James Purdy

-4-

"'Listen to the records, Fairfield,' she told me, 'if you get lonesome, or turn on TV or call up those different numbers on the telephone, you know. I often do that when I'm lonesome. There is a telephone number for religious guidance that is awfully interesting; and another for serious trouble or desperate situations; then you can call the Weather Bureau and find out what kind of weather we're going to get, and there's the time of the day, of course,--all those things you can get by calling a number on the telephone. But don't go out of the house, as I hate to come back to it empty, and you know now, Fairfield, that was one of the reasons you were hired, to always be here.'

"Yes, Madame Sobey, I know, I would say, and then she would always say right back, 'Call me Madge. It sounds more relaxed and we have so much time to spend together anyhow.'

"I knew there was not a chance that I would be with her to the very end like she was always saying, and like I was already her husband or something.

"She always drank enough for a pirate before she went to this doctor. She said she couldn't think up anything to tell him unless she was crocked. straightening

"What are you being treated for?" I asked her, putting on my new uniform before the mirror.

"'Oh, Fairfield, for heaven's sake!' she said. 'I don't have to tell you.'

"Well you're awful sick, I guess, if you have to go every day, I told her.

"'I'm not getting anywhere with him,' Madame Sobey said. 'Of course, my former husband pays for it all or I wouldn't go near. I just hate myself, though, for going.'

"What's wrong with stopping, then,' I asked her.

Madame Sobey smiled and smiled when I said that. I don't think she could

James Purdy

-5-

laugh due to an operation she had had for her face, but she smiled terribly
hard to show she was laughing. Then she got serious immediately, so fast,
you know, it looked like a curtain fell on her smiling face, and this new
mad old face showed at you.

"I told the doctor about you," she said.

"That you had a colored servant, I said in a kind of a mean voice."

"Oh, I didn't mention your color," she lied. "Goodness, what do you think I am..." She stopped a moment or two, and then smiling again, said, "He thought it was a good idea."

"What was? I wondered."

"You being here with me," she said.

"Well, you can't live all to yourself all the time," I told her.

"That isn't why he liked it, though," Madame Sobey said.

"Why did he then?"

"Why, he feels you're good for me just now for one thing...You know all the others up here stole."

"I didn't wonder they had because she wouldn't pay you and yet she wanted you to sit up with her at all hours and talk; due to her having been in the mut-hatch so often she didn't for some reason ever like to be alone, and just TV, the radio, and the phonograph all going at once as they often did wasn't enough: she had to have the living breathing flesh of men around her or she got just wild."

"I didn't see how the doctor knew I was good for her or honest or anything, because how did she know I was going to be good for her or honest or anything. Yet every day she came home from the doctor, and she went danned near every day, and she had all this talk to tell me about how he knew seemingly everything."

James Purdy

-6-

"Well, is this here doctor a spiritualist or something, I said one day when I was tired of hearing about how he knew everything.

"'Fairfield, Fairfield,' she said weary-like, reaching for her earrings on the lamp stand--she took on and off her earrings all the time as she was so nervous from trying to quit drinking. 'Oh dear,' she said. 'You know what kind of doctor he is without my telling you.'

"He sounds like one of those spiritualists, Madame Sobey,' I persisted.

"Please, can't you say Madge,' she begged.

"'My doctor thinks you're prejudiced against white women,' she said suddenly, and I wanted to laugh out loud but I kept on sitting there just as though I couldn't care less about everything.

"II told him I just didn't think so,' she added, 'x kind of crafty, and awfully weak-sounding, I thought.

"Oh, I don't know what I'm prejudiced against, I said, *kittling duxy crafty* right back at her, and I laughed and let her see all my teeth then because she did compliment me more on my teeth than on almost anything else. She saw my teeth and smiled.

"'Fairfield, I appreciate you I bet more than anybody else ever has,' she said finally.

"Thank you, Madge, I told her.

"'You're a fine boy,' she said in a voice as sad as at a funeral.

"I wish I knew what I was going to do, though, I told her.

"'Oh Fairfield,' Madame Sobey said. 'You know you always have a house here. I wish you wouldn't act as though you were--well, as though you had to leave.'

"I thanked her with my teeth again, and she said, 'Don't leave!' She acted very upset. 'I'm used to you, Fairfield, and I want you to stay.'

James Purdy

-9-

"But by the next afternoon she was sobered up enough to go back to her doctor (though she always had to drink some more to get there) and hear how he knew everything she had been doing anyhow, and that encouraged her to go home, talk to me, and start her life all over again from there.

"After I made her her cake or Danish bread in the evening, she would eat just a little to be polite, and then she would always _always_ say, 'I bet you think I'm prejudiced against you, don't you?'

"What for? I always said.

"Well, I think you think I am," she said.

"Everybody's prejudiced, I told her.

"Not me," she said.

"Well, I bet I am, then, I laughed.

"I don't like me, is that it?" she said suspiciously. She had begun on the bourbon now, and was pretty well through her second installment of that.

"Why don't you drink with me," she said. "Is that _your_ prejudice?"

"Uh-huh, I giggled.

"Nobody will drink with me," she confided.

"I know," she went on, "I may not be promising now, but people have treated me awful bad. Nobody would ever know I was a white woman if they read my life story."

"Well, you're rich anyhow, I told her. You've got _that_!"

"Rich," she coughed out the word. "You're rich!"

"I laughed: What am I rich _in_? Outside of being _black_, all of a sudden I had said _that_ without even knowing I was going to.

James Purdy

-11-

"Oh I did laugh on that, an artificial head. I kept laughing at that, and all of a sudden she had thrown the bottle right at my mouth. It knocked out two teeth. I was too surprised to be mad."

"I went right into her bathroom and looked at the damage. Them too teeth were completely out."

"She came running after me still holding her drink and asking me to forgive her."

"I'll call a doctor," she said.

"Huh-huh, I said. He would recognize you from the newspapers."

"Don't be mean," she cried.

"I'm not mean: I'm bleeding."

"She patted my cheek. Come into the front room, please, when you've got yourself doctored up."

"She went out and I could hear her after a while crying in the front room."

"All banged up as I was, I couldn't help feeling sorry for old Madame Sobey."

"I went back on in and I was thinking that in a way it was true what she said, that everybody had everything but her. She was a woman who had a good deal and she wasn't really old or ugly, she just never felt satisfied. There was hardly a moment of the day when she was ever satisfied with anything or anybody."

most

"And there are people, you know, whom just maybe one hour or one half an hour or maybe only five minutes feel some tiny little bit of satisfaction, but Madame Sobey told me herself, both drunk and sober, that she never felt any least teeny bit of satisfaction, and she felt, she said, like every damned thing in the world had been permanently screwed for her, like it had all been planned before she even got here. And so she never slept unless she took drugs and she said even they made her have all-night nightmares."

James Purdy

-12-

"That is why sometimes I am almost sorry I left her, and run off. I think she really meant what she said about me staying with her to the very end dear heart. But being she was a white woman, I couldn't tell.

"Anyhow that was a phrase I have often thought of since working for all the various and sundry people I have worked for, and I don't think she really did care about me being colored. But she bustled so many of my teeth and she hurt my head so much throwing bottles, and then she was just like a tiger, even when she didn't keep bothering me with her kissing and hugging, she just looked at me like a big old hungry tiger and when she wasn't doing that, she was talking all night about what a big old criminal her husband was, and what a big old tart he had got married to, and I honestly felt more sorry for her than almost any human being I have ever seen or talked to.

"But nobody can live with a tiger or spiders, either. And sometimes it seems to me that the spiders were the chief reason for me leaving her big old beautiful house. Every time I see a spider or hear about one, I bet I see and hear something different from anything anybody else does.