100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “I do not think that it is what you call cause, just. But knowing the concentration camps together. And what happens. That they were all crying together and no—courage. It makes them love.”

  “I don’t see what you mean, exactly,” Mr. Worthington said.

  “I do,” said Mrs. Mason. “They all remember the same thing together.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Loeb said.

  It seemed to her for a minute that she saw a sea of faces upturned, with the same look in all the thousands of them, the anguish, the terrible humiliation, the fear. It was a vast and growing sea, a great host of the tortured and the outcast, who had known ultimate fear instead of death and had been together in the valley of living hell. Separately each of them had known fear, had felt it burning in their veins, but now that they were all together the common fear became something else, larger, because there were so many millions of them, because they were not alone; it was set in dignity like a brand of brotherhood upon their lifted faces. And there were more of them, and more of them; if there were any more they would be the largest part of all the people on earth; this part would be strong by its numbers, and unshakeable because of its suffering shared. This was something she had never thought of before.

  The children were sent off to bed at last, and Mrs. Mason went up to say good night to them. They lay in the two cot-beds holding still while they said their prayers and then releasing into a last, wild activity before the light should be turned out on them. She pushed them back under their sheets and kissed them. When she came downstairs again Mr. Worthington was sitting alone in the living-room and the German voices were coming in softly through the screen door, from the warm darkness outside.

  “Hello,” Mr. Worthington said.

  “Hello,” she said. He reached out and took her hand as she passed where he sat, and kissed it. She stood still for a minute, and smiled at him.

  “I love you from now,” he said. She went on looking at his face, bent over her hand but with his eyes looking up at her. After a minute the consciousness of what he said, where she was, the consciousness of herself came back over her and she drew away her hand. But for a moment she had lived in freedom, without watching herself.

  In August Mrs. Sisson came back from California and opened the big house, and Mr. Loeb was much busier, doing all the things that Mrs. Sisson wanted done. Mrs. Sisson was a woman of fifty with black hair and a tall strong figure, who was very particular and liked her big place tended to perfection. Mrs. Mason knew her only slightly—to wave to when Mrs. Sisson drove along the road in her black car with her initials on the Connecticut license plate, and to speak to in a neighborly way when they met in the village. Sometimes now Fräulein started to tell her things about Mrs. Sisson, how badly she treated all her servants, that she didn’t even feed them properly, and had had three different waitresses in just the time she had been back.

  “Nobody wants to work for a woman like that,” Fräulein said.

  But Mrs. Mason thought she ought not to listen to gossip, and did not let Fräulein talk about it much.

  One afternoon when she came out of the house, Mr. Loeb was standing at the gate, talking to Fräulein. The two little boys were playing at the end of the lawn. Mr. Loeb was talking very fast in German, his voice much higher than usual, and Fräulein was looking at him and from time to time saying something in her usual calm voice. Mrs. Mason walked to the gate.

  “Hello, Mr. Loeb,” she said.

  Mr. Loeb made his bow, but he seemed distracted. His eyes were tense and his face was even redder than usual. Mrs. Mason thought he looked almost as if he were going to cry. He turned to her and began to speak in English but stumbled and was silent.

  “That Mrs. Sisson,” Fräulein said. “She says to him she will report him to the Refugee Committee in New York so that he will never be able to get a job again.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing! She talked to him the way she talks to all the people who work for her, she bawled him out, he doesn’t paint the fence quick enough, she says he’s too slow. He’s a foolish man, he pays attention to what she says. I tell him he ought to shrug his shoulders, what does he care, as long as he gets his pay.”

  “I cannot have her speak to me that way!” Mr. Loeb broke out. “I cannot have her call me those things she says. I cannot . . .”

  “He pays attention,” Fräulein said. “He gets his feelings hurt too easy. I tell him, what does he care what she says? She’s nothing. But he says to her, she can’t speak to him that way, he cannot have her speak to him that way, he cannot stay and work for her if she talks like that. So she says all right, she’s going to report him to the Refugee Committee.”

  “What can she say?”

  “She was terrible angry,” Mr. Loeb said. “She will say I do not work. She will say I am a no-good worker. She will say I speak to her fresh.”

  He looked at Mrs. Mason with his frightened eyes, and she nodded at him. Their eyes met and she nodded again, but more slowly this time.

  “I’ll go up and talk to her,” Mrs. Mason said. She did not feel at all afraid to do that, suddenly. She was not thinking about how she felt.

  Fräulein shrugged.

  “I don’t think it makes any difference, you excuse me, Mrs. Mason. That Mrs. Sisson, she doesn’t want Mr. Loeb to work for her any more because he talks back to her, and she writes the letter anyway.”

  “I’ll write to the Refugee Committee, too,” she said. “I’ll tell them that I know all about Mr. Loeb and he’s a good worker and a nice man. But I’ll go up and talk to her anyway.”

  Mr. Loeb leaned against the fence and looked at her. She came out and walked past him into the road.

  “Thank you very much,” Mr. Loeb said in his foreign, formal voice.

  She smiled at him. The tension had gone away from his eyes, the look of fear that she recognized had gone.

  “You don’t have to worry, you know,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever let anything happen to you.”

  1948

  EUDORA WELTY

  The Whole World Knows

  from Harper’s Bazaar

  EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended graduate school at Columbia University during the Great Depression, but was unable to find a job in New York, so she moved back to Jackson and began work at a radio station and a newspaper. She later took a job as a publicist with the Works Progress Administration, gathering material that documented stories about the people of Mississippi. At the same time she assembled a group of writers and composers, which she called the Night-Blooming Cereus Club.

  In 1941 Welty roomed with Katherine Anne Porter and the two became great friends. A Curtain of Green, published the same year, was Welty’s first collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which enabled her to travel to Europe. She later lectured at Harvard University and gathered her speeches in One Writer’s Beginnings. Her works of fiction include Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Collected Stories, and Losing Battles. Series editor Martha Foley described Welty’s fiction as “gentler, less macabre in her presentation of grotesque characters than many of her Southern contemporaries.”

  Welty won a Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter. Over the course of her career, she also received numerous O. Henry Awards, a National Book Award, a National Medal of Arts, and the French Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, among many other honors.

  ★

  MOTHER SAID, Where have you been, son?—Nowhere, mother.—I wish you wouldn’t look so unhappy, son. You could come back to me, now.—I can’t do that, mother. I have to stay in Sabina.

  When I locked the door of the Sabina Bank I rolled down my sleeves and stood for some time looking out at a cotton field across the way until the whiteness nearly put me to sleep and then woke me up like a light turned on in my face. Dugan had been gone a few minutes or so. I got in my car and drove it up the street, turned it around in the foot of Jinny’s driveway (there went Dug
an), and drove down again. I backed in a cotton field at the other end of the pavement, turned, and made the same trip. You know—the thing everybody does every day.

  There was Maideen Summers on the corner waving a little colored handkerchief. She was at first the only stranger—then finally not much of one. When I didn’t remember to stop I saw the handkerchief slowly fall still. I turned again, and picked her up.

  “Dragging Main?” she said. She was eighteen years old. She promptly told you all those things. “Look! Grown-up and citified,” she said, and held both hands toward me. She had brand new white cotton gloves on—they shone. Maideen would ride beside me and talk about things I didn’t mind hearing about—the ice plant, where she kept the books. Fred Killigrew her boss, the way working in Sabina seemed after the country and junior college. Her first job—her mother could hardly believe it, she said. It was so easy, too, out in the world, and nice, with getting her ride home with me sometimes like this and not on the dusty bus—except Mr. Killigrew sometimes wanted her to do something at the last minute—guess what today—and so on.

  She said, “This sure is nice. I didn’t think you saw me, Ran, not at first.”

  I told her my eyes had gone bad. She looked sorry. I drove, idling along, up and down Main Street a few times more. Each time the same people, Miss Callie Hudson and all, the people standing in the store doors or riding in the other cars, waved at my car, and to them all, Maideen waved back—her little blue handkerchief was busy. Their avidity would be far beyond her. She waved at them as she did at me.

  “Are you tired out like you were yesterday? Today’s just as hot.”

  She knew what anybody in Sabina told her; and for four or five afternoons I had picked her up and taken her up and down the street a few turns, bought her a Coca-Cola and driven her home out by the Old Murray Forks somewhere, and she had never said a word except a kind one, like this. She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.

  I drove her home and then drove back to the room I had at Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s—usually, but on this day, there at the end of the pavement, I turned up the cut to the Stark place. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  Maideen didn’t say anything until we reached the top of the drive and stopped, and I got out and opened her door.

  “Do you want to take me in yonder?” she said. “Please, I’d just as soon you wouldn’t.”

  All at once her voice came all over me. It had a kind of humility.

  “Sure. Let’s go in and see Jinny. Why not?” I couldn’t stand it any longer, that was why. “I’m going and taking you.”

  It wasn’t as if Colonel Waters didn’t say to me every afternoon, Come on home with me, boy—argue, while he forced that big Panama down on his head—no sense in your not sleeping cool, with one of our fans turned on you. Mabel says so, Mabel has something to say to you—and he waited a minute in the door before he left, and held his cane (the one Dugan and I had gone in together to buy him because he was president), up in the air as if he threatened me with comfort, until I answered him No Sir.

  With Maideen, I walked around the baked yard to the porch, under the heavy heads, the too-bright blooms that hang down like fruits from the trees—crape myrtles. Jinny’s mama, I saw, put her face to her bedroom window first thing, to show she’d marched right upstairs at the sight of Randall MacLain coming to her door, bringing who-on-earth with him too. After daring to leave her daughter and right on Easter Sunday before church. Now right back to her door, big as you please. And her daughter Jinny, Virginia, who once Shared His Bed, sent straight into the arms of Trash by what he did. One thing—it was Jinny’s family home after all, her mother still kept alive to run it, grand old Mrs. Stark, and this outrage right under her nose. The curtain fell back, as on a triumph.

  “I’ve never been invited to the Stark home,” Maideen said, and I began to smile. I felt curiously lighthearted. Lilies must have been in bloom somewhere near, and I took a full breath of their water smell as determinedly as if then consciousness might go, or might not.

  Out in the front hall, Jinny stood with her legs apart, cutting off locks of her hair at the mirror. The locks fell at her feet. She had on boy’s shorts. She looked up at me and said “How do you like it?” She grinned, as if she had been preparing for me, and then she looked past my shoulder. She would know, with her quickness like foreknowledge, that I would come back when this summer got too much for me, and that I would just as soon bring a stranger if I could find one, somebody who didn’t know a thing, into the house with me when I came.

  I remember Maideen looked down at her gloves, and seemed to decide to keep them on. Jinny hollered at Tellie to bring in some cokes. A spell of remoteness, a feeling of lightness, had hold of me still, and as we all stood on that thin light matting in the Stark hall that seems to billow a little if you take a step, and with Jinny’s hair lying on it, I saw us all in the mirror. And I could almost hear it being told right across me—our story, the fragment of what happened, Jinny’s and my story, as if it were being told—told in the clear voice of Maideen, rushing, unquestioning—the town words. Oh, this is what Maideen Summers was—telling what she looked at, repeating what she listened to—she was like an outlandish little bird, being taught, some each day, to sing a song people made . . . He walked out on her and moved three blocks away down the street. Now everybody’s wondering when he’ll try to go back. They say Jinny MacLain’s got her sweetheart there. Under her mama’s nose. Good thing her father’s dead and she has no brothers. Sure, it’s Lonnie Dugan, the other one at the bank, and you knew from the start, if it wasn’t Ran, who else in Sabina would there be for Jinny Stark? They don’t say how it happened, does anybody know? At the circle, at the table, at Mrs. Judge’s, at Sunday School, they say, they say she will marry the sweetheart if he’ll marry her, but Ran will kill someone if she does. And there’s Ran’s papa died of drink, remember, remember? They say Ran will do something bad. He won’t divorce her but he will do something bad. Maybe kill them all. They say Jinny’s not scared. And oh you know, they say, they run into each other every day of the world, all three. Poor things! But it’s no surprise. There’ll be no surprises. How could they help it if they wanted to help it, how could you get away from anything here? You can’t get away in Sabina. Away from anything.

  Maideen held the tinkling glass in her white glove and said to Jinny, “I look too tacky and mussed when I work all day to be coming in anybody’s strange house.”

  She looked like Jinny—she was an awkward version of Jinny. Jinny, “I look too tacky and mussed when I work all day to be always revealed contamination. I knew it after the fact, so to speak—and was just a bit pleased with myself.” I don’t mean there was anything of mockery in Maideen’s little face—no—but something of Jinny that went back early—to whatever original and young my Jinny would never be now. The breeze from that slow ceiling fan lifted their hair from their temples, like the same hand—Maideen’s brown hair long and Jinny’s brown hair short, ruined—she ruined it herself, as she liked doing.

  Maideen was so still, so polite, but she glowed with something she didn’t know about, there in the room with Jinny. She took on a great deal of unsuspected value. It was like a kind of maturity all at once. They sat down in wicker chairs and talked to each other. With them side by side and talking back and forth, it seemed to reward my soul for Maideen to protest her fitness to be in the house. I would not have minded how bedraggled she would ever get herself. I relaxed, leaned back in my chair and smoked cigarettes. But I had to contain my sudden interest; it seemed almost too funny to be true, their resemblance. I was delighted with myself, most of all, to have been the one to make it evident. I looked from Jinny to Maideen (of course she didn’t guess) and back to Jinny and almost expected praise—praise from somewhere—for my true vision.

  There were knocking sounds from outside—croquet again. Jinny was guiding us to the open door (we walked on her hair) where they were slowly moving across the shade
of the backyard—Doc Short, Vera and Red Lassiter, and the two same schoolteachers—with Lonnie Dugan striking a ball through the wicket. I watched through the doorway and the crowd seemed to have dwindled a little. I could not think who was out. It was myself.

  Mother said, Son, you’re walking around in a dream.

  Bella, Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s little dog, panted sorrowfully all the time—she was sick. I always went out in the yard and spoke to her. Poor Bella, how do you do, lady? Is it hot, do they leave you alone?

  Mother said, Where have you been, son?—Not anywhere, mother.—I wish you wouldn’t look so peaked. And you keep things from me, son.—I haven’t been anywhere, where would I go?—If you came back with me, everything would be just like it was before. I know you won’t eat at Mrs. Judge’s table, not her biscuit.

  When the bank opened, Miss Callie Hudson came up to my window and hollered, Randall, when are you coming back to your precious wife? You forgive her, now, you hear? That’s no way to do, bear grudges. Your mother never bore your father a grudge in her life, and he made her life right hard, I tell you, how do you suppose he made her life? She didn’t bear him a grudge. We’re all human on earth. Where’s little old Lonnie, now, has he stepped out, or you done something to him? I still think of him as a boy in knee breeches and Buster Brown bob, riding the ice wagon, stealing ice—your lifelong playmate, Jinny’s lifelong playmate—a little common but so smart. Ah, I’m a woman that’s been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then. But you march on back to your wife, Ran MacLain. You hear? It’s a thing of the flesh, not the spirit, it’ll pass. Jinny’ll get over this in three, four months maybe. You hear me? And you go back nice. No striking about now and doing anything we’ll all be shamed to hear about. I know you won’t. I knew your father, was crazy about your father, just as long as he could recognize me, love your mother. Sweetest people in the world, most happily mated people in the world. Go home and tell your mother I said so. And you march back to that precious wife. March back and have you some chirren. How long has it been? How long? What day was it you tore the house down, Christmas or Easter? I said Easter, Mr. Hudson said Christmas—who was right? My Circle declares she’ll get a divorce and marry Lonnie but I say not. Thing of the flesh, I told Mr. Hudson. Won’t last. And they’ve known each other a hundred years! The Missionary Circle said you’d kill him and I said, You all, who are you talking about? If it’s Ran MacLain that I knew in his buggy, I said he’s the last person I know to take on to that extent. I laughed. And little Jinny. I had to laugh at her. Says—I couldn’t help it. I says, How did it happen, Jinny, tell old Miss Callie, you monkey, and she says, Oh Miss Callie, I don’t know—it just happened, she says, sort of across the bridge table. I says across the bridge table my foot. Jinny told me yesterday on the street, Oh, she says, I just saw Ran. I hope Ran won’t cherish it against me, Jinny says. I have to write my checks on the Sabina Bank, and Lonnie Dugan works in it, right next to Ran. And we’re all grown up, not little children any more. And I says I know, how could you get away from each other if you tried, you could not. It’s an endless circle. That’s what a thing of the flesh is. And you won’t get away from that in Sabina or hope to. Even our little town. Jinny was never scared of the Devil himself as a growing girl, and shouldn’t be now. And Lonnie Dugan won’t ever quit at the bank, will he? Can’t quit. But as I said to Mr. Hudson—they’re in separate cages. All right, I said to Mr. Hudson, look. Jinny was unfaithful to Ran—that’s what it was. There you have what it’s all about. That’s the brunt of it. Face it, I told Mr. Hudson. You’re a train man—just a station agent, you’re out of things. I don’t know how many times.