Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“The handsome one. The handsome one. There!” Her voice quavered and died.

Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. “Point him out,” he commanded. “Show me.” And the next instant. “Never mind. I see him.”

Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds. Had picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was Emily’s boy. He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was nineteen, and fun-loving, and he had a girl, and he didn’t particularly want to go to France and — to go to France. But more than he had hated going, he had hated not to go. So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set so that his chin stuck out just a little. Emily’s boy.

Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the hard-boiled eyes of a loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man. And suddenly he was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay dog. He was Jo Hertz, thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily, and with the stinging blood of young manhood coursing through his veins.

Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street — the fine, flag-bedecked street — just one of a hundred service-hats bobbing in rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and flowing on.

Then he disappeared altogether.

Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something over and over. “I can’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to. I can’t let him go. Like that. I can’t.”

Jo said a queer thing.

“Why, Emily! We wouldn’t have him stay home, would we? We wouldn’t want him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I’m glad he volunteered. I’m proud of him. So are you, glad.”

Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by, awkwardly. Emily’s face was a red, swollen mass.

So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later he blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him you saw that his eyes were red.

Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her chair, clutching her bag rather nervously.

“Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We’re here to tell you that this thing’s got to stop.”

“Thing? Stop?”

“You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner’s that day. And night before last, Ethel. We’re all disgusted. If you must go about with people like that, please have some sense of decency.”

Something gathering in Jo’s face should have warned her. But he was slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old and fat that she did not heed it. She went on. “You’ve got us to consider. Your sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of your own—”

But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his face even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn’t at all the face of a fat, middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.

“You!” he began, low-voiced, ominous. “You!” He raised a great fist high. “You two murderers! You didn’t consider me, twenty years ago. You come to me with talk like that. Where’s my boy! You killed him, you two, twenty years ago. And now he belongs to somebody else. Where’s my son that should have gone marching by to-day?” He flung his arms out in a great gesture of longing. The red veins stood out on his forehead. “Where’s my son! Answer me that, you two selfish, miserable women. Where’s my son!” Then as they huddled together, frightened, wild-eyed. “Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I hurt you!”

They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.

Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached for a chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist, flabby hand over his forehead and it came away wet. The telephone rang. He sat still, it sounded far away and unimportant, like something forgotten. I think he did not even hear it with his conscious ear. But it rang and rang insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone when at home.

“Hello!” He knew instantly the voice at the other end.

“That you, Jo?” it said.

“Yes.”

“How’s my boy?”

“I’m — all right.”

“Listen, Jo. The crowd’s coming over to-night. I’ve fixed up a little poker game for you. Just eight of us.”

“I can’t come to-night, Gert.”

“Can’t! Why not?”

“I’m not feeling so good.”

“You just said you were all right.”

“I am all right. Just kind of tired.”

The voice took on a cooing note. “Is my Joey tired? Then he shall be all comfy on the sofa, and he doesn’t need to play if he don’t want to. No, sir.”

Jo stood staring at the black mouth-piece of the telephone. He was seeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys, in khaki.

“Hello! Hello!” The voice took on an anxious note. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” wearily.

“Jo, there’s something the matter. You’re sick. I’m coming right over.”

“No!”

“Why not? You sound as if you’d been sleeping. Look here—”

“Leave me alone!” cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked onto the hook. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” Long after the connection had been broken.

He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he turned and walked into the front room. All the light had gone out of it. Dusk had come on. All the light had gone out of everything. The zest had gone out of life. The game was over — the game he had been playing against loneliness and disappointment. And he was just a tired old man. A lonely, tired old man in a ridiculous, rose-colored room that had grown, all of a sudden, drab.

Series editor Edward O’Brien wrote, “In Boston, I am below the salt with the Beacon Hill Yankees and above the salt with the South Boston Irish. There’s no place for me.” In 1919, after traveling in France and Rome, he settled in Oxford, England. But he continued to travel — in Italy, where he befriended Ezra Pound; in Paris, where he met James Joyce. O’Brien soon met the woman who would become his wife, Romer Wilson, a British writer known primarily for her biography of Emily Brontë.

He continued to balance a large number of projects with The Best American Short Stories: books of poetry and religious prose poems, biographies of Gauguin and Nietzsche. In 1922 he began coediting The Best British Short Stories .

In 1923 O’Brien met Ernest Hemingway, a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Toronto Star . Hemingway lamented that his wife, Hadley Richardson, had lost a suitcase of his manuscripts. He was despondent and wanted to quit writing. O’Brien asked to see Hemingway’s only two remaining stories and elected to publish one, “My Old Man,” in that year’s Best American Short Stories . It was the first and last time that O’Brien broke his own rule of selecting only published stories. And it was Hemingway’s first major publication.

The 1920s were a fertile time for literary American short fiction. As O’Brien wrote, “Even the best stories were built like Fords fifteen years ago, while now there are probably forty or fifty young writers who see life freshly, render it clearly, and write without a thought of pandering to editorial prejudices.” Sentimentality on the page was replaced by what O’Brien termed “saturation in the physical scene.” Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Ring Lardner “communicate to us with nearly complete disinterestedness as well as personal interest what the senses of sight and hearing have brought to them in the circles of the world in which they move.” O’Brien went on to write, “[Hemingway] conceals the tenderness of his heart by an attitude of bravado… This is a very common and beautiful attitude in American youth since the war.”