The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “We will both change our names, if you like,” she said.

  “Why do you torture me?” he said. “Why is it you can’t control your power to torture?”

  “Then we won’t think about it, we will go home,” she said, in a cold comforting voice. “Only I think I am going to be sick,” she warned.

  “We will go home,” he said in a stupid voice.

  “I will let you call me Mrs. Klein this one evening, then tomorrow we will have a good talk.” At the same moment she fell back on the walk.

  Some young men from the delicatessen who had been doing inventory came by and asked if there was anything they could do.

  “My wife fell on the walk,” he said. “I thought she was all right. She was talking to me just a moment ago.”

  “Was it your wife, did you say?” the younger man leaned down to look at her.

  “Mrs. Klein,” Frank replied.

  “You are Mr. Klein, then?”

  “I don’t understand,” the older of the two young men said. “You don’t look somehow like her husband.”

  “We have been married six months.”

  “I think you ought to call a doctor,” the younger man said. “She is bleeding at the mouth.”

  “I hit her at a party,” Frank said.

  “What did you say your name was?” the older man asked.

  “Mr. Klein. She is Mrs. Klein,” Frank told them.

  The two men from the delicatessen exchanged looks.

  “Did you push her?” the one man asked.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “I hit her. She didn’t want to be Mrs. Klein.”

  “You’re drunk,” the one man ventured an opinion.

  Lois suddenly came to. “Frank, you will have to take me home,” she said. “There is something wrong with my head. My God,” she began to scream, “I am in awful pain.”

  Frank helped her up again.

  “Is this your husband?” the one man asked.

  She nodded.

  “What is your name?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “Are you Mrs. Klein?” he asked.

  “No,” Lois replied. “I don’t happen to be Mrs. Klein.”

  “Come on, J.D., we can’t get mixed up in this,” the younger man said. “Whatever the hell their names are.”

  “Well, I’m not Mrs. Klein, whoever you are,” she said.

  Immediately then she struck Frank with the purse and he fell back in surprise against the building wall.

  “Call me a cab, you cheap son of a bitch,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”

  EVENTIDE

  Mahala had waited as long as she thought she could; after all, Plumy had left that morning and now here it was going on four o���clock. It was hardly fair if she was loitering, but she knew that certainly Plumy would never loiter on a day like this when Mahala wanted so to hear. It was in a way the biggest day of her whole life, bigger than any day she had ever lived through as a girl or young woman. It was the day that decided whether her son would come back to live with her or not.

  And just think, a whole month had rolled past since he left home. Two months ago if anyone had said that Teeboy would leave home, she would have stopped dead in her tracks, it would have been such a terrible thing even to say, and now here she was, talking over the telephone about how Teeboy had gone.

  “My Teeboy is gone.” That is what Mahala said for a long time after the departure. These words announced to her mind what had happened, and just as an announcement they gave some mild comfort, like a pain-killer with a fatal disease.

  “My Teeboy,” she would say, like the mother of a dead son, like the mother of a son who had died in battle, because it hurt as much to have a son missing in peacetime as to have lost him through war.

  The room seemed dark even with the summer sunshine outside, and close, although the window was open. There was a darkness all over the city. The fire department had been coming and going all afternoon. There were so many fires in the neighborhood—that is what she was saying to Cora on the telephone, too many fires: the fire chief had just whizzed past again. No, she said to Cora, she didn’t know if it was in the white section of town or theirs, she couldn’t tell, but oh it was so hot to have a fire.

  Talking about the fires seemed to help Mahala more than anything. She called several other old friends and talked about the fires and she mentioned that Teeboy had not come home. The old friends did not say much about Teeboy’s not having returned, because, well, what was there to say about a boy who had been practicing to leave home for so long. Everyone had known it but her blind mother love.

  “What do you suppose can be keeping my sister Plumy?” Mahala said to herself as she walked up and down the hall and looked out from behind the screen in the window. “She would have to fail me on the most important errand in the world.”

  Then she thought about how much Plumy hated to go into white neighborhoods, and how the day had been hot and she thought of the fires and how perhaps Plumy had fallen under a fire truck and been crushed. She thought of all the possible disasters and was not happy, and always in the background there was the fresh emotion of having lost Teeboy.

  “People don’t know,” she said, “that I can’t live without Teeboy.”

  She would go in the clothes closet and look at his dirty clothes just as he had left them; she would kiss them and press them to her face, smelling them; the odors were especially dear to her. She held his rayon trousers to her bosom and walked up and down the small parlor. She had not prayed; she was waiting for Plumy to come home first, then maybe they would have prayer.

  “I hope I ain’t done anything I’ll be sorry for,” she said.

  It was then, though, when she felt the worst, that she heard the steps on the front porch. Yes, those were Plumy’s steps, she was coming with the news. But whatever the news was, she suddenly felt, she could not accept it.

  As she came up the steps, Plumy did not look at Mahala with any particular kind of meaning on her face. She walked unsteadily, as if the heat had been too much for her.

  “Come on in now, Plumy, and I will get you something cool to drink.”

  Inside, Plumy watched Mahala as if afraid she was going to ask her to begin at once with the story, but Mahala only waited, not saying anything, sensing the seriousness of Plumy’s knowledge and knowing that this knowledge could be revealed only when Plumy was ready.

  While Mahala waited patiently there in the kitchen, Plumy arranged herself in the easy chair, and when she was once settled, she took up the straw fan which lay on the floor.

  “Well, I seen him!” Plumy brought the words out.

  This beginning quieted the old mother a little. She closed her mouth and folded her hands, moving now to the middle of the parlor, with an intentness on her face as if she was listening to something high up in the sky, like a plane which is to drop something, perhaps harmless and silver, to the ground.

  “I seen him!” Plumy repeated, as if to herself. “And I seen all the white people!” she finished, anger coming into her voice.

  “Oh, Plumy,” Mahala whined. Then suddenly she made a gesture for her sister to be quiet because she thought she heard the fire department going again, and then when there was no sound, she waited for her to go on, but Plumy did not say anything. In the slow afternoon there was nothing, only a silence a city sometimes has within itself.

  Plumy was too faint from the heat to go on at once; her head suddenly shook violently and she slumped in the chair.

  “Plumy Jackson!” Mahala said, going over to her. “You didn’t walk here from the white district! You didn’t walk them forty-seven blocks in all this August heat!”

  Plumy did not answer immediately. Her hand caressed the worn upholstery of the chair.

  “You know how nervous white folks make me,” she said at last.

  Mahala made a gesture of disgust. “Lord, to think you walked it in this hot sun. Oh, I don’t
know why God wants to upset me like this. As if I didn’t have enough to make me wild already, without havin’ you come home in this condition.”

  Mahala watched her sister’s face for a moment with the same figuring expression of the man who comes to read the water meter. She saw everything she really wanted to know on Plumy’s face: all her questions were answered for her there, yet she pretended she didn’t know the verdict; she brought the one question out:

  “You did see Teeboy, honey?” she said, her voice changed from her tears. She waited a few seconds, and then as Plumy did not answer but only sank deeper into the chair, she continued: “What word did he send?”

  “It’s the way I told you before,” Plumy replied crossly. “Teeboy ain’t coming back. I thought you knowed from the way I looked at you that he ain’t coming back.”

  Mahala wept quietly into a small handkerchief.

  “Your pain is realer to me sometimes than my own,” Plumy said, watching her cry. “That’s why I hate to say to you he won’t never come back, but it’s true as death he won’t.”

  “When you say that to me I got a feeling inside myself like everything had been busted and taken; I got the feeling like I don’t have nothing left inside of me.”

  “Don’t I know that feeling!” Plumy said, almost angrily, resting the straw fan on the arm of the chair, and then suddenly fanning herself violently so that the strokes sounded like those of a small angry whip. “Didn’t I lose George Watson of sleeping sickness and all ’cause doctor wouldn’t come?”

  Plumy knew that Mahala had never shown any interest in the death of her own George Watson and that it was an unwelcome subject, especially tonight, when Teeboy’s never coming back had become final, yet she could not help mentioning George Watson just the same. In Mahala’s eyes there really had never been any son named George Watson; there was only a son named Teeboy and Mahala was the only mother.

  “It ain’t like there bein’ no way out to your troubles: it’s the way out that kills you,” Mahala said. “If it was goodbye for always like when someone dies, I think I could stand it better. But this kind of parting ain’t like the Lord’s way!”

  Plumy continued fanning herself, just letting Mahala run on.

  “So he ain’t never coming back!” Mahala began beating her hands together as if she were hearing music for a dance.

  Plumy looked away as the sound of the rats downstairs caught her attention; there seemed to be more than usual tonight and she wondered why they were running so much, for it was so hot everywhere.

  Her attention strayed back to Mahala standing directly in front of her now, talking about her suffering: “You go through all the suffering and the heartache,” she said, “and then they go away. The only time children is nice is when they’re babies and you know they can’t get away from you. You got them then and your love is all they crave. They don’t know who you are exactly, they just know you are the one to give them your love, and they ask you for it until you’re worn out giving it.”

  Mahala’s speech set Plumy to thinking of how she had been young and how she had had George Watson, and how he had died of sleeping sickness when he was four.

  “My only son died of sleeping sickness,” Plumy said aloud, but not really addressing Mahala. “I never had another. My husband said it was funny. He was not a religious man, but he thought it was queer.”

  “Would you like a cooling drink?” Mahala said absently.

  Plumy shook her head and there was a silence of a few minutes in which the full weight of the heat of evening took possession of the small room.

  “I can’t get used to the idea of him never comin’ back!” Mahala began again. “I ain’t never been able to understand that word never anyhow. And now it’s like to drive me wild.”

  There was another long silence, and then, Mahala suddenly rousing herself from drowsiness and the heat of the evening, began eagerly: “How did he look, Plumy? Tell me how he looked, and what he was doing. Just describe.”

  “He wasn’t doin’ nothin’!” Plumy said flatly. “He looked kind of older, though, like he had been thinking about new things.”

  “Don’t keep me waiting,” Mahala whined. “I been waitin’ all day for the news, don’t keep me no more, when I tell you I could suicide over it all. I ain’t never been through such a hell day. Don’t you keep me waitin’.”

  “Now hush,” Plumy said. “Don’t go frettin’ like this. Your heart won’t take a big grief like this if you go fret so.”

  “It’s so unkind of you not to tell,” she muffled her lips in her handkerchief.

  Plumy said: “I told you I talked to him, but I didn’t tell you where. It was in a drinking place called the Music Box. He called to me from inside. The minute I looked at him I knew there was something wrong. There was something wrong with his hair.”

  “With his hair!” Mahala cried.

  “Then I noticed he had had it all made straight! That’s right,” she said looking away from Mahala’s eyes. “He had had his hair straightened. ‘Why ain’t you got in touch with your mother,’ I said. ‘If you only knowed how she was carryin’ on.’

  “Then he told me how he had got a tenor sax and how he was playing it in the band at the Music Box and that he had begun a new life, and it was all on account of his having the tenor sax and being a musician. He said the players didn’t have time to have homes. He said they were playing all the time, they never went home, and that was why he hadn’t been.”

  Plumy stopped. She saw the tenor sax only in her imagination because he had not shown it to her, she saw it curved and golden and heard it playing far-off melodies. But the real reason she stopped was not on account of the tenor sax but because of the memory of the white woman who had come out just then. The white woman had come out and put her arm around Teeboy. It had made her get creepy all over. It was the first time that Plumy had realized that Teeboy’s skin was nearly as light as the white people’s.

  Both Teeboy and the woman had stood there looking at Plumy, and Plumy had not known how to move away from them. The sun beat down on her in the street but she could not move. She saw the streetcars going by with all the white people pushing one another around and she looked around on the scorched pavements and everyone was white, with Teeboy looking just as white as the rest of them, looking just as white as if he had come out of Mahala’s body white, and as if Mahala had been a white woman and not her sister, and as if Mahala’s mother and hers had not been black.

  Then slowly she had begun walking away from Teeboy and the Music Box, almost without knowing she was going herself, walking right on through the streets without knowing what was happening, through the big August heat, without an umbrella or a hat to keep off the sun; she could see no place to stop, and people could see the circles of sweat that were forming all over her dress. She was afraid to stop and she was afraid to go on walking. She felt she would fall down eventually in the afternoon sun and it would be like the time George Watson had died of sleeping sickness, nobody would help her to an easy place.

  Would George Watson know her now? That is what she was thinking as she walked through the heat of that afternoon. Would he know her��because when she had been his mother she had been young and her skin, she was sure, had been lighter; and now she was older looking than she remembered her own mother ever being, and her skin was very black.

  It was Mahala’s outcries which brought her back to the parlor, now full of the evening twilight.

  “Why can’t God call me home?” Mahala was asking. “Why can’t He call me to His Throne of Grace?”

  Then Mahala got up and wandered off into her own part of the house. One could hear her in her room there, faintly kissing Teeboy’s soiled clothes and speaking quietly to herself.

  “Until you told me about his having his hair straightened, I thought maybe he would be back,” Mahala was saying from the room. “But when you told me that, I knew. He won’t never be back.”

  Plumy could hear Mahala kissing the
clothes after she had said this.

  “He was so dear to her,” Plumy said aloud. It was necessary to speak aloud at that moment because of the terrible feeling of evening in the room. Was it the smell of the four o’clocks, which must have just opened to give out their perfume, or was it the evening itself which made her uneasy? She felt not alone, she felt someone else had come, uninvited and from far away.

  Plumy had never noticed before what a strong odor the four o’clocks had, and then she saw the light in the room, growing larger, a light she had not recognized before, and then she turned and saw him, George Watson Jackson, standing there before her, large as life. Plumy wanted to call out, she wanted to say No in a great voice, she wanted to brush the sight before her all away, which was strange because she was always wanting to see her baby and here he was, although seventeen years had passed since she had laid him away.

  She looked at him with unbelieving eyes because really he was the same, the same except she did notice that little boys’ suits had changed fashion since his day, and how that everything about him was slightly different from the little children of the neighborhood now.

  “Baby!” she said, but the word didn’t come out from her mouth, it was only a great winged thought that could not be made into sound. “George Watson, honey!” she said still in her silence.

  He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete.

  There was this mist between her and George Jackson, like the dew that will be on the four o’clocks when you pick one of them off the plant.

  It was her baby come home, and at such an hour.