Eustace Chisholm and the Works

by James Purdy

  About a week after the auction, Carla brought Eustace a red-white-and-blue envelope with an army A.P.O. address, and said, “Who are you exchanging information with in the armed forces?”

  “Jesus, he’s done it,” Ace cried, after glancing through a sheaf of ruled letter paper extricated from the envelope. “It’s our landlord-hero, Daniel Haws.”

  Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper. Daniel, a mumbler or a mute in company, could pour himself out on a blank sheet of paper in a P.X. waiting-room to an invisible correspondent.

  His choice of Ace as a correspondent came about soon after he was inducted into the army. Daniel went first through Camp Grant, thence to the baked plains of Scott Field, and finally to Biloxi, Mississippi, where, one grim Sunday morning, seated at a table in the P.X., he heard the voice of a chaplain addressing him.

  “Attending chapel today, soldier?”

  When Daniel claimed no church, the chaplain went on, “Then, son, do the next best thing and write home.”

  “Nobody left to home, sir,” he replied.

  “You’ve talked with Captain Stadger, I suppose.” The chaplain studied Daniel’s face carefully.

  Daniel paused over the name, and his eyes blinked.

  “That’s all right,” the chaplain cleared his throat. “You look like a capable young fellow and probably ought to go into special training school . . . I’ll let the captain know about you. But write to somebody, today.” He pointed to letter paper and envelopes laid out on the stand beside them.

  When the chaplain had departed, Daniel looked about the room, saw that four or five other soldiers were busy with letter-writing. A sign often seen in flophouses and other lodgings of desperation was hanging on the wall:

  HAVE YOU WRITTEN HOME TO HER TODAY?

  Starting suddenly, as if he were just hearing the name Captain Stadger minutes after the chaplain had pronounced it to him, Daniel gave a short low cry and laid his head down against the writing arm of the chair.

  Unable to call to mind what disturbed him, he groped now to find his bearings. His body knew something which he could not define, and it had cried out just now with his voice.

  What Daniel Haws could not tell himself, because he did not remember, was that on the very first night of his arrival in camp, he had sleepwalked into the tent of Captain Stadger. The officer, still awake at 2:30 A.M. and swatting from time to time at a moth which flew about his only illumination, a flashlight, was occupied in rubbing salve into a ringworm on his arm. He looked up with unbelief and yet with an expression of recognition and fulfilled hope at the sight of the soldier standing stark naked with sightless eyes before him.

  Rising, pointing his flashlight away from the soldier’s face and over his body, the captain studied and waited. Then sensing what he had on his hands, he quickly looked at the serial number on the sleepwalker’s dog-tag and in a hollow voice of command, in strict military etiquette, dismissed his caller with the implication that it had been the captain who had summoned him from his tent and would summon him again. Obedient, Daniel saluted and, with still unseeing eyes, pivoted and with steady bearing marched back to his cot.

  Shaken by something half-remembered and by the name of his captain, and unwelcome as the very sound Eustace Chisholm was to him, nonetheless Daniel’s fingers, pressed white against the lead pencil, began to move over the letter paper as he wrote a message to Chicago:

  “Why, Ace, you will ask,” Daniel Haws wrote, “am I sending this letter to you. Well, that is a question I might better put to myself. I have lost all shame. Spreading the cheeks of my ass for every little graduate 2nd lieutenant from West Point to look up, milking my cock in short-arm inspection, cleaning garbage cans, having my arms and thighs shot full of cow-pox and typhoid, I am a public mop-handle, they have all of me, and are planning to sever anything they cannot freely manipulate. Since I have lost all shame here in Mississippi and since you never had any, and I know you blab everything the minute you hear it, for though you are people say brilliant, you are the lowest species of human being ever crawled over earth, and you will admit this, for if there is one thing in you that distinguishes you from slime it is you are honest, this makes you, I imagine, a man. I admire the trait and you are the one I can write to as a consequence. You are a chancre and you admit it. I do not know what I am, the only thing I know is I signed back to hell, can you figure it out, nobody here can—I was in this hell once and came back of my own free will to reenlist at the advanced age of 25, but as I said I have no shame and will admit to you on paper, which you can show then to all your cackling ball-less friends that what I have I have bad, the fever of Amos, I mean. I ran away thinking I would get it out of my blood but my blood now is burning like naphtha. I have broken the rules here and gone out of bounds nightly to the nigger whorehouse and every black whore I have been with only brought out the fire of Amos and burned me to the root of my insides with it. I am in love with him and can only admit it to a hyena like you. If there was God for me, I would be on my knees all day, all night, I would have entered a religious order, but there is no-nothing for me but Amos, and now the army—I need it, and the army I can see sees I need it. I am under, I understand, a Captain Stadger, who is death in circles, and I hear from beforehand he will exercise all the authority he has over me, well, let him, let him put me on the wheel if he has to and twist until I recognize the authority of the army so good there will be nothing but it over me, over and above Amos and even all the pain—Give me news of him. I earn only twenty bucks a month but am willing to give it all to you for word from that curly-haired master of me. I will even beg, borrow and steal to give you more, if you will only write me about him. Ace, I’m on my knees in front of you, DANIEL HAWS, Headquarters Squad, Biloxi, Miss.”

  STUNNED PERHAPS AS much by his unexpected luck as at the prospect of receiving more letters, Ace wrote back:

  “I am as surprised to get a letter from you as to hear a tombstone speak. I don’t want your army money. I want more letters. I never knew there was so much inside of you. God, Daniel, it’s glorious. If you can still be in love from an army tent, I can do the impossible and be a poet in Chicago. And you’re in love with somebody that is both impossible himself and hoplessly in love with you . . .

  “You ask for news of him. Since you ask for it, I’ll have to give it to you but it’s bound to be all bad. Your Amos has sold his ass to a millionaire, but you know he did try to find work, he tried, but everything was stacked against him and so, to repeat, he has sold his ass to the rich. That’s all the news I have from that quarter, but I’ll go out and hunt for more if necessary in order to have your letters. I’ll even blackmail to keep you in information. Amos is well taken care of, probably for the first time in his life, so you don’t need to worry. Whether he will go on loving you or not, who knows. I hope he doesn’t. You two could have been happy together until Armageddon, which is probably not far off, but you are a proud man and can evidently only declare yourself over the distance of our South. Maybe they will lynch you down there for your pride. Goodbye and for God’s sake keep sending the letters. ACE.”

  13

  It was a full month after Amos Ratcliffe left Maureen’s studio party that he finally made a collect long-distance phone call to the Masterson country house, Sampford Court. When Reuben answered, Amos asked him if he would drive to the bus station and meet him. Reuben, petulant and offended because he had not heard from Amos in all this time, at first snapped at him on the phone and then made it clear he would drive in at once.

  The combination of Reuben’s bad temper and immediate consent to meet him reassured Amos that the millionaire meant what he had said at Maureen’s.

  “Where the heck did you disappear to?” Reuben began at once when he faced Amos in the waiting-room of the bus depot. “And look at your new suit, will you, all out of press and mussed.”

  Amos hardly spoke in return. He was busy shelling and munching roasted peanuts, which he proffered to Reuben who tes
tily refused them.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve had a decent meal in days,” Reuben mused as he sat down beside the boy. “You promised me, Amos,” Reuben began, stuttering slightly, “you’d call on me any time I was needed. What took you so long?” Suddenly he took hold of Amos’s hand.

  “Watch out what you do, Mr. Masterson, or I’ll be picked up. Cops always on the lookout for dangerous degenerates like me.”

  “Oh be still,” Reuben scoffed, missing Amos’s sarcasm.

  “What policeman would dare touch you when you’re in my company?”

  “Thanks for the lesson in class structure, Mr. Masterson,” Amos said. “All right, Reuben then,” he corrected himself at the latter’s irritable protest. “I couldn’t very well have showed myself in my new clothes to old Daniel, or he would have beat the tar out of me . . .”

  At an eloquent look from Reuben, Amos stopped for a moment. “No, Reuben, I’ll tell you straight: after Maureen’s party, I felt I could never go back to Daniel, new clothes or no. I couldn’t return to go on seeing someone I loved with my whole guts, and knew he would never let himself love me back . . . He really sent me to you that night at Maureen’s . . . At the last, I hear he maybe changed his mind and decided at least to say goodbye to me. He came over to Maureen’s—before he went to join the army, but we didn’t connect . . . He went into service, I figure, to save himself the trouble of committing suicide . . .”

  Reuben waited, silent, as if expecting more, then when it didn’t come, said:

  “When you disappeared those days, we all thought maybe you’d followed after Daniel.”

  Amos could not control the angry tears which rolled now down his cheeks, and which he quickly brushed off with his hands. Reuben stealthily handed him a handkerchief, and Amos dried his face carefully with it and, at Masterson’s silent insistence, since he had none of his own, kept it.

  “You sure you didn’t pay Daniel then to go off to the army, Reuben?” Amos made a stab at a joke, but his hurt suddenly returned in full force and he turned quickly away.

  “Oh, Amos, I’m as sorry as I can be to see you caused such pain . . . I know how much you cared for him. I don’t know how he could run off and leave someone like you, frankly. . . . I’d have stayed forever there just to be near you.”

  Amos returned slightly the pressure of Reuben’s hand now.

  “But, Amos, you must have known he was going back to the army!” Reuben cried suddenly. “Was your love affair then over, may I ask?”

  “What love affair, Reuben?” Amos asked ferociously.

  Unaccustomed to such strong feeling, it was Reuben’s turn to look away.

  “Don’t tell me, Amos, if you don’t want to,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I don’t ever want to pry. I have only one mission so far as you are concerned, to help you and to love you.”

  “I never had any love affair with Daniel Haws,” Amos said with maniacal bitterness.

  IN A SECOND-CLASS hotel on La Salle Street, Amos allowed Reuben any and every liberty and intimacy. Indeed Reuben was surprised at the boy’s sexual inexperience, for though Masterson himself had fewer sexual encounters than he boasted and most of these with the female sex, he suddenly felt deeply initiated and masculine before Amos, and his passion was increased by this fact. It was difficult for him to take in that Daniel and Amos’s life together had been only “sleepwalking.” Amos himself tried to explain, but at last gave up, admitting that he himself did not understand it.

  After the first abatement of physical desire, Reuben lay back peacefully against Amos’s body. He talked at such length about Daniel Haws that Amos, nonplussed, gazed at his new friend and said, “You sound more taken with him than you are with me.”

  “Daniel wasn’t my type at all,” Reuben pooh-poohed, “too masculine. But he was certainly the deeper of you two.” He spoke hastily, then apologized for this remark when he saw it had stung Amos’s pride. “Oh you’re more of everything, Amos,” he said. “All I meant by ‘deeper’ is that Daniel loved you more than either of us understand, else how explain the sleepwalking, and well, he gave you up to me through love, that’s clear.”

  “Oh for Jesus Christ’s sake, let up, Reuben!”

  “Tell me where you’ve been all these past weeks,” Reuben asked, bending over his conquest now, moistening the youth’s curls with his mouth. He looked down at Amos’s wreath of pubic hair which at that moment, catching the light, resembled an aureole. Leaning over, he kissed him again and again.

  “Reuben, you wouldn’t believe me if I was to tell you,” Amos lay back languid under the cascade of Reuben’s caresses. “Fact is that’s the trouble with my life. When I tell people about it they think I’m lying. My life is odder than any pack of lies a maniac could give out.”

  “Supposing then you tell me the unbelievable truth.”

  “I went to the district, as Eustace still calls the colored part of town,” Amos began. “See, some months ago, Ace was very keen on the occult and he even got Daniel to go over there with him to Luwana Edwards’s. She’s a spiritualist and fortune-teller. Has her own church now. She was awful taken with Ace, but shied away from Daniel for some reason. She told Ace he had second-sight. I wandered around after Maureen’s party, into Washington Park, and then I thought of Luwana Edwards. After all I had to spend the night somewhere. But she told me too cheerfully she couldn’t admit me even when I explained my situation and she also wanted me to know she didn’t forecast the future any more for anybody . . .”

  “And after Luwana’s where did you go?” Reuben asked bitterly.

  “After Luwana’s?” Amos laughed. Then turning moody, he continued, “You know Luwana said something funny just before I left her place. She said she was aiming to pass her gift on to a friend. I think she meant Ace.”

  “You like colored people, don’t you?” Reuben mumbled, abstractedly. “I can see how sick you are over Daniel’s leaving, Amos,” he went on. “It was wrong of me to make love to you, I guess, but I couldn’t stop myself.” He began covering Amos’s body with hungry embraces. “Suddenly the unobtainable is ours,” he said, and his eyes filled. “Do you think you can ever be serious about me, Rat?” He used the nickname with intrepid hesitancy. “I’m really in love with you, way over and above the physical. I’m head over heels.”

  Amos seemed a thousand miles away.

  “You’ll get over Daniel,” Reuben went on doggedly. “After all, he ran out on you. Tell me you’ll try to get over him! Listen to me, Amos, I want you to come out and live at my house. Mother’s house, that is, but it’s mine, too, after all.”

  “After all.” Amos smiled and touched Reuben’s hand gently. “Well, when do you want me to come?” he said wryly.

  Reuben balked at the question, and walked about the room, dejectedly. Amos studied the body of the man who had just showered him with so much feeling. Despite his growing corpulence, Reuben was not unattractive, and in fact the scars on his chest and legs, from his war service, somehow added to his good looks, but whatever he had, it left Amos cold.

  “I’m trying to get Mother ready for your visit,” Masterson was saying. “I’ve told her as much as I can for the present about you and me.”

  “You mean you’re trying to get me ready for her, Reuben,” Amos spoke up, rubbing himself with a hand-towel. “Well, I’ll never be ready. I don’t belong anywhere. Can’t even make it with niggers, Reuben. I’m just real enough for a sleepwalker to love, I guess. That’s all Daniel could ever do too, so we were two of a kind. Sleepwalk to my bed and look at me like I was the new moon.”

  “So Ace told me.” Reuben hung his head, ashamed perhaps he had discussed the matter with the poet. “Amos, what does it matter if Mother doesn’t understand. Come anyhow. She’ll accept you or she can lump it.”

  “I fell in love with my mother before I knew who she was,” Amos began, as if alone. “My mother and I had an affair not too dissimilar from what we’ve been doing now.”

  “Oh for th
e Lord’s sake,” Reuben turned away from him. “Don’t make a horrible joke of such things.”

  “You said I was honest and told the truth.” Amos turned away from him also.

  “While you were off with your colored people, I was slumming too.” Reuben went back to the remark he had let slip earlier. “I spent a few minutes of time again with Ace Chisholm. What a fantastic character!”

  Amos grimaced at Reuben’s choice of words.

  “He can’t have been a good influence on you, Amos.”

  “Look, Reuben. You’ve got to get a few things straight for once and all . . . I don’t have the luxury of choosing who is a good influence. I’m adrift in the sea, so I have to grasp whatever I can get hold of . . . Besides, who’s to pay any attention to me but somebody like Ace? He admits he’s a monster, at any rate.”

  Amos’s eyes lingered now on the scars of Reuben’s body.

  “Do my war injuries disgust you?” Reuben inquired, somewhat piteously, but there was an undertone of anger, along with the hurt of rejection he had been suffering all night at the hands of Amos.

  “They’re the realest thing about you, Reuben. They make up for your fat tummy.”

  The older man blushed, then managed to get out, “Well, I’m glad you like something about me at least. Oh, I didn’t earn my scars any more than I do my money. They came to me easy and got cured easy. I have Purple Hearts and the rest in my bureau drawer, but I’ll be as honest as you are. I’m no hero, and if I were, you could make me feel I wasn’t. I just love you, that’s all there is to it, and I could drink your come in goblets . . . Unfortunately the feeling isn’t reciprocal. You don’t care for me at all, Amos.”

  “Yes, I do, Reuben. You’re a good friend.”

  “If you could only love me a little bit as you loved him.”

  “Love Daniel! I’d like to kill Daniel. I’d like to barbecue his balls while the bugger is tied live to the stake. That’s what I’d like. I could cut the bastard to ribbons.”