The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Is Jessie Mae worried or something?” Mrs. Hemlock felt her way in the break which had come into the conversation.

  “Worried, my foot,” Myrtle sprang suddenly at this suggestion, and she picked up her glass again and tasted the punch.

  “She lives to worry other people, if you want to know. . . . Or if you really think about it, too much money and not enough to do. . . . Do you know she has a maid to dress her now!”

  Mrs. Hemlock’s heavy face was suffused with the flush of pleasure. And although she had stood until now in her professional guise as hostess, she decided to sit down. She sat directly in front of Myrtle and said: “She doesn’t!”

  Myrtle looked almost cross at Mrs. Hemlock, for she felt the latter’s exclamation was hardly necessary even in a rhetorical sense.

  “I don’t think Jessie Mae does a thing for herself any more,” Myrtle was definite on this. “She has, you know, eight servants.”

  “And yet her house remains so—” and Mrs. Hemlock was going to describe the untidiness again but Myrtle had already gone ahead with:

  “Jessie Mae orders everything there is to be done. And you can bet your bottom dollar that if there’s untidiness she orders that too!”

  Mrs. Hemlock gasped quietly and lowered her head as if to take in all the meaning of the statement, but Myrtle did not see fit to let her contemplate anything at that moment.

  “She keeps these eight servants busy, let me tell you. For every one of the rooms in her house, and there must be twenty if there’s one—they’re all in use!”

  Mrs. Hemlock’s eyes came open wide and then closed, and her mouth closed hard too like one who had found more put in it than she had been ready for.

  “That’s only the beginning!” Myrtle cried.

  Mrs. Hemlock’s eyes came open now and there was such a look of perfect satisfaction on her face that Myrtle’s own expression softened and glowed with the reflected pleasure from her older friend.

  “You don’t know about her!” Myrtle intoned with happiness, sure at last of Mrs. Hemlock’s ignorance.

  “I was only at her house in the old days, when she entertained General Waite so much,” Mrs. Hemlock said, coolly matter-of-fact, a hint of total abdication in her tone. “Jessie Mae’s brother was more or less head of the house then.”

  “Well, Corliss liked to act like he was,” Myrtle took this statement up. “But Jessie Mae was running the whole place even then, and running him too. He died of her bossing, many people think.”

  “Then, of course, I’ve been there several times to tea, and to her art fairs,” Mrs. Hemlock put in rather firmly before stepping down altogether.

  “Oh, those are nothing, my dear, I’m sorry to say. You see you have to spend the night to know how it really is!” Myrtle was suddenly indignant now, but Mrs. Hemlock could see that her indignation was over the principle of Jessie Mae’s behavior.

  For just a second Mrs. Hemlock looked at her large red recipe book lying open to the place where Myrtle was to fill in the instructions for baking Bavarian cookies. But then she moved her eyes away from the book back directly into Myrtle’s face. She wanted Myrtle to know now that she didn’t know anything about Jessie Mae, and that she wanted more than anything else to find out all there was.

  Myrtle saw this expression on Mrs. Hemlock’s face, and put her hands in her lap as a signal they could begin in earnest.

  “Jessie Mae’s trouble is she won’t have anything planned or in order, until she wants it. And she doesn’t know what she wants until the moment she does want it!”

  Myrtle suddenly stopped there like one who has not quite caught the meaning of her own words. Mrs. Hemlock stared at her and her mouth came open again, and it was this openmouthed expression and the immense interest on Mrs. Hemlock’s face, together with the wonderful health and cleanliness of the latter, and the wonderful comfort and luxury of her kitchen that made Myrtle want to stay on here, perhaps indefinitely. She did not know when things had been better for a talk.

  “More punch?” Mrs. Hemlock said in her most encouraging tone.

  “I’d love more!”

  “And some of my ice box fudge bars with it!” Mrs. Hemlock coaxed, almost a bit hysterical with the pleasure which the Jessie Mae story was giving her.

  “I’d love some fudge bars too,” Myrtle said, absentmindedly, still hesitating, it was obvious, whether to give all she knew about their common acquaintance now, or perhaps hold some last bit still back, for another time, or forever.

  “As I say,” Mrs. Hemlock spoke in her matter-of-fact voice, afraid whatever she said would spoil the “more” that might come, “as I say, I was never a friend of Jessie Mae’s, but I’ve known her for twenty-five years.”

  Myrtle did not even consider this but thanked Mrs. Hemlock for the fudge bars and the second glass of punch.

  “I could eat these all day,” Myrtle said chewing softly, not to be hurried or budged. She made a sound of pleasure.

  “I wonder you don’t win prizes with your culinary genius, Mrs. Hemlock,” Myrtle purred, deliberating. “You should be famous.”

  The older woman bowed her head in pleasure and the blush of her health and good living covered her face and throat.

  But both women waited for the signal to begin again, calmly now, but with tremendous expectation.

  “I know everything about her,” Myrtle said suddenly.

  One would not have known Mrs. Hemlock had broken their talk by going to the icebox for the fudge bars. It was almost as though Jessie Mae herself were there before them on the TV screen, helpless and exposed for all their comments.

  “I lived with her for a month!” Myrtle said after she had quit chewing on the fudge bars. “In 1952!”

  Mrs. Hemlock waited.

  “A month, mind you!”

  “Then of course you do know,” Mrs. Hemlock said in a voice close to awe.

  “I was afraid every minute,” Myrtle said.

  Mrs. Hemlock showed a slight lack of comprehension.

  “You spoke of her untidiness, Mrs. Hemlock,” Myrtle swept on. “Well,” she laughed, “you wouldn’t think that that was largely connected with her leaving her jewels everywhere. She left thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds in my room.”

  Mrs. Hemlock shook her head.

  “Then one evening I discovered in the top bureau drawer of my room enough other jewels for the Queen herself!”

  Mrs. Hemlock began to say something but Myrtle hardly paused long enough to allow her friend to tense her mouth.

  “I couldn’t stand that kind of untidiness, if you please, and besides I’m not so sure her untidiness, as we call it, wasn’t purposeful.”

  “Well!” Mrs. Hemlock managed to cry.

  “It’s part of her way of getting even!”

  “But what would she want to get even for when she’s got everything!” Mrs. Hemlock propelled the question into the room and beyond into the garden.

  “You don’t know everything,” Myrtle cautioned again. “She hates me, she hates women even more. And she’s not only untidy. You started to use the right word when we were outside. She’s dirty!”

  Mrs. Hemlock let out a moan of weak remonstrance.

  “I could tell you things,” Myrtle said, “but we’re here in a beautiful tidy house with such wonderful things to eat. I won’t.”

  Myrtle had suddenly stopped talking, and she lay back in her chair, leaving Mrs. Hemlock with a look of complete and unexpected emptiness on her red face.

  Then, perhaps of a second mind, Myrtle said: “Her whole life is to get back at everybody. Hence the servants. Hence the parties at which nothing is quite right. Hence the jewels strewn everywhere to make everybody feel they are suspected of stealing. Who wants to go to a house where jewels are strewn everywhere. Why it makes the closest of us to her wince! And don’t think she doesn’t accuse people of taking them. And not just the servants!”

  “Why, she sounds . . . gone,” Mrs. Hemlock had groped
for the word but did not look satisfied when she had got it.

  “No,” Myrtle corrected politely, smiling quickly, “Jessie Mae is just hateful . . . She’s not gone as you say. A man, a strong old-fashioned type over her would have gone a long way to getting the house tidied up and the jewels either sold or put in a vault. But she’s never had a strong hand over her, and since the day her old father died, she’s done just as she pleased every second . . .”

  “Really, I never!” Mrs. Hemlock began.

  “But the thing nobody seems to know,” Myrtle said, sitting up still more straight, and her face a peculiar shade, “and the thing nobody can believe even when you tell them, is that the whole house is nothing but an excuse for dogs!”

  Mrs. Hemlock’s chin trembled but she said nothing.

  “Jessie Mae has thirty pedigreed dogs in those rooms upstairs if she has one!”

  Mrs. Hemlock closed her eyes again, but she could not conceal the pleasure that rested on her mouth and chin.

  Myrtle waited until her friend opened her eyes and then she said: “Jessie Mae sleeps downstairs, where she made her brother sleep before her. The dogs live upstairs, and there’s a servant on duty for every room of them.”

  “You’re funning!” Mrs. Hemlock used an old word and an old tone that sounded like Amen.

  “And when I stayed there that month,” Myrtle said, her mouth dry from the exertion, “she let me see the whole performance, since I had to sleep downstairs with her in any case. After all the visitors and the bores had left, she let the dogs out of their upstairs rooms, and then they would romp and tear and romp and tear, and that old woman ran and romped right along with them, laughing and shouting at them, and the dogs all yelping and carrying on like a pack of wild animals after her until you wouldn’t know which acted the nuttier, she or the dogs.”

  “Good God!” Mrs. Hemlock turned a deep orange now, and she fanned her face with her fat hand.

  “I usually never talk about Jessie Mae to anybody,” Myrtle intoned.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Hemlock nodded, a tone of firm moral philosophy in her voice.

  “But you’ve been so kind and considerate, to all of we neighbors,” Myrtle almost scolded, “and especially to me, that I think of you, Mrs. Hemlock, as a confidante.”

  “Thank you, Myrtle. I’m touched,” Mrs. Hemlock managed to get out.

  “It’s the truth. You’ve been an angel. Why you’ve baked for us and sent us things. This could be another Delmonico’s!” she waved with her hand. “I’ve never tasted such cooking. And the comparison between your wonderful generosity and neatness and normal ways always comes as such a distinct contrast with Jessie Mae, who is, after all, my cousin, but who never does anything for anybody, and who just isn’t anyhow the kind of person you want to visit.”

  Myrtle stopped, perhaps in realization she had told more than she had ever known she knew.

  “But the poor old thing,” Mrs. Hemlock ventured.

  “Well, with all her wealth why doesn’t she try to straighten herself out, for pity’s sake. She could help so many people if she cared about anybody but herself.”

  Myrtle waited now finally for Mrs. Hemlock to speak, but the older woman sat there quietly, a fudge bar still untasted in her hand, thinking about Jessie Mae’s running up and down with the dogs.

  “I’m not surprised now the house looked so bad,” Mrs. Hemlock said at last, but with a kind of dreamy expression that lacked conviction.

  Myrtle was so tired she just lay back in the chair.

  “Would you like a nice home-made devilled ham sandwich with a good cup of strong coffee?” Mrs. Hemlock said invitingly. “You look awfully tired, Myrtle.”

  “Why, I’d love one, of course . . . But shouldn’t I fill in that recipe for you first,” Myrtle said, and she took out of her apron pocket a piece of paper which contained her directions for baking Bavarian cookies.

  “I think you deserve a sandwich first. Copying is awfully tiring too.”

  “Well, you know me and your cooking,” Myrtle giggled.

  “Why, I would have never known that about Jessie Mae if you hadn’t just happened to be walking through the garden today,” Mrs. Hemlock said, and she began to boil the water for the coffee.

  “I know you won’t tell anybody,” Myrtle said. “Because as you know, she is part of my family, though you’d never know it the way she acts.”

  “I understand, of course,” and Mrs. Hemlock smiled from above her pink chin. “But it does explain at last the . . . untidiness. My stars, yes.”

  Mrs. Hemlock was firm on that point.

  Myrtle nodded abstractedly and both women were silent now waiting for the coffee to be ready.

  YOU MAY SAFELY GAZE

  “Do we always have to begin on Milo at these Wednesday lunches,” Philip said to Guy. Carrying their trays, they had already picked out their table in the cafeteria, and Philip, at least, was about to sit down.

  “Do I always begin on Milo?” Guy wondered, surprised.

  “You’re the one who knows him, remember,” Philip said.

  “Of course, Milo is one of the serious problems in our office, and it’s only a little natural, I suppose, to mention problems even at one of our Wednesday lunches.”

  “Oh, forget it,” Philip said. Seated, he watched half-amused as Guy still stood over the table with his tray raised like a busboy who would soon now move away with it to the back room.

  “I don’t dislike Milo,” Guy began. “It’s not that at all.”

  Philip began to say something but then hesitated, and looked up at the cafeteria clock that showed ten minutes past twelve. He knew, somehow, that it was going to be Milo all over again for lunch.

  “It’s his attitude not just toward his work, but life,” Guy said, and this time he sat down.

  “His life,” Philip said, taking swift bites of his chicken à la king.

  Guy nodded. “You see now he spares himself the real work in the office due to this physical culture philosophy. He won’t even let himself get mad anymore or argue with me because that interferes with the development of his muscles and his mental tranquility, which is so important for muscular development. His whole life now he says is to be strong and calm.”

  “A muscle ascetic,” Philip laughed without amusement.

  “But working with him is not so funny,” Guy said, and Philip was taken aback to see his friend go suddenly very pale. Guy had not even bothered to take his dishes off his tray but allowed everything to sit there in front of him as though the lunch were an offering he had no intention of tasting.

  “Milo hardly seems anybody you and I could know, if you ask me,” Guy pronounced, as though the final decision had at last been made.

  “You forget one of us doesn’t,” Philip emphasized again, and he waved his fork as though they had finally finished now with Milo, and could go on to the real Wednesday lunch.

  But Guy began again, as though the talk for the lunch had been arranged after all, despite Philip’s forgetfulness, around Milo.

  “I don’t think he is even studying law anymore at night, as he was supposed to do.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” Philip said, involuntarily affecting concern and half-resigning himself now to the possibility of a completely wasted hour.

  “Oh, of course,” Guy softened his statement, “I guess he goes to the law library every night and reads a little. Every waking hour is, after all, not for his muscles, but every real thought, you can bet your bottom dollar, is.”

  “I see,” Philip said, beginning on his pineapple snow.

  “It’s the only thing on his mind, I tell you,” Guy began again.

  “It’s interesting if that’s the only thing on his mind, then,” Philip replied. “I mean,” he continued, when he saw the black look he got from Guy, “—to know somebody who is obsessed . . .”

  “What do you mean by that?” Guy wondered critically, as though only he could tell what it was that Milo might be.

&nb
sp; “You said he wanted to devote himself to just this one thing.” Philip wearily tried to define what he had meant.

  “I tried to talk to Milo once about it,” Guy said, now deadly serious, and as though, with all preliminaries past, the real part of his speech had begun. Philip noticed that his friend had still not even picked up his knife or fork, and his food must be getting stone cold by now. “ ‘Why do you want to look any stronger,’ I said to Milo. He just stared at me, and I said, ‘Have you ever taken a good look in the mirror the way you are now,’ and he just smiled his sour smile again at me. ‘Have you ever looked, Milo?’ I said, and even I had to laugh when I repeated my own question, and he kind of laughed then too . . . Well, for God’s sake, he knows after all that nobody but a few freaks are going to look like he looks, or will look, if he keeps this up. You see he works on a new part of his body every month. One month he will be working on his pectorals, the next his calf muscles, then he will go in for a period on his latissimus dorsi.”

  Philip stopped chewing a moment as though seeing these different muscle groups slowly developing there before him. Finally, he managed to say, “Well at least he’s interested in something, which is more than . . .”

  “Yes, he’s interested in it, of course,” Guy interrupted, “—what he calls being the sculptor of his own body, and you can find him almost any noon in the gym straining away while the other men in our office do as they please with their lunch hour.”

  “You mean they eat their lunch then.” Philip tried humor.

  “That’s right,” Guy hurried on. “But he and this Austrian friend of his who also works in my office, they go over to this gym run by a cripple named Vic somebody, and strain their guts out, lifting barbells and throwing their arms up and around on benches, with dumbbells in their fists, and come back an hour later to their work looking as though they had been in a rock mixer. They actually stink of gym, and several of the stenographers have complained saying they always know when it’s exercise day all right. But nothing stops those boys, and they just take all the gaff with as much good humor as two such egomaniacs can have.”