The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  He watched how she kept looking at the boxes of photographs under his guard.

  “You sleep here to be near them?” she said.

  “I don’t know why, Ethel,” Paul said, blowing out air from his mouth as though trying to make something disappear before him.

  “You don’t know, Paul,” she said, her sweet fake awful voice and the stale awful smell of the bathrobe stifling as she drew nearer.

  “Don’t, don’t!” Paul cried.

  “Don’t what?” Ethel answered, pulling him toward her by seizing on his pajama tops.

  “Don’t do anything to me, Ethel, my eye hurts.”

  “Your eye hurts,” she said with unbelief.

  “I’m sick to my stomach.”

  Then bending over suddenly, in a second she had gathered up the two boxes of photographs in her bathrobed arms.

  “Ethel!” he cried out in the strongest, clearest voice she had ever heard come from him. “Ethel, those are my candy boxes!”

  She looked down at him as though she was seeing him for the first time, noting with surprise how thin and puny he was, and how disgusting was one small mole that hung from his starved-looking throat. She could not see how this was her son.

  “These boxes of pictures are what makes you sick.”

  “No, no, Mama Ethel,” Paul cried.

  “What did I tell you about calling me Mama?” she said, going over to him and putting her hand on his forehead.

  “I called you Mama Ethel, not Mama,” he said.

  “I suppose you think I’m a thousand years old.” She raised her hand as though she was not sure what she wished to do with it.

  “I think I know what to do with these,” she said with a pretended calm.

  “No, Ethel,” Paul said, “give them here back. They are my boxes.”

  “Tell me why you slept out here on this backstairs where you know you’ll make yourself even sicker. I want you to tell me and tell me right away.”

  “I can’t, Ethel, I can’t,” Paul said.

  “Then I’m going to burn the pictures,” she replied.

  He crawled hurrying over to where she stood and put his arms around her legs.

  “Ethel, please don’t take them, Ethel. Pretty please.”

  “Don’t touch me,” she said to him. Her nerves were so bad she felt that if he touched her again she would start as though a mouse had gotten under her clothes.

  “You stand up straight and tell me like a little man why you’re here,” she said, but she kept her eyes half closed and turned from him.

  He moved his lips to answer but then he did not really understand what she meant by little man. That phrase worried him whenever he heard it.

  “What do you do with the pictures all the time, all day when I’m gone, and now tonight? I never heard of anything like it.” Then she moved away from him, so that his hands fell from her legs where he had been grasping her, but she continued to stand near his hands as though puzzled what to do next.

  “I look is all, Ethel,” he began to explain.

  “Don’t bawl when you talk,” she commanded, looking now at him in the face.

  Then: “I want the truth!” she roared.

  He sobbed and whined there, thinking over what it was she could want him to tell her, but everything now had begun to go away from his attention, and he had not really ever understood what had been expected of him here, and now everything was too hard to be borne.

  “Do you hear me, Paul?” she said between her teeth, very close to him now and staring at him in such an angry way he closed his eyes. “If you don’t answer me, do you know what I’m going to do?”

  “Punish?” Paul said in his tiniest child voice.

  “No, I’m not going to punish this time,” Ethel said.

  “You’re not!” he cried, a new fear and surprise coming now into his tired eyes, and then staring at her eyes, he began to cry with panicky terror, for it seemed to him then that in the whole world there were just the two of them, him and Ethel.

  “You remember where they sent Aunt Grace,” Ethel said with terrible knowledge.

  His crying redoubled in fury, some of his spit flying out onto the cold calcimine of the walls. He kept turning the while to look at the close confines of the staircase as though to find some place where he could see things outside.

  “Do you remember where they sent her?” Ethel said in a quiet patient voice like a woman who has endured every unreasonable, disrespectful action from a child whom she still can patiently love.

  “Yes, yes, Ethel,” Paul cried hysterically.

  “Tell Ethel where they sent Aunt Grace,” she said with the same patience and kind restraint.

  “I didn’t know they sent little boys there,” Paul said.

  “You’re more than a little boy now,” Ethel replied. “You’re old enough. . . . And if you don’t tell Ethel why you look at the photographs all the time, we’ll have to send you to the mental hospital with the bars.”

  “I don’t know why I look at them, dear Ethel,” he said now in a very feeble but wildly tense voice, and he began petting the fur on her houseslippers.

  “I think you do, Paul,” she said quietly, but he could hear her gentle, patient tone disappearing and he half raised his hands as though to protect him from anything this woman might now do.

  “But I don’t know why I look at them,” he repeated, screaming, and he threw his arms suddenly around her legs.

  She moved back, but still smiling her patient, knowing, forgiving smile.

  “All right for you, Paul.” When she said that all right for you it always meant the end of any understanding or reasoning with her.

  “Where are we going?” he cried, as she ushered him through the door, into the kitchen.

  “We’re going to the basement, of course,” she replied.

  They had never gone there together before, and the terror of what might happen to him now gave him a kind of quiet that enabled him to walk steady down the long irregular steps.

  “You carry the boxes of pictures, Paul,” she said, “since you like them so much.”

  “No, no,” Paul cried.

  “Carry them,” she commanded, giving them to him.

  He held them before him and when they reached the floor of the basement, she opened the furnace and, tightening the cord of her bathrobe, she said coldly, her white face lighted up by the fire, “Throw the pictures into the furnace door, Paul.”

  He stared at her as though all the nightmares had come true, the complete and final fear of what may happen in living had unfolded itself at last.

  “They’re Daddy!” he said in a voice neither of them recognized.

  “You had your choice,” she said coolly. “You prefer a dead man to your own mother. Either you throw his pictures in the fire, for they’re what makes you sick, or you will go where they sent Aunt Grace.”

  He began running around the room now, much like a small bird which has escaped from a pet shop into the confusion of a city street, and making odd little sounds that she did not recognize could come from his own lungs.

  “I’m not going to stand for your clowning,” she called out, but as though to an empty room.

  As he ran round and round the small room with the boxes of photographs pressed against him, some of the pictures fell upon the floor and these he stopped and tried to recapture, at the same time holding the boxes tight against him, and making, as he picked them up, frothing cries of impotence and acute grief.

  Ethel herself stared at him, incredulous. He not only could not be recognized as her son, he no longer looked like a child, but in his small unmended night shirt like some crippled and dying animal running hopelessly from its pain.

  “Give me those pictures!” she shouted, and she seized a few which he held in his fingers, and threw them quickly into the fire.

  Then turning back, she moved to take the candy boxes from him.

  But the final sight of him made her stop. He had crouched on the floor
, and, bending his stomach over the boxes, hissed at her, so that she stopped short, not seeing any way to get at him, seeing no way to bring him back, while from his mouth black thick strings of something slipped out, as though he had spewed out the heart of his grief.

  63: DREAM PALACE

  “Do you ever think about Fenton Riddleway?” Parkhearst Cratty asked the greatwoman one afternoon when they were sitting in the summer garden of her “mansion.”

  Although the greatwoman had been drinking earlier in the day, she was almost sober at the time Parkhearst put this question to her.

  It was a rhetorical and idle question, but Parkhearst’s idle questions were always put to her as a plea that they should review their lives together, and she always accepted the plea by saying nearly the same thing: “Why don’t you write down what Fenton did?” she would say. “Since you did write once,” and her face much more than her voice darkened at him.

  Actually the eyes of the greatwoman were blackened very little with mascara and yet such was their cavernous appearance they gaped at Parkhearst as though tonight they would yield him her real identity and why people called her great.

  “Fenton Riddleway is vague as a dream to me,” the greatwoman said.

  “That means he is more real to you than anybody,” Parkhearst said.

  “How could it mean anything else?” she repeated her own eternal rejoinder. Then arranging her long dress so that it covered the floor before her shoes, she began to throw her head back as though suffering from a feeling of suffocation.

  It was her signal to him that he was to leave, but he took no notice of her wishes today.

  “I can’t write down what Fenton did because I never found out who he was,” Parkhearst explained again to her.

  “You’ve said that ever since he was first with us. And since he went away, a million times.”

  She reached for the gin; it was the only drink she would have since the days of Fenton.

  “Not that I’m criticizing you for saying it,” she said. “How could I criticize you?” she added.

  “Then don’t scratch and tear at me, for Christ’s sake,” he told her.

  Her mouth wet from the drink smiled faintly at him.

  “What Fenton did was almost the only story I ever really wanted to write,” Parkhearst said, and a shadow of old happiness came over his thin brown face.

  Grainger’s eyes brightened briefly, then went back into their unrelieved darkness.

  “You can’t feel as empty of recollection as I do,” Grainger mumbled, sipping again.

  Parkhearst watched the veins bulge in his hands.

  “Why are we dead anyhow?” Parkhearst said, bored with the necessity of returning to this daily statement. “Is it because of our losing the people we loved or because the people we found were damned?” He laughed.

  One never mentioned the “real” things like this at Grainger’s, and here Parkhearst had done it, and nothing happened. Instead, Grainger listened as though hearing some two or three notes of an alto sax she recalled from the concerts she gave at her home.

  “This is the first time you ever said you were, Parkhearst. Dead,” she said in her clearest voice.

  He sat looking like a small rock that has been worked on by a swift but careless hammer.

  “Are you really without a memory?” she asked, speaking now like a child.

  He did not say anything and she began to get up.

  “Don’t get up, or you’ll fall,” he said, almost not looking in her direction.

  The greatwoman had gotten up and stood there like some more than human personage at the end of an opera. Parkhearst closed his eyes. Then she advanced to a half-fall at the feet of her old friend.

  “Are those tears?” she said looking up into his face.

  “Don’t be tiresome, Grainger. Go back and sit down,” he said, with the petulance of a small boy.

  Pushing her head towards his face, she kissed him several times.

  “You’re getting gray,” she said, almost shocked. “I didn’t know it had been such a long time.”

  “I try never to think about those things,” he looked at her now. “Please get up.”

  “Do you think Fenton Riddleway would know you now, Parkhearst?” the greatwoman asked sullenly but without anything taunting in her voice.

  “The real question is whether we would know Fenton Riddleway if we saw him.”

  “We’d know him,” she said. “Above or beneath hell.”

  As evening came on in the “mansion” (mansion a word they both thought of and used all the time because Fenton had used it), they drank more and more of the neat Holland gin, but drunkenness did not take: was it after all, they kept on saying, merely the remembrance of a boy from West Virginia, that mover and shaker Fenton, that kept them talking and living.

  “Tell me all about what he did again,” Grainger said, seated now on her gold carved chair. The dark hid her age, so that she looked now only relatively old; it almost hid the fact that she was drunk, drunk going on to ten years, and her face was shapeless and sexless.

  “Tell me what he did all over again, just this last time. If you won’t write it down, Parkhearst, you’ll have to come here and tell it to me once a month. I had always hoped you would write it down so I could have it read to me on my bad nights. . . .”

  “Your memory is so much better than mine,” Parkhearst said.

  “I have no memory,” the greatwoman said. “Or only a grain of one.”

  She raised her glass threateningly, but it had got so dark in the room she could not see just where Parkhearst’s tired voice was coming from. It was like the time she had called Russell long distance to his home town, the voice had wavered, then had grown, then had sunk into indistinguishable sounds. Parkhearst would take another drink of the gin, then his voice would rise a bit, only to die away again as he told her everything he could remember.

  “Are you awake?” Parkhearst questioned her.

  “Keep going,” she said. “Don’t stop to ask me a single thing. Just tell what he did, and then write it all down for me to read hereafter.”

  He nodded at her.

  THERE WAS THIS park with a patriot’s name near the lagoon. Parkhearst Cratty had been wandering there, not daring to go home to his wife Bella. He had done nothing in weeks, and her resentment against him would be too heavy to bear. Of course it was true, what he was later to tell Fenton himself, that he was looking for “material” for his book. Many times he had run across people in the park who had told him their stories while he pretended to listen to their voices while usually watching their persons.

  In this section of the park there were no lights, and the only illumination came from the reflection of the traffic blocks away. Here the men who came to wander about as aimless and groping as he were obvious shades in hell. He always noticed this fact as he noticed there were no lights. Parkhearst paid little attention to the actual things that went on in the park and, although not a brave or strong young man, he had never felt fear in the park itself. It was its atmosphere alone that satisfied him and he remained forever innocent of its acts.

  It was August, and cool, but he felt enervated as never before. His marriage pursued him like a never-ending nightmare, and he could not free himself from the obsession that “everything was over.”

  Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry, “A reward, I must have a reward. A reward for life just as I have lived it.”

  It was just as he had uttered the words a reward that he first saw Fenton Riddleway go past, he remembered.

  In the darkness and the rehearsed evil of the park it was odd, indeed, as Parkhearst now reflected on the event, that anyone should have stood out at all that night, one shadow from the other. Yet Fenton was remarkable at once, perhaps for no other reason than that he was actually lost and wandering about, for no other reason than this. Parkhearst did not need to
watch him for more than a moment to see his desperation.

  Parkhearst lit a cigarette so that his own whereabouts would be visible to the stranger.

  “Looking for anybody?” Parkhearst then asked.

  Fenton’s face was momentarily lighted up by Parkhearst’s cigarette: the face had, he noted with accustomed uneasiness, a kind of beauty but mixed with something unsteady, unusual.

  “Where do you get out?” the boy asked.

  He stood directly over Parkhearst in a position a less experienced man than the writer would have taken to be a threat.

  Parkhearst recognized with a certain shock that this was the first question he had ever had addressed to him in the park which was asked with the wish to be answered: somebody really wanted out of the park.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  Fenton took from his pocket a tiny dimestore notebook and read from the first page an address.

  “It’s south,” Parkhearst replied. “Away from the lagoon.”

  Fenton still looked too unsure to speak. He dropped the notebook and when he stooped to pick it up his head twitched while his eyes looked at the writer.

  “Do you want me to show you?” Parkhearst asked, pretending indifference.

  Fenton looked directly into his face now.

  Those eyes looked dumb, Parkhearst saw them again, like maybe the eyes of the first murderer, dumb and innocent and getting to be mad.

  “Show me, please,” Fenton said, and Parkhearst heard the Southern accent.

  “You’re from far off,” Parkhearst said as they began to walk in the opposite direction from the lagoon.

  Fenton had been too frightened not to want to unburden himself. He told nearly everything, as though in a police court, that he was Fenton Riddleway and that he was nineteen, that he had come with his brother Claire from West Virginia, from a town near Ronceverte, that their mother had died two weeks before, and that a friend of his named Kincaid had given him an address in a rooming house on Sixty-three Street . . .

  “You mean Sixty-third,” Parkhearst corrected him, but Fenton did not hear the correction then or when it was made fifty times later: “A house on Sixty-three Street,” he continued. “It turns out to be a not-right-kind of place at all. . . .”