Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Foley eventually moved to Maine to live with her brother, who died two days after she arrived. He left no will, and she moved back to New York while his estate was settled. She endured a string of more bad luck: her apartment building in Manhattan burned down, she broke an ankle, “two burglaries [took place] in my apartment, one committed by a man who threatened to kill me (I was too frightened to ask if he wrote short stories).” Although she rarely spoke of it, her son, David, had struggles of his own. Her work began to suffer; the list of magazines at the back of the book became hopelessly outdated. Editors at Houghton Mifflin continued to question her taste: “Not only are the stories of mediocre quality, but there is an overwhelming preoccupation with death, old age, senility, disease, alcoholism in the aged.”

In 1967 Foley moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, and seemed optimistic that her luck would change. She wrote, “I am very happy here. I have a few acres of woods and garden and river and a small contemporary house that is a work of art.”

FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925–1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up on a farm where peacocks were raised. Later she attended the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as one biographer put it.

O’Connor believed that “a writer with Christian concerns needed to take ever more violent means to get her vision across to [her audience].” Her fiction explored themes of original sin, guilt, and isolation. She published two collections of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge , and two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away . O’Connor displayed a uniquely dark humor meant to emphasize her characters’ spiritual deficits, the parts where, as she said, “the good is under construction.”

O’Connor suffered from lupus for much of her life and died at the age of thirty-nine from complications of the disease. The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor won the National Book Award in 1972.

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HER DOCTOR HAD told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride on the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free , she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.

She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”

Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl that he had to take to town.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go.” He opened the door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.

The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. “Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won’t meet myself coming and going.”

“Some day I’ll start making money,” Julian said gloomily — he knew he never would—“and you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first they would move. He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on either side.

“I think you’re doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You’ve only been out of school a year. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when she brought it out I said, ‘Take that thing back. I wouldn’t have it on my head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till you see it on,’ and when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and she said, ‘If you ask me, that hat does something for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with that hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going.’”

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said. “I’m going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I’m going to return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”

He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to take it back,” he said. “I like it.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think I ought…”

“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed than ever.

“With the world in the mess it’s in,” she said, “it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.”

Julian sighed.

“Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.” She said this every time he took her to the reducing class. “Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said, “but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”

“They don’t give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”