100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “Start at the corner of the house and count three windows. Then throw the handful of gravel against the window. Then when the window opens—never mind who it will be, you won’t know anyway—just say who you are and then say ‘He will be at the corner with the buggy in ten minutes. Bring the jewelry.’ Now you say it,” Uncle Rodney said.

  “He will be at the corner with the buggy in ten minutes. Bring the jewelry,” I said.

  “Say ‘Bring all the jewelry,’” Uncle Rodney said.

  “Bring all the jewelry,” I said.

  “Good,” Uncle Rodney said. Then he said, “Well? What are you waiting on?”

  “For the twenty quarters,” I said.

  Uncle Rodney cussed again. “Do you expect me to pay you before you have done the work?” he said.

  “You said about a buggy,” I said. “Maybe you will forget to pay me before you go and you might not get back until after we go back home. And besides, that day last summer when we couldn’t do any business with Mrs. Tucker because she was sick and you wouldn’t pay me the nickel because you said it wasn’t your fault Mrs. Tucker was sick.”

  Then Uncle Rodney cussed hard and quiet behind the crack and then he said, “Listen. I haven’t got the twenty quarters now. I haven’t even got one quarter now. And the only way I can get any is to get out of here and finish this business. And I can’t finish this business tonight unless you do your work. See? I’ll be right behind you. I’ll be waiting right there at the corner in the buggy when you come back. Now, go on. Hurry.”

  V

  So I went on across the yard, only the moon was bright now and I walked behind the fence until I got to the street. And I could hear the firecrackers and I could see the Roman candles and skyrockets sliding up the sky, but the fireworks were all downtown, and so all I could see along the street was the candles and wreaths in the windows. So I came to the lane, went up the lane to the stable, and I could hear the horse in the stable, but I didn’t know whether it was the right stable or not; but pretty soon Uncle Rodney kind of jumped around the corner of the stable and said, “Here you are,” and he showed me where to stand and listen toward the house and he went back into the stable. But I couldn’t hear anything but Uncle Rodney harnessing the horse, and then he whistled and I went back and he had the horse already hitched to the buggy and I said, “Whose horse and buggy is this; it’s a lot skinnier than Grandpa’s horse?” And Uncle Rodney said, “It’s my horse now, only damn this moonlight to hell.” Then I went back down the lane to the street and there wasn’t anybody coming so I waved my arm in the moonlight, and the buggy came up and I got in and we went fast. The side curtains were up and so I couldn’t see the skyrockets and Roman candles from town, but I could hear the firecrackers and I thought maybe we were going through town and maybe Uncle Rodney would stop and give me some of the twenty quarters and I could buy Grandpa a present for tomorrow, but we didn’t; Uncle Rodney just raised the side curtain without stopping and then I could see the house, the two magnolia trees, but we didn’t stop until we came to the corner.

  “Now,” Uncle Rodney said, “when the window opens, say ‘He will be at the corner in ten minutes. Bring all the jewelry.’ Never mind who it will be. You don’t want to know who it is. You want to even forget what house it is. See?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “And then you will pay me the—”

  “Yes!” he said, cussing. “Yes! Get out of here quick!”

  So I got out and the buggy went on and I went back up the street. And the house was dark all right except for one light, so it was the right one, besides the two trees. So I went across the yard and counted the three windows and I was just about to throw the gravel when a lady ran out from behind a bush and grabbed me. She kept on trying to say something, only I couldn’t tell what it was, and besides she never had time to say very much anyhow because a man ran out from behind another bush and grabbed us both. Only he grabbed her by the mouth, because I could tell that from the kind of slobbering noise she made while she was fighting to get loose.

  “Well, boy?” he said. “What is it? Are you the one?”

  “I work for Uncle Rodney,” I said.

  “Then you’re the one,” he said. Now the lady was fighting and slobbering sure enough, but he held her by the mouth. “All right. What is it?”

  Only I didn’t know Uncle Rodney ever did business with men. But maybe after he began to work in the Compress Association he had to. And then he had told me I would not know them anyway, so maybe that was what he meant.

  “He says to be at the corner in ten minutes,” I said. “And to bring all the jewelry. He said for me to say that twice. Bring all the jewelry.”

  The lady was slobbering and fighting worse than ever now, so maybe he had to turn me loose so he could hold her with both hands.

  “Bring all the jewelry,” he said, holding the lady with both hands now. “That’s a good idea. That’s fine. I don’t blame him for telling you to say that twice. All right. Now you go back to the corner and wait and when he comes, tell him this: ‘She says to come and help carry it.’ Say that to him twice, too. Understand?”

  “Then I’ll get my twenty quarters,” I said.

  “Twenty quarters, hah?” the man said, holding the lady. “That’s what you are to get, is it? That’s not enough. You tell him this, too: ‘She says to give you a piece of the jewelry.’ Understand?”

  “I just want my twenty quarters,” I said.

  Then he and the lady went back behind the bushes again and I went on, too, back toward the corner, and I could see the Roman candles and skyrockets again from toward town and I could hear the firecrackers, and then the buggy came back and Uncle Rodney was hissing again behind the curtain like when he was behind the slats on Mandy’s window.

  “Well?” he said.

  “She said for you to come and help carry it,” I said.

  “What?” Uncle Rodney said. “She said he’s not there?”

  “No, sir. She said for you to come and help carry it. For me to say that twice.” Then I said, “Where’s my twenty quarters?” because he had already jumped out of the buggy and jumped across the walk into the shadow of some bushes. So I went into the bushes too and said, “You said you would give—”

  “All right; all right!” Uncle Rodney said. He was kind of squatting along the bushes; I could hear him breathing. “I’ll give them to you tomorrow. I’ll give you thirty quarters tomorrow. Now you get to hell on home. And if they have been down to Mandy’s house, you don’t know anything. Run, now. Hurry.”

  “I’d rather have the twenty quarters tonight,” I said.

  He was squatting fast along in the shadow of the bushes, and I was right behind him, because when he whirled around he almost touched me, but I jumped back out of the bushes in time and he stood there cussing at me and then he stooped down and I saw it was a stick in his hand and I turned and ran. Then he went on, squatting along in the shadow, and then I went back to the buggy, because the day after Christmas we would go back to Jefferson, and so if Uncle Rodney didn’t get back before then I would not see him again until next summer and then maybe he would be in business with another lady and my twenty quarters would be like my nickel that time when Mrs. Tucker was sick. So I waited by the buggy and I could watch the skyrockets and the Roman candles and I could hear the firecrackers from town, only it was late now and so maybe all the stores would be closed and so I couldn’t buy Grandpa a present, even when Uncle Rodney came back and gave me my twenty quarters. So I was listening to the firecrackers and thinking about how maybe I could tell Grandpa that I had wanted to buy him a present and so maybe he might give me fifteen cents instead of a dime anyway, when all of a sudden they started shooting firecrackers back at the house where Uncle Rodney had gone. Only they just shot five of them fast, and when they didn’t shoot any more I thought that maybe in a minute they would shoot the skyrockets and Roman candles too. But they didn’t. They just shot the five firecrackers right quick and then stopped, a
nd I stood by the buggy and then folks began to come out of the houses and holler at one another and then I began to see men running toward the house where Uncle Rodney had gone, and then a man came out of the yard fast and went up the street toward Grandpa’s and I thought at first it was Uncle Rodney and that he had forgotten the buggy, until I saw that it wasn’t.

  But Uncle Rodney never came back and so I went on toward the yard to where the men were, because I could still watch the buggy too and see Uncle Rodney if he came back out of the bushes, and I came to the yard and I saw six men carrying something long and then two other men ran up and stopped me and one of them said, “Hell-fire, it’s one of those kids, the one from Jefferson.” And I could see then that what the men were carrying was a window blind with something wrapped in a quilt on it and so I thought at first that they had come to help Uncle Rodney carry the jewelry, only I didn’t see Uncle Rodney anywhere, and then one of the men said, “Who? One of the kids? Hell-fire, somebody take him on home.”

  So the man picked me up, but I said I had to wait on Uncle Rodney, and the man said that Uncle Rodney would be all right, and I said, “But I want to wait for him here,” and then one of the men behind us said, “Damn it, get him on out of here,” and we went on. I was riding on the man’s back and then I could look back and see the six men in the moonlight carrying the blind with the bundle on it, and I said did it belong to Uncle Rodney? and the man said, “No, if it belonged to anybody now it belonged to Grandpa.” And so then I knew what it was.

  “It’s a side of beef,” I said. “You are going to take it to Grandpa.” Then the other man made a funny sound and the one I was riding on said, “Yes, you might call it a side of beef,” and I said, “It’s a Christmas present for Grandpa. Who is it going to be from? Is it from Uncle Rodney?”

  “No,” the man said. “Not from him. Call it from the men of Motts­town. From all the husbands in Mottstown.”

  VI

  Then we came in sight of Grandpa’s house. And now the lights were all on, even on the porch, and I could see folks in the hall, I could see ladies with shawls over their heads, and some more of them going up the walk toward the porch, and then I could hear somebody in the house that sounded like singing and then Papa came out of the house and came down the walk to the gate and we came up and the man put me down and I saw Rosie waiting at the gate too. Only it didn’t sound like singing now because there wasn’t any music with it, and so maybe it was Aunt Louisa again and so maybe she didn’t like Christmas now any better than Grandpa said he didn’t like it.

  “It’s a present for Grandpa,” I said.

  “Yes,” Papa said. “You go on with Rosie and go to bed. Mamma will be there soon. But you be a good boy until she comes. You mind Rosie. All right, Rosie. Take him on. Hurry.”

  “Yo don’t need to tell me that,” Rosie said. She took my hand. “Come on.”

  Only we didn’t go back into the yard, because Rosie came out the gate and we went up the street. And then I thought maybe we were going around the back to dodge the people and we didn’t do that, either. We just went on up the street, and I said, “Where are we going?”

  And Rosie said, “We gonter sleep at a lady’s house name Mrs. Jordon.”

  So we went on. I didn’t say anything. Because Papa had forgotten to say anything about my slipping out of the house yet and so maybe if I went on to bed and stayed quiet he would forget about it until tomorrow too. And besides, the main thing was to get a holt of Uncle Rodney and get my twenty quarters before we went back home, and so maybe that would be all right tomorrow too. So we went on and Rosie said, “Yonder’s the house,” and we went in the yard and then all of a sudden Rosie saw the possum. It was in a persimmon tree in Mrs. Jordon’s yard and I could see it against the moonlight too, and I hollered, “Run! Run and get Mrs. Jordon’s ladder!”

  And Rosie said, “Ladder my foot! You going to bed!”

  But I didn’t wait. I began to run toward the house, with Rosie running behind me and hollering, “You, Georgie! You come back here!” But I didn’t stop. We could get the ladder and get the possum and give it to Grandpa along with the side of meat and it wouldn’t cost even a dime and then maybe Grandpa might even give me a quarter too, and then when I got the twenty quarters from Uncle Rodney I would have twenty-one quarters and that will be fine.

  1940–1950

  The New Yorker was established in 1925, and in its early years published short stories that were typically comic. The magazine’s reputation for publishing only humor caused critics to pay less attention to its stories, although pieces by Dorothy Parker, Emily Hahn, and Morley Callaghan did appear in The Best American Short Stories over the years. In 1940 Katharine White, fiction editor for the magazine, decided to publish an anthology of stories. In a memo to her boss, White wrote, “What this book should be, as I see it, is a distinguished collection of short stories which, though we didn’t set out to do it, we seemed to have amassed during the years. It would be mostly savage, serious, moving, or just well-written fiction with some that are funny in part.”

  White’s anthology brought the desired recognition. In 1941 alone, series editor Edward O’Brien chose three stories from the magazine to appear in The Best American Short Stories. Four appeared in the next volume. O’Brien’s vision meshed with White’s definition of a “New Yorker short story,” a story that traces a development of character or situation “free of the burden of plot.”

  O’Brien died in 1941 of a heart attack. His mother was probably the only one who knew of the heart condition that had plagued him most of his life. She had stayed near him, to the despair of his wives, throughout the years, most likely to monitor his health and well-being. His death was widely reported, even during this time of war.

  A decade before his death, O’Brien had suggested to Martha Foley that she and Whit Burnett would be the logical successors for his job should anything happen to him. When he died, Houghton Mifflin approached Foley about taking over the job, and in 1941 she parted ways with both Burnett and Story and began editing the series.

  Like O’Brien, Foley had grown up in Boston. She had dropped out of Boston University, become a copy editor in New York and, soon after, a journalist in California. Like Burnett, she wrote fiction. O’Brien had chosen many of her stories to appear in The Best American Short Stories. Foley was an ardent feminist and socialist; when she was twenty, she was arrested and jailed for protesting about women’s rights at a rally for President Woodrow Wilson. She had bright red hair and smoked from a cigarette holder.

  When she took the helm of the series, she defined a good short story more loosely than O’Brien had: “A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a memorable experience.” Perhaps, given O’Brien’s mixed reception in his early years of overseeing the series, this generality served as insurance against future critics.

  Foley paid tribute to O’Brien in each foreword. She also supported small and regional magazines. She was equally opposed to commercialism and agreed that the series should be a vehicle to promote literary stories. She wrote, “Unfortunately most people never see these [literary] magazines because few ever appear on newsstands, owing to a monopolistic distribution system and the usurpation of all the media by advertisers in the last half-century.” Though the general popularity of short stories had begun to wane, Foley noted that the overall literary quality had improved. In her first foreword, she declared that “the lifelessly plotted story, with the forced happy or trick ending, is dying, slowly but surely dying.”

  Foley’s reading process was less orderly than O’Brien’s. She kept a supply of colored index cards and on each wrote the author’s name, the title of the story, the name and date of the magazine, and a few words to jog her memory about the story itself. Those she found superlative were given orange cards; those “quite good” got blue cards; “above average” stories got white. “The others I try to forget.” She read in fits and starts, never
on regular days, and often she found herself weeks behind.

  Foley had a keen eye for fictional trends. In 1943 came “a multitude of stories obviously written with the word ‘escape’ in the minds of their authors and often so labeled by the editors seeking them. And, because their authors are so desperately and self-consciously in flight from any reality, the stories themselves lack significance.” She later noted in that year a preponderance of “non-realistic” or fantasy stories, some with overtones of “mysticism”: “In modern atom-bomb-inventing, airplane-traveling, electrically powered United States of America the newest widespread literary development is, of all things, a re-emergence of the old-fashioned ghost story!” She observed that writing had become more sentimental after the war: “Writers are no longer afraid of their emotions.” Foley posited, as O’Brien had, that the best writing about a war comes a generation later: “It often has been noted that the great stories of the last World War were not written until after the conflict had ended. There had to come a distillation of the profound events writers, like their countries, had undergone.”

  Foley championed the rise of “minority literature,” especially black writers. She also kept a close eye on opportunities for women in fiction, as well as on the role of female characters. She was offered a job hosting a feminist radio talk show, and her speech coach, Ludwig Donath, a well-known Austrian actor, connected her with a Viennese friend who rented Foley a small seaside house in Santa Monica. Here she met Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Charlie Chaplin. Foley wrote about the Chaplins’ visits to her friend’s house, about Oona Chaplin “silently knitting afghans.” She later regaled friends with stories about Greta Garbo and their occasional lunches of “cottage cheese and a salad” while discussing Garbo’s childhood.

  Foley guessed that TV would threaten magazine and book readership and deplete audiences at movie theaters. Writers such as Gore Vidal and Horton Foote began to earn decent money—and fame—by writing teleplays. J. D. Salinger, whose first story had been published in Story, never allowed the televising of any of his stories. When Foley chided him, saying, “If all good writers take your attitude, television will be as bad as Hollywood,” Salinger replied, “The writing was on the wall before the wall was even there.”