On the day the magazine was supposed to be on the stands, he rushed, heart pounding, to the newspaper shop on Sixth Avenue and Twelfth that carried most of the major American literary magazines, pulled the issue of PR from the rack, opened it to the table of contents, and found his name was not there. Then turning the pages one by one, he found that not only was his story not there, but neither was there any breath of him.
Maybe he was mistaken; maybe he had come on the wrong day. Maybe the delivery truck had got stuck in New Jersey. Maybe he had picked up an old issue. He scrutinized the magazine again: Winter, 1965—the date was right. He went up to the shop owner perched on a high stool, better to see who was pilfering the magazines or reading them from cover to cover and call out, “This is not a library!” He asked the man if this was the most recent issue of Partisan Review, and it was, having arrived that morning in DeBoer’s truck, along with bundles of other quarterlies that in not too many months would be riding back on that same truck—bound in stacks, magazines no one would ever read.
He took a day to compose himself, to find the right tone before phoning the editor. Should he be casual? “Hi, I just happened to pick up a copy of PR and noticed that my story isn’t there.” Or very casual? “I was browsing through a rack of magazines and remembered that there was supposed to be a story of mine in the recent issue but it doesn’t seem to be there, so I wondered if I had the pub date wrong.”
With the distinguished editor’s letter in hand—typed and signed and with the praising addendum, “Bravo,” he finally got the courage to call. The phone rang a long time. He hung up and tried again, getting an annoyed, don’t-bother-us busy signal. He considered walking over to the office but then imagined how embarrassed he would be, asking: “Excuse me, but I was wondering whatever happened to my story?” Maybe Edmund Wilson would be there behind a desk with a martini in each fist, or maybe the critics Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald would be hanging out at the water cooler arguing over the respective merits of Dreiser and Trotsky. What would they make of him and the unimportant matter of his story?
Months earlier, he had written the editor thanking him and now he wrote him again: “Might I expect to see my story in the next issue?” To be sure his letter would not go astray, he mailed it at the post office on Fourteenth and Avenue A. And for the next two weeks, he rushed home every day after work to check his mailbox but found no response, just bills and flyers from the supermarket. He knew no one to ask, having no one in his circle remotely connected to PR or to any of its writers. For those at the White Horse he was their ticket to the larger world.
The news that his story had not appeared quickly got around. His colleagues at the Welfare Department—avant-garde filmmakers, artists without galleries, and waiting-to-be-published poets and novelists—where he was an investigator since graduating from City College in ’63, gave him sly, sympathetic looks. “That’s a tough break,” a poet in his unit said, letting drop that he had just gotten a poem accepted in The Hudson Review.
His failure made him want to slink away from his desk the instant he sat down. It was painful enough that he had to go to work there, as it was, it made him queasy the moment he got to East 112th and saw the beige, concrete hulk of the Welfare Department with its grimy windows and its clients lining up—eviction notices, termination of utilities letters in hand. His supervisor, who had been at the Welfare Department ever since the Great Depression and who now was unemployable elsewhere, tried to console him, saying he was lucky to be on a secure job track and with a job where he could meet so many different kinds of people with a range of stories, some of which could find their way into his books.
But he didn’t need stories. What he needed was the time to tell them. And he had worked out a system to do that. He rose at five, made fresh coffee or drank what was left from the day before, cut two thick slices from a loaf of dark rye, which he bought at that place on Eighth off Second Avenue that sold great day-old bread at half price, and had his breakfast.
Sometimes he would shower after breakfast. But the bathtub in the kitchen had no shower, so he had to use a handheld sprinkler that left a dispiriting wet mess on the linoleum floor, which added cleanup time to the shower itself. Thus, he had a good excuse to cut down on the showers and to use that time at his desk to write.
Usually, by 5:45 a.m., he was dressed and at his desk, the kitchen table he made from crate wood that almost broke the saw in the cutting. He sat at his typewriter for two hours and no matter what resulted from it he did not leave the table. At 7:45 he was at the crosstown bus stop on Tenth and Avenue D and if all went well he was at the Astor Place station before 8:15 and, if all still went well, he would catch the local and transfer for the express at Fourteenth, get off at Ninety-Sixth Street and take another local to 114th. Then he’d race to clock in—usually a minute or two before nine. It was not good to be late by even a minute. He was still a provisional and had to make a good impression on Human Resources.
When he got upstairs to his desk and had joined his unit, he’d look over the list of calls to see if any were urgent. They were all urgent: Someone never got her check because the mailbox had been broken into. Someone was pregnant again. Someone needed more blankets. Someone had had just enough and jumped off the roof on 116th and Park Avenue—her children were at her grandmother’s.
Today, he finished all his desk work and phone calls by noon and clocked out for lunch, which he decided to skip. Instead, he finished four field visits very quickly, with just enough time to solicit the information needed to file his reports. He had looked forward all morning to his final, special visit.
He was alarmed when he saw a cop car parked in front of her building. An ambulance, too, with its back doors wide open. He was worried that something bad had happened to her, blind and alone. But the medics were bringing a man down in a stretcher. He was in his eighties, drunk and laughing. The cop spotted his black field book and came over asking, “Is he one of yours?”
“Not mine,” he said.
“Maybe not even God’s,” the cop said. “His girlfriend shot him in the hand,” he added. “Jealousy, at that age!” He laughed. As he was being lifted into the ambulance, the wounded man laughed and said, “Hey! Take me back. I haven’t finished my homework.”
He rang her doorbell only once before he heard footsteps and then the “Who is it?”
“Investigator,” he answered. She opened the door, smiling. She wore white gloves worn at the tips and a long blue dress that smelled of clothes ripening in an airless closet. Her arm extended, her hand brushing along the wall, she led him through a narrow, unlit hall. From her file, which he had reviewed that morning for this visit, he knew it was her birthday. She was eighty-five.
“It’s your birthday,” he said.
She laughed. “Is that so! I guess I forgot,” saying it in a way that meant she hadn’t. “I have tea ready,” she said.
She poured tea from a porcelain teapot blooming with pink roses on a white sky. Its lip was chipped and stained brown, but the cups and sugar bowl that matched the teapot were flawless and looked newly washed. So, too, the creamy-white oilcloth that bounced a dull light into his eyes. It was hot in the kitchen; the oven was on with the door open, though he had told her several times how dangerous that could be. A fat roach, drunk from the heat, made a jagged journey along the sink wall.
“Do you need anything today?” he asked. “Maybe something special?” He wanted to add, “for your birthday,” but he did not want to press the obvious point. He could put in for a clothes or blanket supplement for her, deep winter was days away. Or a portable electric heater she could carry from one room to another, so she would not have to use the stove. But how would she locate the electric sockets? “Oh! Nothing at all,” she said, as if surprised by the question. “Thank you, but what would I need?”
Not to be blind, he thought. Not to be old. Not to be poor. “Well, if anything comes to mind, just call me at the office,” he said, remembering that she
had no phone.
“Well,” she said shyly. “If you have time, would you read me that poem again?”
She already had the book in hand before he could answer, “I’m very glad to.”
She had bookmarked the Longfellow poem he had read to her in his previous visits. He read slowly, with a gravity that he thought gave weight to the lines. He paused briefly to see her expression, which remained fixed, serene.
When he finished, she asked him to repeat the opening stanza. “ ‘Tell me not, in mournful numbers, / Life is but an empty dream! / For the soul is dead that slumbers, / And things are not what they seem. / Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal…’ ”
She thanked him and asked, “Do you like the poem?”
“Yes,” he said, to please her. But he disliked the poem because of what he thought as its cloying, sentimental uplift. He did not want to be sentimental, but he had to admit how much the lines had moved him anyway.
They sipped tea in silence. He did not like tea but accepted a second cup, commenting how perfectly she had brewed it. “Come anytime,” she said, “It’s always nicer to drink tea in company.”
She walked him to the door, picking up a cane along the way. He had never seen her use a cane before. He suddenly worried that should she fall and break her hip, alone in the apartment, she could not phone for help. He made a note in his black notebook to requisition a phone for her.
“The cane is very distinguished,” he said.
“It helps me hop along.” She smiled. “Thank you for reading to me. You have a pleasing voice, do you sing?”
“My voice is a deadly weapon,” he said, surprised by his unusual familiarity. “Birds fall from the sky on my first note.”
“Does it kill rats?” She laughed. “I hear families of them eating in the hall at night.”
He fled down the stairs, having once been caught between floors by three young men with kitchen knives who demanded his money, but when they saw his investigator’s black notebook they laughed and said they’d let him slide this time—everyone knew that investigators never carried cash in the field. He sped to the subway where he squeezed himself into a seat so tight that he could not retrieve his book, Malamud’s The Assistant, from his briefcase. He tried to imagine the book and where he had left off reading. It was about an old Jewish man who ran a failing grocery store and his assistant, a young gentile who lugged milk crates and did other small jobs and who stole from him. It was a depressing novel that pained him, but that had, for all its grimness, made him feel he had climbed out of the grocery store’s dank cellar and into a healthy sunlight.
The train halted three times. The fourth might be the one that got stuck in the blackness for hours and he thought to get off at the next station and take a bus or run home or, better, close his eyes and magically be there. But finally the train lurched ahead and when he exited at Astor Place, a lovely light early snow had powdered the subway steps. He waited for the bus.
He waited only eight minutes by his watch but it seemed an hour, two hours—that he had been waiting his whole life. Finally, he decided to walk and hope to catch the bus along its route. But he still did not see it by the time he got to First Avenue, so he decided to save the fare and walk the rest of the way home to Eighth between C and D. By Avenue A, it began to be slippery underfoot and the snow came down in fists. Now the thought of going home and leaving again in the snowy evening to travel all the way on the snail’s-pace bus to the White Horse Tavern for dinner seemed a weak idea. Anyway, he was still smarting from the bartender’s faraway look and the wisecracks from the bar regulars when he walked in. He decided to eat closer to home, a big late lunch that would keep him through the evening and keep him at home, writing.
Stanley’s on Twelfth and B was almost empty, the sawdust still virgin. It was still early and still quiet, with just a few old-timers, regulars from the neighborhood—the crowds his age came after eleven, when he would be in bed. He ordered a liverwurst sandwich on rye with raw onions and a bowl of rich mushroom soup, made in the matchbox kitchen by a Polish refugee from the Iron Curtain, an engineer who had to turn cook. A juniper berry topped the soup. That, the engineer told him, was the way you could tell it was authentically Polish. He always searched for the berry after that—like a pearl hiding in the fungus. Stanley, the owner, balder than the week before, brought him a draft beer without his asking. “It’s snowing hard,” he pronounced. “Should I salt the street now or later?” He did not wait for an answer and went back to the kitchen to shout at the cook in Polish.
He took two books from his briefcase, so that he could change the mood should he wish: Journey to the End of the Night—for the third time—and Under the Volcano, which he had underlined and made notes in the margins. “No one writes the sky as does Lowry, with its acid blues and clouds soaked in mescal.” He was proud of that note. One day he would write a book of just such notes. Note upon note building to a grand symphony. Then he voted against ever writing such a book, pretentious to its core—worse, it was facile, a cheat. He wanted to write the long narrative, with each sentence flowing seamlessly into another, each line with its own wisdom and mystery, each character a fascination, a novel that stirred and soared. But what was the point of that? What had become of his story?
A girl he liked came in with a tall man in a gray suit. She smiled a warm hello. He returned with a friendly wave and a smile that he had to force. Now he was distracted and pained and could not focus on reading his book or on his sandwich, which, anyway, was too heavy on the onion. He had met the girl at Stanley’s several times, never with a plan, although he had always hoped he would find her there; they talked without flirting, which he was not good at anyway, going directly to the heavy stuff of books and paintings.
The first time he saw her there months earlier, she was reading a paperback of Wallace Stevens poems. He imagined her sensitive, a poet maybe. She was from upstate, near the Finger Lakes with their vineyards and soft hills that misted at dawn and had the green look of Ireland. He had never been upstate or to Ireland. He had never been to Europe. She had been, several times, and had spent a Radcliffe year abroad in Paris, where she had sat at the Café de Flore educating herself after the boring lectures at the Sorbonne in the rue des Écoles. She had learned how to pace herself by ordering un grand café crème and then waiting two hours before ordering another, and then ordering a small bottle of Vichy water with un citron à côté. By then, she was more than twenty pages to the end of La nausée. What did he think of Sartre’s novel, she had asked him as if it were a test. He hated it, he said. It crushed him, written as if to prove how boring a novel could be.
“That’s smart,” she said. “If you were any more original you’d be an idiot.”
They kissed one evening under a green awning on Avenue A. He kissed hungrily, her lips opening him to a new life. After he had walked her to her doorway and gone home and got into his bed, he felt as if he just had been released from years in prison, the gates behind him shut, and “the trees were singing to him.” He did not have her phone number or her address and, over the next few weeks, when he went to Stanley’s hoping to find her she was not there.
He buried himself in the Céline and tried not to look at her. But then she was beside him. “Come over, I want you to meet someone,” she said, sweetly enough to almost make him forget that there was a someone he was supposed to meet.
“This is George,” she said, “my fiancé.” He extended his hand and George did the same, a hand that spoke of a law office or some wood-paneled place of business high up, far downtown, maybe in the Woolworth Building.
George asked him if he’d like a drink and, before he could answer, George called out to Stanley and ordered two double scotches, neat. “Johnny, Black Label,” he said. She was still on her house wine, white, from grapes in California, fermenting under a bright innocent sky. The drinks came. They had little to say to each other or, if they did, they said little. He made a toast:
“Best wishes for your happiness,” he said. Not much of a toast, not very original. It would take him a day to think of one better; under the circumstances, perhaps never. He looked at his watch and remembered he had to meet a friend for dinner across town: They all shook hands again, and he wished them both good luck. “You too, fella,” George said.
The snow fell in wet chunks that seemed aimed at him. When he got home, his head and jacket were wet and he had to brush off the snow married to his trousers. He was worried his jacket would not be dry by morning when he went to work, and he was on the second landing before he realized he had not checked the mail. He thought it was not worth the bother of going back and checking, but he could not stand the thought that he would be home all night wondering if PR had finally written him. There was a letter in the mailbox. But it was not from the magazine. But it was also not from Con Edison or Bell Telephone or Chemical Bank, announcing the fourteen dollars in his savings account. When he got to his apartment, he closed the door behind him with a heavy, leaden clunk and slid the iron pole of the police lock into place. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill,” he announced.
He noticed that his cactus was turning yellow. He had overwatered it, and now it was dreaming of deserts—the old country—as it died slowly, ostentatiously. He thought of getting a cat. It would be great to have company that would be the same as being alone. A black cat that would melt in the night when he slept. He picked up the letter cautiously when he saw there was no return address. It may have come from a disgruntled client who had wanted to spew hatred and threats. But it was not. The note was handwritten with lots of curls that announced Barnard or Sarah Lawrence or some grassy boarding school in Connecticut. “Sorry,” it said, “that your story did not appear in the new issue as you were led to expect. Do call, if you like.” There was a phone number, each digit inscribed as if chiseled in granite and the seven was crossed. For a moment he thought it a prank by one of the White Horse crowd, hoping he would call and find he had dialed a funeral parlor or a police station or a suspicious, jealous husband. But what if it was for real?
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 26