100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  So I took her to his office and w’ile I was waitin’ for her in the reception room, in come Julie Gregg. When somebody comes in Doc Stair’s office, they’s a bell that rings in his inside office so he can tell they’s somebody to see him.

  So he left my old lady inside and come out to the front office and that’s the first time him and Julie met and I guess it was what they call love at first sight. But it wasn’t fifty-fifty. This young fella was the slickest lookin’ fella she’d ever seen in this town and she went wild over him. To him she was just a young lady that wanted to see the doctor.

  She’d came on about the same business I had. Her mother had been doctorin’ for years with Doc Gamble and Doc Foote and without no results. So she’d heard they was a new doc in town and decided to give him a try. He promised to call and see her mother that same day.

  I said a minute ago that it was love at first sight on her part. I’m not only judgin’ by how she acted afterwards but how she looked at him that first day in his office. I ain’t no mind reader, but it was wrote all over her face that she was gone.

  Now Jim Kendall, besides bein’ a jokesmith and a pretty good drinker, well, Jim was quite a lady-killer. I guess he run pretty wild durin’ the time he was on the road for them Carterville people, and besides that, he’d had a couple little affairs of the heart right here in town. As I say, his wife could of divorced him, only she couldn’t.

  But Jim was like the majority of men, and women, too, I guess. He wanted what he couldn’t get. He wanted Julie Gregg and worked his head off tryin’ to land her. Only he’d of said bean instead of head.

  Well, Jim’s habits and his jokes didn’t appeal to Julie and of course he was a married man, so he didn’t have no more chance than, well, than a rabbit. That’s an expression of Jim’s himself. When somebody didn’t have no chance to get elected or somethin’, Jim would always say they didn’t have no more chance than a rabbit.

  He didn’t make no bones about how he felt. Right in here, more than once, in front of the whole crowd, he said he was stuck on Julie and anybody that could get her for him was welcome to his house and his wife and kids included. But she wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with him; wouldn’t even speak to him on the street. He finally seen he wasn’t gettin’ nowheres with his usual line so he decided to try the rough stuff. He went right up to her house one evenin’ and when she opened the door he forced his way in and grabbed her. But she broke loose and before he could stop her, she run in the next room and locked the door and phoned to Joe Barnes. Joe’s the marshal. Jim could hear who she was phonin’ to and he beat it before Joe got there.

  Joe was an old friend of Julie’s pa. Joe went to Jim the next day and told him what would happen if he ever done it again.

  I don’t know how the news of this little affair leaked out. Chances is that Joe Barnes told his wife and she told somebody else’s wife and they told their husband. Anyways, it did leak out and Hod Meyers had the nerve to kid Jim about it, right here in this shop. Jim didn’t deny nothin’ and kind of laughed it off and said for us all to wait; that lots of people had tried to make a monkey out of him, but he always got even.

  Meanw’ile everybody in town was wise to Julie’s bein’ wild mad over the Doc. I don’t suppose she had any idea how her face changed when him and her was together; of course she couldn’t of, or she’d of kept away from him. And she didn’t know that we was all noticin’ how many times she made excuses to go up to his office or pass it on the other side of the street and look up in his window to see if he was there. I felt sorry for her and so did most other people.

  Hod Meyers kept rubbin’ it into Jim about how the Doc had cut him out. Jim didn’t pay no attention to the kiddin’ and you could see he was plannin’ one of his jokes.

  One trick Jim had was the knack of changin’ his voice. He could make you think he was a girl talkin’ and he could mimic any man’s voice. To show you how good he was along this line, I’ll tell you the joke he played on me once.

  You know, in most towns of any size, when a man is dead and needs a shave, why the barber that shaves him soaks him five dollars for the job; that is, he don’t soak him, but whoever ordered the shave. I just charge three dollars because personally I don’t mind much shavin’ a dead person. They lay a whole lot stiller than live customers. The only thing is that you don’t feel like talkin’ to them and you get kind of lonesome.

  Well, about the coldest day we ever had here, two years ago last winter, the phone rung at the house w’ile I was home to dinner and I answered the phone and it was a woman’s voice and she said she was Mrs. John Scott and her husband was dead and would I come out and shave him.

  Old John had always been a good customer of mine. But they live seven miles out in the country, on the Streeter road. Still I didn’t see how I could say no.

  So I said I would be there, but would have to come in a jitney and it might cost three or four dollars besides the price of the shave. So she, or the voice, it said that was all right, so I got Frank Abbott to drive me out to the place and when I got there, who should open the door but old John himself! He wasn’t no more dead than, well, than a rabbit.

  It didn’t take no private detective to figure out who had played me this little joke. Nobody could of thought it up but Jim Kendall. He certainly was a card!

  I tell you this incident just to show you how he could disguise his voice and make you believe it was somebody else talkin’. I’d of swore it was Mrs. Scott had called me. Anyways, some woman.

  Well, Jim waited till he had Doc Stair’s voice down pat; then he went after revenge.

  He called Julie up on a night when he knew Doc was over in Carterville. She never questioned but what it was Doc’s voice. Jim said he must see her that night; he couldn’t wait no longer to tell her somethin’. She was all excited and told him to come to the house. But he said he was expectin’ an important long distance call and wouldn’t she please forget her manners for once and come to his office. He said they couldn’t nothin’ hurt her and nobody would see her and he just must talk to her a little w’ile. Well, poor Julie fell for it.

  Doc always keeps a night light in his office, so it looked to Julie like they was somebody there.

  Meanw’ile Jim Kendall had went to Wright’s poolroom, where they was a whole gang amusin’ themselves. The most of them had drank plenty of gin, and they was a rough bunch even when sober. They was always strong for Jim’s jokes and when he told them to come with him and see some fun they give up their card games and pool games and followed along.

  Doc’s office is on the second floor. Right outside his door they’s a flight of stairs leadin’ to the floor above. Jim and his gang hid in the dark behind these stairs.

  Well, Julie come up to Doc’s door and rung the bell and they was nothin’ doin’. She rung it again and she rung it seven or eight times. Then she tried the door and found it locked. Then Jim made some kind of noise and she heard it and waited a minute, and then she says, “Is that you, Ralph?” Ralph is Doc’s first name.

  They was no answer and it must of came to her all of a sudden that she’d been bunked. She pretty near fell downstairs and the whole gang after her. They chased her all the way home, hollerin’, “Is that you, Ralph?” and “Oh, Ralphie, dear, is that you?” Jim says he couldn’t holler it himself, as he was laughin’ too hard.

  Poor Julie! She didn’t show up here on Main Street for a long, long time afterward.

  And of course Jim and his gang told everybody in town, everybody but Doc Stair. They was scared to tell him, and he might of never knowed only for Paul Dickson. The poor cuckoo, as Jim called him, he was here in the shop one night when Jim was still gloatin’ yet over what he’d done to Julie. And Paul took in as much of it as he could understand and he run to Doc with the story.

  It’s a cinch Doc went up in the air and swore he’d make Jim suffer. But it was a kind of a delicate thing, because if it got out that he had beat Jim up, Julie was bound to hear of it and then she�
��d know that Doc knew and of course knowin’ that he knew would make it worse for her than ever. He was goin’ to do somethin’, but it took a lot of figurin’.

  Well, it was a couple days later when Jim was here in the shop again, and so was the cuckoo. Jim was goin’ duck-shootin’ the next day and had come in lookin’ for Hod Meyers to go with him. I happened to know that Hod had went over to Carterville and wouldn’t be home till the end of the week. So Jim said he hated to go alone and he guessed he would call it off. Then poor Paul spoke up and said if Jim would take him he would go along. Jim thought a w’ile and then he said, well, he guessed a half-wit was better than nothin’.

  I suppose he was plottin’ to get Paul out in the boat and play some joke on him, like pushin’ him in the water. Anyways, he said Paul could go. He asked him had he ever shot a duck and Paul said no, he’d never even had a gun in his hands. So Jim said he could set in the boat and watch him and if he behaved himself, he might lend him his gun for a couple of shots. They made a date to meet in the mornin’ and that’s the last I seen of Jim alive.

  Next mornin’, I hadn’t been open more than ten minutes when Doc Stair come in. He looked kind of nervous. He asked me had I seen Paul Dickson. I said no, but I knew where he was, out duck-shootin’ with Jim Kendall. So Doc says that’s what he had heard, and he couldn’t understand it because Paul had told him he wouldn’t never have no more to do with Jim as long as he lived.

  He said Paul had told him about the joke Jim had played on Julie. He said Paul had asked him what he thought of the joke and the Doc had told him that anybody that would do a thing like that ought not to be let live.

  I said it had been a kind of a raw thing, but Jim just couldn’t resist no kind of joke, no matter how raw. I said I thought he was all right at heart, but just bubblin’ over with mischief. Doc turned and walked out.

  At noon he got a phone call from old John Scott. The lake where Jim and Paul had went shootin’ is on John’s place. Paul had came runnin’ up to the house a few minutes before and said they’d been an accident. Jim had shot a few ducks and then give the gun to Paul and told him to try his luck. Paul hadn’t never handled a gun and he was nervous. He was shakin’ so hard that he couldn’t control the gun. He let fire and Jim sunk back in the boat, dead.

  Doc Stair, bein’ the coroner, jumped in Frank Abbott’s flivver and rushed out to Scott’s farm. Paul and old John was down on the shore of the lake. Paul had rowed the boat to shore, but they’d left the body in it, waitin’ for Doc to come.

  Doc examined the body and said they might as well fetch it back to town. They was no use leavin’ it there or callin’ a jury, as it was a plain case of accidental shootin’.

  Personally I wouldn’t never leave a person shoot a gun in the same boat I was in unless I was sure they knew somethin’ about guns. Jim was a sucker to leave a new beginner have his gun, let alone a half-wit. It probably served Jim right, what he got. But still we miss him round here. He certainly was a card!

  Comb it wet or dry?

  1930–1940

  In 1930, the same year that his wife died, series editor Edward O’Brien met Ruth Gorgel, a poor sixteen-year-old German girl. To the surprise and dismay of his family and friends, he married her soon after. They had two daughters, and O’Brien began to travel yet more in order to drum up work and money to support his growing family.

  He became a highly public figure, both in England, where he often hosted visiting Rhodes Scholars, and in the United States, where he traveled on grueling lecture tours. He once wrote to Ruth that he rarely had time to go to the bathroom or enjoy more than fifteen minutes to himself. He was treated like a celebrity and juggled dozens of interviews, lectures, and business lunches, sometimes daily. He was asked in one interview how he found the time to read so many stories. He replied that over time, his reading speed had increased. He also said, “You don’t have to swallow an oyster to know that it’s bad.”

  He continued to live in England, removed from the daily realities of the Depression. He hardly mentioned the dire situation in the United States in his forewords. He did take note, though, when sales of the series began to plummet. His Best American and Best British story volumes were combined in 1934 as a result of low sales of both. Smaller magazines began to go under. In the 1930s, just three weekly general-interest magazines maintained a circulation of over one million: The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Collier’s. But “glossy” magazines—especially women’s magazines, many of which featured fiction—held their ground.

  During the Depression, southern writing, often dark and agrarian, came to the fore. In 1931 O’Brien wrote, “The old pretentiousness is gone. The false sentiment is gone. The ‘hard-boiled mask’ is gone. The reader is now confronted with two or three people and a situation.” He went on: “The American scene is dusty and colorless. Its beauty and meaning depend on line and mass rather than on colour and decorative detail. The beauty of American life is not exterior. It is a hidden beauty which requires patient search to reward the finder.”

  Also during this time, stories became more political and socially conscious. Writers like Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, Meridel LeSueur, and John Steinbeck explored injustices associated with class, gender, and race. O’Brien did not hide his political preferences, at least when it came to short fiction. In 1935 he admitted, “During the past four or five years, it is on the left rather than on the right that I have found the most fruitful interpretation of American life by the short story writer.”

  Some critics continued to clamor for O’Brien to choose stories with more intrigue and plot. In 1936 he responded: “What I do object to is the short story that exists for the sake of the plot. The plot, after all, is merely a skeleton which the story clothes. The story which exists for the sake of the plot is merely a grinning and repulsive skeleton without flesh and blood.”

  One “small” magazine that was started during this time made a significant impact on the publishing world: Story. Martha Foley and her husband, Whit Burnett, founded the magazine while they were serving as foreign correspondents in Vienna. Foley wrote, “We did not plan to spend our lives at ephemeral day-to-day reporting. We wanted to produce literature.” Foley and Burnett’s first idea was to present Story as a catalogue of potential new writers for fiction editors. The first publication, sixty-seven mimeographed copies, opened with their statement of purpose: “[Story will] present short narratives of significance by no matter whom and coming from no matter where . . . [it will be] a sort of proof-book of hitherto unpublished manuscripts.” Foley and Burnett were soon flooded with submissions, and Story became a bona fide bimonthly magazine.

  O’Brien was a fan of Whit Burnett’s own fiction and was enthusiastic about Story right away. His support bolstered the magazine’s reputation and visibility. Random House contacted Foley and Burnett and offered to publish Story when the two returned to the United States. The new publishing house, primarily a reprint house at the time, drew a flood of new talent with the publication of Story. Foley and Burnett were the first to publish a number of writers who went on to achieve major success: Charles Bukowski, Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, and John Cheever, among others.

  In 1936 Story announced its plan to begin publishing longer stories, coining the English word novella: “We have gone somewhat far afield, and are bringing back the ancient and traditional Italian word novella for this neglected but highly important and eminently readable literary form.” There was and still is much disagreement over the “official” length of a novella. Stephen King once called the genre “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.”

  O’Brien visited Hollywood, where he met Edwin Knopf, the brother of Alfred Knopf, Romer’s American publisher. Edwin Knopf headed a major department at MGM, and after a luncheon party with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Greta Garbo, and two producers—“I think it was a psychological test to see how I would act”—Knopf offered O’B
rien work as MGM’s “European Scenario Editor.” The job would mean instant affluence and an even higher profile. O’Brien took the job but continued his work with the story anthology and his many other editorial projects. His grueling schedule became even worse. He allowed himself only weekday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings for nonfilm work.

  1931

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  Babylon Revisited

  from The Saturday Evening Post

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University. While training in army boot camp, he wrote a draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. His next two books were collections of short stories: Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald became renowned as a fictional chronicler of the Jazz Age as well as a keen social critic.

  Series editor Edward O’Brien did not select many of Fitzgerald’s short stories for The Best American Short Stories, which angered Fitzgerald, who called O’Brien “the world’s greatest admirer of mediocre short stories.”

  In the midst of his career, Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, had struggles with mental illness. Fitzgerald himself soon became ill, and he suffered financially. He tried unsuccessfully to make a living by becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood.

  Fitzgerald’s most influential later books were The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon, left incomplete when he died at the age of forty-four. The Great Gatsby earned tepid reviews and its sales were meager at first. At his funeral, Dorothy Parker looked down at him in his coffin and, taking a line from The Great Gatsby, said, “You poor son of a bitch!” Only after his death did the book garner greater admiration and more positive reviews. Its republication made it one of the most popular American novels of the century.