The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Well, I’m sorry,” the father said doggedly.

  “Those were the days of Ellen Whitelaw,” the son said in tones like the mother.

  “For God’s sake,” the father said and he put a piece of grass between his teeth.

  He was a man who kept everything down inside of him, everything had been tied and fastened so long there was no part of him anymore that could struggle against the stricture of his life.

  There were no words between them for some time; then Mr. Zeller could hear himself bringing the question out: “Did she mention that girl?”

  “Who?” The son pretended blankness.

  “Our servant.”

  The son wanted to pretend again blankness but it was too much work. He answered: “No, I mentioned it. To her surprise.”

  “Don’t you see how it is?” the father went on to the present. “She doesn’t speak to either of us now and if you’re still wearing the beard when you leave it’s me she will be punishing six months from now.”

  “And you want me to save you from your wife.”

  “Bobby,” the father said, using the childhood tone and inflection. “I wish you would put some clothes on too when you’re in the garden. With me it doesn’t matter, you could do anything. I never asked you for anything. But with her …”

  “God damn her,” the boy said.

  The father could not protest. He pleaded with his eyes at his son.

  The son looked at his father and he could see suddenly also the youth hidden in his father’s face. He was young like his mother. They were both young people who had learned nothing from life, were stopped and drifting where they were twenty years before with Ellen Whitelaw. Only she, the son thought, must have learned from life, must have gone on to some development in her character, while they had been tied to the shore where she had left them.

  “Imagine living with someone for six months and not speaking,” the father said as if to himself. “That happened once before, you know, when you were a little boy.”

  “I don’t remember that,” the son said, some concession in his voice.

  “You were only four,” the father told him.

  “I believe this is the only thing I ever asked of you,” the father said. “Isn’t it odd, I can’t remember ever asking you anything else. Can you?”

  The son looked coldly away at the sky and then answered, contempt and pity struggling together, “No, I can’t.”

  “Thank you, Bobby,” the father said.

  “Only don’t plead anymore, for Christ’s sake.” The son turned from him.

  “You’ve only two more days with us, and if you shaved it off and put on just a few clothes, it would help me through the year with her.”

  He spoke as though it would be his last year.

  Why don’t you beat some sense into her?” The son turned to him again.

  The father’s gaze fell for the first time complete on his son’s nakedness.

  BOBBY HAD SAID he would be painting in the storeroom and she could send up a sandwich from time to time, and Mr. and Mrs. Zeller were left downstairs together. She refused to allow her husband to answer the phone.

  In the evening Bobby came down dressed carefully and his beard combed immaculately and looking, they both thought, curled.

  They talked about things like horse racing, in which they were all somehow passionately interested, but which they now discussed irritably as though it too were a menace to their lives. They talked about the uselessness of art and why people went into it with a detachment that would have made an outsider think that Bobby was as unconnected with it as a jockey or oil magnate. They condemned nearly everything and then the son went upstairs and they saw one another again briefly at bedtime.

  The night before he was to leave they heard him up all hours, the water running, and the dropping of things made of metal.

  Both parents were afraid to get up and ask him if he was all right. He was like a wealthy relative who had commanded them never to question him or interfere with his movements even if he was dying.

  He was waiting for them at breakfast, dressed only in his shorts but he looked more naked than he ever had in the garden because his beard was gone. Over his chin lay savage and profound scratches as though he had removed the hair with a hunting knife and pincers.

  Mrs. Zeller held her breast and turned to the coffee and Mr. Zeller said only his son’s name and sat down with last night’s newspaper.

  “What time does your plane go?” Mrs. Zeller said in a dead, muffled voice.

  The son began putting a white paste on the scratches on his face and did not answer.

  “I believe your mother asked you a question,” Mr. Zeller said, pale and shaking.

  Ten-forty,” the son replied.

  The son and the mother exchanged glances and he could see at once that his sacrifice had been in vain: she would also see the beard there again under the scratches and the gashes he had inflicted on himself, and he would never really be her son again. Even for his father it must be much the same. He had come home as a stranger who despised them and he had shown his nakedness to both of them. All three longed for separation and release.

  But Bobby could not control the anger coming up in him, and his rage took an old form. He poured the coffee into his saucer because Mr. Zeller’s mother had always done this and it had infuriated Mrs. Zeller because of its low-class implications.

  He drank vicious from the saucer, blowing loudly.

  Both parents watched him helplessly like insects suddenly swept against the screen.

  “It’s not too long till Christmas,” Mr. Zeller brought out. “We hope you’ll come back for the whole vacation.”

  “We do,” Mrs. Zeller said in a voice completely unlike her own.

  “So,” Bobby began, but the torrent of anger would not let him say the thousand fierce things he had ready.

  Instead, he blew savagely from the saucer and spilled some onto the chaste white summer rug below him. Mrs. Zeller did not move.

  “I would invite you to New York.” Bobby said quietly now, “but of course I will have the beard there and it wouldn’t work for you.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Zeller said, incoherent.

  “I do hope you don’t think I’ve been …” Mrs. Zeller cried suddenly, and they both waited to hear whether she was going to weep or not, but she stopped herself perhaps by the realization that she had no tears and that the feelings which had come over her about Bobby were likewise spent.

  “I can’t think of any more I can do for you,” Bobby said suddenly.

  They both stared at each other as though he had actually left and they were alone at last.

  “Is there anything more you want me to do?” he said, coldly vicious.

  They did not answer.

  “I hate and despise what both of you have done to yourselves, but the thought that you would be sitting here in your middle-class crap not speaking to one another is too much even for me. That’s why I did it, I guess, and not out of any love. I didn’t want you to think that.”

  He sloshed in the saucer.

  “Bobby,” Mr. Zeller said.

  The son brought out his What? with such finished beauty of coolness that he paused to admire his own control and mastery.

  “Please, Bobby,” Mr. Zeller said.

  They could all three of them hear a thousand speeches. The agony of awkwardness was made unendurable by the iciness of the son, and all three paused over this glacial control which had come to him out of art and New York, as though it was the fruit of their lives and the culmination of their twenty years.

  DON’T CALL ME BY MY RIGHT NAME

  Her new name was Mrs. Klein. There was something in the meaning that irritated her. She liked everything about her husband except his name, and that had never pleased her. She had fallen in love with him before she found out what his name was. Once she knew he was Klein, her disappointment had been strong. Names do make a great difference, and after six months of marria
ge she found herself still not liking her name. She began using more and more her maiden name. Then she always called herself on her letters Lois McBane. Her husband seldom saw the mail arrive so perhaps he did not know, and had he known she went by her old name he might not have cared enough to feel any particular hurt.

  Lois Klein, she often thought as she lay next to her husband in bed. It is not the name of a woman like myself. It does not reflect my character.

  One evening at a party when there had been more drinking for her than usual, she said offhand to him in the midst of some revelry: “I would like you to change your name.”

  He did not understand. He thought that it was a remark she was making in drink which did not refer to anything concrete, just as once she had said to him, “I want you to begin by taking your head off regularly.” The remark had meant nothing, and he let it pass.

  “Frank,” she said, “you must change your name, do you hear? I cannot go on being Mrs. Klein.”

  Several people heard what it was she said, and they laughed loudly so that Lois and Frank would hear them appreciating the remark.

  “If you were all called Mrs. Klein,” she said turning to the men who were laughing, “you would not like to be Mrs. Klein either.”

  Being all men, they laughed harder.

  “Well, you married him, didn’t you,” a man said, “and we guess you will have to keep his name.”

  “If he changed his name,” another of the men said, “what name would you have him change it to?”

  Frank put his hand on her glass, as though to tell her they must go home, but she seized the glass with his hand on it and drank quickly out of it.

  “I hadn’t thought what name I did want,” she said, puzzled.

  “Well, you aren’t going to change your name,” Frank said. “The gentlemen know that.”

  “The gentlemen do?” she asked him. “Well, I don’t know what name I would like it changed to,” she admitted to the men.

  “You don’t look much like Mrs. Klein,” one of the men said and began to laugh again.

  “You’re not friends!” she called back at them.

  “What are we, then?” they asked.

  “Why don’t I look like Mrs. Klein?” she wanted to know.

  “Don’t you ever look in the mirror?” one of the men replied.

  “We ought to go, Lois,” her husband said.

  She sat there as though she had heard the last of the many possible truths she could hear about herself.

  “I wonder how I will get out of here, Frank,” she said.

  “Out of where, dear?” he wondered. He was suddenly sad enough himself to be dead, but he managed to say something to her at this point.

  “Out of where I seem to have got into,” she told him.

  The men had moved off now and were laughing among themselves. Frank and Lois did not notice this laughter.

  “I’m not going to change my name,” he said, as though to himself. Then, turning to her: “I know it’s supposed to be wrong to tell people when they’re drunk the insane whim they’re having is insane, but I am telling you now and I may tell the whole room of men.”

  “I have to have my name changed, Frank,” she said. “You know I can’t stand to be tortured. It is too painful and I am not young anymore. I am getting old and fat.”

  “No wife of mine would ever be old or fat,” he said.

  “I just cannot be Mrs. Klein and face the world.”

  “Anytime you want me to pull out is all right,” he said. “Do you want me to pull out?”

  “What are you saying?” she wanted to know. “What did you say about pulling out?”

  “I don’t want any more talk about your changing your name or I intend to pull up stakes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know you can’t leave me. What would I do, Frank, at my age?”

  “I told you no wife of mine is old.”

  “I couldn’t find anybody now, Frank, if you went.”

  “Then quit talking about changing our name.”

  “Our name? I don’t know what you mean by our name.”

  He took her drink out of her hand and when she coaxed and whined he struck her not too gently over the mouth.

  “What was the meaning of that?” she wanted to know.

  “Are you coming home, Mrs. Klein?” he said, and he hit her again. Her lip was cut against her teeth so that you could see it beginning to bleed.

  “Frank, you’re abusing me,” she said, white and wide-eyed now, and as though tasting the blood slightly with the gin and soda mix.

  “Mrs. Klein,” he said idiotically.

  It was one of those fake dead long parties where nobody actually knows anybody and where people could be pushed out of windows without anybody’s being sure until the morrow.

  “I’m not going home as Mrs. Klein,” she said.

  He hit her again.

  “Frank, you have no right to hit me just because I hate your name.”

  “If you hate my name, what do you feel then for me? Are you going to act like my wife or not.”

  “I don’t want to have babies, Frank. I will not go through that at my age. Categorically not.”

  He hit her again so that she fell on the floor, but this did not seem to surprise either her or him because they both continued the conversation.

  “I can’t make up my mind what to do,” she said, weeping a little. “I know of course what the safe thing is to do.”

  “Either you come out of here with me as Mrs. Klein, or I go to a hotel room alone. Here’s the key to the house,” he said, and he threw it on the floor at her.

  Several of the men at the party had begun to notice what was really going on now. They thought that it was married clowning at first and they began to gather around in a circle, but what they saw had something empty and stiff about it that did not interest and yet kept one somehow watching. For one thing, Mrs. Klein’s dress had come up and exposed her legs, which were not beautiful.

  “I can’t decide if I can go on with his name,” she explained from the floor position to the men.

  “Well, it’s a little late, isn’t it, Mrs. Klein,” one of the men said in a sleepy voice.

  “It’s never too late, I don’t suppose, is it?” she inquired. “Oh, I can’t believe it is even though I feel old.”

  “Well, you’re not young,” the same man ventured. “You’re too old to be lying there.”

  “My husband can’t see my point of view,” she explained. “And that is why he can’t understand why his name doesn’t fit me. I was unmarried too long, I suppose, to suddenly surrender my own name. I have always been known professionally and socially under my own name and it is hard to change now, I can tell you. I don’t think I can go home with him unless he lets me change my name.”

  “I will give you just two minutes,” Mr. Klein said.

  “For what? Only two minutes for what?” she cried.

  “To make up your mind what name you are going out of here with.”

  “I know, men,” she said, “what the sensible decision is, and tomorrow, of course, when I’m sober I will wish I had taken it.”

  Turning to Frank Klein, she said simply, “You will have to go your way without me.”

  He looked hurriedly around as though looking for an exit to leave by, and then he looked back to her on the floor as though he could not come to a decision.

  “Come to your senses,” Frank Klein said unemphatically.

  “There were hundreds of Kleins in the telephone directory,” she went on, “but when people used to come to my name they recognized at once that I was the only woman going under my own special name.”

  “For Jesus Christ’s sake, Lois,” he said, turning a peculiar green color.

  “I can’t go with you as Mrs. Klein,” she said.

  “Well, let me help you up,” he said.

  She managed to let him help her up.

  “I’m not going home with you, but I wi
ll send you in a cab,” he informed her.

  “Are you leaving me?” she wanted to know.

  He did not know what to say. He felt anything he said might destroy his mind. He stood there with an insane emptiness on his eyes and lips.

  Everyone had moved off from them. There was a silence from the phonograph and from the TV set, which had both been going at the same time. The party was over and people were calling down to cabs from all the windows.

  “Why won’t you come home with me?” she said in a whisper.

  Suddenly he hurried out the door without waiting for her.

  “Frank!” she called after him, and a few of the men from the earlier group came over and joked with her.

  “He went out just like a boy, without any sense of responsibility,” she said to them without any expression in her voice.

  She hurried on out too, not waiting to put her coat on straight.

  She stood outside in the fall cold and shivered. Some children went by dressed in Hallowe’en costumes.

  “Is she dressed as anybody?” one of the children said pointlessly.

  “Frank!” she began calling. “I don’t know what is happening really,” she said to herself.

  Suddenly he came up to her from behind a hedge next to where she was standing.

  “I couldn’t quite bring myself to go off,” he said.

  She thought for a minute of hitting him with her purse which she had remembered to bring, but she did nothing now but watch him.

  “Will you change your name?” she said.

  “We will live together the way we have been,” he said not looking at her.

  “We can’t be married, Frank, with that name between us.”

  Suddenly he hit her and knocked her down to the pavement.

  She lay there for a minute before anything was said.

  “Are you conscious?” he said crouching down beside her. “Tell me if you are suffering,” he wanted to know.

  “You have hurt something in my head, I think,” she said, getting up slightly on one elbow.

  “You have nearly driven me out of my mind,” he said, and he was making funny sounds in his mouth. “You don’t know what it means to have one’s name held up to ridicule like this. You are such a cruel person, Lois.”