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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Hold on, I said. What do you mean, Dotty Wasserman? She ’s a

  character in a book. She ’s not even a person.

  O.K., he said. Then why Vesey Street? What ’s that?

  Well, it ’s nothing special. I used to be in love with a guy who was a shrub buyer. Vesey Street was the downtown garden center of the city

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  when the city still had wonderful centers of commerce. I used to walk the kids there when they were little carriage babies half asleep, maybe take the ferry to Hoboken. Years later I’d bike down there Sundays, ride round and round. I even saw him about three times.

  No kidding, said my husband. How come I don’t know the guy?

  Ugh, the stupidity of the beloved. It ’s you, I said. Anyway, what ’s this baloney about you and Dotty Wasserman?

  Nothing much. She was this crazy kid who hung around the bars.

  But she didn’t drink. Really it was for the men, you know. Neither did I—drink too much, I mean. I was just hoping to get laid once in a while or maybe meet someone and fall madly in love.

  He is that romantic. Sometimes I wonder if loving me in this homey life in middle age with two sets of bedroom slippers, one a skin of sandal for summer and the other pair lined with cozy sheepskin—it must be a disappointing experience for him.

  He made a polite bridge over my conjectures. He said, She was also this funny mother in the park, years later, when we were all doing that municipal politics and I was married to Josephine. Dotty and I were both delegates to that famous Kansas City National Meeting of Town Meetings. NMTM. Remember? Some woman.

  No, I said, that ’s not true. She was made up, just plain invented in the late fifties.

  Oh, he said, then it was after that. I must have met her afterward.

  He is stubborn, so I dropped the subject and went to get the groceries. Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.

  Walking along the street, encountering no neighbor, I hummed a

  little up-and-down tune and continued jostling time with the help of my nice reconnoitering brain. Here I was, experiencing the old earth of Vesey Street, breathing in and out with more attention to the process than is usual in the late morning—all because of love, probably. How interesting the way it glides to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths. By God, I thought, the lover is real. The heart of the lover continues; it has been propagandized from birth.

  I passed our local bookstore, which was doing well, with The Joy of

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  All Sex underpinning its prosperity. The owner gave me, a dependable customer of poorly advertised books, an affectionate smile. He was a great success. (He didn’t know that three years later his rent would be tripled, he would become a sad failure, and the landlord, feeling himself brilliant, an outwitting entrepreneur, a star in the microeconomic heavens, would be the famous success.)

  From half a block away I could see the kale in the grocer’s bin, crumbles of ice shining the dark leaves. In interior counterview I imagined my husband ’s north-country fields, the late-autumn frost in the curly green. I began to mumble a new poem:

  In the grocer’s bin, the green kale shines

  in the north country it stands

  / sweet with frost

  dark and curly in a garden of tan hay

  and light white snow . . .

  Light white . . . I said that a couple of questioning times. Suddenly my outside eyes saw a fine-looking woman named Margaret, who hadn’t spoken to me in two years. We ’d had many years of political agreement before some matters relating to the Soviet Union separated us. In the angry months during which we were both right in many ways, she took away with her to her political position and daily friendship my own best friend, Louise—my lifelong park, P.T.A., and antiwar-movement sister, Louise.

  In a hazy litter of love and leafy green vegetables I saw Margaret ’s good face, and before I remembered our serious difference, I smiled. At the same moment, she knew me and smiled. So foolish is the true lover when responded to that I took her hand as we passed, bent to it, pressed it to my cheek, and touched it with my lips.

  I described all this to my husband at suppertime. Well of course, he said. Don’t you know? The smile was for Margaret but really you do miss Louise a lot and the kiss was for Louise. We both said, Ah! Then we talked over the way the SALT treaty looked more like a floor than

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  a ceiling, read a poem written by one of his daughters, looked at a TV

  show telling the destruction of the European textile industry, and then made love.

  In the morning he said, You’re some lover, you know. He said, You really are. You remind me a lot of Dotty Wasserman.

  a r o s e f o r e m i l y

  w i l l i a m fa u l k n e r

  I

  When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her

  funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a

  fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

  It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily light-some style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss

  Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

  Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894

  when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business,

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  preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

  When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became may-

  ors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction.

  On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff ’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

  They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A depu-

  tation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon port
rait of Miss Emily’s father.

  They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a

  thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plump-ness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

  She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

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  Her voice was dry and cold. “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”

  “But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn’t you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?”

  “I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. “Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.”

  “But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the—”

  “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”

  “But, Miss Emily—”

  “See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost

  ten years.) “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!” The Negro appeared.

  “Show these gentlemen out.”

  I I

  So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man—a young man then—going in and out with a market basket.

  “Just as if a man—any man—could keep a kitchen properly,” the

  ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

  A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens,

  eighty years old.

  “But what will you have me do about it, madam?” he said.

  “Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. “Isn’t there a

  law?”

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  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said. “It ’s probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”

  The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who

  came in diffident deprecation. “We really must do something about it, Judge. I’d be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we ’ve got to do something.” That night the Board of Aldermen met—three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

  “It ’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her place

  cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don’t . . .”

  “Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

  So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s

  lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

  That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. Peo-

  ple in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long

  thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

  When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was

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  left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

  The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

  We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.

  We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

  I I I

  She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.

  The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father’s death they began the work. The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee—a big, dark, ready man, with a

  big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town.

  Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square,

  Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

  At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, “Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of

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  a Northerner, a day laborer.” But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige—without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, “Poor Emily.

  Her kinsfolk should come to her.” She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

  And as soon as the old people said, “Poor Emily,” the whispering

  began. “Do you suppose it ’s really so?” they said to one another. “Of course it is. What else could . . .” This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift
clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed:

  “Poor Emily.”

  She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she

  was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say “Poor Emily,” and while the two female cousins were visiting her.

  “I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look. “I want some poison,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recom—”

  “I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”

  The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up to an ele-

  phant. But what you want is—”

  “Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. “Is that a good one?”

  “Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want—”

  “I want arsenic.”

  The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. “Why, of course,” the druggist said. “If that ’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.”

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  Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn’t come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”

  I V

  So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself ”; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry him.” Then we said, “She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, “Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.