The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “He wasn’t such a bad looker,” Jennie said.

  The friend leaned forward eagerly. “Lafe?” she said. “Why, Lafe was handsome, honey. Didn’t you know that? He was.” And she held the picture farther forward and shook her head sorrowfully but admiringly.

  “If he had shaved off that little mustache, he would have been better looking. I was always after him to shave it off, but somehow he wouldn’t. Well, you know, his mouth was crocked.…”

  “Oh, don’t say those things,” Mamie scolded. “Not about the dead.” But she immediately slapped her hand against her own mouth, closing out the last word. Oh, she hadn’t meant to bring that word out! We don’t use that word about loved ones.

  Jennie laughed a little, the laugh an older woman might have used in correcting a little girl.

  “I always wondered if it hurt him much when he died,” she said. “He never was a real lively one, but he had a kind of hard, enduring quality in him that must have been hard to put out. He must have died slow and hard and knowing to the end.”

  Mamie didn’t know exactly where to take up the thread from there. She hadn’t planned for this drift in the conversation. She wanted to have a sweet memory talk and she would have liked to reach for Jennie’s hand to comfort her, but she couldn’t do it now the talk had taken this drift. She took another long swallow of beer. It was nasty, but it calmed one a little.

  “I look at his picture every night before I climb in bed,” Jennie went on. “I don’t know why I do. I never loved him, you know.”

  “Now, Jennie, dear,” she began, but her protest was scarcely heard in the big room. She had meant to come forward boldly with the “You did love him, dear,” but something gray and awful entered the world for her. At that moment she didn’t quite believe even in the kind of love which she had seen depicted that very night in the movies and which, she knew, was the only kind that filled the bill.

  “You never loved him!” Mamie repeated the words and they echoed dully. It was a statement which did not bear repeating; she realized that as soon as it was out of her mouth.

  But Jennie went right on. “No, I never did love Lafe Esmond.”

  “Closing time!” Charley called out.

  Mamie looked around apprehensively.

  “That don’t apply to us,” Jennie explained. “Charley lets me stay many a night until four.”

  It was that call of closing time that took her back to her days at the cigar factory when fellows would wait in their cars for her after work. She got to thinking of Scott Jeffreys in his new Studebaker.

  She looked down at her hands to see if they were still as lovely as he had said. She couldn’t tell in the dim light, and besides, well, yes, why not say it, who cared about her hands now? Who cared about any part of her now?

  “My hands were lovely once,” Jennie said aloud. “My mother told me they were nearly every night and it was true. Nearly every night she would come into my bedroom and say, ‘Those lovely white hands should never have to work. My little girl was meant for better things.’ ”

  Mamie swallowed the last of the bottle and nodded her head for Jennie to go on.

  “But do you think Lafe ever looked at my hands? He never looked at anybody’s hands. He wasn’t actually interested in woman’s charm. No man really is. It only suggests the other to them, the thing they want out of us and always get. They only start off by complimenting us on our figures. Lafe wasn’t interested in anything I had. And I did have a lot once. My mother knew I was beautiful.”

  She stopped. This was all so different from anything Mamie had come for. Yes, she had come for such a different story.

  “Lafe married me because he was lonesome. That’s all. If it hadn’t been me it would have been some other fool. Men want a place to put up. They get the roam taken out of them and they want to light. I never loved him or anything he did to me. I only pretended when we were together.

  “I was never really fond of any man from the first.”

  Mamie pressed her finger tightly on the glass as if begging a silent power in some way to stop her.

  “I was in love with a boy in the eighth grade and that was the only time. What they call puppy love. Douglas Fleetwood was only a child. I always thought of forests and shepherds when I heard his name. He had beautiful chestnut hair. He left his shirt open winter and summer and he had brown eyes like a calf’s. I never hardly spoke to him all the time I went to school. He was crippled, too, poor thing, and I could have caught up with him any day on the way home, he went so slow, but I was content to just lag behind him and watch him. I can still see his crutches moving under his arms.”

  Mamie was beginning to weep a little, a kind of weeping that will come from disappointment and confusion, the slow heavy controlled weeping women will give when they see their ideals go down.

  “He died,” Jennie said.

  “When Miss Matthias announced it in home economics class that awful January day, I threw up my arms and made a kind of whistling sound, and she must have thought I was sick because she said, ‘Jennie, you may be excused.’

  “Then there were those nice boys at the cigar factory, like I told you, but it never got to be the real thing, and then Lafe came on the scene.”

  Here Jennie stopped suddenly and laughed rather loudly. Charley, who was at the other end of the room, took this for some friendly comment on the lateness of the hour and waved and laughed in return.

  Mamie was stealthily helping herself to some beer from Jennie’s bottle.

  “Drink it, Mame,” she said. “I bought it for you, you old toper.” Mamie wiped a tear away from her left eye.

  “As I said, I was tired of the cigar factory and there was Lafe every Friday at the Green Mill dance hall. We got married after the big Thanksgiving ball.”

  “Why, I think I remember that,” Mamie brightened. “Didn’t I know you then?”

  But Jennie’s only answer was to pour her friend another glass.

  “He went to the foundry every morning after I had got up to cook his breakfast. He wouldn’t go to the restaurants like other men. I always had such an ugly kimono to get breakfast in. I was a fright. He could at least have given me a good-looking wrapper to do that morning work in. Then there I was in the house from 4:30 in the A.M. till night waiting for him to come back. I thought I’d die. I was so worn out waiting for him I couldn’t be civil when he come in. I was always frying chops when he come.”

  She took a big drink of beer.

  “Everything smelled of chops in that house. He had to have them.”

  Charley began again calling closing time. He said everybody had to clear the place.

  “It ain’t four o’clock, is it?” Mamie inquired.

  “No, not yet. I don’t know what come over Charley tonight. He seems to want to get rid of us early. It’s only one-thirty. I suppose some good-lookin’ woman is waiting for him.”

  Yes, the Mecca was closing. Jennie thought, then, of the places she had read about in the Sunday papers, places where pleasure joints never closed, always open night and day, where you could sit right through one evening into another, drinking and forgetting, or remembering. She heard there were places like that in New Orleans where they had this life, but mixed up with colored people and foreigners. Not classy at all and nothing a girl would want to keep in her book of memories.

  And here she was all alone, unless, of course, you could count Mamie.

  “I was attractive once,” she went on doggedly. “Men turned around every time I went to Cincinnati.”

  Mamie, however, was no longer listening attentively. The story had somehow got beyond her as certain movies of a sophisticated slant sometimes did with her. She was not sure at this stage what Jennie’s beauty or her lack of it had to do with her life, and her life was not at all clear to her. It seemed to her in her fumy state that Jennie had had to cook entirely too many chops for her husband and that she had needed a wrapper, but beyond that she could recall only the blasphemies against love
.

  “My mother would have never dreamed I would come to this lonely period. My mother always said that a good-looking woman is never lonely. ‘Jennie,’ she used to say, ‘keep your good looks if you don’t do another thing.’ ”

  The craven inattention, however, of Mamie Jordan demanded notice. Jennie considered her case for a moment. Yes, there could be no doubt about it. Mamie was hopelessly, unbelievably drunk. And she was far from sober herself.

  “Mamie Jordan,” she said severely, “are you going to be all right?”

  The old friend looked up. Was it the accusation of drink or the tone of cruelty in the voice that made her suddenly burst into tears? She did not know, but she sat there now weeping, loudly and disconsolately.

  “Don’t keep it up anymore, Jennie,” she said. “You’ve said such awful things tonight, honey. Don’t do it anymore. Leave me my little mental comforts.”

  Jennie stared uncomprehendingly. The sobs of the old woman vaguely filled the great empty hall of the drinking men.

  It was the crying, she knew, of an old woman who wanted something that was fine, something that didn’t exist. It was the crying for the idea of love like in songs and books, the love that wasn’t there. She wanted to comfort her. She wanted to take her in her arms and tell her everything would be all right. But she couldn’t think of anything really convincing to say on that score. She looked around anxiously as if to find the answer written on a wall, but all her eyes finally came to rest on was a puddle of spilled beer with Lafe Esmond’s picture swimming in the middle.

  No, you can’t really feel sorry for yourself when you see yourself in another, and Jennie had had what Mamie was having now too many times, the sorrow with drink as the sick day dawned.

  But the peculiar sadness evinced by Mamie’s tears would not go away. The sore spot deep in the folds of the flesh refused to be deadened this time, and it was this physical pang which brought her back to Lafe. She saw him as if for a few illumined seconds almost as though she had never seen him before, as though he were existing for her for the first time. She didn’t see exactly how the dead could know or Lafe could be in any other world looking down on her, and yet she felt just then that some understanding had been made at last between them.

  But it was soon over, the feeling of his existing at all. Lafe wasn’t coming back and nobody else was coming back to her either. If she had loved him she would have had some kind of happiness in looking at his photograph and crying like Mamie wanted her to. There would be consolation in that. Or even if they had brought him home to her so she would be able to visit the grave and go through the show and motions of grief. But what was him was already scattered so far and wide they could never go fetch any part of it back.

  Clasping Mamie by the arm, then, and unfolding the handkerchief to give to her, she had the feeling that she had been to see a movie all over again and that for the second time she had wept right in the same place. There isn’t anything to say about such private sorrow. You just wait till the lights go on and then reach for your hat.

  SOUND OF TALKING

  In the morning Mrs. Farebrother would put her husband in the wheelchair and talk to him while she made breakfast. As breakfast time came to an end he would sink his thumb into the black cherry preserves or sometimes he would take out an old Roman coin he had picked up from the war in Italy and hold that tight. In the summertime it helped to watch the swallows flying around when the pain was intense in his legs, or to listen to a plane going quite far off, and then hear all sound stop. There was a relief from the sound then that made you almost think your own pain had quit.

  This morning began when Mrs. Farebrother thought of her trip to the city the day before, how she stared at the two young men on the bus, for they reminded her of two brothers she had known in high school, and of course her visit to the bird store.

  As her husband’s pain grew more acute, which happened every morning after breakfast, she would talk faster, which she knew irritated him more, but she felt that it distracted him more from his pain than anything else. Her voice was a different kind of pain to him, and that was diversion. For a while he held on to an iron bar when he had suffered, then he had pressed the Roman coin, and now he dabbed in the cherry preserves like a child.

  “You know what I would like?” Mrs. Farebrother said. “I almost bought one yesterday in the bird store.”

  She moved his wheelchair closer to the window before telling him. “A raven.”

  “Well,” he grunted, not letting his pain or anger speak this early. He hated birds, even the swallows which he watched from the kitchen were not silent enough for him.

  “Ever since I was a little girl those birds have fascinated me. I never realized until the other day that I wanted one. I was walking down the intersection and I heard the birds’ voices being broadcast from that huge seed store, all kinds of birds broadcasting to that busy street. I thought a bird might be a kind of amusement to us.”

  Here Mrs. Farebrother stopped talking as she moved him again, her eyes trying to avoid looking at his legs. Many times she did not know where to look, she knew he did not like her to look at him at all, but she had to look somewhere, and their kitchen was small and what one saw of the outdoors was limited.

  “Do you need your pill,” she said with too great a swiftness.

  “I don’t want it,” he answered.

  “I have plenty of nice ice water this morning,” she said, which was a lie. She didn’t know why she lied to him all the time. Her anguish and indecision put the lies into her mouth like the priest giving her the wafer on Sunday.

  “Tell me about the bird store,” he said, and she knew he must be in unusual pain and she felt she had brought it on him by telling about her outing. Yet if she had made him begin to suffer, she must finish what had started him on it, she could not let him sit in his wheelchair and not hear more.

  “I went up two flights to where they keep the birds,” she began, trying to keep her eyes away from his body and not to watch how his throat distended, with the arteries pounding like an athlete’s, his upper body looking more muscular and powerful each day under the punishment that came from lower down. But his suffering was too terrible and too familiar for her to scrutinize, and in fact she hardly ever looked at him carefully: all her glances were sideways, furtive; she had found the word in the crossword puzzles one evening, clandestine; it was a word which she had never said to anybody and it described her and haunted her like a face you can’t quite remember the name for which keeps popping up in your mind. When they lay together in bed she touched him in a clandestine way also as though she might damage him; she felt his injuries were somehow more sensitive to her touch than they were to the hand of the doctor. She slept very poorly, but the doctor insisted that she sleep with him. As she lay in the bed with him, she thought of only two things, one that he could not approach her and the other when would he die.

  Thinking like this, she had forgotten she was telling a story about the bird store. It was his contemptuous stare that brought her back to her own talking: “It was a menagerie of birds,” she said, and stopped again.

  “Go on,” he said as though impatient for what could not possibly interest him.

  “Vergil,” she said looking at his face. “Verge.”

  She did not want to tell the story about the raven because she knew how infuriating it was to him to hear about pets of any kind. He hated all pets, he had killed their cat by throwing it out from the wheelchair against a tree. And all day long he sat and killed flies with a swiftness that had great fury in it.

  “The men up there were so polite and attentive,” she said, hardly stopping to remember whether they were or not, and thinking again of the young men on the bus. “I was surprised because in cities you know how people are, brusque, never expecting to see you again. I hadn’t gone up there to see anything more than a few old yellow canaries when what on earth do you suppose I saw but this raven. I have never seen anything like it in my life, and ev
en the man in the shop saw how surprised and interested I was in the bird. What on earth is that? I said, and just then it talked back to me. It said, George is dead, George is dead.”

  “George is what?” Vergil cried at her, and for a moment she looked at him straight in the face. He looked as though the pain had left him, there was so much surprise in his expression.

  “George is dead,” she said and suddenly by the stillness of the room she felt the weight of the words which she had not realized until then. Sometimes, as now, when the pain left his face all her desire came back for him, while at night when she lay next to him nothing drew her to him at all; his dead weight seeming scarcely human. She thought briefly again about the hospital for paraplegics the doctor had told her about, in California, but she could never have mentioned even paraplegic to Vergil, let alone the place.

  “What was the guy in the bird shop like?” he said, as though to help her to her next speech.

  “Oh, an old guy sixty or seventy,” Mrs. Farebrother lied. “He said he had clipped the bird’s tongue himself. He started to describe how he did it, but I couldn’t bear to hear him. Anything that involves cutting or surgery,” she tried to stop but as though she had to, she added, “Even a bird …”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Vergil said.

  “I have never seen such purple in wings,” Mrs. Farebrother went on, as though a needle had skipped a passage on the record and she was far ahead in her speech. “The only other time I ever saw such a color was in the hair of a young Roumanian fellow I went to high school with. When the light was just right, his hair had that purple sheen. Why, in fact, they called him the raven; isn’t that odd, I had forgotten.…”

  “Let’s not start your when-I-was-young talk.”

  She thought that when he grunted out words like this or when he merely grunted in pain he sounded like somebody going to the toilet, and even though it was tragic she sometimes almost laughed in his face at such moments. Then again when sometimes he was suffering the most so that his hair would be damp with sweat, she felt a desire to hit him across the face, and these unexplained feelings frightened her a great deal.