The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Tonight!” He was emphatic.

  “This young man who looked like one of my own former students came into my classroom at six o’clock tonight,” she began her story. “I was cleaning the blackboard.”

  Winston watched her, his face drained of blood.

  “He asked me if I remembered him, and I said I didn’t, though his face was familiar. . . . He then asked if I remembered Alice Rodgers. Of course, I remembered her. We just expelled her last term, you know. She had gotten herself and nearly every boy in the eighth grade in all that trouble. You remember reading about it all in the paper . . .

  “Do you remember all that about Alice Rodgers?” Miss Miranda asked him.

  Winston half-nodded.

  “This young man, oh, he couldn’t have been more than twenty . . . certainly not more than your age at the most, Winston . . . he said, ‘I think you ought to have to pay for what you did to Alice Rodgers, ruining her name and reputation.’

  “ ‘I only wanted to make a real future for Alice Rodgers,’ I told him.

  “ ‘In the reformatory?’ he asked with an ugly grin.”

  Miss Miranda stopped, perhaps expecting Winston to help her on, but he did nothing.

  “Then,” Miss Miranda said, “he asked me to take off my clothes. He had a gun, you see.”

  Winston got up and walked in the direction of the next room.

  “Where are you going?” Miss Miranda cried.

  He looked back at her, asked her to excuse him, and then came back and sat down.

  “He said he would use the gun if I didn’t do exactly as he said,” she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Miss Miranda was looking at Winston, for she was certain that he was not listening to what she said.

  “He took all my clothes away from me, including my shoes, and keys, and then, saying he hoped I would remember Alice Rodgers for the rest of all our lives, he walked out, leaving me to my plight. . . .”

  Winston was looking down at the carpet again.

  Miss Miranda’s voice continued: “I called out to him from the bannister to come back. ‘How will I get home?’ I called after him.”

  Her voice now trailed off. Suddenly she held her head in her hands and cried, “Oh, God! God!”

  “Are you in pain?” Winston looked up sleepily from the carpet.

  “No,” Miss Miranda replied quickly.

  “My head’s in a whirl,” Winston told her.

  “I don’t remember that young man at all,” Miss Miranda went on. “But you know, Winston, after you’ve taught so many years, and when you’re as old as I am, all young people, all old people, too, look so much alike.”

  “Miss Miranda, let me call somebody! We should inform—”

  “No,” she told him. “I won’t hear of it. Now, please be calm and don’t let what has happened upset you. I want to stay here tonight.”

  “This young man you describe. He didn’t harm you in any way?”

  “He did not,” Miss Miranda said in the voice of one who defends.

  She looked at Winston.

  Without warning, he began to gag. He rushed out of the parlor to a small room near the kitchen.

  He evidently did not have time to close the door behind him. She could hear him vomiting.

  “Oh, dear,” Miss Miranda said.

  She came into the bathroom and watched him. He was straining very hard over the toilet bowl.

  “Winston, I am going to hold your head,” she advised him. He made no motion.

  She held his head while he vomited some more.

  When he had stopped, she took a fresh wash cloth off the rack, and wiped his mouth.

  “I’ve had the virus,” he explained.

  Suddenly he turned to the bowl again and vomited.

  “Poor lad,” she said, wiping his mouth again with the cloth.

  “You must lie down now,” she admonished him.

  He walked toward an adjoining room where there was a double bed, and lay down on it.

  She helped him off with his shoes, and put the covers partly over him.

  “I’m afraid it was me who upset you,” she apologized.

  “No, Miss Miranda, it’s the virus. Can’t seem to shake it off. I catch it off and on from my pupils. First from one, then the other.”

  “Just rest quietly,” she said.

  When he had dozed off, she exclaimed again, “God! God!”

  She must have dozed off, too, in her chair by the double bed, for some time later she awoke with a start and heard him vomiting again in the bathroom, and she hurried in to hold his head.

  “Winston, poor lad,” she said, feeling his hair wet with sweat.

  “How could you stand to watch me be sick like that,” he wondered later when they were back in the bedroom.

  “I’ve taught public school for thirty years,” she reminded him.

  “Miss Miranda,” he said suddenly, “you were raped tonight, weren’t you?”

  She stared at him.

  “You’ve got to let me call the doctor.” He wiped his mouth.

  “I was not . . . raped,” she denied his statement.

  He watched her.

  “That fellow just asked you to take off your clothes?”

  She nodded.

  “On account of Alice Rodgers.” He echoed her story.

  “I had testified against Alice in court,” she added, “and they sent her to the reformatory.”

  “Well, if it’s your story,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” Miss Miranda said.

  “Nobody will believe you,” he told her.

  “Aren’t you talking too much, Winston?” Miss Miranda showed concern for his health.

  He did not answer.

  “Bertha Wilson saw you across the street,” he said sleepily.

  “She was looking in my direction all right,” Miss Miranda admitted.

  “She must have seen you then.”

  “Oh, it was quite dark, Winston, after all.”

  “Bertha’s got real X-ray eyes.”

  “Well, so she saw me,” Miss Miranda said. “I had to come in somewhere.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” Winston said. “Nobody will think anything about us.”

  “Oh, God!” Miss Miranda cried suddenly.

  Winston raised himself on his elbows.

  “You in pain, Miss Miranda? Physical pain?”

  She stifled back her sobs.

  “Miss Miranda,” Winston began. “That young man that came into your classroom tonight . . . are you listening to me . . . that young man was Fred Rodgers. Alice Rodgers’ older brother.”

  Miss Miranda went on making the stifling sounds.

  “Did you hear what I said, Miss Miranda?”

  She nodded.

  “Alice Rodgers’ older brother,” he repeated. “I know him. Listen, Miss Miranda, I know he wouldn’t stop at just taking away your clothes. Don’t you think I have any sense at all?”

  He looked away from the look she gave him then.

  “Knowing Fred Rodgers the way I do, Miss Miranda, I know he wouldn’t stop at what you said he did. He had it in for you for sending his sister to the reform school.”

  “I’m nearly sixty years old, Winston,” Miss Miranda said in the pool of darkness that was her chair. “I’d rather we didn’t talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’ve got to call the doctor,” he said.

  Miss Miranda looked down at the long lapel of her bathrobe.

  “You had blood on you, too,” Winston told her.

  A moment later, he screamed and doubled up with pain in the bed.

  “Winston, for pity’s sake.”

  “I think I got an attack of appendicitis,” he groaned. “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” He touched his stomach.

  “Do you want a doctor then!” she cried, as if he had betrayed her.

  He lay back in the bed and groaned. His face went a kind of green, then yellow, as if suddenly illuminated by a searchlight.


  “Dear God. God!” Miss Miranda cried.

  “I may get all right,” Winston told her, and he smiled encouragement at her from out of his own distress.

  “Oh, what shall I do. What shall I do,” she cried.

  “I guess we both will have to have the doctor,” Winston told her.

  “I can’t tell him, Winston. . . . I’m sixty years old.”

  “Well, you let him do the worrying now, Miss Miranda.”

  “You knew this Fred Rodgers?” She cried a little now.

  Winston nodded.

  “I never taught him, though.” She sighed. Suddenly she cried again, “Dear God. God!”

  “You try to be calm, Miss Miranda,” he comforted her.

  He seemed almost calm now himself.

  “Why don’t you lay your head down on the bed, you look so bad,” he told her.

  “Oh, aren’t we in the worst situation, Winston,” she said.

  She cried a little.

  She laid her head down on the bed, and he patted her hair a moment.

  “I don’t know how many people saw me,” she said.

  Winston lay back, easier now. His pain had quit.

  Miss Miranda, suddenly, as if in response to his pain’s easing, began to tremble violently.

  “Get into bed,” he told her. “You’ve got a chill coming on.”

  He helped her under the covers.

  She screamed suddenly as he put her head down on the pillow.

  “Just try to get as quiet as possible, Miss Miranda.” He helped her cover up.

  She was trembling now all over, crying, “Oh, God! At sixty!”

  “If you can just get a good night’s rest,” he comforted her.

  “Dear God. Oh, God!”

  “In the morning the doctor will fix you up.”

  “I can never go back and teach those children,” she said.

  Winston patted her hand. His nausea had left him, but he had a severe headache that throbbed over his temples.

  “What is that woman’s name across the street again?” Miss Miranda questioned him.

  “You mean Bertha Wilson.”

  Miss Miranda nodded.

  “I taught her in the eighth grade. Way back in 1930, just think.”

  “I wouldn’t think about it, Miss Miranda.”

  “Wouldn’t think about what?”

  “Anything.”

  “I can’t believe this has happened,” she told Winston.

  “The doctor will come and fix us both up.”

  “I don’t see how I can have the doctor or go back to school or anything,” she wept.

  She began crying hard now, and then after a while she got quiet.

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  He had thought to go upstairs and sleep in the bedroom that had been his mother’s, but he didn’t know whether he had the strength to get up there, and in the end he had crawled back under the covers next to Miss Miranda, and they both lay there close to one another, and they both muttered to themselves in the darkness as if they were separated by different rooms from one another.

  “Good night,” he said to her.

  She looked up from her pillow for a moment.

  “Good night, sweetheart,” he said again, in a much lower voice.

  She looked at the wall against which he had said the last words. There was a picture of his mother there, pretty much as Miss Miranda remembered her.

  “God,” Miss Miranda whispered. “Dear God.”

  SERMON

  Ladies and people, you must realize, or you would not be sitting here before me, that I am the possessor of your ears. Don’t speak, I will talk. You have sat here before, and have heard things men, or, in some cases, ladies told you. I have no intention of telling you the same things, but will proceed just as though you were all in the privacy of your own bathhouses. I was not called here to entertain you. You could entertain yourselves if you weren’t here. The fact you are here means something. (I will not mention the fact of my being here.) We face one another across the hostile air, you waiting to hear and to criticize, and I half-staring at some of you and not seeing the rest of you, though perhaps wanting to. Some of you are rude. Many of you are old and homely, others are not up to the speech I have in readiness. We all of us know all of this. It is in the air I look through to see you. Yet we all feel we have to go on. You have left the comfort of your living rooms and bathhouses to be here. I have come because I am a speaker and had to. None of us are really happy, none of us are in the place he feels he might want to be. Many of you feel there must be a better place for you than the one you are occupying now. There is a feeling of everything being not quite right. You feel if you only knew more or could do more you would be somewhere else. The fact is, however, you are wrong.

  I say this looking at all of you now. You are wrong, and I am powerless to add or subtract from that fact. You came originally wrong, and you have been getting worse in every way since that day. There is, in fact, no hope for you, and there never was. Even if you had never been born there would have been no hope for you. It was hopeless whether you arrived or not. Yet you all arrived, you got here, you are here. And it is all so meaningless, because you all know there is a better place for you than here. And that is the trouble.

  You will not accept the hereness. You will not accept me. Yet I am the only thing there is under the circumstances, but you reject me, and why—well I will tell you why. Because you have nothing better to do or be than the person you are now, occupying the particular chair you now occupy and which you are not improving by occupying. You have improved nothing since you came into this situation. You have tried to improve yourself, of course, or things connected with yourself, but you have only finished in making everything worse, you have only finished in making yourself worse than when you were sent, worse than what you were when you were born, worse even than what you were before you entered this great Amphitheater.

  There is, in short, no hope for you, as I said earlier. You are bad off and getting more so, and sadly enough when you get in the worst shape of all so that you think you will not be able to go on for another second, the road ahead is still worse yet. For there is no hope for you even when things get so impossibly terrible that you will kill yourself. For that is no solution. In death you will only begin where you left off, but naturally, in worse shape.

  Yet you continue to sit here watching me, like skinned tadpoles whose long-dead brains still send messages to your twitching feet. You twitch as you listen to me but you hear nothing. You have never heard anything.

  And now you are waiting for the message, the solution to all my speech. You have been thinking, “What He says is terrible and frightening, but now will come the Good Part, the part with the meaning . . .” Ladies and people, listen to me. I have no Good Part to give you. My only message, if it can be called one, and I do not call it one, I call it nothing, my message to you is there is no message. You have made a terrible mistake in coming to the Amphitheater tonight to hear Me, yet you would have made a mistake no matter what you did tonight for the simple reason that you have no choice but to make mistakes, because you have no plans. You are going somewhere because you think you have to . . . That is what you are doing, and how therefore could you do anything but make mistakes. You continue to act and you have nothing to act with but the actions. Hence you are doomed to lectures and books hoping to save yourselves in the evening. Another attempt at action. You are doomed because you will go on trying to be other than you are and therefore you succeed always in continuing as you have been. There is no choice. You are listening even now with your pathetic tadpole faces because you know you are not getting my words. Give up trying, dear auditors. Be without trying to be. Lie back in your seats and let the air have its way with you. Let it tickle you in the spots where you are always fighting its insistent moisture. Don’t let it retreat. Let things be. Don’t try to be improved by my speech, because nothing can improve you. Surrender to what you are conti
nuing against, and perhaps you will not have to go ahead with everything. And I know how weary you are of going ahead. Oh, don’t I know it.

  You are beginning to look at the Giant Clocks, meaning you have stood all you can for one night. I do not pity or sympathize with you and at the same time I do, because you do not belong here, as I said earlier. Nobody belongs here. It has all been a mistake your coming here. I, of course, am a Mistake, and how could my coming be a success. Yet in a sense it is, ladies and people, for the simple reason that I have prepared no speech and have not thought about what I am saying to you. I knew it would be hopeless. I knew when I saw your faces that you would only listen to what you say to yourself in your bathhouses or your laundry cleanup kitchens. You knew everything anyhow and have continued to improve on what has already been done. Hence you are hopeless.

  I have talked here tonight in the hope you would not hear, because if you didn’t you might not so thoroughly disgust yourselves, and therefore me. But you have sat in exactly the rapport or lack of it which I expect from the human tadpole. You have been infinitely repulsive to me, and for that I thank you, because by being infinitely repulsive you have continued continuity and what more could any speaker ask. What if you had become while I was talking. The whole world would have changed, of course. You would have all become alive. But the truth of the continuum is that it is continuous. You have not failed History, the continuous error. You have gone on with it, but continuing.

  And so I say to you, pale and yet red tadpoles, you are hopeless and my words are spoken to tell you not to hope. You have nothing with which to win. It is doom itself that I see your bloated eyes and mouths begging for. How could I say anything to you then but to return to you the stale air which you have been breathing in my face all evening. I return it to you, therefore, not in flatulence, that would be to flatter you, but in air in return. And I thank you. I mean this. I thank you one and all, ladies and people. I take pleasure in my activity though I know you do not, are not expected to take any and would be miserable if my pleasure became real to you. And so farewell, or rather good-by, because we will meet again. There is no escape from it. That is why we are all so repulsive to one another: infinitely so. Life is immortal. Its eggs are too numerous for it but to spawn at the mere touch, and therefore with real emotion I say, So be it. Come whenever you can, I am always here. Good-by, and yet not good-by.