The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Brawith tasted all the food she prepared, but spit most of it out in a container provided near the table for this purpose. But his appetite was unimpaired. Whilst he ate, Moira and he both listened casually to the sounds coming from inside his body.

  After a time they ceased speaking to one another except when Moira issued commands for herself, as when she would say, “I must wash out all your underthings this evening. And I must think up a new dish to tempt you, Brawith, for my knowledge of cooking’s gone from me.”

  Brawith would nod then and his nods were like a thousand smiles so far as she was concerned.

  “It is better here than where you were,” Moira often inquired in what was almost a shouting tone.

  His eyes studied her mouth, or rather her chin. She repeated her question. Almost as if to answer her, the sounds in his body became louder in response.

  They walked out now into the garden, and he stooped down and gathered some of the black nasturtium seeds and held them in his hands. He played with the seeds later that night when he tired of holding the toilet tissues.

  As they lay near to one another at night, Moira began speaking aloud. She slept as little as Brawith did, that is, not at all. She said in a voice that was loud enough to carry into the yard by the window, “Brawith, I have been criticized for everything. I am only sorry, though, I didn’t come for you sooner. Do you hear? It was the only thing to do, my dear, the only thing. . . .”

  After a while his scalp and brow seemed to flow with a thick beady moisture. She often thought she spent most of the time wiping his brow free of the ever-gathering damp. It reminded her of driving in cars long ago before there were windshield wipers, and the snow, rain or sleet fell remorselessly against the car’s panes of glass. They would have to stop the car, and clean off the windshield, but to no avail.

  “I can’t tell you what it means to me,” Moira spoke as she wiped his brow often in the middle of night. “Having you here with me, I was doing nothing before you came,” she went on. “Cousin Keith and my own daughter can hardly wait to leave now the minute they arrive here. I’ve told them all I know. They’ve heard my same old tale till they gag if I begin even to say what kind of weather we’ve been having. They’ve had all of me, but Brawith, you allow me to give you of the little I have for anybody.”

  Having spoken, she would then wipe his brow until it was almost dry, but then another sheet of the moisture came down, and he was as damp as before.

  “My dear grandson, Brawith,” she whispered too low for him to hear.

  After a long pause she went on, “Mr. Kwis is more interested in what I say than my daughter or son. Certainly more than Cousin Keith.”

  As his brow became more and more sopping wet the voices inside his body grew more insistent, more authoritative. She felt they were crying out for something withheld from him, and now Brawith no longer swallowed what he chewed and tasted, but spat the whole thing out.

  Moira and he sat listening to the dictatorial sounds issuing from inside him. Grandmother and grandson were pushed into a deeper silence as if they sat before a political orator or a preacher of the gospel.

  One morning, coming out of a short nap-like sleep, she heard some new sounds arising from the fireplace. She called his name, but she realized now he could barely hear her because the sounds from his own swimming insides drowned out all other sound.

  Walking into the next room, she found he had put his head up into the chimney of the huge fireplace. The fireplace was so high she could see his mouth and part of his nose, for he was not standing up very straight.

  “Brawith, what is it?” She stooped low in order to look up at his eyes. “Are you more comfortable there, my dear boy.”

  After a long while he came out from the chimney. He looked happier, and this pleased Moira. They went out into the kitchen together, and she prepared him his breakfast.

  She realized her danger then at last, that is that she had perhaps made a mistake in disobeying the trained nurses and the doctors, in ignoring the advice of her kinfolk. She remembered, too, even in her good friend Mr. Kwis’s face, the look sometimes of wonderment if not disapproval.

  At the same time she could not go back on her decision in the first place. She felt even more strongly she could not give up Brawith. She studied her own heart, and she knew she had never loved anybody with such complete absorption as she did Brawith. She felt her own insides cried out along with his. Yet she made up her mind to ask him one last time.

  Whilst she was mopping his forehead, she pressed his head toward her, and said, “Listen good now, Brawith, for Moira wants to do the right thing. Do you think maybe you should go back to the Vets? Say the word, and I will do what’s right.”

  He did not say anything in reply, and in the silence she began combing his hair which was sopping wet.

  “Just say the word, Brawith, and I will do as you see fit.”

  As he did not say anything, she sighed, for she knew his silence naturally meant he would not wish to return.

  “You didn’t think that I was indirectly asking you to leave now, did you?” she turned to him. “Heaven forbid you thinking that, Brawith. You’re more welcome than sunshine. You’ve brought so much to me, precious.”

  After that she knew she would never need ask him about returning.

  He would have certainly said something had he thought it was best for his condition to go back to the Vets.

  Now for the most of the night, he began standing upright in the chimney of the fireplace, so that after a while she brought her cot there in the center of the big living room to be as near as possible to him. It was beginning to be more unbearable than ever for her, but she could no more have forbidden him standing in the fireplace than ordering him back to the hospital.

  The odor from his sickness, however, now discouraged anybody from visiting them. Mr. Kwis himself came only as far as the side door, and having brought them the groceries, he deposited them on a small table and departed. Cousin Keith no longer came at all.

  Moira often whispered with Mr. Kwis in the buttery.

  “He gave his all, Mr. Kwis, and it’s very little I can give him in return for all he has sacrificed, yes siree.”

  She felt now that he had come to her of his own free will, that she had not prevailed on him to join her here at the outskirts of Flempton, that he had in fact written her asking to join her in her home. She had never known such happiness, such calm, such useful tasks. Mr. Kwis, though he did not come so far into the house to see Brawith, was the soul of understanding. He listened. He understood, unlike Cousin Keith or her son and daughter. Mr. Kwis offered no word of contradiction, no bilious corrective or cold comment.

  Brawith now refused to come out of the place he had chosen for himself in the chimney. He spent the entire day and night there. Moira saw that a terrible crisis was coming, yet she did not want to call the doctor or inform the Veterans Hospital. Brawith had promised her he would stay until the last.

  Mr. Kwis came when the terrible thing was at its height. Owing to the stench he said he would remain as his custom was on the side porch, and if she thought it advisable he would go for help.

  Brawith now began to scratch and claw the brick, but instead of dust coming down from the chimney, Moira saw a sheet of sweat was descending as if from a broken pipe, and this was followed by actual sheets of blood.

  Moira begged him to come out of the chimney and lie down on his bed, but the sounds of his body all at once tripled in volume. Even Mr. Kwis heard them from outside.

  Occasionally Moira would cry out his name, but the sound of his inside machinery as she thought of it drowned out her words.

  At last he foamed at the mouth, and the foam fell down in thick cusps like what comes off cheap beer in the summer.

  She felt she must hold him up into the body of the chimney since this was his wish.

  Mr. Kwis kept calling from the side porch if there was anything at all which he might do, but she either did not hear him,
or the few times she did hear him she was too distracted to reply.

  The climax was coming or whatever it was, the end she supposed was a better word. His sufferings were culminating and here she was his only flesh and blood relation to help at this dire moment. No nurse or doctor could do what she was doing, and this thought strengthened and appeased her.

  “Tell me, dear boy, if I should do anything different from what I am doing,” Moira would cry out, but the sounds from his insides extinguished her voice.

  All at once he lowered his head from inside the chimney and pointed with a kind of queer majesty with one hand toward a roll of toilet paper.

  She unwound some of the roll and put it within reach of him. Then she saw that without her being aware of it he was naked, but looking again she decided that he still had his clothes on but they had become of the same color and wetness as his skin which breaking totally now exposed his insides. The clothes only resembled his broken skin and bleeding organs. He was not so much hemorrhaging as bursting from inside.

  He managed to put the sheets of toilet paper over the worst of the bursting places on his body.

  He soon used up the one roll of toilet paper, and Moira now called for Mr. Kwis to go into the buttery where she had put all the remaining rolls, and to toss her one from time to time for Brawith was quickly using them all up.

  “You won’t have to come much closer to us than you are now,” she advised Mr. Kwis. “The crisis, dear friend, is near.”

  It seemed that Brawith exhausted one entire toilet paper roll almost immediately it was given to him. There were only four left. As he draped his body with the tissues they immediately became red from the wet stuff that was now breaking from within his entire body.

  When the last roll was consumed, Moira wondered what would happen.

  Then she thought she heard him scream, but she realized that the many noises and sounds which had been audible within his body were moving up now to his larynx and causing his vocal chords to vibrate as if he were speaking. Then she fancied he did speak the one word or part of an unfinished phrase: “Deliver!” repeated again and again: “Deliver.”

  Then like a flock of birds the terrible noise seemed to rush over her head deafening her. She fell, losing her hold on his legs, and as she did so an immense shower of blood and intestines covered her, and his body entirely wrapped in toilet paper from head to toe fell heavily on her.

  Moira did not know how she was able to rise and finally make her toilsome way to the side porch where Mr. Kwis was waiting with anxious dread. She hardly needed to tell him her grandson was no more. In silence Mr. Kwis took her hands in his and pressed them to his lips. Then speaking in a faint whisper, he said he would go now to tell those who were concerned that the heavy burden of Brawith’s life had been lifted at last.

  GERALDINE

  Sue and her mother Belle no longer met in person, but Sue called her mother daily, in fact sometimes she called her two or three times in a day. The subject was always her worries over her thirteen year-old son Elmo.

  “Now what has he done this time,” Belle would sigh or more often yawn.

  They had never been close, mother and daughter, and as if to emphasize their lack of rapport through the years, Belle had from his birth taken an almost inordinate delight and interest in her grandson Elmo. She gave him lavish birthday, Christmas, and Easter gifts and of late had begun taking him to the opera. Belle could not tell whether he enjoyed the opera or not, but he paid it a strict, almost hypnotic attention and applauded the singers with frenzy. Then they would go off to some midnight cafe and have a dinner of quail or venison.

  Belle had heard of course about Geraldine. In fact Geraldine herself came to be very real to the grandmother. The girl, Elmo’s girl in Sue’s phrase, had the persistent presence of a character in great fiction, though Belle had never met her. At night, under the covers of her bed, Belle would often whisper “Geraldine” and smile.

  “They are idiotically in love, and she is at least two years older than Elmo,” Sue would report on the telephone. “They are together constantly, constantly. And their kissing! Oh, Belle, Belle.” Sue had ceased calling her mother mother for at least ten years. Although the grandmother pretended to like this familiarity, it piqued her nonetheless. But then she had never ever been close enough to Sue even to correct her.

  “Don’t put your foot down,” was almost the only advice Belle ever gave her daughter. “Let what will be be. Let him love Geraldine.”

  GERALDINE AND ELMO came to an evening Sunday supper one day in December when there was a light spitting snow outside. Belle was not prepared for Geraldine’s extreme good looks and beautiful clothes. She felt she had opened the door on a painting from some little known Italian hand. Geraldine’s eyelashes alone brought a flush to the grandmother’s face and lips. The girl’s hands free of rings and her arms without bracelets looked like they were made out of some wonderful cream. And then Belle looked round and saw her grandson, not as he had always been on his previous visits but now as a young man with the first show of a beard on his upper lip.

  “At last, at last,” Belle cried and held both of the young people in succession to her. Tonight she only kissed Geraldine however.

  They began going to the opera as a threesome. They attended all of Donizetti’s operas that season, and after the opera they went to Belle’s special cafe and spent hours there laughing as though they were all of the same age.

  THE CRISIS CAME when Sue called Belle at six o’clock in the morning.

  “He has had his right ear pierced!”

  At first the grandmother thought this referred to an accident of some kind. Only when she was given the explanation that the boy had gone to a professional ear piercer, did she recover from her fright. She broke into laughter at that moment which drove Sue into a fit of weeping, weeping propelled by rage and the revival of the feeling her mother had never loved her.

  “No, no, my dear, you must not feel it is a disgrace,” Belle advised Sue. “It is the fashion for young boys.”

  “Fashion, my foot,” Sue screamed over the wires. “It is Geraldine!” Then Belle as if in spite began even at that early hour to praise the beauty of Geraldine.

  A torrent of abuse then followed on the other end of the wire. Sue told of the girl’s excesses.

  “They do not show, my dear,” Belle disagreed. She is unspotted, unsoiled in every lineament of face and body.

  Belle waited with a queer smile on her face while her daughter wept and told of all the shortcomings of Geraldine.

  SUE KEPT A kind of “black book” of Belle’s “crimes” against her. She considered in the first place that Belle had usurped her place in Elmo’s affections. She had taken Elmo away from her as surely as if she kidnapped him, Sue wrote in her black book. She listed other of Belle’s crimes as 1) making Elmo fond of imported sweetmeats, such as chestnuts covered with whipped cream, 2) reading him stories beyond his age group, stories which had questionable morality or contained improper innuendoes, 3) late hours, 4) breakfast in bed after a night of attending the opera, 5) imported hairdressing creams which made Elmo smell more like a fast woman than a young boy, and so on and so on. Then Sue would burst into tears. “Belle never loved me,” Sue would whisper to the covers of the black book. Never never so much as one hour did she squander on me the affection she showers on Elmo or that bitch Geraldine.

  Elmo once called his mother to her face a boo-hooer. That epithet rankled in her heart for a long time. It drove her, as if imitating her mother’s largesse, to go to the most expensive women’s shop in Manhattan and purchase for herself imported hand-sewn handkerchiefs. Into these she wept openly and with uncontrolled wetness. I will boo-hoo both of them, she cried. She even thought of taking legal action against her mother. In fact she called a noted lawyer who dealt in unusual family problems. He discouraged her coldly, even warned her to proceed no further. Then he sent her a bill for $1,000.00.

  “I have Belle,” Sue would ofte
n say as she looked out into the garden of her townhouse. “She will outlive all of us, including Geraldine.”

  “YOUR MOTHER SAYS I act like your fairy godmother,” Belle said one late afternoon just before she and Elmo were to go to the opera.

  Elmo smiled his strange little smile and pressed Geraldine’s hand.

  “She doesn’t mean it as a compliment,” Belle told him. “Are you as happy with me, dear boy, as with Sue?” Belle inquired.

  “Oh, a thousand times happier, Belle,” Elmo replied. He, too, had fallen somehow naturally into calling her by her first name.

  The old woman beamed. “I would keep you forever,” she whispered. “And Geraldine, too. Wouldn’t we all be a threesome of happy ones,” Belle cried. Elmo beamed and nodded, and Geraldine grinned.

  “As happy as larks!” Belle almost shouted. She held Elmo in her arms and kissed him on his cowlick. Then she embraced Geraldine.

  “You love Geraldine, don’t you?” Belle whispered.

  Elmo stiffened a little under her caresses, then in a smothered voice said, “A lot, Grandma, a lot.”

  WHETHER IT WAS the coming of Geraldine or the desecration of Elmo’s and Geraldine’s earlobes by the ear-piercing practitioner, Belle was hurtled back in time—what other way could she describe it—to her own youth. She examined her own ear lobes and found that the tiny holes put there so long ago were still ready to bear the presence of her own many earrings. And how many earrings she had! Yes, Sue had criticized her on this score likewise. “You have enough earrings to bestow on a museum,” Sue had spoken this judgment on Belle not too long ago. “And you never wear one pair of them.”

  “But I will, now I will,” Belle said aloud today. In her older years she often spent whole afternoons and evenings talking to herself. “But what am I saying. They shall wear them also! Geraldine and Elmo. How I do love them, Lord!”

  The next evening before the opera the three of them all laughing and giggling and even guffawing began putting on Belle’s many earrings.