The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Well, let’s go, then,” Parkhearst said lightly. “She gets cross when people are late,” he explained.

  Fenton held on to his belt as though that were what was to lift him out of bed, then got up, and turned on the light.

  “You’re dressed up!” He looked at Parkhearst and then down at himself.

  They suddenly were both looking at Fenton’s shoes, as though they couldn’t help it, and as they both saw they were so miserable and ridiculous, they had to look at them objectively as horrors.

  “I’m not really dressed up,” Parkhearst said weakly, feeling the weakness come over him again which he always felt in Fenton’s presence. “But come on, Fenton,” he said, thinking of the boy’s toes slightly coming through the shoes. “She’s sent a taxi for us, and it’s waiting.”

  Fenton threw a look back at the room. “So long, house,” he said, and he actually waved at the room, Parkhearst noted.

  They said almost nothing on the way to the greatwoman’s house. Fenton kept his head down as though he were praying or sick in his stomach. He did not look out even when Parkhearst pointed out things that might have had a personal interest to him: the sight of the park where they had met, or the police station.

  At last the taxi came to the house. Fenton hesitated, as though he might not get out after all. “Is this a mansion?” he asked.

  Parkhearst looked at him closely. Fenton’s words always had an ambiguousness about them, but there could be no ambiguousness when you studied his face: he meant just what he said, and perhaps that made the words odd.

  They could hear the music from the outside.

  “That is the new music the musicians are playing,” Parkhearst explained. “Grainger doesn’t really listen to it, but she has the musicians come because there is nothing else left to do, and it draws her circle of people to her.”

  Without knocking, they entered what was the most immense room Fenton had ever seen. It was almost as dark, however, as the house where he and Claire had been waiting, and the ceiling was no taller. There were a number of people sitting in corners except for one large corner of the room where some colored musicians were playing.

  At the far end of the room on a slightly raised little platform, in a mammoth chair, Grainger, the greatwoman, sat, or rather hung over one side of the arm.

  “My God, we’re late after all,” Parkhearst exclaimed. “She’s too drunk to know us, I’m afraid.”

  Fenton began to feel a little easier once he was inside the mansion. No one had paid him the least attention. It was, in fact, he saw with relief, not unlike the All Night Theater, for whatever the people were doing here in the mansion, they were paying absolutely no attention to him or Parkhearst or perhaps to anything. Yet they must have seen him, for he could see their heads move and hear their voices as they talked softly among themselves. And again like the All Night Theater, they were about half colored and half white.

  Parkhearst was not doing anything as Fenton’s attention returned slowly to him. They were in the middle of the great room, and his guide merely stood there watching Grainger. Finally, as though after a struggle with himself, he took Fenton’s hand angrily and said, “Come over here, we have to go through with this.”

  They went up to the woman in the chair. She was possibly forty and her face was still beautiful although her mouth was slightly twisted and her throat was creased now and fat. Her eyes, although not focused on the two young men who were standing in front of her, were extremely beautiful and would have been intelligent had they not been so vacant. Whenever Parkhearst addressed her, she would immediately turn her head in the other direction.

  “Grainger, I have brought Fenton Riddleway here to see you, just as you told me to do.”

  She did not say a word, although Parkhearst knew that she had heard him.

  “She’s angry,” Parkhearst said, like a radio commentator assigned to a historical event which is hopelessly delayed. He sighed as though he could no longer breathe in this atmosphere.

  “Everything is getting to be more difficult than anything is really worth,” he pronounced.

  “Please look at Fenton at least and we will leave then,” he addressed Grainger.

  Suddenly the greatwoman laughed and took Parkhearst’s hands in her very small ones. Parkhearst gave a sound expressing relief, though his face did not lose the agonized look it had assumed the moment he recognized she was drunk.

  “Are you going to be good now?” he inquired in a calmer voice.

  She laughed cheerfully, like a young girl.

  Fenton thought that she looked beautiful at that moment and he looked at her dress which was the kind he felt a princess in old books might have worn; it was so frighteningly white and soft and there was so much of it, it seemed to fill the little platform on which they were now all standing.

  Then as Grainger’s eyes moved away from Parkhearst they settled slowly and gloomily upon Fenton. They immediately expressed hostility or a kind of sullen anger. Then looking away from both of them, she picked up a drink she had placed on the floor by the chair and took a swallow so deep that she seemed to be talking to someone in the end of the glass.

  “Haven’t you had enough, tonight?” Parkhearst said gently. “It’s that Holland stuff, too, and you promised me you wouldn’t ever take that again.”

  “Cut that, Parkhearst, cut that,” she said suddenly. “You’ve been boring me for a year now and I’m not listening to any more.”

  This was said in a tone that was tough and which was hard to connect with the soft long dress and the fine eyes.

  “Well, give us something to drink then,” Parkhearst retorted. “If you’re sobered up enough now to be ugly, you can remember your duties as the hostess.”

  Grainger pointed contemptuously to a table where there were bottles and glasses. Then her gaze returned to Fenton, and the same hostility and suspicion crossed her face.

  “Who is this?” she said, putting her hand on his face as one might touch what is perhaps a door in a dark house.

  Fenton could only stand there, allowing her hand to be on him and looking down at her dress. He found that her gaze and touch were not unlike the soft glances that the characters on the screen of the All Night Theater had given him last night, looking down while he wrote what he had to write in the note papers.

  His meekness and his quiet partially calmed the anger of her expression.

  “Don’t you like Fenton, Grainger?” Parkhearst said, returning with drinks for himself and Fenton.

  “Why didn’t you fill mine up too?” she said, turning bitterly to Parkhearst.

  “Because you’ve had enough. And I’m taking the drink you now have away from you,” he said, reaching for her glass.

  Grainger smiled at this and put the glass into his hand.

  “Now, Grainger, wake up, clear awake, and look at this boy I brought to meet you. You’re always wanting to meet new people and then when I bring them to you, you get into a state like this and don’t even know me when I come in. This is Fenton Riddleway.”

  “I saw him,” the greatwoman said. She kept eyeing her drink, which Parkhearst had set on the table near her.

  “How do you feel about the musicians tonight?” she inquired suddenly.

  “I’ve heard them when they sounded more advanced,” Parkhearst said. “But I wasn’t listening to them at all. . . . Anyhow, the new music sounds only like its name to me now. It was only new that first night.”

  “So you brought Fenton to see me,” she said, looking now for the first time without hostility at the guest.

  Fenton had finished half his drink and both he and Parkhearst had sat down on the floor at the feet of Grainger.

  She began to grow quiet now that they were both with her and both drinking.If everything, she had said once a long time ago, could be a garden with the ones you always want and with drinking for ever and ever.

  “Do you think you’re going to like Fenton?” Parkhearst began again.

  �
��If you want me to, I guess I can,” Grainger answered. She looked at her drink on the table but then evidently gave up the struggle to have it.

  “He looks a little like Russell,” Grainger said without any preparation for such a statement.

  The remark made Parkhearst go a little white because Russell had been everything. Russell had been her first husband, the one who when he died, people said, made her go off the deep end and drink for ten years, to end up the way she was now.

  “Only he’s not,” Grainger added. But she added this only because she saw Parkhearst change color. “Nobody could quite be Russell again,” she said.

  When Parkhearst did not reply, holding his face in a wounded quivering expression, the greatwoman flared up. “I said, could they, Parkhearst?”

  “Just nobody could resemble Russell,” Parkhearst said.

  “Well, all right, then, why didn’t you say that before?” she scolded.

  She ignored his contemptuous silence and acted happy. “Russell was the last of any men that there were,” she began, turning to Fenton. “He didn’t love me, of course, but I couldn’t live without him, every five minutes having to touch him or see him coming somewhere near me. . . .”

  “That isn’t true, Grainger, and you know it. Why do you lie to this boy, making out that Russell wasn’t crazy about you? . . .” Then he stopped as he realized how deadly it was going to be ever to get started on Russell all over again.

  Upstairs, he wanted to tell Fenton, there was that memorial room to him everybody has heard about somewhere but never seen, a shrine to his being, with hundreds of immense photographs, mementos, clothes, and everywhere fresh flowers every day. Grainger herself never went into the shrine, and Negro women kept the flowers fresh and the holy places dusted.

  “Crazy . . . about me?” Grainger shot at him and a look of unparalleled meanness came over her face, so that she resembled at that moment a stuffed carnivore he had once seen in a museum. “Nobody was ever crazy about me. The only reason anybody’s here now is I have more money than anybody else in town to slake them.”

  Parkhearst looked up at the word slake; he could not ever remember hearing her use it before.

  “Look at them!” she shouted, pointing to the dim figures in the next room. “Nobody was ever crazy about me.”

  Both Fenton and Parkhearst gazed back at the people in the next room as though to see them, in the greatwoman’s word, being slaked.

  Then her anger subsided, and she gave Fenton a brief oversweet smile. Growing a bit more serious and commanding, she said: “Come over here, Fenton Riddleway.”

  Parkhearst gave a severe nod with his head for Fenton to go to her.

  Fenton had hardly gotten to her chair when she reached out and took his hand in hers and held it for a moment. She laughed quietly, kissed his hand in so strange a manner that the action had no easy meaning, and then released it.

  Parkhearst had risen meanwhile and poured himself and Fenton another shot of gin.

  “You think I should have more?” Fenton said in a way that recalled Claire.

  “Well naturally, yes,” Parkhearst said, and trembled with nervousness. The comparison of Fenton with Russell did not augur too well. He felt a kind of throbbing jealousy as well as fear. It was the biggest compliment that Grainger had ever given to any of the men he had brought to her house. He felt suddenly that he had given Grainger too much in giving her Fenton and Fenton too much in giving him to her.

  Parkhearst realized with a suddenness which resembled a break in his reason that he needed both Grainger and Fenton acutely, and that if he lost them to each other, he would not survive this time at all.

  In the midst of his anguish, his eye fell upon both of them coolly, almost as though he had not seen either of them before. It was outrageous, rather sad, and frightening all at once; not so much because she had a dress that was too fine for royalty and Fenton looked somehow seedier than any living bum, but because something about the way they were themselves, both together and apart, made them seem more real and less real than anybody living he had ever known.

  “He’s Russell!” Grainger said finally, without any particular emphasis.

  “No, he’s not,” Parkhearst replied firmly but with the anger beginning to come to make his words shake in his mouth.

  “He is,” she said, louder.

  “No, Grainger, you know these things don’t happen twice. Nothing does.”

  “Just for tonight he is,” Grainger replied, staring at Fenton.

  “Not even for tonight. He just isn’t Russell, Grainger. Look again.”

  “I’m going to have a drink now,” she threatened him. Half to her own surprise she saw Parkhearst make no attempt to prevent her. She walked rigidly, balancing herself with outstretched hands, over to the little table, filled her glass with a tremendous drain of the bottle, and drank half the draught: at once.

  “Grainger!” Parkhearst was frightened, forgetting he had permitted her to get up at all.

  “All right, he isn’t Russell, then. Or he is Russell. What difference! He can stay here, though. . . . Does he need anything?”

  The drink, Parkhearst thought, perhaps has sobered her.

  She sat down in the great chair and began staring at Fenton again. Then his clothes at last caught her attention.

  “Would you accept a suit?” she began. “One of Russell’s suits,” the greatwoman said, turning her face away from Parkhearst as though to shield her words from him and give them only to Fenton.

  Fenton in turn looked at Parkhearst for a clue, and Parkhearst could only look down, knowing that Fenton would never understand the generosity that was being offered, the giving away of the clothes of the dead young Christ.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” She turned in rage now on Parkhearst. “Why don’t you go upstairs with your jealous eyes and give him one of Russell’s suits?”

  As her face lay back in the chair, burning with rage, Parkhearst saw how mistaken he had been about her ever being sobered up by a drink. At that very moment the musicians stopped playing the new music for the evening, the hostess fell over, slightly, upsetting her drink, and then with almost no noise slipped to the floor and lay perfectly still, her drinking glass near her hand, without even a goodnight, lying there, as Parkhearst observed, looking a little too much like Hamlet’s mother.

  WE MAY AS well go to my house now,” Parkhearst said, after they had got one of Russell’s suits on Fenton.

  “What shall we do with my old clothes?” Fenton wondered, looking at them with almost as much wonder now as other people had.

  Parkhearst hesitated. “We’ll take them,” he said. “This way.”

  They went downstairs away from the “shrine” and walked past the room where Grainger was lying on an immense silver bed with red coverings. She had her clothes still on. Parkhearst hesitated near the bed.

  “I suppose we should say goodnight to her, in case she’s conscious.”

  They both stood there in dead silence while Parkhearst tried to make up his mind.

  “Grainger!” he called. Then he suddenly laughed as he saw the serious expression on Fenton’s face.

  “She’s just out, she won’t be up and around for God knows when,” Parkhearst explained in his bored tone. “When she gets in these states she lies till she gets up or until they find her. I will have to come over here tomorrow and see how things are. . . .”

  Then for the first time since they had been in the “shrine,” Parkhearst gave Fenton a more critical look. Russell’s suit had been a close enough fit all right; the greatwoman had not been too drunk to understand the relative sizes of the two men, although the trousers were a bit too short in the legs. The suit made a tremendous change, of course, and yet the boy who looked out from this absurdly rich cloth seemed to belong in it, despite the expression of pain mingled with rage imprinted on his mouth. He was a Russell of some kind in the clothes.

  Parkhearst gave him a last look directly in the eye.

>   “My wife will be asleep,” Parkhearst told him in a rather cross voice, “but if we speak low, she won’t hear us. Anyhow we have to have coffee.”

  PARKHEARST’S HOME WAS an apartment on the fifth floor of a building that leaned forward slightly as if it would bend down to the street.

  “I forgot you had a wife,” Fenton remarked, looking at him vaguely. “I never thought of you as married.”

  “A lot of people can’t,” Parkhearst admitted. “I suppose it’s because I never had a job, never worked.”

  Parkhearst observed with some satisfaction that this made no impression on Fenton. He believed that if he had said he had murdered someone, for instance, Fenton would have accepted this statement with the same indifferent air.

  That, as Parkhearst was beginning to see more and more, was the main thing about Fenton, his being able to accept nearly anything. For one so young it was unusual. He accepted the immense dreariness of things as though there were no other possibility in the shape of things.

  A cat came out of the door as they entered the apartment. They proceeded down a long hallway to a kitchen.

  “I’ll throw your old clothes on this bench,” Parkhearst said. Then he began to fumble with the coffee can.

  Before he began to measure out the coffee he stopped as though he thought somebody was calling to him from the front of the apartment. Then when he did not hear his wife’s voice, he began to boil the water for the coffee.

  Fenton put his head down on the tiny kitchen table before which he sat.

  “Don’t go to sleep, Fenton. You can’t spend the night here. My wife would die. . . . And Claire must be worrying about you.”

  “Not Claire,” Fenton mumbled. “I thought I told you that we sleep at different times, on account of the bed being so small, and the bugs and all. There are hundreds of bugs.” He began to think of the anguish they cause. “They crawl up and down, sometimes they go fast, and you can never find them when they bite. They stink like old woodsheds.”

  “Bugs are awful,” Parkhearst agreed. “But,” he went on, “about Claire. He may not miss you, but is he safe alone?”

  “I’m too sick to care,” Fenton said, his head on the table now.