The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy by James Purdy & John Waters

Author:James Purdy & John Waters
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Classics, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780871406699
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2013-07-21T23:00:00+00:00

RAPTURE

“Iwouldn’t have known you!” Mrs. Muir spoke to her brother.

“You’ve grown so tall, and you’re so deeply tanned. Oh, Kent, it’s really you, then?”

Kent put down his two valises, and kissed her dryly on the cheek.

“You haven’t changed much, though, Gladys. The same sweet smile, and sky-blue eyes.” He hugged her ever so gently then.

Kent was Gladys Muir’s half-brother. He had an extended furlough from the army, where he was stationed in West Germany. Before his assignment there he had been in the Middle East, and before that somewhere in the Pacific. But now, though still a young man, he was a few years over thirty, he was free from his military service at least for a while.

He had been given so long a furlough in order to see Mrs. Muir because the doctor had told him she was not expected to live for more than a few months at the most. Kent, as he studied his sister’s face, was not certain if she knew how serious her illness was, and how brief a time yet remained to her.

“Here is Brice,” Mrs. Muir said softly as her only son entered the front room of their Florida bungalow. “You’ve not seen him, Kent, since he was ten or eleven years old, have you?”

Kent stepped back a few inches when he set eyes on his nephew, and his right hand moved slightly upwards as it did when he saluted an enlisted man.

“Here he is at last, your Uncle Kent.” Mrs. Muir spoke to Brice as if her brother would not hear her prompting her son. Brice blushed a deep brick red, and looked away.

“Brice has so often spoken of you,” Gladys Muir went on. “He has collected all the snapshots of you, and keeps them over his dresser. Especially the photo of you coming out from swimming in the ocean somewhere. That seems to be his favorite of you.”

Brice turned his gaze to the patio outside, and colored even more violently. He was then just sixteen and was shy for his age.

“If Uncle Kent will excuse me, Mother, I have to practice my cornet. I have a lesson today,” Brice apologized. He almost bowed to his uncle as he left the room.

Mrs. Muir and her brother laughed in agreeable nervousness as the boy took leave of them.

“Brice wears his hair quite long, doesn’t he?” Ken remarked as they sat down, and began sipping some fresh lemonade.

Soon they could hear the cornet coming from the garage where Brice practiced.

“Say, he sounds like a real professional.”

“He plays with a very fine group of musicians,” Mrs. Muir said. “But after his father’s death, you see, he left school. That was two or three years ago. He has been working in a restaurant days. He gets up every morning before five o’clock.”

Her brother clicked his tongue.

Mrs. Muir observed then how very short Kent’s own hair was, though he wore rather long and well-defined sideburns which emphasized his deep-set green eyes.

“He does so much want to be a musician, Kent.

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