Straight Man

were full of stately Victorian and Edwardian homes—mansions, some of them—of which only a few remain, most of those in disrepair, on the street where my mother lives. The public gardens themselves no longer exist, having been converted back in the thirties to an amusement park, which itself flourished and then died in the late sixties. All that remains of it now is a condemned, rickety Ferris wheel, a vacant shell of a building that once housed the carousel, and the huge open-air pavilion where summer dances and concerts were held overlooking what was once a manmade lake and is now a muddy declivity. Despite its decay, the former public gardens/amusement park remains the most valuable real estate in the city, though for several decades it has been mired in litigation, a battle of greedy but otherwise disinterested out-of-state heirs.
    The houses on my mother’s street have all been divided into large, high-ceilinged, drafty, impossible-to-heat rental flats, most of which are owned by the same man, my mother’s landlord, Charles Purty, who has purchased them one by one, at fire sale prices, over a period of thirty years. The only house on the street he doesn’t own is a decrepit old brownstone purchased by the diocese for an all but extinct order of nuns—the Sisters of the Divine Heart.
    When I pull up in front of my mother’s flat, I notice that Mr. Purty, who lives next door, is setting up his monthly yard sale, which always runs from late Thursday afternoon to midday Sunday. He’s got about a dozen large, folding metal tables, and his tilting porch is stacked with cardboard boxes full of the junk he will set out on them. Mr. Purty is a world-class scavenger, and since he retired a couple years ago from selling discount furniture and appliances, turning the business over to a son who no longer allows him to set foot in the store, he’s divided his time between scouting garage and estate sales in remote corners of central Pennsylvania and courting my mother, who, at seventy-three (several years Mr. Purty’s senior), must remind him of all these elegant, impractical old houses he’s purchased over the years. My mother is proving more difficult to acquire. She gives him the time of day only when she needs to go somewhere (she no longer drives) and I’m unavailable to take her. Then she graciously allows Mr. Purty to chauffeur her about in his full-size pickup truck, a vehicle she despises because it’s hard for a small, modest woman like my mother to climb up into and because the seat is always lumpy with junk Mr. Purty’s bought at yard sales. My mother, a woman who never looks before she sits, hates being goosed, even by inanimate objects.
    But Mr. Purty is a patient man, and even now, with my father’s return imminent, he’s apparently content to wait for my mother to become available. He figures he’ll outlast her stubborn reservations about him. He thinks of them as reservations. I doubt that Mr. Purty, whom my mother suspects of being illiterate, knows the word
aversion
, which more precisely describes my mother’s feelings for her landlord.
    “Henry,” Mr. Purty hollers over when I get out of the car and wave. Henry is what my mother calls me, so of course it’s how Mr. Purty refers to me as well, though I’ve encouraged him to call meHank. “You look like you could use a pair of these,” he says when I’ve climbed his porch steps and we’ve shaken hands.
    He offers for my inspection a fake plastic nose, glasses, and a mustache. He’s right, too. I can imagine half a dozen uses. “How much do you want for them?” I ask.
    He waves off my offer of money. “Take ’em.”
    I put the nose and glasses in my pocket.
    “Aren’t you going to try them on?”
    I just grin at him.
    “I see your ma’s on the pop-ed page again,” Mr. Purty observes. He’s a man of few words, a startling percentage of them malapropisms. Lately, having amassed more money than he knows what to do with, he’s begun dabbling in stocks and mutual funds, a subject he imagines I, a professor, must know something about. He shares with me his misgivings about the market’s “fuctuations.” Mr. Purty wears a hearing aid, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that he’s been mishearing words and phrases all his life. My mother’s take is predictably less generous. She insists he’s never read a book in his life and therefore had no opportunity to compare the words he’s hearing with their representations on