To whom was she talking? Herself or someone other?
Although pitched rather loudly, the voice of Mother was saying something incomprehensible to him.
“Oh, Precious gran’chile, I believe your daddy’s awake, now, I heard him in his bedroom, le’s go in and—”
“Oh, no. Mother, hello. Mother, no, no, not quite yet, dear!”
“Shun, shun, Shtephen, what a sad but beautiful shtory! Mother’s naturally very upshet by the tragedy of poor Sue Coffin but undershtands why you preferred not to shpeak of it. The thing to consider now ish the proper background and shchooling of thish adorable deshendant of an Ashe and a Coffin of the Nantucket Coffins. Thish beautiful shecret of yours, thish darlin’ Clove Coffin Ashe ish comin’ in there to fetch you shoon as—Oh, Clove, Preshus, I’m shtill sho un-shtrung, thrilled to pieces, of course, but shtill a bit overcome by the shuddenness of it all. Sweetheart, do you think I could have another one of those marvelous ashpirin shubstitutes you gave me when I arrived, and maybe alsho another one of thoshe delishous Merry Marys to wash it down with?”
Then through the hall door, that frontier of a world in which all that remained of his particular reality was confined with Stephen Ashe, came the voice of Clove, its hillbilly coarseness, outright abrasiveness of intonation, hardly recognizably muted and transfigured, as if adapted from a score for a brass instrument to one for a delicate woodwind.
“Mommy, I reckoned you might want seconds and here they are, just stick your tongue out and 111 pop in this new type aspirin and—there! Leave mouth open for Mary!—There, now, slowly, drink all, don’t let none spill! Good, huh. Mommy? If the drugstore man was God and the barman was Jesus, they couldn’t make ‘em better, you can bet your sweet—”
“Shunny, I am afraid that Shun Stephen has neglected your social training. You mustn’t pat a lady on her behind, not on such short acquaintansh, regardless of—relashuns!”
But if there was any genuine reproof in Mom’s tone, it was immediately cancelled out by her subsequent giggles, coy as a skittish schoolgirl’s…
Some minutes later, fewer than might be surmised, Stephen had opened the bedroom door just a crack and had called softly: “Son?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Shun Stephen!” cried out Mom in her curiously altered voice.
“Mom, I’m sorry you had to discover my little, uh, secret like this, but if Son will give me some help in here. I’m not feeling well. Mom. You remember that thing I had called labyrinthitis? Well, it has come back on me, there’s been a little recurrence, it, it—affects my equilibrium, and if Sonny will help me in here. I’ll, I’ll—make myself decent so we can talk this all out together.”
Stephen heard the sound of a prolonged and moist osculation in the hall. He swayed backwards a little as Clove entered the door of the dark bedroom. Having swayed in that direction, Stephen went all the way backwards to the little bench beneath the dormer windows, where he soon found Clove beside him.
“You know, at sixteen I’m one helluva lot smarter than you are. Daddy. Your Mom likes Quaalude, Daddy, and she got one in her first Mary.”
“Quaa what?”
“Lude.”
“Yes, it’s all very lewd, it’s almost disgustingly lewd.”
“You got the wrong spellin’. Daddy, but never mind about that. I think that your Mom is already hooked on Quaaludes washed down with a toddy or two. Now, here. You take this other Quaalude and then you go out to your Mom.”
“And do what?”
“Shit, you’ll know what to do when this big one hits you, washed down with a Merry Mary as your sweet ole Mom calls it!”
Clove thrust the Quaalude into Stephen’s slack mouth, then pressed the Mary to his lips.
“Now swallow slowly. Daddy, don’t slobber. Which one of the drawers in that bureau is the drawer full of drawers?”
“Bottom drawer.”
“Right. Drawers for your bottom in bottom drawer.”
Clove got Stephen dressed for his heart-to-heart with Mom in less time than an experienced short-order cook would need to serve up two over lightly with a side of French fries.
“How you feel, how’d it hit you. Daddy?” whispered Clove.
“No problem, no problem at all,” Stephen replied with an uncertain air of assurance.
“Must run in the family but it took me to bring it out. Now git with Mom.”
He headed Stephen forcibly toward the door.
Mom attempted to rise to her feet to embrace Stephen as he entered the hall but she nearly hit the carpet. Clove caught her buttocks to his groin, and then Stephen witnessed a scene the shock of which even his Quaalude washed down with a double Mary did not insulate him against completely. Mom was now seated in the lap of Clove. Both of them were sobbing, the difference being that Clove was winking and grinning over Mom’s shoulder.
Mom made a sound that was “Shun, Shun, Shun,” but doubtless was her best effort, under the circumstances, to articulate three times the word “Son.”
“Mom, can you hear me?” Stephen shouted.
“Oh, Shun, oh, Shun!”
“Daddy,” said Clove, “your Mom is the treasure at the end of the rainbow I’ve waited for all my life. She understands! You understand, Daddy? Your Mom understands and is so goddamn happy she’s speechless!”
Mom did, indeed, appear to be overcome with felicity but she was not only in the arms of the Arkansas chicken but those of narcotized slumber. After a little colloquy between Clove and Stephen, it was agreed that she should be transferred to her suite in the Ritz Tower where she customarily stayed when in Manhattan, Stephen’s room for her in his apartment being a matter of fiction.
Endlessly resourceful. Clove prepared Mom for this transference. He put over her blind but half-open eyes his own pair of shades, got her sables about her and hung her crocodile shoulder bag over her slumped shoulder.
“Now, Daddy, git with it. You got to show downstairs when I put her in the limo and you got to tell the driver to git her delivered all the way up to her room at this fat cat hotel where she sacks.”
As he was conveying this command to Stephen, his hand was busy inside Mom’s shoulder bag, extricating from it some nice bits of green, well-engraved.
“Mom is sharp about money.”
“That’s why she’s loaded with it, but. Daddy, it’s got a price, all of it’s got a price, that’s one piece of education that I took with me out of the Arkansas Ozarks.”
Late the next day, after another all-afternoon heart-to-heart among son Stephen and Mom and this treasure of an offspring Clove Coffin Ashe, Mom was carefully deposited on a jet to Palm Beach, blowing kisses to “Shun” and his “Lamb” long after the jet was airborne. In her crocodile shoulder bag was a bottle of forty-nine Quaaludes, the fiftieth having been ingested at the start of the highly emotional afternoon and washed down with a Merry Mary and high oh-oh…
Stephen and Clove and a tiny French Pug puppy (surprise gift for Mom who associated that breed of canine fondly with dear old Wally Windsor) were sharing a compartment on the Amtrak to Miami which would let them off at Palm Beach. They had chosen rail travel instead of plane because Stephen’s infinitely precocious (and improbable) offspring felt that the extra time was needed to prepare his daddy-by-adoption for certain ideas, in the nature of projects on the agenda, which had to involve them jointly during their visit with Mom at the Golden Shores.
“1 think the porter heard that goddamn dog under the fruit in the basket when he was making up the beds.”
“If he heard the dog in the basket, the memory of it was completely erased by that twenty bucks I got you to give him on his way out.”
“Clove, you don’t seem to recognize the fact that I’m an unemployed man, I can’t be that loose with money.”
“With all the money you got comin’ in to you?”
“Money from where. Clove?”
“Man, you know and I know that your Mom is sittin’ on one helluva bundle and I don?
??t mean her fat ass.”
“Clove, you don’t know how close Mom is with her money, why, she-”
“Daddy, don’t give me that jive, what I don’t know is yet to be known by sweet Jesus. Now you jus’ stick out your tongue for this lewd pill. Tha’s right. Now drink this shot of Wild Turkey. Tha’s right. —Feel better? Feel good? Like when I’m teaching you the Arkansas Ozark way?”
Attempting to nod, Stephen moved his head in an elliptical way.
“Now, then. Daddy, jus’ lissen, don’t bother to speak. Your Mom is down there sittin’ on this helluva bundle and high as the moon on her lewds, and what is more important to me and to you. Mom is afflicted with tragic sickness!”
“Sickness, tragic? I don’t follow you. Clove. All that’s ever been wrong with Mom is an occasional little asthmatic condition which allergy specialists say is just a touch of rose fever, so she had to insist that the gardener at Golden Shores dispose of all rosebushes on the five-acre grounds.”
“Shay-if!” Clove said with a slightly savage chuckle.
“Clove, you must not indulge in vulgarisms of this nature while you’re—”
“Comfo’ting Mom through the last stage of her tragic asthma condition, Daddy?”
At this point his fils-adoptif had somewhat diverted Stephen from the kid’s Dogpatch drawl by the slow removal of Clove’s fine-textured flesh-colored briefs.
Dear God, thought Stephen, You must have said Let there be Clove before You said Let there be light, because what this Arkansas Ozark kid is now unveiling surely equals or takes precedence over all other works and wonders that You performed in Your six days of creation!
Unconsciously Stephen Ashe crossed a few paces to secure the lock on the compartment door of the Amtrak southbound to Mom. And he thought it best not to comprehend fully what Clove was speaking, now, his words timed with the gradual removal of his briefs.
“Daddy, I’ve told you but I’ll tell you once more,” Clove was saying. “You got to come out of the closet, I mean all the way out and for good, and you got to lock the door of it behind you and forget that the goddamn closet ever existed, because—now you hear this!—You are alone on this Amtrak with a killer chicken! An’ when this chicken infawms you that Mom is afflicted with a tragic sickness, you better rate this chicken’s word higher than words out of any medical mouth in the world.”
Clackety-clack went the wheels of the Amtrak, rhythmically unchanging over its roadbed, but Stephen heard nothing but a hum in his ears as faint as the late-night music of the river named East in the passive view of which the ravishment of his often-patted backside had occurred between a Sunday brunch and Mom’s oddly catered buffet.
“Clove, I didn’t quite catch what you’ve been talking about and maybe it’s better that way.”
Clove’s response was only an ineffably innocent smile, but from the wicker basket of Hammacher Schlemmer’s Garden of Eden department, from under the apples, bananas, peaches and seedless grapes, the French Pug puppy uttered a sound, a little “Woof-woof” which had to pass for a note of moral protest in the absence of any other more consequential to events proceeding in this world whose one and only crisis is not the depletion of its energy resources.
November 1977 {Published 1978)
Bibliographical Notes
THE ACCENT OF A COMING FOOT. Written in March 1935, not previously published. This version is from a manuscript of early writings, Pieces of my Youth, put together by Williams in the mid-seventies but never published. In that manuscript the following note accompanied the story:
It was immediately after the conclusion of this story, one of those which I wrote in the evenings after my days at the Continental Branch of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, that I suffered my first heart attack. As I rose from my worktable in my cubbyhole room in the apartment we were crammed into at 6254 Enright St., in the unfashionable suburb of University City, I found that my heart was pounding and skipping beats. Something more than cups of black coffee, something too close to myself in the character of Bud and the tension of Catharine, triggered this first cardiac seizure. Persons suffering from an attack of this sort always feel an instinct to rush outside. It should be restrained but it wasn’t. Everyone was asleep in the apartment but me. I rushed down the back fire escape and I went wildly along the midnight street, quickening my pace as my pulse quickened.
I must have rushed for miles, all the way from the suburb to Union Boulevard deep into St. Louis. It was March; the trees along the streets were beginning to bud. With characteristic romanticism, I kept looking up at those green bits of life emerging again and somehow it was this that quieted my panic and my tachycardia subsided.
Later that week, after work, I went secretly to a doctor who informed me that I did, indeed, have a defective heart. Shortly afterwards a second attack occured which hospitalized me for a week and which had one great compensation—it released me from the shoe business in which I’d been trapped for three years…
The title is a quote from Emily Dickinson.
THE ANGEL IN THE ALCOVE. Written in October 1943 in Santa Monica, published in 1948 in the collection One Arm. This story is a partial basis for the play Vieux Carré.
BIG BLACK: A MISSISSIPPI IDYLL. Written 1931/32, not previously published. This story won an honorable mention in the Mahan Contest run by the University of Missouri English Department. (The contest is still a yearly event.) A copy of the typescript was supplied by the University of Missouri Archives.
CHRONICLE OF A DEMISE. Published in 1948 in the collection One Arm.
THE COMING OF SOMETHING TO THE WIDOW HOLLY. Begun in 1943, published in 1953 in ND Fourteen—New Directions in Prose & Poetry, included in the collection Hard Candy (1954).
COMPLETED. Written in November 1973, published in 1974 in the collection Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed.
THE DARK ROOM. Written c. 1940, not previously published. A copy of the typescript was supplied by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
DAS WASSER IST KALT. Written during the period 1973-79, published in 1982 in Antaeus, not previously collected.
DESIRE AND THE BLACK MASSEUR. Begun in March 1942, finished in April 1946, published in 1948 in the collection One Arm.
THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN. Written in 1937, published in 1939 in Story magazine, included in the collection One Arm (1948).
GIFT OF AN APPLE. Written c. 1936, not previously published. A copy of the typescript was supplied by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
“GRAND.” Published in a limited edition (House of Books, Ltd.) in 1964, included in the collection The Knightly Quest (1966).
HAPPY AUGUST THE TENTH. Probably begun in 1957 but mainly written in August 1970, published in Antaeus in 1971, reprinted in Esquire and Best American Short Stories of 1973, included in the collection Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974).
HARD CANDY. Begun in Rome, August 1949, finished in March 1953, published in 1954 in the collection. Hard Candy. This story is really a variation of the earlier “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio.”
THE IMPORTANT THING. Published in Story in 1945, included in the collection One Arm (1948).
IN MEMORY OF AN ARISTOCRAT. WRITTEN C. 1940, not previously published. A copy of the typescript was supplied by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
THE INTERVAL. Written in September/October 1945, not previously published. This version is from the Pieces of my Youth manuscript where several variant endings are given; the ending used is dated October 1945.
THE INVENTORY AT FONTANA BELLA. Written in July 1972, published in Playboy in 1973, included in the collection Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974).
THE KILLER CHICKEN AND THE CLOSET QUEEN. Written in November 1977, published in 1978 in Christopher Street, not previously collected.
THE KINGDOM OF EARTH. Begun in 1942 in Macon, Georgia, published in 1954 in the limited edition
of the collection. Hard Candy, included in the trade edition of The Knightly Quest (1966). This story is the basis for the play The Kingdom of Earth or The Seven Descents of Myrtle.
THE KNIGHTLY QUEST. Begun in 1949 but mainly written in 1965, published in 1966 in the collection The Knightly Quest. This long story is a partial basis for the unpublished play The Red Devil Battery Sign.
A LADY’S BEADED BAG. Published in 1930 in the magazine The Columns.
THE MALEDICTION. Begun in the summer of 1941, published in 1945, included in the collection One Arm (1948).
MAMA’S OLD STUCCO HOUSE. Published in the January 1965 issue of Esquire, included in the collection The Knightly Quest (1966).
MAN BRING THIS UP ROAD. Written in Italy in the summer of 1953, published in 1959 in Mademoiselle, included in the collection The Knightly Quest (1966). This story is the basis for the play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and the filmscript Boom!
THE MAN IN THE OVERSTUFFED CHAIR. Written c. 1960, published in December 1980 in Antaeus, not previously collected.
THE MATTRESS BY THE TOMATO PATCH. Written in 1953 (refers to an incident c. 1943), published in 1954 in the collection Hard Candy.
MISS COYNTE OF GREENE. Written in November 1972, published in 1973 in Playboy, included in the collection Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974).
MOTHER YAWS. Published in 1977 in Esquire, not previously collected.
THE MYSTERIES OF THE JOY RIO. Written in 1941 in New Orleans, published in 1954 in the collection Hard Candy.
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. Begun in April 1946 in New Orleans (based on an incident in Acapulco in September 1940), finished in February 1948 in Rome, published in 1948 in the collection One Arm. This story is a partial basis for the play The Night of the Iguana.
ONE ARM. Begun in May 1942 in New York, revised in 1943 in Santa Monica, but not finished until 1945 in Dallas, published in 1948 in the collection One Arm. This story is the basis for the unproduced screenplay of the same title.