The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  The Prince was nearly as overcome with joy as his friend the opera singer and they all embraced one another in an excess of joyful thanksgiving.

  “He was just beginning to tell me how it was he was lost to us,” Madame Lenore told the Prince.

  “I had forgotten, Your Grace,” Kitty Blue turned to his highness, “that I was forbidden to talk with common cats.”

  “And from what I have heard,” the Prince said, “you could hardly have chosen a worse creature to speak to than the notorious Great Cat and his accomplice One Eye, who I am glad to tell you have both been sent to prison for life.”

  Kitty Blue could not help smiling.

  “After Great Cat had robbed me of my earring, I was rescued by a young theater scout sent to locate promising talent by Herbert of Old Vienna.”

  “And don’t I know the theater scout you mention,” the Prince was indignant. “Kirby Jericho is his name.”

  Kitty Blue nodded. “He took me to his training chamber,” the cat went on, “and for six weeks I was his prisoner while he coached me and instructed me in the art of guitar playing, elocution and soft-shoe dancing, prior to his turning me over to Herbert of Old Vienna.”

  The Prince could not help interrupting the narrative here by cries of outrage.

  Madame Lenore cringed at the thought of what her beloved cat had suffered in her absence.

  Despite his painful adventures and the accompanying pain and suffering they had inflicted on Kitty Blue, both Madame Lenore and the Prince had to admit that the cat’s experiences had given him if possible an even more ingratiating and splendid personality, and what is more an almost inexhaustible repertory.

  “Before, dear Blue,” the Prince expressed it this way, “you were a marvelous companion and a sterling intimate, but having been trained by wicked but brilliant Herbert of Old Vienna and Kirby Jericho, you are without an equal in the entire world.

  The Prince then stood up and folded his arms.

  “I want to invite you, Madame Lenore and Kitty Blue, to accompany me on an ocean cruise around the world beginning tomorrow at noon. Will you kindly accept such an invitation?”

  As he waited for their reply the Prince added: “I think both of you could stand with a long vacation, and this one is scheduled to last for seventeen months.”

  Madame Lenore turned to her favorite cat for a response.

  Kitty Blue fairly leaped for joy at the thought of a world cruise with a royal protector and the greatest living singer, and nodded acceptance.

  And so the three of them became during that long sea voyage inseparable friends and companions. And almost every night, at the Prince’s command, Kitty Blue would entertain them with the story of his adventures, interspersed with his guitar playing and singing and soft-shoe routine. The narrative of his adventures changing a little from night to night, new details coming into the story, new additions not imparted before, gave the Prince and Madame Lenore such entertainment they never knew a dull moment on their sea voyage. The three of them became the most famous trio perhaps known then or thereafter.

  BONNIE

  People begin always by asking me about my dove, but what they really want me to tell them about is Bonnie. I think they find it, if not amusing, a bit outside the ordinary run of story. They tell it to others and pass it around. I resent this, but people ask me to tell our story, and I oblige them. So I am to blame if people retell it and maybe laugh behind my back.

  I have after all only one story, and it is Bonnie. At first maybe I was ashamed that this was so, but now I admit it, and I don’t care anymore what people say or think or how much they laugh.

  I married her when I was only eighteen. She was a bit older than me, everybody said. Actually I never thought about her having any age at all, she was so all-in-all to me. It was even more than love, though it was that too, all of it. And I guess I would have loved her if she had turned out to be twice my age, or maybe even not a human being at all.

  Our troubles started in earnest (though we had trouble from the very first night together on our honeymoon) when Bonnie began putting on weight. At first I sort of liked it, you see. It didn’t spoil her appearance, or her prettiness as far as I was concerned, and Bonnie was the prettiest girl in the world. All the old worn-out phrases described her to a T, “peaches and cream, snow and roses.” And her yellow hair everybody always called “spun gold,” and so on. Her weight in fact didn’t seem to show because of such precious good looks.

  But in the end it was her strange hunger for sweets that caused the final breakup between us, not her getting fat. When, for example, we’d pass a bakery, we would have to stop and she would gaze through the glass at the spectacle of the cakes, pie, jelly rolls, cookies and tarts, till once I said more good-humored than angry, “Bonnie, you love sweets more than you do me!”

  When it got so bad, and she had put on thirty extra pounds, I said one day as she stopped suddenly to look in a pastry shop, “Maybe, Bonnie, we should see a doctor.”

  “Maybe you should, Danny,” and the way she said “Danny” went through me like a knife because it had the real sound of goodbye in it. I can’t explain how one word, my name, as she pronounced it could tell me everything was at an end, but when I heard her say it, I knew.

  I knew too she blamed me in her heart for her not having babies.

  SO IT WENT on like this for some months. Whenever I would come home, whether unexpected or not, she would be sitting at the big dining room table eating something fattening, a piece of pie loaded with whipped cream or a slice of Sacher torte, caving in with chocolate.

  “Bonnie,” I said one time, seizing her hand with the fork in it so that I hurt her, “You don’t want to put on any more pounds!”

  “How do you know what I want or don’t want,” she retorted, tears in her eyes.

  Finally I could hardly recognize her. She was getting on to becoming “circus fat.” I moved to the small room down the hall and left her to sleep by herself. I began missing supper in the evening, and there were days I didn’t come home at all, but slept in my office in this big firm in the financial district. I didn’t have another girl, which was what she thought. The truth is I was still in love with Bonnie, more so than ever in fact, but there was no Bonnie for me, you see. Just this fat woman growing toward “circus fat.”

  Then I moved out entirely. She didn’t put up the least resistance. We weren’t going to be divorced even, for how could I divorce a woman whom I no longer even recognized? The real Bonnie was gone. At work I sometimes daydreamed about her as if she had left on a round-the-world voyage.

  AFTER A YEAR or so had passed like this the thought presented itself to me that at least a legal separation might be better for us both. I stopped by the old place and rang the bell furtively, almost shuddering to think how it would be. A young man, hardly more than a boy, answered the door. I faltered for a moment, then got out, “Bonnie here?”

  He nodded, studying me cooly as if he recognized her description of me easily.

  The long wait in the hall made me wonder if she had gotten so heavy maybe he was going to have to wheel her out.

  Then I was aware of a presence, and I looked straight forward and saw her. I had to hold my right hand on the doorjamb to steady me. For there she was, Bonnie, but just the way she had looked when I had been eighteen and taken her to dances and drive-in movies. In fact she was a little thinner I believe than when I first began going with her.

  “Gosh all get out,” was all I could utter and finally, “Bonnie! Bonnie!”

  But though she looked just like the old Bonnie I had gone with and had married, so slim and if anything prettier and even more luscious-looking, there was no real look of recognition in her face for me, no greeting, warmth, certainly no welcome home.

  “I’m glad you stopped by, Dan,” she began icily, while I just stood there, and why not admit it, worshipped her, and kept muttering her name again and again until she cut me short with: “We do want the divorce now after all
.

  “Since you’ve been out of a job, I’ve heard,” she went on without letting me catch my breath, “we can pay for it ourselves, can’t we, Earle?” She turned to the young man who had greeted me and who now stood directly beside her.

  “Oh, I’m going to work again soon in the financial district,” I said too unemphatically and soft for them perhaps to have heard.

  “Just the same,” she continued, “since you’ve missed so much work, we’d like to pay all the court costs.”

  “I don’t want a divorce,” I tried to put some body in my voice, but it came out about as substantial as a whisper. “I may not have any ground to stand on,” I was continuing, “but Bonnie . . . Bonnie. . . .”

  “I have a good lawyer,” she was going right forward, and all the time like a simp I was uttering her name. I couldn’t stop saying it, like a man with the hiccups.

  Then I saw the stare she was giving me. The leave-taking came like winter sleet. I would hear from them, she said and she added that they had tried to contact me several times earlier.

  “If I could only speak what is in my heart, Bonnie,” I think I said or words to that effect between the space left by the door closing against me.

  THEN THE DIVORCE was granted without my contesting it or replying to the many legal communications which piled up on my desk. Two years passed, maybe more. I became deeply absorbed in my new work on Broad Street and Wall. For a man so at loose ends my rise was perhaps surprising and probably impressed all who knew me except myself.

  I worked often fourteen hours a day, the outside world became thin and insubstantial and even when leaving the office I noticed very little around me. My whole life was work.

  Yet in the late evening, when I would leave my office, I usually passed a woman on a park bench who held patiently on her outstretched hand a small, beautifully shaped bird which I was to learn later as if in a school lesson was no ordinary pet shop specimen.

  Up until then I had never been interested in birds, but I looked at this bird attentively while barely glancing at the woman who held it. In truth I had quit looking close at anybody for some time after my matrimonial fiasco.

  But once soon after the very cold days arrived, one day when I was about to pass the bird and its owner, I stopped, as if frozen in my tracks, gawked, stared, was unable to take my eyes off her. The woman holding the bird was Bonnie, but not a Bonnie I believe even her own mother would have recognized.

  “What is it, Bonnie?” I began as if there had not been our separation and the distance of time. “Can I do anything?”

  She was so thin one could see many little veins in her face and hands and the protuberance of bones. She had not an extra ounce of flesh on her.

  “Where is Earle?” I said at a loss as to how to continue.

  “Oh, Earle? Remarried.” She spoke indifferently, almost sleepily.

  “Can I come to see you, Bonnie?” I asked against my own better judgment.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea,” she replied after a careful silence.

  “Remember,” I began awkwardly, my voice almost unrecognizable to my own ears, “I’m . . . yours Bonnie, if you want me!” I blushed at those last improvident words.

  She cut me down with a look.

  EVERY DAY THEN for many weeks I would see her sitting on the same bench under a huge sycamore tree, the bird always with her, each day a different kind of tiny neckband on its throat. I dared not go near.

  Then at the beginning of a break in the weather, when sitting out would have been more customary, I missed her. The next day also she was absent, and the day after that, and so on. Several weeks passed without her turning up.

  One Saturday when I had to go to work to finish some pressing details of my job, I stopped short. There on the identical bench all alone was the white small bird. I looked frantically. I waited, I forgot about my job. I picked up the bird, and kept looking up and down the street. He was quite tame and made no effort to struggle out of my grasp. I walked over to an outdoor stand which sold bird seed, and bought some to feed him. He seemed in fact hungry and partook of all I could give him. I sat there half the day, waiting, never going near my office, certain she must return for the pet.

  That evening I returned home with the bird. I had purchased him a small cage from a variety store around the corner from where I live.

  Sunday I went back to work to finish the task I should have performed on Saturday. While looking over my ledger, William Weston, a well-known investigator, happened to drop past and asked me a few questions about some technicality in an area in which I am now becoming somewhat expert. After I had replied to his satisfaction, I hesitantly asked him if he knew of an investigator who could trace the whereabouts of a missing person.

  William’s face did not change expression and hesitating only a few moments he said he’d be more than pleased to take the assignment himself.

  A YEAR PASSED, and he had come up with nothing. I then hired, without telling him, another investigator. It was not cheap, let me tell you, hunting for Bonnie. At last, since not the most minuscule clue came to light, I gave up the search.

  AFTER THE END of our hunting, I used to go and sit on the identical seat and hold her pet in my hand, as I am doing today. Nothing, however, came of that either, so far as attracting her to come back to me.

  One day a gentleman carefully dressed and wearing only a single eyepiece stopped and asked me if he could examine the bird. He bent over me for what seemed an eternity.

  “Would you sell him?” he finally inquired.

  I declined frigidly.

  “Your bird belongs to quite a rare species of dove,” he informed me.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me it’s rare,” I mumbled. My present rudeness and lack of interest recalled to me Bonnie’s treatment of me.

  “Are you aware, sir, of its worth, then?” he persisted.

  “I am aware of only one thing,” I raised my voice now in the face of his insulting condescension. “This is a dove, as you call him, placed in safekeeping with me against the owner’s return.”

  He stepped back on hearing this and studied me with a curious mixture of disbelief, puzzlement and slight contempt.

  After he had gone I held the “dove” gently against my overcoat.

  HE HAS GROWN so comfortable with me of late that I have put away his cage in a back closet, leaving him to come and go as if he were in his own great outdoor home.

  GERTRUDE’S HAND

  Sonny at no time complained about being left out of Gertrude’s will. Perhaps he never thought he would ever be remembered by her in any case. Still, everybody was a bit surprised Gertrude had left everything to her cook and companion, a dark-complexioned woman of thirty who appeared to cultivate the pronounced mustache growing above her hard, thin lips. Sonny had been just as devoted as Gertrude’s cook, Alda, but whereas Alda had almost never left the house, Sonny had run his legs off for Gertrude on errands of all kinds, had assisted Gertrude in her atelier where she made the iron-wrought primitive sculptures that had given her at the end of her life a kind of local fame. Sonny had gone sometimes even thrice a day to the blacksmith’s where Gertrude’s sculptures were finally finished. He must have worn out fifty or so boots during his fifteen years’ service with the sculptress.

  Once Gertrude was gone and lying beneath a very simple headstone in Cypress Grove Cemetery, Alda sat in the same oak chair her former employer had always occupied, moved into the larger, more airy, and better lighted bedroom that was Gertrude’s, and from then on cooked very little. Gertrude had been a hearty eater, and Alda, thin and pinched, though with the beginning of a pot belly owing to poor posture rather than overeating, was easily satisfied with an omelet and perhaps some pea or bean soup to eke out the rest of her diet. She occasionally invited Sonny now to these frugal repasts, although in the days of Gertrude he had never been asked to partake of anything at the table, but had once in a while “pieced” on something in the pantry.

  Gertrud
e’s distant great-nieces and a nephew had attempted to break the will, but in the end, partly because the will had been drawn up so well, partly because Gertrude herself had written down dreadful criticisms of these far-away relatives, all of Gertrude’s not inconsiderable fortune had passed to the bird-like, mustached Alda, whose eyes were never still. (Sonny had once remarked that he wondered if her eyes did not move all night rather than close motionless in sleep.)

  Alda was a bit puzzled at Sonny’s obvious signs of mourning over Gertrude’s passing. He wore a large, almost purple armband immediately she was dead, while Alda made no change in her attire, for she had always preferred in any case black dresses and black hats.

  Alda had planned to go to an island off the coast of Georgia shortly after the reading of the will, for the New England winters had come to be a trial to her, and wealthy as Gertrude was, she had insisted on their going on living together in the converted Maine farmhouse. But after Gertrude’s death, Alda had had a serious fall and her dream of going to Georgia vanished. After her accident, Alda hobbled considerably, and her doctor had advised her to remain at home in Maine and rest, for she could hardly travel without assistance.

  Of course Alda could have called in other people to aid her, but the fact that she had passed from being Gertrude’s cook to Gertrude’s heir had caused her to look on everybody with slightly different eyes. She distrusted Sonny, but she knew him. She was aware he had expected to be included in Gertrude’s will, but he had never spoken of it, and, what is more, went on from time to time to shed tears when he thought of the sculptress’s death. These tears were a source of wonder to Alda. She had never seen a grown man cry so much.

  Though she was only in her thirties, Alda’s fall reminded her that she too might need a lawyer, and improbable as it seemed for her, a woman who had been poor all her life, an heir. She had neither. Well, she could have Gertrude’s lawyer, of course, Mr. Seavers, but she had never liked him. He had certainly never been kind to or considerate of her, and at the reading of the will in his spacious, blindingly bright law office he had pronounced the legal words in a kind of fury as if it were the warrant for her arrest.