The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “I want it right where it is,” the boy said, and he threw the Tinker Toy at Mrs. Zilke.

  “Look here now, Baxter,” the father said, but still sleepily and with no expression.

  “Shut your goddamn face,” the boy spat out at his father.

  The father suddenly seized the boy’s chin and jaw and forced him to spit out what he had.

  His wedding ring fell on the carpet there, and they all stared at it a second.

  Without warning the son kicked the father vigorously in the groin and escaped, running up the stairs.

  Baxter stepped deliberately from the safety of the upper staircase and pronounced the obscene word for his father as though this was what he had been keeping for him for a long time.

  Mrs. Zilke let out a low cry.

  The father writhing in pain from the place where the boy had kicked him, managed to say with great effort: “Tell me where he learned a word like that.”

  Mrs. Zilke went over to where the ring lay now near the Tinker Toy.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to people,” she said, putting the ring on the table.

  Then, a weary concern in her voice, she said, “Sir, are you hurt?”

  The tears fell from the father’s eyes for having been hit in such a delicate place, and he could not say anything more for a moment.

  “Can I do anything for you, sir?” Mrs. Zilke said.

  “I don’t think right now, thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” He grunted with the exquisite pain.

  “I’ve put your ring up here for safekeeping,” she informed him.

  The father nodded from the floor where he twisted in his pain.

  NIGHT AND DAY

  “The chestnut man will be here before too long,” Cleo said, “and I will buy you a lot of nice chestnuts before bedtime. But you must be a good boy, you must not tell Grandy things Mama says when we’re alone together. After lunch tomorrow maybe he will take you out for a walk around the park. Won’t that be nice?”

  But he just sat there, on the new Persian rug, with his little train and engine, also new like the rug, and also gifts from Grandy, and would not answer her.

  There was always the difficulty of his going to sleep, and the best thing was to just let him lie in bed talking to the animals on the wall, talking sometimes half the night.

  One night, when Grandy made her tell him she was going to have the animals painted off the walls if he didn’t behave, he had put up a fuss and said he was going to tell Grandy what she had called the old man the night he had not given her enough money. After that he got to talk to the kangaroo for an hour and told him what Mama had called Grandy, and then he told his other favorite, the elephant that stood on the weighing machine, and finally he told the South American foxes.

  Tonight the chestnut man had not come, and when there was unexpectedly no sound from the little room upstairs, Cleo, once the tension had let up, began crying a little and said to Grandy: “His father will never know what bringing up a child means. And wouldn’t care maybe if he knew.”

  Grandy patted her hand lightly.

  “Where do you suppose Bruce is anyhow,” she said, coldly angry. “It’s going on two years.”

  “Cleo,” Grandy said, “you know as well as I the only thing you can do.”

  They sat down then to their supper of cold chicken, cheese casserole, and cup after cup of coffee ready to strengthen her.

  She had just put some food into her mouth when the door upstairs opened and he screamed.

  Going up immediately to his room and sitting down with the perfunctory motions of a sleepwalker, she said: “Why can’t you control yourself for just one meal.”

  “Where is Grandy?” he wondered.

  “Grandy is reading the paper,” she told him.

  “I want to see Grandy.”

  “Well, he is too old and tired to come up the steps all the time.”

  “Tell Grandy to come up.”

  “You go to sleep.”

  She went down again and sat with Grandy and he began to smooth her hair as was his custom.

  “Please, please,” Cleo said when he kissed her loudly. “Let’s try to be a little more careful now.”

  “Has he been careful?”

  “Bruce?” she said, knowing, of course, that it was Bruce he meant.

  Grandy watched her as though commanding her to give the answer he wanted.

  “I loved Bruce, Grandy. I really did.”

  “He deserted you,” Grandy said.

  “Oh, now, father, father.” She was weak with him.

  “I know my own son,” he told her. “Bruce ran out on you.”

  “There is no proof of that, father.” Then: “Oh, Bruce, Bruce,” she said, pretending she was saying this to herself.

  “Bruce is no-account, never was, and it’s infantile to ever expect his return.”

  “You shouldn’t even think such a thing about your own boy,” Cleo said unemphatically.

  “Have Grandy come up now!” the small voice from upstairs called.

  “He listens to everything we say and do,” Cleo told the old man.

  “And understands nothing, just like Bruce.”

  “But you love him, don’t you,” she said, fear in her voice, and her face suddenly red under the lamplight.

  “Who?” Grandy roared.

  “Who but the boy!” she said rather hotly.

  “You know who I love,” he told Cleo, and he put his hand on her lap. “And I know who you love.”

  “Oh, Grandy, Grandy.” She was pliant and soft again.

  “Why must it always be Grandy,” the old man said. “Why can’t it be . . .”

  “Have Grandy come up, Mama; have him do that now. I am so lonesome.”

  “Talk to the little kangaroo until you go to sleep, lover,” she called up. “Tell the little kangaroo your thoughts.”

  “No, I’m tired of him,” the child said. “I want a new animal for telling my thoughts to,” he called angrily.

  “He wants a police dog,” Cleo told the old man.

  “They want everything,” he replied, holding her hand tightly.

  “Like some other people in this world,” Cleo said, not removing her hand.

  “You can’t go on like this,” Grandy emphasized to her, peremptorily removing his hand from hers and placing it on her cheek, where it stroked back and forth insinuatingly near her ear like a mouth whispering messages.

  “What would our lives be like, if I did this terrible thing?” Cleo said.

  “You’ve already gone more than half the way,” Grandy said.

  “Oh, Grandy,” she cried, and she pushed her face into his vest and cried a little.

  “If Bruce ever knew, my God, my God.” Her voice came muffled and weak from against his chest.

  “And what do you think Bruce might be doing tonight?” He was cool and unmoved.

  “Well, he’s not with my mother,” she gasped, weakly impetuous, as though this were her last outburst of concern, for immediately after she sank back into his arms, and he kissed her with real feeling.

  “Where are you now?” The voice came from upstairs.

  “Oh, is he out of his bed, do you think?” Cleo asked, jumping up.

  “Sit down, Cleo,” the old man commanded. “Nothing is going to surprise us. You’re jumpy as a cat. Do sit down, and don’t get up again.”

  “I wish that boy had a nurse sometimes.”

  “He could have,” Grandy told her.

  “Oh, dear, dear. What is it all about?”

  “Don’t talk like one of those religious philosophers now,” Grandy said to her. “You know and I know what is going to happen.” He kissed her on the mouth.

  “I don’t know, and you can’t make me,” she said weakly.

  He kissed her again.

  “What is it, then, my age?” he asked ironically.

  “Your age?” She laughed. “Have I ever known a younger man?” She touched his mouth, and he clasped her hand
tightly at this.

  “Younger than Bruce,” he said, and his coy, crafty wink made her tense.

  “Grandy, we might destroy everything!” she cautioned.

  “You forget Bruce has already done that. How long has he been gone?” He began counting with that theatrical manner he so often assumed now.

  “I can’t helping thinking Bruce loved me,” she said ignoring his manner.

  “And his supposed love is enough.”

  “But for God’s sake,” she said getting up and pacing about the room. “You’re his father! Grandy, you’re Bruce’s father!”

  “How many times have you seen Bruce in the last two years—do you remember?” he asked now, his theatrical manner stronger than ever.

  “He’s been gone, of course, a little more than a year this time.”

  “This time!” Grandy stood up now and walked over to her. He embraced her with passion. Everything else he did resembled different people doing different things successively. But his embraces were his own. Perhaps that is what made her go on with them.

  “More than a year, Cleo!” he said, almost shaking her. “Do you realize how ridiculous that is. Your own husband. Why a year? Why a month? Why even a fortnight? Why should that be?” He actually shook her now. “Why?”

  “Please, please, don’t wake the child again now. He’s been quiet for nearly half an hour.”

  “Bruce can take him!” he said with great suddenness.

  “Grandy!” she cried. “Why, you must know me better than that. Why, Grandy!”

  She moved out of his orbit, her mouth trembling with surprise, her face a hot, red moon of hurt and confusion.

  “Of course, I didn’t mean that just as it sounded.”

  “You did too.” She turned on him. “How dare you! Grandy, how dare you!”

  She wept a little and, finding no handkerchief, she accepted the one he handed her.

  “Give up that little thing upstairs,” she began. “I hate you for that talk.” Then softening a little again: “Oh, Grandy, Grandy, what am I going to do?”

  “Do you want to answer this question,” he cleared his throat, the actor playing now the counselor-at-law, closing the case. “Where would you have been this past year without my help? How would the little prince upstairs have eaten and slept, do you think? Who would have had the artist to paint the animals on his bedroom wall?”

  “Stop all of this talk at once,” she said without conviction. “Oh, Grandy.” She collapsed.

  He held her hand as though this gesture were the source of his power and her weakness.

  “You’re not a working-woman type, Cleo,” he told her, his mouth to her ear now. He kissed her softly and insistently.

  “I’m not very clever, if that’s what you mean,” she said, wiping her tears on his handkerchief again.

  “You’re not clever in the world’s view. You’re not a modern woman, Cleo. You belong at home with a man who can take care of you. You aren’t meant to make your own way. . . . But that’s right what you’re going to be doing, if you go on with Bruce! My patience . . .” He thundered now.

  “Oh, no, Grandy,” she sobbed. “Don’t speak like this. We have to think . . .”

  “You’ve said that for months. What do we have to think about?”

  “Maybe there are circumstances we don’t understand,” she begged him. “Maybe there’s something happened to Bruce we don’t know about.”

  “You forget you’re talking about my son.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything here,” she said, some of her old thoughts awakening suddenly, only to fade to extinguishment under his touch.

  “I know Bruce better than anybody in the world,” he emphasized.

  “You know him as a man,” she said.

  “I’m his father,” Grandy said.

  “You’re a man.” She was implacable.

  “All right, you love Bruce then,” he told her.

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that at all.” A wave of weakness, impotence, idiocy swept over her again.

  “Then what do you mean?” He was insistent.

  “All I meant,” she said, her breath coming heavily and fear changing her voice so that it resembled both a child’s and an old woman’s, “all I meant is, are we being fair to them, are we . . .”

  “Tell me this,” he said, holding her hand with savage firmness. “Does Bruce love you?”

  She drew back, as though this question, never posed before, had swept away everything of the little she had held back for herself.

  “Grandy, please, do we have to be so . . . so specific?”

  “Yes, Cleo, yes.”

  “What was your question then?” she said, reaching for her cigarettes.

  “Here,” he commanded, “take one of mine.”

  “I’d rather have one of my . . .”

  He put the cigarette in her mouth and lit it.

  “Now, Cleo, I also can be of another mind. . . .”

  “About what?” she said, looking at him with her terrified, young-innocent-girl face.

  “There is a limit to my time, my endurance. And I’m not going to live forever, after all. I want life now. Not tomorrow. And I’ve waited . . .”

  “Grandy, just don’t do anything rash yet. Please wait, things will straighten out, I know. . . .”

  “Have you ever thought that I might have somebody else, too?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to steady the fear that made her voice muffled as though she were speaking to him through a curtain. “I’ve thought of that, Grandy . . . many times.” She lifted her tear-stained face to him.

  “Think of it tonight with special clearness,” he ordered her.

  “I will, Grandy,” she said, the tears falling again now, and she noticed that he did not caress her, did not hold out a hand to her. He had given her the question, the final decision; he was not going to do more. She saw that she must answer.

  “It’s the most difficult thing in the world, Grandy.”

  “Bawling’s not going to help you, not going to get you anywhere.” He was like another man now, and she saw something in him at that moment, vague and far away, which must have destroyed happiness for her with his son Bruce.

  “I must know now,” he told her.

  “Oh, Grandy, no.” She wept now, unashamed, uncontrolled.

  “Of course,” she said incoherently, “it’s you, Grandy.”

  “And if it’s me, then, it can’t be him.”

  “You mean Bruce,” she said, looking up from her hands which she had put over her face, hopefully expectant.

  “I mean the kid!” He was clear and complete.

  “What are you saying,” she said, suddenly calm, her tears suddenly gone, a white toneless face, stripped of every emotion, looking at him.

  “I want to marry you. Let Bruce have the kid.”

  “He’s not a kid,” she said.

  “Well, what the hell is he?”

  “He’s still almost an infant.” She walked up and down the room.

  “And you will go to work to support him then?”

  She did not say anything.

  “I asked you a question, Cleo. Will you go to work in a factory or office to support him?”

  “I never knew before how cruel you really are, and were.”

  “I’ve waited for you for at least two years, and I can’t wait any longer.” His voice quieted down slowly.

  “I think I am beginning to see how it would be,” she said and walked to the other side of the room and sat down.

  “What was the meaning of that cryptic remark?”

  “There was nothing cryptic in it, and it was more than a remark. I think it was a decision.”

  “You’ve made a decision?” He smiled knowingly.

  “I think I have,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “I must try to be calm, though,” she told him. “I must say only what I mean and no more.”

  “That would be unusual f
or you.” He used all his bitterness.

  “Would it, Grandy?” She looked at him and as he gazed at her he hardly recognized her. She hardly, perhaps, recognized herself.

  “What then have I been doing these years?” she said. “My God, yes, what.”

  “Now, Cleo, what is this?” he said going over to the chair where she was sitting.

  “Don’t come near me,” she ordered him, and there was a strength in the way she motioned to him with trembling, thin hands covered with his rings.

  “I see everything, of course, I’ve always seen it,” she told him. “I think I see myself.”

  “You sound just like Bruce now,” he said. “The goddam old preacher in him has come out in you.”

  “Just words,” she said. “Just your old words.” She stood up. “Words from an old goat,” she cried, looking at his white hair.

  “Cleo,” he admonished, with gay good humor. “Realize what you are saying, my dear.”

  “What does that mean, realize what I’m saying. I’m realizing you, for the love of God. Don’t you know that?”

  “And what does that mean?” he said, and his disguise, or disguises, suddenly to her seemed to fall like pieces of cardboard at their feet. She felt she almost heard a sound of collapse in the room.

  “An old old goat on his last legs, making a bargain as hard . . . as hard . . .” she said.

  “Cleo, you know if you finish saying this, there can be nothing more for the two of us. Consider well what you are going to say.”

  He held up his hand.

  “Oh, the theater of that!” She almost spat, her handsome face suddenly ugly.

  At that moment they heard the bare feet and saw the child come into the room, or rather they did not see him. They both looked and looked away as though, after all, he had been there from the beginning.

  The boy clasped his mother around the waist, but she went on talking, her hand, which had always fallen automatically on his curls when he went up close to her, suddenly now raised at the old man.

  “You hit Grandy! Mama you hit Grandy!” the child cried, and he ran between her and his grandfather.

  “Stop, don’t touch him,” she told the child. She went over to where the boy stood and brought him back to her.

  “He’s not your Grandy any more,” she roared at him.