Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

She wondered, too, whether the place was really arranged as it had been in Morrison's time. He and his wife had never had much money, even in the years of his critical success; and the couple was reported to have been indifferent to creature comforts. Friends had complained that although the conversation was excellent you never got a decent meal or a good nights sleep at Wing Lodge. Gina recognized one or two drawings that she knew Morrison had possessed, and a few things that he might have brought back from the East. But the rest must have come after he died, when his wife had inherited money from her family in America; it was then, perhaps, that she had turned Wing Lodge into this tasteful little nest. No doubt the frail, ladylike guide and her frail, ladylike, possibly lesbian companion, who presumably lived here quietly together on the days when they were not intruded upon by a curious public, had also added their bit of polish to the deep old charm.

In the study, where Morrison's writing table was set out with pens and notebooks, as if he had just this minute stepped out for a walk in the fields in search of inspiration, there was also a shallow locked glass case in which were displayed first editions of the novels and some of Morrisons longhand drafts, as well as the copies that his wife had typed up on her Olivetti, and on which Morrison had scribbled furiously in his dark soft pencil. Gina had handled his notebooks and manuscripts and was familiar with his process of composition.

When the others had moved on, she peered closely into the case at one of the notebooks. These longhand drafts were not difficult to read, although Morrison's handwriting was odd, with large capitals and crunched-up lowercase. She recognized the text immediately. It was the scene in “Winter's Day” when the middle-aged daughter declares her love for the doctor, in the house where her father is dying. They have left her father with the nurse for an hour, and the doctor is trying to persuade Edith to get some rest. A lamp is burning, although it is already light outside; they are surrounded by the overflow of chaos from the sickroom-basins and medicines and laundry. Edith tells the doctor, who is married, that she can’t bear the idea that when her father is dead he will no longer come to visit. “Because we shan’t have our talks-you could have no idea, because you’re a man and you have work to do, of what these mean to me. My life has been so stupidly empty.” She presses her face, wet with tears, against the woolen sleeve of his jacket. The doctor is shocked and offended that Edith's mind is not on her father. Also, he is not attracted to her: he pities her, and her plain looks, haggard with exhaustion, and bad teeth.

There were few corrections to this passage in the notebook. It was a kind of climax, an eruption of drama in a novel whose texture was mostly very still. But Morrison must have cut part of this scene in a later version. In the published book, all Edith said when she broke down was “Because we shan’t have our talks… I will miss them.” Gina's eyes swam with tears as she bent over the case, reading the original words. She was astonished. She never cried, she never got colds, so she didn’t even have a tissue in her bag. Luckily, she was alone. She wiped her face on the back of her hand and decided not to follow the rest of the tour group upstairs to the bookshop. Instead, she made her way out into the exquisitely blooming back garden, and found a seat under a bower overgrown with Nelly Moser clematis and some tiny white roses with a sweet perfume.

Why did it move her so much, this scene of a woman relinquishing power over herself? It ought to disgust her, or fill her with rage-or relief, that a whole repertoire of gestures of female abasement was now, after so many centuries, culturally obsolete. No one would dream of using a scene like that in a novel these days. That wet face, though, against the rough woolen sleeve, sent Gina slipping, careering down the path of self-abandonment. (Was the sleeve still there in the published version? She couldn’t at the moment remember for sure.) She could almost smell the wool and imagine its hairy texture against her mouth, although none of the men she had loved ever wore that kind of tweedy jacket, except her father, perhaps, when she was a little girl. It was sexual, of course, and masochistic: female nakedness rubbing up against coarse male fiber. There was the threat of abrasion, of an irritated reaction on the finer, more sensitized, wet female surface.

You could see how it all worked. You could rationally resist it, and you could even-and here was the answer, perhaps, to the question that had brought her down to Wing Lodge in the first place-feel sure that you would never be able to surrender yourself like that ever again. And yet the passage had moved her to unexpected tears. There was something formally beautiful and powerful and satisfying in it: that scene of a woman putting her happiness into a man's hands. Next to it, all the other, better kinds of power that women had nowadays seemed, just for one floundering moment, second best.

Gina sat for a long time. A bee, or some beelike insect, fell out of the flowers onto her skirt, and she was aware of the lady guide looking at her agitatedly from the French windows, probably wanting to close up the house. And there came to her, in a flood of regret for her youth, the memory of a card trick, the one where you secretly sorted the pack into black and red in advance so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong.

from The New Yorker

ONE DAY you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it's my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.

I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy. Of course, crazy is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I don’t think asocial disorder fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or, at least, not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. And I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disappearing ever since.

I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there's such a thing as an effec- tive homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else's clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.

Probably none of this interests you. Homeless Indians are everywhere in Seattle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage. But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back East. Of course, that's his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is just a plain old everyday Indian. I’m kind of suspicious of him, because he identifies himself only as Plains Indian, a generic term, and not by a specific tribe. When I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he is, he said, “Do any of us know exactly what we are?” Yeah, great, a philosophizing Indian. “Hey,” I said, “you got to have a home to be that homely.” He just laughed and flipped me the eagle and walked away.