The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Bizarre,” he paused on the word. “They’re nearly good, if you ask me.”

  “I don’t like Spyro,” she said.

  “Why don’t you invite him here, if your son likes him?” he put the whole matter in her hands.

  “When I work in a factory all day long, Spence. . . .”

  “You don’t feel like doing anything but working in a factory,” he said irritably.

  “I thought my own brother would be a little more understanding,” she said coldly angry.

  “I wish you would be of Gibbs,” he told her.

  “Oh Spence, please, please.”

  “Please, nothing. You always have a problem, but the problem is you, Merta. You’re old and tired and complaining, and because you can’t put your finger on what’s wrong you’ve decided that there’s something wrong with your son because he goes, of all places, to a Greek restaurant and talks to Spyro who draws rather well and who is now making a portrait of your son.”

  “Spence! Don’t tell me that!”

  “You dear old fool, Merta,” he said and he put on his hat now, which she looked at, he thought, rather critically and also with a certain envy.

  “That’s a nice hat,” she forced herself to say at last.

  “Well a doctor can’t look like a nobody,” he said, and then winced at his own words.

  “What you should do, Merta,” he hurried on with another speech, “is get some sort of hobby, become a lady bowler, get on the old women’s curling team, or meet up with some gent your own age. And let your son go his own way.”

  “You are comforting,” Merta said, pretending to find humor in his words.

  “WAS THAT SPENCE leaving just now?” Gibbs said, putting down some books.

  Merta held her face up to be kissed by him, which he did in a manner resembling someone surreptitiously spitting out a seed.

  “And how was Spyro tonight?” she said in a booming encouraging voice whose suddenness and loudness perhaps surprised even her.

  He looked at her much as he had when as a small boy she had suddenly burst into the front room and asked him what he was being so very still for.

  “Spyro is doing a portrait of me,” he told her.

  “A portrait,” Merta said, trying hard to keep the disapproval out of her voice.

  “That’s what it is,” Gibbs said, sitting down at the far end of the room and taking out his harmonica.

  She closed her eyes in displeasure, but said nothing as he played “How High the Moon.” He always played, it seemed, when she wanted to talk to him.

  “Would you like Spyro to come visit us some day?” she said.

  “Visit us?”

  “Pay a call,” she smiled, closing her eyes.

  “What would he pay us a call for?” he wondered. Seeing her pained hurt look, he expanded: “I mean what would he get to see here.”

  “Oh, me,” she replied laughing. “I’m so beautiful.”

  “Spyro thinks you don’t like him,” Gibbs said, and while she was saying Tommyrot! Gibbs went on: “In fact, he thinks everybody in this town dislikes him.”

  “They are the only Greeks, it’s true,” Merta said.

  “And we’re such a front family in town, of course!” he said with sudden fire.

  “Well, your Uncle Spence is somebody,” she began, white, and her mouth gaping a little, but Gibbs started to play on the harmonica again, cutting her off.

  She tried to control her feelings tonight, partly because she had such a splitting headache.

  “Would you like a dish of strawberry Jell-O?” Merta said above the sound of the harmonica playing.

  “What?” he cried.

  “Some strawberry Jell-O,” she repeated, a little embarrassment now in her voice.

  “What would I want that for?” he asked, putting down the harmonica with impatience.

  “I suddenly got hungry for some, and went out there and made it. It’s set by now and ready to eat.”

  There was such a look of total defeat on her old gray face that Gibbs said he would have some.

  “I’ve some fresh coffee too,” she said, a touch of sophistication in her voice, as if coffee here were unusual and exotic also.

  “I’ve had my coffee,” he said. “Just the Jell-O, thank you.”

  “Does Spyro always serve you coffee?” she said, her bitterness returning now against her will as they stood in the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” he said belligerently.

  “But I thought you saw him every evening,” She feigned sweet casualness.

  “I never notice what he serves,” Gibbs said loudly and indifferently.

  “Would you like a large dish or a small dish of Jell-O?” she said heavily.

  “Small, for Christ’s sake,” he told her.

  “Gibbs!” she cried. Then, catching herself, she said, “Small it will be, dear.”

  “What have you got to say that you can’t bring it out!” he suddenly turned on her, and taking the dish of Jell-O from her hand he put it down with a bang on the oilcloth covering of the tiny kitchen table.

  “Gibbs, let’s not have any trouble. Mother has a terrible headache tonight.”

  “Well, why don’t you go to bed then,” he said in his stentorian voice.

  “Perhaps I will,” she said weakly. She sat down and began eating right out of the Jell-O bowl. She ate nearly all the rubbery stiff red imitation strawberry Jell-O and drank in hurried gulps the coffee loaded with condensed milk.

  “Spence gave me hell all evening,” she said eating. “He thinks I would be happier if I found a fellow!”

  She laughed but her laughter brought no response from Gibbs.

  “I know I have nothing to offer anybody. Let’s face it.”

  “Why do you have to say let’s face it?” Gibbs snapped at her.

  “Is there something wrong grammatically with it?” she wondered taking her spoon out of her mouth.

  “Every dumb son of a bitch in the world is always saying let’s face it.”

  “And your own language is quite refined,” she countered.

  “Yes, let’s face it, it is,” he said, a bit weakly, and he took out the harmonica from his pocket, looked at it, and put it down noiselessly on the oilcloth.

  “I’ve always wanted to do right by you, Gibbs. Since you was a little boy, I have tried. But no father around, and all . . .”

  “Mom, we’ve been over this ten thousand times. Can’t we just forget I didn’t have an old man, and you worked like a team of dogs to make up for everything?”

  “Yes, let’s do. Let’s forget it all. For heaven’s sake, I’m eating all this Jell-O,” she said gaily.

  “Yes, I noticed,” he said.

  “But I want to do for you,” she told him suddenly again with passion, forgetting everything but her one feeling now, and she put out her hand to him. “You’re all I have, Gibbs.”

  He stared at her. She was weeping.

  “I’ve never been able to do anything for you,” she said. “I know I’m not someone you want to bring your friends home to see.”

  “Mom, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “Don’t swear,” she said. “I may not know grammar or English, but I’m not profane and I never taught you to be. So there,” she said, and she brought out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes, making them, he saw, even older and more worn with the rubbing.

  “Mom,” he said, picking up the harmonica again, “I don’t have any friends.”

  “No? she said, laughing a little. Then understanding his remark more clearly as her weeping calmed itself, she said, commanding again, “What do you mean now by that?”

  “Just what I said, Mom. I don’t have any friends. Except maybe Spyro.”

  “Oh, that Greek boy. We would come back to him.”

  “How could I have friends, do you think. After all . . .”

  “Don’t you go to college like everybody else?” she said hurriedly. “Aren’t we making the attempt, Gibbs?”
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  “Don’t get so excited. I don’t care because I don’t have any friends. I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

  “You go to college and you ought to have friends,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Look, for Christ’s sake, just going to college doesn’t bring you friends. Especially a guy like me with . . .”

  “What’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re handsome. You’re a beautiful boy.”

  “Mom, Je-sus.”

  “No wonder that Greek is painting you. You’re a fine-looking boy.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that way at all,” he said, bored. “Spyro has to paint somebody.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t have friends,” she said. “You have everything. Good looks, intelligence, and you can speak and act refined when you want to . . .”

  “You have to be rich at that college. And your parents have to be . . .”

  “Is that all then?” she said, suddenly very white and facing him.

  “Mom, I didn’t mean anything about you. I didn’t say any of this to make you feel . . .”

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Don’t talk.”

  “Maybe we should talk about it, Mom.”

  “I can’t help what happened. What was was, the past is the past. Whatever wrong I may have done, the circumstances of your birth, Gibbs . . .”

  “Mom, please, this isn’t about you at all.”

  “I’ve stood by you, Gibbs,” she hurried on as if testifying before a deaf judge. “You can never deny that.” She stared at him as though she had lost her reason.

  “I’d like to have seen those rich women with their fat manicured husbands do what I’ve done,” she said now as though powerless to stop, words coming out of her mouth that she usually kept and nursed for her long nights of sleeplessness and hate.

  She stood up quickly as if to leave the room.

  “With no husband and no father to boot in this house! I’d like to see them do what I did. God damn them,” she said.

  Gibbs waited there, pale now as she was, and somehow much smaller before her wrath.

  “God damn everybody!” she cried. “God damn everybody.”

  She sat down and began weeping furiously.

  “I can’t help it if you don’t have friends,” she told him, quieting herself with a last supreme effort. “I can’t help it at all.”

  “Mom,” he said. He wanted to weep too, but there was something too rocklike, too bitter and immovable inside him to let the tears come loose. Often at night as he lay in his bed knowing that Merta was lying in the next room sleepless, he had wanted to get up and go to her and let them both weep together, but he could not.

  “Is there anything I could do to change things here at home for you?” she said suddenly wiping away the tears, and tensing her breast to keep more of the torrent from gathering inside herself. “Anything at all I can do, I will,” she said.

  “Mom,” he said, and he got up, and as he did so the harmonica fell to the linoleum floor.

  “You dropped your little . . . toy,” she said, tightening her mouth.

  “It’s not a toy,” he began. “This is,” he began again. “You see, this is the kind the professionals play on the stage . . . and everywhere.”

  “I see,” she said, struggling to keep the storm within her quiet, the storm that now if it broke might sweep everything within her away, might rage and rage until only dying itself could stop it.

  “Play something on it, Gibbs darling,” she said.

  He wanted to ask her if she was all right.

  “Play, play,” she said desperately.

  “What do you want me to play, Mom?” he said, deathly pale.

  “Just play any number you like,” she suggested.

  He began then to play “How High the Moon” but his lips trembled too much.

  “Keep playing,” she said, beating her hands with the heavy veins and the fingers without rings or embellishment.

  He looked at her hands as his lips struggled to keep themselves on the tiny worn openings of the harmonica which he had described as the instrument of the professionals.

  “What a funny tune,” she said. “I never listened to it right before. What did you say they called it?”

  “Mom,” he said. “Please!”

  He stretched out his hand.

  “Don’t now, don’t,” she commanded. “Just play. Keep playing.”

  EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

  “Idon’t like to make things hard for you,” Jesse said to Cade, “but when you act like this I don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t like nothing I do for you anyhow.”

  The two boys, Jesse and Cade, shared a room over the south end of State Street. Jesse had a job, but Cade, who was fifteen, seldom could find work. They were both down to their last few dollars.

  “I told you a man was coming up here to offer me a job,” Cade said.

  “You can’t wait for a man to come offering you a job,” Jesse said. He laughed. “What kind of a man would that be anyhow.”

  Cade laughed too because he knew Jesse did not believe anything he said.

  “This man did promise me,” Cade explained, and Jesse snorted.

  “Don’t pick your nose like that,” Jesse said to Cade. “What if the man seen you picking.”

  Cade said the man wouldn’t care.

  “What does this man do?” Jesse wondered.

  “He said he had a nice line of goods I could sell for him and make good money,” Cade replied.

  “Good money selling,” Jesse laughed. My advice to you is go out and look for a job, any job, and not wait for no old man to come to teach you to sell.”

  “Well nobody else wants to hire me due to my face,” Cade said.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” Jesse wanted to know. “Outside of you picking your nose all the time, you have as good a face as anybody’s.”

  “I can’t look people in the eye is what,” Cade told him.

  Jesse got up and walked around the small room.

  “Like I told you,” Jesse began the same speech he always gave when Cade was out of work, “I would do anything for you on account of your brother. He saved my life in the goddam army and I ain’t never going to forget that.”

  Cade made his little expression of boredom which was to pinch the bridge of his nose.

  “But you got to work sometimes!” Jesse exploded. “I don’t get enough for two!”

  Cade grimaced, and did not let go the bridge of his nose because he knew this irritated Jesse almost as much as his picking did, but Jesse could not criticize him for just holding his nose, and that made him all the angrier.

  “And you stay out of them arcades too!” Jesse said to Cade. “Spending the money looking at them pictures,” Jesse began. “For the love of . . .” Suddenly Jesse stopped short.

  “For the love of what?’ Cade jumped him. He knew the reason that Jesse did not finish the sentence with a swear word was he went now to the Jesus Saves Mission every night, and since he had got religion he had quit being quite so friendly to Cade as before, cooler and more distant, and he talked, like today, about how good work is for everybody.

  “That old man at the trucking office should have never told you you had a low IQ,” Jesse returned to his difficulty of Cade’s finding work.

  But this remark did not touch Cade today.

  “Jesse,” Cade said, “I don’t care about it.”

  “You don’t care!” Jesse flared up.

  “That’s right,” Cade said, and he got up and took out a piece of cigarette from his pants cuff, and lit a match to the stub. “I don’t believe in IQs,” Cade said.

  Did you get that butt off the street? Jesse wanted to know, his protective manner making his voice soft again.

  “I ain’t answering that question,” Cade told him.

  “Cade, why don’t you be nice to me like you used to be,” Jesse said.

  “Why don’t I be nice to you!” Cade exclained with sa
vagery.

  Suddenly frightened, Jesse said, “Now simmer down.” He was always afraid when Cade suddenly acted too excited.

  “You leave me alone,” Cade said. “I ain’t interferin’ with your life and don’t you interfere with mine. The little life I have, that is.” He grunted.

  “I owe something to you and that’s why I can’t just let you be any old way you feel like being,” Jesse said.

  “You don’t owe me a thing,” Cade told him.

  “I know who I owe and who I don’t,” Jesse replied.

  “You always say you owe me on account of my brother saved your life just before he got hisself blowed up.”

  “Cade, you be careful!” Jesse warned, and his head twitched as he spoke.

  “I’m glad he’s gone,” Cade said, but without the emotion he usually expressed when he spoke of his brother. He had talked against his brother so long in times past in order to get Jesse riled up that it had lost nearly all meaning for both of them. “Yes, sir, I don’t care!” Cade repeated.

  Jesse moved his lips silently and Cade knew he was praying for help.

  Jesse opened his eyes wide then and looking straight at Cade, twisted his lips, trying not to let the swear words come out, and said: “All right, Cade,” after a long struggle.

  “And if religion is going to make you close with your money,” Cade began looking at Jesse’s mouth, “close and mean, too, then I can clear out of here. I don’t need you, Jesse.”

  “What put the idea into your head religion made me close with my money?” Jesse said, and he turned very pale.

  “You need me here, but you don’t want to pay what it takes to keep me,” Cade said.

  Jesse trembling walked over to Cade very close and stared at him.

  Cade watched him, ready.

  Jesse said, “You can stay here as long as you ever want to. And no questions asked.” Having said this, Jesse turned away, a glassy look on his face, and stared at the cracked calcimine of their wall.

  “On account of my old brother I can stay!” Cade yelled.

  “All right then!” Jesse shouted back, but fear on his face. Then softening with a strange weaknes he said, “No, Cade, that’s not it either,” and he went over and put his arm on Cade’s shoulder.