Charles Purty

Charles Purty is a retired discount-furniture and appliance seller, an indefatigable scavenger, and the next-door landlord courting Hank’s Mother. His hopeful pursuit is both earnest and badly matched to her inclinations: he imagines persistence will overcome her reservations, while the narrator understands that she feels something closer to aversion. When she reunites with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., Charles finally recognizes the limits of his courtship. His role joins gentle comic misjudgment to a more affecting portrait of a man who has waited for hope to become possible.

Identity and Habits

After retiring, Charles turned the furniture and appliance business over to a son who no longer allows him to set foot in the store. He fills the resulting time by scouting garage and estate sales in remote parts of central Pennsylvania. He also runs a monthly yard sale, from late Thursday afternoon to midday Sunday, setting out roughly a dozen folding metal tables beside cardboard boxes stacked on his tilting porch. His own house is crowded with salvage: when the narrator has seen it, the rooms have offered only narrow paths through things piled from floor to ceiling. Scavenging is not a passing hobby but the organizing work of his retired life.

Charles’s eye for useful or sellable things gives his encounters with the narrator their particular texture. He offers a fake plastic nose, glasses, and mustache, and the narrator can immediately imagine several uses for the disguise. Later, Charles’s purchase of a nearly new, bright-red pickup becomes the most visible token of his courtship. It has about fifteen thousand miles on it, a three-fifty engine, room for three in the front seat, and the capacity to tow a U-Haul. He is proud not only of its features but of having paid less than the sticker price. The vehicle advertises his pleasure in a bargain as plainly as it displays his hopes for his future with Hank’s Mother.

Courtship of Hank’s Mother

Charles pursues Hank’s Mother with patience, though his patience rests on a faulty reading of her feelings. He takes her places when she needs a ride and the narrator is unavailable; she no longer drives. She dislikes his full-size pickup because it is difficult for her to climb into and its seat is lumpy with yard-sale purchases. A woman who does not look before sitting, she particularly resents being goosed by objects. The narrator’s account makes the mismatch unmistakable: Charles is trying to court her with the very sort of vehicle that inconveniences her, and with the kind of clutter she dislikes.

Even so, Charles treats his pursuit as a matter of waiting out reservations. The narrator doubts that he knows the word aversion, a more accurate description of Hank’s Mother’s feelings toward her landlord. Charles has hoped to make her more receptive by offering an early look at the goods he saves for later in the weekend, even inviting her to choose something from his house. She shows little interest. He admits that he has romantic intentions, while insisting he would behave as a gentleman. His description of her as a “real aristocat” reveals how he turns her reserve into an image of elegance and status, rather than understanding it as a refusal of his advances.

The Narrator and the Courtship Rituals

Charles calls the narrator Henry, following Hank’s Mother’s practice, although the narrator has encouraged him to use Hank. Their conversations often give the narrator the role of adviser on how to approach her. Charles listens to warnings, including that she would have him arrested if he crossed a line, but the narrator sees that Charles mistakes the problem for one of technique. He believes a little adjustment will help; the narrator knows the distance between his own understanding of his mother and Charles’s is much larger than Charles imagines.

Music and food extend the courtship into everyday gestures. Charles has picked up a Patsy Cline tape for Hank’s Mother, while he prefers Willie Nelson; he asks whether the narrator’s father likes music and learns that he prefers silence. Charles then suggests breakfast at The Circle, despite the narrator having eaten several hours earlier and subsequently being sick. The narrator is hungry again, and Charles’s cheerful project of winning over Hank’s Mother with a pickup, a country-music tape, and a string of malapropisms helps him take the world less seriously despite its heartbreak. Charles also introduces him to scrapple, which proves better than its concept suggests. He assures the narrator that he would never ask Hank’s Mother to eat it, a small sign that his attention to her is not wholly oblivious, even when his larger hopes are misplaced.

Recognition and Aftermath

When William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s return is imminent, Charles is still apparently content to wait. His hope persists even after Hank’s Mother announces that the father is coming back. Later, the narrator encounters Charles beside a pickup towing a U-Haul. Charles is dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a western shirt; on closer inspection, he looks to the narrator like someone who has been stomped by a man wearing boots like his own. The description carries comic violence, but the evidence establishes an appearance, not an actual beating. Charles’s weary greeting and the U-Haul frame the end of his long effort.

Over scrapple and eggs, Charles explains that seeing Hank’s Mother and William Henry Devereaux, Sr. together finally made him understand who she was and why his courtship could not succeed. His phrase for them is that they are “two peas in a pop.” What her announcement alone had not made him accept, their reunion makes plain. Charles also says that William Henry Devereaux, Sr. was no help, though the narrator already knows his father’s limited history of practical labor; Charles asks why the older man cries like that. Before they part, Charles says he cannot believe the father has read every book in the house, because there are too many. The observation preserves Charles’s concrete, common-sense way of judging the world even as the reunion forces him to revise his judgment of his own prospects.