The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  SERIES EDITORS

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1941–1951 Herschel Bricknell

  1954–1959 Paul Engle

  1960 Mary Stegner

  1961–1966 Richard Poirier

  1967–1996 William Abrahams

  1997–2002 Larry Dark

  2003– Laura Furman

  PAST JURORS

  Louise Erdrich, Thom Jones, David Foster Wallace

  Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody

  Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, Lorrie Moore

  Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, George Saunders

  Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Mona Simpson

  Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead

  David Guterson, Diane Johnson, Jennifer Egan

  The Series Editor wishes to thank Sue Batterton, Rebecca Bengal,

  Peter Short, and Susan Williamson for their help and good company during

  our long talks about short stories, and the staff of Anchor Books.

  To JWB, SCFB, and KS, thank you for your love at home. LF

  Note to the Reader: As of this collection, The O. Henry Prize Stories will be

  published in January rather than October. The present collection was chosen

  from stories published in 2003. The next collection, The O. Henry

  Prize Stories 2006, will be selected from stories published in 2004.

  Publisher's Note

  MANY READERS have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even those back for a second, third, or fourth look. One can say “Gift of the Magi” in conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It's hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

  O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. He wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. O. Henry spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and lived his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origins of his pen name vary; it may have dated from his Austin days, when he was known to call the wandering family cat, “Oh! Henry!” or been inspired by the captain of the guard in the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

  Porter had devoted friends in New York, and it's not hard to see why. He was charming and courteous and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of fifteen dollars (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” The banker was unavailable most of Porter's life. His sense of humor was always with him.

  Reportedly, Porter's last words were from a popular song, “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  Eight years after O. Henry's death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Hotel Biltmore in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”

  Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984–1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997 The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback.

  Over the years, the rules and methods of selection have varied. As of 2003, the series editor chooses twenty short stories, each one an O. Henry Prize Story. All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration.

  Three jurors are appointed annually. The jurors receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form, with no identification of author or publication. Each judge, acting independently, chooses a short story of special interest and merit, and comments on that story.

  The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

  To Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

  WITHOUT CHEKHOV, many of us wouldn’t read or write stories as we do, for he showed us that the precise and subtle evocation of a moment can express a character's whole life. Even those who have not yet read him experience Chekhov through other writers who love him and learned from him. Writers as different from one another as Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, and V. S. Pritchett echo Chekhov's sensibility and timing.

  Tolstoy said: “In Chekhov, everything is real to the verge of illusion.” “The Black Monk,” which Chekhov wrote two years before his death, exemplifies Tolstoy's uncanny remark. Kovrin, a brilliant young scholar who suffers from nerves, retreats to the childhood home where he was raised by Pesotsky, a horticulturist with a remarkable garden. Kovrin soon has a vision of a black-robed monk who pronounces him a genius, set apart from all men. Encouraged by this apparition, Kovrin falls in love with Tanya Pesotskaya, his guardian's daughter, and they marry. All seems well—until Tanya overhears Kovrin talking with the invisible monk and persuades her husband that he's mad. Pesotsky eventually loses his masterpiece of a garden; Tanya loses her father and comes to hate her husband; and Kovrin himself, ceasing to see the monk, becomes an embittered mediocrity. As Kovrin is dying of tuberculosis, the black monk reappears, and Kovrin recalls the summer and the beautiful garden where he first saw the monk and fell in love with Tanya. He “feels a boundless, inexpressible happiness,” convinced once more, as the monk whispers, that he is a genius. In that moment of contradiction, of madness and belief, Chekhov reveals Kovrin's plight.

  With its hero's grandiose hallucinations, the rise and fall of young love, the loss of a beloved parent, and the destruction of dreams of greatness— Pesotsky's and Kovrin's both—“The Black Monk” has the scope of a novel. No one is blameless and no one can be blamed, but this is not casual relativism; it is a cool-eyed vision of how our entanglements can become a strangulation.

  Although symptoms of the tuberculosis that eventually killed Chekhov appeared earlier, his first serious, and public, hemorrhage occurred in 1884, when he was twenty-four. From then on, he could no longer deny that he was ill with a disease for which there was plenty of treatment but no cure. He told Gorky, “Living with the idea that one must die is far from pleasant, but living and knowing that one will die before one's time is utterly ridiculous.”

  A man who spends half his life dying lives in another country, and must watch the healthy and the ill, wastrels and paragons of virtue, with a certain dispassion. It is his almost unnerving combination of remoteness and intimacy, and a controlled depth of emotion, that makes Chekhov indispensable for readers and writers of the short story. He died on July 2, 1904, at a German resort where he went in a last attempt to relieve his illness. One hundred ye
ars later, The O. Henry Prize Stories celebrates Anton Chekhov's art.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  MUDLAVIA

  Elizabeth Stuckey-French, The Atlantic Monthly

  THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD

  Kevin Brockmeier, The New Yorker

  THE GOLDEN ERA OF HEARTBREAK

  Michael Parker, The Oxford American

  THE HURT MAN

  Wendell Berry, The Hudson Review

  THE TUTOR

  Nell Freudenberger, Granta

  FANTASY FOR ELEVEN FINGERS

  Ben Fountain, Southwest Review

  THE HIGH DIVIDE

  Charles D Ambrosio, The New Yorker

  DESOLATION

  Gail Jones, The Kenyon Review

  A RICH MAN

  Edward P. Jones, The New Yorker

  DUES

  Dale Peck, The Threepenny Review

  SPECKLE TROUT

  Ron Rash, The Kenyon Review

  SPHINXES

  Timothy Crouse, Zoetrope

  GRACE

  Paula Fox, Harper's Magazine

  SNOWBOUND

  Liza Ward, The Georgia Review

  TEA

  Nancy Reisman, Michigan Quarterly Review

  CHRISTIE

  Caitlin Macy The New Yorker

  REFUGE IN LONDON

  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Zoetrope

  THE DROWNED WOMAN

  Frances de Pontes Peebles, Indiana Review

  THE CARD TRICK

  Tessa Hadley, The New Yorker

  WHAT YOU PAWN I WILL REDEEM

  Sherman Alexie, The New Yorker

  READING THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2005

  The Jurors on Their Favorites Cristina García on “Refuge in London” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Ann Patchett on “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie Richard Russo on “Mudlavia” by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

  WRITING THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2005

  The Authors on Their Work

  Recommended Stories

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  IN THE work of Anton Chekhov, to whom The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 is dedicated, one feels a force as powerful as a hurricane moving toward his characters. His knowledge from a young age that he had a terminal illness may account for some of this, but he was also sensitive to the gathering political storm in Russia. The 1905 revolution broke out within six months of his death. Writers and other artists respond to the same political and societal pressures as everybody else. Some explicitly use a political figure or an overwhelming event such as the Vietnam War in their art. Others are engaged by the public tensions of their time without any direct reference to current events.

  The twenty writers of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 live all over our planet—a family farm in Kentucky, the city of Perth in Western Australia, urban Florida. Their stories are set in India, Paris, London, Brazil, and New York, also possibly in heaven. Whatever their origin, whatever their private or public inspiration, our Prize Stories are all preoccupied with notions of community. The relationship between individual and society is usually portrayed as a struggle—think of the destruction of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. In these O. Henry stories, community and individual appear most often not in opposition but in some kind of disintegrating relation.

  Among the New York City characters of “Dues,” nothing is forgiven, neither a minor crime of property nor a love affair that won’t quite die. Dale Peck sprinkles his story with doubles and dualities from the deuce of the title on, but all the odd couples are joined when an ironic community arises from disaster. Another New Yorker, in Paula Fox's “Grace,” is opaque to his fellow office-workers and too obdurate for love. It's not because he's in New York that John Hillman is isolated but because he's himself. In the New York of Caitlin Macy's tale of real estate and social distinction, “Christie,” well-being is defined by living at the right address, even having the right doorman. The fun of the story is that we root for the narrator's happiness though we know, and hope she knows, that it's unattainable.

  Happiness, almost an ecstasy, radiates from Sherman Alexie's “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” a tall tale of an unnamed Spokane Indian's circular attempts, during a drunken twenty-four-hour odyssey to repossess his grandmother's regalia. In the course of his hero's haphazard encounters, Alexie creates a community of people who, without expecting much, receive, and sometimes give, great gifts.

  Kevin Brockmeier's “The Brief History of the Dead” is set in a heavenlike yet down-to-earth city of the dead where acceptance is the norm, a city whose inhabitants are linked by the beat of a communal heart, the “pulse of those who are still alive.” The absence of hostility among the city's dead citizens marks the afterlife as an almost enviable place to live.

  Port William, the setting of Wendell Berry's “The Hurt Man,” is a river town, unplanned and apparently ungoverned, “the sort of place that pretentious or ambitious people were inclined to leave.” Berry's is a story about learning from those we live with, told by five-year-old Mat Feltner, who's still wearing dresses and isn’t sure if he’ll be a boy or a girl, though he's taken a step toward masculinity by learning to smoke cigars and chew coffee beans. He comes to understand that in the best communities we inherit one another's stories and are sometimes remembered by them.

  The love triangle in Timothy Crouse's “Sphinxes” begins with piano lessons and completes itself in tragedy. The reader witnesses lovers wrenching apart, friendships dissolving, and the death of a child. Where once there was a sweet group—a family, three friends—by the end there are only individuals suffering separately. In another love story, Michael Parker's “The Golden Era of Heartbreak,” the narrator is a runner pursuing respite from his baroquely relentless misery. He seems like the loneliest man on earth, but when he finds himself with company, his misfortune only increases.

  Lillian in Nancy Reisman's “Tea” has an unusual and satisfying life. Single, Jewish, she's made a bold peace with her late-1920s community and with her sensuality by sleeping with the men she wants to and allowing herself no emotional involvements. Then she embarks on a new affair, and what begins with desire grows more treacherous. In Gail Jones's “Desolation,” an accidental intimacy in Paris between a desperate man and a distant woman affords little comfort to either of them. The story captures both the loneliness and serendipitous companionship of solitary travel.

  Three of the Prize Stories draw on history. In Elizabeth Stuckey-Frenchs “Mudlavia,” a community of early twentieth-century health seekers offers an alternative to a boy's unhappy home life; that the alternative has its own flaws makes it no less important to his future. At the center of Ben Fountain's “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers” is a rare piece of music that only a talented pianist born with an eleventh finger can play. It is an emblem for what happens to twentieth-century European Jewish life. In Liza Ward's “Snowbound,” the young narrator, trapped in a Midwestern blizzard, lightens her loneliness by imagining a long-ago storm that isolated her frontier ancestors.

  Exile creates new forms of community. The narrator of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's “Refuge in London” grows up in a London boardinghouse full of “European émigrés, all of them… carrying a past, a country or countries—a continent.” Her involvement with a once-famous artist and his rebellious wife affirms the lifeline that making art can be. In Nell Freuden-berger's “The Tutor,” set in Bombay, a young Indian man, altered by his student years in America, meets an American girl who has grown up in a series of foreign cities; she needs his help to be admitted to an American college. Rather as a surgeon might explore a wound, Freudenberger considers what belonging to a community means for each character.

  In Tessa Hadley's “The Card Trick,” Gina is an awkward teenager who's ashamed of herself and her background. She visits a beloved writer's house, now a museum, expecting to find herself as much at home as sh
e is in the writer's work; instead she's alienated by the décor and its bourgeois comfort. Years later, her adolescent awkwardness seemingly behind her, Gina returns to the house, and her new reading of it pulls the story to its moving conclusion.

  In Charles D’Ambrosio's “The High Divide,” Ignatius Loyola Banner is a loner: his mother is dead, his father mad, and he lives in a Catholic orphanage. He befriends a boy who seems to be his opposite—he has a beautiful mother and a father who “rakes it in”—but a camping trip in the Olympic Mountains reveals that where family trouble is concerned, says Ignatius with wisdom and forgiveness, “there are millions of us everywhere.” Too much togetherness and easy community demand a high price in Edward P. Jones's “A Rich Man.” A recent widower, Horace Perkins finds a bright life with a new group of friends, until, overcome by locusts in the form of women, drugs, drink, and his own weaknesses, Horace is so alone that he must ask in the end: “How does a man start from scratch?”

  The startling beauty of the North Carolinian setting of Ron Rash's “Speckle Trout” distracts the reader at first from the corruption at work in Lanny the young and bored protagonist, and his rural community. When Lanny steals marijuana plants from an inaccessible plantation, he courts disaster and achieves it. Lanny knows the water and the mountains, the meaning of the sky and the local plants, but he is incapable of using his knowledge for his own good.

  When her cousin runs in from the beach with the startling announcement that the body of a drowned woman has washed ashore, the narrator of Frances de Pontes Peebles's “The Drowned Woman” comments: “My father would have never allowed Dorany into the dining room like that under normal circumstances.” Yet in her family there are no normal circumstances. None of the relationships are what they appear to be, and the truths that emerge shatter their small community.