“The White Blackbird”
by
James Purdy
EVEN BEFORE I REACHED my one hundredth birthday, I had made several wills, and yet just before I put down my signature
Delia Mattlock
my hand refused to form the letters. My attorney was in despair. I had outlived everyone and there was only one person to whom I could bequeath much, my young godson, and he was not yet twenty-one.
I am putting all this down more to explain the course of events to myself than to leave this as a document to posterity, for as I say, outside of my godson, Clyde Furness, even my lifelong servants have departed this life.
The reason I could not sign my name then is simply this: piece by piece my family jewels have been disappearing over the last few years, and today as I near my one hundred years all of these precious heirlooms one by one have vanished into thin air.
I blamed myself at first, for even as a young girl I used to misplace articles, to the great sorrow of my mother. My great grandmother’s gold thimble is an example. You would lose your head if it wasn’t tied on, Mother would joke rather sourly. I lost my graduation watch, I lost my diamond engagement ring, and, if I had not taken the vow never to remove it, my wedding ring to Will Mattlock would have also taken flight. I will never remove it and will go to my grave wearing it.
But to return to the jewels. They go back in my family over two hundred years, and yes, piece by piece, as I say, they have been disappearing. Take my emerald necklace — its loss nearly finished me. But what of my diamond earrings, the lavaliere over a century old, my ruby earrings — oh, why mention them? For to mention them is like a stab in the heart.
I could tell no one for fear they would think I had lost my wits, and then they would blame the servants, who were I knew blameless, such perfect, even holy, caretakers of me and mine.
But there came the day when I felt I must at least hint to my godson that my jewels were all by now unaccounted for. I hesitated weeks, months before telling him.
About Clyde now. His Uncle Enos told me many times that it was his heartbroken conviction that Clyde was somewhat retarded. “Spends all his time in the forest,” Enos went on, “failed every grade in school, couldn’t add up a column of figures or do his multiplication tables.”
“Utter rot and nonsense,” I told Enos. “Clyde is bright as a silver dollar. I have taught him all he needs to know, and I never had to teach him twice because he has a splendid memory. In fact, Enos, he is becoming my memory.”
Then of course Enos had to die. Only sixty, went off like a puff of smoke while reading the weekly racing news.
So then there was only Clyde and me. We played cards, chess, and then one day he caught sight of my old Ouija board.
I went over to where he was looking at it. That was when I knew I would tell him — of the jewels vanishing, of course.
Who else was there? Yet Clyde is a boy, I thought, forgetting he was now twenty, for he looked only fourteen to my eyes.
“Put the Ouija board down for a while,” I asked him. “I have something to tell you, Clyde.”
He sat down and looked at me out of his handsome hazel eyes.
I think he already knew what I was to say.
But I got out the words.
“My heirloom jewels, Clyde, have been taken.” My voice sounded far away and more like Uncle Enos’s than mine.
“All, Delia?” Clyde whispered, staring still sideways at the Ouija board.
“All, all. One by one over the past three years they have been slipping away. I have almost wondered sometimes if there are spirits, Clyde.”
He shook his head.
That was the beginning of even greater closeness between us.
I had given out, at last, my secret. He had accepted it; we were, I saw, like confederates, though we were innocent, of course, of wrongdoing ourselves. We shared secretly the wrongdoing of someone else.
Or was it wrongdoing, I wondered. Perhaps the disappearance of the jewels could be understood as the work of some blind power.
But what kind?
My grandfather had a great wine cellar. I had never cared for wine, but in the long winter evenings I finally suggested to Clyde we might try one of the cellar wines.
He did not seem very taken with the idea, for which I was glad, but he obeyed docilely, went down the interminable steps of the cellar and brought back a dusty bottle.
It was a red wine.
We neither of us relished it, though I had had it chilled in a bucket of ice, but you see it was the ceremony we both liked. We had to be doing something as we shared the secret.
There were cards, dominoes, pachisi and finally, alas, the Ouija board, with which we had no luck at all. It sat wordless and morose under our touch.
Often as we sat at cards, I would blurt out some thoughtless remark: once I said, “If we only knew what was before us!”
Either Clyde did not hear or he pretended I had not spoken.
There was only one subject between us. The missing jewels. And yet I always felt it was wrong to burden a young man with such a loss. But then I gradually saw that we were close, very close. I realized that he had something for me that could only be called love. Uncle Enos was gone, Clyde had never known either mother or father. I was his all, he was my all. The jewels in the end meant nothing to me. A topic for us — no more.
I had been the despair of my mother because, as she said, I cared little for real property, farmlands, mansions, not even dresses. Certainly not jewels.
“You will be a wealthy woman one day,” mother said, “and yet look at you, you care evidently for nothing this world has to offer.” My two husbands must have felt this also. Poring over their ledgers at night, they would often look up and say, “Delia, you don’t care if the store keeps or not, do you?”
“You will be a wealthy woman in time, if only by reason of your jewels,” my mother’s words of long ago began to echo in my mind when I no longer had them.
My real wealth was in Clyde. At times when I would put my hand through his long chestnut hair a shiver would run through his entire body.
He suffered from a peculiar kind of headache followed by partial deafness, and he told me the only thing that helped the pain was when I would pull tightly on his curls.
“Pull away, Delia,” he would encourage me. How it quickened the pulse when he called me by my first name.
Yes, we came to share everything after I told him without warning that bitter cold afternoon.
“Clyde, listen patiently. I have only my wedding ring now to my name.”
I loved the beautiful expression in his hazel eyes and in the large, almost fierce black pupils as he stared at me.
“Do you miss Uncle Enos?” I wondered later that day when we were together.
“No,” he said in a sharp loud voice.
I was both glad and sad because of the remark. Why I felt both things I don’t exactly know. I guess it was his honesty.
He was honest like a pane of the finest window glass. I loved his openness. Oh, how I trusted him. And that trust was never betrayed.
I saw at last there was someone I loved. And my love was as pure as his honesty was perfect.
My secret had given us a bond one to the other.
(Read the rest of James Purdy’s “The White Blackbird” in the Fall 1990 issue of Conjunctions).
Biblioklept 