Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The big net stared up at Ozzie like a sightless eye. The big, clouded sky pushed down. From beneath it looked like a gray corrugated board. Suddenly, looking up into that unsympathetic sky, Ozzie realized all the strangeness of what these people, his friends, were asking: they wanted him to jump, to kill himself; they were singing about it now — it made them that happy. And there was an even greater strangeness: Rabbi Binder was on his knees, trembling. If there was a question to be asked now it was not “Is it me?” but rather “Is it us?… Is it us?”

Being on the roof, it turned out, was a serious thing. If he jumped would the singing become dancing? Would it? What would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON’T JUMP.

Ozzie’s knees rocked and sagged a little under him as though they were setting him for a dive. His arms tightened, stiffened, froze, from shoulders to fingernails. He felt as if each part of his body were going to vote as to whether he should kill himself or not — and each part as though it were independent of him .

The light took an unexpected click down and the new darkness, like a gag, hushed the friends singing for this and the mother and rabbi chanting for that.

Ozzie stopped counting votes, and in a curiously high voice, like one who wasn’t prepared for speech, he spoke.

“Mamma?”

“Yes, Oscar.”

“Mamma, get down on your knees, like Rabbi Binder.”

“Oscar—”

“Get down on your knees,” he said, “or I’ll jump.”

Ozzie heard a whimper, then a quick rustling, and when he looked down where his mother had stood he saw the top of a head and beneath that a circle of dress. She was kneeling beside Rabbi Binder.

He spoke again. “Everybody kneel.” There was the sound of everybody kneeling.

Ozzie looked around. With one hand he pointed towards the synagogue entrance. “Make him kneel.”

There was a noise, not of kneeling, but of body-and-cloth stretching. Ozzie could hear Rabbi Binder saying in a gruff whisper, “… or he’ll kill himself,” and when next he looked there was Yakov Blotnik off the doorknob and for the first time in his life upon his knees in the Gentile posture of prayer.

As for the firemen — it is not as difficult as one might imagine to hold a net taut while you are kneeling.

Ozzie looked around again; and then he called to Rabbi Binder.

“Rabbi?”

“Yes, Oscar.”

“Rabbi Binder, do you believe in God?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe God can do Anything?” Ozzie leaned his head out into the darkness. “Anything?”

“Oscar, I think—”

“Tell me you believe God can do Anything.”

There was a second’s hesitation. Then: “God can do Anything.”

“Tell me you believe God can make a child without intercourse.”

“He can.”

“Tell me!”

“God,” Rabbi Binder admitted, “can make a child without intercourse.”

“Mamma, you tell me.”

“God can make a child without intercourse,” his mother said.

“Make him tell me.” There was no doubt who him was.

In a few moments Ozzie heard an old comical voice say something to the increasing darkness about God.

Next, Ozzie made everybody say it. And then he made them all say they believed in Jesus Christ — first one at a time, then all together.

When the catechizing was through it was the beginning of evening. From the street it sounded as if the boy on the roof might have sighed.

“Ozzie?” A woman’s voice dared to speak. “You’ll come down now?”

There was no answer, but the woman waited, and when a voice finally did speak it was thin and crying, and exhausted as that of an old man who has just finished pulling the bells.

“Mamma, don’t you see — you shouldn’t hit me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God—”

“Ozzie, please come down now.”

“Promise me, Mamma, promise me you’ll never hit anybody about God.”

He had asked only his mother, but for some reason everyone kneeling in the street promised he would never hit anybody about God.

Once again there was silence.

“I can come down now, Mamma,” the boy on the roof finally said. He turned his head both ways as though checking the traffic lights. “Now I can come down…”

And he did, right into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.

In keeping with series editor Martha Foley’s notion that the best writing about war usually arrives years later, little reference to Vietnam was made in the fiction that appeared in The Best American Short Stories during the 1960s. As after World War II, stories about fantasy and the supernatural, as well as dreams, crowded magazines. “Ghosts, talking animals, werewolves and the like… [and] dreams,” Foley wrote. “Not, thank heaven, the old device of a character having an extraordinary adventure and waking up to find it was only a dream but dreams as a more tangible part of the story.”

During this time writers also began to explore the hidden complexities of the 1950s “happy family.” Two very different writers were included frequently in the series in these years: John Updike, who was criticized for featuring too little violence in his work, and Joyce Carol Oates, who was criticized for featuring too much.

With the rise of a new counterculture came a new sexual frankness in short fiction. Foley wrote, “The editors of this volume do not believe in censorship, and the stories here represented have been chosen for their literary merits only. Actually, the stories in this volume happen to be more restrained in their use of sex than most of the pieces appearing.”

Feminism, increasingly part of the zeitgeist, was slow to catch on in the short stories that appeared in popular magazines. Women’s magazines ran commercial fiction, typically written by men and featuring benign male characters. Foley wrote, “But women can be bitches in their stories. An editor explained that although her readers were nearly all women she had to be careful not to print anything derogatory about male characters. There can be no wonderful villains as in all fiction of yore. ‘Our publisher and top executives are men. They wouldn’t like it.’ I, personally, refuse to believe that modern men, even publishers, have become so namby-pamby.”

Over the years Foley had maintained a strained friendship with her ex-husband, Whit Burnett, arguing frequently over the support of their son. In 1962 she asked Houghton Mifflin to omit Story from the list of magazines at the back of The Best American Short Stories and refused to read it in consideration for the series. An editor at Houghton Mifflin secretly read the magazine each year to assure that no potential candidates were being omitted.

In 1966 Foley broke her pelvic bone and retired from Columbia. She began instead teaching a small group of adult students at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Wednesday afternoons. She regaled students with tales of her work as a reporter and her crusade for women’s rights, anecdotes about Paris in the twenties and her years as an editor. She talked openly to her students and friends about writers whom she had disliked—“Oh, Hemingway. Hemingway was such a mean bastard. He never did a nice thing for anybody in his life.” One of her favorite tales involved Ray Bradbury. She had chosen a story of his to appear in The Best American Short Stories and soon after got a telegram refusing permission to reprint it. Later she learned that he’d been arguing with a girlfriend, who, without his knowledge, had in fact been the one to send the telegram to Foley.