Tales of Desire (New Directions Pearls) by Tennessee Williams

Author:Tennessee Williams [Williams, Tennessee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1856-6
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2010-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

Hard Candy

ONCE UPON A TIME in a southern seaport of America there was a seventy-year-old retired merchant named Mr. Krupper, a man of gross and unattractive appearance and with no close family connections. He had been the owner of a small sweetshop, which he had sold out years before to a distant and much younger cousin with whose parents, no longer living, he had emigrated to America fifty-some years ago. But Mr. Krupper had not altogether relinquished his hold on the shop and this was a matter of grave dissatisfaction to the distant cousin and his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter, whom Mr. Krupper, with an old man’s interminable affection for a worn-out joke, still invariably addressed and referred to as “The Complete Little Citizen of the World,” a title invented for her by the cousin himself when she was a child of five and when her trend to obesity was not so serious a matter as it now appeared. Now it sounded like a malicious jibe to the cousins, although Mr. Krupper always said it with a benevolent air, “How is the complete little citizen of the world today?” as he gave her a quick little pat on the cheek or the shoulder, and the child would answer, “Drop dead!” which the old man never heard, for his high blood pressure gave him a continual singing in the ears which drowned out all remarks that were not shouted at him. At least he seemed not to hear it, but one could not be sure about Mr. Krupper. The degree of his simplicity was hard to determine.

Sick old people live at varying distances from the world. Sometimes they seem to be a thousand miles out on some invisible sea with the sails set in an opposite direction, and nothing on shore seems to reach them, but then, at another time, the slightest gesture or faintest whisper will reach them. But dislike and even hatred seems to be something to which they develop a lack of sensibility with age. It seems to come as naturally as the coarsening of the skin itself. And Mr. Krupper showed no sign of being aware of how deeply his cousins detested his morning calls at the shop. The family of three would retire to the rooms behind the shop when they saw him coming, unless they happened to be detained by customers, but the old man would wait patiently until one of them was forced to reappear. “Don’t hurry, I have got nothing but time,” he used to say. He never left without scooping up a fistful of hard candies which he kept in a paper bag in his pocket. This was the little custom which the cousins found most exasperating of all, but they could do nothing about it.

It was this way: the little shop had maintained itself so poorly since the cousins took over that they had never been able to produce more than the interest on the final payment that was due to Mr.

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