The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Your son is lonely,” she said suddenly.

  The father did not look at her now.

  “I mean by that,” she went on, “it’s too bad he’s an only child.”

  “Doesn’t he have other children over here, though. I thought—”

  “Oh, it’s not the same,” Mrs. Zilke said. “Having in other youngsters like he does on Saturday and all. It’s not enough.”

  “Of course I am gone a good deal.”

  “You’re gone all the time,” she said.

  “That part can’t be helped, of course. You see,” he laughed, “I’m a success.”

  Mrs. Zilke did not return his laughter, he noticed, and he had noticed this before in plain strong old working women of her kind. He admired Mrs. Zilke tremendously. He was glad she had not laughed with him.

  “No one should have just the one child,” she told him.

  “You know,” he said, confidentially, “when you have just your work, as I do, people get away from you.”

  He looked at the bottle of brandy on the bookshelf.

  “Would you have a pony of brandy with me, Mrs. Zilke.”

  She began to say no because she really didn’t like it, but there was such a pleading look on his young face, she nodded rather regally, and he got up and poured two shots.

  “Thank you for drinking with me,” he said suddenly, as though to brush away something that had come between his words and his memory.

  “Quite a bouquet,” she said, whiffing first.

  “You are really very intelligent,” he told Mrs. Zilke.

  “Because I know the bouquet,” she said coldly.

  “Oh, that and a lot of other things.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “You know everything,” he remarked. “All I have is my work.”

  “That’s a lot. They need you,” she said.

  He sat down now, but he did not touch the brandy, and Mrs. Zilke having smelled the bouquet put her tiny glass down too.

  They both sat there for a moment in silence as though they were perhaps at communion.

  “I can’t remember the color of my wife’s eyes,” he said, and he looked sick.

  Mrs. Zilke sat there as though considering whether this had importance, or whether she might go on to the next topic of their talk.

  “And tonight, would you believe it, I couldn’t remember the color of his!”

  “They’re blue as the sea,” Mrs. Zilke said rather gruffly, but with a kind of heavy sad tone also in her voice.

  “But what does it matter about those little things,” she said. “You’re an important man!”

  He laughed very loud at this, and Mrs. Zilke suddenly laughed, too. A cord of tension had been snapped that had existed between them earlier.

  The father lifted his glass and said the usual words and Mrs. Zilke took her glass with a slight bored look and sipped.

  “I can taste the grapes in that, all right,” she said.

  “Well, it’s the grapes of course I buy it for,” he replied in the tone of voice he might have used in a men’s bar.

  “You shouldn’t care what color their eyes are or were,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “Well, it’s my memory about people,” he told her. “I don’t know people.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said. “But you have other things!”

  “No, I don’t. Not really. I could remember people if I wanted to.”

  “If you wanted to,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “Well, why can’t I remember my wife’s eyes?” he brought the whole thing out. “Can you remember,” he wanted to know, “the color of eyes of all those in your family.”

  “All forty-two of them,” she laughed.

  “Well, your husband and your sons and daughters.”

  “Oh, I expect I can,” she was rather evasive.

  “But you do, Mrs. Zilke, you know you do!”

  “All right, but I’m just a woman about the house. You’re out in the world. Why should you know the color of people’s eyes! Good grief, yes!”

  She put her glass down, and picked up some socks she had been darning before she had put the boy to bed.

  “I’m going to work while we talk,” she said with a firmness that seemed to mean she would be talking less now and that she would probably not drink the brandy.

  Then suddenly closing his own eyes tight he realized that he did not know the color of Mrs. Zilke’s eyes. But suddenly he could not be afraid anymore. He didn’t care, and he was sure that Mrs. Zilke would not care if he knew or not. She would tell him not to care. And he remembered her, which was, he was sure, more important. He remembered her kindness to him and his son, and how important they both were to him.

  “HOW OLD are you?” Baxter asked him when he was sitting in his big chair with his drink.

  “Twenty-eight, I think,” the father said vaguely.

  “Is that old enough to be dead?” the son wondered.

  “Yes and no,” the father replied.

  “Am I old enough to be dead?”

  “I don’t think so,” the father replied slowly, and his mind was on something else.

  “Why aren’t we all dead, then?” the son said, sailing a tiny paper airplane he had made. Then he picked up a bird he had made out of brown paper and sailed this through the air. It hit a philodendron plant and stuck there in it, as though it were a conscious addition.

  “You always think about something else, don’t you?” the boy said, and he went up and stared at his father.

  “You have blue eyes,” the father said. “Blue as the sea.”

  The son suddenly kissed his father, and the father looked at him for a long time.

  “Don’t look funny like that,” the boy said, embarrassed.

  “Like what?” the father said, and lowered his gaze.

  The son moved awkwardly, grinding his tiny shoes into the carpet.

  “Like you didn’t know anything,” the boy said, and he ran out into the kitchen to be with Mrs. Zilke.

  AFTER MRS. ZILKE went to bed, which was nearly four hours after the boy had gone, the father was accustomed to sit on downstairs thinking about the problems in his work, but when he was at home like this he often thought about her, his wife of long ago. She had run off (this was almost the only term he used for her departure) so long ago and his marriage to her had been so brief that it was almost as though Baxter were a gift somebody had awarded him, and that as the gift increased in value and liability, his own relation to it was more and more ambiguous and obscure. Somehow Mrs. Zilke seemed more real to him than almost anybody else. He could not remember the color of her eyes either, of course, but she was quite real. She was his “mother,” he supposed. And the boy was an infant “brother” he did not know too well, and who asked hard questions, and his “wife,” who had run off, was just any girl he had gone out with. He could not remember her now at all.

  He envied in a way Mrs. Zilke’s command over everything. She understood, it seemed, everything she dealt with, and she remembered and could identify all the things which came into her view and under her jurisdiction. The world for her, he was sure, was round, firm, and perfectly illuminated.

  For him only his work (and he remembered she had called him a man of importance) had any real meaning, but its relationship to everything else was tenuous.

  As he went upstairs that night he looked into his son’s room. He was surprised to see that the boy was sleeping with an enormous toy crocodile. The sight of the toy rather shocked him. For a moment he hesitated whether or not to remove the toy and then deciding not to disturb him, he went to his room, took off all his clothes, and stood naked, breathing in front of the opened window. Then he went quickly to bed.

  “IT’S HIS FAVORITE DOLL,” Mrs. Zilke said at breakfast. “He wouldn’t part with it for the world.” She referred to the toy crocodile.

  “I would think it would give him nightmares,” the father said.

  “He don’t
have nightmares,” Mrs. Zilke said, buttering the toast. “There you are, sir!” and she brought him his breakfast.

  The father ate silently for a while.

  “I was shocked to see that crocodile in his bed,” he told Mrs. Zilke again.

  “Well, that’s something in you, is all,” she said.

  “I expect. But why couldn’t it have been a teddy bear or a girl doll.”

  “He has those too. It just happened to be crocodile night last night,” Mrs. Zilke said, restless now in the kitchen.

  “All right,” the father said, and he opened the newspaper and began to read about Egypt.

  “Your boy needs a dog,” Mrs. Zilke said without warning, coming in and sitting down at the table with him. Her hands still showed the traces of soap suds.

  “What kind?” the father said.

  “You’re not opposed to it, then?” Mrs. Zilke replied.

  “Why would I oppose a dog?” He continued to look at the newspaper.

  “He’s got to have something,” Mrs. Zilke told him.

  “Of course,” the father said, swallowing some coffee. Then, having swallowed, he stared at her.

  “You mean he doesn’t have anything?”

  “As long as a parent is living, any parent, a child has something. No, I didn’t mean that,” she said without any real apology, and he expected, of course, none.

  “I’d rather have him sleeping with a dog now than that crocodile.”

  “Oh, that,” Mrs. Zilke said, impatient.

  Then: “All right, then,” he said.

  He kept nodding after she had gone out of the room. He sat there looking at his old wedding ring which he still wore. Suddenly he took the ring off his finger for the first time since he had had it put on there by the priest. He had left it on all these years simply because, well, he wanted men to think he was married, he supposed. Everybody was married, and he had to be married somehow, anyhow, he knew.

  But he left the wedding ring lying on the table, and he went into the front room.

  “Sir,” Mrs. Zilke called after him.

  “Just leave the ring there,” he said, thinking she had found it.

  But on her face he saw something else. “You’ll have to take the boy to buy the dog, you know. I can’t walk on hard pavements anymore, remember.”

  “That will be fine, Mrs. Zilke,” he said, somehow relieved at what she said.

  THE DOG THEY bought at the shop was a small mongrel with a pitifully long tail, and—the father looked very close: brown eyes. Almost the first thing he did was to make a puddle near the father’s desk. The father insisted on cleaning it up, and Baxter watched, while Mrs. Zilke muttered to herself in the kitchen. She came in finally and poured something white on the spot.

  The dog watched them too from its corner, but it did not seem to want to come out to them.

  “You must make up to your new little friend,” the father said.

  Baxter stared but did not do anything.

  “Go to him,” the father said, and the son went over into the corner and looked at the pup.

  The father sat down at his desk and began to go through his papers.

  “Did you have a dog?” Baxter asked his father.

  The father thought there at the desk. He did not answer for a long time.

  “Yes,” the father finally said.

  “What color was it,” the son asked, and the father stirred in his chair.

  “That was so long ago,” he said, almost as though quoting himself.

  “Was it gray then?” the boy wanted to know.

  The father nodded.

  “A gray dog,” the son said, and he began to play with his new pet. The dog lifted its wet paw and bit the boy mildly, and the boy cried a little.

  “That’s just in fun,” the father said absentmindedly.

  Baxter ran out into the kitchen, crying a little, and the small dog sat in the corner.

  “Don’t be afraid of the little fellow now,” Mrs. Zilke said. “Go right back and make up to him again.”

  Baxter and Mrs. Zilke came out of the kitchen and went up to the dog.

  “You’ll have to name him too,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “Will I have to name him, Daddy?” the boy said.

  The father nodded.

  After supper all three sat in the front room. Baxter nodded a little. The father sat in the easy chair smoking his pipe, a pony of brandy near him. They had gathered here to decide what name to choose for the dog, but nobody had any ideas, it seemed, and the father, hidden from them in a halo of expensive pipe smoke, seemed as far away as if he had gone to the capital again.

  Baxter nodded some more and Mrs. Zilke said, “Why, it still isn’t bedtime and the little man is asleep!”

  From below in the basement where they had put the pup they could all hear the animal’s crying, but they pretended not to notice.

  Finally, Mrs. Zilke said, “When he is housebroken you can sleep with him, Baxter.”

  Baxter opened his eyes and looked at her. “What is that?” he said.

  “When he learns to take care of himself, not make puddles, you can have him in bed with you.”

  “I don’t want to,” the boy said.

  Mrs. Zilke looked stoically at the father.

  “Why don’t you want to, sweetheart,” she said, but her words showed no emotion.

  “I don’t want anything,” the boy said.

  Mrs. Zilke looked at the father again, but he was even more lost to them.

  “What’s that hanging loose in your mouth,” Mrs. Zilke suddenly sprang to attention, adjusting her spectacles, and looking at the boy’s mouth.

  “This.” The boy pointed to his lips, and blushed slightly. “Gum,” he said.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  The clock struck eight.

  “I guess it is your bedtime,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  She watched the boy.

  “Do you want to go to bed, Baxter,” she said, abstractedly.

  The boy nodded.

  “Say goodnight to daddy and kiss him,” she told him perfunctorily.

  The boy got up and went over to his father, but stopped in front of the rings of smoke.

  “Goodnight,” the boy lisped.

  “What’s that in his mouth,” the father addressed his remark to Mrs. Zilke and his head came out of the clouds of smoke.

  Mrs. Zilke got up painfully now and putting on her other glasses looked at the boy.

  “What are you sucking?” Mrs. Zilke said, and both of them now stared at him.

  Baxter looked at them as though they had put a net about him. From his long indifference to these two people a sudden new feeling came slowly into his dazed, slowly moving mind. He moved back a step, as though he wanted to incite them.

  “Baxter, sweetheart,” the old woman said, and both she and the father stared at him as though they had found out perhaps who he was.

  “What do you have in your mouth, son,” the father said, and the word son sounded queer in the air, moving toward the boy with the heaviness and suggestion of nausea that the dog puddle had given him earlier in the afternoon.

  “What is it, son,” the father said, and Mrs. Zilke watched him, her new understanding of the boy written on her old red face.

  “I’m chewing gum,” the boy told them.

  “No, you’re not now, Baxter. Why don’t you tell us,” Mrs. Zilke whined.

  Baxter went over into the corner where the dog had been.

  “That dog is bad, isn’t he,” Baxter giggled, and then he suddenly laughed loudly when he thought what the dog had done.

  Meanwhile Mrs. Zilke and the father were whispering in the cloud of tobacco smoke.

  Baxter sat down on the floor talking to himself, and playing with a broken piece of Tinker Toy. From his mouth still came sounds of something vaguely metallic.

  Then Mrs. Zilke came up stealthily, a kind of sadness and kindness both in her face, like that of a trained nurse.

  �
��You can’t go to sleep with that in your mouth, sweetheart.”

  “It’s gum,” the boy said.

  Mrs. Zilke’s bad legs would not let her kneel down beside the boy on the floor as she wished to do. She wanted to have a close talk with him, as she did sitting by his bed in the nursery, but instead now, standing over him, so far away, her short heavy breathing sounding obnoxiously in the room, she said only, “You’ve never lied to me before, Baxter.”

  “Oh yes I have,” Baxter said. “Anyhow this is gum,” and he made the sounds again in his mouth.

  “I’ll have to tell your father,” she said, as though he were already away in Washington.

  “It’s gum,” the boy said in a bored voice.

  “It’s metal, I think,” she said looking worriedly at the boy.

  “It’s just gum.” The boy hummed now and played with the Tinker Toy.

  “You’ll have to speak to him,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  The father squatted down with the son, and the boy vaguely realized this was the first time the father had ever made the motion of playing with him. He stared at his father, but did not listen to what he was talking about.

  “If I put my finger in your mouth will you give it to me?” the father said.

  “No,” the boy replied.

  “You wouldn’t want to swallow the thing in your mouth,” the father said.

  “Why not,” the boy wondered.

  “It would hurt you,” the father told him.

  “You would have to go to the hospital,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “I don’t care where I go,” the boy said. “It’s a toy I have in my mouth.”

  “What sort of toy,” the father wondered, and he and Mrs. Zilke suddenly became absorbed in the curiosity of what Baxter had there.

  “A golden toy,” the boy laughed, but his eyes looked glassy and strange.

  “Please,” the father said, and he put his finger gently on the boy’s lips.

  “Don’t touch me!” the son called out suddenly. “I hate you!”

  The father drew back softly as though now he would return to his work and his papers, and it was Mrs. Zilke who cried out instead: “Shame!”

  “I do hate him,” the boy said. “He’s never here anyhow.”

  “Baxter,” the father said.

  “Give your father what’s in your mouth or you will swallow it and something terrible will happen to you.”