The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  But today she did not want him to suffer, and that is why she did not like to tell about the raven; she knew it was hurting him somehow—why she did not know, it was nothing, it bored her as she told it, and yet he insisted on hearing everything. She knew that if he kept insisting on more details she would invent some; often that happened. He would keep asking about the things that went on outside and she would invent little facts to amuse him. Yet these “facts” did not seem to please him, and life described outside, whether true or false tortured him.

  “Oh, Verge, I wished for you,” she said, knowing immediately what she had said was the wrong thing to say; yet everything was somehow wrong to say to him.

  “Then I said to the man in charge, doesn’t the raven ever say anything but George is …” She stopped, choking with laughter; she had a laugh which Vergil had once told her sounded fake, but which somehow she could not find in her to change even for him.

  “Then the man gave me a little speech about ravens,” Mrs. Farebrother said.

  “Well?” he said impatiently. His insistence on details had made her tired and gradually she was forgetting what things had happened and what things had not, what things and words could be said to him, what not. Everything in the end bore the warning FORBIDDEN.

  “He said you have to teach the birds yourself. He said they have made no effort to teach them to talk.” Mrs. Farebrother stopped trying to remember what the man had said, and what he had looked like.

  “Well, he must have taught the bird to say George is dead,” Vergil observed, watching her closely.

  “Yes, I suppose he did teach him that,” she agreed, laughing shrilly.

  “Had there been somebody there named George?” he said, curious.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said abstractedly. She began dusting an old picture-frame made of shells. “I imagine the bird just heard someone say that somewhere, maybe in the place where they got it from.”

  “Where did they get it from?” he wondered.

  “I’m sure nobody knows,” she replied, and she began to hum.

  “George is dead,” he repeated. “I don’t believe it said that.”

  “Why, Verge,” she replied, her dust rag suddenly catching in the ruined shells of the frame. Tired as her mind was and many as the lies were she had told, to the best of her knowledge the bird had said that. She had not even thought it too odd until she had repeated it.

  “Maybe the old man’s name was George,” Mrs. Farebrother said, not very convincing. A whole whirlwind of words waited for her again: “I asked him the price then, and do you know how much he wanted for that old bird, well not old, perhaps, I guess it was young for a raven, they live forever.… Fifty dollars!” she sighed. “Fifty dollars without the cage!”

  He watched her closely and then to her surprise he drew a wallet out from his dressing gown. She had not known he kept a wallet there, and though his hands shook terribly, he insisted on opening it himself. He took out five ten-dollar bills, which oddly enough was all that was in it, and handed them to her.

  “Why, Verge, that isn’t necessary, dear,” she said, and she put her hands to her hair in a ridiculous gesture.

  “Don’t talk with that crying voice, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You sound like my old woman.”

  “Darling,” she tried to control her tears, “I don’t need any pet like that around the house. Besides, it would make you nervous.”

  “Do you want him or don’t you,” he said furiously, pushing up his chest and throat to get the words out.

  She stopped in front of the wheelchair, trying to think what she did want; nearly everything had become irrelevant or even too obscure to bear thinking about. She fingered the five ten-dollar bills, trying to find an answer to please both of them. Then suddenly she knew she wanted nothing. She did not believe anybody could give her anything. One thing or another or nothing were all the same.

  “Don’t you want your raven,” he continued in his firm strong male voice, the voice he always used after an attack had passed so that he seemed to resemble somebody she had known in another place and time.

  “I don’t really want it, Vergil,” Mrs. Farebrother said quietly, handing him the bills.

  He must have noticed the absence of self-pity or any attempt to act a part, which in the past had been her stock-in-trade. There was nothing but the emptiness of the truth on her face: she wanted nothing.

  “I’ll tell you what, Verge,” she began again with her laugh and the lies beginning at the same time, as she watched him put the money back in his wallet. Her voice had become soothing and low, the voice she used on children she sometimes stopped on the street to engage in conversation. “I’m afraid of that bird, Vergil,” she confessed, as though the secret were out. “It’s so large and its beak and claws rather frightened me. Even that old man was cautious with it.”

  “Yet you had all this stuff about ravens and Roumanians and high school,” he accused her.

  “Oh, high school,” she said, and her mouth filled with saliva, as though it was only her mouth now, which, lying to him continually, had the seat of her emotions.

  “It might cheer things up for you if something talked for you around here,” he said.

  She looked at him to determine the meaning of his words, but she could find no expression in them or in him.

  “It would be trouble,” she said. “Birds are dirty.

  “But if you want him, Verge,” and in her voice and eyes there was the supplication for hope, as if she had said, If somebody would tell her a thing to hope for maybe she would want something again, have desire again.

  “No,” he replied, turning the wheel of the chair swiftly, “I don’t want a raven for myself if you are that cool about getting it.”

  He looked down at the wallet, and then his gaze fell swiftly to the legs that lay on the wheelchair’s footrest. She had mentioned high school as the place where life had stopped for her; he remembered further back even than Italy, back to the first time he had ever gone to the barbershop, his small legs had then hung down helplessly too while he got his first haircut; but they had hung alive.

  “Of course you could teach the bird to talk,” she said, using her fake laugh.

  “Yes, I enjoy hearing talk so much,” and he laughed now almost like her.

  She turned to look at him. She wanted to scream or push him roughly, she wanted to tell him to just want something, anything for just one moment so that she could want something for that one moment too. She wanted him to want something so that she could want something, but she knew he would never want at all again. There would be suffering, the suffering that would make him swell in the chair until he looked like a god in ecstasy, but it would all be just a man practicing for death, and the suffering illusion. And why should a man practicing for death take time out to teach a bird to talk?

  “There doesn’t seem to be any ice after all,” Mrs. Farebrother said, pretending to look in the icebox. It was time for his medicine, and she had quit looking at anything, and their long day together had begun.

  CUTTING EDGE

  Mrs. Zeller opposed her son’s beard. She was in her house in Florida when she saw him wearing it for the first time. It was as though her mind had come to a full stop. This large full-bearded man entered the room and she remembered always later how ugly he had looked and how frightened she felt seeing him in the house; then the realization it was someone she knew, and finally the terror of recognition.

  He had kissed her, which he didn’t often do, and she recognized in this his attempt to make her discomfort the more painful. He held the beard to her face for a long time, then he released her as though she had suddenly disgusted him.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked. She was, he saw, almost broken by the recognition.

  “I didn’t dare tell you and come.”

  “That’s of course true,” Mrs. Zeller said. “It would have been worse. You’ll have to shave it off, of course. Nobody must see you. You
r father of course didn’t have the courage to warn me, but I knew something was wrong the minute he entered the house ahead of you. I suppose he’s upstairs laughing now. But it’s not a laughing matter.”

  Mrs. Zeller’s anger turned against her absent husband as though all error began and ended with him. “I suppose he likes it.” Her dislike of Mr. Zeller struck her son as staggeringly great at that moment.

  He looked at his mother and was surprised to see how young she was. She did not look much older than he did. Perhaps she looked younger now that he had his beard.

  “I had no idea a son of mine would do such a thing,” she said. “But why a beard, for heaven’s sake,” she cried, as though he had chosen something permanent and irreparable which would destroy all that they were.

  “Is it because you are an artist? No, don’t answer me,” she commanded. “I can’t stand to hear any explanation from you.…”

  “I have always wanted to wear a beard,” her son said. “I remember wanting one as a child.”

  “I don’t remember that at all,” Mrs. Zeller said.

  “I remember it quite well. I was in the summer house near that old broken-down wall and I told Ellen Whitelaw I wanted to have a beard when I grew up.”

  “Ellen Whitelaw, that big fat stupid thing. I haven’t thought of her in years.”

  Mrs. Zeller was almost as much agitated by the memory of Ellen Whitelaw as by her son’s beard.

  “You didn’t like Ellen Whitelaw,” her son told her, trying to remember how they had acted when they were together.

  “She was a common and inefficient servant,” Mrs. Zeller said, more quietly now, masking her feelings from her son.

  “I suppose he liked her,” the son pretended surprise, the cool cynical tone coming into his voice.

  “Oh, your father,” Mrs. Zeller said.

  “Did he then?” the son asked.

  “Didn’t he like all of them?” she asked. The beard had changed this much already between them, she talked to him now about his father’s character, while the old man stayed up in the bedroom fearing a scene.

  “Didn’t he always,” she repeated, as though appealing to this new hirsute man.

  “So,” the son said, accepting what he already knew.

  “Ellen Whitelaw, for God’s sake,” Mrs. Zeller said. The name of the servant girl brought back many other faces and rooms which she did not know were in her memory. These faces and rooms served to make the bearded man who stared at her less and less the boy she remembered in the days of Ellen Whitelaw.

  “You must shave it off,” Mrs. Zeller said.

  “What makes you think I would do that?” the boy wondered.

  “You heard me. Do you want to drive me out of my mind?”

  “But I’m not going to. Or rather it’s not going to.”

  “I will appeal to him, though a lot of good it will do,” Mrs. Zeller said. “He ought to do something once in twenty years at least.”

  “You mean,” the son said laughing, “he hasn’t done anything in that long.”

  “Nothing I can really remember,” Mrs. Zeller told him.

  “It will be interesting to hear you appeal to him,” the boy said. “I haven’t heard you do that in such a long time.”

  “I don’t think you ever heard me.”

  “I did, though,” he told her. “It was in the days of Ellen Whitelaw again, in fact.”

  “In those days,” Mrs. Zeller wondered. “I don’t see how that could be.”

  “Well, it was. I can remember that much.”

  “You couldn’t have been more than four years old. How could you remember then?”

  “I heard you say to him, You have to ask her to go.”

  Mrs. Zeller did not say anything. She really could not remember the words, but she supposed that the scene was true and that he actually remembered.

  “Please shave off that terrible beard. If you only knew how awful it looks on you. You can’t see anything else but it.”

  “Everyone in New York thought it was particularly fine.”

  “Particularly fine,” she paused over his phrase as though its meaning eluded her.

  “It’s nauseating,” she was firm again in her judgment.

  “I’m not going to do away with it,” he said, just as firm.

  She did not recognize his firmness, but she saw everything changing a little, including perhaps the old man upstairs.

  “Are you going to ‘appeal’ to him?” The son laughed again when he saw she could say no more.

  “Don’t mock me,” the mother said. “I will speak to your father.” She pretended decorum. “You can’t go anywhere with us, you know.”

  He looked unmoved.

  “I don’t want any of my friends to see you. You’ll have to stay in the house or go to your own places. You can’t go out with us to our places and see our friends. I hope none of the neighbors see you. If they ask who you are, I won’t tell them.”

  “I’ll tell them then.”

  They were not angry, they talked it out like that, while the old man was upstairs.

  “Do you suppose he is drinking or asleep?” she said finally.

  “I THOUGHT HE looked good in it, Fern,” Mr. Zeller said.

  “What about it makes him look good?” she said.

  “It fills out his face,” Mr. Zeller said, looking at the wallpaper and surprised he had never noticed what a pattern it had before; it showed the sacrifice of some sort of animal by a youth.

  He almost asked his wife how she had come to pick out this pattern, but her growing fury checked him.

  He saw her mouth and throat moving with unspoken words.

  “Where is he now?” Mr. Zeller wondered.

  “What does that matter where he is?” she said. “He has to be somewhere while he’s home, but he can’t go out with us.”

  “How idiotic,” Mr. Zeller said, and he looked at his wife straight in the face for a second.

  “Why did you say that?” She tried to quiet herself down.

  “The way you go on about nothing, Fern.” For a moment a kind of revolt announced itself in his manner, but then his eyes went back to the wallpaper, and she resumed her tone of victor.

  “I’ve told him he must either cut it off or go back to New York.”

  “Why is it a beard upsets you so?” he wondered, almost to himself.

  “It’s not the beard so much. It’s the way he is now too. And it disfigures him so. I don’t recognize him at all now when he wears it.”

  “So, he’s never done anything of his own before,” Mr. Zeller protested suddenly.

  “Never done anything!” He could feel her anger covering him and glancing off like hot sun onto the wallpaper.

  “That’s right,” he repeated. “He’s never done anything. I say let him keep the beard and I’m not going to talk to him about it.” His gaze lifted toward her but rested finally only on her hands and skirt.

  “This is still my house,” she said, “and I have to live in this town.”

  “When they had the centennial in Collins, everybody wore beards.”

  “I have to live in this town,” she repeated.

  “I won’t talk to him about it,” Mr. Zeller said.

  It was as though the voice of Ellen Whitelaw reached her saying, So that was how you appealed to him.

  SHE SAT ON the deck chair on the porch and smoked five cigarettes. The two men were somewhere in the house and she had the feeling now that she only roomed here. She wished more than that the beard was gone that her son had never mentioned Ellen Whitelaw. She found herself thinking only about her. Then she thought that now twenty years later she could not have afforded a servant, not even her.

  She supposed the girl was dead. She did not know why, but she was sure she was.

  She thought also that she should have mentioned her name to Mr. Zeller. It might have broken him down about the beard, but she supposed not. He had been just as adamant and unfeeling with her about the girl as h
e was now about her son.

  Her son came through the house in front of her without speaking, dressed only in his shorts and, when he had got safely beyond her in the garden, he took off those so that he was completely naked with his back to her, and lay down in the sun.

  She held the cigarette in her hand until it began to burn her finger. She felt she should not move from the place where she was and yet she did not know where to go inside the house and she did not know what pretext to use for going inside.

  In the brilliant sun his body, already tanned, matched his shining black beard.

  She wanted to appeal to her husband again and she knew then she could never again. She wanted to call a friend and tell her but she had no friend to whom she could tell this.

  The events of the day, like a curtain of extreme bulk, cut her off from her son and husband. She had always ruled the house and them even during the awful Ellen Whitelaw days and now, as though they did not even recognize her, they had taken over. She was not even here. Her son could walk naked with a beard in front of her as though she did not exist. She had nothing to fight them with, nothing to make them see with. They ignored her as Mr. Zeller had when he looked at the wallpaper and refused to discuss their son.

  “YOU CAN GROW it back when you’re in New York,” Mr. Zeller told his son.

  He did not say anything about his son lying naked before him in the garden but he felt insulted almost as much as his mother had, yet he needed his son’s permission and consent now and perhaps that was why he did not mention the insult of his nakedness.

  “I don’t know why I have to act like a little boy all the time with you both.”

  “If you were here alone with me you could do anything you wanted. You know I never asked anything of you.…”

  When his son did not answer, Mr. Zeller said, “Did I?”

  “That was the trouble,” the son said.

  “What?” the father wondered.

  “You never wanted anything from me and you never wanted to give me anything. I didn’t matter to you.”