Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“I cannot have her speak to me that way!” Mr. Loeb broke out. “I cannot have her call me those things she says. I cannot…”

“He pays attention,” Fräulein said. “He gets his feelings hurt too easy. I tell him, what does he care what she says? She’s nothing. But he says to her, she can’t speak to him that way, he cannot have her speak to him that way, he cannot stay and work for her if she talks like that. So she says all right, she’s going to report him to the Refugee Committee.”

“What can she say?”

“She was terrible angry,” Mr. Loeb said. “She will say I do not work. She will say I am a no-good worker. She will say I speak to her fresh.”

He looked at Mrs. Mason with his frightened eyes, and she nodded at him. Their eyes met and she nodded again, but more slowly this time.

“I’ll go up and talk to her,” Mrs. Mason said. She did not feel at all afraid to do that, suddenly. She was not thinking about how she felt.

Fräulein shrugged.

“I don’t think it makes any difference, you excuse me, Mrs. Mason. That Mrs. Sisson, she doesn’t want Mr. Loeb to work for her any more because he talks back to her, and she writes the letter anyway.”

“I’ll write to the Refugee Committee, too,” she said. “I’ll tell them that I know all about Mr. Loeb and he’s a good worker and a nice man. But I’ll go up and talk to her anyway.”

Mr. Loeb leaned against the fence and looked at her. She came out and walked past him into the road.

“Thank you very much,” Mr. Loeb said in his foreign, formal voice.

She smiled at him. The tension had gone away from his eyes, the look of fear that she recognized had gone.

“You don’t have to worry, you know,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever let anything happen to you.”

EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended graduate school at Columbia University during the Great Depression, but was unable to find a job in New York, so she moved back to Jackson and began work at a radio station and a newspaper. She later took a job as a publicist with the Works Progress Administration, gathering material that documented stories about the people of Mississippi. At the same time she assembled a group of writers and composers, which she called the Night-Blooming Cereus Club.

In 1941 Welty roomed with Katherine Anne Porter and the two became great friends. A Curtain of Green , published the same year, was Welty’s first collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which enabled her to travel to Europe. She later lectured at Harvard University and gathered her speeches in One Writer’s Beginnings . Her works of fiction include Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Collected Stories , and Losing Battles. Series editor Martha Foley described Welty’s fiction as “gentler, less macabre in her presentation of grotesque characters than many of her Southern contemporaries.”

Welty won a Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter. Over the course of her career, she also received numerous O. Henry Awards, a National Book Award, a National Medal of Arts, and the French Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, among many other honors.

★

MOTHER SAID , Where have you been, son? — Nowhere, mother. — I wish you wouldn’t look so unhappy, son. You could come back to me, now. — I can’t do that, mother. I have to stay in Sabina .

When I locked the door of the Sabina Bank I rolled down my sleeves and stood for some time looking out at a cotton field across the way until the whiteness nearly put me to sleep and then woke me up like a light turned on in my face. Dugan had been gone a few minutes or so. I got in my car and drove it up the street, turned it around in the foot of Jinny’s driveway (there went Dugan), and drove down again. I backed in a cotton field at the other end of the pavement, turned, and made the same trip. You know — the thing everybody does every day.

There was Maideen Summers on the corner waving a little colored handkerchief. She was at first the only stranger — then finally not much of one. When I didn’t remember to stop I saw the handkerchief slowly fall still. I turned again, and picked her up.

“Dragging Main?” she said. She was eighteen years old. She promptly told you all those things. “Look! Grown-up and citified,” she said, and held both hands toward me. She had brand new white cotton gloves on — they shone. Maideen would ride beside me and talk about things I didn’t mind hearing about — the ice plant, where she kept the books. Fred Killigrew her boss, the way working in Sabina seemed after the country and junior college. Her first job — her mother could hardly believe it, she said. It was so easy, too, out in the world, and nice, with getting her ride home with me sometimes like this and not on the dusty bus — except Mr. Killigrew sometimes wanted her to do something at the last minute — guess what today — and so on.

She said, “This sure is nice. I didn’t think you saw me, Ran, not at first.”

I told her my eyes had gone bad. She looked sorry. I drove, idling along, up and down Main Street a few times more. Each time the same people, Miss Callie Hudson and all, the people standing in the store doors or riding in the other cars, waved at my car, and to them all, Maideen waved back — her little blue handkerchief was busy. Their avidity would be far beyond her. She waved at them as she did at me.

“Are you tired out like you were yesterday? Today’s just as hot.”

She knew what anybody in Sabina told her; and for four or five afternoons I had picked her up and taken her up and down the street a few turns, bought her a Coca-Cola and driven her home out by the Old Murray Forks somewhere, and she had never said a word except a kind one, like this. She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.

I drove her home and then drove back to the room I had at Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s — usually, but on this day, there at the end of the pavement, I turned up the cut to the Stark place. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Maideen didn’t say anything until we reached the top of the drive and stopped, and I got out and opened her door.

“Do you want to take me in yonder?” she said. “Please, I’d just as soon you wouldn’t.”

All at once her voice came all over me. It had a kind of humility.

“Sure. Let’s go in and see Jinny. Why not?” I couldn’t stand it any longer, that was why. “I’m going and taking you.”

It wasn’t as if Colonel Waters didn’t say to me every afternoon, Come on home with me, boy — argue, while he forced that big Panama down on his head — no sense in your not sleeping cool, with one of our fans turned on you. Mabel says so, Mabel has something to say to you — and he waited a minute in the door before he left, and held his cane (the one Dugan and I had gone in together to buy him because he was president), up in the air as if he threatened me with comfort, until I answered him No Sir.

With Maideen, I walked around the baked yard to the porch, under the heavy heads, the too-bright blooms that hang down like fruits from the trees — crape myrtles. Jinny’s mama, I saw, put her face to her bedroom window first thing, to show she’d marched right upstairs at the sight of Randall MacLain coming to her door, bringing who-on-earth with him too. After daring to leave her daughter and right on Easter Sunday before church. Now right back to her door, big as you please. And her daughter Jinny, Virginia, who once Shared His Bed, sent straight into the arms of Trash by what he did. One thing — it was Jinny’s family home after all, her mother still kept alive to run it, grand old Mrs. Stark, and this outrage right under her nose. The curtain fell back, as on a triumph.