Eustace Chisholm and the Works

by James Purdy

  “Never you mind who she is, or rather was,” Ace said. “Get in here and quiz me, professor.”

  “I’d stare you down, lady, but you heard what my pupil said.” Rat’s eyes burned under the scrutiny given him by Ace’s wife. “Got a pretty good notion too who you might be,” he added, a remark that made Carla’s face relax for the first time.

  After she had gone, Rat scolded Ace, “So this is your woman come back. You backsliding pathic, so you went and sent an S.O.S. for her.”

  “That’s what old Clay charged me with last night,” Ace yawned.

  Rat came over to within a few inches of Ace’s jaw and watched him.

  “My God, Rat is lovely!” It was Carla Chisholm’s voice again. She reappeared for a moment, ignored by the two men in the room, and was dreamily surveying the scene.

  “Get, Carla. I said shoo,” Ace mumbled between his teeth.

  Rat sat down in the big leather chair with a crash, opened his Greek primer, gave a last blink at Carla retreating to the kitchen, and asked Ace to open his primer to contract verbs on page 38.

  “Does he have to do that?” Rat suddenly jerked his head in the direction of Clayton Harms, who had begun sweeping the floor with an oversize broom.

  “Clay, knock that off and go to the pool parlor if you got to use your elbow grease.”

  “Awful dirty in here,” Clayton pleaded hopelessly.

  “You heard Rat.”

  Banging the broom into its place in a far corner, grumbling, Clayton Harms trudged on out into the dining nook to sit down facing Carla.

  “I have to say it all over again,” Carla said to Clayton, but her voice easily carried to the front room. “Never saw such a beautiful boy outside of pictures.”

  “It won’t last,” Clayton said in a whisper that did not carry.

  “Why not?” Carla wondered.

  “Why, he’ll die,” Clayton replied sleepily in the manner of Ace.

  “And where do you get your information?” Carla spoke with some of her old wifely authority.

  “His palm,” Clayton said condescendingly. “Broken fate line.”

  “Well, I don’t need to ask you who’s been giving you palmistry lessons,” Carla said and sighed, for everybody knew that Eustace could read palms extremely well.

  AFTER HIS FATHER failed in business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and shot himself through the roof of his mouth in the canning-factory office from which he had conducted his affairs for over thirty years, Eustace Chisholm, two days after the funeral, left for Chicago. The next fall he began attending the university for a while, and actually came close to being graduated. Coming out into the world at the end of the Hoover and beginning of the Roosevelt period, he could find no work except a few part-time jobs that did not last: he worked as a short-order cook in a Pullman-car eatery, as a receptionist-file clerk in a home for feeble-minded boys, as a reader to a blind millionaire, and whatever else he could get.

  All his jobs terminated, his employers agreed, owing to “something intangible missing in his makeup,” and he soon became acquainted with the bite and pinch of full unemployment. Camping on the doorstep of the university vocational guidance bureau, he soon learned the order of preference given to undergraduates and alumni—the bureau was interested first in athletes and lettermen, next in youths with religious training, and third in those with public-speaking experience. Ace’s application was always “reactivated” only to be marked after two or three weeks’ trial, “not active.” He now began the easy descent from intermittently going without to actual deprivation and hunger. He had sunk so low when Miss Carla Hartshorn met him that, when she proposed, he said he had just enough strength left to say yes. Carla made much of her credentials, if nothing of her character as a woman. For that era, she had a “grand” job in the auditing department of the City of Chicago—and she would be able to keep a roof over their heads.

  Up to the time he was “saved” by marriage, Eustace had sunk to a low level. He had ended up living with Negroes on Thirty-third and South Parkway in a “tin house.” Along with pennies and cigarette butts in the streets, he had picked up a dose of syphilis, though this badge of Venus surprised him more than it frightened him because of the infrequency with which love had been bestowed on him. The only thing that never failed him in his period of dry rot was the visit of his Muse, for his mania of being a poet seldom left him.

  During this pre-Carla period, Eustace Chisholm’s fingers trembled so when he lit a cigarette that his colored friends used to inquire if he was sure he was cured, or if he had gone on to locomotor ataxia. Ace would look at his hands thoughtfully in the tin room and say, “Oh, I’m cured of syph but I’m not cured of me. Look at that classic American hand”—holding out his palm—“pure stock from back to the Indians, shaking now like an aspen leaf. No,” he would tell his listeners, “I got another bacillus in me science won’t find a name for.”

  Friends of both bride and groom agreed that by the morning of their wedding, Ace Chisholm had certainly crossed the borderline of sanity. In that epoch it scarcely seemed to matter, and Carla had the American woman’s fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound, and their friends all hoped for the best.

  As Carla sat in the dining nook, three years after their wedding, opposite her husband’s lover, the sign-salesman, her thoughts floated round and about the shipwreck of her two marriages, the legal one, and the make-believe one, and she welcomed the presence of Clayton and the progress of the Greek lesson in the front room to keep her from breaking down again with hysteria in front of Amos. Under the encouragement of Clayton’s eyes, with the words of Attic Greek sounding like barks from angry whelps, she heard herself talking at length of her hegira, her “adultery trek,” confiding all to the ears of a stranger. She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now. Her time away had been spent with someone even more impractical than her husband—Baxter Evans—a young man just out of the university, who had found even less of a reception awaiting him in the world than had Ace. He was no more equipped for the one job he had stumbled on, in a big bakery, than he had been for his role as eloper and adulterer. He barely fulfilled his sexual task, and then only because he felt it was part of running away with someone; Ace, of coarser stuff, had at least gone through with the connubial duties, faithfully, regularly, and thoroughly, if without feeling or tenderness. After a few months’ freedom, Carla found herself nursing Baxter in cheap lodging rooms, from a sudden onslaught of illnesses which increased in number and symptoms alarmingly: lame back, fever, catarrh, excessive sweating and vomiting. None of the doctors she summoned agreed on what ailed him, and the medicine they prescribed only made him worse. Drinking bootleg whiskey seemed the only palliative, and Carla found herself in strange places and situations trying to secure it. One cold October evening, coming home with his “medicine,” she found Baxter gone. After a few days, she was about to go to the police when she became unaccountably ill herself. When she recovered, there was a letter waiting for her postmarked Piqua, Ohio. It was from Baxter’s mother, who thanked Carla for having bestowed the most loathsome of all diseases on her son: he was now under the care of their old family physician, but of course he would never have the untainted health he had had before meeting her. She ended her letter with the hope that in the future Carla would insinuate her poison into the bloodstream only of men of her own age and social class and leave promising young men of good family connections like Baxter alone.

  Thinking cautiously as she concluded her recital, Clayton Harms raised his coffee cup to the height of the bridge of his nose, in way of salute, and said, “Well, welcome back anyway, old girl!” and winked ferociously at her.

  “JUST TO THINK,” Ace was saying meanwhile in the front room to Amos, “here I am old enough to be your Grandpa, sitting at your feet to get my Greek.” He grunted. “I wonder if I’ll live long enough to read Pindar.”

  “You should get as far as The Greek A
nthology,” Amos Ratcliffe ventured, encouraging his pupil with a nice show of teeth.

  “Fact is,” Ace confided, “I’m not nearly so bright as I was. Don’t think I can lay it all at the door of the dose, but you never know. At the time I could only afford the services of a horse doctor, and I’m probably spotty with brain damage, different cirrhoses, kidney attrition, and it would be unsurprising if I now have two or three kinds of blood types inside me what with all those serums they shot through me in charity clinics . . . Only time my mind comes all the way clear is when I’m letting the words run and flow over the Chicago Tribune.”

  “Look over here, Ace,” Amos’s voice took on an edge. “Do you want your lesson, or don’t you?”

  Standing up, arching his back, Ace went up to within a few inches of his teacher and inquired, haphazardly, pulling on the lobe of his ear: “What do you do for money these days, Rat?”

  Amos Ratcliffe put down his Introduction to Attic Greek and now acted like the pupil pausing to answer the professor’s weighty question.

  Still standing over him, Ace roughed up the boy’s shock of tight curls, then touched the piece of court-plaster on his brow, and said: “Who’d you say has been cleaning up on you this time, outside of that landlord of yours?”

  The tone of near-concern, touched almost with tenderness, made Rat look up apprehensively.

  “I’m not doing anything about money,” Rat replied to the earlier question of Ace’s. “I could go on relief if I was of age, and it so happens I did go over to the welfare office a while back and the minute those relief blacks in the waiting-room caught sight of me, ‘Shoo, fly, shoo,’ they said and damned if I didn’t take their advice and lit out.”

  Still thinking of money, Ace said: “Don’t I remember you once mentioning you had a mother somewhere, an aunt or cousin or somebody.”

  Amos looked hollow-eyed. “You’re thinking of Cousin Ida. That’s the name my Mother always goes under, I told you.”

  Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings. “Cousin Ida,” he repeated, as Carla made another of her stealthy reappearances at the door.

  “Rat’s parents were never married.” Ace stared at Carla.

  “Yes,” Amos said sleepily. “I was born entirely out of reference to fucking wedlock.”

  “So let’s cross Cousin Ida off the list of those who can donate funds.” Ace wrote something on the fly-leaf of his Greek grammar.

  Carla now walked rather rapidly from her post at the threshold to the middle of the room, with a probationary show of confidence and self-assurance.

  “Amos, your immediate family then consists only of the person you call Cousin Ida, that is, your mother?” she recited, in the pained metallic voice and would-be omniscient tone of a social-case worker.

  Amos stared at her with a blank look that concealed faint amusement mixed with fatigue.

  “For instance,” Carla almost cooed, “where is your father, at this crisis in your life?”

  Amos threw his head back and laughed in a kind of paroxysm which caught even Ace Chisholm off guard. After studying Rat’s seizure, Ace decided that it must be genuine.

  Calming down a little from his laugh, Rat said, “Your wife must have me mixed up with one of your psychics, Ace, who get asked the whereabouts of missing persons.”

  Ace sighed uneasily and said, “She’s queer on questions today, sure enough.” However, his tone was less cutting toward Carla than it had been.

  “Well, I don’t know what’s so funny about what I asked Amos.” Carla looked toward Ace as if seeking further social acceptance from that quarter.

  “Rat wouldn’t know his father if he met him naked in a shower bath, or stretched out goggle-eyed in the morgue. Rat don’t know fathers,” Eustace said, rolling on his back on the floor in one of his relaxing exercises.

  At this last remark Amos laughed again until his veins stood out in white and green ribbons on his neck.

  “Since you have no people to help you, I’d think the university would come to your assistance.” Carla spoke with high moral indignation, and then chided the hard times and Amos’s bad luck in particular.

  Rat shook his head steadily, like a metronome.

  “We’ll have to find him a millionaire to keep his ass out of the cold this winter, I guess.” Ace looked at Amos uneasily, then picked up his Jew’s harp, plucking out a phrase from some old song.

  “Your husband’s a poor scholar today.” Amos suddenly came to, jumped up quickly and threw the Greek grammar to the floor beside him.

  Carla stood with her arms akimbo, glancing admiringly from Amos to Eustace. It was clear to everybody she was glad now to be home and glad to have permission to remain in the room. “Maybe if I get a job,” Carla was saying, meditative in that atmosphere of mixed thoughts and poor attention, “if, I say, then perhaps Amos could stay here with us!”

  “Ho, a lot you know,” Ace scoffed loudly, glowering at her. “Why, Rat wouldn’t leave the little nest where he is now for all the jobs you could find in a lifetime. Would you, Rat?”

  “Expect not, Ace.” Amos suddenly flushed and pounded his fist into the palm of his hand.

  “Who is he staying with now, Eustace?” Carla continued, all concern and bright interest.

  Amos looked anxiously at Eustace, who answered at once for his friend: “Amos lives with a dirty ex-coalminer, who’s a hillbilly and a bully. Ask him to take off that court-plaster to show you how they get on.”

  At an expression of repulsion and disgust from Carla, Eustace continued his bantering: “Carla can’t bear the thought of your curls pressed against a coalminer’s chest, Rat.”

  “For God’s sake, we’ll have to think of something for him, Ace!” Carla managed to get out, for she had, as a matter of fact, visualized Amos Ratcliffe’s case all too well.

  “Let’s hope,” Eustace said, “you’ll think up something better for him, Mrs. Chisholm, than you ever did for me.”

  Carla smiled, brightening perhaps at the fact he had called her “Mrs.”

  The direful gong of the university chapel tower announced twelve noon.

  “About ready for our lunch of hominy and pork butt?” Eustace announced to nobody in particular, then said directly to Carla, “Rat always takes lunch on our Greek lesson days.”

  Amos yawned so heavily that they were treated to the sight of every one of his teeth and his pink clear tongue.

  “I’ll lay the plates then!” Carla remembered her place and tiptoed out of the room.

  With clenched teeth Amos fulminated at Eustace: “So all the time you were acting like a great old emancipated free body you were tied down to this cunt, who is back, and you’re glad of it. Gladness is written all over you.”

  “That beautiful beautiful angel face and that dirty dirty language coming out of it,” Ace said, picking up the Jew’s harp again. “I don’t know what’s going to become of you, Amos dear, unless what your palm says is true, and you’ll die. But palms can lie, mark my words. I mean they change, and your death may come by slow freight.”

  “Dying is the least of whatever is chewing me, you ought to know me that well by now, Ace,” Amos said, and at the sudden look of rapt attention on Eustace’s face broke into another wild cascade of laughing, partly, as all his friends had long ago agreed, to show off his dimples and fine teeth.

  “You shouldn’t live with that Daniel Haws either.” Eustace mentioned the coalminer-landlord now by name. “Whether you’re in love with him or he with you, or both of you with one another, no matter. You’ve got no future with him. I mean, Amos, do you have to? You ought to live with rich people, Rat. Really and truly. You’re a nice boy who’s just acting a dirty part. You don’t fool me at all. At heart you’re really nice, and not who you act like.”

  Rat spat out a volley of half-hearted obscene expostuations.

  “If you cleaned yourself up,” Eustace went on pokerfaced, “and quit fighting to show people you’re not a queer, you
might get through the world. Of course, I don’t know.” He studied Amos closely. “You are mighty special. You’re so good-looking and so smart, you’re fairly strong, too, but most of your other buttons are missing. Too bad maybe it’s so, but so it is.”

  “Whole country fucked to the dogs, so why single me out, Ace?”

  “Most people have their buttons,” Eustace continued. “You know what I mean. They get through things without the wear and tear you put on yourself. You’re bleeding every step you take. You’re crazy, Rat, and you know it, and so am I. Only somehow I’m safe up here with people keeping me, and I’m writing my poem on old newspapers every day. But you’re out there all alone with your buttons gone, and so vulnerable.” He gave a last look at the court-plaster. “I don’t see how you can make it alone, unless you find somebody to care for you.”

  “Well, we didn’t get much Attic Greek took up today, did we?” Amos said as Carla came in to invite them to lunch.

  3

  Amos lived at the back of a red brick building whose front entrance, permanently closed and boarded up for unexplained reasons, bore the erection date, 1887. You reached Amos’s room by going up five wooden flights of stairs in the rear. A stormdoor at the head of the stairs opened on the kitchen used by the landlord, Daniel Haws, as his “business office.” Down an interminable hall lighted by a 7 1/2-watt bulb was the six-by-nine cell, furnished with an old army cot and stool, where Amos was at home with his Greek books.

  Whether coal-mining had anything to do with Daniel’s walnut complexion or not, Eustace Chisholm claimed that, by living with Daniel, Amos had crossed the color line. Daniel was aware of Eustace’s jibe, but the remark only amused him. He said he had always looked dark as far back as he could remember. All year long, even in mid-winter, he looked like a man who had just returned from basking in the Gulf of Mexico sun.

  “Actually I don’t live with a nigger and Ace knows it,” Amos would say. “I live with an Illinois man like me, a lean wiry fellow. Deep wrinkles for so young a fellow, but wrinkles look good on him, maybe because he’s all sinew and bones, and anyhow is in a class by himself. He is the landlord of the eight rooms on the top of the 1887 building.”