Strange Tales V

by Mark Valentine

  Buried deep in my mind was some loathsome but irresistible connection to the flies that I could not break.

  A few weeks after I left Miss Franklin for her own good I made the following entry in my journal.

  Tonight on the bus I saw flyspecks on the window and turned up my coat collar and moved my seat. I wound up seated next to an old woman on whose worn, moth-eaten coat I could see classic ‘spots’ of regurgitation. Flies had obviously tried to feed on whatever grimy particles they could find. In the most innocent manner I pretended to look out of the window while surreptitiously studying her profile. Mother had looked this way in her final days, or possibly not, I couldn’t remember for sure—the faces of those I used to know have grown hazy to me lately. And then, almost by accident, I spotted it. A fly had become caught in the nest of her hair and was struggling to get free. Hair by hair it attempted to climb and reach the outside, but each little footfall only appeared to complicate its dilemma. I turned away, though I knew I was too late. As the bus trundled on, street after street, making the occasional stop, a terrible fear gripped me. After all, I thought, it was always going to happen again, so why not now? You can’t run forever. Anyone looking at me, I was sure, would see a scruffy bearded madman with glassy eyes, a raincoat and slippers, someone to avoid at all costs. But what did it matter what they saw? That would be up to them to figure out. I, Thomas Hurley Jr, knew what he had to do. The world is the world and a man a man, and a man must do his duty.

  ‘Whosoever harms the fly,’ I whispered with dry lips cracked from the days of bitter wind, ‘hurts Thomas Hurley’. By this time I barely recognised my own name. All that mattered was that I speak the words.

  Inch by inch, hair by hair the fly clambered, fell back, struggled anew. And I knew what it wanted. I knew it as well as I knew my own mind. Of course I did. It would only take a second. His plight was mine after all, one and the same.

  Kill the old woman and free the fly, I thought. Do it now, Mr Hurley, if you know what’s good for you.

  Slowly, my hands rose off my lap. The flesh on my dirty palms could already feel her old lady throat, seeking by their own independent will to go where they belonged. This woman, this jailer of innocent flies. . . .

  ‘Whoever harms the flies,’ I whispered over and over to myself.

  As I began to turn—for I was going to do it suddenly and all at once and be done with it—I saw the driver glance up into his mirror. Our eyes met—darting signals of understanding passed between strangers. Just like Miss Franklin, I thought—he knows me. And then as he began to pull over for whatever he had in mind (for one never knows what a bus driver has in mind). I grabbed my coat and pushed out of the back exit. The snow greeted me and I shuffled off into the dark like anyone else, but shaken. Shaken beyond belief.

  Is it really possible that a man might fall in with an entire species without intending to? That they might demand the foulest, most criminal acts from him? And who is one to ask to find out the answer? Where is one to go?

  When I got back to the Somerset Hotel I went straight to my desk. I picked up a pencil and began to write everything down, for always I hoped that in writing what happened to me during the long days I might somehow uncover the answer, scratch it out from beneath the surface. The secret. The mysterious connection. In my mind’s eye, as I scribbled on, I could again see the fly struggling against the woman’s grey scalp. That single-minded desperation, a mere detail of struggle in the greater, imponderable, titanic, ever-churning struggle of the world, was like a hole boring into my brain, deeper and deeper, as though in the fly’s little struggle was my own. And little did it matter that he was probably already dead, his struggle over. What mattered was that Thomas Hurley had failed him. Failed him utterly, and all because of a bus driver.

  That night I had the dream again.

  It was daytime and I was riding on the bus, everything looked familiar, but on the streets were not people but flies by the thousands, crowding and squeezing down the major avenues. So full were the blocks that not an inch of pavement could be seen. Through the window I could hear buzzing so loud it drowned out all other sound. To touch the window, I knew, would be to feel the vibration of that noise—the noise of countless thousands of flies. None of this was a surprise to me. I knew why I was on this bus and where it was going. As we crept on, block after block, not stopping to pick up or discharge because, as usual, I was the sole passenger and was going where I always went, I saw it appear out of the haze far ahead. ‘Fifteenth and Main, Mr Hurley,’ my driver announced as he always did around this time, and looked at me in that special way in his mirror. Stiffly I rose and got my coat around me and stepped out in my slippers into the buzzing inferno. Then I turned, and right before it pulled away and the driver waved I looked at the bus’s destination sign: LAMBERT’S DEPARTMENT STORE, FIFTH & MAIN.

  And then I screamed.

  When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but darkness. Lambert’s . . . Lambert’s . . . Lambert’s . . . again and again the name pounded in my mind. I licked my lips, stared into the darkness of the ceiling and tried to calm myself. So, the final solution had been here all along, and deep down—I had known it.

  That night I rediscovered prayer. I had never prayed as a child, had never seen any need to, but now I went on my knees and pressed my forehead to my folded hands with all the passive entreaty a human being is capable of. O Jesus, I accept willingly this sickness and trial, which it has pleased you to lay upon me. I, Thomas Hurley, murderer, but an innocent man in other respects, confide all my pains to your Sacred Heart, and beg you to unite them with your bitter sufferings, and thus perfect them by making them your own. . . .

  As I muttered on in this way I thought of my father and mother, of Huntford College and poor dead Philips underground, of Voorhees Life Insurance and Miss Franklin, whom I had almost strangled to death. I thought of the old lady on the bus and even Dr Burke. I pushed it all together as one tends to do with one’s life when one pleads for it. In the eyes of other people, it is just some loosely connected, rather ordinary events soon to be ground up by the passage of time and forgotten. But the attempt to merge my sufferings with a greater being made sense to me during those minutes and I saw what God saw—that it was Thomas Hurley’s whole life and not just a few elements of it that I had to pray for.

  Everything I had done up to the present moment had to be settled.

  When I lifted my head I recognised that my eyes had been closed for some time, that I might even have been sleeping, and that something had changed. I felt, unlike all the months before, a sudden sense of purpose. I washed myself in the basin as best I could, straightened back my stringy hair in the mirror, put on my clothes and slippers and paid my bill with the last of my money. I took a bus downtown. I sat stiffly behind the partition where I would not have to see the old lady or look at the driver’s eyes, for there was no need for any of that now, no need at all. It was all moving smoothly if I could just make it last a little bit longer, a few more blocks like this. When I got to Fifth and Main I got off and came in through the revolving doors behind some others. It was like a dream. Nothing had really changed. Still, I said nothing, not a word, just in case. I stepped on the rickety escalator and looked straight ahead as we went up, and only then did I allow myself to speak.

  ‘Whosoever harms the flies,’ I whispered, ‘harms Thomas Hurley.’

  I was back where I belonged. The time—9:01 exactly.

  PURSES

  Nathan Alling Long

  (for two Constances)

  When her mother died, Melissa knew one of the most difficult things to deal with would be the purses—hundreds of them, buried in small and large boxes in her bedroom closet.

  Her mother had shown Melissa the purse collection only once, seven years earlier, at the end of a long evening when Melissa had brought a boyfriend over for dinner and the three of them had drunk two bottles of wine and a small glass of apricot liquor after dessert. Melissa and her mother—who was th
en seventy years old—were in the living room, alone; the boyfriend was on the back porch smoking. ‘Not an ingratiating habit,’ her mother said and sat satisfied and pensive in her silver-embroidered chair.

  ‘Listen, I want to give you something, dear,’ she said, and asked Melissa to retrieve her purse from the radiator in the hall.

  The red velvet purse seemed to glow beside the front door, just out of the shadow of the wall. This was a strange purse Melissa had never seen before, and she picked it up by the top of the strap, as though it were something alive, like a mouse.

  As Melissa carried the purse, it swung with a balanced weight, its contents perfectly arranged. She wondered what could be in there for her. When she returned to the living room, her mother was already dozing silently in her chair. Melissa looked at her face, then glanced beyond. She could make out the silhouette of her boyfriend, Charles, on the porch.

  Melissa’s father had died when she was a teenager, and she grew accustomed to a house occupied only by herself and her mother. Her mother seemed to know exactly what she needed before she did, as though she had some secret knowledge. It made Melissa feel, for a long time, that she would grow up to be like her mother and spend the rest of her life single. She had dated in college, though had not really become serious about settling down until a few years ago, when she turned thirty.

  On the drive over and through the long conversation at dinner, Melissa had felt so certain about Charles. She was still certain—but now, past the glass of the sliding doors, with his body encased in a haze of smoke, his eyes looking far off at the sliver of moon, he seemed insubstantial, a mirage, while inside her mother sat in her chair, asleep, so infinitely real. She was so deeply woven into the fabric of Melissa’s history that it was impossible to keep her separate. Why, then, she wondered, am I not marrying someone like her?

  Melissa shook her head, looked down at the red purse and ran her hand along its side, as if stroking a cat. It had a life of its own, and she was afraid to open it.

  Her mother had moved into this house soon after Melissa went off to college, and though Melissa was always welcome to visit, the place and all the things inside it felt private and unknowable. Melissa realised that, more than whatever her mother was planning to give her, she wanted to know about this purse—its story. She decided that when her mother awoke, she would ask her about it. Charles, outside, could wait.

  But her mother slept on. Melissa grew impatient and coughed politely a few times. Her mother opened her eyes as though rising out of prayer. ‘Oh,’ she said as Melissa handed her the purse. ‘You didn’t open it, did you?’

  Melissa said no, she hadn’t. ‘Where did you find it?’

  Her mother held the purse tightly in her lap, as though squeezing a memory out of it. ‘I bought this years ago, for a date I had with a young man—not your father,’ she said. ‘I wanted to impress him. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve had it all these years?’ Melissa said. ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ her mother said flatly. ‘I got it out again just the other day.’ She looked down at the arm of her chair, as though she might again fall asleep. ‘It took forever to find it among all the others.’

  Melissa tilted her head. ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘Oh,’ her mother said, ‘hundreds, I suppose.’ The alcohol had loosened her throat; her laughter was deep and rich, like an old record.

  Melissa was startled. She could not recall her mother using more than five or six purses in her life and assumed that she had only as many as she had herself, replacing one now and then when an old purse wore out. Perhaps her mother was someone far more complex than she had ever imagined—unless she was exaggerating in her drunkenness. Melissa cleared her throat and sat up straight. ‘Could I see them?’ she asked.

  Her mother was silent, her eyes seeming to dart between objects in the air that Melissa could not see. Finally, her eyes settled on the purse in her hands and glowed with a soft, resigned light. ‘Oh,’ her mother said, ‘I don’t see why not.’

  Melissa’s body tingled. It was as if she were a child again, and her mother were inviting her for the first time to make the Christmas pudding or set the Easter table with the dinner plates that had been handed down from her great-great-grandmother.

  Her mother rose, using both arms to lift herself. Melissa stood up and walked behind, careful not to do anything to change her mother’s decision. At the door of the walk-in bedroom closet, Melissa stood mesmerised as her mother carefully took down a large cardboard box with no markings on it and set it on the floor. She kneeled slowly until she was resting on her knees. She opened the flaps of the box carefully from the centre. The box was full of purses that lay together like tiles in a mosaic.

  Melissa’s mother pulled out a pearly white purse. ‘This I carried on the way to my wedding,’ she said, transferring it delicately into Melissa’s hands.

  ‘And this one,’ she added, pulling out a dark blue purse with copper beads, ‘I bought in the early 1960s from a shop outside Santa Fe, from a man who lived behind the shop with his dog and a single electric outlet.’ She handed it to Melissa with one hand and was already retrieving another.

  Melissa stood silently, wanting to ask about each one. As soon as her mother had told the brief story of one purse and handed it to her daughter, she pulled out another. Some elements of the stories were familiar, and others were a complete surprise. She had not known, for instance, that her mother had ever been in Santa Fe. Melissa looked up onto the closet shelf where the box had come from and saw there were several similar boxes, which presumably also contained purses.

  ‘This one my friend Lily gave me as a present,’ her mother said, ‘after a wonderful day hiking in the Sequoias. It’s made entirely out of wood, no metal or fabric at all.’ She handed Melissa the large wooden purse, which was—surprisingly—as light as a balsawood plane. Then she pulled out another purse, one that seemed to be made out of shells.

  There were hundreds of them, all with a similar shape—a flat-bottomed purse with two sides leaning toward each other like an A-frame house. Triangle purses, Melissa’s mother called them. Every one appeared to be at once an antique yet perfectly new.

  Some were barely large enough to hold a cup and saucer, while others could easily accommodate a well-fed cat. The variety of fabrics—aquamarine sharkskin; soft, peach-coloured felt; iridescent gold lamé; turquoise-amber paisley linen—was spectacular, with no two even vaguely alike. What was most startling, almost upsetting, was that each seemed to project itself into the room, as though it were producing its own light.

  Melissa sat stupefied in the pool of purses, barely able to hold each new example. She could no longer pay attention. As her mother began to tell the story of a purse she’d bought in Spain and lost temporarily on the boat coming home, Melissa interrupted to ask, ‘What made you buy so many?’

  Her mother stopped and stared at Melissa for a long time. The drunkenness seemed to have evaporated. ‘Who knows?’ her mother said, snapping one purse shut. Then she began to place each purse back in its box.

  And that was the end of the evening. Her mother never spoke of the purses again.

  Two years later, Melissa married—not Charles, but someone like him. A shorter, quieter, smokeless Charles. Her mother seemed indifferent to him as well, and had asked the day before the wedding, ‘Do you love him enough?’ Melissa said she did, though the question troubled her all through the honeymoon and would rise up to haunt her over the years. How did anyone know what enough love was? They were still together after five years, though without children. They lived nearby but only visited her mother twice a month when she invited them to dinner.

  When Melissa called, her mother was often not home, though what she did outside the house was a mystery.

  Melissa had no reason to think that her mother was in poor health, so she was unprepared when her mother’s neighbour called one morning with the news—a heart attack. The
neighbour had gone over to have tea and found her body, cold, sitting in the silver chair.

  Melissa asked that her mother be taken away before she arrived at the house. She would see her at the funeral, when her body was properly dressed—not in her home, uninvited. The neighbour had waited for Melissa outside and after greeting her stood by the front door as she walked numbly through each room. The fact that her mother died on her favourite chair helped Melissa imagine that the end had not been too full of pain.

  As Melissa passed a table or a chair, she touched the lip or back of it, recalling how she had played or sat on it in her childhood, in the previous house.

  When she returned to the front hallway, Melissa asked the neighbour, still motionless and attentive, if she could be alone. With a tiny nod, the neighbour slipped out of the door and closed it behind her.

  It was the small click of the door latch, travelling down the centre of Melissa’s body, that shook her awake. She cleared her throat to break the silence.

  She realised that she was staring at a purse perched on the same spot on the radiator as the red one seven years before. This purse was dark green, a soft suede with a single silver square clasp at the top. Melissa grasped it firmly, as though something inside might be trying to escape.

  She opened the purse and looked inside. She had peered into her mother’s empty purses that night seven years before, examining their dyed and perfect silk, eyeing a penny or receipt left behind. In one of the first purses her mother had handed her, Melissa had discovered an unused tube of bright red lipstick tucked into a corner at the bottom. Melissa had asked her mother, ‘Did you really wear that colour?’ ‘I suppose not,’ her mother had said coyly. ‘The tube is still sealed.’