by James Purdy
“Right you are, to call it so, Eustace, my love,” Maureen retorted, winking at Amos, who meanwhile had sat down on the floor in a customary pose, and begun as was his custom to feel the sole of his shoe, when Eustace bellowed, “When are you going to go to the goddam shoemaker?”
Then without much change of expression, he called out in the direction of the kitchen: “Better make a few extra cups of something hot to drink, Carla, for unless you’re deaf you know we’ve got company.”
“Carla!” Maureen cried in surprise. “Is she back?”
“Everybody’s back,” Eustace growled.
“Well, I wish you had told me beforehand she was back.” Maureen seemed to sober up. “I’d have thought twice about bringing my bad news here tonight. Or I’d thought up a different speech than the one I planned just for you, Ace.”
“Oh come off your girly pose, Maureen,” Eustace whipped at her. “You know it doesn’t matter a hoot in hell whether Carla hears your bad news from you, me, or reads it chalked up on some wall, it won’t affect her or you. She has no friends, in any case, so how could she repeat your story except to strangers, and strangers never care enough to repeat anything. So dry up about your sensitive feelings.”
“Maybe Carla’s return is an omen.” Maureen seemed to speak from a sudden recurrence of the blues. “Anyhow I can’t tell you, Ace, not now.”
“Maureen got herself pregnant, Ace.” Amos brought it all out in one of his sudden flashes of information nobody ever was ready for.
Eustace dropped a card, and looked up. He looked at Maureen’s stomach again as if to check an earlier impression.
“Here I thought all the time that bulge meant you’d just been on a long beer binge,” Eustace said after a few moments silence. “So that’s what’s sticking out of you.”
He gathered up all the cards, put them away in a metal box, and waited a moment, blinking his eyes. It was clear the news had excited him and, because it was bad news, he gave it undivided attention.
“So you’ll be out of circulation for a while, Maureen,” Eustace finally pronounced. “Don’t suppose you know the father.”
“Afraid I’ll have to disappoint you there, Ace. I do.”
Surprised again, Eustace rose, put his arms through the sleeves of his bathrobe, tied the cord tight, and inquired, “And which of your bedfellows out of so many made such a definite impression on you?”
“Rat knows,” Maureen said, a deadly coyness in her voice. Her statement caught Amos unaware and he dropped the smiling look which the exchange of words between Maureen and Eustace had occasioned. He turned white as a sheet.
“Rat wouldn’t know a father if God came down to show him one!” Eustace cried. “Or have you been hoarding other people’s secrets from me, my beauty?” Eustace turned to Amos.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Maureen exclaimed. “Rat, the little bastard don’t know!”
Amos watched her, ashen.
“Father is Daniel Haws of course,” Maureen said softly, not taking her eyes off Amos.
Amos rose and went over to the window and looked out.
“Now see what you’ve done to our little playmate,” Eustace cried in glee to Maureen. Then, gravely for him, Eustace spoke up: “Guess maybe you didn’t know then, Maureen, Rat is head-over-heels with Daniel Haws and what’s more his landlord is ditto with him. There they both are,” he spoke to Maureen but addressed Amos, “both of them together hanging by their heels.”
“Ace, God damn you,” Amos wheeled on him with hard fists and clenched teeth.
Carla entered at that moment with her tray of hot beverage.
Turning toward her, Amos raised his right fist and knocked the tray from her hands, then rushing toward the door which he pulled open with such force its hinges gave a sickening groan, he turned to them to say:
“God damn the whole pack of you!”
He rushed out of the apartment, down the stairs, but they noted an odd discrepancy in the sound of his footsteps, as though a cripple were running. Then Carla, looking down at the damage of the spilled tray, pointed to one of Amos’s shoes lying by a broken cup and saucer.
Staring at the shoe which his wife now held in her hand, Eustace advised, “Sit down, Carla, and try to be as calm as Maureen and I are pretending we are.”
Maureen had welcomed Carla back with a silent kiss, while with deft quick sleight-of-hand she took Amos’s shoe from her, and said: “I’ll be back to talk with you both, at length, but before that I’m going after the little snot, and give him back his moccasin. After all, he won’t dare leave the building without it in this weather.”
Smiling warmly at Carla, Maureen waddled out the door.
Down below, in the vestibule, she found Amos, warming his shoeless foot and his ass against a radiator, his eyes red from angry weeping.
Maureen put her arms around him, but he repulsed her vehemently.
“Put on your shoe, honey,” she comforted him. “Then sit down here with me on the steps, why don’t you.”
Maureen, puffing for breath, had already seated herself.
Having put on his shoe as best he could—it was missing its laces—and giving himself time to pout a bit more, Amos obeyed and sat down next to her.
She kissed him on his ear, pulled at a strand of his hair, and then pressed against him.
“Just to think, we’ve both been in love with the same guy.”
“Don’t rub it in, Maureen.” Amos pulled away from her.
“I never dreamed you loved him too. I just thought you moved in with him by chance.”
“Oh cut it out, will you?” Amos began to get up, but she gently pulled him down again to her side.
“We’ll both get over it,” Maureen joked.
“Yeah, when we’re dead.”
“You don’t confide in me at all, do you, Amos? You don’t confide in anybody of course.” She looked at him. “You’re adrift in a real sea, kid. More even than me . . . Why don’t you trust me a little? I love you for being what you are, Rat, darling . . . Trust me.”
“Oh, Maureen,” Amos cried, exasperated, “quit harping on it, will you!”
“I understand what you’re going through,” she went on.
He shook his head wearily.
“Let me put it this way: if you’ll help me, I’ll help you,” she began her proposal.
“I don’t know how I could help you.” Amos scratched his chin. “Can’t even help myself . . . Don’t believe, come to think of it, anybody ever asked me to help them before.” He broke into a laugh. “Suppose I should feel complimented that you think I can.”
He took out his box of snuff and dipped, not offering her a pinch. “It reminds me of Cousin Ida all over again,” Amos mumbled.
“All right, let it remind you, but help me.”
“Sure, Maureen,” he said and put his arm around her now. He didn’t think she was serious.
“You wait though till you hear what I’m asking of you . . . You can back out then, if you don’t want to do it.”
“All right, I’m waiting, Maureen.”
“Amos, I want you to come with me to the abortion doctor, next Monday.”
The color went out of his cheeks, and his mouth tightened. He looked dumfounded.
“I’m not surprised you don’t want to. But there’s nobody else, if you won’t . . .”
He put his arm about her gingerly.
“I just can’t go alone,” she said, as if to herself.
“I’ll go with you, Maureen, so stop fretting.”
“I won’t lie to you, baby, it’ll be awful, really awful. I’ve been there, after all, before. Can you take it, I mean?”
“If you can take it, Maureen, I can.” He was decisive.
“All I need is your moral support, as they say in the movies, hon. You don’t have to do a thing but go with me, maybe hold my hand. Baby, you will?”
When he nodded vigorously, she covered him with wet kisses.
“Then we’re
friends for life,” she told him.
He rose now, and walking over to the door rested his hand on the knob.
“I’ll have to go back and say good night to Carla and Ace,” she said. Her voice sounded relieved. “I’ll call you then, Amos, for I know you won’t go back on me.”
5
More than a bit awed his landlord was to be a father, Amos kept out of Daniel’s way the days following Maureen’s disclosure, avoiding him except at meals (there being a tacit understanding between them that Amos would starve if Daniel did not give him daily handouts). However, another reason kept Amos shy of seeing much of him: his monthly rent day was coming round and this time Amos had not a dollar to his name. But at last knowing he could not put off a showdown, the boy started walking down the long hall from his room to Daniel Haws’s office on the corner of the alleyway, where the landlord received his roomers’ rent money.
Daniel Haws always acted considerably different in his office from the way he did, say, when he sat drinking coffee at the big round table covered with oilcloth in the kitchen, or hosting in the men’s club dining hall. For one thing, in his office he sat on a tall stool which made the perfect globes of his buttocks noticeable. For another, here he was as disdainful and unhelpful as a drill sergeant.
Today, lingering like a truant before the office threshold, Amos felt that Daniel Haws looked as handsome as a Pawnee brave in the subdued light from the alleyway. Yet the minute he heard Haws say, “What in the blazing hell do you want?” he snapped out of his reverie and knew he had come at the worst of times.
“Well, Mr. Haws,” Amos began, but he stopped then, cocked his head, listening to the dripping of the kitchen faucet, then went on with: “I’m behind in my rent as you know.” He stepped over to the filing cabinet and leaned against it. “I don’t rightly know when I can get any money. As I already told you, my fellowship expired at the university and I can’t find a job because of not being registered for classes, and also because of the economic burnout, as Mr. Eustace Chisholm calls it.” He giggled awkwardly in the face of Daniel Haws’s stony gravity.
A yearning flash of the eyes warred with his angry mouth as the landlord replied: “But being a deadbeat don’t interfere with you being able to laugh, does it! Or with that peachbloom complexion of yours!”
He leaned toward the boy threateningly as he spoke, and his Blackwing pencil which he had been holding tight in his grasp, broke unexpectedly and fell to the floor.
Amos stooped to pick up the pieces, but the landlord in angry haste retrieved them.
“Well, do you want me to move out, Mr. Haws?” Amos Ratcliffe said.
“Mr. Haws, chicken shit!” he roared at the boy. “Don’t you talk up smart to me, you little snot . . . You’ll Daniel me or you’ll call me nothing. I know you, damn you, and you know me. What’s owin’ the rent got to do with pretendin’ I can be Mister to you.”
“Then you quit actin’ like the Lord and Master with me, if you want to hear me call you Daniel!”
The landlord listened, incredulous, like a traveler who fancies he has heard a familiar voice in a lonesome stretch of woods.
“I asked you do you want me to move or don’t you, Daniel?” Amos advanced a step toward him. “Well, do you or don’t you?” he came close to a tone of command.
Daniel Haws’s dimming eyes looked glaucous, almost sightless.
“I could use the room, yes.” He mused over Amos’s question. He suddenly braced himself against his desk, and threw back his neck into the cupped support of his hands; his Adam’s apple bulging out from this pressure revealed itself in full outlines and Amos, watching, lost the thread of the conversation, until Haws, flushing at the rapt pair of eyes fixed on him, exclaimed:
“Christ, it will be a relief frankly to have you and your damned staring puss gone!”
“Well, then, I’d best pack and leave, Dan’l, and you’ll have to trust me for the rent, I guess, till I find a job.”
“You child prodigies! Why don’t you stay home with your folks until the pot ring is off of your ass.”
Amos’s mouth trembled. Daniel’s eyes moved swiftly away from him, lit up suddenly like an idol’s from a torch within its empty insides.
“I’ll be packing to get, then.” Amos started to go.
Haws cleared his throat peremptorily to detain him.
“I don’t suppose a scholar like you would be amenable to working around the house for your room,” he spoke to the wall behind Amos’s back.
“How much do I charge you for your room, by the by?” the landlord inquired, and he took down his ledger from a shelf. As if, thought Amos, the bastard didn’t know then and there how much he charged.
“So two and a half is the pitiful sum you’re giving for that nice bright front room of mine,” Daniel mumbled, looking at the ledger and closing it.
Turning his back on the landlord, Amos rubbed his neck, for he could feel a bad headache coming on.
“Would you mind facing around when I talk to you,” Daniel cried.
Amos wheeled about. The look of raw hurt feeling on the boy’s face caused the landlord to halt from further speech for the moment.
“See here, Amos,” he began after a silence in which one could hear them both breathing, “give me eight or nine hours of your time a week, doing odd chores, and you can work out the rent for your room.”
“Fine and dandy, Daniel,” Amos said.
“I’ll put you in charge of mopping the floor every morning, keeping the bathroom spick and span, washing all the windows every few days or when there’s been a bad rainstorm or sleet or snow. And you can make my bed. Change the linens and so forth.”
“Fine, Daniel,” Amos nodded.
“While I’m about it, though,”—Daniel Haws looked up wildly at the molding at the top of the room—“I don’t mind telling you it don’t please me a little bit the way you’ve been coming home lately. You have this peachbloom face and fancy higher education and yet you live on the street. Come in the other night with one of your shoes off. Hardly a week goes by you don’t arrive with a black eye or scratched up and bruised . . .” He looked at Amos now with an appraising indignation as he might have at an expensive piece of his furniture someone was subjecting to ill-use.
“Suppose you want to show the world you’re tough in spite of your peachbloom face,” the landlord continued, and he paused on the word peachbloom as if it was this quality he would tear from all creation. “Well, let me tell you,” he pointed a finger, “you don’t fight no more while you live here or you can clear out. Get me? Now make yourself scarce on account of I’m pressed for time and I’m behind in my work and don’t you come in here again without you knock. Hear?”
“I’ll shake then on our agreement, Daniel,” Amos Ratcliffe extended his hand. Daniel Haws looked at the proffered hand, a bitter twist on his mouth, slowly extended his own hand, and then with extreme cautiousness took Amos’s in his, but without enthusiasm.
“I don’t suppose you have any Indian blood in you, do you, Daniel?” Amos Ratcliffe inquired. He seemed to stop drawing in breath as he waited for the answer, but then, to his relief, he saw that such a maladroit question had, if anything, pleased the landlord.
“I’ll write the Department of Interior about it.” Daniel grinned. He gave the boy then a long look like that of a man trying to recall a name or face he cannot fix in his own complicated memory.
“But I’m not an Indian-giver though, if that’s what you’re driving at.” Daniel went back to his old bitter suspicious tone. “No, sir, when I give a man something, he gets to have it for keeps.”
Amos nodded, then taking his leave, walked down the hall. Back in his own “bright front room,” he put his head down on his study desk and pressed his eyes against the wood.
6
Some few minutes after the men’s club had closed and its lights were extinguished for the night, the millionaire son of millionaires, Reuben Masterson of the North Shore, stone drunk, was bein
g helped down the steps by a cooperative and efficient, if sullen, young man. The helper was not one of his servants, but improbably enough Daniel Haws. The ill-assorted pair were advancing, not in the direction of Masterson’s country estate, the usual path he followed after a fling, but to the landlord’s own “roost.”
Masterson had arrived at the club fairly intoxicated. By generous helpings from his pocket flask he had become uproarious, then sick, and finally passed out after vomiting on a newly upholstered sofa. The club steward, Mr. Fogarty, not being able to rouse Masterson from the rug on which he lay sprawled, and being too old and infirm to take command, asked Daniel Haws to assist this “scion of a great American family” and member of the club’s board to bed—somewhere, anywhere, Daniel’s own quarters if possible. Daniel protested, but Mr. Fogarty insisted. He reminded him of the number of young men who would give anything for Daniel’s job, and in the end Haws not only complied but came close to saluting as he carried out the order.
Resigned to his task, Daniel walked smartly to the men’s lounge, on the floor of which Reuben Masterson still lay stretched out, a deep grin on his mouth, a thatch of brown hair over his eyes. Intent first merely to gauge Masterson’s weight and height and deduce how best to carry him to his flat, Daniel paused a moment to study the man in his charge. He grunted with disapproval at what he saw: Reuben Masterson had that indefinable character of wealth about him which the coalminer’s son prided himself on always being able to spot—the unconscious man looked too young for his years, there was too much color in his flesh, and too little expression on his pudding-like face—even his wrinkles, Daniel felt, were bestowed on him from fat living rather than by thought or care. Daniel turned back suddenly to Mr. Fogarty, who had stayed at a convenient distance, and put on such an expression of high scorn that the official left the room in dismay. Daniel squatted a moment in preparation, then lifted up the son of one of “America’s front families” none too gently, as he might have a side of beef. Masterson, awakening suddenly and struggling to be free, caused Daniel to fix his charge in a kind of modified but savage full-Nelson.