The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “How is that?” Parkhearst wondered.

  They moved out of the middle section of the park and into a place where the street light looked down on them. Fenton was gazing at him easily but Parkhearst’s eyes kept to his coat pocket, which bulged obviously.

  “Is that your gun there?” he said, weary.

  Fenton watched him, moving his lips quickly.

  “Don’t let it go off on yourself,” Parkhearst said ineffectively as the boy nodded.

  “But what were you saying about that house?” the writer went back to his story.

  “It’s alive with something, I don’t know what. . . .”

  Fenton’s thick accent, which seemed to become thicker now, all at once irritated Parkhearst, and as they drew near the part of the city that was more inhabited and better lighted, he felt himself surprised by Fenton’s incredibly poor-fitting almost filthy clothes and by the fact that his hair had the look of not ever perhaps having been cut or combed. He looked more or less like West Virginia, Parkhearst supposed, and then Parkhearst always remembered he had thought this, he looked not only just West Virginia, he looked himself, Fenton.

  “What’s it alive with, then?” Parkhearst came back to the subject of the house.

  “I don’t mean it’s got ghosts, though I think it maybe does.” He stopped, fishing for encouragement to go on and when none came he said: “It’s a not-right house. There ain’t nobody in it for one thing.”

  “I don’t think I see,” Parkhearst said, and he felt not so much his interest waning as his feeling that there was something about this boy too excessive; everything about him was too large for him, the speech, the terrible clothes, the ragged hair, the possible gun, the outlandish accent.

  “All the time we’re alone in it, I keep thinking how empty it is, and what are we waiting for after all, with so little money to tide us over, if he don’t show up. Claire cries all the time on account of the change. The house don’t do him any good.”

  “Can you find your way back now, do you think?” Parkhearst asked, as they got to a street down which ordinary people and traffic were moving.

  A paralysis had struck the writer suddenly, as though all the interest he might have had in Fenton had been killed. He was beginning to be afraid also that he would be involved in more than a story.

  Fenton stopped as if to remind Parkhearst that he had a responsibility toward him. His having found the first person in his life who would listen to him had made him within ten minutes come to regard Parkhearst as a friend, and now the realization came quickly that this was only a listener who having heard the story would let him go back to the “not-right house.”

  “Here’s fifty cents for you,” Parkhearst said.

  He took it with a funny quick movement as though money for the first time had meaning for him.

  “You won’t come with me to see Claire?”

  Parkhearst stared. This odd boy, who was probably wanted by the police, who had come out of nothing to him, had asked him a question in the tone of one who had known him all his life.

  “Tomorrow maybe,” Parkhearst answered. He explained lamely about Bella waiting for him and being cross if he came any later.

  The boy’s face fell.

  “You know where to find the house?” Fenton said, hoarse.

  “Yes,” Parkhearst replied dreamily, indifferent.

  Fenton looked at Parkhearst, unbelieving. Then: “How can you find it?” he wondered. “I can’t ever find it no matter how many times I go and come. How can you then?”

  The sorrow on Fenton’s face won him over to him again, and he felt Bella’s eyes of reproach disappear from his mind for a moment.

  “Tomorrow afternoon I’ll visit you at the house,” he promised. “Two o’clock.”

  A moment later when Fenton was gone, Parkhearst looking back could not help wait for the last sight of him in the street, and a new feeling so close to acute sickness swept over him. It was the wildness and freedom Fenton had, he began to try to explain to himself. The wildness and freedom held against his own shut-in locked life. He hurried on home to Bella.

  BELLA LISTENED VAGUELY to the story of Fenton Riddleway. There had been, she recalled mechanically, scores, even hundreds, of these people Parkhearst met in order to study for his writing, but the stories themselves were never put in final shape or were never written, and Parkhearst himself forgot the old models in his search for new ones.

  “Is Fenton to take the place of Grainger now?” Bella commented on his enthusiasm, almost his ecstasy.

  There was no criticism in her remark. She was beyond that. Bella Cratty had resigned herself to her complete knowledge of her husband’s character. There was, furthermore, no opposing Parkhearst; if he were opposed he would disintegrate slowly, vanish before her eyes. He was a child who must not be crossed in the full possession of his freedom, one who must be left to follow his own whims and visions.

  She had married him without anyone knowing why, but everyone agreed she had done so with the full knowledge of what he was. If she had not known before, their married life had been a continuous daily rehearsal of Parkhearst’s character; he was himself every minute, taking more and more away from what was her with each new sorrow he brought home to her. He became more and more incurable and it was his incurable quality which made him essential to her.

  She was not happy a second. Had she seen the wandering men in the park after whom Parkhearst gazed, she might have seen herself like them, wandering without purpose away from the light. And though she tried to pretend that she wanted Parkhearst to have friends no matter what they were, no matter what they would do, she never gave up suffering, and each of the “new” people he met and “studied” cost her an impossible sacrifice.

  There was something at once about the name Fenton Riddleway that made her feel there was danger here in his name as Grainger was in hers. Only there was something in the new name more frightening than in Grainger’s.

  As two o’clock approached the following day (an evil hour in astrology, Parkhearst had noticed covertly, for Bella objected to his interest in what she called “the moons”), both of them felt the importance of his departure. He had tried to get her “ready” from the evening before so that she would accept this as Fenton’s day, when as a writer he must find out all there was to know about this strange boy. Parkhearst used the word material again, though he had promised himself to give up using the word.

  “I suppose in the end you will let Grainger have Fenton,” Bella remarked, a sudden hostility coming over her face as she sat at the kitchen table drinking her coffee.

  Parkhearst stopped his task of sewing on a button on his old gray-green jacket.

  It was only when his wife said that that he understood he did not wish to share Fenton with anyone, until, he lied to himself, he had found out everything Fenton had done. And then he corrected this lie in his own mind: he simply did not want to share Fenton with anybody. Grainger would spoil him, would take him over, if she were interested, and he knew of course that she was going to be.

  “Grainger won’t get him,” he said finally.

  Bella laughed a very high laugh, ridden with hysteria and shaky restraint. “You’ve never kept anybody from one another as long as you’ve been friends,” she reviewed their lives. “What would happen,” she went on bitterly, “if you couldn’t show one another what you take in, what you accomplish. If there was no competition!”

  “Fenton is different,” Parkhearst said, pale with anger. Then suddenly, so shaken by fear of what she said, he told her a thing which he immediately realized was trivial and silly: “He has a gun, for one thing.”

  Bella Cratty did not go on drinking coffee immediately, but not due to anything Parkhearst had said except his pronouncing of Fenton’s name. There had, of course, in their five years of marriage and in their five years of Grainger, been people with guns, and people whom he had found in streets, in parks, in holes, who had turned out to be all right, but now she sudde
nly felt the last outpost of safety had been reached. Their lives had stopped suddenly, and then were jerked ahead out of her control at last. She felt she was no longer here.

  “Maybe Grainger should meet him,” she said in a tone unlike herself, because there was no hysteria or pretending in it, just dull fear, and then she finished the coffee at the same moment her husband finished sewing the button on his coat.

  Still holding his needle and thread, he advanced to her and kissed her on the forehead. “I know you hate all this,” he said, like a doctor or soldier about to perform an heroic act. “I know you can’t get used to all this. Maybe you aren’t used to what is me.”

  Bella had not waited this time for the full effect of the kiss. She got up and quickly went into the front room and began looking out the window with the intensity of one who is about to fly out into space. He followed her there.

  “Do you hate me completely?” Parkhearst asked, happy with the sense she had given him permission to go for Fenton.

  It was nearly two o’clock, he noted, and she did not give him goodbye and the word to leave.

  “Just go, dear,” she said at last, and it was not the fact she had put on a martyr’s expression in her voice, the voice was the only one that could come from her having chosen, as she had, the life five years before.

  “I can’t go when you sound like this,” he complained. His voice told how much he wanted to go and that it was already past two o’clock.

  Yet somehow the strength to give him up did not come to her. He had to find it in her for himself and take it from her.

  “Go now, go,” she said when he kissed the back of her neck.

  “I will,” he said, “because I know I’m only hurting you by staying.”

  Bella nodded.

  When he was gone, she watched for him onto the street below. From above she could see him waving and throwing a kiss to her as he moved on down toward Sixty-third Street. He looked younger than Christ still, she said. A boy groom . . . Sometimes people had half-wondered, she knew, if she was his very young mother. She stood there in that stiff height so far above him and yet felt crawling somewhere far down, like a bug in a desert, hot and sticking to ground, and possibly not even any more alive.

  AS NECESSARY AS Bella was to his every need for existence, his only feeling of life came when he left her, as today, for a free afternoon. And this afternoon was especially free. There was even the feeling of the happiness death might give. It was only later that life was to be so like death that the idea of dying was meaningless to him, but tonight, he remembered, he had thought of death and it was full of mysterious desirability.

  It was one of those heavy days in the city when a late riser is not certain it is getting light or dark, an artificial twilight in which the sounds of the elevated trains and trucks weight darkness the more. Parkhearst hurried on down the interminable street, soon leaving the white section behind, and into the beginning of the colored district. People took no notice of him, he was no stranger to these streets, and besides he was dressed in clothes which without being too poor made him inconspicuous.

  He was not looking at the street anyhow today, whose meanness and filth usually gave his soul such satisfaction. His whole mind was on Fenton. Fenton was a small-town boy, and yet all his expression and gestures and being made it right that he should live on this street, where no one really belonged or stayed very long.

  It was difficult, though, to see Fenton living in a house, even in the kind of house that would be near Sixty-third Street. There must be some kind of mistake there, he thought.

  He went on, pursued by the memory of Fenton’s face. Was there more, he wondered out loud, in that face than poverty and a tendency to be tricky if not criminal? What were those eyes conveying, then, some meaning that was truthful and honest over and above his deceit and rottenness?

  He was late. He hurried faster. The dark under the elevated made him confuse one street for another. He stopped and in his indecision looked back east toward the direction of the park where he had met Fenton: he feared Fenton had played a trick on him, for there was nothing which resembled a house on the street. He stood in front of a fallen-in building with the handwritten sign in chalk:

  THE COME AND SEE RESURRECTION PENTECOSTAL CHURCH.

  REVEREND HOSEA GULLEY, PASTOR.

  Then walking on, he saw near a never-ending set of vacant lots the house he knew must contain Fenton. It was one of those early twentieth-century houses that have survived by oversight but which look so rotten and devoured that you can’t believe they were ever built but that they rotted and mushroomed into existence and that their rot was their first and last growth.

  There was no number. It was a color like green and yellow. Around the premises was a fence of sharp iron, cut like spears.

  He began knocking on the immense front door and then waiting as though he knew there would be no answer.

  As nobody stirred, he began calling out the name of his new friend. Then he heard some faint moving around in the back and finally Fenton, looking both black and pale, appeared through the frosted glass of the inner door and stared out. His face greeted Parkhearst without either pleasure or recognition, and he advanced mechanically and irritably, as though the door had blown open and he was coming to close it.

  “No wonder you had trouble finding it,” Parkhearst said when Fenton unlocked the door and let him in.

  “He’s having a bad spell, that’s why I’m in a hurry,” Fenton explained.

  “Who?” Parkhearst closed the door behind him.

  “Claire, my brother Claire.”

  They went through a hallway as long as a half city block to a small room in which there was a dwarflike cot with a large mattress clinging to it and a crippled immense chest of drawers supported by only three legs. The window was boarded up and there was almost no light coming from a dying electric bulb hung from the high ceiling.

  On the bed lay a young boy dressed in overall pants and a green sweater. He looked very pale but did not act in pain.

  “He says he can’t walk now,” Fenton observed. “Claire, can’t you say hello to the visitor?” Fenton went over to the bed and touched Claire on the shoulder.

  “He keeps asking me why we can’t move on. To a real house, I suppose,” Fenton explained softly to Parkhearst. “And that worries him. There are several things that worry him,” Fenton said in a bored voice.

  “Look,” Claire said cheerfully and with energy, pointing to the wall. There were a few bugs moving rather rapidly across the cracked calcimine. “Sit down in this chair,” Fenton said and moved the chair over to Parkhearst.

  “Do you really think,” Fenton began on the subject that was closest to him too, “that we’re in the right house maybe?”

  Parkhearst did not speak, feeling unsure how to begin. For one thing, he was not positive that the small boy who was called Claire was not feebleminded, but the longer he looked the more he felt the boy was reasonably intelligent but probably upset by the kind of life he was leading with Fenton. He therefore did not reply to Fenton’s question at once, and Fenton repeated it, almost shouting. He had gotten very much more excited since they had met in the park the evening before.

  Parkhearst was noticing that Claire followed his brother with his eyes around the room with a look of both intense approval and abject dependence. It was plain that between him and nothing there was only Fenton.

  “We’ve come to the end of our rope, I guess,” Fenton said, almost forgetting that Parkhearst had not replied to his question.

  “No,” Parkhearst said, but Fenton hardly heard him now, talking so rapidly that his spit flew out on all sides of his mouth. He talked about their mother’s funeral and how they had come to this house all because Kincaid had known them back in West Virginia and had promised them a job here. Then suddenly he picked up a book that Claire had under the bedclothes and showed it to Parkhearst as though it was both something uncommon and explanatory of their situation. The book, old and
ripped, was titled Under the Trees, a story about logging.

  “Doesn’t anybody else live here?” Parkhearst inquired at last.

  “We haven’t heard nobody,” Fenton replied. “There’s so many bugs it isn’t surprising everybody left, if they was here,” he went on. “But Claire says there is,” he looked in the direction of his brother. “Claire feels there is people here.”

  “I hear them all the time,” Claire said.

  “No, there is nobody here,” Parkhearst assured both of them. “This is a vacant house and you must have made a mistake when you came in here. Or your friend Kincaid played a joke on you,” he finished, seeing at once by their expression he should not have added this last sentence.

  “Anyhow,” Parkhearst continued awkwardly while Fenton stared at him with his strange eyes, “it’s no place for you, especially with Claire sick. I think I have a plan for you, though,” Parkhearst said, as though thinking through a delicate problem.

  Fenton walked over very close to him as though Parkhearst were about to hand him a written paper which would explain everything and tell him and Claire what to do in regard to the entire future.

  “I think Grainger will give you the help you need,” he explained. He had forgotten that Fenton knew nothing about her.

  Fenton turned away and looked out the boarded window. Evidently he had expected some immediate help, and Parkhearst had only spoken a name like a matchbox, Grainger, adding later that was the last name of a wealthy woman that nobody ever called by her first name. This was discouraging because of course Fenton knew he could never do anything to please anybody with such a name.

  “Grainger will like you,” Parkhearst went on doggedly, knowing he was not moving Fenton at all.

  “You would be interested in going to her mansion at least,” he said.

  Claire, following Fenton’s example, showed likewise no interest in the “great woman.”

  “If you promise me you will go with me to the house of the ‘great woman,’ ” Parkhearst said (using that phrase preciously and purposely just as he had mentioned Grainger without explaining who she was or that she was a woman), “I assure you we’ll be able to help you between us. Really help.”