The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “We dove into the water,” the student said, “my friend and I. We dove and then we swam until we found a plank to hang on to. After a while we were picked up by another lifeboat. By then the Southern Cross was near us, so we rowed there. And then we got too close to the back of that …”

  As his voice trailed away, Duncan, who had moved closer, said, “That wasn’t the boat …?”

  The young man nodded, looking over at Axel and Duncan, then down at the deck, as if embarrassed that others had already heard the story and that some had seen the boat overturned.

  “My friend,” he said. “My friend—by the time the crew from the Southern Cross reached us, he was gone.”

  How could anyone be so unlucky? Not one but two lifeboats wrecked beneath him, his friend by his side through the torpedoing, through the first lifeboat’s destruction, only to be lost. Sam closed his eyes. The ship rolled beneath him, a long, slow movement that made him dizzy. A hand touched his: Axel?

  Bessie, Sam saw, when he opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “The whiskey,” Sam said faintly.

  “Let me get you some water,” she said, burrowing through the crowd. Duncan came up on Sam’s other side and poked his shoulder. Jovially, stupidly, looking exactly the same as he had all week—the new supplies had meant nothing to him—he said, “Too much to drink?”

  Where had Axel gone?

  Duncan stopped smiling. “You don’t look very well.”

  “Now you worry about me?” Sam said.

  An odd look crossed Duncan’s face. “What went on at the congress—that’s work. I don’t agree with your work; I want it buried. Doesn’t mean I want you buried. Until you came over the side of this ship, when I thought you might have drowned, I felt—”

  “Oh, please,” Sam said.

  “You’re impossible,” said Duncan. He pushed past Sam and toward Harold and George. Then, finally, Axel reappeared, his face concerned and his hand stretched toward Sam.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s all right. It wasn’t as bad as all that.”

  “What wasn’t?” Sam asked stupidly.

  “When our boat overturned, under the stern of the Southern Cross—I saw you turn pale when that young man was speaking, the one we’d pulled from the water earlier, with his friend. I knew you must be thinking of me, what had happened to me and how much worse it might have been. But it wasn’t so terrible, not really. I was in the water for a while but I didn’t know I was hurt, I couldn’t even feel the gash on my head. And I had an oar to cling to, and it wasn’t too long before the crewmen from the Southern Cross found me and got me aboard. And then once I got here, and Duncan tracked me down, he arranged everything. You mustn’t worry so about me.”

  How was he only now learning for sure what had happened to Axel? If they’d had time alone together, if they’d been able to talk … why hadn’t Axel ever come to him? That night on the water, he’d scanned every boat they approached for Axel’s face. Then, it hadn’t mattered that they very seldom saw each other, that since Sam’s time in Russia—no, before that, even—since Axel’s marriage, perhaps, or since Sam had lost that first job and Axel hadn’t been able to help him, they had drifted apart. He’d come to the meeting in Edinburgh hoping to repair this, tracking Axel through the corridors and cocktail parties like a devoted beagle, but although they’d had pleasant moments and caught each other up on the trivia of their lives, they’d never had the one, real, deep conversation Sam had been missing for so many years. And when Duncan attacked him so vigorously, Axel had not defended him. He hadn’t supported Duncan—but he had not, in public, stood up for Sam. Instead, afterward, he’d pulled Sam toward a bench beneath a holly tree and questioned him closely about his results. Then he said—Sam felt this simultaneously as a blessing and a dismissal—that the work itself seemed promising. But why, Axel scolded, would he expose it to the world at such an early stage! If he would only stop speculating in public …

  “That’s what happened to you?” Sam said now. “That night in the boat?” It wasn’t so much what changed in the environment that altered a living organism; it was the when. A question of timing. When in the course of development does the event arrive that initiates the cascade of changes? “That’s what happened?” he repeated.

  “You knew that,” Axel said. “Didn’t you? I assumed …”

  That Duncan had told him, Sam understood. That Duncan had relayed to him whatever Axel, stretched out on his berth, the bandage stuck to his oozing wound, had said. Axel must have told the story of his night on the water to Duncan, who lay on the floor in the place where Sam should have been. Perhaps he’d also relied on Duncan for whatever image he had of Sam’s own night; he’d never asked Sam. “Duncan,” Sam said feebly.

  “I know,” Axel said. “Really, I do know—he can be so exasperating sometimes, he probably told you more than he should have, he’s always too dramatic. And he forgets how attached we are. I don’t think it even occurred to him that you might be upset by hearing that something bad happened to me. Any more than he seemed to understand, in Edinburgh, how much he’d hurt me by attacking you.”

  Sam stared at him blankly. “But Duncan,” he said, “the way you are with him …”

  “I do the best I can,” Axel said. “You must have found yourself in similar situations with students. You know how sometimes you have to treat the one you actually feel least close to as the favorite, just so he won’t lose confidence entirely?”

  “I do,” Sam said miserably. Not that he’d ever felt treated as a favorite, but he knew what Axel meant: he’d always acted more kindly toward Sam than he really felt, so that Sam wouldn’t be too crushed to go on.

  “I’ve always had to do that with Duncan,” Axel said. His bandage, unpleasantly stained, had shifted farther back on his head. “I still do, I find, in certain situations. And here—what could I do? He wanted so badly to take care of me.”

  “You gave him his start,” Sam said, not knowing what he meant.

  “It’s a good thing I can count on you to understand,” Axel said. “You’re strong enough to go your own way. That’s part of what gets you into such trouble. And part of why your work is so interesting.”

  The next morning, still a day and a half out from Halifax, Axel and five other passengers were transferred to one of the cutters, which had excellent hospital facilities. The wound on his head wasn’t healing properly; the coast guard doctor wanted to debride and resuture it without further delay. Sam, left behind with Duncan and Harold and George, could do nothing but wave goodbye and hope that they’d find each other later.

  At the docks, a huge crowd greeted them, Red Cross nurses and immigration officials, family members of some of the survivors, local citizens who wanted to help, reporters from various papers: they were big news. Theirs had been the first ship sunk and theirs the first Canadian and American casualties; when the torpedo struck the Athenia, not even half a day had passed since Britain and Germany had gone to war. Nurses moved in to tend to the wounded; volunteers brought coffee and sandwiches; officials herded them into the immigration quarters, where they arranged baths and offered clean clothes. Scores of reporters moved in as well, eager for stories—what had they seen, what had they felt?—and then all the passengers began to talk at once, a hopeless tangle.

  How could Sam be surprised when Duncan stepped forward? Of course it was Duncan who, never having set foot on the Athenia, still somehow managed to simplify, generalize, organize the scattered impressions. The reporters turned toward him, relaxing, already making notes: so much easier to follow his linear narrative, spangled with brief portraits of the survivors and vivid details of the crossing! He’d listened closely, Sam saw, to accounts of what he hadn’t experienced himself. Bits of Axel’s story flashed by, along with elements of the art student’s, the plant physiologist’s, Bessie’s, and more. Bessie looked startled, as did some of the others, but what Duncan recounted wasn’t untrue; it just didn
’t match much of what Sam felt, or what he knew to be important. If Duncan were to tell the story of Sam’s working life it would, he knew, be similarly skewed—yet who knew him better than Duncan? Who had been with him for as much of the way?

  Only Axel, who, leaving the City of Flint for the cutter, had held his hand to his stained bandage, looked crossly at the doctor, and said, “Really, I’m fine. I don’t know why you want to move me like this. I’d rather stay here with my friends.” And then had gestured toward Duncan and Sam, on either side of him.

  Reading The O. Henry

  Prize Stories 2013

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Our jurors read the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories in a blind manuscript. Each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors don’t consult the series editor or one another. Although they write their essays without knowledge of authors’ names, the names may be inserted into the essay later for the sake of clarity.

  —LF

  Lauren Groff on “Your Duck Is My Duck” by Deborah Eisenberg

  A short story, done right, is a ferocious creature: razor-toothed and bristling and deceptively small for all its power. Think wolverine. Think barracuda. A reader, finding herself alone in a room with a great short story, should feel thrilled, unbalanced, alive.

  Such intensity is not for everyone; readers, we are told, have a hard time with short stories, preferring the long slow waltz of novels to the story’s grapple and throw. A writer of stories will be told this a hundred times, by publishing houses and book clubs and friends and even family members who are a little bit abashed that they haven’t read the writer’s own stories. It’s okay, we say, and shrug, because for the most part we are meek people who have a horror of unwritten confrontations, and only later do we shuffle off to our little word-hovels and weep.

  Any fierce lover and defender of the story form should take such statements personally. Frankly, it is not okay. One: the story is not a lesser form. It is merely a smaller form. Two: since when are readers some monolithic block of zombies who have no say in what they like? Maybe readers simply haven’t been exposed to the story geniuses rampant on the earth these days, people like George Saunders and Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and—cripes almighty!—William Trevor.

  Or, for that matter, Deborah Eisenberg, whose “Your Duck Is My Duck” was a fever dream from which, a dozen reads later, I have yet to awaken. We judges are given the twenty stories in this anthology to read blind, which means we read the stories without the authors’ names attached. But if you love short stories passionately, you read them passionately and in great quantities, and if you read them passionately and in great quantities, you begin to be able to see the individual writer’s imprint on her story from her very first words. It was impossible to read “The Summer People,” and not know that it was a story by the astounding Kelly Link, or to read “The Particles,” and not know that the author was Andrea Barrett, who so often electrifies science in her fiction, or to read “Leaving Maverley,” and not understand that the sharp sentences and elegant timeline could only have come from Alice Munro. There were a few among my favorites that I didn’t identify immediately, the moving and memorable “The History of Girls,” “Two Opinions,” and “Pérou,” by Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Joan Silber, and Lily Tuck, respectively. When I first read the collection, I simply couldn’t choose from among the half-dozen stories that blew my mind. So I put the collection away. I went off to London. I locked the door of my subconscious and let the stories fight it out, a roomful of wolverines, all sleek and snarling and gorgeous.

  In the end, “Your Duck Is My Duck” is the one I saw when I opened the door again. It had stayed alive, and, by staying alive, it had changed me. The story bears Eisenberg’s signature from the first words, her brittle humor and world-weariness and the astounding grace of her lines. She writes: “Way back—oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties.” See what she does! I want to shout. See Deborah Eisenberg’s brilliance! Three words in, and our narrator is already contradicting herself; a few more, and we see her oddly self-puncturing bombast; then, boom, the final clause, like the punchline to a joke we won’t quite understand until the end of the piece. Already, we’ve been whipped like a top, and we’ll be jittery and teetering, just like the narrator, for the rest of the story.

  But what is most thrilling about “Your Duck Is My Duck,” what makes it so deeply “Eisenberg-y,” is how seductive and light the story feels for most of its gallop. Okeydoke, we think at first, this is a story about self-obsessed rich people, and for most writers, that would be enough. But Eisenberg is canny and wise, and we come to understand at the end how the story is about so much more, about everything, about the end of an empire and the obscenity of great wealth and millenarian anxieties and the insanity of creating art in the face of the horrors that Eisenberg hints are to come. This is the kind of work that is alive, and that, in turn, sparks other stories to life. This is art. This is the kind of story you want to press into the hands of short-story doubters, because it is its own best defense of its form.

  Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York. She is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton and the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize anthology and two editions of The Best American Short Stories. Her second novel, Arcadia, was published in 2012. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  Edith Pearlman on “The Summer People” by Kelly Link

  I have a taste for the inexplicable and the semisurreal, in literature and in life, and so I warned myself when I began reading these twenty stories (which turned out to be as masterful as expected) to be wary of indulging that taste. And two realistic stories did attract me. One is “Sugarcane” by Derek Palacio, whose protagonist, a doctor in post-Batista Cuba, is obsessed with sugar itself, which represents all that is sweet and rare and addictive and ultimately monotonous. The story is about abstractions like love, loyalty, and deception. It also reveals particulars of life on the island: the annual burning of sugarcane fields to chase out vermin, the saddling and calming of a mule, and a nearly fatal baby delivery, which, like the story containing it, lingers in the memory for a long time.

  In “The Visitor” by Asako Serizawa, set in Japan immediately after World War II, there are only two characters—a woman and a demobilized soldier—but the woman’s absent son, Yasushi, who fought alongside the visiting soldier, is also achingly present. Yasushi’s history seeps into the conversation and reminiscences and gives the story urgency. In seemingly straightforward sentences (with deft side metaphors, allusions, and unexpected adjectives) the story behaves like a scorched flower, slowly dropping its browned florets to reveal the next circle of unpleasant facts or perhaps fabrications or perhaps distortions, always deepening our sense of war’s corruption of its warriors. Another memorable tale.

  But in the end, despite these worthy temptations, I recognized as my favorite “The Summer People” by Kelly Link. Its setting is an unnamed semirural area of woods, waterfalls, pastures, meadows, and hollows where rich people have summer houses and the local population serves them. The teenaged heroine, Fran, abandoned by her mother, neglected by her father, laid low by the flu and dosing herself with NyQuil, feverishly takes care of summer houses and shops for summer people. She acquires a fascinated sidekick. Two unsupervised adolescents accomplishing adult tasks tickle our interest, especially Fran with her ungrammatical backwoods locutions; her kindness; the intelligence she isn’t sure she has. So far, so realistic.

  The particular summer people of the title, though, are not rich vacationers—they are a seldom-glimpsed crowd who live al
l year round in a house in the wooded mountain, where they make wind-up toys and other devices, and also dispense whiskey and medicine. They do need services, though, and they will not release whoever is currently taking care of them and their premises (the caretaker is Fran, just now). BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, warns a sign within the house.

  This is a fairy tale, except that no one is heroic or wise or cruel—not even Fran’s alcoholic father and his crooked cronies. There is trickery; there are spooky goings on; there’s a pair of magical binoculars. But be not too bold could be said by any anxious parent you know, and NyQuil can be bought in your local drugstore. These things anchor the fantastic to the real.

  Yes, a fairy tale. It supplies Whys, not Becauses; endings, not wrappings-up; and it dispenses with that sine qua non of realism, motivation. (Conversely, “Sugarcane” lets us in on the doctor’s need for sugar, “The Visit” the mother’s ambivalent search for truth). But “who knows what makes any of us do what we do?” the poet Amy Clampitt bravely wrote—an insight that writing workshops might keep in mind. Clampitt could have been referring to the characters in “The Summer People.” And who knows what made its writer create this tale? To gladden my heart, maybe.

  Edith Pearlman’s short stories have appeared in many prize anthologies, and in 2011, she was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction, honoring her four collections of stories: Vaquita, Love Among the Greats, How To Fall, and Binocular Vision, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, the Story Prize, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the Boston Authors Club, as well as the Edward Lewis Wallant Award given by the University of Hartford. Edith Pearlman lives in Massachusetts.