The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Too bad, loves, only one of your ears is pierced,” Belle cried, and she showed them herself in full panoply, wearing first a priceless jade set of earrings, then the ancient turquoise pair, after that the diamond, and then to the hush-hush of the young couple, her emerald pair.

  “O, may I wear the emerald tonight?” Elmo cried.

  “Why, Elmo,” Geraldine whispered and kissed him wetly on his mouth and chin.

  “Why ever not, dears, why ever not! And Geraldine must not be left out. By no means. Oh, God in Heaven,” Belle cried, “how happy I am. I never would have dreamed two people could have brought me such happiness. Never, never.” And she held them to her tightly. “And I don’t care what Sue thinks, children,” Belle cried.

  All at once, as if from a cue somewhere, perhaps from the opera house itself at which they practically lived now, they began dancing all three of them as if in some queer minuet. With their new earrings sparkling they might indeed have been part of the ballet of some rarely performed opera.

  “The only thing that makes sense is gaiety!” Belle cried, a bit out of breath. “If one were never gay, it would not be worth a candle. One must sparkle like our earrings, children! One must sparkle.”

  SUE’S CONVERSION CAME swiftly and without warning. She had got used to Elmo’s always staying the night—and often the weekend—with his grandmother. In fact Sue began somehow to believe that Elmo now lived with Belle. True, it had always been Belle’s wish of course that Elmo stay—really live with her. And since Elmo never went anywhere now without Geraldine, in Sue’s troubled mind she assumed that like brother and sister both now resided with Sue’s mother Belle.

  Sue kept touching her earlobes. The piercing in both her ears which Belle in fact had supervised some twenty years earlier needed attention. The skin in the pierced holes was beginning to close. “I must have them tended to,” Sue spoke to herself. Her tall Finnish butler served her course after course tonight, all of which she left untasted.

  She had stared at Jan the same way at the beginning of every meal when he asked “Will Master Elmo be dining?” Sue would look only at his long blond sideburns and reply, “He is still at his grandmother’s.”

  “I must have my earlobes pierced again. My earrings don’t go in.” She spoke aloud within the hearing of Jan.

  But that evening came her realization. Unlike Belle, Sue did not hold a box at the opera. But she kept a seat very near the stage which cost more or nearly as much as Belle’s royal box. Actually she retained two seats, but Elmo almost never attended the opera with her.

  “For where would Geraldine sit, then?” She addressed this statement also to her Finnish servant.

  He could hardly wait until he reached the safety of the kitchen to burst out laughing to the cook. Sue heard his laughter but construed it as coming from his asthmatic attacks. “He wheezes like an animal,” she once remarked to Elmo. “If he weren’t so tall and personable, I would ditch him.”

  SHE ARRIVED LATE at the opera but tipped the usher to allow her to go in against regulations when the opera was in progress.

  No sooner had she disturbed forty or fifty people gaining her seat than her eyes swept away from the stage to Belle in her box. “Ah, ah,” she cried again disturbing the opera lovers. She had never seen anything so resplendent! There they were, Belle, Geraldine and Elmo, but with what a difference. Each wore earrings, each wore some kind of shining necklace attached to the beads of which was a resplendent kind of brooch. Sue wondered why every eye in the opera house was not watching Belle and her retinue.

  Sue wept unashamedly. She never heard a note of the opera. But her weeping refreshed her more than a dive in a cool spring. The vision of her loved ones—for she now knew she too loved Geraldine almost as much as her own flesh and blood—that vision dissolved then and forever her jealousy and rancor. She suddenly accepted Belle, and with her acceptance of her mother she accepted her jurisdiction and sequestration of her son and her son’s sweetheart Geraldine.

  “Let them love one another,” she cried, and falling back against the rich upholstery of her seat she went to sleep.

  She was awakened by an usher shaking her. The opera had long been over, every seat but hers emptied. Looking up at Belle’s box, she saw it too was deserted, extinct of resplendence.

  She was helped out to the street by the usher who summoned her a cab. She gave him an ostentatiously grand tip and sped away in the cab.

  “Tomorrow, I will have my earlobes re-pierced,” she spoke loud enough for the cab driver to hear. He nodded gloomily.

  I wanted to please her, yes, Sue reflected after it was all over, I saw I wanted only one thing, to be Belle’s little girl.

  THE WORLD-FAMOUS JEWELER was not too surprised as he had been Sue’s jeweler for twenty years when he saw Sue enter his private consulting room in the jeweler’s shop, a room reserved only for the phenomenally wealthy.

  “My dear, you look tired.” He helped her to a green French settee. “Shan’t I get you something?”

  Sue could only nod. He brought her out a dark liquid in a glass so thin it resembled mere paper but sparkled like diamonds. One would have thought he knew she was coming, had prepared for her visit days in advance.

  “I saw the earrings in the window,” Sue only moistened her lips with the brandy.

  “I had hoped you’d come by and look at them,” Mr. Henton-Coburn confided.

  “I want to please Belle,” she brought out. “My husband spoiled me so I wouldn’t bother him. Every time he felt I was going to ask something of him I got a gift. They were mostly jewels as you know. He purchased however very few earrings. I will need all the earrings on display.”

  “But two are spoken for.”

  She put down her glass, and touched her lower lip.

  “But if you insist of course.”

  “I said I wanted them. I mean I have to have them. I have to please Belle. . . .

  “But, listen, dear friend,” and she took a noisy swallow of the brandy. “I think” (she placed a finger on an earlobe) “they need piercing again. When I had my trouble, my sorrow with Belle, I all but quit wearing jewels.”

  “May I?” he inquired and bent over her left ear. Then her right ear.

  “What is needed, dear lady, is,” and he produced a kind of stiff thread. “I will pull this through with your say-so where the old piercing was, and you’ll be perfect for the displays in the window. Oh, my dear, why haven’t you been by.” He bent down and kissed her.

  HER DECISION TO attend the opera then one snowy bitter night with the mercury near zero ushered in what resembled, as she later noted in her book of records, what resembled different ceremonies, a first communion, a wedding, perhaps even a funeral. But it was none of these. It was more—she blushed as she wrote it down—like going to paradise.

  She had spent hours on her toilet. She had tried on at least fourteen pairs of earrings.

  That night at the opera looking down with his opera glasses, Elmo caught sight of a woman who looked somehow familiar, yet the more he gazed at her the less sure he was it was anyone whom he knew. Yes! Looking again he saw that it was someone who resembled Sue, yet this Sue was wearing the most elegant and ornate earrings he had ever seen anybody wearing.

  “Is that Sue?” he inquired of Geraldine.

  Geraldine took the opera glasses and looked only a moment, then merely shrugged her shoulders. Elmo stared at Geraldine coldly, and Geraldine returned the stare with a frigid contemptuous expression in her eyes and on her lips.

  Belle now took the opera glasses and looked down. But at that moment the house lights dimmed, and soon the overture to the third act began.

  Geraldine and Elmo had quarreled. And Belle had become distant, as if her real center of affection now was Geraldine and not Elmo.

  It was snowing harder when the three of them left the opera house. Belle looked at Elmo inquiringly as he summoned for them a cab.

  “I will not be coming with you, Grandma,” Elmo
spoke with devastating aplomb. Helping Belle into the cab, he almost pushed Geraldine in after her. Belle was too surprised to protest, or even say anything but “Good night then.”

  “I am going home,” Elmo spoke aloud, his mouth opened wide and received the thick goosefeathery flakes of snow. “It was Sue, I know that with her ears pierced.”

  “YES, SO IT was you.”

  Elmo had entered his mother’s room on the top floor as he said this. He was so covered with snow, his eyebrows and the hair sticking out from his ski cap white as avalanches, even a few hairs in his nostrils white.

  Sue had just in fact put on an even more resplendent pair of earrings as if she was waiting for him to see her so arrayed. When as a matter of fact she thought he would stay on indefinitely with Geraldine and Belle.

  “Mother, good evening,” he said. He sat down on the divan near her.

  She was still too astounded to speak, and his calling her mother further stopped the speech in her throat.

  “Take off your wet clothes and put them in the bathroom to dry.”

  “I can’t get over it,” he said obeying her and going into the bathroom, a room as large as many New York parlors.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. To his astonishment—or was it astonishment really—anyhow he saw that his own earring had disappeared from his earlobe. He touched where it had been pierced.

  Coming out of the bathroom, he gazed at Sue. She looked almost as young as Geraldine and yes, admit it, Elmo, he thought to himself, admit it, more lovely.

  “Well, Mother,” he said again.

  “What has brought this about?” Sue wondered. “Shall I wake up Jan and have him prepare us something.” Elmo shook his head.

  “Geraldine is through with me,” he began. He sniffled a bit, whether from the snow or his grief was not clear. “Finished, finito.”

  “Ah, well, that is what being young brings,” Sue said.

  “And Belle prefers her to me.”

  “Oh, Belle,” Sue said. Then minding her speech she merely added. “Well, she’s old.”

  “And fickle,” he added. “The opera is her lifeblood.”

  “Certainly the costumes and the sets are. She’s deaf as a nest of adders.”

  “Belle is deaf?”

  “And nearly blind.”

  “How many earrings do you have?” he wondered.

  “I’m afraid enough for everybody in the opera.”

  “Do you mind if I stay with you now, Mother?”

  “Nothing you could suggest would make me more happy.” Two huge tears descended from her eyes.

  Elmo sat back astonished, some wet snow drops falling from his thick black hair. His eyelashes, too long for a boy’s as Geraldine had pointed out, sparkled with wetness.

  “And you won’t send me away somewhere.”

  Sue shook her head and mumbled, “Never.”

  “May I kiss you then?” he wondered. He came over to where she sat limp and disheveled for all her jewels.

  “Mother, I believe . . .”

  “Don’t say any more.”

  But he finished his sentence. “I feel I’m home.”

  A LITTLE VARIETY, PLEASE

  Alice Drummond feared the Green Dragon almost as much as she did being late to tea. (Her stepmother always whipped her for tardiness.)

  The Green Dragon did not have it in for Alice, but his only pleasure, it is true, was to frighten small girls. He had been wintering in Mountain Gulch and was now rested up for hearty springtime activity.

  Alice’s stepmother warned her the Dragon was back and would be looking for her in particular, and to kindly practice her roller-skating.

  “If you have on your skates, you’ll be sure to outpace him,” the stepmother assured her. “He’s also, remember, out of condition from wintering.”

  “If I could be sure of that,” Alice Drummond whispered to herself. Alice tired so of roller skating, and spring made her sleepy and careless.

  MILDRED TERRY, A friend of Alice’s stepmother, had a bad fright the day Alice was getting warned by her adopted parent. Mildred had come home unexpectedly from the store and found the Dragon going through her apple bin.

  “If you’d written me a note, I’d have set out a bushel or so of apples beforehand,” Mildred scolded him. “I don’t like you coming in here like a harum-scarum.”

  She sat down on her best divan, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. The Dragon threw one apple after another upon the floor.

  “These are all Northern Spy and of a poor quality at that,” he said finally. Then he ate a small apple at the bottom of the pile. “Just so-so,” the Dragon remarked between chewing sounds.

  “In all my years in Centerville I’ve never known so inconsiderate a creature as yourself,” Mildred cried on. “You’ve frightened poor little Alice Drummond something awful. She feels you’re after her. Are you?”

  The Dragon wiped his paws clean of apple parings, and then began picking and cleaning his front teeth with the remains of a rolling pin.

  “Why in Sam Hill did you come back here?” Mildred finally said, when she saw he was not going to answer. “Isn’t there another place for you to go firecrackering about?” Suddenly the Dragon began to moan and whine almost like a small cat and held his left arm to his stomach. His eyes rolled in his head, and his scales lowered their lights.

  “Oh, me and my,” the Dragon cried. “I feel on fire. . . .”

  Mildred got up and went to the medicine cabinet, and brought out a bottle of essence of peppermint. She poured a few drops in a tumbler and handed it to the Green Dragon, who swallowed it down.

  “Mmm, better already,” he mused. “Where now does Alice Drummond live . . .”

  “You can’t go there, Green Dragon,” Mildred spoke, still holding the tumbler in her hand. “You must promise me to give up little girls. Think of all I’ve done for you. I want you to leave Centerville.”

  “I am going to cure Alice Drummond of being afraid of tardiness,” the Dragon said. “You know,” he repressed a fiery belch, “that I have never harmed the hair of a living creature. However, even I, if pressed by aggressive fear on the part of my inferiors, will frighten . . .”

  “Little girls.” Mildred sobbed.

  “Little girls!” he roared. “I hate the creatures. Only like old parcels like you.” He fondled Mildred against his scales briefly.

  “Oh, Draggie, why can’t you be satisfied?” she cooed. “Why don’t you stay out of sight and live with me then at night. You’re so selfish.”

  “I’ll see the Drummond Girl. . . .”

  “You’ll frighten the poor dear to death.” The Dragon smiled. “Oh, Draggie, why can’t you let well enough alone.”

  “MILDRED HAS WARNED me that the Green Dragon is coming to teach Alice a lesson,” Mrs. Drummond told her husband that evening. As Alice was only an adopted child of the Drummonds, they were not so frightened as they might have been. Alice had been left on their doorstep six years before, and though they had never wanted her, nobody else would take her, and so she had boarded and lived with them. They were all very unhappy with one another.

  “He may be here any moment,” Mrs. Drummond said.

  “Who?” Mr. Drummond inquired, looking up from his cribbage board.

  “I just told you, simpleton.”

  “Oh, the Dragon,” Mr. Drummond replied. “Mae, perhaps it would be better for all if Draggie took her.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t entertained the idea,” Mrs. Drummond said. “But the principle of the thing is wrong, Corless, you know it is. We’d be criticized by the community.”

  “Well, warn the girl, and if he comes, I suppose he’ll have to take her.” At supper the two Drummonds and Alice discussed the contingencies of a visit from the Dragon. Alice cried right through dessert, and had to be taken into the front room and laid on a sofa. She continued to cry until Mrs. Drummond slapped her. Then Alice made little whimpering sounds, and Mr. Drummond cuffed her for making th
ose, and then she didn’t know what she might do, and she held her breath until she turned purple.

  At that moment the Green Dragon came through the wall and shot his tongue out. He had not recovered from his colic from eating apples, and he sat down in the large fireplace chair and looked at Alice. When she saw the Dragon she began breathing again. The Drummonds tiptoed out into the kitchen.

  “I have fallen in love with you on hearsay,” Alice began, looking obliquely at the huge animal.

  The Dragon’s eyes opened wider than usual, and the room became noticeably warmer. “You . . . fallen for me?” he roared. “That isn’t in my book.” The Dragon loosened his scales and moved his tongue about in his parched mouth.

  “I had no idea you would look the way you do. I am ready to go away with you,” she went on.

  The Dragon looked out the window at the lengthening spring evening. “I am only interested in scaring little . . .”

  “Why are you pictured so differently by the press?” Alice wanted to know. She paced up and down the room. She could see her stepmother’s eyes through the kitchen door keyhole. Her anger against her adopted parents suddenly gave her the courage to go directly up to the Dragon. Her fear of course had left her, and she sat down on the big animal’s lap. The heat from his body made her terribly uncomfortable, but then Alice Drummond had been uncomfortable all her life. She threw her arms about him while the great animal shifted on his seat.

  “Do you think you could get up long enough to get me a frosty cold drink?” the Dragon inquired.

  “Anything you ask for is already yours,” the girl spoke like one who talks to herself in sleep. The room was getting absolutely torrid. Mrs. Drummond who had heard his request for a drink was already reaching out from the half-opened kitchen door a glass, which Alice took and gave to the great animal. He drank it off and required another. Then a series of exhausting tasks for the Drummonds began. They brought over 300 glasses to the Dragon, but both he and the house became hotter and hotter.

  “You’re bringing me the wrong kind of liquid,” he shouted at last and threw the glass straight at Mrs. Drummond. “Now get out to that kitchen and prepare a frosty drink, as I told you. . . .”