

  She kept pushing a black imitation cameo bracelet back and forth on her arm. “You know how my husband would feel against it,” she said.

  Then Mr. Hannah did something that was even more surprising. He suddenly tore up the bill right in front of her.

  Maud let out a little cry and then Mr. Hannah moved closer to her and Maud said, “No, Mr. Hannah, no, you let me make this right with you because Obie will soon be getting a check.” She became actually frightened then with him in the dark, stale-smelling pharmacy room. “Some day,” she said, “some day I will make this right,” and she hurried out away from Mr. Hannah and she walked quickly, almost unconsciously, to the screen door where the flies were collecting before a summer thunder shower.

  “I will make this right,” she said, and the old druggist followed her and shouted after her, “You don’t need to tell him, Maud.”

  “Don’t call me Maud,” she gasped.

  She stopped and looked at him standing there. She laughed. The screen door slammed behind her and she was in the street.

  It was getting a little late and Mamie was gone and the street was almost empty. She felt so excited that she would have liked to talk to Mamie and tell her what had happened to her, but she was too excited to talk to anyone and she hurried straight toward her house near the river.

  Just as she got to the bridge she saw Bruce Hauser. She said, “Good evening, Bruce, how are you?” She could not say any more, she was that excited, and without waiting a minute to talk to Bruce, she took out her key and unlocked the door. As she was about to go up the stairs, she caught a reflection of herself in the hall mirror. She stared into it. Maud felt so much pleasure seeing herself so young, that she repeated Mr. Hannah’s words again, “Maud, you beauty, you beauty.” She was as pretty and carefree this June day as she had been that time when she and her mother had walked with the new pink parasol—long before she had met Obie—and they had joked together, not like mother and daughter, but like two good girl chums away at school.

  YOU REACH FOR YOUR HAT

  People saw her every night on the main street. She went out just as it was getting dark, when the street lights would pop on, one by one, and the first bats would fly out round Mrs. Bilderbach’s. That was Jennie. Now what was she up to? everyone would ask, and we all knew, in company and out. Jennie Esmond was off for her evening walk and to renew old acquaintances. Now don’t go into details, the housewives would say over the telephone. Ain’t life dreary enough without knowing? They all knew anyhow as in a movie they had seen five times and where the sad part makes them cry just as much the last showing as the first.

  They couldn’t say too much, though. Didn’t she have the gold star in the window, meaning Lafe was dead in the service of his country? They couldn’t say too much, and, after all, what did Jennie do when she went out? There wasn’t any proof she went the whole hog. She only went to the Mecca, which had been a saloon in old World War days and where no ladies went. And, after all, she simply drank a few beers and joked with the boys. Yes, and well, once they told that she played the piano there, but it was some sort of old-fashioned number and everybody clapped politely after she stopped.

  She bought all her clothes at a store run by a young Syrian. Nobody liked him or his merchandise, but he did sell cheap and he had the kind of things that went with her hair, that dead-straw color people in town called angel hair. She bought all her dresses there that last fall and summer, and they said the bargain she got them for no one would ever believe.

  Then a scandalous thing. She took the gold star out of the window. What could it mean? Nobody had ever dreamed of such a thing. You would have thought anyone on such shaky ground would have left it up forever. And she took it down six months after the sad news. It must mean marriage. The little foreign man. But the janitor said nobody ever called on her except Mamie Jordan and little Blake Higgins.

  She went right on with her evening promenades, window-shopping the little there was to window-shop, nodding to folks in parked cars and to old married friends going in and out of the drug store. It wasn’t right for a woman like Jennie to be always walking up and down the main street night after night and acting, really acting, as if she had no home to go to. She took on in her way as bad as the loafers had in front of the court house before the mayor ordered the benches carried away so they couldn’t sit down. Once somebody saw her in the section around the brewery and we wondered. Of course, everyone supposed the government paid her for Lafe’s death; so it wasn’t as if she was destitute.

  Nobody ever heard her mention Lafe, but Mamie Jordan said she had a picture of him in civilian clothes in her bedroom. He wasn’t even smiling. Mamie said Jennie had had such trouble getting him to go to Mr. Hart’s photography studio. It was right before his induction, and Jennie had harped on it so long that Lafe finally went, but he was so mad all the time they were taking him he never smiled once; they had to finish him just looking. Mamie said Jennie never showed any interest in the picture and even had toilet articles in front of it. No crepe on it or anything.

  Mamie didn’t understand it at all. Right after he was reported missing in action she went down to offer her sympathy and Jennie was sitting there eating chocolates. She had come to have a good cry with her and there she was cool as a cucumber. You’d never have known a thing had happened. It made Mamie feel so bad, because she had always liked Lafe even if he never would set the world on fire, and she had burst out crying, and then after a little while Jennie cried too and they sat there together all evening weeping and hugging each other.

  But even then Jennie didn’t say anything about Lafe’s going really meaning anything to her. It was as though he had been gone for twenty years. An old hurt. Mamie got to thinking about it and going a little deeper into such a mystery. It came back to her that Lafe had always gone to the Mecca tavern and left Jennie at home, and now here she was out there every night of her life.

  Mamie thought these things over on her way to the movie that night. No one had ever mentioned Jennie’s case lately to her, and, truth to tell, people were beginning to forget who Lafe was. People don’t remember anymore. When she was a girl they had remembered a dead man a little longer, but today men came and went too fast; somebody went somewhere every week, and how could you keep fresh in your memory such a big list of departed ones?

  She sighed. She had hoped she would run into Jennie on her way to the movie. She walked around the court house and past the newspaper office and she went out of her way to go by the drygoods store in hopes she would see her, but not a sign. It was double feature night; so she knew she would never get out in time to see Jennie after the show.

  But the movie excited her more than ever, and she came out feeling too nervous to go home. She walked down the main street straight north, and before she knew it she was in front of the Mecca. Some laboring men were out front and she felt absolutely humiliated. She didn’t know what on earth had come over her. She looked in the window and as she did so she half expected the men to make some underhanded move or say something low-down, but they hardly looked at her. She put her hands to the glass, pressing her nose flat and peering in so that she could see clear to the back of the room.

  She saw Jennie all right, alone, at one of the last tables. Almost before she knew what she was doing, she was walking through the front door. She felt herself blushing the most terrible red ever, going into a saloon where there were no tables for ladies and before dozens of coarse laboring men, who were probably laughing at her.

  Jennie looked up at her, but she didn’t seem surprised.

  “Sit down, Mamie.” She acted just as cool as if they were at her apartment.

  “I walked past,” Mamie explained, still standing. “I couldn’t help noticing you from outside.”

  “Sweet of you to come in,” Jennie went on. Something in the dogged, weary quality of her voice gave Mamie her chance. She brought it right out: “
Jennie, is it because you miss him so that you’re … here?”

  The old friend looked up quickly. “Dear Mame,” she said, laughing, “that’s the first time I’ve heard you mention him in I don’t know how long.”

  Jennie simply kept on looking about as if she might perhaps find an explanation for not only why she was here but for the why of anything.

  “I wish you would let me help you,” Mamie continued. “I don’t suppose you would come home with me. I suppose it’s still early for you. I know my ’Lish always said time passed so fast with beer.”

  Jennie kept gazing at this frowsy old widow who was in turn gazing at her even more intently. She looked like her dead mother, the way she stared.

  “I understand,” Mamie repeated. She was always saying something like that, but Jennie didn’t weigh her friend’s words very carefully. She wasn’t quite sure just who Mamie was or what her friendship stood for, but she somehow accepted them both tonight and brought them close to her.

  “You may as well drink. May as well be sheared for a sheep as a lamb.”

  “I believe I will,” Mamie said, a kind of belligerence coming into her faded voice.

  “Charley,” Jennie called, “give Mamie some bottle beer.”

  The “girls” sat there laughing over it all.

  The smile began to fade from Jennie’s mouth. She looked at her old friend again as if trying to keep fresh in her mind that she was really sitting there, that she had come especially. Mamie had that waiting look on her face that old women always have.

  The younger woman pulled the tiny creased photograph from her purse. Mamie took it avidly. Yes, it was coming, she knew. At last Jennie was going to pour herself out to her. She would know everything. At last nothing would be held back. In her excitement at the thought of the revelation to come, she took several swallows of beer. “Tell me,” she kept saying. “You can tell old Mamie.”