The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “How are you sick?” Parkhearst wondered.

  “Inside,” Fenton replied, still not taking his head off the table and talking into the wood like a colored fortune teller Parkhearst had once known. “Where your soul’s supposed to be,” he spoke again.

  Parkhearst stared at him.

  “If there was a God,” Fenton said quickly, raising his head from the table and giving Parkhearst an accusing look, “none of this would happen.”

  “Oh, it might, Fenton,” Parkhearst answered. “You don’t think He’s all-powerful, do you?”

  “Do you believe in Him?” Fenton wondered.

  “I don’t believe but I’m always thinking about it somehow.”

  “Do you believe Claire is dying?” Fenton said quickly.

  “No,” Parkhearst answered.

  “I keep seeing him dead,” Fenton said.

  Parkhearst handed Fenton a cup of coffee. Then he sat down, facing Fenton. They both drank their coffee without continuing the discussion. Parkhearst from time to time would listen intently to see if Bella called to him, but there was no sound, no matter how many times he stopped to listen.

  “I want to be dead like a bug,” Fenton said and laid his head down on the table again.

  “Drink all of that coffee and then I’ll get you some more.”

  Parkhearst watched the thick hair come loose from the head and creep over the table’s edge like a strange unfolding plant.

  “Is this the first time you’ve ever been drunk?” Parkhearst’s voice came from far away.

  “I drink nearly all the time,” Fenton said, and some coffee began to trickle down the side of his mouth. “When I go home,” he went on, “Claire will be dead. I will be happy, like a great load has been taken off my neck, and then I will probably fly into a thousand pieces and disappear. I am sick of him just the same, dead or alive. He makes it too hard for me, just like Mama did. Both him and her talked too much about God and how we would all meet at His Throne on the Final Day. . . . Do you disbelieve in the Throne too?” he looked up at Parkhearst.

  The writer watched him, silent.

  Fenton was watching him also, almost as though from behind his thick disheveled hair.

  “Keep drinking the coffee,” Parkhearst said in a soft voice. He felt weak lest Bella should get up and see this. Then he began to feel irritated seeing Fenton in Russell’s clothing.

  “Grainger is an idiot,” Parkhearst said.

  “Are you in love with me too?” Fenton asked Parkhearst, but the writer merely sat there drinking, as though he had not heard.

  Fenton did not say any more for a long time. Perhaps ten minutes passed this way in the silence of the city night; that is a silence in which although one cannot really say this is a sound I am hearing now, many little contractions and movements like the springs of a poorly constructed machine make one feel that something will break with a sudden crash and perhaps destroy everyone.

  Fenton knocked his cup off the table and it broke evenly in two at Parkhearst’s feet.

  “What did you think of the church Grainger has for Russell?” Parkhearst said, getting up for another cup.

  He poured coffee into the cup and handed it to his friend. “Drink this.”

  Fenton half sat up and gulped down some more of the coffee.

  “Did you hear what I asked about her church for him?” Parkhearst began again.

  “Why did she love Russell so?” Fenton asked, and the whites of his eyes suddenly extinguished his pupils so that he looked like a statue.

  “He was nothing,” Parkhearst said. “Rather beautiful. His mind worked all right, I guess. He was nothing. He had so little personality he looked all right in all kinds of clothes. I think he had millions of life insurance policies. He was a blank except for one thing. He loved Grainger. I think maybe he was the one started calling her by her last name, and now nobody calls her by her first. Grainger didn’t love him, but he told her he loved her every ten minutes. It was funny, I could never figure it out, why he loved her. I used to stare at him to try to understand who he was. I think I know who Grainger is, but not Russell. Then he died in his car one night. Nobody knows what from. They said his heart. And he had all these life insurance policies. He was rich though before, owned factories and mines and patents and things. After that Grainger never had to think about work. But I think she’s spent nearly all she has. When she has spent the last of it she will have to die too. . . .”

  Parkhearst’s voice ended with a little sound like an old phonograph record stopping but still running. He had not given the speech for any reason except the pleasure he took in telling it. “The way they found him in the car is so beautiful. He had been out drinking all night, and of course he and Grainger together. He said goodbye to her from that car he had from Italy, and she went dragging into her bedroom, not very much like Shakespeare but like the girl in Shakespeare, they threw kisses into and out of the balcony, and then Grainger fell down dead drunk on her bed, and Russell still sat out there in the Italian car, trying to call somebody because he suddenly, I suppose, felt sick; the coroner said he had felt sick, Russell had opened his vest, and had blown the horn that only sounded like a small chime (the neighbors told about that), and the next morning there he sat in the sun under her house, dead as time. Grainger never mentioned how he died to anybody we know. She doesn’t even drink any more than she did then, but there’s something different about her, I guess, because after he died she could never change but always had to go on acting herself.

  “The church,” Parkhearst began again, getting up and looking out into the black windows. “What do you think of the church?”

  “All those photographs of rich people?” Fenton said.

  “Yes,” Parkhearst nodded seriously. “And those fake poses of her. She knows she is not the woman in those photos, of course, because she wasn’t the woman in her own mind Russell said she was.

  “Grainger knows the truth about herself,” Parkhearst continued, “but it only makes things more impossible for her. And it’s really only money that keeps her alive, and it’s going, nearly gone.”

  “You make me sicker than I was,” Fenton said suddenly. “Why do you find out all these things about people when they are so sad?”

  “I don’t know,” Parkhearst said softly.

  “How do you know all these things?” Fenton said almost desperately. “Do you know about me like that too?” He laid his head down on the table and didn’t wait for Parkhearst’s answer.

  Parkhearst said nothing.

  Then Fenton got up. “I got to go back.”

  “Where?” Parkhearst was curious and anxious.

  “The All Night Theater.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about the All Night Theater some time?” Parkhearst asked.

  “There ain’t nothing to tell. It’s what it says, it goes on all night.”

  “It’s like the park then.” Parkhearst had a very quiet voice.

  Fenton did not say anything, drinking his coffee from the saucer.

  “It’s morning,” Parkhearst announced more cheerfully.

  “You can’t tell when it’s morning in a city place,” Fenton said.

  “You told me that before,” Parkhearst said, “but that is only because you’re Fenton that you think that.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Parkhearst woke up with a headache and the feeling of rags on his tongue. He knew without looking that Bella had gone to work.

  He thought of the greatwoman almost at once and before he thought of Fenton. He would have to go to see her at once. She would still be unconscious, the wreck of her evening undisturbed yet by the maids.

  His face looked old and thin and brown in the looking glass, old for twenty-nine. Yet how old did that look, except older than Fenton Riddleway?

  Then all the part about Grainger and Russell and Russell’s resembling Fenton or Fenton’s resembling Russell came back.

  “I suppose in Grainger’s mind,” he said aloud to himself, “she t
hinks she has already taken him over, away from me. Of course it’s true. I’ve given her everybody she ever had.”

  He had forgotten Russell only because he had never counted him.

  A NOT UNUSUAL thing was to smell flowers in front of Grainger’s house. Today their perfume was stronger than usual. There was the silence of early day inside of the house, but there was evidence that the maids had come and gone, and noiselessly enough to have left her still sleeping in the front parlor.

  The flowers, he noticed, were only roses. Grainger lay on the divan, a queer frayed coverlet over her. A tiny smile covered her mouth.

  “Is the Queen of Hell conscious?” he said in a voice that struggled with both eagerness and contempt.

  He began kissing her on the eyelids. “Open those big blue eyes.”

  Grainger opened her eyes, her smile vanished, and the accusing frown returned. “You cheap son of a bitch,” she said groggily. “You never loved Russell. You never even would talk about him. You didn’t understand his greatness. His going never even moved you.”

  “Shall I make you some breakfast now?” he wondered.

  “You hated Russell.”

  He kissed her fingers.

  “You make me sick. You cheap son of a bitch,” she said, looking at him kiss her fingers. “I ought to hate you. Russell hated you. He said you were lacking in the fundamental. That boy you dragged here last night, what’s his name? . . .”

  Parkhearst told her.

  “. . . he hates you too. You know so damn much. You sit around seeing things so that you can write them down in a hundred years.”

  Parkhearst went on holding her fingers as though he were giving her the energy to go on.

  He looked longingly at some hot coffee on a nearby table, then letting her hands fall slowly, he got up and went over to the table and poured himself a cup and began sipping.

  “And why do we all love you, though, when you stink with cheapness, dishonor, not having probably one human hair on your body. Maybe I love you the most. . . .”

  “Don’t forget my wife,” he said, and the expression my wife as he said it had a different quality than that of any other husband who had ever said the words.

  “Your wife!” she said, getting up and staring at him. “She owns you, but I wouldn’t call that loving. Anyhow, she’s overpaid. . . .”

  “Overpaid?” he said, his mouth dropping slightly.

  They were both silent, as though even for them frankness had overstepped itself.

  “What was I saying to you when we ran into this quiet period?” she began again.

  “About my wife getting too much for her money,” he said exhaustedly.

  “Who is this Fenton?” she changed topics. “What did you bring him here for?”

  “I thought he would be a change for you. You really ordered him anyhow, and have forgotten it.”

  “I never ordered him,” she said carefully, drawing the silk coverlet up to her eyebrows. “Did you think he would remind me of Russell?” she put the question with coy crafty innocence, and he felt he would laugh.

  “No, Grainger, it didn’t occur to me at the time.”

  “Don’t lie to me as though I were your wife!” she lashed at him. “If he hadn’t looked a little like Russell would you have brought him here then?”

  “Yes, I would, Grainger.” He smarted now under her attack. “I brought him here because he was so much just himself. This boy is better than Russell,” he took final courage to throw at her.

  “I’m glad you said boy.” Grainger was quiet under his blasphemy. “He’s a child, really. And I’m an old woman.”

  Parkhearst waited for her.

  “How did you find him?” she went on, muttering now, less irritation in her voice.

  “How do I find everybody?” he said, a kind of dull bitterness in his voice.

  “I never find anybody at all,” she said. “Are you jealous because I did something for him?” she wanted to know suddenly.

  “Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But after all I wanted to bring him here. I was willing to take the risk.”

  She saw the flowers for the first time.

  “Do you know why I buy all these flowers?” she asked him.

  “Of course,” he said, impatient at her always changing the subject so abruptly.

  “No, you don’t,” she said with a ridiculous emphasis. “Tell me why I have them then, if you know. . . .”

  “Why do you have that church upstairs?” he said.

  “Church?” she said, somewhat distracted and looking at him with her back to the window. He had forgotten that this was his private word and that he had not ever used it for her; and yet he had employed it with such force of habit, she knew it was his word and that he must say it all the time when out of her presence.

  Recovering from her shock over the word, she began to talk about the flowers again: “I can see now you don’t know everything after all.”

  “If there hadn’t been any Russell, of course you wouldn’t have flowers,” he raised his voice as he would have had he lived an ordinary domestic life with ordinary people.

  “Should I go to see him?” She changed to a new line of thought.

  He stared at her with almost real anger.

  “Should I return his call or not?” she roared. “Don’t start being Christ with me again or something will happen.”

  “It’s too silly even for you to say,” he told her. “Returning a call to Fenton.” His voice, though, softened a bit.

  “He is very beautiful, isn’t he?” she said. “More than Russell was.”

  “Grainger, you know we never agree with one another about who is beautiful or who is anything.”

  “He’s more beautiful than Russell,” she went on, both musing and commanding. “But there’s something not right with him that Russell never had. There was nothing really wrong with Russell.”

  He looked up briefly at her as though something important had finally been said.

  “When should I go visit him?” she asked him eagerly.

  “We can’t go today.” Parkhearst acted bored. “Bella’s coming home this afternoon from work.”

  “I wish you would quit mentioning Bella,” she complained. “It’s all you talk about . . . You get me involved with this new boy, and then you go off with your wife, and leave me without anything.”

  “Grainger, don’t be a complete idiot all the time.”

  “I’ll go,” she said. “You’ll stay home and entertain that Bella and I’ll go. And every minute,” she vituperated, “you’ll be thinking of me and him together.”

  Parkhearst laughed a little, and then the pain of the scene which she had just presented to his imagination bore down with unaccustomed weight.

  “You don’t even know where he lives,” he said. “I can just see you going in there in your finery.”

  He laughed such a nasty laugh that Grainger found herself listening to it as attentively as one of the “concerts.”

  THE NEXT THING Fenton remembered was standing in front of a wrestling arena known as Fair City. He was in front of a little wooden gate with his hands put through the partitions as though asking somebody for an admission ticket. It was still early morning, almost no one was on Sixty-third Street; and so, removing his hands from the partitions at last, he began walking in the direction of the house.

  Right in front of the house he stopped. He heard several voices singing something vaguely sacred. “It’s niggers,” he said peevishly, rubbing the back of his neck. He raised his eyes to the Come and See Resurrection Church. He leaned his head then gently over onto the pavement so that it was within a few inches of the curb and some of the coffee he had drunk came up easily. Then he got up and unlocked the door to the house and went inside.

  He felt he must look creased and yellow as he opened Claire’s door.

  Claire was sitting on the kitchen chair but hardly glanced up at Fenton and only nodded in answer to his brother’s greeting.

 
; The sound of the colored spiritualists was just faintly audible here.

  “How can they shout when it’s morning?” Fenton asked, and then as Claire did not say any more, he asked, “I don’t suppose anybody called?”

  Claire merely stared at him.

  “Ain’t you all right?” Fenton said, going over to the chair and touching him.

  “Dooon’t,” the boy cried, as though he had touched him on a raw nerve.

  “Claire! Are you sick?” Fenton wanted to know.

  “Don’t touch my head,” Claire told him, and Fenton took his hand away.

  “Let me get you into bed, and I’ll go for coffee and rolls,” Fenton told him and he helped him into the cot.

  “I don’t want none,” Claire said and he closed his eyes.

  “You didn’t notice my new clothes,” Fenton complained.

  “Yes, I did,” Claire replied without opening his eyes.

  “Do you like them?” Fenton said, looking around, as though to find some part of the room that would reflect his image.

  “Kind of, yeah,” Claire answered.

  “I’ll go for something for you now,” Fenton encouraged him, but he didn’t go. He kept staring at the deep pallor of Claire. He looked around the room as though there might be something there that would extend help to them.

  Fenton looked at himself as he sat there on the chair in his new clothes. He wondered if he was changing; there was something about the wearing of those clothes that made him feel almost as if his body had begun to change, that his soul had begun to change into another soul. A new life was beginning for him, he dimly recognized. And with the new life, he knew, Claire would be less important. He knew that Claire would not like Grainger or Parkhearst and would not go to visit them or be with them. He knew that Claire actually never wanted to leave this room again. He had come to the last stages of his journey. Fenton tried not to think of this but it was too difficult to avoid: Claire had come as far now as he could. . . . There could be no more journeying around for him. And Fenton knew that as long as Claire was Claire he would not let him lead the “new life” he saw coming for him. There would be trouble, then, a great deal of trouble.