100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Feminism, increasingly part of the zeitgeist, was slow to catch on in the short stories that appeared in popular magazines. Women’s magazines ran commercial fiction, typically written by men and featuring benign male characters. Foley wrote, “But women can be bitches in their stories. An editor explained that although her readers were nearly all women she had to be careful not to print anything derogatory about male characters. There can be no wonderful villains as in all fiction of yore. ‘Our publisher and top executives are men. They wouldn’t like it.’ I, personally, refuse to believe that modern men, even publishers, have become so namby-pamby.”

  Over the years Foley had maintained a strained friendship with her ex-husband, Whit Burnett, arguing frequently over the support of their son. In 1962 she asked Houghton Mifflin to omit Story from the list of magazines at the back of The Best American Short Stories and refused to read it in consideration for the series. An editor at Houghton Mifflin secretly read the magazine each year to assure that no potential candidates were being omitted.

  In 1966 Foley broke her pelvic bone and retired from Columbia. She began instead teaching a small group of adult students at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Wednesday afternoons. She regaled students with tales of her work as a reporter and her crusade for women’s rights, anecdotes about Paris in the twenties and her years as an editor. She talked openly to her students and friends about writers whom she had disliked—“Oh, Hemingway. Hemingway was such a mean bastard. He never did a nice thing for anybody in his life.” One of her favorite tales involved Ray Bradbury. She had chosen a story of his to appear in The Best American Short Stories and soon after got a telegram refusing permission to reprint it. Later she learned that he’d been arguing with a girlfriend, who, without his knowledge, had in fact been the one to send the telegram to Foley.

  Foley eventually moved to Maine to live with her brother, who died two days after she arrived. He left no will, and she moved back to New York while his estate was settled. She endured a string of more bad luck: her apartment building in Manhattan burned down, she broke an ankle, “two burglaries [took place] in my apartment, one committed by a man who threatened to kill me (I was too frightened to ask if he wrote short stories).” Although she rarely spoke of it, her son, David, had struggles of his own. Her work began to suffer; the list of magazines at the back of the book became hopelessly outdated. Editors at Houghton Mifflin continued to question her taste: “Not only are the stories of mediocre quality, but there is an overwhelming preoccupation with death, old age, senility, disease, alcoholism in the aged.”

  In 1967 Foley moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, and seemed optimistic that her luck would change. She wrote, “I am very happy here. I have a few acres of woods and garden and river and a small contemporary house that is a work of art.”

  1962

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Everything That Rises Must Converge

  from New World Writing

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925–1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up on a farm where peacocks were raised. Later she attended the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as one biographer put it.

  O’Connor believed that “a writer with Christian concerns needed to take ever more violent means to get her vision across to [her audience].” Her fiction explored themes of original sin, guilt, and isolation. She published two collections of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. O’Connor displayed a uniquely dark humor meant to emphasize her characters’ spiritual deficits, the parts where, as she said, “the good is under construction.”

  O’Connor suffered from lupus for much of her life and died at the age of thirty-nine from complications of the disease. The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor won the National Book Award in 1972.

  ★

  HER DOCTOR HAD told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride on the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.

  She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”

  Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

  She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl that he had to take to town.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go.” He opened the door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.

  The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. “Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won’t meet myself coming and going.”

  “Some day I’ll start making money,” Julian said gloomily—he knew he never would—“and you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first they would move. He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on either side.

  “I think you’re doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You’ve only been out of school a year. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when she brought it out I said, ‘Take that thing back. I wouldn’t have it on my head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till you see it on,’ and when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and she said, ‘If you ask me, that hat does something for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with that hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going.’”

  Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching s
ight of his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said. “I’m going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I’m going to return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”

  He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to take it back,” he said. “I like it.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t think I ought . . .”

  “Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed than ever.

  “With the world in the mess it’s in,” she said, “it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.”

  Julian sighed.

  “Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.” She said this every time he took her to the reducing class. “Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said, “but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”

  “They don’t give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”

  She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. “I most certainly do know who I am,” she said, “and if you don’t know who you are, I’m ashamed of you.”

  “Oh hell,” Julian said.

  “Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,” she said. “Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.”

  “Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.

  “You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”

  “There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.

  “They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station: “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”

  “Let’s skip it,” Julian said.

  “The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white. They’re tragic.”

  “Will you skip it?”

  “Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed feelings.”

  “I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.

  “Well let’s talk about something pleasant,” she said. “I remember going to Grandpa’s when I was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that went up to what was really the second floor—all the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the walls smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances,” she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they were.”

  “Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian muttered. He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once when he was a child before it had been sold. The double stairways had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were living in it. But it remained in his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was because of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a torment to him—whereas she had hardly known the difference. She called her insensitivity “being adjustable.”

  “And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline. There was no better person in the world. I’ve always had a great respect for my colored friends,” she said. “I’d do anything in the world for them and they’d . . .”

  “Will you for God’s sake get off that subject?” Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother’s sins.

  “You’re mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”

  “Yes I feel all right,” he said. “Now lay off.”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile humor,” she observed. “I just won’t speak to you at all.”

  They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket.

  She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you take me to town?” she said. “Why must you deliberately embarrass me?”

  “If you’ll never learn where you are,” he said, “you can at least learn where I am.”

  “You look like a—thug,” she said.

  “Then I must be one,” he murmured.

  “I’ll just go home,” she said. “I will not bother you. If you can’t do a little thing like that for me . . .”

  Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Restored to my class,” he muttered. He thrust his face toward her and hissed, “True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.”

  “It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.”

  “Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”

  “I care who I am,” she said icily.

  The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it approached, they moved out into the street to meet it. He put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up on the creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her. While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad front seats for three which faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the end of it. His mother moved up beside her and left room for Julian beside herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals were planted.

  His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding fan, black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her.

  “I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no hotter.”

  “It must get the afternoon sun,” his mother said. She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed.

  “For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other day and they were thick as fleas—up front and all through.”

  “The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don’t know how we’ve let it get in this fix.”

  “What gets my goat is all those boys from good families stealing automobile tires,” the woman with the protruding teeth said. “I told my boy, I said you may not be rich but you been raised right and if I ever catch you in any such mess, they can send you on to the reformatory.
Be exactly where you belong.”

  “Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in high school?”

  “Ninth grade,” the woman said.

  “My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but he’s selling typewriters until he gets started,” his mother said.

  The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw her such a malevolent look that she subsided against the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspaper. He got up and got it and opened it out in front of him. His mother discreetly continued the conversation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, “Well that’s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other.”

  “I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.

  The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started from any of the right premises, more might have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which he had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made them necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny without the Chestny goods, and to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won.