by James Purdy
“Clayton asked Eustace to choose between us almost from the first day of my return. One day in a rage he threw four of five of his electric signs out of the window, nearly killing some people, and demanded a final say-so, but none of us could give one. Then a few nights ago, we had this knock-down-drag-out fight. God, it was awful. Ace and he beat one another to a pulp, and Clayton turned on me with a bread knife just before the police got here.” She pointed to a few inconclusive scratches on her arm. “But Reuben dear,”—she shot a glance of sympathy at him—“here I am chatterboxing away when your grandmother is at the point of death! Forgive me.”
“I think Mother—I always call grandmother Mother,” Reuben came out of his reverie, dry-eyed now, “I think she plans to die in order to show me how much she disapproves of my present life and Amos. She has the will to do so.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a bit because of your present depression?” Carla was taken aback in spite of herself.
“That’s just what I’m not doing, dear lady,” he said huffily. “She’ll die to make the rest of my life a lasting lesson from her to me.”
He rose and applied a menthol stick to his forehead. “Where, by the way,” his bad temper continued, “did you say Eustace took Amos this evening?”
“They went to Luwana Edwards, a Negro spiritualist. But in regard to your other remark I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s all the other way around, Reuben. Amos took Eustace. I think Amos can lead him by the nose any time he takes the notion to!”
“Are Eustace and Amos that way with one another? I mean lovers,” Reuben brought out rather quickly.
“No,” Mrs. Chisholm sighed deeply, “they’re not lovers at all. It might be better if they were for this way they both try to exert power over one another, and that’s what makes their relationship so dangerous. Each eggs the other on to do terrible things.”
Reuben groaned, offered the bottle of bourbon to Carla, who refused it, and then he went on with a serious narration of “everything”: all that had happened after the night at the Swedish gardener’s. Mrs. Masterson received Sven’s full “confession” as to what had occurred, including the washing of the boy’s feet. In the end she forgave the Swede (he had thrown himself on his knees several times), and since he was almost as good a Lutheran as she was a Presbyterian, they all, including Reuben, knelt down at the last in prayer in the den. She kept Reuben behind, after Sven’s departure, to go over and over the “ceremony” of the gardener’s washing the boy’s feet. She claimed she could not get it out of her mind, and then a few hours later, while in a state of high good spirits, she had suffered an additional stroke.
Carla again pressed her invitation on Reuben to spend the night. He could have her bed, and she would be glad of this excuse to sleep with her husband on the davenport in the front room. Finally, more than half drunk, Reuben kissed Carla, told her she was a charming attractive kid, and stumbled into her bed, where he was immediately dead to the world, while Carla sat on waiting for her husband to return from Luwana Edwards’s.
Reuben Masterson, in Carla’s bed, had been dreaming he was conversing with Cousin Ida. He saw the hollyhocks, just as Amos had described them, the tar-covered gravel alley leading down to the river, and in the big backyard, flanked by a line of catalpas, Ida herself, hanging up her clothes on the line and threatening the robins if they came near her sheets. Catching sight of Reuben, she advanced in his direction, took the clothespin out of her mouth, called him by name. Facing him, only inches from his face, she whispered to him her fears: Amos, a poor swimmer, had gone to the quarry and not returned, and would he, she wondered, go down there and see if anything was amiss.
Waking, Reuben found Eustace Chisholm sitting on the bed beside him, studying him. It was just light outside.
“Go on back to sleep, Mr. Masterson,” Eustace spoke. “I only wanted to be sure it was you . . . Thought Carla maybe had made a mistake about who was sleeping in here,” he added under his breath.
Masterson gave a pleasant good morning, extended his hand, which Eustace ignored or did not see, and then cried: “Is Amos with you?”
Eustace shook his head.
“Do you know where he might be?”
“Who are you to ask?” Eustace rose from the bed, then looking down at the floor-boards said, more civilly, “I don’t know where he is.”
Reuben pulled on his shorts, and bending over began drawing on his shoes. Red-faced, he looked up to inquire, “I don’t suppose by any chance you remember where you left him?”
“In Washington Park, for your information,” Eustace snapped. “At 2:30 A.M.”
In the kitchen, paring his nails and cuticles with a knife, Ace mumbled in ill-temper:
“You and Amos come at a time when I don’t have any further use for you.” He looked in the direction of the newspaper scribbled over with his poems. “I’m on Daniel Haws now full-time, with generous helpings from Cousin Ida’s letters . . .”
Reuben started on hearing each name, and Ace stopped speaking for a moment to observe him carefully.
“I make a rather fair pancake for breakfast, Mr. Masterson.” Eustace had put down his knife, and was observing his guest narrowly.
“I don’t want to inconvenience you,” Reuben began.
“Oh come out of your make-believe, sir.” Eustace was already beating the eggs and milk together. “Just to be alive means inconveniencing everybody around.”
Reuben sniggered.
Cooking the pancakes, Ace went on: “I’m not surprised you jumped so when I mentioned Daniel Haws’s name. After all you robbed him of Amos . . . But when I say I’m on Daniel, I mean he’s writing me two and three letters a week from Biloxi, Mississippi, with special-delivery on Sunday, and I’m soaking all he tells me right up and pouring it right back into those” (he nodded in the direction of the defaced newspapers).
“I’m afraid I’m not very interested in poor Haws,” Reuben said morosely, as Eustace set his platter of steaming pancakes before him, with a jar of maple syrup.
Reuben began eating the cakes dispiritedly, then perked up a bit, and complimented his host on the flavor.
After finishing the pancakes, and after having had his question answered as to the whereabouts of Carla—she had gone to work in the “tin mines”—Reuben asked cautiously:
“I suppose you think a man of my age pretty silly being so badly in love with a boy.”
“Are you?” Eustace snapped.
No match against Ace’s cutting manner, Reuben nonetheless went on: “Everything is Amos with me now. You’d be doing me an awful favor if you’d take me to him, or at least tell me where he stays.”
Eustace shrugged.
“I take it then he doesn’t want to see me again.” Reuben studied the poet’s face attentively.
A look of such despair gradually came over Masterson’s face that Ace spoke up then, in spite of himself:
“He doesn’t want to go back and live with your Mother, Reuben, sure enough.”
“Please tell me where he is.”
Eustace got up and looked out the window overlooking the alley to watch the everlasting unloading of meat for the delicatessen.
Biting his lip like a traitor, he said, “By and by I’ll give you where he lives.”
“Mother’s dying so that’s no reason now for him to keep away.”
“I believe maybe you are in love.” Ace stood with his back now to the window, watching Reuben absentmindedly. Making a clicking sound with his tongue, he went into the toilet and peed loudly into the bowl, washed his hands, dried his fingers on his long black hair, came back, and sat down on the floor and began playing Klondike.
He heard Reuben breathing heavily and irregularly and in consequence he kept his eyes averted from him and fixed on the playing cards.
“Yes, siree,” Ace said cheerfully against the painful silence. “Everybody shows up here with their problems. This is the clearing house for busted dreams.”
�
�Would you believe me if I told you I’d never been in love before like this,” Reuben spoke with difficulty. The note of supplication and hopelessness in the older man’s voice was so grave that Ace looked up in spite of himself.
Astonished at the look on Reuben’s face, Eustace swallowed, finally got out: “Maybe . . . But why don’t you look at it like this then. It won’t last, and you’ll be free of him.”
Reuben flailed under the scrutiny the poet now gave him.
“I’m trying to visualize you as a doughboy in the trenches.” Eustace smiled after a bit. “I think I can see how you looked . . . Embraceable, if not adorable.”
Suddenly Ace scrambled all the cards up, gathered them all together and put them away in the box.
“You don’t even know who Amos is,” Ace frowned, rising. “Not that it has much to do with love, I suppose. I only just know, but you don’t at all . . . Daniel Haws got wind of it though, and skiddooed, I judge, on that account. But you—. Come on in the front room where we can lounge more.”
A dirty orange sunlight was coming through the latticed blinds in the room, and a searchlight shaft of scintillating dust particles crossed over the threadbare hooked carpet. Ace sat down on the made-up davenport, which had been his and Carla’s bed last night.
Touching the article of furniture he sat on, Eustace mused: “You accomplished one thing anyhow, Reuben. By taking her bed, you let my wife sleep with me for the first time in better than a year.”
Masterson stammered a minute, then got out, “Wouldn’t Clayton Harms’s leaving have done that in any case?”
Eustace blinked and then managed a grin.
“I almost wish you hadn’t told me you’d left Amos in Washington Park, and at the hour when you did leave him,” Reuben spoke out of breath. He shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand on which some precious stone flickered faintly.
“Some men are immune to evil customs,” Ace droned. “Maybe that immunity is what Amos and Daniel had in common. That’s why they loved one another, and always will, even though they no more than touched here . . . Take Amos, he looks frail, small bones, small beautiful skull, eyes like forget-me-nots, but he’s hardier than you and me combined. Since Daniel left, he’s given his ass to black and white without stint or refusal. If he has a charmed life from danger, it’s because he’s already fatal. A strong man would have died . . . No, Amos was ruined a long age ago, in his mother’s body . . .”
Walking up and down as he did when alone, Eustace continued: “He blames it all on a July afternoon in a small-town soda-parlor where sitting in an ice-cream chair his runaway Dad give him the short sword on the cervix . . . But don’t you know that story?”
“You know damned well I don’t,” Reuben spoke with heat.
“His runaway Dad,” Eustace went on, ignoring his own rhetorical question and Reuben’s anger, “got to thinking about him about fifteen years after he had left his knocked-up girl friend who goes now under the name of Cousin Ida.”
As if he had been there, and seen it all with his own eyes, Eustace related the following narrative:
Dad drove up in a Franklin touring-car, vintage 1913, with side-curtains, running-board, funny spokes in wheels, and a statue radiator-cap. He parked up on the lawn of Ida’s ramshackle house camouflaged by hollyhocks, dwarf sunflowers, morning glories, and wild plum trees. Little sea shells bloomed in the garden, frilled snowy curtains hung behind the tiny windows, notes to the milkman stood in bottles on the back steps, clothes lines swayed, birds galore hopped about in the lettuce, mint and sweetpeas, and there that beautiful boy lived, a bastard brought up more lovingly than an heir. The runaway Dad began walking up to the back door, stopped, probably to let them see who it was.
He’s a six-foot-four gent, who couldn’t make an honest day’s living if he was put in a chain gang, had been in jail for passing bad checks four or five times, all bone and sinew, cocked sailor straw hat with black ribbon, faroff blue eyes like his son’s, not fixed on life, a yearning mouth. He rapped at the back door, standing by the milk bottles, and the woman he had got in the family way fifteen years before looks through the screen, and damned if she didn’t recognize him.
“Ida, is the boy to home?”
“What boy are you talking about?” she replied. “You no-account sonofabitch.” But there Amos sat having his coffee out of a deep saucer.
“Does he drink his coffee out of a saucer like a infant?” his father grinned.
“He drinks it any way he wants to drink it in my house, specially since it’s out of my sweat and toil he has growed up to this age.”
Hat in hand, Amos’s Dad did not budge, said he knew he had no rights, but asked to be able to take the boy out for an hour’s spin. After permission was wormed out of her, the Dad drove Amos to this out-of-the-way ice-cream parlor near the state line, a favorite stop for truck drivers hauling smuggled merchandise, ladies committing adultery with local building and loan directors, where a preacher was shot to death by a widow who was losing his love, where the local fairies used to come late afternoons.
After the soda-jerker had served Amos, his Dad, not having ordered anything for himself, dry-mouthed, morose, observed: “You eat your chocolate nut sundae more like a girl than a boy.” Pushing aside his dish, Amos turned linen white, waited a few seconds, wiped his lips free of syrup with his own fresh-laundered handkerchief.
“I could be a girl for all you know,” Amos declared. He stood up and pushed the chair hard against the table.
“Sit down when I tell you to!” His Dad flushed beet red.
“Go back and put your condoms on the line to dry,” Amos spoke loud enough for the few other customers to hear.
“You sit back down here, you God-damned little snot,” his Dad cried, eyes smarting, gasping for breath. “Nobody speaks to Cy Ratcliffe like that . . .”
At a sudden movement of his father’s fists, Amos seized a water glass, smashed it and ground the splintered edge into his father’s arm, and pausing only long enough to observe blood staining the torn sleeve and the cry of anguished surprise, the boy went coolly out the front door of the soda parlor.
Amos walked the ten miles back to town, taking the long detour around the stone quarry, beyond the river. Later he claimed he could not remember a single step of the hike back to Cousin Ida’s, but he must have tripped and fallen frequently for his face and clothing were stained with earth, grass and vegetation.
“What did that big stiff do to you that you’re in this condition?” Ida cried, stupefied, opening the door on him.
“If you ask me that again, I’ll kill you, Cousin Ida,” Amos warned her.
Seems always about that time of the year, the Ku Klux Klan, not a strictly nigger-burning outfit in that town but more a combination of odd left-over law-enforcement chores and a fraternal get-together group, holds some kind of pow-wow by the charred wreckage of the old First Baptist Church that was blown to smithereens some years back killing seventeen robed members. The way to the burned-out church cuts across the gravel road and the big cornfield beside Cousin Ida’s house, on the outskirts of town. The processions of the Klan, announced more by clouds of white ascending dust from the crushed stone than by any sound or confusion, always filled both Amos and Ida with vague concern and uncertain terror. In the not too distant past, when Ida had been summoned into the Mayor’s office on a charge of serving liquor to her boarders without a license, she had called the annual parades to the attention of the Mayor, a prematurely white-haired fun-loving sport who had made passes at her before he was elected to office. He had promised to look into the matter, but of course never did.
Hours after he had stabbed his father, Amos, sick in bed with a fever, had smelled the dust from the road and heard the crunch of the marchers’ footsteps. Terrified herself that the two events, the stabbing of Cy and the parade of the Klan might be connected (Amos’s father was low-down enough, she knew, to wear a sheet), Ida put out all the lights in the house and shut the storm door ti
ght.
“You keep under the covers and stay in bed no matter what happens here tonight,” she told Amos.
The procession haltingly got past the house on its way to the church; she sat by his bed, and suddenly touched his forehead: his scalp and hair were wringing wet, his teeth clicking like dice in the box.
“I have a very impressionable boy on my hands.” She echoed under her breath her old speech to the Mayor. “The damned Klan has no right to march by my house in their robes and scare us to death . . .”
After a silence, Ida spoke directly to Amos: “If you’re moanin’ about what you done to your Dad, you can quit, for I called the county infirmary. I’m sorry to tell you you didn’t do him no real harm and he was released with only eighteen stitches . . .”
Then taking real concern at the cold sweat that oozed over all his body, she crept into bed with him, hugging and comforting him with words and caresses. Along about two o’clock they heard the last of the marchers coming home from the pow-wow, and when everything was dead still again, this thing happened.
“Amos already told me, Eustace, so please stop . . . for pity’s sake.” Reuben tried to put some force into his voice, and then turned his face to the wall.
“Amos had kissed her,” Ace went on. “At the relief she had felt over the procession finally moving away, Ida had lain back hardly aware of his lovemaking and then in sudden terror of realization she had whispered, ‘Amos, not your own Mother, for God’s own sake!’ ”
“It was right after that,” Eustace concluded, “that Amos came to Chicago and into our arms . . .”
They listened then to the sound of the key being turned and the door’s almost human squeak, and Carla’s high-heeled step, meaning the work-day was over. Suddenly, under her metallic “Anybody to home?” they caught Amos’s soft querulous tones. He had returned.
17
According to friends, Eustace Chisholm showed signs of going rapidly down-hill about the time Reuben drove Amos out to the Make-Believe Dance Hall, off South Parkway, though Ace himself put it down to his last visit to Luwana Edwards, the colored psychic. He claimed she had given him a funny look and he hadn’t felt right afterwards. By “going down-hill” the friends meant he had given up nearly any little interest that remained in his poem and seemed to want to hear about only two subjects, Daniel Haws in Mississippi, and Amos Ratcliffe in Chicago and environs. (He thought of the two subjects, however, as one.) He was also, some people claimed, losing his memory.