by James Purdy
As for Reuben, once he felt reasonably certain Amos would not “run out” on him—after all Sampford Court was some forty miles from Chicago—his absences became more frequent and he made no pretence of hiding what he went to the city to do. As Amos pointed out in a bitter letter to Eustace, “I’ve become the child Reuben Masterson had to give birth to, and it’s no surprise therefore he’s deposited me with his Grandmother, while the heir and father goes scot-free to worship Bacchus.”
Many a cold spring evening, and spring was very cold that year, the old lady and the transformed Amos sat together through dinner and the interminable evening, guarded and attended by the formidable staff of servants, fed like royal prisoners and bored to death by each other’s company.
Mrs. Masterson went to bed around nine and lay the rest of the night in a kind of wrestling match with Morpheus, never really falling sound sleep until three or four in the morning, that is if she heard Reuben’s footsteps returning from another of his evenings out.
The day after looking at Amos’s Greek book Mrs. Masterson had sent her butler to a bookstore in town, to procure a complete English translation of Xenophon’s Banquet. It took him hours and several phone calls to the university Greek faculty, to locate one. She wondered whether her reading of the dialogue helped her to grasp, at least partially, the goings-on that then occurred in her house.
Galled by Reuben’s neglect and wearied with the interminably long evenings, Amos had a diabolical inspiration. He remembered the Swedish gardener, whose principal task was to keep the rooms of the great house supplied with flowers from his nursery. Recently a widower, he lived alone in servants quarters a short distance down the ravine, and his appearance was striking enough that Amos felt he would have graced a banquet at which Socrates was a guest more becomingly than aristocratic Reuben himself.
In the middle of the night, disturbing Mrs. Masterson, who took the boy’s exiting steps for those of her grandson’s return from carousing, Amos, an Indian bathrobe thrown over his pure silk scarlet pajamas, carefully adjusting his usual nocturnal erection, walked confidently to the Swede’s cottage, whistling a little tune. At the door, he knocked loudly and waited, still whistling. The gardener finally heard the whistle, if not the knocking, and admitted his guest through sheer astonishment. Once inside, Amos had no intention of leaving again, for he had got chilled through and through from the raw air, and the sight of Boötes rising in the east had made his teeth chatter.
WHEN REUBEN DID not answer her imperious “Is that finally you?,” Mrs. Masterson rose, threw a quilt about her shoulders, and opened the door of her grandson’s bedroom. Surprised at the absence of both Reuben and his favorite, and feeling now suddenly a bit light-headed, she sat down at Amos’s desk. Her eyes fell on a half-finished letter the boy had written to Cousin Ida; under this letter lay a handful of others, opened, and thumbprinted by his reading, bearing an indecipherable Illinois postmark with the sender’s name, Ida Henstridge. Mrs. Masterson struggled with her conscience only briefly, then she read avidly not only Amos’s unfinished epistle, but with even more rapt attention all those Cousin Ida had written her son. The small town speech, like a current of warm air, brought her immediately back to long-forgotten thoughts and feelings and relationships before her marriage.
She read of Cousin Ida blaming herself, defending herself, and at last crying out against Amos’s unjust bitterness, and accusations against his “lot.” Cousin Ida begged him to have patience, trust, hope, to thank his benefactors, even though he could not stand the rich, as exemplified at any rate by Reuben and the “old lady of the castle.” She begged Amos to put up with the shows of wealth now as he had with poverty and going without and to remember he was a man and that meant he could be free. “I would give anything sometimes if I had been born a man, for then I would not have to sit here and wonder where my next dollar was coming from, but on the other hand, I would not be the mother of a fine son like you, and that makes up for all the rest, dearest Amos.”
She told then how Aunt Lily had come by the other day, and she and Ida had told the tea leaves to see what lay in store for Amos, and then they had got down together on the rag rug in the kitchen and prayed that things would go better for him in the future. “But if they don’t, dear Amos, come home, remember the Welcome sign is always out.” There were other details, the canary had died, and she wouldn’t get another, but would leave the cage in its old place; Widow Martin down the alley had taken away her membership in the church because of her disliking the new preacher’s wife; the refinery was being sued by the town for its failure to control the suffocating fumes and bad odors it let loose. “I am glad,” she concluded, “Mr. Masterson shows you such strong affection and interest, for there never is any word from your father, and I wonder, Amos, if maybe he isn’t dead.”
Having read all the letters, Mrs. Masterson sat on, feeling a terrible weakness and foreboding and sudden extreme giddiness. She desperately hoped Reuben might come in, for she felt too weak to call out for the servants. Then her eye fell on a slender sheaf of pages over which was scrawled “Visits from a Sleepwalker.” She read, uninterruptedly absorbed, for an hour more.
STILL YAWNING IN huge paroxysms, the Swedish gardener Sven studied his late caller. His command of English being negligible, and a man of few words in his own tongue, he took off his thick slippers, and curled up beside his self-invited visitor. He recognized Amos as the guest of Mr. Masterson and in his bewildered way decided that owing to an influx of guests at the great house either the old lady or Master Reuben himself had sent the boy to ease the overflow.
After the light was extinguished, he was soon put to a different view of matters at the floodgate of affection which Amos, stung by his having lost Daniel Haws and being shut up away from everything in the country, poured out on the taciturn gardener, whose own arms deprived of love by his wife’s death yielded too easily.
After the first appeasement of feeling, the gardener was bold enough to ask why Amos’s feet were so hard and horny, for he could not help comparing them to his wife’s, whose toes had been like cotton when pressed against him. Amos explained that he was an inveterate walker from his earliest childhood in the country and had spent most of his time in Chicago on the streets, exploring every inch of the city afoot. At this the gardener, with a certain uneasy superstitious dread in his voice, asked if the boy would show him his feet.
Amos willingly obliged, and placed his toes on a white rug that lay by the bed. The gardener, who slept naked, covered himself against the cold with Amos’s borrowed bathrobe, and studied the boy’s feet under a lamp.
“Goat feet you have!” he told Amos. “And the rest of you so handsome!”
The gardener looked up from his kneeling posture.
“What’s swinging between your legs?” Amos chided.
“The devil scolds where he’s to blame!” Sven cried. Puzzled from the time he had opened the door on his caller, he shook his head now half-pleased, half-dismayed.
“Does your master know you have such goat-like feet?” Sven inquired.
“I have no master but me,” Amos snapped.
The Swede was walking into the next room when Amos cried with a kind of wistful alarm: “You’re not going off now like everybody else?”
“Oh no, no,” the gardener smiled, “you’ll see what I’m about, and you’ll be glad.”
Amos could hear him drawing water, and he returned with a heavy tray containing a silver wash basin, a bar of freshly opened soap, a thick brush, some cloths, and talcum powder. Without more ado, he plunged Amos’s feet into the basin, and began washing them vigorously.
Moved by such ceremony, Rat mumbled appreciation and studied the gardener’s face. He was about thirty, and health and an open honesty of expression gave him appeal, and besides his biceps bulged like turkey eggs.
“You have walked to the ends of the earth.” The gardener looked up from his task from time to time. “Only the devil has walked further.”
> During the bathing of his feet by Sven, Amos as was his habit whistled rather loudly, and this familiar whistle was heard now by Reuben Masterson, as reeling from his night on the north side of Chicago, he started up the path to the big house. He stopped short in his tracks, inspecting his breath as it issued into the air. The whistle came again, this time unmistakenly from the gardener’s cottage.
Wheeling about suddenly, grinning with anticipation of seeing Amos, and not suspecting anything out of the ordinary, Reuben knocked at the door of the cottage calling Amos by name.
“Don’t answer,” Amos begged Sven.
“But I must,” the gardener showed no sense of the danger.
“It’ll be bad to let him in, I’m warning you.”
But Sven with his old-world respect for authority and proper behavior, was already on the way down, without having remembered in his haste that he still had on the bathrobe Amos had worn rather than his own.
“What are you doing with my robe on?” Reuben stammered on confronting the Swede in the doorway.
“Your young friend is here,” the gardener replied.
Having caught sight of Amos naked on the bed, Reuben picked up a rawhide whip from the wall and struck the gardener with it full in the face. Tasting blood which ran copiously into his mouth, the Swede almost involuntarily knocked his employer’s son to the floor. Amos, in a rush of spontaneous enthusiasm, clapped his hands.
“You applaud, you rotten little bugger, when it was I who took you off the streets and gave you your first decent living!” Masterson turned his fury on the boy, scarcely noticing that the gardener had bent over and lifted him up off the floor.
“I applaud this fellow only because he returned an insult like a man, not out of ingratitude for your incredible generosity to me.” Amos found himself speaking in the style of Xenophon as translated by himself.
“Get out the both of you!” Reuben cried, mopping the blood from his face with the handkerchief handed him by the Swede. “A fine plot you’ve been hatching behind our back!”
“You won’t dismiss me, sir,” Sven began to Amos’s incredible disgust. “You can’t turn me out, Mr. Masterson, for something I did not mean!”
Reuben smiled. “Maybe your young bedfellow here will intercede for you.”
“Please, please,” the Swede looked from Amos to Reuben, imploring, and gave every evidence he was about to kneel there before them when Amos suddenly struck the gardener a vivid blow.
“Where are your balls you were so proud of a few minutes ago?” the boy bellowed, while Reuben turned suddenly hysterical and began to sob.
“You’re too young to know what being without work is,” the Swede turned to Amos bitterly. “If you’ve walked the streets, I’ve walked them more!”
“Get packed, and we’ll clear out.” Amos spoke with cool imperiousness.
The gardener shrugged his shoulders in hopeless agreement. Then, removing the Masterson bathrobe, he laid it gently on the table. Reuben sat there too stupefied to say a thing, but looking up just then, whether brought to by the sight of the gardener stripped, or realizing that having fired an employee of whom Mrs. Masterson was so inordinately fond and proud would bring him trouble from that quarter, he suddenly stood up and asked Sven to forget everything he had said and to stay.
“I’ve been overhasty, Sven,” Reuben said, finding it very difficult to speak to a man standing stark naked in front of him. Besides,” he finished, “I’ve no right to dismiss you. That is Grandmother’s province. After all, I’m hardly more than a lodger here myself.”
“No, no, I’ll leave, sir.” The gardener turned away confused. But then pointing to Amos, he cried, “Why did he have to come here, sir, and put me to this test!”
Both men suddenly gave Amos the same indescribable look as if they had discovered at last the common source of their trouble and torment.
“Is there a drop of spirits in the house?” Reuben inquired, and in a way of conciliation he threw the bathrobe around the Swede’s shoulders. “I think, Sven, we could all stand with a stiff drink of something.”
Sven brought out a bottle of brandy, a gift from Mrs. Masterson, who allowed liquor in the homes of her servants on the understanding it was to be used only in cases of illness or exposure. It was, as Reuben found out hardly to his surprise when he tasted it, third-rate. When the gardener could not find glasses, Masterson, despite Sven’s bashful reluctance, insisted they drink out of the mouth of the bottle.
Amos declined to join them. He sat on an old buffalo rug in the center of the room, and glowered. After a while Sven, prompted by Reuben, ceased even to wipe the mouth of the bottle and the two men, becoming mellow, exchanged confidences. They railed at boys like Amos who preyed on widowers, and devoted a great deal of time to repeating pledges to one another never to tell “Lady” Masterson the events of this night. Reuben then assured Sven that he could stay at Sampford Court till hell froze over. He was in the midst of a long speech of effusive congratulations on the gardener’s physique, poise, and gentlemanly bearing, together with a panegyric on the glory of having Viking ancestry, when Amos rose in disgust and, throwing the ill-omened bathrobe over him, opened the door.
There to his astonishment stood on the threshold old Mrs. Masterson, garbed only in her dressing-gown, her hair in long yellowish white braids falling over her shoulder. Her gaze went immediately from Amos to Reuben, with his arm around the stark naked Sven. Both men were in violent sexual excitement. She turned her look of icy outrage and blame to Amos and her lips moved to say something to him, but a convulsion of some violent kind came over her, and she lurched forward to fall at the boy’s feet.
Reuben rushed forward. “Mother, mother!” his hysteria mounted.
“Tell him to leave me, my only son!” The old woman continued to fix her attention on Amos. Her jaw hung down from the effect of the stroke she had just suffered, and only her eyes, out of her entire countenance, kept their former expression. “Can’t my death have some decorum?”
Reuben looked accusingly at Amos, as if it was the boy who had both drawn the grandmother to the cottage and who had been responsible for her fall, but Amos gave him back so fierce and eloquent a look that Reuben turned away.
Sven, hastily clothed, now carried the old lady to a large overstuffed easy chair. She closed her eyes briefly only to open them wide on Amos, who glowered at her in rapt attention from the shadow of the open door.
“Hasn’t this chosen Satan of yours any shame?” she cried. “Can’t you pay him to leave, Reuben, if he won’t depart peaceably? Make my last moments decent, for God’s sweet sake, even though your own life is foul!”
“Please go, Rat,” Reuben entreated, deadly pale.
Amos wheeled about in the direction of the mansion.
A few minutes later, carrying a small grip, he was on the main highway to Chicago.
16
“
Coming, coming!” Carla Chisholm, exasperated, cried in response to the rain of peremptory blows on the door to the apartment. She put down the jar of night cream, and wiped off her chin and throat with a tissue.
To her considerable astonishment, on lifting the safety lock, she found herself facing not Ace, whom she had been expecting for hours, but a stranger. Even had she known the heir of Sampford Court (she had scarcely set eyes on him before), she probably would not have been able to recognize Reuben Masterson in his present condition: he was bleeding from the nose, wore two great blue bruises over one eye, his collar and tie were torn; only his tweed suit and benign expression hinted he might be “somebody.”
He identified himself, and she stood aside, still speechless, to let him come in. Recovered from her initial shock, and thrilled to know who it was, she invited him to sit down and managed to make him feel more comfortable, more quickly, than any other woman he had ever met: she brought him a half dozen things from her medicine cabinet, and most soothing of all, a fifth of Weller bourbon, which he opened immediately.
&nbs
p; Between constant probing of his mouth to see if he had lost teeth, he summarized his news: Amos had run away and Mother Masterson despite the fact she had had a stroke, had given permission to “fetch the boy back,” which he was here to do. Next Reuben explained, with a bit more detail, the reasons for his own condition. He had driven into town in hopes of finding out Amos’s whereabouts from Eustace, had parked nearby, and within seconds after locking the door of the car had been set upon by “roughs” who had knocked him down, but had left without robbing him, scared off by his cries for help.
During his perfunctory recital Reuben looked about the apartment anxiously as if searching for traces of Amos’s presence.
“Amos isn’t far off,” Carla reassured him. “He’s gone with my husband over to South Parkway to see some Negro spiritualist they have the habit of calling on every so often.”
Reuben looked at her in a dazed manner and she wondered if he had heard her.
“Mr. Masterson, why don’t you spend the night here now? We’ve an extra place as Clayton Harms has left us.”
“Please call me Reuben,” he said. “Well, if Amos will be back, I’ll gladly wait forever.” He could not completely suppress his tears.
In wishing perhaps to divert him from weeping, she chose to discuss Clayton Harms at length. She helped herself, at the same time, at his invitation, from her own bottle of bourbon.
“We’ve been through an upheaval nearly as terrible as what you’ve been through with Amos and your Grandmother and the gardener. Perhaps as terrible, for us.” She considered the whole affair. “I don’t know whether you ever met Clayton Harms.” She explained quickly her own running away with another man, and Clayton’s moving in and taking over in her stead.
Wiping his eyes with her tissue from his own grief, Reuben listened now more through stupefaction than interest.