The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Mrs. Owens continued to gaze out the big front window, its heavy shutter pulled back now in daylight to allow her a full view of the street.

  She had paused long enough to allow Pearl’s curiosity to whet itself while her own attention strayed to the faces of passersby. Indeed Mrs. Owens’s only two occupations now were correcting the endless inventory of her heirlooms and observing those who passed her window, protected from the street by massive wrought-iron bars.

  “Mr. Evening is in and out of his rooming house frequently enough to be up to a good deal, if you ask me, Grace,” Pearl finally broke through her sister’s silence.

  Coming out of her reverie, Mrs. Owens smiled. “We’ve always known he was busy, of course.” She took a piece of newsprint from her lap, and closed her eyes briefly in the descending rays of the January sun. “But now at last we know what he’s busy at.” She waved the clipping gently.

  “Ah, don’t start so, child.” Mrs. Owens almost laughed. “Pray look at this, would you,” and she handed the younger woman a somewhat lengthy “notice” clipped neatly from the Wall Street Journal.

  While Pearl put on thick glasses to study the fine print, Mrs. Owens went on as much for herself as her sister: “Mr. Evening has always given me a special feeling.” She touched her lavaliere. “He’s far too young to be as idle as he looks, and on the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, he’s clearly busier than those who make a profession of daily responsibility.”

  “It’s means, Grace,” Pearl said, blinking over her reading, but making no comment on it, which was a kind of desperate plea, it turned out, for information concerning a certain scarce china cup, circa 1910. “He has means,” Pearl repeated.

  “Means?” Mrs. Owens showed annoyance. “Well, I should hope he has, in his predicament.” She hinted at even further knowledge concerning him, but with a note of displeasure creeping into her tone at Pearl’s somewhat offhand, bored manner.

  “I’ve telephoned him to appear, of course.” Mrs. Owens had decided against any further “Preparation” for her sister, and threw the whole completed plan at her now in one fling. “On Thursday, naturally.”

  Putting down the “notice” Pearl waited for Mrs. Owens to make some elaboration on so unusual a decision, but no elaboration came.

  “But you’ve never sold anything, let alone shown to anybody!” Pearl cried, after some moments of deeply troubled cogitation.

  “Who spoke of selling!” Mrs. Owens tightened an earring. “And as to showing, as you say, I haven’t thought that far. . . . But don’t you see, poor darling”—here Mrs. Owens’s voice boomed in what was perhaps less self-defense than self-explanation—“I’ve not met anybody in half a century who wants heirlooms so bad as he.” She tapped the clipping. “He’s worded everything here with one thought only in mind—my seeing it.”

  Pearl withdrew into incomprehension.

  “Don’t you see this has to be the case!” Here she touched the “notice” with her finger. “Who else has the things he’s enumerated here? He’s obviously investigated what I have, and he could have inserted this in the want ads only in the hope it would catch my eye.”

  “But you’re certainly not going to invite someone to the house who merely wants what you have!” Pearl found herself for the first time in her life not only going against her sister in opinion, but voicing something akin to disapproval.

  “Why, you yourself said only the other night that what we needed was company!” Mrs. Owens put these words adroitly now in her sister’s mouth, where they could never have been.

  “But Mr. Evening!” Pearl protested against his coming, ignoring or forgetting the fact she had been quoted as having said something she never in the first place had thought.

  “Don’t we need somebody to tell us about heirlooms! I mean our heirlooms, of course. Haven’t you said as much yourself time after time?”

  Mrs. Owens was trying to get her sister to go along with her, to admit complicity, so to speak, in what she herself had brought about, and now she found that Pearl put her mind and temper against even consideration.

  “Someone told me only recently”—Pearl now hinted at a side to her own life perhaps unknown to Mrs. Owens—“that the young man you speak of, Mr. Evening, can hardly carry on a conversation.”

  Mrs. Owens paused. She had not been inactive in making her own investigations concerning their caller-to-be, and one of the things she had discovered, in addition to his being a Southerner, was that he did not or would not “talk” very much.

  “We don’t need a conversationalist—at least not about them,” Mrs. Owens nearly snapped, by them meaning the heirlooms. “What we need is an appreciator, and the muter the better, say I.”

  “But if that’s all you want him for!”—Pearl refused to be won—“why, he’ll smell out your plan. He’ll see you’re only showing him what he can never hope to buy or have.”

  A look of deep disappointment tinged with spleen crossed Mrs. Owens’s still-beautiful face.

  “Let him smell out our plan, then, as you put it,” Mrs. Owens chided in the wake of her sister’s opposition, “we won’t care! If he can’t talk, don’t you see, so much the better. We’ll have a session of ‘looking’ from him, and his ‘appreciation’ will perk us up. We’ll see him taking in everything, dear love, and it will review our own lifelong success. . . . Don’t be so down on it now. . . . And mind you, we won’t be here quite forever,” she ended, and a certain hard majestical note in her voice was not lost on the younger woman. “The fact,” Mrs. Owens summed it all up, “that we’ve nothing to give him needn’t spoil for us the probability he’s got something to give us.”

  Pearl said no more then, and Mrs. Owens spoke under her breath: “I haven’t a particle of a doubt that I’m in the right about him, and if it should turn out I’m wrong, I’ll shoulder all the blame.”

  WHATEVER PARTICLE OF a doubt there may have been in Mrs. Owens’s own mind, there was considerable more of doubt and apprehension in Mr. Evening’s as he weighed, in his rooming house, the rash decision he had made to visit formidable Mrs. Owens in—one could not say her business establishment, since she had none—but her background of accumulation of heirlooms, which vague world was, he could only admit, also his own. Because he had never known or understood people well, and he was the most insignificant of “collectors,” he was at a loss as to why Mrs. Owens should feel he had anything to give her, and since her “legend” was too well known to him, he knew she, likewise, had nothing at all to give him, except, and this was why he was going, the “look-in” which his visit would give him. Whatever risk there was in going to see her, and there appeared to be some, he felt, from “warnings” of a queer kind from those who had dealt with her, it was worth something just to get inside, even though again he had been informed by those in the business it would be doubtful if he would be allowed to mention “purchase” and in the end it was also doubtful he would be allowed even a close peek.

  On the other hand, if Mrs. Owens wanted him to tell her something—this crossed his mind as he went toward her huge pillared house, though he could not imagine even vaguely what he could have to tell her, and if she was mad enough to think him capable of entertaining her, for after all she was a lonely ancient lady on the threshold of death, he would disabuse her of all such expectations almost as soon as they had met. He was uneasy with old women, he supposed, though in his work he spent more time with them than with other people, and he wanted, he finally said out loud to himself, that hand-painted china cup, 1910, no matter what it might cost him. He fancied she might yield it to him at some atrocious illegal price. It was no more improbable, after all, than that she had invited him in the first place. Mrs. Owens never invited anybody, that is, from the outside, and the inside people in her life had all died or were incapacitated from paying calls. Yes, he had been summoned, and he could hope at least therefore that what everybody else told him was at least thinkable—purchase, and if that was not in store for him, then the oth
er improbable thing, “viewing.”

  But Mr. Evening could not pretend. If his getting the piece of china or even more improbably other larger heirlooms, kept from daylight as well as human eyes, locked away in the floors above her living room, if possession meant long hours of currying favor, talking and laughing and dining and killing the evening, then no thank you, never. His inability to pretend, he supposed, had kept him from rising in the antique trade, for although he had a kind of business of his own here in Brooklyn, his own private income was what kept him afloat, and what he owned in heirlooms, though remarkable for a young dealer, did not make him a figure in the trade. His inconspicuous position in the business made his being summoned by Mrs. Owens all the more inexplicable and even astonishing. Mr. Evening was, however, too unversed both in people and the niceties of his own profession to be either sufficiently impressed or frightened.

  Meanwhile Pearl, moments before Mr. Evening’s arrival gazing out of the corner of her eye at her sister, saw with final and uncomfortable consternation the telltale look of anticipation on the older woman’s face which demonstrated that she “wanted” Mr. Evening with almost the same inexplicable maniacal whim which she had once long ago demonstrated toward a certain impossible-to-find Spanish medieval chair, and how she had got hold of the latter still remained a mystery to the world of dealers.

  I

  “Shall we without further ado, then, strike a bargain? Mrs. Owens intoned, looking past Mr. Evening, who had arrived on a bad snowy January night.

  He had been reduced to more than his customary kind of silent social incommunicativeness by finally seeing Mrs. Owens in the flesh, a woman who while reputed to be so old, looked unaccountably beautiful, whose clothes were floral in their charm, wafting sachets of woody scent to his nostrils, and whose voice sounded like fine chimes.

  “Of course I don’t mean there’s to be a sale! Even youthful you couldn’t have come here thinking that.” She dismissed at once any business with a pronounced flourish of white hands. “Nothing’s for sale, and won’t be even should we die.” She faced him with a lessening of defiance, but he stirred uncomfortably.

  “Whatever you may think, whatever you may have been told”—she went now to deal with the improbable fact of their meeting—“let me say that I can’t resist their being admired” (she meant the heirlooms, of course). She unfolded the piece of newsprint of his “notice.” “I could tell immediately by your way of putting things”—she touched the paper—“that you knew all about them. Or better, I knew you knew all about them by the way you left things undescribed. I knew you could admire, without stint or reservation.” She finished with a kind of low bow.

  “I’m relieved”—he began to look about the large high room—“that you’re not curious then to know who I am, to know about me, that is, as I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to satisfy your curiosity on that score. That is to say, there’s almost nothing to tell about me, and you already know what my vocation is.”

  She allowed this speech to die in silence, as she did with an occasional intruding sound of traffic which unaccountably reached her parlor, but then at his helpless sinking look, she said in an attempt, perhaps, to comfort: “I don’t have to be curious about anything that holds me, Mr. Evening. It always unfolds itself, in any case.

  “For instance,” she went on, her face taking on a mock-wrathful look, “people sometimes try to remind me that I was once a famous actress, which though being a fact, is irrelevant, and, more, now meaningless, for even in those remote days, when let’s say I was on the stage, even then, Mr. Evening, these”—and she indicated with a flourish of those commanding white hands the munificent surroundings—“these were everything!

  “One is really only strictly curious about people one never intends to meet, I think, Mr. Evening,” Mrs. Owens said.

  She now rose and stood for a moment, so that the imposition of her height over him, seated in his low easy chair, was emphasized, then walking over to a tiny beautiful peachwood table, she looked at something on it. His own attention, still occupied with her presence, did not move for a moment to what she was bestowing a long, calm glance on. She made no motion to touch the object on the table before her. Though his vision clouded a bit, he looked directly at it now, and saw what it was, and saw there could be no mistake about it. It was the pale rose shell-like 1910 hand-painted china cup.

  “You don’t need to bring it to me!” he cried, and even she was startled by such an outburst. Mr. Evening had gone as white as chalk.

  He searched in vain in his pockets for a handkerchief, and noting his distress, Mrs. Owens handed him one from the folds of her own dress.

  “I won’t ever beg of you,” he said, wiping his brow with the handkerchief. “I would offer you anything for the cup, of course, but I can’t beg.”

  “What will you do then, Mr. Evening?” She came to within a few inches of him.

  He sat before her, his head slightly tilted forward, his palms upturned like one who wishes to determine if rain is beginning.

  “Don’t answer”—she spoke in loud, gay tones—“for nobody expects you to do anything, beg, bargain, implore, steal. Whatever you are, or were, Mr. Evening—I catch from your accent you are Southern—you were never an actor, thank fortune. It’s one of the reasons you’re here, you are so much yourself.

  “Now, mark me.” Mrs. Owens strode past his chair to a heavy gold-brocaded curtain, her voice almost menacing in its depth of resonance. “I’ve not allowed you to look at this cup in order to tempt you. I merely wanted you to know I’d read your ‘notice,’ which you wrote, in any case, only for me. Furthermore, as you know, I’m not bargaining with you in any received sense of the word. You and I are beyond bargaining with one another. Money will never be mentioned between us, papers, or signatures—all that goes without saying. But I do want something,” and she turned from the curtain and directed her luminous gray eyes to his face. “You’re not like anybody else, Mr. Evening, and it’s this quality of yours which has, I won’t say won me, you’re beyond winning anybody, but which has brought an essential part of myself back to me by your being just what you are and wanting so deeply what you want!”

  Holding her handkerchief entirely over his face now so that he spoke to her as from under a sheet, he mumbled, “I don’t like company, Mrs. Owens.” His interruption had the effect of freezing her to the curtain before her. “And company, I’m afraid, includes you and your sister. I can’t come and talk, and I don’t like supper parties. If I did, if I liked them, that is, I’d prefer you.”

  “What extraordinary candor!” Mrs. Owens was at a loss where to walk, at what to look. “And how gloriously rude!” She considered everything quickly. “Good, very good, Mr. Evening. . . . But good won’t carry us far enough!” she cried, and her voice rose in a great swell of volume until she saw with satisfaction that he moved under her strength. The handkerchief fell away, and his face, very flushed, but with the eyes closed, bent in her direction.

  “You don’t have to talk”—Mrs. Owens dismissed this as if with loathing of that idea that he might—“and you don’t have to listen. You can snore in your chair if you like. But if you come, say, once a week, that will more than do for a start. You could consider this house as a kind of waiting room, let’s say, for a day that’s sure and bound to come for all, and especially us. . . . You’d wait here, say, on Thursday, and we could offer you the room where you are now, and food, which you would be entitled to spurn, and all you would need do is let time pass. I could allow you to see, very gradually”—she looked hurriedly in the direction of the cup—“a few things here and there, not many at a visit, of course, it might easily unhinge you in your expectant state”—she laughed—“and certainly I could show you nothing for quite a while from up there,” and she moved her head toward the floors above. “But in the end, if you kept it up, the visits, I mean, I can assure you your waiting would ‘pay off,’ as they say out there. . . . I can’t be any more specific.” She brought
her explanation of the bargain to an abrupt close, and indicated with a sweeping gesture he might stand and depart.

  II

  Thursday, then, set aside by Mrs. Owens for Mr. Evening to begin attendance on the heirlooms, loomed up for the two of them as a kind of fateful, even direful, mark on the calendar; in fact, both the mistress of the heirlooms and her viewer were ill with anticipation. Mr. Evening’s dislike of company and being entertained vied with his passion for “viewing.” On the other hand, Mrs. Owens, watched over by a saddened and anguished Pearl, felt the hours and days speed precipitously to an encounter which she now could not understand her ever having arranged or wanted. Never had she lived through such a week, and her fingers, usually white and still as they rested on her satin cushions, were almost raw from a violent pulling on and off of her rings.

  At last Thursday, 8:30 PM, came, finding Mrs. Owens with one glass of wine—all she ever allowed herself, with barely a teaspoon of it tasted. Nine-thirty struck, ten, no Mr. Evening. Her lips, barely touched with an uncommon kind of rouge, moved in a bitter self-deprecatory smile. She rose and walked deliberately to a small ebony cabinet, and took out her smelling bottle, which she had not touched for months. Opening it, she found it had considerably weakened in strength, but she took it with her back to her chair, sniffing its dilute fumes from time to time.

  Then about a quarter past eleven, when she had finished with hope, having struck the silk and mohair of her chair several castigating blows, the miracle, Mr. Evening, ushered in by Giles (who rare for him showed some animation), appeared in his heavy black country coat. Mrs. Owens, not so much frosty from his lateness as incredulous that she was seeing him, barely nodded. Having refused her supper, she had opened a large gilt book of Flaxman etchings, and was occupying herself with these, while Pearl, seated at a little table of her own in the furthest reaches of the room, was dining on some tender bits of fish soaked in a sauce into which she dipped a muffin.