The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Then the whole trip’s off, you mean,” he said without any expression, as though he had read this statement on the table. “Three,—four years of planning,” he said in the same expressionless voice, and then, with a bit more force: “What do you think I’m going to tell my folks?”

  “Tell them anything you like,” she said.

  His wounded look brought up something like attention in her and she began to talk a little more. “You see, Buddy, I couldn’t bear that photograph of me in the passport, for one thing. It made me look like our French teacher or something. About 100 and a permanent virgin. I couldn’t appear in European capitals with that photo.”

  “But you could have another made.”

  “And the boat sailing in three days,” she said.

  He admitted she was right.

  “We planned this trip ever since we were freshmen,” he repeated this bit of knowledge. “And now that we’re engaged too and all,” he said, looking up from the bits of her passport.

  “But if you cared anything at all about me, you wouldn’t care,” she said. “You’re just afraid is all. I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but you are. And I hate you for it. I just hate you for it.”

  “For the love of mud,” he said.

  “Oh how tiresome,” she replied.

  “Well,” Hilda said, after a pause during which she had watched him for some sign of decision, and she stood up, still watching him lazily. “I hope you’ll come to your senses,” she said. “Let Corinne worry. She deserves to.”

  Suddenly her eye lighting on the remains of her passport, she seized the pieces quietly and tearing them in even finer pieces, left them with him.

  “For the love of mud,” he said again. His face went a terrible red as though she had thrown a chemical in his eyes.

  He sat there in the deserted student union trying to think of what to do, and finally he decided he must see Hilda’s mother. Corinne was in another city, and he couldn’t just let the whole thing rest here. Picking up the pieces of her passport, he walked out of the building, and headed for Mrs. Wormley’s.

  BUDDY TOLD HILDA’S mother about her daughter’s not wanting to use her own passport, and he found not too much to his surprise that Mrs. Wormley was almost as unaware of the nature of law as her daughter. Mrs. Wormley had purple fingernails today, he noticed, and her hair was close to a certain shade of purple also. She was too nervous to sit down during their talk and kept looking out the window.

  “I’m expecting a special delivery letter,” she told Buddy.

  He nodded.

  “How about my daughter,” Mrs. Wormley said finally, half-turning to him. “Let her use her sister’s passport. You know she looks more like Corinne than Corinne does.”

  “Could I have a glass of water, do you suppose?” Buddy asked her.

  She looked at him a short while before answering. “Of course you may,” she said at last, and she pulled on a cord.

  “Bring the young man a glass of cold water,” she told the maid who entered.

  “You see,” Mrs. Wormley said, still not sitting down, and repeating her thought, “Hilda looks more like Corinne than Corinne does. Always has. You’ve met Corinne, haven’t you,” Mrs. Wormley wanted to know.

  Buddy nodded.

  “We just can’t go then, I guess,” he said when he had drunk the water.

  “Well that’s up to you, of course,” Mrs. Wormley told him. “Quite up to you . . . But I don’t see why you should cross Hilda in a small thing like this . . . You see, you’re engaged to her now, and that makes a bit of a difference . . .”

  “I know I’m engaged, of course,” he told Mrs. Wormley.

  “You’re both engaged,” Mrs. Wormley said. “Remember that.” She looked out the window again. “I can’t understand why that letter doesn’t come,” she said.

  “Are you sure it’s coming?” he said, and he immediately regretted saying this. He didn’t understand somehow what his own statement meant. But Mrs. Wormley did not seem to mind at all.

  “I’m not sure of a thing,” she said. “I’ve so much to worry me!”

  Finally she sat down, but the moment she did so she noticed a runner in her right hose, and she let out a soft cry of disbelief.

  “I try not to intervene in my children’s lives,” Mrs. Wormley said after a pause.

  Buddy nodded.

  “You see,” she went on, “since Hilda has been thirteen I have tried to make her make all her own decisions. Now if she does want to use her sister Corinne’s passport, I won’t interfere.”

  Buddy drank a little more of the water, and pulled out a package of cigarettes.

  “You smoke in here, don’t you?” he said, a bit unsure why he had made this statement also.

  Mrs. Wormley stared at him. “Why we smoke everywhere in my house,” she said, and she seemed, he thought, quite puzzled at this. She was going to say more, he could see, but instead she got up and looked out the window.

  “Hilda will simply have to make up her own mind,” Mrs. Wormley told him. “I won’t do a thing.”

  “I CAN’T go with her!” Buddy suddenly almost shouted at her.

  Mrs. Wormley looked at him carefully.

  “I CAN’T!” he said, this time shouting.

  “Well, there you are,” Mrs. Wormley said. “I suppose she’ll go anyhow.”

  “On Corrine’s passport?”

  “Oh you always come back to that,” Mrs. Wormley said.

  “If her father were only alive,” Buddy finally expressed a wish.

  “Mr. Wormley never interfered in our way of doing things,” she said, but with her mouth so close to the wall near the window Buddy was not sure he had heard her.

  “If somebody could only tell her!” Buddy cried.

  “But you’re still only in college!” Mrs. Wormley said.

  “But what has that to do with passports?” he said, more hysterical than angry now.

  “You’re so serious, you see,” Mrs. Wormley told him. “You shouldn’t be when you’re in college. You should have fun. Why is it you don’t know that?”

  “Your daughter is going to be arrested or something, Mrs. Wormley.”

  “Oh come now,” she replied. “What ever brought you to such a conclusion.”

  Buddy got up, he wanted to leave the house at once, but he was somehow too dizzy, actually dizzy, with confusion to know whether he could manage to get out of the house without stumbling over something.

  “You’ll just have to tell her no then, Mrs. Wormley,” he said, ready to leave.

  “No to what?” Mrs. Wormley wondered vaguely.

  “No to Europe,” he said. “No to everything.”

  Mrs. Wormley nodded. Then, walking behind a large vase of flowers she said: “Well she’ll be disappointed, of course,” she said as though perhaps she saw things clearly at last. “But she’ll get over it!” she finished, more like herself again. “And you will too.”

  Buddy stared at her, puffing audibly in the room.

  “And maybe she didn’t want to go, poor dear,” Mrs. Wormley said thoughtfully, as though at last she had had the time to consider the question. “She’s had to wait you know all through college!

  ON HIS WAY out, Buddy found a postman ready to ring the bell. The postman was holding a special delivery letter.

  “She’s ready for you,” Buddy shouted at the postman, who stared at Buddy’s face with grave surprise, and Buddy feeling he must look very peculiar, headed on back to the student union.

  DR. DIECK & COMPANY

  Though this story was written in 1986, it reflects the

  “lost decade” (between 1946 and 1955) when Purdy taught

  at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin.

  Dr. Dieck was the big frog in that literary pond, Irene reminisced. Among so many college professors who have been divorced by their wives, he remained oh for so long so long unsmirched. But at last Dr. Dieck himself fell. Rather, his wife fell first. She was like the wiv
e in that old American comedy about a woman who had a mania for keeping her house clean. She also would not allow anybody to raise his voice. Silence and cleanliness were Clara’s gods. Her husband did most of his work in the faculty men’s club, or huddled into that tiny narrow hateful office of his. He so seldom appeared with her in public, he used the excuse of his literary studies. There Clara was at home endlessly cleaning. The women who came in to help with the housework wore pinched white faces, they would, it was commonly thought, have preferred to help the lumberjacks rather than work for her. She seldom kept a housecleaner for more than six months. And it was Wisconsin you know oh yes, where though much less dirt than in New York where we are today, still the paper factories brought in considerable dirt. He joked that he spent an hour a day cleaning his feet before entering his residence. I will explain that he ran back and forth to his classroom as so many of those college professors did at that period. To school, home again, clean your feet, to school, home again, clean your feet. Wisconsin has heavy snows beginning almost with the falling of the petals of the last roses, and not ending until the first crocus is buried in a drift of heavy white. And in summer of course the damp earth clings to one’s feet. He wiped then as he had in the snow and sleet. Dr. Dieck I often thought was essentially a wiper. I can remember him wiping his old-fashioned stick-pen after he had dipped it in the ink well. He had old-fashioned habits. They said he wore stiff wing collars long after they were in style . . . He wore high-shoes for many years . . . Gradually he moved into a new decade after the decades in question had passed . . . He was always a generation removed from the present, yet since he moved, he did not quite remain in his own period.

  Dr. Dieck wrote novels about people whom he knew, but he was ever careful of sparing feelings, and when his books were published, his readers paid him the supreme compliment of not recognizing themselves in his pages. In fact, as the President of the college once remarked, nobody had ever finished one of Dr. Dieck’s novels except the students in his creative writing class. Some of these, however, it was learned later had not finished his books.

  Writing stories and novels in his spare time, which, owing to a pull he had had with the administration, he had nothing but spare time, and taught almost not at all, much to the disgruntlement of the other faculty members. Yet he was busier than the most weighted down members of the faculty who were on special committees, inspected the dormitories, attended football banquets and the like. Dr. Dieck did, as they said, nothing but his spare time, and his wiping. He was ever on his way to Main Hall, or on his way back, and even when he arrived at the old building erected in 1838, he wiped his feet dutifully there, on a welcome mat, though no one was expected to do so, and the students, one observed, if anything, always anointed their feet with extra mud or snow before entering the hall.

  As Dr. Dieck went through the corridors (his own office he had kept on the third floor because of memories and perhaps superstition) he was not above listening in on some of his colleagues’ lectures, especially the history professor, a Roman Catholic whom he disliked intensely.

  But Dr. Dieck was not a confirmed eavesdropper. Observing others, listening, took too much time from his writing, and it was after all writing, and not people which interested him. He had admitted this himself, and his enemies had confirmed it.

  As Dr. Dieck wiped and wiped his feet, Mrs. Dieck grew, it was known, more and more punctilious, clean, particular, as the ladies said. Nothing was clean enough. Dr. Dieck’s face was always scrubbed to the irritating of a large mole on his cheek to such an extent he finally had to have it removed.

  It was the removal of his “cleanliness” mole (his wife could determine by it whether or not his face was as clean as it should be) which many said led to his downfall. The removal of the mole, no question about it, changed the expression and perhaps the actual meaning of his face. He looked younger and more vacant, but more interested suddenly in life.

  Shortly after the mole came off, he began to cease wiping his feet at the entrance of Main Hall, the humanities classroom building. He wiped more perfunctorily too at home.

  It was rumored that Dr. Dieck had found another person than Mrs. Dieck. It did not come as an actual surprise to the college, which while ostensibly Methodist, entertained a rather wearisome number of adulteries, divorces, and varied extra-marital relationships, including faculty men who fell in love with young unmarried bachelors. Everything went on in Wisconsin in microcosm therefore which goes on say in New York.

  Dr. Dieck, therefore, everybody said, at the age of 50 had fallen in love, or, the same thing, an unknown “party” had fallen in love with him. The shade in his office was now frequently pulled, and he took to making tea in his office, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Dieck who felt he could not “keep house” well in his own study in Main Hall if he took to “cooking” and eating there. Dr. Dieck surprised her to the point of tears here by overruling her command, and told her he would do as he pleased with reference to his own office, and in his rage, Mrs. Dieck heard—to her disturbance—heard him wiping his feet savagely under the dining room table, where they had all arguments. She never rose in time for breakfast.

  The knowledge that Dr. Dieck was in love, or more properly, had a lover became known instantaneously and as it were was carried ubiquitously to town and gown. Everybody in Stapleton knew it. It was recalled suddenly angrily (where before it had been recalled gaily) that Dr. Dieck had once called Stapleton the Kotex empire of the world. It was of course the center for papermaking.

  Everybody talked about nothing but Dr. Dieck’s new love, and nobody knew a thing. The lover was said of course to be a student. Married women were satisfied it was a co-ed, while unmarried men, bachelors on the faculty asserted it was a football player interested in poetry.

  His mole was gone, he was developing untidy habits, and he was already classified as a common adulterer. Dr. Dieck had fallen, but whether he lived in the decade of the time or not was of small moment, for no one was impressed by adultery, even if it was only with a boy. The news was simply that Dr. Dieck had fallen. That was enough. He no longer wiped his feet, his mole was gone, everything had changed.

  Mrs. Dieck did not at once know her husband’s reputation was changed. Perhaps because her own seemed to continue as it was. She was known as a maniac for housekeeping and this was as final for her as a tombstone erected over her, while Dr. Dieck had been a literary celebrity, and this fame was now overshadowed by his rep as an adulterer at 50. A keeper of rendezvous, a lover in short.

  Mrs. Dieck learned of her husband’s activities only by the merest chance, for she did not attend many of the social functions of the college or the town, and where a choice was to be made she always chose the town. She had gone to the faculty wives’ tea, and had heard, from her station in the powder room, Mrs. Wickham tell the whole thing to Miss Perrins. The last sentence which had drifted to her through the wall was “Of course Tessie (Mrs. Dieck) doesn’t know.” The meaning of that sentence was then enhanced by one which followed. “It’s good she has her house to keep her busy with.”

  Mrs. Dieck’s hands stretched out now as if cleaning a window, and catching herself in this pose, she realized that there was some connection perhaps at least in the ladies’ minds with her incessant housecleaning and Dr. Dieck’s fall.

  The change with regard to public opinion concerning Dr. Dieck was total and very rapid. Methodist though the college community was, there was not the slightest moral condemnation of Dr. Dieck. There was, somehow, only relief that he had been found human and probably common, and that there was no longer any need on the part of anybody to regard him as a literary figure, a literary critic, or a literary anything. No one again need try to pretend they had to read his books, which nobody in power had ever praised, and almost nobody unless under compulsion had ever read.

  As one senile lady said, “Dr. Dieck has entered seventh oblivion.”

  Her remark was quoted up and down the town.

  So absorb
ed was Dr. Dieck at this time, that he at first did not notice the changes in his wife, that she now spoke little, ate almost nothing (these changes or his not noticing them could be explained in that she had never eaten very much in the first place and he had seldom listened to anything she ever said in any case).

  But his real awareness that something had come over Mrs. Dieck came when one evening he had upset by some kind of “lucky shot” such as might happen in a bowling-alley both the cream pitcher, the petit point coffee pot, and a tall pitcher of molasses (dessert) which was, it must be admitted, wrongly placed, at least for Mrs. Dieck. There on the imported linen ran rivers of cream, coffee, and molasses. As he gazed at the destruction he noted the similarity of it all to what nurses might face in a hospital bed.

  Normally Mrs. Dieck would have given three brief cries, and then pushing herself away from the table would have gone into the kitchen and wept hysterically; Dr. Dieck would have followed her to the kitchen sink, begged her to overlook his fault, she would have refused him forgiveness, gone upstairs, and not appeared again perhaps for a week, meanwhile delegating his being fed to the ladies in charge of the college dormitory cafeterias. Tonight, however, Mrs. Dieck said nothing for a moment. Her silence imposed silence on him. At last, however, with a deceitful gay laugh, she had said blithely: “We’ll send the tablecloth to the old lady by the river.”

  Dr. Dieck did not know to whom she referred.

  Strangely enough, it was Dr. Dieck who began silently weeping, great tears the size of hazel nuts rolling down his cheeks.

  “Strain,” Mrs. Dieck said sibyl-like and rose. She did not leave the room, however.

  “I know everything, Dick,” she then made her statement.

  “I expect so,” he wiped his face now.

  “Who is she?” Mrs. Dieck asked. Then wiping a strand of hair from her eyes (a few weeks before a strand of hair falling over her eyes at the dinner table would have been quite impossible), she waited.

  “I beg your pardon, dear,” he said. “Ah!” he brightened, “you mean the old lady by the river. I was about to ask you. Don’t know any laundress down by the river, though when we were children do you remember—