Discusssion&Essay

177

Désirée’s Baby

1892

as the day was Pleasant, Madame Valmondé drove over to L’Abri to see Désirée and the baby. It made her laugh to think of Désirée with a baby. Why, it seemed but yes- terday that Désirée was little more than a baby herself; when Monsieur in rid- ing through the gateway of Valmondé had found her lying asleep in the shadow of the big stone pillar. The little one awoke in his arms and began to cry for “Dada.” That was as much as she could do or say. Some people thought she might have strayed there of her own accord, for she was of the toddling age. The prevailing belief was that she had been purposely left by a party of Texans, whose canvas- covered wagon, late in the day, had crossed the ferry that Coton Maïs kept, just below the planta- tion. In time Madame Valmondé abandoned every speculation but the one that Désirée had been sent to her by a beneficent Providence to be the child of her affection, seeing that she was without child of the flesh. For the girl grew to be beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere, — the idol of Valmondé. It was no wonder, when she stood one day against the stone pillar in whose shadow she had lain asleep, eighteen years before, that Armand Aubigny rid- ing by and seeing her there, had fallen in love with her. That was the way all the Aubignys fell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot. The wonder was that he had not loved her before; for he had known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles. Monsieur Valmondé grew practical and wanted things well considered: that is, the girl’s obscure origin. Armand looked into her eyes and did not care. He was reminded that she was nameless. What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana? He ordered the corbeille1 from Paris, and contained himself with what patience he could until it arrived; then they were married. Madame Valmondé had not seen Désirée and the baby for four weeks. When she reached L’Abri she shuddered at the first sight of it, as she always did. It was a sad looking place, which for many years had not known the gentle presence of a mistress, old Monsieur Aubigny having married and buried his wife in France, and she having loved her own land too well ever to leave it. The roof came down steep and black like a cowl, reaching out beyond the wide galleries that encircled the yellow stuccoed house. Big, solemn oaks grew close to it, and their thick- leaved, far-reaching branches shadowed it like a pall. Young Aubigny’s rule was a strict one, too, and under it his negroes had forgotten how to be gay, as they had been during the old master’s easy-going and indulgent lifetime.

1 Wedding presents (French).

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The young mother was recovering slowly, and lay full length, in her soft white muslins and laces, upon a couch. The baby was beside her, upon her arm, where he had fallen sleep, at her breast. The yellow nurse woman sat beside a window fanning herself. Madame Valmondé bent her portly figure over Désirée and kissed her, holding her an instant tenderly in her arms. Then she turned to the child. “This is not the baby!” she exclaimed, in startled tones. French was the lan- guage spoken at Valmondé in those days. “I knew you would be astonished,” laughed Désirée, “at the way he has grown. The little cochon de lait!2 Look at his legs, mamma, and his hands and fingernails, — real fingernails. Zandrine had to cut them this morning. Isn’t it true, Zandrine?” The woman bowed her turbaned head majestically, “Mais si, Madame.” “And the way he cries,” went on Désirée, “is deafening. Armand heard him the other day as far away as La Blanche’s cabin.” Madame Valmondé had never removed her eyes from the child. She lifted it and walked with it over to the window that was lightest. She scanned the baby narrowly, then looked as searchingly at Zandrine, whose face was turned to gaze across the fields. “Yes, the child has grown, has changed,” said Madame Valmondé, slowly, as she replaced it beside its mother. “What does Armand say?” Désirée’s face became suffused with a glow that was happiness itself. “Oh, Armand is the proudest father in the parish, I believe, chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name; though he says not, — that he would have loved a girl as well. But I know it isn’t true. I know he says that to please me. And mamma,” she added, drawing Madame Valmondé’s head down to her and speaking in a whisper, “he hasn’t punished one of them — not one of them — since baby is born. Even Négrillon, who pretended to have burnt his leg that he might rest from work — he only laughed, and said Négrillon was a great scamp. Oh, mamma, I’m so happy; it frightens me.” What Désirée said was true. Marriage, and later the birth of his son had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly. This was what made the gentle Désirée so happy, for she loved him desperately. When he frowned she trembled, but loved him. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessing of God. But Armand’s dark, handsome face had not often been disfig- ured by frowns since the day he fell in love with her. When the baby was about three months old, Désirée awoke one day to the conviction that there was something in the air menacing her peace. It was at first too subtle to grasp. It had only been a disquieting suggestion; an air of mystery among the blacks; unexpected visits from far-off neighbors who could hardly account for their coming. Then a strange, an awful change in her hus- band’s manner, which she dared not ask him to explain. When he spoke to her, it was with averted eyes, from which the old love-light seemed to have gone

2 An endearment (literally, “suckling pig” in French).

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out. He absented himself from home; and when there, avoided her presence and that of her child, without excuse. And the very spirit of Satan seemed sud- denly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves. Désirée was miserable enough to die. She sat in her room, one hot afternoon, in her peignoir, listlessly drawing through her fingers the strands of her long, silky brown hair that hung about her shoulders. The baby, half naked, lay asleep upon her own great mahogany bed, that was like a sumptuous throne, with its satin-lined half-canopy. One of La Blanche’s little quadroon boys — half naked too — stood fanning the child slowly with a fan of peacock feathers. Désirée’s eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby, while she was striving to penetrate the threaten- ing mist that she felt closing about her. She looked from her child to the boy who stood beside him, and back again; over and over. “Ah!” It was a cry that she could not help; which she was not conscious of having uttered. The blood turned like ice in her veins, and a clammy moisture gathered upon her face. She tried to speak to the little quadroon boy; but no sound would come, at first. When he heard his name uttered, he looked up, and his mistress was pointing to the door. He laid aside the great, soft fan, and obediently stole away, over the polished floor, on his bare tiptoes. She stayed motionless, with gaze riveted upon her child, and her face the picture of fright. Presently her husband entered the room, and without noticing her, went to a table and began to search among some papers which covered it. “Armand,” she called to him, in a voice which must have stabbed him, if he was human. But he did not notice. “Armand,” she said again. Then she rose and tottered towards him. “Armand,” she panted once more, clutching his arm, “look at our child. What does it mean? Tell me.” He coldly but gently loosened her fingers from about his arm and thrust the hand away from him. “Tell me what it means!” she cried despairingly. “It means,” he answered lightly, “that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.” A quick conception of all that this accusation meant for her nerved her with unwonted courage to deny it. “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skin is fair,” seizing his wrist. “Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand,” she laughed hysterically. “As white as La Blanche’s,” he returned cruelly; and went away leaving her alone with their child. When she could hold a pen in her hand, she sent a despairing letter to Madame Valmondé. “My mother, they tell me I am not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For God’s sake tell them it is not true. You must know it is not true. I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live.” The answer that came was as brief: “My own Désirée: Come home to Valmondé; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child.”

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180 K A T E C H O P I N

When the letter reached Désirée she went with it to her husband’s study, and laid it open upon the desk before which he sat. She was like a stone image: silent, white, motionless after she placed it there. In silence he ran his cold eyes over the written words. He said nothing. “Shall I go, Armand?” she asked in tones sharp with agonized suspense. “Yes, go.” “Do you want me to go?” “Yes, I want you to go.” He thought Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly with him; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kind when he stabbed thus into his wife’s soul. Moreover he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name. She turned away like one stunned by a blow, and walked slowly towards the door, hoping he would call her back. “Good-by, Armand,” she moaned. He did not answer her. That was his last blow at fate. Désirée went in search of her child. Zandrine was pacing the sombre gal- lery with it. She took the little one from the nurse’s arms with no word of expla- nation, and descending the steps, walked away, under the live-oak branches. It was an October afternoon; the sun was just sinking. Out in the still fields the negroes were picking cotton. Désirée had not changed the thin white garment nor the slippers which she wore. Her hair was uncovered and the sun’s rays brought a golden gleam from its brown meshes. She did not take the broad, beaten road which led to the far-off plantation of Valmondé. She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds. She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again.

Some weeks later there was a curious scene enacted at L’Abri. In the centre of the smoothly swept back yard was a great bonfire. Armand Aubigny sat in the wide hallway that commanded a view of the spectacle; and it was he who dealt out to a half dozen negroes the material which kept this fire ablaze. A graceful cradle of willow, with all its dainty furbishings, was laid upon the pyre, which had already been fed with the richness of a priceless layette. Then there were silk gowns, and velvet and satin ones added to these; laces, too, and embroideries; bonnets and gloves; for the corbeille had been of rare quality. The last thing to go was a tiny bundle of letters; innocent little scribblings that Désirée had sent to him during the days of their espousal. There was the remnant of one back in the drawer from which he took them. But it was not Désirée’s; it was part of an old letter from his mother to his father. He read it. She was thanking God for the blessing of her husband’s love: — “But, above all,” she wrote, “night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of sla very.”

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181

The Story of an Hour

1894

knowIng that mrs. mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a par- alyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who had cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will — as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes.

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They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years: she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. And yet she had loved him — sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this posses- sion of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door — you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.” “Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his gripsack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of joy that kills.

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That Evening Sun 323

That Evening Sun

1931

I

Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees — the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms — to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morn- ing, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.

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This selection has been omitted intentionally in this electronic edition.

William Faulkner: "That Evening Sun" copyright 1931 and renewed 1959 by William Faulkner,

From Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random

House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use

of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly

to Random House LLC for permission. Electronic rights to "That Evening Sun" granted by

permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

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324 W I L L I A M F A U L K N E r

But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow. Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She was tall, with a high, sad face sunken a little where her teeth were missing. Sometimes we would go a part of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence. She would go down on her hands and knees and crawl through the gap, her head rigid, uptilted, the bundle steady as a rock or a balloon, and rise to her feet again and go on. Sometimes the husbands of the washing women would fetch and deliver the clothes, but Jesus never did that for Nancy, even before father told him to stay away from our house, even when Dilsey was sick and Nancy would come to cook for us. And then about half the time we’d have to go down the lane to Nancy’s cabin and tell her to come on and cook breakfast. We would stop at the ditch, because father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus — he was a short black man, with a razor scar down his face — and we would throw rocks at Nancy’s house until she came to the door, leaning her head around it without any clothes on. “What yawl mean, chunking my house?” Nancy said. “What you little dev- ils mean?” “Father says for you to come on and get breakfast,” Caddy said. “Father says it’s over a half an hour now, and you’ve got to come this minute.” “I aint studying no breakfast,” Nancy said. “I going to get my sleep out.” “I bet you’re drunk,” Jason said. “Father says you’re drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?” “Who says I is?” Nancy said. “I got to get my sleep out. I ain’t studying no breakfast.” So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went back home. When she finally came, it was too late for me to go to school. So we thought it was whisky until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say: “When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since you paid me a cent —” Mr Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, “When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since —” until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, “It’s been three times now since he paid me a cent.” That was how she lost her teeth, and all that day they told about Nancy and Mr Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail could hear Nancy

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singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. She didn’t shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whisky, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn’t a nigger any longer. The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn’t have on anything except a dress and so she didn’t have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn’t make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, like a little balloon. When Dilsey was sick in her cabin and Nancy was cooking for us, we could see her apron swelling out; that was before father told Jesus to stay away from the house. Jesus was in the kitchen, sitting behind the stove, with his razor scar on his black face like a piece of dirty string. He said it was a watermelon that Nancy had under her dress. “It never come off of your vine, though,” Nancy said. “Off of what vine?” Caddy said. “I can cut down the vine it did come off of,” Jesus said. “What makes you want to talk like that before these chillen?” Nancy said. “Whyn’t you go on to work? You done et. You want Mr Jason to catch you hanging around his kitchen, talking that way before these chillen?” “Talking what way?” Caddy said. “What vine?” “I cant hang around white man’s kitchen,” Jesus said. “But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I cant stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I aint got no house. I cant stop him, but he cant kick me outen it. He cant do that.” Dilsey was still sick in her cabin. Father told Jesus to stay off our place. Dilsey was still sick. It was a long time. We were in the library after supper. “Isn’t Nancy through in the kitchen yet?” mother said. “It seems to me that she has had plenty of time to have finished the dishes.” “Let Quentin go and see,” father said. “Go and see if Nancy is through, Quentin. Tell her she can go on home.” I went to the kitchen. Nancy was through. The dishes were put away and the fire was out. Nancy was sitting in a chair, close to the cold stove. She looked at me. “Mother wants to know if you are through,” I said. “Yes,” Nancy said. She looked at me. “I done finished.” She looked at me. “What is it?” I said. “What is it?” “I aint nothing but a nigger,” Nancy said. “It aint none of my fault.” She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor hat on her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all, when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat at that hour.

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326 W I L L I A M F A U L K N E r

“Is she through?” mother said. “Yessum,” I said. “What is she doing?” mother said. “She’s not doing anything. She’s through.” “I’ll go and see,” father said. “Maybe she’s waiting for Jesus to come and take her home,” Caddy said. “Jesus is gone,” I said. Nancy told us how one morning she woke up and Jesus was gone. “He quit me,” Nancy said. “Done gone to Memphis, I reckon. Dodging them city po-lice for a while, I reckon.” “And a good riddance,” father said. “I hope he stays there.” “Nancy’s scaired of the dark,” Jason said. “So are you,” Caddy said. “I’m not,” Jason said. “Scairy cat,” Caddy said. “I’m not,” Jason said. “You, Candace!” mother said. Father came back. “I am going to walk down the lane with Nancy,” he said. “She says that Jesus is back.” “Has she seen him?” mother said. “No. Some Negro sent her word that he was back in town. I wont be long.” “You’ll leave me alone, to take Nancy home?” mother said. “Is her safety more precious to you than mine?” “I wont be long,” father said. “You’ll leave these children unprotected, with that Negro about?” “I’m going too,” Caddy said. “Let me go, Father.” “What would he do with them, if he were unfortunate enough to have them?” father said. “I want to go, too,” Jason said. “Jason!” mother said. She was speaking to father. You could tell that by the way she said the name. Like she believed that all day father had been trying to think of doing the thing she wouldn’t like the most, and that she knew all the time that after a while he would think of it. I stayed quiet, because father and I both knew that mother would want him to make me stay with her if she just thought of it in time. So father didn’t look at me. I was the oldest. I was nine and Caddy was seven and Jason was five. “Nonsense,” father said. “We wont be long.” Nancy had her hat on. We came to the lane. “Jesus always been good to me,” Nancy said. “Whenever he had two dollars, one of them was mine.” We walked in the lane. “If I can just get through the lane,” Nancy said, “I be all right then.” The lane was always dark. “This is where Jason got scared on Hallowe’en,” Caddy said. “I didn’t,” Jason said. “Cant Aunt Rachel do anything with him?” father said. Aunt Rachel was old. She lived in a cabin beyond Nancy’s, by herself. She had white hair and she smoked a pipe in the door, all day long; she didn’t work any more. They said

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she was Jesus’ mother. Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn’t any kin to Jesus. “Yes, you did,” Caddy said. “You were scairder than Frony. You were scairder than T.P. even. Scairder than niggers.” “Cant nobody do nothing with him,” Nancy said. “He say I done woke up the devil in him and aint but one thing going to lay it down again.” “Well, he’s gone now,” father said. “There’s nothing for you to be afraid of now. And if you’d just let white men alone.” “Let what white men alone?” Caddy said. “How let them alone?” “He aint gone nowhere,” Nancy said. “I can feel him. I can feel him now, in this lane. He hearing us talk, every word, hid somewhere, waiting. I aint seen him, and I aint going to see him again but once more, with that razor in his mouth. That razor on that string down his back, inside his shirt. And then I aint going to be even surprised.” “I wasn’t scaired,” Jason said. “If you’d behave yourself, you’d have kept out of this,” father said. “But it’s all right now. He’s probably in St. Louis now. Probably got another wife by now and forgot all about you.” “If he has, I better not find out about it,” Nancy said. “I’d stand there right over them, and every time he wropped her, I’d cut that arm off. I’d cut his head off and I’d slit her belly and I’d shove —” “Hush,” father said. “Slit whose belly, Nancy?” Caddy said. “I wasn’t scaired,” Jason said. “I’d walk right down this lane by myself.” “Yah,” Caddy said. “You wouldn’t dare to put your foot down in it if we were not here too.”

II

Dilsey was still sick, so we took Nancy home every night until mother said, “How much longer is this going on? I to be left alone in this big house while you take home a frightened Negro?” We fixed a pallet in the kitchen for Nancy. One night we waked up, hearing the sound. It was not singing and it was not crying, coming up the dark stairs. There was a light in mother’s room and we heard father going down the hall, down the back stairs, and Caddy and I went into the hall. The floor was cold. Our toes curled away from it while we listened to the sound. It was like singing and it wasn’t like singing, like the sounds that Negroes make. Then it stopped and we heard father going down the back stairs, and we went to the head of the stairs. Then the sound began again, in the stairway, not loud, and we could see Nancy’s eyes halfway up the stairs, against the wall. They looked like cat’s eyes do, like a big cat against the wall, watching us. When we came down the steps to where she was, she quit making the sound again, and we stood there until father came back up from the kitchen, with his pistol in his hand. He went back down with Nancy and they came back with Nancy’s pallet. We spread the pallet in our room. After the light in mother’s room went off, we could see Nancy’s eyes again. “Nancy,” Caddy whispered, “are you asleep, Nancy?”

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Nancy whispered something. It was oh or no, I dont know which. Like nobody had made it, like it came from nowhere and went nowhere, until it was like Nancy was not there at all; that I had looked so hard at her eyes on the stairs that they had got printed on my eyeballs, like the sun does when you have closed your eyes and there is no sun. “Jesus,” Nancy whispered. “Jesus.” “Was it Jesus?” Caddy said. “Did he try to come into the kitchen?” “Jesus,” Nancy said. Like this: Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus, until the sound went out, like a match or a candle does. “It’s the other Jesus she means,” I said. “Can you see us, Nancy?” Caddy whispered. “Can you see our eyes too?” “I aint nothing but a nigger,” Nancy said. “God knows. God knows.” “What did you see down there in the kitchen?” Caddy whispered. “What tried to get in?” “God knows,” Nancy said. We could see her eyes. “God knows.” Dilsey got well. She cooked dinner. “You’d better stay in bed a day or two longer,” father said. “What for?” Dilsey said. “If I had been a day later, this place would be to rack and ruin. Get on out of here now, and let me get my kitchen straight again.” Dilsey cooked supper too. And that night, just before dark, Nancy came into the kitchen. “How do you know he’s back?” Dilsey said. “You aint seen him.” “Jesus is a nigger,” Jason said. “I can feel him,” Nancy said. “I can feel him laying yonder in the ditch.” “Tonight?” Dilsey said. “Is he there tonight?” “Dilsey’s a nigger too,” Jason said. “You try to eat something,” Dilsey said. “I dont want nothing,” Nancy said. “I aint a nigger,” Jason said. “Drink some coffee,” Dilsey said. She poured a cup of coffee for Nancy. “Do you know he’s out there tonight? How come you know it’s tonight?” “I know,” Nancy said. “He’s there, waiting. I know. I done lived with him too long. I know what he is fixing to do fore he know it himself.” “Drink some coffee,” Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup to her mouth and blew into the cup. Her mouth pursed out like a spreading adder’s, like a rubber mouth, like she had blown all the color out of her lips with blowing the coffee. “I aint a nigger,” Jason said. “Are you a nigger, Nancy?” “I hellborn, child,” Nancy said. “I wont be nothing soon. I going back where I come from soon.”

III

She began to drink the coffee. While she was drinking, holding the cup in both hands, she began to make the sound again. She made the sound into the cup and the coffee sploshed out onto her hands and her dress. Her eyes looked at us and she sat there, her elbows on her knees, holding the cup in both hands, looking at us across the wet cup, making the sound. “Look at Nancy,” Jason said. “Nancy cant cook for us now. Dilsey’s got well now.”

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“You hush up,” Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup in both hands, looking at us, making the sound, like there were two of them: one looking at us and the other making the sound. “Whyn’t you let Mr Jason telefoam the marshal?” Dilsey said. Nancy stopped then, holding the cup in her long brown hands. She tried to drink some coffee again, but it sploshed out of the cup, onto her hands and her dress, and she put the cup down. Jason watched her. “I cant swallow it,” Nancy said. “I swallows but it wont go down me.” “You go down to the cabin,” Dilsey said. “Frony will fix you a pallet and I’ll be there soon.” “Wont no nigger stop him,” Nancy said. “I aint a nigger,” Jason said. “Am I, Dilsey?” “I reckon not,” Dilsey said. She looked at Nancy. “I dont reckon so. What you going to do, then?” Nancy looked at us. Her eyes went fast, like she was afraid there wasn’t time to look, without hardly moving at all. She looked at us, at all three of us at one time. “You member that night I stayed in yawls’ room?” she said. She told about how we waked up early the next morning, and played. We had to play quiet, on her pallet, until father woke up and it was time to get breakfast. “Go and ask your maw to let me stay here tonight,” Nancy said. “I wont need no pallet. We can play some more.” Caddy asked mother. Jason went too. “I cant have Negroes sleeping in the bedrooms,” mother said. Jason cried. He cried until mother said he couldn’t have any dessert for three days if he didn’t stop. Then Jason said he would stop if Dilsey would make a chocolate cake. Father was there. “Why dont you do something about it?” mother said. “What do we have officers for?” “Why is Nancy afraid of Jesus?” Caddy said. “Are you afraid of father, mother?” “What could the officers do?” father said. “If Nancy hasn’t seen him, how could the officers find him?” “Then why is she afraid?” mother said. “She says he is there. She says she knows he is there tonight.” “Yet we pay taxes,” mother said. “I must wait here alone in this big house while you take a Negro woman home.” “You know that I am not lying outside with a razor,” father said. “I’ll stop if Dilsey will make a chocolate cake,” Jason said. Mother told us to go out and father said he didn’t know if Jason would get a chocolate cake or not, but he knew what Jason was going to get in about a minute. We went back to the kitchen and told Nancy. “Father said for you to go home and lock the door, and you’ll be all right,” Caddy said. “All right from what, Nancy? Is Jesus mad at you?” Nancy was holding the coffee cup in her hands again, her elbows on her knees and her hands holding the cup between her knees. She was looking into the cup. “What have you done that made Jesus mad?” Caddy said. Nancy let the cup go. It didn’t break on the floor, but the coffee spilled out, and Nancy sat there with her hands still making the shape of the cup. She began to make the sound again, not loud. Not singing and not unsinging. We watched her.

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“Here,” Dilsey said. “You quit that, now. You get aholt of yourself. You wait here. I going to get Versh to walk home with you.” Dilsey went out. We looked at Nancy. Her shoulders kept shaking, but she quit making the sound. We watched her. “What’s Jesus going to do to you?” Caddy said. “He went away.” Nancy looked at us. “We had fun that night I stayed in yawls’ room, didn’t we?” “I didn’t,” Jason said. “I didn’t have any fun.” “You were asleep in mother’s room,” Caddy said. “You were not there.” “Let’s go down to my house and have some more fun,” Nancy said. “Mother wont let us,” I said. “It’s too late now.” “Dont bother her,” Nancy said. “We can tell her in the morning. She wont mind.” “She wouldn’t let us,” I said. “Dont ask her now,” Nancy said. “Dont bother her now.” “She didn’t say we couldn’t go,” Caddy said. “We didn’t ask,” I said. “If you go, I’ll tell,” Jason said. “We’ll have fun,” Nancy said. “They won’t mind, just to my house. I been working for yawl a long time. They won’t mind.” “I’m not afraid to go,” Caddy said. “Jason is the one that’s afraid. He’ll tell.” “I’m not,” Jason said. “Yes, you are,” Caddy said. “You’ll tell.” “I won’t tell,” Jason said. “I’m not afraid.” “Jason ain’t afraid to go with me,” Nancy said. “Is you, Jason?” “Jason is going to tell,” Caddy said. The lane was dark. We passed the pas- ture gate. “I bet if something was to jump out from behind that gate, Jason would holler.” “I wouldn’t,” Jason said. We walked down the lane. Nancy was talking loud. “What are you talking so loud for, Nancy?” Caddy said. “Who; me?” Nancy said. “Listen at Quentin and Caddy and Jason saying I’m talking loud.” “You talk like there was five of us here,” Caddy said. “You talk like father was here too.” “Who; me talking loud, Mr Jason?” Nancy said. “Nancy called Jason ‘Mister,’ ” Caddy said. “Listen how Caddy and Quentin and Jason talk,” Nancy said. “We’re not talking loud,” Caddy said. “You’re the one that’s talking like father —” “Hush,” Nancy said; “hush, Mr Jason.” “Nancy called Jason ‘Mister’ aguh —” “Hush,” Nancy said. She was talking loud when we crossed the ditch and stooped through the fence where she used to stoop through with the clothes on her head. Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. The smell of the house was like the lamp and the smell of Nancy was

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like the wick, like they were waiting for one another to begin to smell. She lit the lamp and closed the door and put the bar up. Then she quit talking loud, looking at us. “What’re we going to do?” Caddy said. “What do yawl want to do?” Nancy said. “You said we would have some fun,” Caddy said. There was something about Nancy’s house; something you could smell besides Nancy and the house. Jason smelled it, even. “I don’t want to stay here,” he said. “I want to go home.” “Go home, then,” Caddy said. “I don’t want to go by myself,” Jason said. “We’re going to have some fun,” Nancy said. “How?” Caddy said. Nancy stood by the door. She was looking at us, only it was like she had emp- tied her eyes, like she had quit using them. “What do you want to do?” she said. “Tell us a story,” Caddy said. “Can you tell a story?” “Yes,” Nancy said. “Tell it,” Caddy said. We looked at Nancy. “You don’t know any stories.” “Yes,” Nancy said. “Yes, I do.” She came and sat in a chair before the hearth. There was a little fire there. Nancy built it up, when it was already hot inside. She built a good blaze. She told a story. She talked like her eyes looked, like her eyes watching us and her voice talking to us did not belong to her. Like she was living somewhere else, waiting somewhere else. She was outside the cabin. Her voice was inside and the shape of her, the Nancy that could stoop under a barbed wire fence with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head as though without weight, like a bal- loon, was there. But that was all. “And so this here queen come walking up to the ditch, where that bad man was hiding. She was walking up to the ditch, and she say, ‘If I can just get past this here ditch,’ was what she say . . .” “What ditch?” Caddy said. “A ditch like that one out there? Why did a queen want to go into a ditch?” “To get to her house,” Nancy said. She looked at us. “She had to cross the ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door.” “Why did she want to go home and bar the door?” Caddy said.

IV

Nancy looked at us. She quit talking. She looked at us. Jason’s legs stuck straight out of his pants where he sat on Nancy’s lap. “I don’t think that’s a good story,” he said. “I want to go home.” “Maybe we had better,” Caddy said. She got up from the floor. “I bet they are looking for us right now.” She went toward the door. “No,” Nancy said. “Don’t open it.” She got up quick and passed Caddy. She didn’t touch the door, the wooden bar. “Why not?” Caddy said. “Come back to the lamp,” Nancy said. “We’ll have fun. You don’t have to go.”

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“We ought to go,” Caddy said. “Unless we have a lot of fun.” She and Nancy came back to the fire, the lamp. “I want to go home,” Jason said. “I’m going to tell.” “I know another story,” Nancy said. She stood close to the lamp. She looked at Caddy, like when your eyes look up at a stick balanced on your nose. She had to look down to see Caddy, but her eyes looked like that, like when you are balancing a stick. “I won’t listen to it,” Jason said. “I’ll bang on the floor.” “It’s a good one,” Nancy said. “It’s better than the other one.” “What’s it about?” Caddy said. Nancy was standing by the lamp. Her hand was on the lamp, against the light, long and brown. “Your hand is on that hot globe,” Caddy said. “Don’t it feel hot to your hand?” Nancy looked at her hand on the lamp chimney. She took her hand away, slow. She stood there, looking at Caddy, wringing her long hand as though it were tied to her wrist with a string. “Let’s do something else,” Caddy said. “I want to go home,” Jason said. “I got some popcorn,” Nancy said. She looked at Caddy and then at Jason and then at me and then at Caddy again. “I got some popcorn.” “I don’t like popcorn,” Jason said. “I’d rather have candy.” Nancy looked at Jason. “You can hold the popper.” She was still wringing her hand; it was long and limp and brown. “All right,” Jason said. “I’ll stay a while if I can do that. Caddy can’t hold it. I’ll want to go home again if Caddy holds the popper.” Nancy built up the fire. “Look at Nancy putting her hands in the fire,” Caddy said. “What’s the matter with you, Nancy?” “I got popcorn,” Nancy said. “I got some.” She took the popper from under the bed. It was broken. Jason began to cry. “Now we can’t have any popcorn,” he said. “We ought to go home, anyway,” Caddy said. “Come on, Quentin.” “Wait,” Nancy said; “wait. I can fix it. Don’t you want to help me fix it?” “I don’t think I want any,” Caddy said. “It’s too late now.” “You help me, Jason,” Nancy said. “Don’t you want to help me?” “No,” Jason said. “I want to go home.” “Hush,” Nancy said; “hush. Watch. Watch me. I can fix it so Jason can hold it and pop the corn.” She got a piece of wire and fixed the popper. “It won’t hold good,” Caddy said. “Yes, it will,” Nancy said. “Yawl watch. Yawl help me shell some corn.” The popcorn was under the bed too. We shelled it into the popper and Nancy helped Jason hold the popper over the fire. “It’s not popping,” Jason said. “I want to go home.” “You wait,” Nancy said. “It’ll begin to pop. We’ll have fun then.” She was sitting close to the fire. The lamp was turned up so high it was beginning to smoke. “Why don’t you turn it down some?” I said.

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“It’s all right,” Nancy said. “I’ll clean it. Yawl wait. The popcorn will start in a minute.” “I don’t believe it’s going to start,” Caddy said. “We ought to start home, anyway. They’ll be worried.” “No,” Nancy said. “It’s going to pop. Dilsey will tell um yawl with me. I been working for yawl long time. They won’t mind if yawl at my house. You wait, now. It’ll start popping any minute now.” Then Jason got some smoke in his eyes and he began to cry. He dropped the popper into the fire. Nancy got a wet rag and wiped Jason’s face, but he didn’t stop crying. “Hush,” she said. “Hush.” But he didn’t hush. Caddy took the popper out of the fire. “It’s burned up,” she said. “You’ll have to get some more popcorn, Nancy.” “Did you put all of it in?” Nancy said. “Yes,” Caddy said. Nancy looked at Caddy. Then she took the popper and opened it and poured the cinders into her apron and began to sort the grains, her hands long and brown, and we watching her. “Haven’t you got any more?” Caddy said. “Yes,” Nancy said; “yes. Look. This here ain’t burnt. All we need to do is —” “I want to go home,” Jason said. “I’m going to tell.” “Hush,” Caddy said. We all listened. Nancy’s head was already turned toward the barred door, her eyes filled with red lamplight. “Somebody is com- ing,” Caddy said. Then Nancy began to make that sound again, not loud, sitting there above the fire, her long hands dangling between her knees; all of a sudden water began to come out on her face in big drops, running down her face, carrying in each one a little turning ball of firelight like a spark until it dropped off her chin. “She’s not crying,” I said. “I ain’t crying,” Nancy said. Her eyes were closed. “I ain’t crying. Who is it?” “I don’t know,” Caddy said. She went to the door and looked out. “We’ve got to go now,” she said. “Here comes father.” “I’m going to tell,” Jason said. “Yawl made me come.” The water still ran down Nancy’s face. She turned in her chair. “Listen. Tell him. Tell him we going to have fun. Tell him I take good care of yawl until in the morning. Tell him to let me come home with yawl and sleep on the floor. Tell him I won’t need no pallet. We’ll have fun. You member last time how we had so much fun?” “I didn’t have fun,” Jason said. “You hurt me. You put smoke in my eyes. I’m going to tell.”

V

Father came in. He looked at us. Nancy did not get up. “Tell him,” she said. “Caddy made us come down here,” Jason said. “I didn’t want to.” Father came to the fire. Nancy looked up at him. “Can’t you go to Aunt Rachel’s and stay?” he said. Nancy looked up at father, her hands between her

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knees. “He’s not here,” father said. “I would have seen him. There’s not a soul in sight.” “He in the ditch,” Nancy said. “He waiting in the ditch yonder.” “Nonsense,” father said. He looked at Nancy. “Do you know he’s there?” “I got the sign,” Nancy said. “What sign?” “I got it. It was on the table when I come in. It was a hogbone, with blood meat still on it, laying by the lamp. He’s out there. When yawl walk out that door, I gone.” “Gone where, Nancy?” Caddy said. “I’m not a tattletale,” Jason said. “Nonsense,” father said. “He out there,” Nancy said. “He looking through that window this minute, waiting for yawl to go. Then I gone.” “Nonsense,” father said. “Lock up your house and we’ll take you on to Aunt Rachel’s.” “ ’Twont do no good,” Nancy said. She didn’t look at father now, but he looked down at her, at her long, limp, moving hands. “Putting it off wont do no good.” “Then what do you want to do?” father said. “I don’t know,” Nancy said. “I can’t do nothing. Just put it off. And that don’t do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain’t no more than mine.” “Get what?” Caddy said. “What’s yours?” “Nothing,” father said. “You all must get to bed.” “Caddy made me come,” Jason said. “Go on to Aunt Rachel’s,” father said. “It won’t do no good,” Nancy said. She sat before the fire, her elbows on her knees, her long hands between her knees. “When even your own kitchen wouldn’t do no good. When even if I was sleeping on the floor in the room with your chillen, and the next morning there I am, and blood —” “Hush,” father said. “Lock the door and put out the lamp and go to bed.” “I scared of the dark,” Nancy said. “I scared for it to happen in the dark.” “You mean you’re going to sit right here with the lamp lighted?” father said. Then Nancy began to make the sound again, sitting before the fire, her long hands between her knees. “Ah, damnation,” father said. “Come along, chillen. It’s past bedtime.” “When yawl go home, I gone,” Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. “Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady.” Mr. Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morn- ing his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings. “Nonsense,” father said. “You’ll be the first thing I’ll see in the kitchen tomorrow morning.”

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“You’ll see what you’ll see, I reckon,” Nancy said. “But it will take the Lord to say what that will be.”

VI

“Come and put the bar up,” father said. But she didn’t move. She didn’t look at us again, sitting quietly there between the lamp and the fire. From some dis- tance down the lane we could look back and see her through the open door. “What, Father?” Caddy said. “What’s going to happen?” “Nothing,” father said. Jason was on father’s back, so Jason was the tallest of all of us. We went down into the ditch. I looked at it, quiet. I couldn’t see much where the moonlight and the shadows tangled. “If Jesus is hid here, he can see us, can’t he?” Caddy said. “He’s not there,” father said. “He went away a long time ago.” “You made me come,” Jason said, high; against the sky it looked like father had two heads, a little one and a big one. “I didn’t want to.” We went up out of the ditch. We could still see Nancy’s house and the open door, but we couldn’t see Nancy now, sitting before the fire with the door open, because she was tired. “I just done got tired,” she said. “I just a nigger. It ain’t no fault of mine.” But we could hear her, because she began just after we came up out of the ditch, the sound that was not singing and not unsinging. “Who will do our washing now, Father?” I said. “I’m not a nigger,” Jason said, high and close above father’s head. “You’re worse,” Caddy said, “you are a tattletale. If something was to jump out, you’d be scairder than a nigger.” “I wouldn’t,” Jason said. “You’d cry,” Caddy said. “Caddy,” father said. “I wouldn’t!” Jason said. “Scairy cat,” Caddy said. “Candace!” father said.

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380 G A B r I E L G A r C í A M á r Q U E z

RELATED CASEBOOK See Casebook on Magical realism, pages 1016–1035, including Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” page 1020; Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous real in America,” page 1022 and “The Baroque and the Marvelous real,” page 1024; Luis Leal, “Magical realism in Spanish American Literature,” page 1026; William Gass, “The First Seven Pages of the Boom,” page 1028; Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Kind of Fiction Most Characteristic of Our Times,” page 1030; Mario vargas Llosa, “The Prose Style of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez,” page 1034.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

1955 / Translated by Gregory rabassa

on The Third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glim- mered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with mute stupor. He was dressed like a rag- picker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake. “He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.” On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial con- spiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff ’s club, and before

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going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant on earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becom- ing a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in a corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an impostor when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the rec- ognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write to his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts. His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

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382 G A B r I E L G A r C í A M á r Q U E z

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any atten- tion to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal1 bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleep-walker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ail- ments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon. The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the penitents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end he ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had been one not of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose. Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidser- vant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any con- nection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put an end to the priest’s tribulations. It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attrac- tions, there arrived in town the traveling show of the woman who had been

1 Coming from the stars.

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changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were per- mitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heart-rending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms. The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high net- ting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before the child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.

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When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae2 of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels. And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feath- ers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decrepitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she saw him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

2 The tubular pieces by which feathers are attached to a body.

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405

Young Goodman Brown

1835

young goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown. “Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeared of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.” “My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ’twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married?” “Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you find all well when you come back.” “Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.” So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons. “Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a wretch am I to leave her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night. But no, no; ’t would kill her to think it. Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth, and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.” With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself jus- tified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude. “There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!” His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach and walked onward side by side with him.

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“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes agone.” “Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected. It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second travel- ler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have felt abashed at the governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court, were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light. “Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary.” “Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, “having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st of.” “Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet.” “Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of Brown that ever took this path and kept” — “Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person, interpreting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war.1 They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake.” “If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of

1 King Philip, a Wampanoag chief, spearheaded the most destructive Indian war ever waged against the New England colonists (1675–1676).

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the sort would have driven them from New England. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness.” “Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm sup- porters of my interest. The governor and I, too — But these are state secrets.” “Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple husband- man like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.” Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy. “Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself, “Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with laughing.” “Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I’d rather break my own.” “Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling before us that Faith should come to any harm.” As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin. “A marvel, truly that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at nightfall,” said he. “But with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was going.” “Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the path.” Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his com- panion, who advanced softly along the road until he had come within a staff ’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some indistinct words — a prayer, doubtless — as she went. The traveller put forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the serpent’s tail. “The devil!” screamed the pious old lady. “Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller, con- fronting her and leaning on his writhing stick. “Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame. “Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But — would your worship believe

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it? — my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf ’s bane” — “Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the shape of old Goodman Brown. “Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling aloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling.” “That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.” So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened. “That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment. They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his com- panion to make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and dried up as with a week’s sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused to go any farther. “Friend,” he said, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?” “You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance, composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.” Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister in his morn- ing walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the

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forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so happily turned from it. On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man’s hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that particular spot, neither the trav- ellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pull- ing aside the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minis- ter and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch. “Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had rather miss an ordination dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion.” “Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the minis- ter. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground.” The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overbur- dened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars brightening in it. “With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” cried Goodman Brown. While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly north- ward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones,

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heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sin- ners, seemed to encourage her onward. “Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if bewil- dered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon. “My Faith is gone!” cried he after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.” And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Good- man Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds — the creak- ing of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while some- times the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was him- self the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors. “Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him. “Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your devil- try. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you.” In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more fright- ful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

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In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the for- est, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alter- nately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once. “A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown. In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heav- enward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field be dazzled Goodman Brown, or he rec- ognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for their espe- cial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft. “But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled. Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can con- ceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in hom- age to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a flowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New England churches.

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“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest. At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the dev- il’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire. “Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!” They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage. “There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heav- enward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels — blush not, sweet ones — have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power — than my power at its utmost — can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other.” They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that unhal- lowed altar. “Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my chil- dren, to the communion of your race.”

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“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph. And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hallowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they dis- closed and what they saw! “Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.” Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew. The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minis- ter was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Good- man Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desper- ate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fer- vid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at

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morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.

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Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, but he spent most of his boyhood in Michigan, where his father, a doctor, encouraged his enthusi- asm for camping and hunting. Active as a reporter for his high school newspaper, Hemingway decided not to go on to college. Instead he worked as a reporter on the Kansas City Star for a few months before volunteering to serve in an Ameri- can ambulance unit in France during World War I. Then he went to Italy, served at the front, and was severely wounded in action just before his nineteenth birthday. After the war he was too restless to settle down in the United States, so he lived in Paris and supported himself and his wife as a newspaper correspondent. He worked hard at learning how to write fiction; as he later said, “I found the great- est difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, or had been taught to feel, was to put down what really hap- pened in action: what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you ex perienced.” In America Hemingway had admired the work of Sherwood Anderson, especially the colloquial, “unliterary” tone of his stories, and in Paris he came under the influence of Gertrude Stein, telling Anderson in a letter of 1922 that “Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.” As many critics have recognized, Hemingway was receptive to several diverse influences as a young writer forging his literary style. He was also aware of the work of the ex perimental poet Ezra Pound, whose advice in essays written in 1913 on the com position of imagist poetry is suggested in the style developed in Hemingway’s early fiction:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” without evasion or cliché. 2. The use of absolutely no word that does not contribute to the general

design. 3. Fidelity to the rhythms of natural speech. 4. The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time (1925), is a collection of stories and sketches. His early novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), established him as a master stylist, probably the most influential writer of American prose in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1938 he collected what he considered his best short fiction, forty-nine stories. After publication of The Old Man and the Sea, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Seven years later, in poor health and haunted by the memory of the suicide of his father, who had shot himself with a Civil War pistol in 1929, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in his Idaho hunting lodge. Hemingway’s concise way of developing a plot through dialogue, as in “Hills Like White Elephants,” attracted many imitators. He once explained how he achieved an intense compression by comparing his method to the principle of the iceberg: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know

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it then there is a hole in the story.” The most authoritative collection of Heming- way’s stories, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca-Vigia Edition, was published in 1991.

RELATED sTORY Russell Banks, “Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat,” page 62.

Hills Like White Elephants

1927

the hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid. “What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table. “It’s pretty hot,” the man said. “Let’s drink beer.” “Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain. “Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway. “Yes. Two big ones.” The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry. “They look like white elephants,” she said. “I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer. “No, you wouldn’t have.” “I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said. “What does it say?” “Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.” “Could we try it?” The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar. “Four reales.”

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“We want two Anis del Toro.” “With water?” “Do you want it with water?” “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?” “It’s all right.” “You want them with water?” asked the woman. “Yes, with water.” “It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down. “That’s the way with everything.” “Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” “Oh, cut it out.” “You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.” “Well, let’s try and have a fine time.” “All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” “That was bright.” “I wanted to try this new drink: That’s all we do, isn’t it — look at things and try new drinks?” “I guess so.” The girl looked across at the hills. “They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” “Should we have another drink?” “All right.” The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. “The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said. “It’s lovely,” the girl said. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.” “Then what will we do afterward?” “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.” “What makes you think so?” “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.” The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out, and took hold of two of the strings of beads. “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.” “I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.”

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“So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.” “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.” “And you really want to?” “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” “I love you now. You know I love you.” “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.” “If I do it you won’t ever worry?” “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.” “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t care about me.” “Well, I care about you.” “Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.” “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.” The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees. “And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.” “What did you say?” “I said we could have everything.” “We can have everything.” “No, we can’t.” “We can have the whole world.” “No, we can’t.” “We can go everywhere.” “No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.” “It’s ours.” “No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” “But they haven’t taken it away.” “We’ll wait and see.” “Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.” “I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.” “I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do — — ” “Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?” “All right. But you’ve got to realize — — ”

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“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?” They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. “You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.” “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.” “Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.” “Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.” “It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.” “Would you do something for me now?” “I’d do anything for you.” “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights. “But I don’t want you to,” he said, “I don’t care anything about it.” “I’ll scream,” the girl said. The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said. “What did she say?” asked the girl. “That the train is coming in five minutes.” The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her. “I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She smiled at him. “All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.” He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” he asked. “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

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Araby

1914

north richmond street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing- room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister. When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side. Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books, and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a sum- mons to all my foolish blood.

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Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop- boys who stood on guard by the barrel of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa,1 or a bal lad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensa- tion of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times. At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said she would love to go. “And why can’t you?” I asked. While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. “It’s well for you,” she said. “If I go,” I said, “I will bring you something.” What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The

1 Jeremiah O’Donovan (1831–1915), born in Ross Carberry of County Cork, was nicknamed “Dynamite Rossa” for championing violent means to achieve Irish independence.

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Araby 455

syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play. On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in the evening. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat- brush, and answered me curtly: “Yes, boy, I know.” As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the window. I left the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me. When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress. When I came downstairs again I found Mrs. Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old garrulous woman, a pawnbroker’s widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs. Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn’t wait any longer, but it was after eight o’clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said: “I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.” At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten. “The people are in bed and after their first sleep now,” he said. I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically: “Can’t you give him the money and let him go? You’ve kept him late enough as it is.” My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” He asked me

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where I was going and, when I had told him a second time, he asked me did I know The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt. I held a florin2 tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in a third- class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the car- riage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name. I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary- looking man. I found myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in dark- ness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins. Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. “O, I never said such a thing!” “O, but you did!” “O, but I didn’t!” “Didn’t she say that?” “Yes. I heard her.” “O, there’s a . . . fib!” Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spo- ken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured: “No, thank you.” The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder. I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and

2 A silver coin worth two shillings.

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walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

The Dead

1914

lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gos- siping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come. It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of every- thing: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three

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Two Kinds

1989

My Mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. “Of course you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.” America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.

We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, “Ni kan” — You watch. And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying, “Oh my goodness.” “Ni kan,” said my mother as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. “You already know how. Don’t need talent for crying!” Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to a beauty training school in the Mission district and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. “You look like Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. “Peter Pan is very popular these days,” the instructor assured my mother. I now had hair the length of a boy’s, with straight-across bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut and it made me actually look forward to my future fame. In fact, in the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, trying each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtains, wait- ing to hear the right music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk for anything.

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But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”

Every night after dinner, my mother and I would sit at the Formica kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amaz- ing children she had read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s Digest, and a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bath- room. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. “What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the maga- zine story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. “Nairobi!” I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that was possibly one way to pronounce “Helsinki” before showing me the answer. The tests got harder — multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember. “Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and . . . that’s all I remember, Ma,” I said. And after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expecta- tions. Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back — and that it would always be this ordinary face — I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me — because I had never seen that face before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not. So now on nights when my mother presented her tests, I performed list- lessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day, I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a

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while I usually counted only one, maybe two bellows at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope.

Two or three months had gone by without any mention of my being a prodigy again. And then one day my mother was watching The Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would go back on and Ed would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Ed would go silent again. She got up, the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down. Silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. She seemed entranced by the music, a little frenzied piano piece with this mesmerizing quality, sort of quick passages and then teasing lilting ones before it returned to the quick playful parts. “Ni kan,” my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. “Look here.” I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly mod- est like a proper Chinese child. And she also did this fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded slowly to the floor like the petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn’t afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano les- sons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother bad-mouthed the little girl on TV. “Play note right, but doesn’t sound good! No singing sound,” complained my mother. “What are you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s pretty good. Maybe she’s not the best, but she’s trying hard.” I knew almost immediately I would be sorry I said that. “Just like you,” she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. The little Chinese girl sat down also to play an encore of “Anitra’s Dance” by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.

Three days after watching The Ed Sullivan Show, my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six. When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn’t stand it anymore.

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“Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn’t go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!” I cried. My mother slapped me. “Who ask you be genius?” she shouted. “Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!” “So ungrateful,” I heard her mutter in Chinese. “If she had as much talent as she has temper, she would be famous now.” Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on top of his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired and sleepy. But he must have been younger than I thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once and that was enough. She had this peculiar smell like a baby that had done something in its pants. And her fingers felt like a dead person’s, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator; the skin just slid off the meat when I picked it up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. “Like Beethoven!” he shouted to me. “We’re both listening only in our head!” And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining their purpose: “Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!” And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple chord, and then, as if inspired by an old, unreachable itch, he gradually added more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then I just played some nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong smiled and applauded and then said, “Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!” So that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half- time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me, pushing down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shape when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn’t practiced enough, I never corrected myself. I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at that young age. But I

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was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different that I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year, I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo Jong both talking in a loud bragging tone of voice so others could hear. It was after church, and I was leaning against the brick wall wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, who was about my age, was standing farther down the wall about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess Champion.” “She bring home too many trophy,” lamented Auntie Lindo that Sunday. “All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her win- nings.” She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. “You lucky you don’t have this problem,” said Auntie Lindo with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: “Our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.” And right then, I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.

A few weeks later, Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show which would be held in the church hall. By then, my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show, I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing, play- ing the repeat parts twice to make the piece sound longer. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listened to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being some- where else, about being someone else. The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, left leg bends, look up and smile. My parents invited all the couples from the Joy Luck Club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children both younger and older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, twirled Hula Hoops, pranced in pink ballet tutus, and when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, “Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excite- ment. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking to

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myself, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my father’s yawn, Auntie Lindo’s stiff-lipped smile, Waverly’s sulky expression. I had on a white dress layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. It was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that at first I didn’t worry how I would sound. So it was a surprise to me when I hit the first wrong note and I realized something didn’t sound quite right. And then I hit another and another followed that. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through two repeats, the sour notes staying with me all the way to the end. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous and the audience, like Old Chong, had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up and smiled. The room was quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting, “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” But then I saw my mother’s face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and as I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother, “That was awful,” and the mother whispered back, “Well, she certainly tried.” And now I realized how many people were in the audience, the whole world it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly throughout the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all: the eighteen-year-old boy with a fake mustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white makeup who sang from Madama Butterfly and got honorable mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who won first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee. After the show, the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs from the Joy Luck Club came up to my mother and father. “Lots of talented kids,” Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. “That was somethin’ else,” said my father, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You aren’t a genius like me,” she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and it seemed as if every- body were now coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident, to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother was silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father

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unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and then went to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations. No blame. And in a way, I felt dis- appointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.

I assumed my talent-show fiasco meant I never had to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. “Four clock,” she reminded me as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I wedged myself more tightly in front of the TV. “Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn’t budge. And then I decided. I didn’t have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her before and look what happened. She was the stupid one. She came out from the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the liv- ing room. “Four clock,” she said once again, louder. “I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.” She walked over and stood in front of the TV. I saw her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. “No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. “No! I won’t!” I screamed. She yanked me by the arm, pulled me off the floor, snapped off the TV. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me toward the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up and onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased I was crying. “You want me to be someone that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!” “Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!” “Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. I felt like worms and toads and slimy things were crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. “Too late change this,” said my mother shrilly. And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted to see it spill over. And that’s when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.” It was as if I had said the magic words, Alakazam! — and her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the

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room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.

It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class presi- dent. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped, the lid to the piano was closed, shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams. So she surprised me. A few years ago, she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed. “Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?” “No, this your piano,” she said firmly. “Always your piano. You only one can play.” “Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.” “You pick up fast,” said my mother, as if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could been genius if you want to.” “No I couldn’t.” “You just not trying,” said my mother. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if to announce a fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said. But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, every time I saw it in my parents’ living room, standing in front of the bay windows, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy I had won back.

Last week I sent a tuner over to my parents’ apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been getting things in order for my father, a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters she had knitted in yellow, pink, bright orange — all the colors I hated — I put those in moth- proof boxes. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them home with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer than I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench

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were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same secondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape. I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piece I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand side of the page, “Pleading Child.” It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how easily the notes came back to me. And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side. It was called “Perfectly Contented.” I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contented” was longer but faster. And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

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Herman melville

Herman Melville wrote “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an eloquent essay on nathaniel Hawthorne’s volume of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, for the new York periodical the Literary World in August 1850. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe in his review of Hawthorne’s short fiction, Melville did not use the opportunity to theorize about the form of the short story. Instead, he conveyed his enthusiasm for Hawthorne’s tragic vision, what Melville saw as the “great power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s writing. This was the aspect of Hawthorne’s work that seemed most congenial to Melville’s own genius while he continued work that summer on his novel-in-progress, Moby-Dick. As he wrote in his essay, “Great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the times, and possess a corresponding coloring.” In 1850 Melville exhorted America to “prize and cherish her writers,” since they “are not so many in number as to exhaust her goodwill.”

Blackness in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

1850

It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge so like all other hedges as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond. So has it been with me concerning the enchanting landscape in the soul of this Haw- thorne, this most excellent Man of Mosses. His Old Manse has been written now four years, but I never read it till a day or two since. I had seen it in the bookstores — heard of it often — even had it recommended to me by a tasteful friend, as a rare, quiet book, perhaps too deserving of popularity to be popular. But there are so many books called “excellent” and so much unpopular merit, that amid the thick stir of other things, the hint of my tasteful friend was dis- regarded; and for four years the Mosses on the Old Manse never refreshed me with their perennial green. It may be, however, that all this while, the book, like wine, was only improving in flavor and body. . . . At any rate, it so chanced that this long procrastination eventuated in a happy result. At breakfast the other day, a mountain girl, a cousin of mine, who for the last two weeks has every morning helped me to strawberries and raspberries, which, like the roses and pearls in the fairy tale, seemed to fall into the saucer from those strawberry beds, her cheeks — this delightful creature, this charming Cherry says to me — “I see you spend your mornings in the haymow; and yes- terday I found there Dwight’s Travels in New England. Now I have something far better than that; something more congenial to our summer on these hills. Take these raspberries, and then I will give you some moss.” “Moss!” said I. “Yes, and you must take it to the barn with you, and good-by to Dwight.”

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With that she left me, and soon returned with a volume, verdantly bound, and garnished with a curious frontispiece in green; nothing less than a frag- ment of real moss, cunningly pressed to a fly-leaf. “Why, this,” said I, spill- ing my raspberries, “this is the Mosses from an Old Manse.” “Yes,” said Cousin Cherry, “Yes, it is that flowery Hawthorne.” “Hawthorne and Mosses,” said I, “no more it is morning: it is July in the country: and I am off for the barn.” Stretched on that new-mown clover, the hillside breeze blowing over me through the wide barn door, and soothed by the hum of the bees in the mead- ows around, how magically stole over me this Mossy Man! and how amply, how bountifully, did he redeem that delicious promise to his guests in the Old Manse, of whom it is written: “Others could give them pleasure, or amuse- ment, or instruction — these could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest — rest, in a life of trouble! What better could be done for those weary and world-worn spirits? . . . what better could be done for anybody who came within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him?” So all that day, half buried in the new clover, I watched this Hawthorne’s “Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill.” The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams, and when the book was closed, when the spell was over, this wizard “dismissed me with but misty reminiscences, as if I had been dreaming of him.” What a wild moonlight of contemplative humor bathes that Old Manse! — the rich and rare distillment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart. No rollicking rudeness, no gross fun, fed on fat dinners, and bred in the lees of wine, — but a humor so spiritually gentle, so high, so deep, and yet so richly relishable, that it were hardly inappropriate in an angel. It is the very religion of mirth; for nothing so human but it may be advanced to that. The orchard of the Old Manse seems the visible type of the fine mind that has described it — those twisted and contorted old trees, “they stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination that we remember them as humorists and odd-fellows.” And then, as surrounded by these grotesque forms, and hushed in the noonday repose of this Hawthorne’s spell, how aptly might the still fall of his ruddy thoughts into your soul be symbolized by: “In the stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of perfect ripeness.” For no less ripe than ruddy are the apples of the thoughts and fancies in this sweet Man of Mosses . . . But it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. Where Haw- thorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style — a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated: a man who means no meanings. But there is no man, in whom humor and love, like mountain peaks, soar to such a rapt height, as to receive the irradiations of the upper skies; there is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius — no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable comple- ment of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe

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like a plummet. Or, love and humor are only the eyes, through which such an intellect views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength. . . . For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Haw- thorne’s soul, the other side — like the dark half of the physical sphere — is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and cir- cumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom — this I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance. At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight — transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds. In one word, the world is mistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne. He himself must often have smiled at its absurd misconception of him. He is immeasurably deeper than the plum- met of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold. Now, it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of light for every shade of his dark. But however this may be, this blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background — that background against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that have made for Shakespeare his loftiest but most circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers. For by philoso- phers Shakespeare is not adored, as the great man of tragedy and comedy: “Off with his head; so much for Buckingham!” This sort of rant, interlined by another hand, brings down the house — those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard the Third humps and Macbeth daggers. But it is those deep, far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality, — these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things which we feel to be so terrifically true that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to

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utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask, and speaks the same madness of vital truth. But, as I before said, it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. And so, much of the blind, unbridled admiration that has been heaped upon Shakespeare has been lavished upon the least part of him. And few of his endless commentators and critics seem to have remembered, or even perceived, that the immediate prod- ucts of a great mind are not so great as that undeveloped and sometimes unde- velopable yet dimly-discernible greatness to which those immediate products are but the infallible indices. In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so much for what he did do as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly and by snatches. . . . And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author of your own flesh and blood — an unimitating, and, perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man — whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne? He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writers. The smell of young beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara. Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own gen- eration; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses on him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him you thereby confess others; you brace the whole broth- erhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. . . . But with whatever motive, playful or profound, Nathaniel Hawthorne has chosen to entitle his pieces in the manner he has, it is certain that some of them are directly calculated to deceive — egregiously deceive — the super- ficial skimmer of pages. To be downright and candid once more, let me cheerfully say that two of these titles did dolefully dupe no less an eagle-eyed reader than myself; and that, too, after I had been impressed with a sense of the great depth and breadth of this American man. “Who in the name of thunder” (as the country people say in this neighborhood), “who in the name of thunder,” would anticipate any marvel in a piece entitled “Young Goodman Brown”? You would of course suppose that it was a simple little tale, intended as a supplement to “Goody Two-Shoes.” Whereas it is deep as Dante; nor can you finish it, without addressing the author in his own words: “It is yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.” And with Young Goodman, too, in allegorical pursuit of his Puritan wife, you cry out in your anguish,

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying — “Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the wilderness.

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Now this same piece, entitled “Young Goodman Brown,” is one of the two that I had not at all read yesterday; and I allude to it now, because it is, in itself, such a strong positive illustration of that blackness in Hawthorne which I had assumed from the mere occasional shadows of it, as revealed in several of the other sketches. But had I previously perused “Young Goodman Brown,” I should have been at no pains to draw the conclusion which I came to at a time when I was ignorant that the book contained one such direct and unqualified manifestation of it.

alice munro

Alice Munro revealed her unconventional way of structuring her stories by follow- ing her intuition in this excerpt from her essay “What Is Real?”

How I Write Short Stories

1982

What I would like to do here is what I can’t do in two or three sentences at the end of a reading. I won’t try to explain what fiction is, and what short stories are (assuming, which we can’t, that there is any fixed thing that it is and they are), but what short stories are to me, and how I write them, and how I use things that are “real.” I will start by explaining how I read stories written by other people. For one thing, I can start reading them anywhere; from beginning to end, from end to beginning, from any point in between in either direction. So obviously I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house. Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people. So when I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure. This is the hard part of the explanation, where I have to use a word like “feeling,” which is not very precise, because if I attempt to be more intellectually respectable I will have to be dishonest. “Feeling” will have to do. There is no blueprint for the structure. It’s not a question of, “I’ll make this kind of house because if I do it right it will have this effect.” I’ve got to make, I’ve got to build up, a house, a story, to fit around the indescribable “feeling” that is

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soldiers in this novel, life in the mountains and jungles is every bit as alien and terrifying as it is for the Americans in O’Brien’s. In 1997, a fragment of “The Things They Carried” was published in the Vietnamese literary magazine Foreign Literature. The publishing house Nha Nam will publish the first full translation later this year, in a print run of a few thousand copies, typical for novels here. If O’Brien ends up translating better than other English language writers of the war, it may be because he explodes the expectations of readers, American and Vietnamese alike. For example, in a startling chapter in the middle of “The Things They Carried,” he depicts the telling of a story by Rat Kiley, the unit’s medic and a narrator whose reliability is explicitly undermined from the start. In the story, a G.I. somehow manages to bring his gorgeous blond high-school sweetheart to his firebase. She gradually acclimates to the war, takes up with the Green Berets, and winds up padding through the jungle on weeklong ambushes and return- ing wearing a necklace of human tongues. We eventually realize we are reading an absurdist parody of the “heart of darkness” story. In an earlier chapter called “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien tells us that if it matters whether it really happened, then the story isn’t “true”: “With- out the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen — and maybe it did, anything’s possible — even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story doesn’t depend on that kind of truth.” O’Brien is suggesting that what American soldiers discovered in Vietnam, amid the horrors, was a particular modern way of being that demanded a sur- realistic kind of storytelling. And Vietnamese are interested in surrealism. (Haruki Murakami, for example, is hugely popular here.) They just aren’t ter- ribly interested in the war.

amy tan

Amy Tan discussed the subject of multicultural literature in an essay written for The Threepenny Review in 1996. There she admitted that she was proud to find her name on the reading lists for many college courses (“What writer wouldn’t want her work to be read?”) and then explained why she was “not altogether comfortable” about appearing on lists of required reading.

In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons

1996

Several years ago I learned that I had passed a new literary milestone. I had made it to the Halls of Education under the rubric of “Multicultural Litera- ture,” also known in many schools as “Required Reading.”

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Thanks to this development, I now meet students who proudly tell me they’re doing their essays, term papers, or master’s theses on me. By that they mean that they are analyzing not just my books but me — my grade-school achievements, youthful indiscretions, marital status, as well as the movies I watched as a child, the slings and arrows I suffered as a minority, and so forth — all of which, with the hindsight of classroom literary investigation, prove to contain many Chinese omens that made it inevitable that I would become a writer. Once I read a master’s thesis on feminist writings, which included examples from The Joy Luck Club. The student noted that I had often used the number four, something on the order of thirty-two or thirty-six times — in any case, a number divisible by four. She pointed out that there were four mothers, four daughters, four sections of the book, four stories per section. Furthermore, there were four sides to a mah jong table, four directions of the wind, four players. More impor- tant, she postulated, my use of the number four was a symbol for the four stages of psychological development, which corresponded in uncanny ways to the four stages of some type of Buddhist philosophy I had never heard of before. The stu- dent recalled that the story contained a character called Fourth Wife, symbolizing death, and a four-year-old girl with a feisty spirit, symbolizing regeneration. In short, her literary sleuthing went on to reveal a mystical and rather Byz- antine puzzle, which, once explained, proved to be completely brilliant and precisely logical. She wrote me a letter and asked if her analysis had been cor- rect. How I longed to say “absolutely.” The truth is, if there are symbols in my work they exist largely by accident or through someone else’s interpretive design. If I wrote of “an orange moon rising on a dark night,” I would more likely ask myself later if the image was a cliché, not whether it was a symbol for the feminine force rising in anger, as one master’s thesis postulated. To plant symbols like that, you need a plan, good organizational skills, and a prescient understanding of the story you are about to write. Sadly, I lack those traits. All this is by way of saying that I don’t claim my use of the number four to be a brilliant symbolic device. In fact, now that it’s been pointed out to me in rather astonishing ways, I consider my overuse of the number to be a flaw.

Reviewers and students have enlightened me about not only how I write but why I write. Apparently, I am driven to capture the immigrant experience, to demystify Chinese culture, to point out the differences between Chinese and American culture, even to pave the way for other Asian American writers. If only I were that noble. Contrary to what is assumed by some students, reporters, and community organizations wishing to bestow honors on me, I am not an expert on China, Chinese culture, mah jong, the psychology of mothers and daughters, generation gaps, immigration, illegal aliens, assimi- lation, acculturation, racial tension, Tiananmen Square, the Most Favored Nation trade agreements, human rights, Pacific Rim economics, the purported one million missing baby girls of China, the future of Hong Kong after 1997, or, I am sorry to say, Chinese cooking. Certainly I have personal opinions on

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many of these topics, but by no means do my sentiments and my world of make-believe make me an expert. So I am alarmed when reviewers and educators assume that my very per- sonal, specific, and fictional stories are meant to be representative down to the nth detail not just of Chinese Americans but, sometimes, of all Asian culture. Is Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres supposed to be taken as representative of all of American culture? If so, in what ways? Are all American fathers tyrannical? Do all American sisters betray one another? Are all American conscientious objectors flaky in love relationships? Over the years my editor has received hundreds of permissions requests from publishers of college textbooks and multicultural anthologies, all of them wishing to reprint my work for “educational purposes.” One publisher wanted to include an excerpt from The Joy Luck Club, a scene in which a Chinese woman invites her non-Chinese boyfriend to her parents’ house for dinner. The boyfriend brings a bottle of wine as a gift and commits a number of social gaffes at the dinner table. Students were supposed to read this excerpt, then answer the following question: “If you are invited to a Chinese family’s house for dinner, should you bring a bottle of wine?”

In many respects, I am proud to be on the reading lists for courses such as Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Asian American Literature, Asian American History, Women’s Literature, Feminist Studies, Feminist Writers of Color, and so forth. What writer wouldn’t want her work to be read? I also take a certain perverse glee in imagining countless students, sleepless at three in the morning, trying to read The Joy Luck Club for the next day’s midterm. Yet I’m also not altogether comfortable about my book’s status as required reading. Let me relate a conversation I had with a professor at a school in southern Cal i fornia. He told me he uses my books in his literature class but he makes it a point to lambast those passages that depict China as backward or unattrac- tive. He objects to any descriptions that have to do with spitting, filth, poverty, or superstitions. I asked him if China in the 1930s and 1940s was free of these ele- ments. He said, No, such descriptions are true; but he still believes it is “the obli- gation of the writer of ethnic literature to create positive, progressive images.” I secretly shuddered and thought, Oh well, that’s southern Cal i fornia for you. But then, a short time later, I met a student from UC Berkeley, a school that I myself attended. The student was standing in line at a book signing. When his turn came, he swaggered up to me, then took two steps back and said in a loud voice, “Don’t you think you have a responsibility to write about Chinese men as positive role models?” In the past, I’ve tried to ignore the potshots. A Washington Post reporter once asked me what I thought of another Asian American writer calling me something on the order of “a running dog whore sucking on the tit of the imperialist white pigs.” “Well,” I said, “You can’t please everyone, can you?” I pointed out that read- ers are free to interpret a book as they please, and that they are free to appreciate

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or not appreciate the result. Besides, reacting to your critics makes a writer look defensive, petulant, and like an all-around bad sport. But lately I’ve started thinking it’s wrong to take such a laissez-faire attitude. Lately I’ve come to think that I must say something, not so much to defend myself and my work but to express my hopes for American literature, for what it has the potential to become in the twenty-first century — that is, a truly Ameri- can literature, dem o cratic in the way it includes many colorful voices. Until recently, I didn’t think it was important for writers to express their private intentions in order for their work to be appreciated; I believed that any analysis of my intentions belonged behind the closed doors of literature classes. But I’ve come to realize that the study of literature does have its effect on how books are being read, and thus on what might be read, published, and written in the future. For that reason, I do believe writers today must talk about their intentions — if for no other reason than to serve as an antidote to what others say our intentions should be. For the record, I don’t write to dig a hole and fill it with symbols. I don’t write stories as ethnic themes. I don’t write to represent life in general. And I certainly don’t write because I have answers. If I knew everything there is to know about mothers and daughters, Chinese and Americans, I wouldn’t have any stories left to imagine. If I had to write about only positive role models, I wouldn’t have enough imagination left to finish the first story. If I knew what to do about immigration, I would be a sociologist or a politician and not a long-winded storyteller.

So why do I write? Because my childhood disturbed me, pained me, made me ask foolish ques- tions. And the questions still echo. Why does my mother always talk about kill- ing herself? Why did my father and brother have to die? If I die, can I be reborn into a happy family? Those early obsessions led to a belief that writing could be my salvation, providing me with the sort of freedom and danger, satisfaction and discomfort, truth and contradiction I can’t find in anything else in life. I write to discover the past for myself. I don’t write to change the future for others. And if others are moved by my work — if they love their mothers more, scold their daughters less, or divorce their husbands who were not positive role models — I’m often surprised, usually grateful to hear from kind readers. But I don’t take either credit or blame for changing their lives for better or for worse. Writing, for me, is an act of faith, a hope that I will discover what I mean by “truth.” I also think of reading as an act of faith, a hope that I will discover something remarkable about ordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and the reader discover the same thing, if they have that connection, the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic. To me, that’s the mystery and the wonder of both life and fiction — the connection between two individuals who discover in the end that they are more the same than they are different. And if that doesn’t happen, it’s nobody’s fault. There are still plenty of other books on the shelf. Choose what you like.

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The Bath

1981

Saturday afternoon the mother drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was deco- rated with a spaceship and a launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars. The name scotty would be iced on in green as if it were the name of the spaceship. The baker listened thoughtfully when the mother told him Scotty would be eight years old. He was an older man, this baker, and he wore a curious apron, a heavy thing with loops that went under his arms and around his back and then crossed in front again where they were tied in a very thick knot. He kept wiping his hands on the front of the apron as he listened to the woman, his wet eyes examining her lips as she studied the samples and talked. He let her take her time. He was in no hurry. The mother decided on the spaceship cake, and then she gave the baker her name and her telephone number. The cake would be ready Monday morning, in plenty of time for the party Monday afternoon. This was all the baker was willing to say. No pleasantries, just this small exchange, the barest information, nothing that was not necessary.

Monday morning, the boy was walking to school. He was in the company of another boy, the two boys passing a bag of potato chips back and forth between them. The birthday boy was trying to trick the other boy into telling what he was going to give in the way of a present. At an intersection, without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb, and was promptly knocked down by a car. He fell on his side, his head in the gutter, his legs in the road moving as if he were climbing a wall. The other boy stood holding the potato chips. He was wondering if he should finish the rest or continue on to school. The birthday boy did not cry. But neither did he wish to talk anymore. He would not answer when the other boy asked what it felt like to be hit by a car. The birthday boy got up and turned back for home, at which time the other boy waved good-bye and headed off for school. The birthday boy told his mother what had happened. They sat together on the sofa. She held his hands in her lap. This is what she was doing when the boy pulled his hands away and lay down on his back.

Of course, the birthday party never happened. The birthday boy was in the hospital instead. The mother sat by the bed. She was waiting for the boy to wake up. The father hurried over from his office. He sat next to the mother. So now the both of them waited for the boy to wake up. They waited for hours, and then the father went home to take a bath.

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Story and Its Writer, Compact

RAYMOND CARVER / The Bath 977

The man drove home from the hospital. He drove the streets faster than he should. It had been a good life till now. There had been work, father- hood, family. The man had been lucky and happy. But fear made him want a bath. He pulled into the driveway. He sat in the car trying to make his legs work. The child had been hit by a car and he was in the hospital, but he was going to be all right. The man got out of the car and went up to the door. The dog was barking and the telephone was ringing. It kept ringing while the man unlocked the door and felt the wall for the light switch. He picked up the receiver. He said, “I just got in the door!” “There’s a cake that wasn’t picked up.” This is what the voice on the other end said. “What are you saying?” the father said. “The cake,” the voice said. “Sixteen dollars.” The husband held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand. He said, “I don’t know anything about it.” “Don’t hand me that,” the voice said. The husband hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and poured himself some whiskey. He called the hospital. The child’s condition remained the same. While the water ran into the tub, the man lathered his face and shaved. He was in the tub when he heard the telephone again. He got himself out and hur- ried through the house, saying, “Stupid, stupid,” because he wouldn’t be doing this if he’d stayed where he was in the hospital. He picked up the receiver and shouted, “Hello!” The voice said, “It’s ready.”

The father got back to the hospital after midnight. The wife was sitting in the chair by the bed. She looked up at the husband and then she looked back at the child. From an apparatus over the bed hung a bottle with a tube running from the bottle to the child. “What’s this?” the father said. “Glucose,” the mother said. The husband put his hand to the back of the woman’s head. “He’s going to wake up,” the man said. “I know,” the woman said. In a little while the man said, “Go home and let me take over.” She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Really,” he said. “Go home for a while. You don’t have to worry. He’s sleep- ing, is all.” A nurse pushed open the door. She nodded to them as she went to the bed. She took the left arm out from under the covers and put her fingers on the wrist. She put the arm back under the covers and wrote on the clipboard attached to the bed. “How is he?” the mother said.

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Story and Its Writer, Compact

978 C A S E B O O k O N E / Raymond Carver

“Stable,” the nurse said. Then she said, “Doctor will be in again shortly.” “I was saying maybe she’d want to go home and get a little rest,” the man said. “After the doctor comes.” “She could do that,” the nurse said. The woman said, “We’ll see what the doctor says.” She brought her hand up to her eyes and leaned her head forward. The nurse said, “Of course.”

The father gazed at his son, the small chest inflating and deflating under the covers. He felt more fear now. He began shaking his head. He talked to himself like this. The child is fine. Instead of sleeping at home, he’s doing it here. Sleep is the same wherever you do it.

The doctor came in. He shook hands with the man. The woman got up from the chair. “Ann,” the doctor said and nodded. The doctor said, “Let’s just see how he’s doing.” He moved to the bed and touched the boy’s wrist. He peeled back an eyelid and then the other. He turned back the covers and listened to the heart. He pressed his fingers here and there on the body. He went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted the time, scribbled on the chart, and then he considered the mother and the father. This doctor was a handsome man. His skin was moist and tan. He wore a three-piece suit, a vivid tie, and on his shirt were cufflinks. The mother was talking to herself like this. He has just come from some- where with an audience. They gave him a special medal. The doctor said, “Nothing to shout about, but nothing to worry about. He should wake up pretty soon.” The doctor looked at the boy again. “We’ll know more after the tests are in.” “Oh, no,” the mother said. The doctor said, “Sometimes you see this.” The father said, “You wouldn’t call this a coma, then?” The father waited and looked at the doctor. “No, I don’t want to call it that,” the doctor said. “He’s sleeping. It’s restor- ative. The body is doing what it has to do.” “It’s a coma,” the mother said. “A kind of coma.” The doctor said, “I wouldn’t call it that.” He took the woman’s hands and patted them. He shook hands with the husband.

The woman put her fingers on the child’s forehead and kept them there for a while. “At least he doesn’t have a fever,” she said. Then she said, “I don’t know. Feel his head.” The man put his fingers on the boy’s forehead. The man said, “I think he’s supposed to feel this way.”

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Story and Its Writer, Compact

RAYMOND CARVER / The Bath 979

The woman stood there awhile longer, working her lip with her teeth. Then she moved to her chair and sat down. The husband sat in the chair beside her. He wanted to say something else. But there was no saying what it should be. He took her hand and put it in his lap. This made him feel better. It made him feel he was saying something. They sat like that for a while, watching the boy, not talking. From time to time he squeezed her hand until she took it away. “I’ve been praying,” she said. “Me too,” the father said. “I’ve been praying too.”

A nurse came back in and checked the flow from the bottle. A doctor came in and said what his name was. This doctor was wearing loafers. “We’re going to take him downstairs for more pictures,” he said. “And we want to do a scan.” “A scan?” the mother said. She stood between this new doctor and the bed. “It’s nothing,” he said. “My God,” she said. Two orderlies came in. They wheeled a thing like a bed. They unhooked the boy from the tube and slid him over onto the thing with wheels.

It was after sunup when they brought the birthday boy back out. The mother and father followed the orderlies into the elevator and up to the room. Once more the parents took up their places next to the bed. They waited all day. The boy did not wake up. The doctor came again and examined the boy again and left after saying the same things again. Nurses came in. Doctors came in. A technician came in and took blood. “I don’t understand this,” the mother said to the technician. “Doctor’s orders,” the technician said. The mother went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. Cars with their lights on were driving in and out. She stood at the window with her hands on the sill. She was talking to herself like this. We’re into something now, something hard. She was afraid. She saw a car stop and a woman in a long coat get into it. She made believe she was that woman. She made believe she was driving away from here to someplace else.

The doctor came in. He looked tanned and healthier than ever. He went to the bed and examined the boy. He said, “His signs are fine. Everything’s good.” The mother said, “But he’s sleeping.” “Yes,” the doctor said. The husband said, “She’s tired. She’s starved.” The doctor said, “She should rest. She should eat. Ann,” the doctor said.

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“Thank you,” the husband said. He shook hands with the doctor and the doctor patted their shoulders and left.

“I suppose one of us should go home and check on things,” the man said. “The dog needs to be fed.” “Call the neighbors,” the wife said. “Someone will feed him if you ask them to.” She tried to think who. She closed her eyes and tried to think anything at all. After a time she said, “Maybe I’ll do it. Maybe if I’m not here watching, he’ll wake up. Maybe it’s because I’m watching that he won’t.” “That could be it,” the husband said. “I’ll go home and take a bath and put on something clean,” the woman said. “I think you should do that,” the man said. She picked up her purse. He helped her into her coat. She moved to the door, and looked back. She looked at the child, and then she looked at the father. The husband nodded and smiled.

She went past the nurses’ station and down to the end of the corridor, where she turned and saw a little waiting room, a family in there, all sitting in wicker chairs, a man in a khaki shirt, a baseball cap pushed back on his head, a large woman wearing a housedress, slippers, a girl in jeans, hair in dozens of kinky braids, the table littered with flimsy wrappers and styrofoam and coffee sticks and packets of salt and pepper. “Nelson,” the woman said. “Is it about Nelson?” The woman’s eyes widened. “Tell me now, lady,” the woman said. “Is it about Nelson?” The woman was trying to get up from her chair. But the man had his hand closed over her arm. “Here, here,” the man said. “I’m sorry,” the mother said. “I’m looking for the elevator. My son is in the hospital. I can’t find the elevator.” “Elevator is down that way,” the man said, and he aimed a finger in the right direction. “My son was hit by a car,” the mother said. “But he’s going to be all right. He’s in shock now, but it might be some kind of coma too. That’s what worries us, the coma part, I’m going out for a little while. Maybe I’ll take a bath. But my husband is with him. He’s watching. There’s a chance everything will change when I’m gone. My name is Ann Weiss.” The man shifted in his chair. He shook his head. He said, “Our Nelson.”

She pulled into the driveway. The dog ran out from behind the house. He ran in circles on the grass. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wheel. She listened to the ticking of the engine.

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TOM JENkS / The Origin of “Cathedral” 981

She got out of the car and went to the door. She turned on lights and put on water for tea. She opened a can and fed the dog. She sat down on the sofa with her tea. The telephone rang. “Yes!” she said. “Hello!” she said. “Mrs. Weiss,” a man’s voice said. “Yes,” she said. “This is Mrs. Weiss. Is it about Scotty?” she said. “Scotty,” the voice said. “It is about Scotty,” the voice said. “It has to do with Scotty, yes.”

TO M J E N k s

The origin of “cathedral”

1993

I first met Ray Carver in New York in early September 1984 at a publishing din- ner to launch Gary Fisketjon’s Vintage Contemporary paperback series. Many of the new VC authors and their friends were there: Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Jay McInerney, Tom McGuane, Jim Crumley, and Ralph Beer — a distinctly male crowd, and what struck me most was that, as we geared up to move to a nightclub, Ray, amid teasing about running off somewhere to see a woman, put himself in a taxi and headed for his hotel room alone. By the ginger way he got himself into the cab and laughingly ducked the barbs all around him, there was no doubt he meant to keep himself out of trouble. But he was fair game for the friendly taunts that followed him into the cab. We were witnessing the Good Ray, but we all knew about the Bad Ray, the one who used to be Lord Misrule himself. Reformed, Ray was fast becoming the most famous short story writer in the world, and the facts of his life were well known, partly because they were often the stuff of his writing and because fame brings a peculiar public intimacy. At the time, I was an editor of Esquire and had made Ray’s acquaintance through the mail and on the phone. I had published some of his work and knew him somewhat, and as I watched him slip away in the cab, I imagined him going back to his hotel room (it was early yet — ten o’clock) and telephon- ing Tess Gallagher at their home in Syracuse. Each evening they set aside the hours beyond ten o’clock to spend with each other. He was, in a sense, running off to see a woman. A year and a half later, I visited them in Syracuse. During the days, Ray and I read stories for a book we were working on and at night we watched TV. One night, we were watching a PBS version of Wuthering Heights, and Ray began to tell about another night of TV: the night the blind man for whom Tess once worked had come to visit. Tess told her side, too — how Ray was uneasy about the man’s visit, uncomfortable with his blindness and his familiarity with Tess, a mild jealousy rising in Ray. Their evening was slow and tedious, and ended

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M A R i O VA R G A s L L O s A

The Prose Style of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García márquez

2002 / Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Borges is one of the most original prose stylists of the Spanish language, and per- haps the greatest Spanish stylist of the twentieth century. For that very reason, he has exerted a great influence and, if I may say so, an unfortunate one. Borges’s style is unmistakable and functions extraordinarily well, giving life and credibil- ity to a world of sophisticated intellectual and abstract ideas and curiosities. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history (contemplated from an eminently literary perspective) are the raw material of invention. Borges’s style adapts itself to its subject matter and merges with it in a powerful alloy, and the reader feels from the first sentences of his stories and of many of his essays that these works have the inventive and sovereign quality of true fictions, that they could only have been told in this way, in this intelligent, ironic, and mathemati- cally precise language — not a word too few, not a word too many — with its cold elegance and aristocratic defiance, privileging intellect and knowledge over sen- sation and emotion, playing with erudition, making a technique of presumption, eluding all forms of sentimentality, and ignoring the body and sensuality (or not- ing them at a great distance, as lower manifestations of existence). His stories are humanized thanks to their subtle irony, a fresh breeze that lightens the complex- ity of the arguments, intellectual labyrinths, and baroque constructions that are almost always their subject matter. The color and grace of Borges’s style lies first and foremost in his use of adjectives, which shake the reader with their audac- ity and eccentricity (“No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night”), and in his violent and unexpected metaphors, whose adjectives and adverbs, besides fleshing out an idea or highlighting a physical or psychological trait, often serve to foster a Borgesian atmosphere. Precisely because it is essential, Borges’s style is inimitable. When his admirers or literary followers copy his way of using adjec- tives, his irreverent sallies, his witticisms and poses, their stylings are as out of place as badly made wigs that fail to pass as real hair, proclaiming their falseness and bringing ridicule down on the unhappy heads they cover. Jorge Luis Borges was a formidable creator, and there is nothing more irritating or bothersome than the “mini-Borges” imitators whose imitations lack the essentiality of the prose they mimic, making what was original, authentic, beautiful, and stimulating something caricaturish, ugly, and insincere. (The question of sincerity or lack of sincerity in literature is not an ethical issue but an aesthetic one.) Something similar has happened around another great prose stylist, Gabriel García Márquez. Unlike Borges’s style, his is not sober but exuberant and not intellectualized at all; rather, it is sensory and sensual. Its clarity and correctness reveal its classical origins, but it is not stiff or old-fashioned — it is open to the assimilation of sayings and popular expressions and to neologisms and foreign words, and it possesses a rich musicality and conceptual purity

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MARIO VARGAS LLOSA / The Prose Sty le of Jorge Luis Borges 1035

free of complications or intellectual wordplay. Heat, taste, music, all the tex- tures of perception and the appetites of the body are expressed naturally and without fuss, and fantasy draws breath with the same freedom, casting itself toward the extraordinary. Reading [García Márquez] we are overwhelmed by the certainty that only in these words, with this grace and rhythm, would these stories be believable, convincing, fascinating, moving; that separated from these words they would not have been able to enchant us as they have: his stories are the words in which they are told. And the truth is that words are also the stories they tell. As a result, when a writer borrows a style, the literature that is produced sounds false, like mere parody. After Borges, García Márquez is the most imitated writer is the lan- guage, and although some of his disciples have been successful — that is to say, they’ve attracted many readers — the work, no matter how diligent the dis- ciple, fails to take on a life of its own, and its secondary, forced character is immediately evident. Literature is pure artifice, but great literature is able to hide the fact while mediocre literature gives itself away.

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A P P E N D I X T w O

The Elements of Fiction

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more eas- ily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemp- tive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art — which just means art whose primary aim is to make money — is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The prob- lem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expec- tations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

—David Foster Wallace, 1993 interview

Most of us read casually for the pleasure it gives us, but how do we read more attentively and imaginatively so we can enjoy what David Foster Wallace called “serious” art, a term that encompasses the short fiction in this anthology? Understanding the different elements of fiction available during the writing process to every storyteller can enhance our reading.

Plot Since the short story is defined as a prose narrative involving one unified epi- sode or a sequence of related events, plot is basic to this literary form. It deter- mines the way we experience the story. Plot is the sequence of events in a story

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and their relation to one another as they develop and often resolve a conflict. Usually, writers present the events of the plot in a coherent time frame that the reader can follow easily. When we read, we sense that the events are related by causation, and their meaning lies in this relation. To the casual reader, causation (or why something in the plot happened next) seems to re sult only from the writer’s organization of the events into a chronological se quence. A more thoughtful reader understands that causation in the plot of a memorable short story reveals a good deal about the author’s use of the other elements of fiction as well, especially characterization. As the English novelist E. M. Forster realized, plot not only answers what happened next, but it also suggests why. The psychologist James Hillman has explained that plot reveals “human intentions. Plot shows how it all hangs together and makes sense. Only when a narrative receives inner coherence in terms of the depths of human nature do we have fiction, and for this fiction we have to have plot. . . . To plot is to move from asking the question And then what happened? to the question Why did it happen?” A short story can dramatize the events of a brief episode or compress a longer period of time. Analyzing why a short story is short, the critic Norman Friedman suggests that it “may be short not because its action is inherently small, but rather because the author has chosen — in working with an episode or plot — to omit certain of its parts. In other words, an action may be large in size and still be short in the telling because not all of it is there.” A short story can describe something that happens in a few minutes or encompass action that takes years to conclude. The narrative possibilities are endless, as the writer may omit or condense complex episodes to intensify their dramatic effect or expand a single incident to make a relatively long story. Regardless of length, the plot of a short story usually has what critics term an end orientation — the outcome of the action or the conclusion of the plot — inherent in its opening paragraphs. As Mark Twain humorously observed, “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” The novelist may conclude a single episode long before the end of a novel and then pick up the thread of another narrative, or interpret an event from another angle in a different character’s point of view, linking episode to episode and character to character so that each illuminates the others. But a story stops earlier. As Edgar Allan Poe recognized in 1842, its narrative dramatizes a single effect complete unto itself. The events in the plot of a short story usually involve a conflict or struggle between opposing forces. When you analyze a plot, you can often (but not al ways) see it develop in a pattern during the course of the narration. Typically you find that the first paragraphs of the story or exposition give the background or setting of the conflict. The rising action dramatizes the specific events that set the conflict in motion. Often there is a turning point in the story midway before further complications prolong the suspense of the conflict’s resolution. The climax is the emotional high point of the narration. In the falling action, the events begin to wind down and point the reader toward the conclusion or dénouement at the end of the story, which resolves the conflict to a greater

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or lesser degree. Sometimes the conclusion introduces an unexpected turn of events or a surprise ending. The plot of Grace Paley’s short story “Samuel” is easily summarized. It relates a sequence of events about four young boys who are fooling around on the platform between two cars of a moving subway train. A woman watching them tells them they’ll get hurt, but the boys only laugh at her. Witnessing their response, a man gets angry and pulls the emergency cord. The train lurches to a stop, causing one of the boys to fall and be crushed to death. The mother of the dead boy grieves, then becomes hopeful after she becomes pregnant again. But after the birth of her baby she realizes that the new child can never replace the son she has lost.

The first part of the plot, or exposition, of “Samuel” is the opening paragraph. It introduces the idea that motivates the main characters of Paley’s little drama, the idea that boys like to show off for each other. The rising action dramatizes the conflict of interest between the young boys and the adults watching them in the subway car. Some of the men in the car sympathize with the kids, remem- bering the dangerous stunts they pulled when they were young. Most of the women in the car are angry at the boys and want them to behave more respon- sibly, to take seats and calm down. The turning point is when one of the women, with a son at home, summons her courage and admonishes the boys. They make fun of her, and this raises the tension of the story by adding a complicating factor of defiance to their behavior. The climax of “Samuel” is when the self- righteous male passenger pulls the emergency cord and Samuel is killed. In the falling action, Paley describes the result of the accident. Traffic on the subway is stopped, the passengers who saw the accident are in shock, the others riding the train are curious, and a policeman notifies Samuel’s mother of his death. The conclusion is the final paragraph of the story, more than a year later, when Samuel’s parents understand the full dimen- sion of their loss. A short story can cover the events of a brief episode, as does Grace Paley’s “Samuel,” or encompass action that takes years to conclude, as in Alejo Carpen- tier’s “Journey to the Seed.” Usually stories that are static, where little change occurs, are relatively short (as Paley’s), while more dynamic actions, covering a longer time and involving the characters’ changes from one state to another, are longer. Yet the narrative possibilities are endless. The writer may omit or condense complex episodes to intensify their dramatic effect (Nathaniel Haw- thorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”) or expand a single incident to make a rela- tively long story (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”).

The plot of a short story usually involves a conflict or struggle between opposing forces. The discerning reader can see it develop in a pattern during the course of the narration, whether its events proceed chronologically, as in “Samuel,” or are rearranged with flashbacks, as in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Even if a plot lacks a momentous peak in

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the action, it always includes the basic pattern of a beginning, a middle, and an end. In most stories the beginning sets up the problem or conflict; the middle is where the author introduces various complications that prolong suspense and make the struggle more meaningful; and the end resolves the conflict to a greater or lesser degree. In successful stories the writer shapes these stages into a complex structure that impresses the reader with its balance and proportion, often suggesting a fresh aspect of a familiar human situation. The particular pattern varies from story to story, of course, and from author to author. Nathaniel Hawthorne began “Young Goodman Brown,” for example, with only a few short paragraphs of exposition, the leave-taking between Goodman Brown and his young wife, Faith. Herman Melville de voted pages to exposition in his much longer story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” describ- ing the lawyer, his two eccentric copyists, and his office boy before introducing the title character. Plot can work in several ways. It can be an outgrowth of a character’s personality or will, as in Young Goodman Brown’s insistence on his meet- ing with the devil, or in Bartleby’s refusal to participate in the lawyer’s office routines, or in Montresor’s insane scheme of revenge against Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” It can be propelled by an apparent accident of fate, as when Brently Mallard’s unexpected appearance at the end of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” causes his wife to suffer a fatal heart attack. It can be controlled by the setting, as in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” Most often the plots of stories can be understood as the interaction of character with circumstances: for example, in F. Scott Fitzger- ald’s “Winter Dreams.” Plot does not emerge just through the description of events in the story. It can also be carried forward in dialogue, as when Hawthorne introduced the characters, the time, and the situation through the conversation between Goodman Brown and his wife in the beginning of the story. Readers also respond to foreshadowing and dramatic irony as the plot moves along, anticipating a turn of events which may or may not go along with our expecta- tions. In the opening of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” we can visualize the grandmother beginning the car trip dressed in navy blue trimmed with white organdy and lace and a sachet of cloth violets so that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” Later in the story we learn that although she survives the car accident, being dressed so neatly doesn’t save her from being killed by the Misfit after she pleads with him, “I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady!” Paley’s story is very short, more of a sketch than a fully developed narrative. The only dialogue is between the lady who warns the boys that they might get hurt and the boys themselves, who find her warning hilarious. Samuel pounds his buddy Alfred’s back until the tears come, saying “You a baby, huh?” Paley gives a hint of foreshadowing in the opening paragraphs of her story, suggest- ing the action to come, when some of the men watching the boys think, “These kids do seem to be acting sort of stupid. They are little.”

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These words anticipate a turn of events that may or may not go along with our expectations, but when we reread the story, we see that Paley’s plot runs along as solidly as a subway train. Not for her are the tricky surprise endings favored in short stories by earlier writers such as Guy de Mau- passant, Kate Chopin, and Ambrose Bierce. We sense Paley’s emotional involvement in her characters as she chronicles the tragedy of a small boy’s senseless death. Along with her choice of a title, Paley sets up an expectation in the reader early on with her hint of foreshadowing — the story will be about Samuel, and its “single effect” will be the shock of his accidental, senseless death on the peo- ple around him. Paley doesn’t go on to tell us about the lives of the three boys who survive the accident, or about the guilty feelings (and subsequent nervous breakdown?) of the man who pulls the emergency cord. These would be other stories. Regardless of the author’s method of developing the plot, the goal is the same: The writer of short stories must show the reader something about human nature through the dramatic action of the plot and the other elements of the story, and not just tell the reader what to think. A good plot arouses our curios- ity, engages our emotions, and keeps us in suspense. As the contemporary American writer Eudora Welty understood, “A nar- rative line is in its deeper sense, of course, the tracing out of a meaning, and the real continuity of a story lies in this probing forward.” A storyteller must sus- tain the illusion of reality until the end of the story, unfolding events with the continuing revelation of an apparently endless silk handkerchief drawn from a skillful magician’s coat sleeve.

Character If you are like most people, plot is what keeps you going when you first read a story, and character is what stays with you after you have finished reading it. The title of Paley’s short narrative is “Samuel,” the name of the foolish young boy (he lacked prudence) who is the protagonist or central character in the story. Characters are usually the people who are involved in what happens in a story. Writers can use animals as characters, or giant insects such as Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” or even such inanimate objects as houses, trees, chairs, and shoes. But by the term character we usually mean a human being with emotions whose mind works something like our own. With a plot we do not just ask, What next? We also ask, Why? The answer is usually found in the characters, who are plausible if we can understand their actions. The characters themselves don’t always have a conscious awareness of why they act the way they do, or — if they have an awareness — it isn’t always accurate. Yet there always are reasons, and the reader may discover them before the characters do. The reader instinctively wants to connect the events

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of a story by more than their simple chronological sequence. Assuming a rela- tion between the events and the characters makes the story seem coherent. Paley chooses to keep her story so short that she doesn’t give her characters any time to develop. They are static, not dynamic. We are told their names, but we don’t see them change during the narrative or after Samuel’s death. They are flat, not round characters. For characters to emerge as round, the reader must feel the play and pull of their actions and responses to situations. Yet Paley’s character types are familiar to all of us. Samuel is a schoolboy clown- ing for his buddies, and we understand why he acts as he does. The man who pulls the emergency cord in the subway car is a little more complex. We aren’t told much about him, except that his “boyhood had been more watchful than brave.” Unlike some of the other male spectators, he has no sense of empathy with the boys who are fooling around on the moving platform. Perhaps part of the anger the man feels toward the boys is prompted by their mockery of the lady who issues the reprimand. Paley tells us only that “he walked in a citizenly way” when he went to pull the emergency cord. Con- sidering the dire results of the man’s action, Paley is using verbal irony here, meaning the opposite of the literal meaning of the words good citizen. No one acting like a good citizen wants to cause a small boy’s death. As readers, we instinctively strive to connect the events of a story by more than their simple chronological sequence, because assuming connections between the events and the inner life of the characters makes the story seem coherent. How are the characters in a short story to be understood? Any discussion of character tends to drift into a value judgment, as our principles of definition and evaluation for fictional characters are based on the ones we use for real people, tentative and unfocused as they may be. We must remember that we are reading about fictional characters in a short story, not real ones. The only evidence we have about characters is what the author puts into the story. We are on firmer ground in literary discussions when we analyze the writ- er’s method of characterization as well as the character’s personality. Paley’s method is one of economy; the extremely short length of her story mirrors Samuel’s brief lifetime. Writing a realistic story, she might be suggesting that characters from modest economic backgrounds have little control over their fates in the big city, underscoring the tragedy of the loss of a young boy who never had the chance to grow up. Other authors, such as Poe, create a fantasy world in their stories, imagin- ing situations in which their characters have total control. We know that Poe’s protagonist Montresor gets away with murder in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Pigeonholing his character does not bring us close to understanding the sense of horror that Poe evokes in the story. We can appreciate it more readily by relishing the language Poe uses in dialogue and description to show us Montresor’s thoughts and responses as he acts out his obsessive plan to avenge his honor and lure Fortunato to his death. As the literary critic David Reynolds has realized, the two characters in this classic short story, although limited, are not flat.

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They come swiftly alive before our eyes because Poe describes them with acute psychological realism. Montresor is a complex Machiavellian crimi- nal, exhibiting a full range of traits from clever ingratiation to stark sadism. Fortunato, the dupe whose pride leads to his own downfall, nevertheless exhibits . . . admirable qualities. . . . The drama of the story lies in the care- fully orchestrated interaction between the two. Poe directs our attention away from the merely sensational and toward the psychological. . . .

In all successful fiction the characters come alive as individuals. They must materialize on the page through the accumulation of details about their appearance, actions, and responses as seen, heard, and felt physical realities. Hawthorne told us little about the physical appearance of Goodman Brown except that he is young and newly married. We do not even know his first name — “Goodman” was used by the Puritans as a title of respect for men in the community who owned land. We know more about his wife — her name is Faith, she is pretty and affectionate, and she wears pink ribbons on her cap. The lack of physical details about him makes Goodman Brown less than flesh and blood to most readers. He remains an abstraction in a moral allegory. Thus Hawthorne was able to reveal more clearly the figure of a man on trial for his belief in good and evil. As we are caught up in reading the story, Goodman Brown’s actions as a fictional “person” provoke our curiosity and his responses arouse our alarm. If he continues to interest us after we have finished reading the story, it is because we are fascinated, as Hawthorne was, with the moral dilemma that the narrative dramatizes. Each writer of short fiction puts his or her own emphasis on character. An attentive reader can perceive that Anton Chekhov and Jorge Luis Borges, for example, did not develop characters in the same way. Chekhov, a great nineteenth-century realist, placed highest emphasis on character, believing that it determines our fate. Borges, a contemporary teller of philosophical tales, believed that our subjective nature makes it impossible for us to under- stand the essential riddle of human existence, so he made plot more important than character. Different fictional worlds make different demands on the reader’s imagi- nation. What is most important to the reader’s enjoyment of the tale is the emotional truth conveyed by the characters, whether they are flat or round, dynamic or static. To avoid sentimentality (emotional overindulgence) and stereotyping (oversimplified judgment) in creating characters, the writer must be able to suggest enough complexity to engage the reader’s emotions, or the story will not succeed.

Setting Setting is the place and time of the story. To set the scene and suggest a mood or atmosphere for the events to follow, the writer attempts to create in the reader’s visual imagination the illusion of a solid world in which the story takes

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place. Paley uses only a few words to describe the subway setting of her story, but they create an image of power and danger. The doors are “locked.” The platform is “swaying.” The cars on either side are full of people, who are watch- ing the boys uneasily. When the cars unexpectedly slow down suddenly for the first time, the boys “grab the swinging guard chains,” nearly falling down. Paley’s description of the second slowdown, after the man pulls the emergency cord, is more shocking, relying on strong active verbs such as abandoned, caught, held, fell, whipped, pitched, crushed, and killed:

Almost at once, with a terrible hiss, the pressure of air abandoned the brakes and the wheels were caught and held. People standing in the most secure places fell forward, then backward. Samuel had let go of his hold on the chain so he could pound Tom as well as Alfred. All the passengers in the cars whipped back and forth, but he pitched only forward and fell head first to be crushed and killed between the cars.

When the writer locates the narrative in a physical setting, the reader is moved step by step toward acceptance of the fiction. The external reality of the setting is always an illusion, our mental images stimulated by the words that the writer has put on paper. Yet this invented setting is essential if we are to share the internal emotional life of the characters involved in the plot. A sense of place engages us in the fictional characters’ situations. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” for ex ample, when the protagonist Goodman Brown enters the dark, tangled world of the forest surrounding the colonial village of Salem to keep his appointment with the devil, the attentive reader may perceive that Brown really enters the troubled world of his own mind. Exercising his own free will, he voluntarily exchanges the companionship of his pretty young wife and her pink ribbons for the attractions of Satan. The setting of a story furnishes the location for its world of feeling, the dif- ferent emotional associations awakened in the reader’s mind by a gloomy New England forest in a Hawthorne story, a dank burial crypt in a Poe story, or a crowded Manhattan subway train in a Paley story. A sense of place is essential for us to imagine the fictional characters’ situations as the author creates the story. Place helps the characters seem real, but, to be most effective, the setting must also have a dramatic use. It must be shown, or at least felt, to affect char- acter or plot. The emergency brake in the subway car precipitates the disaster of Samuel’s death. Exchanging the windy street in Salem village for the dreary, solitary path through the tangled forest leads Young Goodman Brown straight to the devil. The mound of bones piled outside the damp niche where Mon- tresor has planned to entomb his victim Fortunato foreshadows the evil deed to come. Imagining the details of setting in the creation of stories, writers must exert their talents to make the reader see only the fictional world that emerges on the printed page, under the illusion that while the story unfolds, it is the real world itself.

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sensitive to the construct of language that is the story. Good readers under- stand that the way the story is written is an essential part of what it is saying.

Style Style is the characteristic way an author uses language to create literature. Style is the result of the writer’s habitual use of certain rhetorical patterns, including sentence length and complexity, word choice and placement, and punctuation. Paley’s style in “Samuel” is informal, even colloquial in her choice of language. In her story she uses mostly one-syllable words, even slang occasionally (super in the first paragraph refers to the superintendent or caretaker of an apartment building). You might think of the author’s prose style as a projection of her or his voice as a writer, as if you were hearing the story instead of reading it. Voice, as the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood described it, is “a speaking voice, like the singing voice in music, that moves not across a space, across the page, but through time. Surely every written story is, in the final analysis, a score for voice. These little black marks on the page mean nothing without their retrans- lation into sound.” Suggested by the verbal patterns of literary style, voice is an essential ele- ment of all good fiction. Voice is the total effect of the author’s rhetorical and stylistic choices. It can be flat, as in Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” to suggest the narrator’s psychological exhaustion. Or voice can be exuberant, as in Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” suggesting the naiveté of the young narrator. As a creation of the writer, the narrative voice is always part of the “lie” of fiction, not always identical with the voice of the writer telling the story. Good readers remember D. H. Lawrence’s dictum: Trust the tale, not the teller. The way that authors use language to tell a story conveys the quality of their mind to the reader. As we follow the story on the page we seem to hear the narration as well as see it in our imaginations. Eudora Welty once said that “my own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.” From the reader’s initial encounter with the first words on the page, the voice of the storyteller is the agent that evokes the imaginary landscape of fiction and conveys part of the story’s meaning. For example, Lawrence’s fairy- tale tone at the beginning of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” prepares the reader for the strange, otherworldly events as the story progresses. An author’s choice of tone in a narrative conveys his or her unstated atti- tudes toward the story. Paley’s tone is serious in “Samuel,” despite her use of colloquial language. The dry restraint in Hawthorne’s comment about Good- man Brown’s “excellent resolve” as he turns the corner by the meetinghouse and enters the forest is an example of the way tone contributes to Hawthorne’s dignified, lofty prose style. A subtle irony, drawing attention to the differ- ences between what is said in the omniscient point of view of the storyteller and what Hawthorne really thought, helped him keep an emotional distance

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from his characters suitable to the level of abstraction he created in the narra- tive. In contrast, Sherwood Anderson used everyday speech and more under- stated irony to set up a feeling of intimacy with the reader. This narrative voice suggests a sympathy for the characters in his realistic stories about frustrated, small-town lives. Be careful in judging the tone of stories that have been translated from for- eign languages. It is nearly impossible for a translation to capture the exact tone of the original language, even if it renders most other details of the story accurately. Irony is another aspect of style. Irony makes the reader aware of a reality that differs from the reality the characters perceive (dramatic irony) or from the literal meaning of the author’s words (verbal irony). Paley uses verbal irony when she says that the man who pulls the emergency cord “walked in a citizenly way.” Earlier in the story, Samuel pounds his buddy Alfred’s back until the tears come, saying “You a baby, huh?” This is an example of dramatic irony. In only a few minutes Samuel will be crushed between the wheels of the subway car and his life will end while he is still, comparatively, a baby. Symbolism and allegory can also be aspects of the author’s style. A lit- erary symbol can be anything in a story’s setting, plot, or characterization that suggests an abstract meaning to the reader in addition to its literal sig- nificance. Consider the pink ribbons on Faith’s cap in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” They may be interpreted as an abstract symbol of the awakening sexuality of the young wife in the story, suggesting her innocence and purity. The total context of a story often suggests a symbolic as well as literal read- ing of the narrative. After closing the anthology and thinking about a story you’ve just read, you may be struck by the way some elements of the story sug- gest deeper meaning by eliciting your emotional responses. Charlotte Perkins Gilman used the claustrophobic setting of her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to help her reverse and subvert her readers’ traditional associations about mar- riage. Instead of being a conventional symbol of home — safety, comfort, and refuge — the house in the story becomes a symbol of the wife’s imprisonment and deterioration. Symbols are not always interpreted the same way by different readers. Faith’s pink ribbons in “Young Goodman Brown” may symbolize her youth and innocence to one reader, and her femininity and coquettishness to another. Faith is such an abstract character that either interpretation is pos- sible. Regardless of how the symbol of the pink ribbons is interpreted, they are experienced as a dominant image in the somber landscape of Hawthorne’s fiction. Some readers may even see them as an example of Hawthorne’s explo- ration of the ambiguous nature of signs, similar to the ambiguous nature of Goodman Brown’s night in the forest. Symbols are more eloquent as specific images — visual ideas — than any paraphrase, unifying the story and suggest- ing infinitely more than they state. A story becomes an allegory when all the characters, places, things, and events represent symbolic qualities, and their interactions are meant to reveal a

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moral truth. Whereas symbolism results from the multiple meanings inherent in a good story, allegory tends to have a fixed meaning. Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seem to exist more on the abstract, symbolic level of moral allegory than as realistic fiction in most readers’ imaginations. Kafka’s genius in describing Gregor’s internal state in “The Metamorphosis” is so extraordinary that we read the details of the fan- tasy story quite literally; to many readers its allegorical meaning as a fable of alienation seems more restrictive and less compelling than Kafka’s painful dra- matization of Gregor’s waking nightmare after he finds himself transformed into a monstrous creature. All of these aspects of style work together to create a distinctive literary voice. As the writer Vladimir Nabokov once said in a lecture, “Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality.”

Theme Theme is a generalization about the meaning of a story. It is more than the subject of the story, which is what the narrative is generally about. While the subject can be expressed in a word or two (“ ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is about religious fanaticism”), the theme requires a phrase or a sentence. The theme of a story is also different from the plot. Whereas the plot of Haw thorne’s story can be summarized by stating what happened in the action (a young Puritan hus- band loses his faith in God and humankind after attending a witches’ coven), the theme is an abstract statement of the meaning of the story (losing religious faith can destroy a person’s life). The theme of a story abstracts its meaning from the concrete details of its plot, characterization, setting, point of view, and style. Theme is the implied meaning of all the details of a story. It need not always be stated as a moral judgment. The story’s meaning can and often does suggest principles of right and wrong behavior, but the impulse to tell a story can arise from several uni- versal urges of the human spirit — to communicate, to create, to raise ultimate questions and not just pragmatic ones; in short, to provide a personal expres- sion in narrative form of our sense of what life is like. As the writer Steven Millhauser has remarked, “When I write I have the sense that what compels me isn’t the promotion of certain values, but something else — the working out of a harmony, the completion of a necessary design. This may be just an other way of insisting that the values that belong to art are aesthetic. Exactly how moral values fit in is for a trained philosopher to say.” To paraphrase the writer Milan Kundera, great storytellers refuse to give explicit moral judgment a place in their fiction. Their stories usually aren’t simple parables in which good triumphs over evil. To create a complex fic- tional world reflecting actual human experience, writers are rarely led by the desire to give a simple sermon. Instead, they provide multiple viewpoints within their stories through their dramatizations of the conflicting points of

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view of the various characters. They leave it to readers to come up with their own moral judgments in the statement of the story’s theme. A gifted storyteller says, “Let me tell you how it is,” and our interest as read- ers is always in what the whole story can show us about human expe rience. Your statement of the theme suggests your understanding of the author’s vision of the meaning of life. Theme comes last in a discussion of the elements of fiction because it is a consequence of all the other elements in a story. The structure and theme of a story are fused like the body and soul of a reader; their interaction cre- ates a living pattern. Authors work hard to breathe life into their fiction. Most do not like to abstract the meaning of their stories to explain what they are “about.” Even when they do, as the southern writer Flannery O’Connor did in her explanation of the theme of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or as William Faulkner did in discussing “A Rose for Emily,” some readers agree intellectu- ally but not emotionally with the writer’s interpretation. O’Connor said she understood that her story might be read in different ways by different people, but she could have written it only with the one meaning she had in mind. To say that a story can have more than a single meaning doesn’t imply that it can mean anything at all. You have to be able to find sufficient impor- tant details that support your interpretation. Often readers find it difficult to formulate a single sentence that captures their impression of what a story means. After many futile minutes of trying to “boil it down” to a one-sentence essence, they may find words coming irresistibly to mind from another con- text, written by the American poet Archibald MacLeish: “A poem should not mean / But be.” The way the author creates the narrative by using all the elements of fic- tion to embody the theme is, of course, the most important achievement of the story. To appreciate the fact that the story itself is always more complex than its bare-bones meaning, try this experiment: Write a sentence summarizing what you believe to be the theme of “Samuel” and then close your anthology and try to re-create Paley’s story. Though the summary of a writer’s theme is no substitute for the story in its entirety, your attempt to state it can help you to understand the story better. Flannery O’Connor insisted that a story is not its abstract meaning but rather what she called its “experienced” meaning: “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. . . . When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”

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