The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Isidro Crespo

  Mexico

  MOE’S VILLA

  The presence of Frau Storeholder at the entrance of Vesta Hawley’s sprawling forty-room mansion had always annoyed Dr. Sherman Cooke on his frequent visits to see Miss Hawley. Dr. Cooke was not paying a visit as a physician but, according to the town wiseacre, he came as her suitor of more than twenty years.

  Even when Dr. Cooke finally remarried suddenly to wealthy Miss Mamie Resch, he continued his courtship of the only woman he had ever loved—Mistress Hawley, as people in Gilboa often called her.

  Frau Storeholder who spoke German with more ease than English spent most of her time, Dr. Cooke was sure, reading the obituary notices in several local and out-of-town newspapers. She often would call attention to a recent death to Dr. Cooke who, however, pointedly ignored her.

  “She is like an ill-tempered though usually silent watchdog,” Dr. Cooke often remarked of Frau Storeholder to Miss Hawley. “Do you have to have her here, and if you do have to have her, why then can’t she sit in her own room rather than station herself like a sentinel at your front door?”

  Vesta Hawley would smile at the doctor’s observations. “I find Frau Storeholder’s presence most comforting,” she would reply.

  “And her reading aloud to all and sundry from the latest obituary notices?” the doctor complained.

  Vesta chuckled at this remark.

  “Why should hearing an obituary notice irk you, a doctor of medicine, dear Sherman?” Then Sherman Cooke would gaze at his only love with sheep’s eyes.

  Though no longer young, Vesta Hawley’s hair was of a remarkable yellow color (one had to see it in the sunshine to appreciate it fully), and someone had once compared it to the hue of the Circassian walnut furniture scattered throughout her mansion.

  THERE WERE DIFFERENT theories in Gilboa why Vesta Hawley had never married a suitor of such indefatigable faithfulness and ardour as Sherman Cooke. Of course her only previous marriage to Peter Driscoll had been a disaster, and Peter had decamped early on after only a few years of matrimony. And certainly Vesta could have been more comfortable with someone who could help support her mansion and herself. She was always in debt, owing many banks huge sums of mortgage money.

  Not only had Peter Driscoll “decamped” but her only son, young Rory (whom she had foolishly thought might one day support her), had run away before he was even grown up.

  Rory Hawley had taken his mother’s name since there was some doubt Vesta had ever been legally married to Peter Driscoll in the first place.

  Vesta Hawley had never bothered to send her son to school. True, the public schools of Gilboa were hardly equipped to teach their few pupils even the essentials of reading and arithmetic. It was believed, however, in any case that Rory had almost never attended classes from his earliest years. His mother pretended to believe he was at school when she must have known better.

  Rather than attend school and learn at least to read and write, Rory often went from his mother’s house in the morning to another mansion a mile or more away whose owner was a Shawnee Indian by the name of Moses Swearingen. Moses Swearingen’s mansion, called the Villa, although it did serve admirable evening repasts, was more famous for its gambling salons behind the restaurant proper and the number of young men who waited on him hand and foot.

  Moses Swearingen himself had taken an interest in Rory when he saw how neglected he was by his mother (“She lived in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” Swearingen had often remarked after the different scandals which occurred around Rory and to a lesser degree himself).

  Moses Swearingen had taught Rory to read, write and cipher, and finally how to play cards.

  Rory soon surpassed his teacher in the art of card playing and finally gambling. It was both the boy’s salvation and some said his eventual ruin.

  Our story begins quite far back, or as we might say, in the era when there were still brawny men who delivered ice from the quarry to residents like those of Vesta and Moses Swearingen. For there was no refrigeration as we know it now in Gilboa, an unincorporated village of nearly 3,000 people. There were as a result icemen and also milkmen, and fruit and vegetable men, and knife and scissors sharpeners. All these came in vehicles drawn by dray horses.

  Swearingen himself once said he could not have maintained his restaurant without the icemen and the rest of the horse-drawn vehicles.

  Moses Swearingen did not look like an Indian. For one thing he had hair almost the color of Vesta Hawley’s, except it was if anything more abundant and of a finer texture. His eyes changed, it was observed, like the tides. In the morning his eyes were almost robin’s egg blue, but as the day progressed his orbs became darker, and as he sat overlooking the card players in the evening his eyes were of a fearful black.

  A young man who had dabbled in anthropology and who visited Moe’s Villa from time to time said that, despite Moses’ fair hair, his pronounced high cheekbones were the telltale proof he had Shawnee blood.

  Where Moses’ great-grandfather came into his fortune and his mansion was never truthfully known. Indeed it has been an equal mystery where his family originally came from.

  On the other hand Dr. Sherman Cooke did not resemble at all a family physician in his appearance. He had the chest of an athlete, almost a Samson, and even at an advanced age he gave the impression of a blacksmith or the wielder of a sledgehammer. He had a waist, some of his clients joked, not above twenty-eight inches in girth.

  There were some blotches or scars on his weather-beaten complexion. Rumour had it that Rory had attacked the doctor one evening when he saw the doctor emerging from Vesta’s bedroom. Some claimed that the boy had thrown a pot of scalding water on the doctor’s countenance. Others said Rory had stabbed him with a penknife.

  Once, however, the doctor told one of his closest friends he had fallen as a child into a bonfire and was only tardily rescued at the last moment, else he would have perished.

  Even more arresting to his appearance was his untamable shock of very black hair, which appeared never to have been cut or indeed combed. And, until at a late age, it was all but untouched by gray. (He laid this fact to his eating foods rich in copper.) In short, Dr. Cooke (he also spelled his name indifferently now and again as Coke) resembled a Shawnee Indian more than Moses Swearingen. And townsfolk often jeered that the scars on the doctor’s countenance were inherited from tomahawk wounds.

  After the disappearance of Pete Driscoll, they came from far and near. At first perhaps the suitors were curious concerning Vesta’s reputed wealth and the fact of course she owned one of the great showplaces of this remote rural area. For the general opinion was that whoever inherited her mansion was set for life. (What no one realized, perhaps not even Vesta Hawley, was that the house, in disrepair since the Civil War, was gradually turning to powder.)

  But the indomitable untamable and indestructible suitor was of course Dr. Sherman Cooke of the blotched countenance and unruly uncut unbarbered hair.

  It was also whispered that Moses Swearingen himself far back had often paid Vesta Hawley short mysterious calls. It was said he always left the premises with lowered brow and sagging shoulders.

  Vesta herself frequently remarked that had she not had so intractable and unteachable a son as Rory, perhaps she would have married. Doubtful, in retrospect. For Vesta loved her own independence more than life itself. And she did not wish to marry for another reason: she wished one day to bequeath her mansion to Rory who she always called her fate and nemesis—as the only means she could make up for her failure as a mother and guide.

  “Rory will never be satisfied,” she once remarked to some of her gentlemen visitors, “until he sees me lying in a pinewood box on the way to Maple Grove Cemetery. Then and only then can he do exactly as he pleases!”

  But Rory as soon as he could talk had done exactly as he pleased, and Vesta soon realized he was as intractable as a tiger cub.

  So extensive was Vesta’s mansion there were—she claimed—many r
ooms she had never set foot in.

  But in all the rooms she was familiar with there were her clocks. Everyone in Gilboa had heard stories of them, and some lucky people had actually heard them tick and chime. Almost all the rooms on the main floor had at least one grandfather clock. In Vesta’s huge bedroom (large enough to sleep a squadron) there were over sixteen clocks of varying size.

  The irony of all this collection of timepieces was that most of them had long ago given out, and no matter how Vesta herself and her friends tinkered with them, they could not bring the clocks back to life.

  But when none of the clocks kept time at all, and poor as she was or claimed to be, she was able to persuade a famous watchsmith from Toronto, Canada, to come to visit her.

  Dr. Sherman Cooke had attempted to dissuade her from inviting an unknown man to her house. He scoffed at her assurance that the watchsmith was considered the finest in the hemisphere.

  “Famous or not, you may be in actual peril,” the doctor cautioned.

  “The invitation stands, Sherman!” and she added, “If you really had been concerned over the years, you would have bought me a proper timepiece.”

  “A timepiece! You would only be satisfied with a hundred! And I am convinced, dear girl, that there is something in the temperature of your rooms which slows down and finally stops all your clocks.”

  They both laughed after he had made this little speech.

  Vesta was more worried over how she would pay the famous visiting watchsmith than under any apprehension he might murder her.

  “He was too young, much too young!” Dr. Sherman Cooke later recalled the watchsmith. “It cost me many a sleepless night while he was at her beck and call. And the scamp also fell for Vesta, wouldn’t you know—the Canadian watchsmith! Head over heels he was!”

  Dr. Sherman Cooke slowly began to understand why Rory had run away from home, if one could call such an establishment as Vesta’s “home.”

  “Rory saw she was not his mother, but a Circe,” Dr. Cooke confided to one of his oldest patients who was dying of an undiagnosed illness.

  The young Canadian watchsmith had stayed a week and, to give the devil his due, he succeeded in making almost all the clocks run again except one ancient grandfather timepiece.

  “It will have to be sent to my workshop in Canada,” he told Vesta. “For we would have to repair almost all of its inner works.”

  Dr. Cooke saw the watchsmith’s behaviour (he charged Vesta only five dollars for his extensive time and workmanship) as a kind of repeat performance of all the men, young and old, who had fallen for Vesta Hawley, including even her young son Rory. For the boy, constantly caressed and spoiled, then neglected and confused, had his own inner working ruined perhaps forever.

  IT WAS THE schoolteacher Bess Byal who called on Vesta one blustering fall evening when all the countless clocks were by now ticking and chiming away.

  Vesta insisted on giving the schoolmarm her best India tea together with fresh homemade Parker House rolls and gooseberry jam.

  “Do you realize,” Bess said after unwillingly enjoying the repast, “that Rory has not attended school since the first two days of the term.”

  Vesta’s mind was a thousand miles away.

  “He is either at the picture show, or when the picture show is not running, he spends the day and even most of the night at Moe’s Villa.”

  “Moe’s?” Vesta was evasive and toyed with her grandmother’s brooch.

  “The very same,” Bess confirmed and then swallowing some tea the wrong way, she burst into a seizure of coughing.

  “And did the truant officer never talk to the boy?” Vesta inquired with the vagueness and indifference she might have shown had Bess told her of a child’s kite which the wind had blown out of reach.

  “I’m afraid we have no such officer, Vesta. Ben Wheatley, our truant officer, passed away last year, and the school board doesn’t now have the funds to employ another.”

  “Yes, what is to become of Rory,” Vesta said listlessly, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Bess let the Parker House rolls tempt her again in the face of this absence of maternal responsibility.

  DR. COOKE WAS both fascinated and made uneasy by Vesta’s many “fancies,” as the doctor called her pet pleasures. There was of course her obsessive interest in—as an example—her countless clocks. But her unusual “fancies” extended to many other phenomena.

  One evening when the doctor was seated beside her in the velvet settee of the parlour, holding her hand and hoping she would allow him to kiss her, he saw Vesta all at once leap up and go to the large front window, pull back the heavy curtains and bend her ear close to the pane.

  “What on earth is it?” he wondered.

  “Sh! Listen, only listen.”

  He heard from a distance a man’s powerful whistle.

  It was the sound of young men whistling, he learned finally, which created in Vesta Hawley an almost swooning pleasure such as she experienced when she heard the combined ticking of her many clocks.

  Yes, she admitted, she found the sound of young men whistling from their powerful lungs as breathtakingly moving as a more sophisticated person might experience hearing a sax or fine piccolo solo.

  “Oh, Vesta, Vesta, I will never understand you.”

  Then there came the day when it seemed clear that Rory had left his mother’s house for good, that Vesta noticed Frau Storeholder grasping one of the out-of-town evening newspapers, standing worriedly and hoping to be allowed to tell her mistress something.

  “No more obituaries, Frau Storeholder. I am not strong enough this evening to hear who has left us for the other shore! Please!”

  “May I read from the marriage announcements of last month,” Frau Storeholder was very firm and obstinate.

  “But why on earth marriage,” Vesta said, and then perhaps sensing at a severe look from Frau Storeholder what was to come, “All right,” Vesta managed to say. “Read your news! But only if it is about the living.”

  Frau Storeholder in her heavy accent read then from a Chicago newspaper that Dr. Sherman Cooke of Gilboa had married Miss Mamie Resch also of Gilboa in a private ceremony.

  Vesta made her way to the easy chair and slumped down against its freshly-laundered antimacassar.

  “Shall I bring you the elixir doctor left you last week?” Frau Storeholder, having put away the newspaper suggested.

  “That may be a good idea,” Vesta answered in a voice at least two octaves lower than usual. “Kindly do so.”

  Sipping the elixir, Vesta muttered to her faithful friend, “I will weigh carefully what it is I must do next.”

  A bit afraid Vesta might mean an act of violence, Frau Storeholder spoke in her lullaby manner, urging Vesta to take no action until the shock had subsided.

  Queerly enough, Dr. Cooke arrived at his usual hour of visiting the next evening, but Frau Storeholder informed him that Vesta was not at home to anyone this night.

  “Not at home!” the doctor scoffed and then bore down his Herculean presence past the old obituary-reader and rudely opened the sliding doors which lead to the parlour. There he caught sight of his only love with a hot water bottle attached to her aching head, sprawled out on a fancy ottoman.

  Dr. Cooke courageously removed the hot water bottle and took both her hands in his. She was too weak to rebuff him.

  “Where is the pain?” he whispered, touching lightly his lips in her fragrant hair.

  She tried to push him away, but in her weakness failed to achieve this action.

  “Nothing will have changed, dear Vesta. You are my only one. You know that!”

  She slapped him across the face, but he noticed this no more than had he felt a fly alight on his forehead.

  “I have been in catastrophic financial straits,” he began, and Vesta knew this was a sly reference to his having helped her modestly in days gone past.

  “And you have moved in bag and baggage with her I am told. Have you departed yo
ur own place where you treated your patients for so many decades.”

  “My wife has given me her entire first floor for my professional duties,” he spoke lamely.

  More excuses now followed in a lachrymose delivery.

  “The banks would not honor my last request for a loan,” he finished, and without her permission he bestowed a kiss on her forehead.

  Because she did not repulse him for this action he knew then she probably would continue to admit him to her presence, married or not! But then who could predict Vesta’s changing moods?

  That night Vesta had a strange dream. It had to do not so much with the doctor, though he flitted in and out of the dream, as it showed Miss Mamie Resch in the action of hiding a collection of gold pieces in what looked like an opening in the wallpaper.

  Waking, Vesta could not get the dream out of her mind. She knew of course, as did everybody in Gilboa, that Mamie Resch was not only incredibly rich, but was even more famous as a miser who hid her money in all kinds of secret places.

  The next morning Vesta Hawley was consumed with anger and outraged to such an extent she feared she might suffer palpitations for which Dr. Cooke had treated her in times past with tiny little red pills.

  Under the pretext she had run out of medicine, she decided to pay a visit to Dr. Cooke.

  Yes, Vesta Hawley who almost never left her own residence realized that was exactly what she must do. She summoned one of her “whistlers,” a farmer’s boy, Stu Hysted, who came at once in his rickety car with tires which appeared to be not so much punctured as shredded. He doffed his hat and bowed low when he saw Vesta come out of her front door and grinned showing his toothpaste ad beautiful teeth.

  They rode then not to the Doctor’s old lodging but to the imposing edifice of Dr. Cooke’s new mistress—the heiress Mamie Resch who else!

  Asking Stu Hysted to wait in his jalopy, Vesta strode up the twenty or so steep steps leading to Mamie’s front living room. Out of breath more from anger than palpitations, Vesta flung open the door and then all but fell onto an ottoman.