Tales of Desire

by Tennessee Williams

  “Just lemme git all this straight. You are my secret daddy? And my mom, she’s also a secret named—”

  “A young lady named Sue Coffin who died at your birth, Clove.”

  “Geez, this is heavy, but when you say you’ll make it worth my while, I reckon that I can handle it for you okay. Now you stay in here, rest on that bed there, and I’ll fetch a couple of doubles. I’ll be right out and then we can git it together in more detail, Daddy.”

  As the door opened briefly for Clove’s kitchen errand, Stephen heard from near, but as if from far, the doorbell ringing again.

  “Never had such a hangover, wow …” he murmured to himself, falsely, as he removed the paisley silk robe and toppled onto the bed.

  Easily an hour had passed by the time Stephen emerged gradually and uncertainly from his bedroom in which he had ingested easily three and probably more Bloody Marys, fetched him by the Ganymede younger sibling of Nat Webster’s adolescent bride from the Arkansas Ozarks.

  He did not begin to know what faced him in the living room: he knew only that the entire complement of his colleagues in the Wall Street law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe were there assembled, each with his respective spouse.

  “Well. I want you to know—” he heard himself saying, in a slow and slurred voice as he joined the abruptly hushed assemblage.

  Nat Webster, the old hound dog, was first to speak up.

  “I don’t much think you want us to know a goddamn thing which we don’t know already.”

  “I want you to know I passed out in the bedroom and I don’t know how it happened.”

  Nat Webster was on his feet.

  “If you’ll drop by the office tomorrow about noon, I think your official paper of resignation from the firm will be ready for signature. Is that understood, Ashe?”

  Then he marched to the door, calling back “Come on, Maude!”

  Maude bestowed a sisterly kiss on Stephen’s blanched cheek as she responded languidly to this summons. Then she lisped loudly and sweetly,

  “Thanks for putting up Clove, so much better for him than life at the ‘Y.’”

  “Maude!” shouted Nat Webster from the door.

  She blew a kiss at the lingering guests and undulated into the hallway.

  Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe were all on their feet now and their wives, conferring together in whispers, were getting into their furs. Clove had now entered. He closed the fly of his jeans with a loud zip.

  Smythe was last to leave the Sunday brunch. He came up close to Stephen, still standing stunned in the living room center, and delivered these comforting words.

  “Too bad, boy, you had to blow it like this.”

  His butt-pat, which followed, was of a fondly valedictory nature.

  Vertigo took sudden hold of Stephen, he tottered in several directions, but finally fell backwards into the arms of Clove.

  “Bed, bed, before Mom,” he heard himself imploring before it all went black.

  It could not be said that Stephen emerged altogether from black when he recovered consciousness in his elegantly appointed bachelor bedroom. However the black was not total, unrelieved black, although the room was not lighted by the least lingering vestige of daylight through his dormer windows. Day had withdrawn as completely, and, to Stephen, as precipitately as had his future association with the law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe. Still, as the pupils of his eyes expanded, he could detect those sometimes-comforting little irregular glimmerings of light on the river East, which the windows of the bedroom overlooked, as well as the more assertive challenges to dark that were offered by city-bound Sunday night traffic on the Triboro Bridge.

  “Jesus K. Morris BROTHERS!”

  This extraordinary exclamation was not provoked by a reassessment of his future with Wall Street and its legal aspects but by a very precisely located physical sensation, one bitch of a pain where he had never experienced one before.

  Hard upon this outcry of distress, Stephen heard from the hallway (thank God the door was closed) the voice of his nearest and dearest still living relative, none other than his mother, her voice, yes, but not at all under its usual cool restraint.

  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 unshtrung, 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 I’ll 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—re-lashuns!”

  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 protects on the agenda, which had to involve them jointly during their visit with Mom at the Golden Shores.

  “I 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-it!” 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 in-fawms 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 [PUB. 1978]

  Tennessee Williams

  “Williams had several very different fictional modes—the nostalgic, the naturalistic, the comic, and the fantastic. Yet each is underpinned by the same piercing psychology, compassion, and black humor that marked his best theatrical work.” —Robert Phillips, Commonweal

  “The stories are, by turns, disturbing, moving and funny; and they help amplify Williams’s tragic vision, for like the plays, they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the human heart. Nearly all the people in these stories belo
ng to that same gallery of the dispossessed that Williams delineated with such fierce eloquence and compassion in his plays.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) wrote as if his life depended on it. During his long career as twentieth-century America’s most distinguished and successful playwright, Williams wrote one-acts, stories, sketches—some of which would ultimately become the great plays The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (to name just three). Four volumes of stories were combined after his death into the monumental Collected Stories (1985). Some of these stories told of a secret life that, at the time, could only be hinted at in the plays; five of those stories are given in this volume.

  The New Directions Pearls

  Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende

  Javier Marías, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

  Yukio Mishima, Patriotism

  Tennessee Williams, Tales of Desire

  Copyright © 1948, 1954, 1978 by the University of the South

  Copyright © 1985 by Gore Vidal

  Copyright © 2010 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  These stories are taken from Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories, published clothbound by New Directions in 1985 and as New Directions Paperbook 784 in 1994. Tales of Desire is published by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a Pearl (NDP1166) by New Directions in 2010

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Design by Erik Rieselbach