The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Let me say at this time, my dear friends and colleagues, that in my opinion we have no jurisdiction over the lives of the person we have been discussing. We are, let us remember, schoolmasters and teachers. What Mistress Hawley does in her private chambers, and Mr. Swearingen does in his, do not concern us. If the Hawley boy has gone to Mr. Swearingen of his own free will, as I understand he has, and if his mother, the excellent Vesta Hawley herself, has made no appeal to outside authority for his return, who are we, as I say, mere schoolteachers, to interfere in the freedom and privacy of these two leading citizens!”

  No silence could have been more profound than the dead silence that now followed this speech (indeed had not only a pin dropped but a sledgehammer, no one would have heard it). Mr. Shingles, smiling a bit triumphantly and letting go his gavel, picked up his heavy felt hat and almost slammed it over his ears. And following this singular action, he took from his breast pocket a silver whistle and blew it forcefully.

  His private chauffeur, Kurt Bandor, appeared immediately as if from nowhere on hearing the whistle blown and with a rather elaborate and possessive manner led the old man outside to his waiting limousine.

  Mr. Jaqua, put in his place, and acting as if he had been slapped in the bargain, crimsoned to the roots of his hair and, for the first time in his tenure as principal, could find nothing to say until after a nervous question from Bess Byal, he managed to utter, “The meeting, Miss Byal and gentlemen, is indeed adjourned; thank you.”

  As everyone was filing out then, except for Mr. Jaqua, the members of the gathering were astonished to hear all of a sudden from the room just vacated Mr. Jaqua striking the table at which he still sat with Superintendent Shingles’s gavel.

  Bess Byal, at the sound of the gavel, turned back and stared questioningly at the principal.

  “Good night, Miss Byal,” he managed to say, still grasping the superintendent’s gavel.

  ONE FROSTY NOVEMBER evening as Vesta was entertaining some star customers over dessert and mulled wine, Frau Storeholder a bit ruffled entered and whispered in Vesta’s ear: “Dr. Cooke says he would like a word with you.”

  “Tell the good doctor to join us in dessert.”

  Just then the clock struck twelve.

  “Doctor asks a word alone with you,” Frau Storeholder added solemnly.

  “No, no, no!” Vesta cried. But she got up, dropping her napkin, and excused herself from her three dinner guests and faced the doctor.

  “Why won’t you come and have some dessert,” Vesta scolded. “Don’t tell me you won’t.”

  Dr. Cooke knew enough from past experience not to vex her more at the moment. Doffing his heavy coat, he entered the dining hall. The guests were Dave Dysinger, a young man who worked at the greenhouse, Hal Bryer, a minister of the gospel, and Hayes Wishart, who lived off his family’s income.

  The three guests all rose and greeted Dr. Cooke, who unwillingly, then, and very grudgingly, consented to taste some plum pudding in a heavy sauce. But the pudding, against his will, actually revived him, and he broke gradually into a thin smile and then suddenly grinned and licked the spoon.

  The three young men now left, using the excuse of allowing the doctor to be alone with Vesta, though they had been ready to depart an hour or so earlier.

  In the parlour, Vesta now sat with the doctor as she yawned and occasionally sighed.

  “We have had an unfortunate episode at our house,” Dr. Cooke began.

  Vesta looked at the folds of her evening gown and lifted the hem which had fallen on her high shoes.

  “Episode?” she wondered indifferently. “And who do you mean by we?”

  “My wife of course,” he said deeply hurt, deeply offended.

  “You mean Mamie Resch, I suppose,” Vesta said as she looked up at the ceiling chandelier and yawned again.

  “Oh, Vesta, try to be a little civil at least.”

  “Civil! After you have broken in on my evening supper and driven my guests out of the house. Civil! And you dare to mention that abandoned creature you now claim as your wife when you are in my house, and uninvited at that! And you barge in after midnight at that! Well, then, why are you here?”

  “We have had a break-in, Vesta. A robbery.”

  “I hope you have informed the authorities.”

  He shook his head gravely. “That I will never do,” he mumbled.

  “Then the episode you speak of must be rather trifling.”

  “If ten thousand dollars is a trifle!” He bowed his head, and they both knew he was “licked.”

  Vesta rose grandly and touched a tiny silver bell. It brought one of the kitchen help almost immediately. A young man hardly more than sixteen, wearing a kitchen apron much too large for him, entered.

  “Fetch the brandy bottle, Theo, and the little glasses, and be quick about it too.”

  “No, no, Vesta,” Dr. Cooke implored.

  “Yes, yes, doctor. God knows you need something to clear your brain.”

  Drinking first one glass of brandy and shortly thereafter another, Dr. Cooke all at once in a gravelly but loud voice exclaimed: “I forgive you, Vesta, and you will never hear me mention the affair again.”

  His statement only infuriated Vesta the more.

  “You have been my suitor now for how long, doctor?”

  “Oh, Vesta, please.”

  “Please, nothing! Answer my question.”

  “A good twenty years, I expect.”

  “And during all those difficult years when I wondered day in and day out how I was to meet my expenses, who lent me a helping hand? Who kept the sheriff from closing me down?”

  He shook his head and stared into his drink.

  “Shake your head a thousand times. The answer is Dr. Cooke certainly did not lend a hand. Yet he had free run of my house. Strolled at will through every one of my floors and my rooms like a baron!”

  Here she raised her milk-white arms as if those arms held a rawhide about to fall.

  “Yes, the good doctor, as he is known, enjoyed all this great house has to offer, including the upper chamber. Yet did he ever contribute more than one farthing to the upkeep of my regal outlays and expenditures? And then one fine day out of a blue sky without warning, or so much as a hint of what he was up to, he ups and marries a woman who had in twenty years never invited him to any of her skimpy soirees, was indeed barely on speaking acquaintance with him, a woman so desperate for conjugal closeness that it was she, old and unfrequented as the hills, who proposed to him, and he at the thought of Mamie’s wealth, our good doctor, grasped her hand as if she had stretched it out to save him from drowning!”

  Dr. Cooke, who had seen action, they say, in at least two wars and had won several citations for bravery, now flinched more than when he was under enemy fire. But Vesta, perhaps too disgusted to lay hands on her former suitor, merely groaned and moved her head vigorously until her star sapphire earrings threatened to come loose in her rage.

  “If there is a thief anywhere in this blasted town I am looking at him now! And if money is missing, certainly over-the-hill Mamie Resch ought to know what become of it, and who took it.”

  “I know you took it.” Dr. Cooke to his own astonishment was able to get these words out.

  Vesta laughed shrilly and so loudly that hobbling old Frau Storeholder entered the room in alarm.

  “Sit down, dear lady,” Vesta smiled and made a cooing sound at her old doorkeeper.

  “I will settle the score, then, Vesta, with my wife,” Dr. Cooke said and looked longingly at the bottle of brandy.

  “For all you have consumed here, doctor, over the decades and the rolling years,” Vesta had begun again, “for all the grub, Canadian pheasant and venison, the roast suckling pig and fatted calf, the sweetmeats and pumpkin royals, and all the other bounty of my kitchen, and certainly the spirits which have flowed for you and only you like the waters of the lake in springtime, for all that, you could never repay me in a hundred years what you have over time us
urped from me. For yes, God knows, you have bled me white. And you dare come here at this late hour to accuse me of robbery when I am looking right now at the greatest robber who ever entered any woman’s life!”

  Rising, or rather tottering to his feet, Dr. Cooke now shouted: “And I tell you I will make it all right with my wife.”

  “You have no wife,” Vesta called out. “Do you mean to tell me you are capable of the marriage rite, you and that old bag of bones, wigs and paint that is Mamie Resch, a crone old enough to be your own mother. Yes, go home now, waken your legal spouse, tell her you owe the grass widow, owner of the finest showplace in the state, tell her, do you hear, you owe me at the very least twenty million dollars which no peephole in wallpaper is big enough to hide.”

  Dr. Cooke was already on his way out, bent almost double, and sniveling and choking from his own effluvia.

  Vesta who had threateningly accompanied the doctor to the door and slammed it after him now returned to the parlour.

  Had Frau Storeholder ever gone to the theater, she might have thought Sarah Bernhardt had come back to the stage. And for a split second Frau Storeholder did not actually believe she had been hearing the Vesta she knew. She shivered a little. She shook.

  Only when Vesta sat down in the best chair in the house and began laughing uproariously did Frau Storeholder return to reality.

  “Oh, what a wonderful audience you make, what a divine onlooker, dear Belinda. Yes, you egged me on to one of my finest performances, I do believe. Dunning me for a few thousand dollars when he is in my debt for millions!”

  Vesta picked up a half-empty glass of brandy left by her late-hour guest and downed it all in one swallow. She wiped her eyes of the tears which her laughter had brought forth and then sank back limp as a rag against the bolster of one of her antique overstuffed chairs.

  For the zeal of thine house bath eaten me up.

  Vesta found this verse underlined in an open copy of Frau Storeholder’s well-worn Holy Bible.

  The verse was from the Psalms, and whether owing to the fact the verse had been underlined with pencil or because of the words themselves, the text appeared to be blazing like hot coals.

  Vesta felt the underlined verse was meant for her. She was not sure of its meaning, but she had been aware for some time that Frau Storeholder, if not downright critical of her, was not altogether comfortable with Vesta’s behaviour of late.

  “Yet what would the poor old thing do without me,” Vesta muttered, still gazing at the passage in the Psalms. “Yes, I suppose I do have zeal for my house. It’s all I have, and it was all my own people had before me. And, as I’ve told Frau Storeholder a thousand times, what would become of her if some day the sheriff came and closed the property. Where would she go? Where would I go?”

  That evening, after an unusually sumptuous banquet and after every one of the guests had departed, Vesta came into the little parlour reserved primarily for Frau Storeholder. She was sitting in a wicker rocking chair, her eyes closed.

  The Holy Bible was still open at the marked passage in the Psalms.

  Vesta strode over to where the book lay and deliberately read aloud the underlined passage.

  “You are quite a student of Scripture, Belinda,” she remarked, turning to gaze at Frau Storeholder.

  Frau Storeholder opened her eyes, roused as if out of sleep, brought on in part perhaps by the excellent dinner she had just enjoyed.

  “I am afraid I am far from what anyone could call a student of Scripture,” the old woman managed to say. She spoke as if she was talking in her sleep.

  “Does the verse have some special meaning for you, Belinda, seeing you have underlined it.”

  “Let me look at it, Vesta.” She rose now and came over to stare at the passage marked in the Psalms.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand the verse myself,” she confessed. “Perhaps that is why it’s underlined.”

  “I was wondering if the verse had some reference to me,” Vesta tried to make her voice kind and reasonable, but still it came out rather edgy.

  Frau Storeholder now gazed lengthily at Vesta, then spoke up bravely, “I believe house here means the Temple of the Lord.”

  Vesta now took up the heavy tome in her hands and read the passage again aloud in her soaring contralto.

  “Isn’t the passage, dear Belinda, a pointed reference to someone who worships her own mansion?”

  When Frau Storeholder did not respond, Vesta put down the heavy book on its stand.

  “I’m afraid you think I worship my home more than I do anything else in creation.”

  Frau Storeholder moved about the room now as if she was looking for something which might explain the passage itself. Finishing her pacing, the old woman sat down in her favorite chair, and again closed her eyes.

  “You believe, I feel, that I love my house more than I love Rory, my only child. For he has left me, think of it, just think of it. Zeal, zeal!” She almost shouted this word. “Yes, whatever you say, I am afraid the passage has more than a little to do with me. Say or think whatever you like.”

  “Vesta,” Frau Storeholder’s voice came now as distant as if from the banquet room, “we must do what we must do in this life.”

  “But eaten me up! That is a terrible way of putting it. For I do believe the verse has to do with me. With my life.”

  Vesta could not restrain a few short sobs.

  “We should not try to understand Holy Writ, dear Vesta. Let me repeat, the word house here means the Lord’s Temple, that and nothing more.”

  “Oh, how I wish I could believe you. I have heard there are many ways of interpreting Scripture of course.”

  “Don’t fret, dear Vesta. It breaks my heart to see you fret.”

  “And you didn’t leave the book open at this passage for my eyes?”

  Frau Storeholder said nothing at this point.

  “I wish you would admit you did. I think the passage does refer to my kind of worship. A house! It’s all I have. My only son has deserted me. And his deserting me has been approved of by the Superintendent of Schools! Think of that. Rory has gone permanently to live with Moses Swearingen.”

  “Moe’s Villa,” Frau Storeholder clicked her tongue.

  The mention of Moe’s Villa drove out then from Vesta’s mind the Bible and its verses. All she could think of then was they had taken her boy away from her. Of course she had neglected him, had not paid attention to his needs, to his truancy from school! She was not free of blame, but she had kept a roof over his precious head! Her zeal as the Good Book said, had been behind it. And the passage, no matter what Frau Storeholder might say, yes, it was about her!

  MOSES SWEARINGEN BELONGED to one of the most respected families in Gilboa. His ancestors went back before the Revolution. And he had, like Vesta Hawley, inherited an antebellum sprawling piece of property which had possibly more rooms than the mansion of the grass widow herself.

  Moses had studied to be a medical doctor, but having to work with cadavers had caused him to have such a horror of the profession, he had left school a few months before graduation.

  He had returned to Gilboa and settled down. It was said he sometimes practiced medicine without a license, and even Dr. Cooke often remarked Moses knew more about the profession than many a licensed M.D.

  But Moses Swearingen’s real interest outside of cards, gambling and strong drink, lay—unbeknownst to almost everyone—in the field of psychic phenomenona, which he had studied in the medical school, devouring every book he could lay his hands on.

  He felt that he himself had some talent in the field, but he was afraid to go further into this science. It seemed to threaten something very deep in his nature.

  Moses, being perhaps the wealthiest man in the county, could afford to hire the unemployed young men to do the hard work about his mansion and run his many errands. But he was always looking in them also for some hint that they might have psychic ability.

  Moses Swearingen had noticed f
or some time the strange behaviour of young Rory Hawley, the neglected child of a ruined marriage.

  Everyone in Gilboa knew Rory never attended school regularly, if at all, and was, as they said, a dyed-in-the-wool truant.

  The word “truant” kept running though Moses’ mind the first time some men in the pool parlor mentioned it in reference to Widow Hawley’s son.

  One cold winter day Moses spied young Rory wandering aimlessly about the town square. He wore no overcoat or gloves and was blowing his hands to keep them warm.

  It did not take many words for Moses to invite him to his Villa, as his property was frequently, though sarcastically, called.

  Moses rummaged about the garments in his clothes closet and came back with a thick sweater, two or three sizes too large for the boy, but which would give him the warmth he needed.

  But the sweater, Moses soon saw, was not warm enough to keep Rory from a fit of shivering. His lips were almost blue. Moses felt the boy’s forehead and took his pulse. Rory began shaking convulsively.

  At Moe’s Villa bottles of spirits were in evidence everywhere. He poured Rory a few jiggers of alcohol against the boy’s resistance but got some of it anyhow down his throat. The remaining drops fell over the young boy’s chin and chest.

  Frightened at the boy’s dangerous condition, Moses carried him up the long antique staircase to the front guest room where there were plenty of goose down comforters, quilts, and pillows.

  He didn’t bother to remove the boy’s clothing, but put him between the thick linen sheets and piled on the blankets and comforters.

  A quaking fright took over him that the boy might expire in his care.

  He called in one of his hired girls and told her to make some tea. The girl stared for a long time at the unfamiliar guest. Moses had to shout for her to get on with his request.

  Moses sat up the rest of the night, unwilling to leave the boy for fear he might perish if left untended. Toward morning, however, Rory stirred and opened his eyes and half-smiled at Moses, then lay back and closed his eyes. A thin stream of blood came out of his nostrils. Moses wiped his nose and mouth delicately of the stains.