100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  With growing annoyance at the intrusion, Charlie waited for them to explain themselves. After some concentration Duncan said:

  “We came to take you to dinner. Lorraine and I insist that all this shi-shi, cagy business got to stop.”

  Charlie came closer to them, as if to force them backward down the corridor.

  “Sorry, but I can’t. Tell me where you’ll be and we’ll call you in half an hour.”

  This made no impression. Lorraine sat down suddenly on the side of a chair, and focusing her eyes on Richard, cried, “Oh, what a nice little boy! Come here, little boy.” Richard glanced at his mother, but did not move. With a perceptible shrug of her shoulders, Lorraine turned back to Charlie:

  “Come on out to dinner. Be yourself, Charlie. Come on.”

  “How about a little drink?” said Duncan to the room at large.

  Lincoln Peters had been somewhat uneasily occupying himself by swinging Honoria from side to side with her feet off the ground.

  “I’m sorry, but there isn’t a thing in the house,” he said. “We just this minute emptied the only bottle.”

  “All the more reason coming to dinner,” Lorraine assured Charlie.

  “I can’t,” said Charlie almost sharply. “You two go have dinner and I’ll phone you.”

  “Oh, you will, will you?” Her voice became suddenly unpleasant. “All right, we’ll go along. But I remember, when you used to hammer on my door, I used to be enough of a good sport to give you a drink. Come on, Dunc.”

  Still in slow motion, with blurred, angry faces, with uncertain feet, they retired along the corridor.

  “Good night,” Charlie said.

  “Good night!” responded Lorraine emphatically.

  When he went back into the salon Marion had not moved, only now her son was standing in the circle of her other arm. Lincoln was still swinging Honoria back and forth like a pendulum from side to side.

  “What an outrage!” Charlie broke out. “What an absolute outrage!”

  Neither of them answered. Charlie dropped into an armchair, picked up his drink, set it down again and said:

  “People I haven’t seen for two years having the colossal nerve—”

  He broke off. Marion had made the sound “Oh!” in one swift, furious breath, turned her body from him with a jerk and left the room.

  Lincoln set down Honoria carefully.

  “You children go in and start your soup,” he said, and when they obeyed, he said to Charlie:

  “Marion’s not well and she can’t stand shocks. That kind of people make her really physically sick.”

  “I didn’t tell them to come here. They wormed this address out of Paul at the bar. They deliberately—”

  “Well, it’s too bad. It doesn’t help matters. Excuse me a minute.”

  Left alone, Charlie sat tense in his chair. In the next room he could hear the children eating, talking in monosyllables, already oblivious of the scene among their elders. He heard a murmur of conversation from a farther room and then the ticking bell of a phone picked up, and in a panic he moved to the other side of the room and out of earshot.

  In a minute Lincoln came back. “Look here, Charlie. I think we’d better call off dinner for tonight. Marion’s in bad shape.”

  “Is she angry with me?”

  “Sort of,” he said, almost roughly. “She’s not strong and—”

  “You mean she’s changed her mind about Honoria?”

  “She’s pretty bitter right now. I don’t know. You phone me at the bank to-morrow.”

  “I wish you’d explain to her I never dreamed these people would come here. I’m just as sore as you are.”

  “I couldn’t explain anything to her now.”

  Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the corridor. Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in a strange voice, “Good night, children.”

  Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him.

  “Good night, sweetheart,” he said vaguely, and then trying to make his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, “Good night, dear children.”

  V

  Charlie went directly to the bar with the furious idea of finding Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched his drink at the Peterses’, and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul came over to say hello.

  “It’s a great change,” he said sadly. “We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second, and now when everything keeps going down. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?”

  “No, I’m in business in Prague.”

  “I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”

  “I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

  “Selling short.”

  “Something like that.”

  Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare—the people they had met traveling; then people who couldn’t add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship’s party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the human mosaic of pearls who sat behind them at the Russian ballet and, when the curtain rose on a scene, remarked to her companion: “Luffly; just luffly. Zomebody ought to baint a bicture of it.” Men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

  He went to the phone and called the Peters apartment; Lincoln himself answered.

  “I called up because, as you can imagine, this thing is on my mind. Has Marion said anything definite?”

  “Marion’s sick,” Lincoln answered shortly. “I know this thing isn’t altogether your fault, but I can’t have her go to pieces about this. I’m afraid we’ll have to let it slide for six months; I can’t take the chance of working her up to this state again.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn’t much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that that was just money—he had given so many people money.

  “No, no more,” he said to another waiter. “What do I owe you?”

  He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

  1933

  KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

  The Cracked Looking-Glass

  from Scribner’s Magazine

  KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890–1980) was born in Texas but ran away at sixteen. She later settled in Chicago, where she worked as an extra in movies. Then she returned to Texas and began work as a drama critic and society commentator for the Fort Worth Critic. She went on to live in New York, Mexico, Germany, and France.

  Her first book was Flowering Judas, a story collection published to rave reviews. She was also the author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider; The Leaning Tower; and Collected Stories, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 1962 her only novel, Ship of Fools, was published. In 1977 she published The Never-Ending Wrong, a book about Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Porter’s work explored themes of justice and betrayal. She is considered to be one of the country’s finest writers, although she struggled financially owing to moderate sales and the length of time it took her to produce new works. She taught at many different universities, including Stanford and the University of Michigan.

  In an interview she said, “The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeli
ng and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.”

  ★

  DENNIS HEARD ROSALEEN talking in the kitchen and a man’s voice answering. He sat with his hands dangling over his knees, and thought for the hundredth time that sometimes Rosaleen’s voice was company to him, and other days he wished all day long she didn’t have so much to say about everything. More and more the years put a quietus on a man; there was no earthly sense in saying the same things over and over. Even thinking the same thoughts grew tiresome after a while. But Rosaleen was full of talk as ever. If not to him, to whatever passerby stopped for a minute, and if nobody stopped, she talked to the cats and to herself. If Dennis came near she merely raised her voice and went on with whatever she was saying, so it was nothing for her to shout suddenly, “Come out of that, now—how often have I told ye to keep off the table?” and the cats would scatter in all directions with guilty faces. “It’s enough to make a man lep out of his shoes,” Dennis would complain. “It’s not meant for you, darlin’,” Rosaleen would say, as if that cured everything, and if he didn’t go away at once, she would start telling some kind of story. But today she kept shooing him out of the place and hadn’t a kind word in her mouth, and Dennis in exile felt that everything and everybody was welcome in the place but himself. For the twentieth time he approached on tiptoe and listened at the parlor keyhole.

  Rosaleen was saying: “Maybe his front legs might look a little stuffed for a living cat, but in the picture it’s no great matter. I said to Kevin, ‘You’ll never paint that cat alive,’ but Kevin did it, with house paint mixed in a saucer, and a small brush the way he could put in all them fine lines. His legs look like that because I wanted him pictured on the table, but it wasn’t so, he was on my lap the whole time. He was a wonder after the mice, a born hunter bringing them in from morning till night—”

  Dennis sat on the sofa in the parlor and thought: “There it is. There she goes telling it again.” He wondered who the man was, a strange voice, but a loud and ready gabbler as if maybe he was trying to sell something. “It’s a fine painting, Miz O’Toole,” he said, “and who did you say the artist was?”

  “A lad named Kevin, like my own brother he was, who went away to make his fortune,” answered Rosaleen. “A house painter by trade.”

  “The spittin’ image of a cat!” roared the voice. “It is so,” said Rosaleen. “The Billy-cat to the life. The Nelly-cat here is own sister to him, and the Jimmy-cat and the Annie-cat and the Miekey-cat is nephews and nieces, and there’s a great family look between all of them. It was the strangest thing happened to the Billy-cat, Mr. Pendleton. He sometimes didn’t come in for his supper till after dark, he was so taken up with the hunting, and then one night he didn’t come at all, nor the next day neither, nor the next, and me with him on my mind so I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Then at midnight on the third night I did go to sleep, and the Billy-cat came into my room and lep upon my pillow and said: ‘Up beyond the north field there’s a maple tree with a great scar where the branch was taken away by the storm, and near to it is a flat stone, and there you’ll find me. I was caught in a trap,’ he says, ‘wasn’t set for me,’ he says, ‘but it got me all the same. And now be easy in your mind about me,’ he says, ‘because it’s all over.’ Then he went away, giving me a look over his shoulder like a human creature, and I woke up Dennis and told him. Surely as we live, Mr. Pendleton, it was all true. So Dennis went beyond the north field and brought him home and we buried him in the garden and cried over him.” Her voice broke and lowered and Dennis shuddered for fear she was going to shed tears before this stranger.

  “For God’s sake, Miz O’Toole,” said the loud-mouthed man, “you can’t get around that now, can you? Why, that’s the most remarkable thing I ever heard!”

  Dennis rose, creaking a little, and hobbled around to the east side of the house in time to see a round man with a flabby red face climbing into a rusty old car with a sign painted on the door. “Always something, now,” he commented, putting his head in at the kitchen door. “Always telling a tall tale!”

  “Well,” said Rosaleen, without the least shame, “he wanted a story so I gave him a good one. That’s the Irish in me.”

  “Always making a thing more than it is,” said Dennis. “That’s the way it goes.” Rosaleen turned a little edgy. “Out with ye!” she cried, and the cats never budged a whisker. “The kitchen’s no place for a man! How often must I tell ye?”

  “Well, hand me my hat, will you?” said Dennis, for his hat hung on a nail over the calendar and had hung there within easy reach ever since they had lived in the farm house. A few minutes later he wanted his pipe, lying on the lamp shelf where he always kept it. Next he had to have his barn boots at once, though he hadn’t seen them for a month. At last he thought of something to say, and opened the door a few inches.

  “Wherever have I been sitting unmolested for the past ten years?” he asked, looking at his easy chair with the pillow freshly plumped, side ways to the big table. “And today it’s no place for me?”

  “If ye grumble ye’ll be sorry,” said Rosaleen gayly, “and now clear out before I hurl something at ye!”

  Dennis put his hat on the parlor table and his boots under the sofa, and sat on the front steps and lit his pipe. It would soon be cold weather, and he wished he had his old leather jacket off the hook on the kitchen door. Whatever was Rosaleen up to now? He decided that Rosaleen was always doing the Irish a great wrong by putting her own faults off on them. To be Irish, he felt, was to be like him, a sober, practical, thinking man, a lover of truth. Rosaleen couldn’t see it at all. “It’s just your head is like a stone!” she said to him once, pretending she was joking, but she meant it. She had never appreciated him, that was it. And neither had his first wife. Whatever he gave them, they always wanted something else. When he was young and poor his first wife wanted money. And when he was a steady man with money in the bank, his second wife wanted a young man full of life. “They’re all born ingrates one way or another,” he decided, and felt better at once, as if at last he had something solid to stand on. In October a man could get his death sitting on the steps like this, and little she cared! He clacked his teeth together and felt how they didn’t fit any more, and his feet and hands seemed tied on him with strings.

  All the while Rosaleen didn’t look to be a year older. She might almost be doing it to spite him, except that she wasn’t the spiteful kind. He’d be bound to say that for her. But she couldn’t forget that her girlhood had been a great triumph in Ireland, and she was forever telling him tales about it, and telling them again. This youth of hers was clearer in his mind than his own. He couldn’t remember one thing over another that had happened to him. His past lay like a great lump within him; there it was, he knew it all at once, when he thought of it, like a chest a man has packed away, knowing all that is in it without troubling to name or count the objects. All in a lump it had not been an easy life being named Dennis O’Toole in Bristol, England, where he was brought up and worked sooner than he was able at the first jobs he could find. And his English wife had never forgiven him for pulling her up by the roots and bringing her to New York, where his brothers and sisters were, and a better job. All the long years he had been first a waiter and then head waiter in a New York hotel had telescoped in his mind, somehow. It wasn’t the best of hotels, to be sure, but still he was head waiter and there was good money in it, enough to buy this farm in Connecticut and have a little steady money coming in, and what more could Rosaleen ask?

  He was not unhappy over his first wife’s death a few years after they left England, because they had never really liked each other, and it seemed to him now that even before she was dead he had made up his mind, if she did die, never to marry again. He had held out on this until he was nearly fifty, when he met Rosaleen at a dance in the County Sligo hall far over on East 86th Street.
She was a great tall rosy girl, a prize dancer, and the boys were fairly fighting over her. She led him a dance then for two years before she would have him. She said there was nothing against him except he came from Bristol, and the outland Irish had the name of people you couldn’t trust. She couldn’t say why—it was just a name they had, worse than Dublin people itself. No decent Sligo girl would marry a Dublin man if he was the last man on earth. Dennis didn’t believe this, he’d never heard any such thing against the Dubliners; he thought a country girl would lep at the chance to marry a city man whatever. Rosaleen said, “Maybe,” but he’d see whether she would lep to marry Bristol Irish. She was chambermaid in a rich woman’s house, a fiend of darkness if there ever was one, said Rosaleen, and at first Dennis had been uneasy about the whole thing, fearing a young girl who had to work so hard might be marrying an older man for his money, but before the two years were up he had got over that notion.

  It wasn’t long after they were married Dennis began almost to wish sometimes he had let one of those strong-armed boys have her, but he had been fond of her, she was a fine good girl, and after she cooled down a little, he knew he could have never done better. The only thing was, he wished it had been Rosaleen he had married that first time in Bristol, and now they’d be settled better together, nearer an age. Thirty years was too much difference altogether. But he never said any such thing to Rosaleen. A man owes something to himself. He knocked out his pipe on the foot scraper and felt a real need to go in the kitchen and find a pipe cleaner.

  Rosaleen said, “Come in and welcome!” He stood peering around wondering what she had been making. She warned him: “I’m off to milk now, and mind ye keep your eyes in your pocket. The cow, now—the creature! Pretty soon she’ll be jumping the stone walls after the apples, and running wild through the fields roaring, and it’s all for another calf only, the poor deceived thing!” Dennis said, “I don’t see what deceit there is in that.” “Oh, don’t you now?” said Rosaleen, and gathered up her milk pails.