James Purdy: In a Shallow Grave

The droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it’s more what you want. I had just walked away from Georgina leaving her under the ruined polka-dot moon and the orchestra doing “On the Alamo” for the twentieth time. I hardly knew I had left her.

The tables were turned then, but their turning bored me more than they vindicated me. They were, though, turned completely. I had tried to tell the doc about my feelings, that is, that at first I had loved Georgina, childhood sweet­heart, etc., and now I was in love with this son of a sheep-rancher from Utah who had been killed in the hurricane. The doc smiled and nodded and listened. He would always let me say anything, I guess, but he never said much back, but this time he said something vague, like all human feel­ings, you see, are as old as history. As if I cared about history or it was any use to me.

I missed Quintus almost more than Daventry because as long as he was sitting around reading, and sharing his learn­ing with me, why the very irritation of his presence, his peevishness, the fact that he hated me even maybe (I guess he hated me), all made me feel at home with him, for there is nobody more Virginian than Quintus. Daventry had become my permanent secret like the ruined dance hall, but Quintus was home, and so I missed him fearfully, but would have bit my tongue off rather than say it.

Then she got her “applicants.” That took the place of me being irritated and riled up and puzzled and half-entertained by Quintus and his old reading texts.

Her applicants were young men who had been children when I was fighting for my country.

They came in the morning and sometimes again in the P.M. with a letter signed always “Your Georgina.”

I could tell of course they were all—the letters—imitated from Daventry and even me, and here now I had taken Georgina’s place in the scheme of events. I no longer loved her. I would go and look at myself in the mirror, I sort of looked normal now except I reminded myself of the man in the nursery rhyme who had scratched out both his eyes in a quickset hedge and then jumped into another hedge and scratched them in again.

A young man came one forenoon with a larger than usual letter, to judge by the envelope, and I embarrassed him greatly by asking him to read the contents. He looked about fourteen, the down was just showing on his cheeks but not really on his upper lip.

All the time though while he read the letter I was thinking about how I didn’t even have a snapshot of Daventry. The only thing I had from him to prove he even ever existed was a bandana handkerchief and I kept it under my pillow.

“Would you mind reading the letter again?” I said, for I realized that all the time he had been droning out what she had penned I hadn’t heard a syllable.

The boy’s chin trembled, but I gather she must have paid him good, for he swallowed his choler and began to read it all over again:

“What can I say to convince you that it has been you all along that I have cared for . . . When you came home from the war it was not that I rejected you, I suffered I do believe more from what had happened to you than you yourself . . .”

I don’t recollect all she said and having the boy read it a second time didn’t keep my mind on it successively, so I missed several paragraphs. In fact he could have read it over and again until the Last Judgment, I wouldn’t have heard it all, for my mind was on other things, and I was also looking in the mirror at myself most of the time he was reading, so at least hearing the silence that came from his final delivery, I turned to him, and give him a fifty-cent piece for his pains.

The thing I had been looking at in the mirror while he read was this, my face was no longer anywhere the color of mulberry.

That was the longest and coldest winter I ever remember, the very tears froze on one’s face. Even the ocean acted funny, like it was sulking, though I listened to it now more than before, before him, that is, before the one I love, for it had bothered him, the wind, and the ocean he was criti­cal of, whereas I had always taken them for granted, but that long winter I am talking about when I was alone, when I had changed from the color of mulberry back to my white Virginia winter face, it seemed to me that the ocean was complaining, rather than angry, that it whim­pered and sobbed and talked to itself in its sleep, that it digged and delved like it was looking for Daventry too, who is buried nearby in a Confederate cemetery, which I don’t know would please him, but we didn’t have any idea where to send him in Utah, and the Widow tends his grave, and when good weather comes, we will bring fresh flowers to it, you can count on that.

But spring did come finally, and I found in one of Quintus’ tomes some lines I did prize, see if I can recollect them right:

The blossom is the token of the rebirth of the year, it is the trees’ rejoicing. It is then that trees show themselves new creatures and are transformed from what they really are, and quite revel in rivaling each other with their varied hues of coloring.

I was pretending to read one night late, for I had been in some pain in my chest, I was reading as usual in some ancient book about a place once called Arabia Felix, when I hear a kind of banging at the garden gate. The goose-pimples came over me like a sheet of ice had been slipped down over the base of my spine.

Then I heard a soft knock. I don’t think I would have ever gone to the door had whoever it was not been so pa­tient, that is he sort of went on drumming on the wood, like a bird, and I knew he would never let up until I went out and let him in.

I didn’t know him at all. It was his clothes that threw me off. He was dressed like some old-time swell, gold watchchain, cuff links, tie clasp, big parrotlike showy tie, hand-sewn lapels, flashy high shoes, oh you name it.

He streaks in and rushes to the kitchen and took down a glass and was drinking some water from the hydrant without so much as hello, kissmyass, or what have you.

I was gasping with rage and terror, but then I looked again and who of course was it but Quintus, but trans­formed like he had been touched by a wand, in fact I looked around to see if he didn’t have any retinue of followers.

“Why didn’t you speak?” I began my wrangling, but then after a moment I felt too good to be mad, and I sat down beside him there in the kitchen.

My eyes were riveted to his fingers, for there they sparkled, diamond and precious gem rings, or so they seemed.

“Did you have a rich uncle or somebody die?” I had begun my interrogatory, but he held up his fingers to be silent.

“I couldn’t pay the price anymore, Garnet.”

That “Garnet” sounded so good, for he said it as only a Virginian can say it, and I gave out two short sobs before I could control myself.

“These rich black people from Richmond I met during the hurricane offered to take me to Mexico.” He began a long narrative, which like the Widow’s applicant letters to me, did not hold my undivided attention. So I did not and do not recollect any more of what he done or had done to him than phrases like all they wanted was sex . . . my peter . . . money . . . they drunk so damn much . . . tequila can kill a man . . .

Then there was a long long talk again like his reading to me, about the Aztec ruins and Chapultepec and another city that had a church built in it for every day in the year and blinded you with its white domes in the sun . . .

“So you come home, then, did you?” I begun on him in earnest at last. “And you expected the door to be open wide, did you, and the welcome mat still out?”

“I did hear one thing in town, before I come back,” Quintus spoke somewhat uneasy like. “That the Widow Rance has asked your hand in marriage . . .”