Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Paley died at the age of eighty-four. Her obituary in the New York Times noted, “To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy… Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.”

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TO PUT US at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying, our dear friend Selena said, Life, after all, has not been an unrelieved horror — you know, I did have many wonderful years with her.

She pointed to a child who leaned out of a portrait on the wall — long brown hair, white pinafore, head and shoulders forward.

Eagerness, said Susan. Ann closed her eyes.

On the same wall three little girls were photographed in a schoolyard. They were in furious discussion; they were holding hands. Right in the middle of the coffee table, framed, in autumn colors, a handsome young woman of eighteen sat on an enormous horse — aloof, disinterested, a rider. One night this young woman, Selena’s child, was found in a rooming house in a distant city, dead. The police called. They said, Do you have a daughter named Abby?

And with him , too, our friend Selena said. We had good times, Max and I. You know that.

There were no photographs of him . He was married to another woman and had a new, stalwart girl of about six, to whom no harm would ever come, her mother believed.

Our dear Selena had gotten out of bed. Heavily but with a comic dance, she soft-shoed to the bathroom, singing “Those were the days, my friend…”

Later that evening, Ann, Susan, and I were enduring our five-hour train ride home. After one hour of silence and one hour of coffee and the sandwiches Selena had given us (she actually stood, leaned her big soft excavated body against the kitchen table to make those sandwiches), Ann said, Well, we’ll never see her again.

Who says? Anyway, listen, said Susan. Think of it. Abby isn’t the only kid who died. What about that great guy, remember Bill Dalrymple — he was a noncooperator or a deserter? And Bob Simon. They were killed in automobile accidents. Matthew, Jeannie, Mike. Remember Al Lurie — he was murdered on Sixth Street — and that little kid Brenda, who O.D.’d on your roof, Ann? The tendency, I suppose, is to forget. You people don’t remember them.

What do you mean, “you people”? Ann asked. You’re talking to us .

I began to apologize for not knowing them all. Most of them were older than my kids, I said.

Of course, the child Abby was exactly in my time of knowing and in all my places of paying attention — the park, the school, our street. But oh! It’s true! Selena’s Abby was not the only one of the beloved generation of our children murdered by cars, lost to war, to drugs, to madness.

Selena’s main problem, Ann said — you know, she didn’t tell the truth.

What?

A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough, Ann thinks, to steam all God’s chemical mistakes and society’s slimy lies out of her life. We all believe in that power, my friends and I, but sometimes… the heat.

Anyway, I always thought Selena had told us a lot. For instance, we knew she was an orphan. There were six, seven other children. She was the youngest. She was forty-two years old before someone informed her that her mother had not died in childbirthing her. It was some terrible sickness. And she had lived close to her mother’s body — at her breast, in fact — until she was eight months old. Whew! said Selena. What a relief! I’d always felt I was the one who’d killed her.

Your family stinks, we told her. They really held you up for grief.

Oh, people, she said. Forget it. They did a lot of nice things for me, too. Me and Abby. Forget it. Who has the time?

That’s what I mean, said Ann. Selena should have gone after them with an ax.

More information: Selena’s two sisters brought her to a Home. They were ashamed that at sixteen and nineteen they could not take care of her. They kept hugging her. They were sure she’d cry. They took her to her room — not a room, a dormitory with about eight beds. This is your bed, Lena. This is your table for your things. This little drawer is for your toothbrush. All for me? she asked. No one else can use it? Only me. That’s all? Artie can’t come? Franky can’t come? Right?

Believe me, Selena said, those were happy days at Home.

Facts, said Ann, just facts. Not necessarily the truth .

I don’t think it’s right to complain about the character of the dying or start hustling all their motives into the spotlight like that. Isn’t it amazing enough, the bravery of that private inclusive intentional community?

It wouldn’t help not to be brave, said Selena. You’ll see.

She wanted to get back to bed. Susan moved to help her.

Thanks, our Selena said, leaning on another person for the first time in her entire life. The trouble is, when I stand, it hurts me here all down my back. Nothing they can do about it. All the chemotherapy. No more chemistry left in me to therapeut. Ha! Did you know before I came to New York and met you I used to work in that hospital? I was supervisor in gynecology. Nursing. They were my friends, the doctors. They weren’t so snotty then. David Clark, big surgeon. He couldn’t look at me last week. He kept saying, Lena… Lena… Like that. We were in North Africa the same year—’44, I think. I told him, Davy, I’ve been around a long enough time. I haven’t missed too much. He knows it. But I didn’t want to make him look at me. Ugh, my damn feet are a pain in the neck.

Recent research, said Susan, tells us that it’s the neck that’s a pain in the feet.

Always something new, said Selena, our dear friend.

On the way back to the bed, she stopped at her desk. There were about twenty snapshots scattered across it — the baby, the child, the young woman. Here, she said to me, take this one. It’s a shot of Abby and your Richard in front of the school — third grade? What a day! The show those kids put on! What a bunch of kids! What’s Richard doing now?

Oh, who knows? Horsing around someplace. Spain. These days, it’s Spain. Who knows where he is? They’re all the same.

Why did I say that? I knew exactly where he was. He writes. In fact, he found a broken phone and was able to call every day for a week — mostly to give orders to his brother but also to say, Are you O.K., Ma? How’s your new boy friend, did he smile yet?

The kids, they’re all the same, I said.

It was only politeness, I think, not to pour my boy’s light, noisy face into that dark afternoon. Richard used to say in his early mean teens, You’d sell us down the river to keep Selena happy and innocent. It’s true. Whenever Selena would say, I don’t know, Abby has some peculiar friends, I’d answer for stupid comfort, You should see Richard’s.

Still, he’s in Spain, Selena said. At least you know that. It’s probably interesting. He’ll learn a lot. Richard is a wonderful boy, Faith. He acts like a wise guy but he’s not. You know the night Abby died, when the police called me and told me? That was my first night’s sleep in two years. I knew where she was.

Selena said this very matter-of-factly — just offering a few informative sentences.

But Ann, listening, said, Oh! — she called out to us all, Oh! — and began to sob. Her straightforwardness had become an arrow and gone right into her own heart.

Then a deep tear-drying breath: I want a picture, too, she said.

Yes. Yes, wait, I have one here someplace. Abby and Judy and that Spanish kid Victor. Where is it? Ah. Here!

Three nine-year-old children sat high on that long-armed sycamore in the park, dangling their legs on someone’s patient head — smooth dark hair, parted in the middle. Was that head Kitty’s?