The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  “I do adore clever men,” Marise went on. “I was so in love with Gilbert’s intelligence, absolutely crazy about him at first. I could sit listening to him for hours on end, telling me all about history and ideas and art. Because, you know, I’m just an absolute idiot. I was kicked out of school when I was fourteen—the nuns hated me. Valerie, truly, I can hardly read and write. Whereas I expect you can do typing and shorthand, you clever girl. So I’d just kneel there at Gilbert’s feet, gazing up at him while he talked. You know, just talking, talking, droning on and on. So pleased with himself. Don’t men just love that?”

  “Do they? I wouldn’t know.”

  “But they do, they love it when we’re kneeling at their feet. Jamie thinks that’s hilarious, don’t you, Jamie? Because now I’m worshipping him instead, he thinks. Worshipping his guitar.”

  “My talent,” Jamie chastely suggested. Marise shuffled down in the sofa to poke her white boot at him, prodding at his hands and blocking the strings so that he couldn’t play until he ducked the neck of his guitar out of her way. His exasperated look slid past her teasing and onto Valerie, where it rested. Marise subsided with a sigh.

  “So Gilbert’s sitting there steering along in the little cockpit of his own cleverness, believing himself so shining, such a wonder! And then suddenly one day I couldn’t stand it! I thought, But the whole world, the whole of real life, is spread out underneath him. And he’s up there all alone in his own clever head. Don’t you know what I mean?”

  “I’ve never taken much interest in Gil’s work,” Valerie said primly. “Though I’m aware how highly it’s regarded. I’ve got my own interests.”

  “Oh, have you? Good for you! Because I’ve never really had any interests to speak of. I’ve counted on the men in my life to supply those. Gilbert was certainly interesting. Did you know that he beat me? Yes, really. To a pulp, my dear.”

  What melodrama! Valerie laughed out loud. She didn’t believe it. Or perhaps she did. When Marise, mocking, blew out a veil of smoke, she had a glimpse for a moment of Gil’s malevolent Bitch from Hell, the strong-jawed dark sorceress who might incite a man to violence. Poor Gilbert. And it was true that his rages had been a revelation when they were first married. In the university office, all the women had petted him and were in awe of his mystique: he had seemed thoughtful, forgetful, bumbling, dryly humorous, and high-minded. She stood up, trying to shake off the influence of the Bloody Mary. Her mother would be expecting her, she said. “And I don’t know what your plans are for Robyn’s tea. But I made us cheese sandwiches for the train, so she’s had a decent lunch, at least, and an apple and a Mars bar.”

  Marise was amused. “I don’t have any plans for Robyn’s tea. I’ve never really made those kinds of plans.”

  She stretched out, luxuriating into the extra space on the sofa, putting her boots up. Valerie meant to go looking for Robyn then, to say good-bye, but the sight of chaos in the kitchen brought her up short: dishes piled in an old sink, gas cooker filthy with grease, torn slices of bread and stained tea towels and orange peels lying on the linoleum floor where they’d been dropped. The table was still laid with plates on which some dark meat stew or sauce was congealing. She went to pick up her bag instead. “Give her my love,” she said.

  No one offered to show Valerie out. Heroically, like a girl in a film, she made her way alone through the next-door room, where the pale horse gleamed sinisterly; she jumped when something moved, thinking it was a flutter of stuffed birds, but it was only her own reflection in the foxed mirror. On the stairs, she remembered that she shouldn’t have called it “tea.” Gil was always reminding her to say “dinner” or “supper.” And once she was outside, on the path in the wind, Valerie looked back, searching along the first-floor windows of the house for any sign of the child looking out. But it was impossible to see—the glass was reflecting a last smoldering streak of sunset, dark as a livid coal smashed open.

  * * *

  —

  That night it snowed. Valerie woke up in the morning in her old bedroom at her mother’s and knew it before she even looked outside: a purer, weightless light bloomed on the wallpaper, and the crowded muddle of gloomy furniture inherited from her grandmother seemed washed clean and self-explanatory. She opened the curtains and lay looking out at the snow falling, exhilarated as if she were back in her childhood. Her mother had the wireless on downstairs.

  “Trains aren’t running,” she said gloatingly when Valerie came down. She was sitting smoking at the table in her housecoat, in the heat of the gas fire. “So I suppose you’ll have to stay over another night.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mum. I’ve got things to do at home.”

  The snow made her restless; she didn’t want to be shut up with her mother all day with nothing to talk about. She found a pair of zip-up sheepskin boots at the back of a cupboard and ventured out to the phone box. Snow was blowing across the narrow street in wafting veils, and the quiet was like a sudden deafness; breaking into the crusted surface, her boots creaked. No one had come out to shovel yet, so nothing was spoiled. Every horizontal ledge and edge and rim was delicately capped; the phone box was smothered in snow, the light blue-gray inside it. She called Gil and pushed her money in, told him she was going to go to the station, find out what was happening. He said that there was snow in the North, too. He wouldn’t go to the faculty meeting today; he’d work on his book at home. “Please try to get here any way you can,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “He misses you.”

  “I have to go,” she said. “There’s quite a queue outside.”

  But there wasn’t; there was only silence and the shifting vacancy. The footprints she’d made on her way there were filling up already.

  “I don’t know why you’re so eager to get back to him,” her mother grumbled. But Valerie wasn’t really thinking about Gil: it was the strangeness of the snow she liked, and the disruption it caused. It took her almost an hour and a half to get to King’s Cross—the Underground was working, but it was slow. When she surfaced, it had stopped snowing, at least for the moment, but there still weren’t any trains. A porter said she should try again later that afternoon; it was his guess that if the weather held they might be able to reopen some of the major routes. Valerie didn’t want to linger in King’s Cross. She put her bag in left luggage, then thought of going shopping—they’d surely have cleared Oxford Street. But she took the Piccadilly line instead, as far as South Ken. By the time she arrived at the Chelsea house, it was gone two o’clock.

  The house was almost unrecognizable at first, transformed in the snow. It seemed exposed and taller and more formidable, more mysteriously separated from its neighbors, standing apart in dense shrubbery, which was half obliterated under its burden of white. Valerie didn’t even know why she’d come back. Perhaps she’d had some idea that if she saw Marise today she’d be able to behave with more sophistication, say what she really thought. As she arrived at the corner, she glanced up at the side windows on the first floor. And there was Robyn looking out—in the wrong direction at first, so that she didn’t see Valerie. She seemed to be crouched on the windowsill, slumped against the glass. It was unmistakably her, because although it was past lunchtime she was still dressed in the new white pajamas.

  Valerie stopped short in her tramping. Her boots were wet through. Had she seriously entertained the idea of ringing the doorbell and being invited inside again, without any reasonable pretext, into that place where she most definitely wasn’t wanted? The next moment it was too late: Robyn had seen her. The child’s whole body responded in a violent spasm of astonishment, almost as if she’d been looking out for Valerie, yet not actually expecting her to appear. In the whole week of her visit, she hadn’t reacted so forcefully to anything. She leaped up on the windowsill, waving frantically, so that she was pressed full length against the glass. Remembering how those windows had rattled the night before, Valerie signal
ed to her to get down, motioning with her gloved hand and mouthing. Robyn couldn’t hear her but gazed in an intensity of effort at comprehension. Valerie signaled again: Get down, be careful. Robyn shrugged, then gestured eagerly down to the front door, miming opening something. Valerie saw that she didn’t have a choice. Nodding and pointing, she agreed that she was on her way around to the front. No one had trodden yet in the snow along the path, but she was lucky, the front entrance had been left open—deliberately, perhaps, because, as she stepped into the hall, a man called down, low voiced and urgent, from the top landing, “John, is that you?”

  Apologizing into the dimness for not being John, Valerie hurried upstairs to where Robyn was fumbling with the latches on the other side of the purple-and-orange door. Then she heard Jamie. “Hullo! Now what are you up to? Is someone out there?”

  When the door swung back, Valerie saw that—alarmingly—Jamie was in his underpants. He was bemused rather than hostile. “What are you doing here?”

  She invented hastily, hot faced, avoiding looking at his near-nakedness. “Robyn forgot something. I came to give it to her.”

  “I want to show her my toys,” Robyn said.

  He hesitated. “Her mother’s lying down—she’s got a headache. But you might as well come in. There’s no one else for her to play with.”

  Robyn pulled Valerie by the hand through a door that led straight into the kitchen; someone had cleared up the plates of stew, but without scraping them—they were stacked beside the sink. The only sign of breakfast was an open packet of cornflakes on the table, and a bowl and spoon. In Robyn’s bedroom, across a short passageway, there really were nice toys, better than anything Valerie had ever possessed: a doll’s house, a doll’s cradle with white muslin drapes, a wooden Noah’s ark whose roof lifted off. The room was cold and cheerless, though, and there were no sheets on the bare mattress, only a dirty yellow nylon sleeping bag. No one had unpacked Robyn’s suitcase—everything was still folded inside; she must have opened it herself to get out her pajamas. There was a chest with its drawers hanging open, and most of Robyn’s clothes seemed to be overflowing from supermarket carrier bags piled against the walls.

  “I knew you’d come back,” Robyn said earnestly, not letting go of Valerie’s hand.

  Valerie opened her mouth to explain that it was only because she’d missed her train in all this weather, then she changed her mind. “We weren’t expecting snow, were we?” she said brightly.

  “Have you come to get me? Are you taking me to your house again?”

  She explained that she’d only come to say good-bye.

  “No, please don’t say good-bye! Auntie Valerie, don’t go.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be coming to stay with us again soon.”

  The child flung herself convulsively at Valerie, punishing her passionately, butting with her head. “Not soon! Now! I want to come now!”

  Valerie liked Robyn better with her face screwed into an ugly fury, kicking out with her feet, the placid brushstrokes of her brows distorted to exclamation marks. Holding her off by her shoulders, she felt the aftertremor of the child’s violence.

  “Do you really want to come home with me?”

  “Really, really,” Robyn pleaded.

  “But what about your mummy?”

  “She won’t mind! We can get out without her noticing.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll need to talk to her. But let’s pack first. And you have to get dressed—if you’re really sure, that is. We need to go back to the station to see if the trains are running.” Valerie looked around with a new purposefulness, assessing quickly. “Where’s your coat? Do you need the bathroom?”

  Robyn sat abruptly on the floor to take off her pajamas, and Valerie tipped out the contents of the suitcase, began repacking it with a few things that looked useful—underwear and wool jumpers and shoes. The toothbrush was still in its sponge bag. Then they heard voices, and a chair knocked over in the kitchen, and, before Valerie could prepare what she ought to say, Marise came stalking into the bedroom, with Jamie behind her. At least he’d put on trousers. “How remarkable!” Marise exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing, Valerie? Are you kidnapping my child?” Wrapped in a gold silk kimono embroidered with dragons, the sooty remnants of yesterday’s makeup under her eyes, she looked as formidable as a tragic character in a play.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Valerie coolly said. “I’m not kidnapping her. I was about to come and find you, to ask whether she could come back with us for another week or so. And I’ve got a perfect right, anyway. She says that she’d prefer to be at her father’s.”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. You haven’t got a leg to stand on. It’s criminal neglect. Look at this room! There aren’t even sheets on her bed.”

  “She prefers a sleeping bag. Ask her!”

  Frozen in the act of undressing, Robyn turned her face, blank with dismay, back and forth between the two women.

  “And I’d like to know what she’s eaten since she came home. There isn’t any milk in the house, is there? It’s two thirty in the afternoon and all the child has had since lunchtime yesterday is dry cornflakes.”

  “You know nothing about motherhood, nothing!” Marise shrieked. “Robyn won’t touch milk—she hates it. She’s been fussy from the day she was born. And she’s a spy, she’s a little spy! Telling tales about me. How dare she? She’s a vicious, ungrateful little snake and you’ve encouraged her in it. I knew this would happen. I should never have let Gilbert take her in the first place. I knew he’d only be stirring her up against me. Where’s he been all these years, with his so-called feelings for his daughter, I’d like to know? Jamie, get this cheap kidnapping whore out of here, won’t you? No, I like whores. She’s much worse, she’s a typist.”

  * * *

  —

  Valerie said that she didn’t need Jamie to take her anywhere, and that, if they were slinging names about, she knew what Marise was. Minutes later, she was standing outside in the garden, stopping to catch her breath beside the gate, where the dustbins were set back from the path behind a screen of pines. She was smitten with the cold and trembling, penitent and ashamed. She shouldn’t have interfered; she was out of her depth. It was true that she didn’t know anything about motherhood. Hadn’t she encouraged Robyn, just as Marise said, trying to make the child like her? And without genuinely liking in return. Now she had abandoned her to her mother’s revenge, which might be awful. Then the front door opened and Jamie was coming down the path, with a curious gloating look on his face: under his arms, against his bare chest, he was carrying the dirty yellow sleeping bag that had been on Robyn’s bed. Hustling Valerie back among the pines, out of sight of the windows, he dumped the bag at her feet. “Off you go,” he said significantly, as if he and Valerie were caught up in some game together. “Her mother’s lying down again. Take it and get out of here.”

  It took her a moment or two to understand. In the meantime, he’d returned inside the house and closed the door. There was a mewing from the bag, she fumbled to unroll it, and Robyn struggled out from inside and wrapped her arms, with a fierce sigh of submission, around Valerie’s knees. But she was in her white pajamas, barefoot, in the snow! How could they make their way through the streets with Robyn dressed like that? A window opened above them and Jamie lobbed out something, which landed with a soft thud on the path: one of the carrier bags from Robyn’s room, packed with a miscellany of clothes—and he’d thought to add the pair of plimsolls. Then he closed the window and disappeared. There was no coat in the bag, but never mind. In panicking haste, Valerie helped Robyn put on layers of clothes over her pajamas: socks, cord trousers, plimsolls, jumper.

  “I thought he was going to eat me,” Robyn said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Valerie said firmly. She kicked the sleeping bag away out of sight,
among the hedge roots.

  “Are we escaping?”

  “We’re having an adventure.”

  And they set out, ducking into the street, hurrying along beside the hedge. By a lucky chance, as soon as they got to the main road there was a taxi nosing through the slush. “How much to King’s Cross?” Valerie asked. She had all the money she’d been saving up to spend on a new dress. She’d have to buy Robyn a train ticket, too. Then she asked the taxi to stop at a post office, where she went inside to send a telegram. She couldn’t telephone Gil; she knew he’d forbid her to bring the child back again. But she couldn’t arrive with Robyn without warning him. “Returning with daughter,” she wrote out on the form. “No fit home for her.” She counted out the shillings from her purse.

  Back in the taxi, making conversation, she asked Robyn where her dollies were. Robyn was stricken—she’d left them behind, under her pillow. It was dusk in the streets already: as they drove on, the colored lights from the shops wheeled slowly across their faces, revealing them as strangers to each other. Valerie was thinking that she might need to summon all this effort of ingenuity one day for some escape of her own, dimly imagined, and that taking on the child made her less free. Robyn sat forward on the seat, tensed with her loss. Awkwardly, Valerie put an arm around her, to reassure her. She said not to worry, they would make new dolls, and better ones. Just for the moment, though, the child was inconsolable.

  John Keeble

  Synchronicity

  WHEN I CAME INTO THE KITCHEN, Ward was using a knife to help his wife, Irene, peel the skin from two buffalo tongues. The skin was discarded in a small heap along with the glutinous veins cut from the undersides, then Ward left it to Irene to cut the meat into cubes. He pulled out a chair opposite me at the table in the dining area and opened up a John Deere repair manual, which was my reason for being there, and began thumbing through it. Meanwhile, Irene put the cubes into a cast-iron Dutch oven and seared them. She added butter, garlic, onion, white wine, and spices, causing me to grow alert to aromas. Besides garlic and onion, I picked out the scents of rosemary, oregano, and something else I couldn’t identify. A pressure cooker slowly heated up on a back burner, and on the counter beside Irene stood ranks of quart mason jars.