The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “That I am the white blackbird, Delia? For that is what you think in your inmost being.”

  Then I cried out, “Never, never has such a thought crossed my mind.”

  “Perhaps not in your waking hours, Delia. But in your deepest being, in your troubled sleeping hours, Delia, I feel you think I am the white blackbird.”

  I could think of no response to make then to his dreadful avalanche of words launched against me. Nothing, I came to see, could dispel his thought that I considered him the thief, the white blackbird himself. My mouth was dry. My heart itself was stilled. My godson was lost to me I all at once realized. He would never again be the young and faithful evening companion who had given my life its greatest happiness. As he returned my gaze I saw that he understood what I felt, and he looked away not only in sadness but grief. I knew then he would leave me.

  Yet we had to sit on like sentinels, our worry growing as the minutes and the hours slipped by.

  It was long past midnight, and we sat on. We neither of us wanted more wine. But at last Clyde insisted he make some coffee, and I was too troubled and weak to offer to make it myself.

  As we were sipping our second cup of the Arabian brew, we heard footsteps and then the banging on the door with a heavy walking stick.

  Clyde and I both cried out with relief when Dr. Noddy, covered with wet snow and carrying three parcels stomped in, his white breath covering his face like a mask.

  “Help me, my boy,” Dr. Noddy scolded. He was handing Clyde three packages wrapped in cloth of old cramoisie velvet. “And be careful. Put them over there on that big oak table, why don’t you, where they used to feed the threshers in summers gone by.”

  As Clyde was carrying the parcels to the oak table, I saw with surprise Dr. Noddy pick up Clyde’s second cup of Arabian coffee and gulp it all down at one swallow. He wiped his mustache on a stray napkin near the cup!

  “Help me off with my greatcoat, Delia, for I’m frozen to the bone and my hands are cakes of ice.”

  As soon as I had helped him off with his coat and Clyde had hung it on a hall tree, Dr. Noddy collapsed on one of the larger settees. He took off his spectacles and wiped them and muttered something inaudible.

  For a while, because he kept his eyes closed, I thought the doctor had fallen into one of those slumbers I had observed in him before. My own eyes felt heavy as lead.

  Then I heard him speaking in louder than usual volume: “I have fetched back everything, Delia, that was missing or lost to you. And I have wrapped what I’ve found in scraps and shreds from the crimson hanging curtains of the Bell Tower.”

  His voice had an unaccustomed ring of jubilee to it.

  “Bring out the first package, Clyde,” he shouted the orders and as he spoke he waved both his arms like the conductor of a band.

  Clyde carried the first bundle morosely and placed it on the coffee table before us.

  “Now, Delia, let us begin!” Noddy snapped one of the cords with his bone pocketknife and began undoing the bundle of its coverings with a ferocious swiftness.

  I felt weak as water as he exposed to view one after the other my diamond necklace, my emerald brooch, my ruby rings, my pearl necklace, and last of all my sapphire earrings!

  “Tell me they are yours, Delia,” Noddy roared as only a deaf man can.

  I nodded.

  “And don’t weep,” he cautioned me. “We’ll have no bawling here tonight after the trouble I’ve been to in the Tower!”

  At a signal from the doctor, Clyde fetched to the table even more doggedly the second package, and this time my godson watched as the doctor undid the wrappings.

  “Tell us what you see,” Dr. Noddy scolded and glowered.

  “My gold necklace,” I answered, “and yes, my diamond choker, and those are my amethyst rings and that priceless lavaliere, and oh see, my long-forgotten gold bracelet.”

  I went on and on. But my eyes were swimming with the tears he had forbidden me to shed.

  Then the third bundle was produced, unwrapped and displayed before us as if I were presiding at Judgment Day itself.

  “They are all mine, doctor,” I testified, avoiding his direful stare. I touched the gems softly and looked away.

  “What treasures,” Clyde kept mumbling and shaking his head.

  My eyes were all on Clyde rather than the treasures, for I took note again that it was not so much perhaps Dr. Noddy who had taken him away from me, it was the power of the treasures themselves which had separated my godson and me forever.

  And so the jewels, which I had never wanted in my possession from the beginning, were returned again to be mine. Their theft or disappearance had plagued me of course over the years as a puzzle will tease and torment one, but now seeing them again in my possession all I could think of was their restoration was the cause of Clyde’s no longer being mine, no longer loving me! I was unable to explain this belief even to myself but I knew it was the truth.

  The next day Clyde holding his few belongings in a kind of sailor’s duffel bag, his eyes desperately looking away from my face, managed to get out the words: “Delia, my dear friend, now the weather is beginning to clear, I do feel I must be returning to Uncle Enos’s so I can look after his property as I promised him in his last hours.”

  Had he stabbed me with one of my servants’ hunting knives his words could not have struck me deeper. I could barely hold out my hand to him.

  “I have, you know, too, a bounden duty to see his property is kept as he wanted me to keep it,” he could barely whisper. “But should you need me you have only to call, and I will respond.”

  I am sure a hundred things came to both our lips as we stood facing one another in our farewell. Instead all we could do was gaze for a last time into each other’s eyes.

  With Clyde’s return “in bounden duty” to his Uncle Enos’s, there went our evenings of wine sipping and parlor songs and all the other things that had made for me complete happiness.

  I was left then with only the stolen jewels, stolen according to our Dr. Noddy by a breed of white blackbird known as far back as remote antiquity as creatures irresistibly attracted to steal anything which was shining bright and dazzling.

  SHORTLY AFTER CLYDE had departed for his uncle’s, I had called some world-famous jewel merchants for a final appraisal of the treasures. The appraisers came on the heels of my godson’s departure. The men reminded me of London policemen or detectives, impeccable gentlemen, formal and with a stultifying politeness. As they appraised my jewels, however, even they would pause from time to time and briefly stare at me with something like incomprehension. They would break the silence then to say in their dry clear voices: “Is nothing missing, ma’am?”

  “Nothing at all,” I would reply to the same question put to me again and again.

  I had by then taken such a horror to the jewels and to their beauty which everyone had always spoken of with bated breath that even to draw near them brought on me a kind of fit of shuddering.

  After I had signed countless pages of documents, the appraisers hauled the whole collection off to a famous safety vault in Montreal.

  Then for the first time in years I felt a kind of relief that would have been, if not happiness, a kind of benediction or thanksgiving, had I not been so aware I had lost forever my evenings with my godson.

  BRAWITH

  Moira went for Brawith at the Vets Hospital despite the fact everybody told her it would not work out, and should he get worse, she would bear the blame for his death. There was no way for him to get well the same people claimed, and all her trouble would go for nothing. But Moira was his grandmother, she reminded everyone, and so she took him home to Flempton where she had a nice property near the copse. The river is close by, and there are lots of woodlands, and the town is only about a mile or so due west on a gravel road not too bad to walk on.

  Brawith had been nearly made a sieve of from the war, as people in the hospital said, whether from bullets or an explosion or from both facto
rs.

  Brawith seldom spoke. When you asked him questions he blinked and looked at his nails.

  Moira did not know how bad off he was until he had been home with her about a week or so, and then it was too late to be sorry. She was to have many a heartache over her decision to take him from the Vets Hospital, but if she sometimes was sorry, she never let on to anybody about what she felt.

  Her cousin Keith came in occasionally and shook his head but said nothing and left after a short visit. Brawith’s parents were dead and gone so long as to be nearly forgotten. They died long before the war. Moira was Brawith’s grandmother on his mother’s side. Moira had not known Brawith very well when he was a boy. And now she saw she hardly knew him once he had come to stay; she had certainly not known to begin with he had no control over his bowels and carried a roll of toilet paper wherever he went.

  After he was back home with her awhile he seemed to get worse, but Moira would not hear of him going back to the hospital ward.

  Most of the time Brawith sat quietly in a big chair remodeled from an antique rocker and looked out over the stretch of woods visible from the back door.

  Strangely enough he had a fair appetite, and she spent most of her hours cooking.

  “If I have made a mistake,” Moira began a letter to her sister Lily who lived ten miles away, “I will not back down now. I will stand by my decision, let whoever say what they may.” For some reason she found she could not finish the letter.

  Brawith liked to walk to the post office and mail her letters, and so she would write something to her other relatives on a government postcard, and he would take it to the main post office, carrying the roll of toilet paper along with him. It was this habit of his more than what happened later on that drew attention to him. Moira did not have the heart to tell him not to take the roll of paper along, and besides she knew he needed it.

  “If he did all that for his country, why can’t people look the other way if they see him coming,” she wrote Lily.

  “Brawith, come in and rest. Take the weight off your poor feet,” Moira said to him one hot August noon when he had been to the post office for her. “You’re flushed from the walk in the sun!” She tried to take the roll of toilet paper away from him, but he held on tight and would not let her.

  After that he always held on to it, whether at the dining table or sitting on the back porch watching the woods, or taking his walks to the post office.

  Gradually it occurred even to her that he was slowly oozing from almost every pore in his body, and it was not that he did not think with words anymore, or not hear words, his attention was entirely occupied by the soft sounds like whispers arising from the wet parts of his insides, which shattered by wounds and hurts had begun gently coming out from within him or so it seemed, so that all his insides would one day peacefully come out; so his insides and his outer skin would merge finally into one complete wet mass. Moira began to understand this also, and she was never out of eyeshot of him except when he went on his walks. She did not ever relent then on having taken him from the Vets Hospital. She would not admit it was a mistake and agree to return him back there. No, he was her own, he was the only human being she felt who looked up to her, and she would keep him by her side therefore from this day forth.

  Her reward, she always said, came when he would once or twice a week, no more, look up at her and say, “Moira.” It meant thank you, she supposed, it meant, even love she felt. His soft glossy brown hair and beard, thick almost as the pelt of an animal, were bathed in constant streams of sweat. She would touch his hair at such moments, and her hand came away as wet as if she had wrung out a mop. His hair showed none of the affliction his body had undergone but was, one might almost say, blossoming. His hair and his beard had not been cut in the new fashion of nowadays.

  After a few evenings she came to the understanding that Brawith did not sleep. She slept very little herself, but she did fall off toward morning for two to three hours of slumber. The realization he did not sleep at all harmed her peace of mind more than any other fact. She did not regret nonetheless her action. She had this home, and the wide expanse of land around it, and she was his own flesh and blood and there was nothing she would not do for him. Besides she had never wanted him in the Vets Hospital in the first place, but her cousin Keith had arranged that. She had countermanded his action—hence Keith’s anger against her.

  It had all begun the day when she was visiting Brawith in the hospital just as the sun was getting ready to go down. There was nobody in his ward at that moment but a colored man mopping the floor. She had taken Brawith’s hand in her own, and not letting go her hold, she had spoken as if begging on her knees, “Brawith, do you choose Grandma’s own house or this place? Tell me the truth.” He had looked at her like a small child summoned in the middle of night by fire engines. He had despite his confusion tried to keep his mind on what it was she was saying, and at last after a long pause, he had said: “Grandmother’s house,” and nodded repeatedly.

  Thereafter against all advice, instruction and pleas, against the opinion of the doctors and nurses who had talked and even shouted at her, she had taken him away with her. One nurse had handed her the roll of toilet paper as she was going out the door with him. Moira had been too astonished not to receive it, and as if he sensed her dilemma, Brawith took the roll from her, holding it in the manner of one who would receive a present, and so they went down the long flight of white clean-swept steps into Mr. Kwis’s truck and thence to her property.

  “I know of course I will be criticized,” she finished the government postcard to Lily the same day she brought Brawith home, “but I feel as if I have had this call from the boy’s mother and father from on high. And I want to do something for the boy before I go.”

  She had no more written these last words than she saw Brawith was, as if by means of telepathy, waiting to take the postcard to the post office.

  Once in a blue moon Lily telephoned her from East Portage. During these phone calls Brawith was observed by his grandmother to sit down in the rocking chair, and letting the roll of toilet paper rest on his lap, he would rock and rock contentedly. She could see the damp emerging from his scalp and hair even from her position in the next room.

  “He has given his all,” Moira was heard again and again to retort on the phone to Lily, and as she said these words Brawith looked over at her, and something almost like a smile passed over his blurred lips, for there was never any real expression on his face—all there was of expression must have been kept now in the depths of his insides which nudged and urged more and more to come out, to be released themselves like a sheet which would cover his outside skin and hair.

  Her cousin Keith visited her from time to time on the side porch and always insisted the same thing. “In the name of decency at least,” Keith would say, “if not of proper care—which you cannot give him—send him back to the Vets Hospital.”

  “They were giving him nothing,” Moira always contradicted Keith.

  She frequently looked anxiously within the house when she and Keith talked on the side porch. She heard Brawith’s rocking chair going faster and faster.

  “He has the right to die with his loved ones,” Moira told Keith firmly, and Keith got up and drove off in a fury after these last words.

  Coming back into the house, she took Brawith’s hand in hers, but he drew it away shortly to place it back on the roll of toilet paper.

  His hands were only quiet, actually, when they rested on the roll of paper. The rolls were like a sleeping powder for him she thought. He appeared to sleep with them over his moving chest.

  She kept a plentiful store of the rolls in her kitchen closet. They were of varying colors, but Brawith paid no attention to details of this kind.

  “Nothing is too good for you, Brawith,” she sometimes would speak in a loud voice to him. And, she added in a softer voice, “nothing is too good for my darling.”

  She felt he heard her, though she was beginning
to understand at last that all he heard, all he felt, all he knew was the communications which the vast flowing wet of his insides imparted to him, those rivulets of blood and lymph, the outpouring of his arteries and veins, all of which whispered and told him of irreparable damage and disrepair, and of the awesome future that was to come.

  Then one day when all was very still (Moira was somewhat deaf in one ear), when no automobile having gone past for some time, as she was cleaning his feet in a basin, she became perfectly aware herself, despite her own moderate deafness, of the sounds inside himself. She paused for a moment, incredulous, fearful, yet at the same time with an anticipated relief that she could share his knowledge. She listened carefully and she heard enough of the many sounds that were coming from inside himself and which he listened to constantly. All this she was now aware of. Their eyes met briefly, and he gave her a kind of nod, meaning he knew she had heard the sounds and had understood. She held his feet in a tight clasp. That was the beginning of their even deeper closeness.

  She moved her cot into his room, and now they were sleepless together in the darkness, as they both listened to his body and waited for the day or perhaps the night to come when the fearful event would take place.

  He now never spoke, and she occasionally hummed tunes and songs to him rather than say anything in ordinary speech except an occasional, “That’s good, that’s very good. I want you to taste this mutton broth.”

  But the voices of his insides did something to her. She had known it all before, being mother, grandmother but hearing it in a young man’s body, a young man who had not had a chance to live as yet, made her incapable to go about her work for a time.

  Then gradually she resumed daily tasks, but nothing was the same.

  Mr. Kwis, who had helped to bring Brawith home, now delivered the bread and other victuals for their meals, including a few fresh vegetables. He waited on the side porch always for Moira to come out and gather up the provisions.