by James Purdy
If anybody had asked Eustace which of the chapters in the life of young Rat he liked the best (though he would have considered this a literary question, to be treated with contempt) he would have had to reply, “The Make-Believe Dance Hall.”
The death and funeral of Mrs. Masterson had been acted out, so to speak, in advance by Amos and Reuben that night at the Make-Believe Dance Hall, and it was perhaps his sense of ceremony and ritual—considerably deranged though it now was—that had permitted Reuben to go to such a place at such a time.
Eustace tried to hold in memory for as long a while afterwards as he could, the sound of Amos’s drawling honey-like yet steady male voice as he chronicled the final episode of his life with Reuben Masterson.
He did not get the whole of the story from Amos alone, he got parts of it in scraps of conversation from others, like Maureen O’Dell and Reuben himself. But he always remembered it in Amos’s voice and accent.
Driving Amos into Chicago, Reuben had tried to be philosophical and summarized the failure of their relationship.
“Don’t you require kindness, Amos? You don’t seem to. Don’t you require love? I had so much of that to give you. All my life I’ve wanted to love somebody, and I never could find anybody to pour it out to. My wife was unloving, didn’t like anything about love. All she required was a formal drawing-room patter and etiquette. She liked to have me hand her in and out of cars, peck her on the cheek, arrange her orchid. And now I realize that all my life it was only men I could have loved after all, when I guess it’s too late . . . But I loved you more than anyone I ever met before. I could have been happy with you for life, had you allowed me to love you . . .”
“Happy with you and Grandmother?” Amos glared at Reuben.
“You have the most piercing eyes I’ve ever seen. If they were black instead of blue they would kill, I suppose. One can almost see your brain when you stare so . . .”
“The eye is an exposed part of the brain,” Amos snapped.
“There, you’ve spoiled that for me, too,” Reuben groaned. “You who are so beautiful don’t want beauty.”
“Not the Oscar Wilde kind,” Amos said. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Then you’d better find out, my very dear, very young man . . .”
Amos guffawed.
“Well, you never found out what you wanted, Reubie, and you had twenty or is it two hundred million dollars behind you to have a go at discovery. Guess that’s what’s wrong with you, all dough and no character. You were tutored to do everything. I’m surprised your Grandma didn’t have you tutored to fuck, or teach you herself out of her Old Testament . . .”
Reuben stared gloomily ahead at the twin shaft from his headlights on the dark curve of road.
“Frankly, Amos,” he said, after swallowing his anger, “you remain a deep mystery to me. You come out of that far south section of Illinois, you’re part hill-billy and yet the most sophisticated keen person I think I’ve met . . .”
Amos adjusted the folds of his scrotum with deliberate ostentation.
“You believe in nothing, I guess,” Reuben droned on. “You’re hard, and I guess that’s what Mother senses in you.”
“She sensed a rival in me, Reubie.” The boy spoke with a trace of his old heat.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
Amos grunted. “Your grandmother never wanted anybody to love you. She never loved you, and she couldn’t have stood it if anybody else ever came along to show her how she couldn’t. She never loved anybody. That’s how you got so gummed up. And are you gummed! Without your money to keep you mucilaged together, man, you’d be in worse shape and condition than me. I’m such a mess I can operate. That’s an achievement, I warrant . . .”
“So Mother never loved me,” Reuben smiled, as if pleased he was at last a serious topic of discussion.
“You’re in her bag for life, Reubie, and when they bury her, they will bury a lot of you with her. That’s why you’re right to go dancing tonight. It’ll be a beacon of hope for the rest of your life. ‘I went dancing the evening that Grandma was dying,’ you can tell your descendants, if any.”
“I should let you out of the car,” Reuben said, deathly pale.
“It may save what little life’s left in you, Reubie, going to the Make-Believe Dance Hall.”
WHETHER YOU CALL it the Globe City Ball Room, which is the name that greets you outside in pink letters (its original structure had been a car barn) or, with the fairies, the Make-Believe Dance Hall, it was only within its precincts, Reuben claimed later, that he had ever been forgetful of the passage of time. He could have gone on dancing there forever.
When they had entered, Amos looked up to see the big orange-colored globe fixed in the middle of the high ceiling. The sole source of illumination, it might have been the greatgrandaddy of all the paper moons that ever shone. It seemed crowded inside, with a queer odor like that given off by crushed moths or butterflies, yet as a matter of fact there were few people in attendance by crowd standards; perhaps it looked full to Reuben and Amos because they were the only whites.
They were immediately popular, Reuben felt, the moment they entered the door, though he wondered later if it was perhaps Amos’s looks and the impression he himself gave of bulging with silver and reserved favors. The black waltzers and fox-trotters were ready to go again at the sight of the two whites, despite an already long evening behind them with Terpsichore (it was just 2:00 A.M.). Everybody stopped dancing for a moment when they entered and then the two were asked as partners, and there under the orange moon, they went at it until each was so weary he could only rest his head on the shoulders of the partner of the moment in motionless embrace.
“You said there would be no girls here!” Reuben came up to Amos between numbers, complaint in his voice as he pointed to some dancers in skirts in the far corner of the ballroom.
“Them—girls?” Amos smiled. “Don’t you know that each of those crepe de Chine dresses you see covers a writhing eel?”
Just the same Reuben wished to dance only with the boys who wore pants, he said he felt he had done with dresses. “Thank you for this, Amos!” Reuben cried, going off with a new partner. “I’ll thank you for the rest of my life.”
Suddenly Amos saw in the middle of the dance floor the dreadful familiar face of Beaufort Vance, the abortion doctor. He must have recognize Amos at almost the exact moment, for turning his glance away from the boy, he disappeared into the crowd. Amos looked about to see if by chance Clark B. Peebles, Vance’s assistant, was also present, but he was nowhere in evidence.
Then it got less and less crowded, and the clock ticked on toward daybreak.
The sight of the abortion doctor and the feeling of the approach of day dampened the little enthusiasm Amos had for the ballroom in the first place, and he retired to a table near a heavy velvet curtain from which with sardonic amusement he could watch Reuben, whirling and giddy, throwing himself from partner to partner.
The passage of time had by now become indistinct to Amos. Looking up suddenly, he saw there was nobody dancing any longer in the ballroom and the ten-piece orchestra had vanished, except for the piano player who was tying his shoe-string. When Amos looked down, he saw that Reuben was now lying on the floor beside him, a satisfied grin on his lips.
“There’s nothing like the bare floor to straighten a man out, Reubie,” Amos mumbled. “I hear that’s why the Mexican peons are so beautiful. Sleep on flat old terra firma, a few swipes of straw under their ass. Of course I’ve slept on flat ground a good many thousand nights alongside Cousin Ida, but that ain’t why people say I’m beautiful . . .”
Amos hummed the blues number he had heard earlier:
I left my Mother,
Why can’t I leave you?
Dozing off again, he had some sort of hazy dream about Beaufort Vance and Clark B. Peebles and, awakening, found Reuben’s fingers stretched out in sleep around his ankle.
“Your light is out.�
�� He placed his toe on Reuben’s hair, and saw that the older man was still under. “You get drunk just like a baby. I can’t get drunk, Reubie. Know that? My heart just won’t be slowed down I guess for anybody except old Bugger Man Death . . . As to love, Reubie, I’d love you, sweetheart, if I felt you were for real for more than a split second. But you’re an American baby. Your Grandma knows what’s what about you. To think you were a doughboy, and wounded, with a bureau drawer crammed with medals. Yet I feel I got to protect you. Your Grandma thinks I’ve brought you into the world. A man is lucky when it takes only four drinks to knock him out. You’ve been asleep all your life, snoozing in the gray maw of money and when you’re awake, you’re in partial anaesthetic. Still even you suffer . . .”
Amos rose, looked in vain for the piano player, and began two-stepping with some imaginary partner under the extinguished orange globe.
“I could be any man’s son,” he called to all the empty tables and chairs. He slipped and fell to the floor.
HOURS LATER, FROM his sprawling position on the sawdust, he saw Reuben listening to his wristwatch and checking it to see if it could be so late.
“Christ Jesus, what have I done?” he heard Reuben’s excited falsetto. “Why didn’t you call me? What have you let me do?” Reuben cried. He was beside himself, and Amos understood that he would be blamed for having taken Reuben away from his dutiful vigil at his grandmother’s deathbed.
THEY HAD TROUBLE getting out of the ballroom. The door had been locked on them, and Amos gave a display of his strength by breaking it open. A fine rain was beginning to fall as they drove up the driveway of Sampford Court, where an immense ornate funeral-parlor limousine was parked, waiting to take Mrs. Masterson’s body to the undertaker’s. She had died shortly after Reuben had left for the ballroom.
Reuben sat there in front of the steering wheel, blubbering.
“You allowed me to kill Mother,” he accused Amos again and again.
III
under earth’s deepest stream
18
In his letters Daniel Haws, who in “life” (by which he meant civilian life) had been morose, taciturn, bitterly reserved and almost inarticulate, poured out everything. He did not even hesitate to touch on the master passion of his existence—Amos. The letters to Eustace arrived now almost daily.
Eustace Chisholm’s appetite for other people’s mail may have had its genesis in the frequency with which he haunted the city streets. Unlike small towns, cities contain transient persons without fixed abodes who carry their letters about with them carelessly, either losing them or throwing them away. Most passers-by would not bother to stoop down and pick up such a letter because they would assume there would be nothing in the contents to interest or detain them. This was not true of Eustace. He pored over found letters whose messages were not meant for him. To him they were treasures that spoke fully. Paradise to Eustace might have been reading the love-letters of every writer, no matter how inconsequential or even illiterate, who had written a real one. What made the pursuit exciting was to come on that rare thing: the authentic, naked, unconcealed voice of love.
It was also true that people had always written to Eustace. Few people may have respected him deeply (Daniel Haws hardly did), but nobody had contempt for him either. They probably wrote to him for the reason that he was interested, had the time and capacity to listen, would not judge them, and did not feel infallible. If Ace offered any advice, he did so in the way of a half-suggestion, which he was the first to admit might be incorrect. Everything in his own life may have been a failure, but he never tired of listening to others or reading their mail. What Eustace had not bargained for was that Daniel Haws was to prove both his supreme reward and his nemesis in the matter of letters.
One stifling summer morning Ace was curled up on his davenport reading the latest from D. Haws, when without so much as a rap of his knuckles, Amos Ratcliffe walked in. Mrs. Masterson was dead, of course, but Amos had made no effort to return to Sampford Court. As Ace put it, the same old people had him on their hands.
“Is that a letter from who I think it is?” Amos asked, sitting down on the floor near Ace’s feet. Ace nodded.
“ ‘There is this Captain Stadger,’ ” he went on reading aloud now from the part of Daniel’s letter where he had been interrupted. “ ‘Don’t like the looks of him a-tall, not a-tall. Claims he seen me in the regular army before this Roosevelt emergency. Chicken shit on that. He keeps at me, though. Says he knows I got Indian blood. Named the tribe, too, Cherokee, as he claims he’s an expert on blood strain. Always hanging around watching me. Says if I don’t do just right he’ll send me to a really tough outfit, and that will make me appreciate how good he is to me here. It’s taken me a long time, Eus, even to learn how to salute down here. Showing respect for bastards so low-down on the evolutionary scale makes my gorge rise. Mostly everybody down here are all little pissy Southerners. Can’t see sometimes how I’ll last, and then again I never want this emergency to end. I got to last. I got to get through the army, for Christ, I could never come back to Chicago, and where else could I go, answer me that. I’m in a real ghost world down here, Biloxi, Mississippi, Spanish moss hanging from trees, we’re in tents, snakes galore, though mostly harmless, this funny little city on the Gulf, with its nigger town out of bounds. But everywhere I go, in the swamp, or by the ocean, or in the woods, there’s Captain Stadger always to bump into . . .’ ”
“Give me that letter.”
“You go straight to hell,” Ace replied.
“I deserve those letters, you stingy bastard, more than you do.” Amos made a kind of whimpering sound as he spoke which gave Ace pause.
“If I’d give you one of these letters even to look at, you’d be apt to put it right in your mouth and swallow it, I’d never get it back, that’s sure. And I’m going to hold on to them.”
“Going to put them in your newspaper poem, I reckon . . .”
Ace showed impatience to get on with reading Daniel’s letter to him, but Amos interrupted again with: “Does Daniel ever ask about me?”
“Oh, I guess once in a blue moon.”
“And do you give him news of me?” Amos spoke almost bashfully, not able to disguise his eagerness.
“Well,” Ace studied the boy. “I told him about the scandal you caused at old lady Masterson’s funeral.” The poet rolled his tongue about in his cheek.
“I bet you dressed that story up good and proper.”
“No, I told it just the way I heard it, without embellishment. How the funeral parlor director had not known you and Mr. Reuben Masterson were in front of the casket making love, and when he pressed the electric button for the curtain to go up which separated the bier from the audience of waiting mourners, there you two were both drunk and necking, Reuben’s hand on your open fly for the whole world to get the picture . . . I added that as a result of that scene the heir to two hundred million had been read out of the Social Register and was about to leave Chicago . . .”
Amos hung his head, but couldn’t control a wry grin.
“You never know a party until he writes you a letter,” Ace mused, intoning. “Take your ex-lover, Daniel Haws. When he was here, all I ever got from you or him about yourselves was next to nothing. Then he gets epistolary, and by God, I’ve got him full-bodied. See all of him. He’s epic, he’s great, he gives me everything on PX stationery.”
Ace, however, did not immediately go on with the reading, and Amos took his turn to say: “Remember all those wonderful nigger love letters I found in Washington Park that day and brought right up here to you, quick as I could hot-foot it? You grabbed the whole damned packet, never said thank you, kiss-my-foot, and you got at least four chapters for your poem out of them. And remember those murder threats I found near the corner of Woodlawn and 67th Street, brought ’em to you before I’d half-read them, and here you won’t even give me a peek at the letters of the one person matters to me in this beat-up life of mine.”
“Calm down, honeybunch,” Ace snapped. “Matters to you! Nobody matters to you, and you know it. You’re still mad Daniel Haws didn’t go to bed with you, that’s all. Had he done so, you’d have treated him like dirt. He must have sensed it, and that’s why he left you . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen to him in the army, but it couldn’t be much worse than had he shared his life with you . . .”
“Talk about the chicken-hawk,” Daniel Haws’s letter continued. “That’s Captain Stadger. You must know how a hawk acts, Eus, you was in the country once. He’s waiting to get something on me, and have me red-handed. Admitted as much himself. Dogs me when I’m on KP, bobs up from nowhere when I go to town. Other day stopped me when by accident I drunk out of a Lister bag that was in the colored section of our camp here. ‘Daniel, you like to drink after niggers?’ he inquired. ‘Answer that question. A real American Indian like you want to drink out of a nigger’s Lister bag?’ I had to apologize for an hour and a half, salute my hand off, and all the time he is not looking at my face, he is gazing around me, as if he thought he might spy me wearing side-arms. Looking at some part of my body that he can’t seem to find.
“Why is it, in my life, somebody is always hounding and devilling me. Take my mother. After my father died in a coal miner’s riot and I took his place in the pits, at the age of 13 sole support of her and my kid brothers and sisters, she hounded me from sunup to sundown; when she died and the kids were placed in homes, I went to live with this M.D., drove for him, niggered for him, he hounded me morning noon and night; in my jobs in Chicago I always got the fellow in charge who knew how to hound; Amos hounded me, Maureen O’Dell, Reuben Masterson, all hounded me. I bet if I lived near or around you, Ace, I would bring it out in you too. But now I got the prince of hounders, Captain Stadger, and he looks at me as if he’s been waiting for me all his life, and that he knowed I was born to be hounded.