My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  The story seemed to me, this time through, to be about that miracle you come across every once in a long while: two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.

  Christianity, which in its beginning retained much of the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good, was slowly influenced by Neoplatonism, which held for a strict duality between the body and the spirit. Asceticism, abstinence, monas-ticism—you can blame it all on the Greeks. Nevertheless, if the stories in this collection provide any evidence, it ’s the renunciation of the body that distinguishes true love from any simulacrum. When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, real love shows its face. This seems to happen most often in old age, or as the result of a winnowing of ego. Born with desire, these stories say, we grow into love, and then only sometimes, and only if we ’re lucky.

  In Alice Munro’s magnificent “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,”

  the husband of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, after regret-fully relinquishing her to a nursing home, finds, on his subsequent visits, that she is slowly forgetting him and becoming involved with an elderly male patient. The husband responds to this death-in-life with an act of love that goes beyond the bounds of matrimony, approaching the selflessly divine. Deborah Eisenberg’s shatteringly beautiful and unerring

  “Some Other, Better Otto” suggests that, in moments of existential cri-

  Introduction

  xiii

  sis, the only lifeline remains the quotidian, humdrum, durable presence of that imperfect thing: one ’s life partner. Each of these two stories is nearly impossibly good. The complexity of the characterization alone is a marvel—Munro’s model husband was, it turns out, a serial philanderer some years back, and the irascible Otto of Eisenberg’s tale becomes, despite his scorched-earth policy relating to other human beings, a person of uncommon tenderness and philosophical insight, in the way depleted soil is enriched by burning. These two stories are the bleakest in the collection, too; they tiptoe right up to the abyss, Munro by unsentimentally describing the inevitable decay of the mind and body, Eisenberg by insisting on the absurd and pitiful insubstantiality, the puniness, of the self. And yet these are the stories in which love, to use an oldfashioned word, triumphs. To borrow from Raymond Carver, whose

  work is also included here: this is what we talk about when we talk about love. Not eros, maybe, when all is said and done. Closer to agape.

  Had Catullus written only those two opening poems about Lesbia’s

  sparrow, he might not be remembered today. Although they prefigured his own fraught relationship with his married woman, and although I find in them the poles around which all love stories revolve, there is a whole world of detail, particularity, and specificity in between. Read these stories, then, not to confirm the brutal realities of love, but to experience its many variegated, compensatory pleasures. From the bracing acerbities of Lorrie Moore ’s “How to Be an Other Woman” to the stark assess-ments of Richard Ford ’s “Fireworks” to Bernard Malamud ’s comic presentation of one very picky rabbi, the stories that made their way to me, by sometimes circuitous paths, never failed to be just the thing, after a long, unromantic day at my desk, that I most wanted to read.

  It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

  There ’s this thought, too. After Lesbia spurned him, what did Catullus do? Kill himself ? Drink to excess? No. Mostly, he wrote, and eulo-gized his friendships and his dead brother. He brought to his work the

  xiv

  Introduction

  same devotion he ’d once lavished in vain on Clodia. And he left behind his poems, which speak to the stories in this collection that burn, dazzle, delight, or sadden, depending.

  Passer pipiabat. Here ’s a loose translation: “Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all.”

  (Finally: As this book is a charitable undertaking, I ask the reader to be charitable toward its numerous and unavoidable omissions.)

  f i r s t l o v e a n d o t h e r s o r r o w s

  h a r o l d b r o d k e y

  Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.

  At the age when I was always being warned by my mother not to

  get overheated, spring began on that evening when I was first allowed to go outside after dinner and play kick-the-can. The ground would be moist, I’d manage to get muddy in spite of what seemed to me extreme precautions, my mother would call me home in the darkness, and when she saw me she would ask, “What have you done to yourself ?” “Nothing,” I’d say hopefully. But by the time I was sixteen, the moment when the year passed into spring, like so many other things, was less clear. In March and early April, track began, but indoors; mid-term exams came and went; the buds appeared on the maples, staining all their branches red; but it was still winter, and I found myself having feelings in class that were like long petitions for spring and all its works. And then one evening I was sitting at my desk doing my trigonometry and I heard my sister coming home from her office; I heard her high heels tapping on the sidewalk, and realized that, for the first time since fall, all the windows in the house were open. My sister was coming up the front walk. I looked down through a web of budding tree branches and called out to her that it was spring, by God. She shrugged—she was very handsome

  2

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  and she didn’t approve of me—and then she started up the front steps and vanished under the roof of the porch.

  I ran downstairs. “The bus was crowded tonight,” my sister said, hanging up her coat. “I could hardly breathe. This is such a warm dress.”

  “You need a new spring dress,” my mother said, her face lighting up.

  She was sitting in the living room with the evening paper on her lap.

  She and my sister spread the newspaper on the dining-room table to look at the ads.

  “We ’ll just have to settle for sandwiches tonight,” my mother said to me. My father was dead, and my mother pretended that now all the cooking was done for my masculine benefit. “Look! That suit ’s awfully smart!” she cried, peering at the paper. “Montaldo’s always has such nice suits.” She sighed and went out to the kitchen, leaving the swinging door open so she could talk to my sister. “Ninety dollars isn’t too much for a good suit, do you think?”

  “No,” my sister said. “I don’t think it ’s too much. But I don’t really want a suit this spring. I’d much rather have a sort of sky-blue dress—

  with a round neck that shows my shoulders a little bit. I don’t look good in suits. I’m not old enough.” She was twenty-two. “My face is too round,” she added, in a low voice.

  My mother said, “You’re not too young for a suit.” She also meant my sister was not too young to get married.

  My sister looked at me and said, “Mother, do you think he shaves

  often enough? How often do you shave?”

  “Every three days,” I said, flushing up my neck and cheeks.

  “Well, try it every other day.”

  “Yes, try to be neater,” my mother said. “I’m sure girls don’t like boys with fuzz on their chin.�
��

  “I think he ’s too proud of his beard to shave it,” my sister said, and giggled.

  “I feel sorry for the man who marries you,” I said. “Because everybody thinks you’re sweet and you’re not.”

  She smiled pityingly at me, and then she looked down over the newspaper again.

  *

  *

  *

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  3

  Until I was four, we lived in a large white frame house overlooking the Mississippi River, south of St. Louis. This house had, among other riches, a porte-cochere, an iron deer on the lawn, and a pond with goldfish swimming in it. Once, I asked my mother why we had left that earlier house, and she said, “We lost our money—that ’s why. Your father was a very trusting man,” she said. “He was always getting swindled.”

  She was not a mercenary woman, nor was she mean about money—

  except in spells that didn’t come often—but she believed that what we lost with the money was much of our dignity and much of our happiness. She did not want to see life in a grain of sand; she wanted to see it from the shores of the Riviera, wearing a white sharkskin dress.

  I will never forget her astonishment when she took us—she was

  dressed in her best furs, as a gesture, I suppose—to see the house that was to be our home from then on and I told her I liked it. It had nine rooms, a stained-glass window in the hall, and neighbors all up and down the block. She detested that house.

  As she grew older, she changed, she grew less imperious. She put

  her hair into a roll, wore dark-colored clothes, said often, “I’m not a young woman any more,” and began to take pride in being practical. But she remained determined; she had seen a world we didn’t remember too clearly, and she wanted us to make our way back to it. “I had it all,” she said once to my sister. “I was good-looking. We were rich. You have no idea what it was like. If I had died when I was thirty, I would have died completely happy. . . .”

  But being practical did not come easy to her. She was not practical in her bones, and every spring brings back the memory of my mother peering nearsightedly, with surprise, at the tulip shoots in her flower border. And it brings back her look of distraught efficiency during spring housecleaning. “You’d better clear your closet shelves tonight,”

  she would warn me, “because tomorrow Tillie and I are going in there with a vacuum cleaner, and we ’ll throw out everything we find.” Year after year, I would run upstairs to save my treasures—even when I was sixteen and on the verge of a great embarkation, the nature of which I could not even begin to guess. My treasures consisted of my postcard collection—twenty-five hundred cards in all, arranged alphabetically

  4

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  by states of the Union and countries of the world (the wonder was that I lived in St. Louis)—an old baseball glove, my leaf collection, two obscene comic books I had won in a poker game at a Boy Scout jam-boree, my marble collection, and thirty-five pages of secret thoughts written out in longhand. All these had to be taken out to the garage and hidden among the tools until the frenzy of cleaning was over and I could smuggle them back upstairs.

  After supper, as the season grew warmer, my mother and sister and I would sit on the screened porch in the rear of the house, marooned among the shadows and the new leaves and the odor of insect spray, the light from our lamps sticking to the trees like bits of yellow paper. Usually the radio was on, and my mother, a book on her lap, her face abstracted (she was usually bored; her life was moved mainly by the burning urge to rise once more along the thin edge of social distinction), would listen to the comedians and laugh. When the phone rang, she would get up and go into the house with long strides, and if the call was for my sister, my mother would call her to the phone in a voice mottled with triumph.

  Sometimes in the evening my mother would wash my sister’s hair.

  My sister would sit in front of the basin in Mother’s bathroom, a towel around her shoulders, smiling. From my room across the hall I would hear my sister chattering about the men she knew—the ones she dated, the ones she wanted to date, the ones she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. My mother would interrupt with accounts of her own cleverness, her sorties and successes when young, sometimes laughingly, but sometimes gloomily, because she regretted a lot of things. Then she and my sister would label my sister’s suitors: one or two had family, one had money, one—a poor boy—had a brilliant future, and there were a few docile, sweet ones who were simply fillers, who represented the additional number of dates that raised my sister to the rank of a very popular girl.

  In these conversations, my mother would often bring up matters of propriety. Late dates were improper, flirting with boys other than one ’s date, breaking dates. Then, too, she would try to instruct my sister in other matters, which had to do with keeping passion in its place and so preventing embarrassment for the boy and disaster for the girl. My

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  5

  sister would grow irritated. “I don’t know why you talk like that—I behave very well,” she would tell my mother. “Better than the other girls I know.” Her irritation would please my mother, who would smile and say that only good-looking girls could afford to be good, and then they would both laugh.

  I used to wonder why my mother didn’t take my sister’s success for granted. My sister was lovely, she had plenty of dates, the phone rang incessantly. Where was the danger? Why did she always lecture my

  sister?

  Once, my mother said my sister ought not to dance with too many

  boys or she would frighten off the more serious ones. My sister was getting dressed for the spring dance at the country club. Arrogant and slender, she glistened like a water nymph, among her froth of bottles and jars and filmy clothes. She became furious; she screamed that she liked to dance. I closed the door to my room, but I could still hear the two of them. “Don’t be so foolish,” my mother kept saying, over and over again. “Please don’t be foolish. . . .” Then my sister, on the verge of tears, said she just wanted to have a good time. My sister’s date arrived, and I went downstairs to let him in, and by the time I came back upstairs, the two of them were laughing. My mother said she was just trying to be helpful; after all, my sister was impractical and her looks wouldn’t last forever. My sister, as she opened the door of her room, said, under her breath, “They’ll last a lot longer yet.”

  I’ll never forget the wild rustling of her voluminous white skirt as she came down the hallway toward me. Her face was strangely still, as if seen by moonlight. Her hair was smooth and shining, her hands bent outward at the wrist, as if they were flowers. “How beautiful you look!”

  I cried. My sister smiled and then solemnly turned all the way around, and her huge skirt rose and fell like a splash of surf. She was so beautiful I could hardly bear it. I hugged her, and she laughed.

  Later that night I asked my mother why she got so distraught. Wasn’t my sister popular enough? My mother was sitting in the kitchen, in an old, faded yellow housecoat, drinking a glass of warm milk. “You don’t know anything about it,” she said, with such sadness that I rose from the table and fled to my room.

  6

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  “I know what I’m saying!” my mother would cry when she argued

  with my sister. “You must listen to me. People talk. . . . You don’t know who you’ll meet on a date; it ’s good to accept even if you don’t like the boy. . . . Girls have to be very careful. You’re thoughtless. Don’t you think in fifty years I’ve learned what makes the world go around? Now, listen to me. I know what I’m saying. . . .” But my sister’s face was so radiant, her charm was so intense, she pushed her blond hair back from her face with a gesture so quick, so certain, so arrogant and filled with vanity, that no one, I thought, could doubt that whatever she did would be right.

  I
wanted to be arrogant, too. I didn’t want to wear glasses and be one of the humorless, heavy-handed boys my sister despised. I was on her side as much as she ’d let me be. She was the elder, and she often grew impatient with me. I didn’t seem to understand all the things involved in being on her side.

  Night after night I saw her come home from work tired—she had

  a secretarial job in a hospital and she hated it—and two hours later she would descend the stairs, to greet her date, her face alight with seriousness or with a large, bright smile, depending on her mood or on where her escort was taking her that evening. A concert or an art movie made her serious; one of the hotel supper clubs brought the smile to her face.

  She would trip down the stairs in her high heels, a light, flimsy coat thrown over one arm, one hand clutching a purse and gloves, her other hand on the banister. In the queer yellow light of the hall chandelier, her necklace or her earrings would shine dully, and sometimes, especially if she was all dressed up, in a black dress, say, with a low neck, because they were going out to a supper club, there would be an air, in spite of her gaiety, of the captive about her. It was part of her intense charm. In her voluminous white skirt, she went to the spring dance at the country club and brought back to my mother the news that she had captured the interest of Sonny Bruster, the oldest son of M. F. Bruster, a banker and a very rich man—more than interest, it turned out, because he started calling my sister up almost every day at work and taking her out almost every night. My mother was on the phone much of the afternoon explaining to her friends that my sister wasn’t engaged. It was criminal the way some

  First Love and Other Sorrows