Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Yes,” I said.

And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“Do you think I’m still very feminine? I’m thirty-two years old now. You don’t know what that means. But do you think I am?”

And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

ROBERT STONE (1937–2015) was born in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was schizophrenic, and after she was institutionalized, he lived for years in an orphanage. He later attended and won writing prizes at Archbishop Molloy High School, but he left before graduating.

Stone served in the navy during the mid-1950s and then attended New York University for a year while working as a copyboy at the Daily News . He eventually moved to California, where he attended Stanford University and met Beat Generation writers such as Ken Kesey.

Stone’s first book is A Hall of Mirrors , which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. Stone also created a screen adaptation of the work, which became the 1970 film WUSA , starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Anthony Perkins. He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers . His story collection Bear and His Daughter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Stone also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. His work often tells of politically related adventures in war-torn places like Jerusalem and Central America.

Stone taught writing at Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and Yale. His most recent novel is Death of a Black-Haired Girl. He died in 2015 at his home in Key West, Florida, at the age of seventy-seven.

★

ONE GRAY NOVEMBER day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon. The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before.

Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods.

In January, blizzards swept down from the Arctic until the weather became too cold for snow. The Shawmut Valley grew quiet and crystalline. In the white silences, Elliot could hear the boards of his house contract and feel a shrinking in his bones. Each dusk, starveling deer came out of the wooded swamp behind the house to graze his orchard for whatever raccoons had uncovered and left behind. At night he lay beside his sleeping wife listening to the baying of dog packs running them down in the deep moon-shadowed snow.

Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating. But he could not shake off the sensations he had felt in Boston. In his mind’s eye he could see dead leaves rattling along brick gutters and savor that day’s desperation. The brief outing had undermined him.

Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling. Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face, and a sneaking manner. He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before.

“I been having this dream,” Blankenship announced loudly. His voice was not pleasant. His skin was unwholesome. Every time he got arrested the court sent him to the psychiatrists and the psychiatrists, who spoke little English, sent him to Elliot.

Blankenship had joined the Army after his first burglary but had never served east of the Rhine. After a few months in Wiesbaden, he had been discharged for reasons of unsuitability, but he told everyone he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He went about in a tiger suit. Elliot had had enough of him.

“Dreams are boring,” Elliot told him.

Blankenship was outraged. “Whaddaya mean?” he demanded.

During counseling sessions Elliot usually moved his chair into the middle of the room in order to seem accessible to his clients. Now he stayed securely behind his desk. He did not care to seem accessible to Blankenship. “What I said, Mr. Blankenship. Other people’s dreams are boring. Didn’t you ever hear that?”

“Boring?” Blankenship frowned. He seemed unable to imagine a meaning for the word.

Elliot picked up a pencil and set its point quivering on his desk-top blotter. He gazed into his client’s slack-jawed face. The Blankenship family made their way through life as strolling litigants, and young Blankenship’s specialty was slipping on ice cubes. Hauled off the pavement, he would hassle the doctors in Emergency for pain pills and hurry to a law clinic. The Blankenships had threatened suit against half the property owners in the southern part of the state. What they could not extort at law they stole. But even the Blankenship family had abandoned Blankenship. His last visit to the hospital had been subsequent to an arrest for lifting a case of hot-dog rolls from Woolworth’s. He lived in a Goodwill depository bin in Wyndham.

“Now I suppose you want to tell me your dream? Is that right, Mr. Blankenship?”

Blankenship looked left and right like a dog surrendering eye contact. “Don’t you want to hear it?” he asked humbly.

Elliot was unmoved. “Tell me something, Blankenship. Was your dream about Vietnam?”

At the mention of the word “Vietnam,” Blankenship customarily broke into a broad smile. Now he looked guilty and guarded. He shrugged. “Ya.”

“How come you have dreams about that place, Blankenship? You were never there.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship began to say, but Elliot cut him off.

“You were never there, my man. You never saw the goddamn place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!”

He had raised his voice to the extent that the secretary outside his open door paused at her word processor.

“Lemme alone,” Blankenship said fearfully. “Some doctor you are.”

“It’s all right,” Elliot assured him. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Everybody’s on my case,” Blankenship said. His moods were volatile. He began to weep.

Elliot watched the tears roll down Blankenship’s chapped, pitted cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Look, fella…” he began. He felt at a loss. He felt like telling Blankenship that things were tough all over.

Blankenship sniffed and telescoped his neck and after a moment looked at Elliot. His look was disconcertingly trustful; he was used to being counseled.

“Really, you know, it’s ridiculous for you to tell me your problems have to do with Nam. You were never over there. It was me over there, Blankenship. Not you.”

Blankenship leaned forward and put his forehead on his knees.

“Your troubles have to do with here and now,” Elliot told his client. “Fantasies aren’t helpful.”