Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen but I said that I would not.

We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

STANLEY ELKIN (1930–1995) was born in Brooklyn, where his father sold costume jewelry, and was raised in Chicago. After two years in the U.S. Army, he taught in the English Department of Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Elkin was the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including Mrs. Ted Bliss, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, The MacGuffin, The Magic Kingdom, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers . His novel George Mills won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, and he was nominated three times for the National Book Award. Critic Josh Greenfeld called the author “at once a bright satirist, a bleak absurdist and a deadly moralist.”

In 1972 Elkin was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He died at the age of sixty-five of heart failure. He had just completed the novel Mrs. Ted Bliss , for which he posthumously received his second National Book Critics Circle Award.

★

ELLERBEE HAD BEEN having a bad time of it. He’d had financial reversals. Change would slip out of his pockets and slide down into the crevices of other people’s furniture. He dropped deposit bottles and lost money in pay phones and vending machines. He overtipped in dark taxicabs. He had many such financial reversals. He was stuck with Superbowl tickets when he was suddenly called out of town and with theater and opera tickets when the ice was too slick to move his car out of his driveway. But all this was small potatoes. His portfolio was a disgrace. He had gotten into mutual funds at the wrong time and out at a worse. His house, appraised for tax purposes at many thousands of dollars below its replacement cost, burned down, and recently his once flourishing liquor store, one of the largest in Minneapolis, had drawn the attentions of burly, hopped-up and armed deprivators, ski-masked, head-stockinged. Two of his clerks had been shot, one killed, the other crippled and brain damaged, during the most recent visitation by these marauders, and Ellerbee, feeling a sense of responsibility, took it upon himself to support his clerks’ families. His wife reproached him for this which led to bad feeling between them.

“Weren’t they insured?”

“I don’t know, May. I suppose they had some insurance but how much could it have been? One was just a kid out of college.”

“Whatshisname, the vegetable.”

“Harold, May.”

“What about whosis? He was no kid out of college.”

“George died protecting my store, May.”

“Some protection. The black bastards got away with over fourteen hundred bucks.” When the police called to tell him of the very first robbery, May had asked if the men had been black. It hurt Ellerbee that this should have been her first question. “Who’s going to protect you? The insurance companies red-lined that lousy neighborhood a year ago. We won’t get a penny.”

“I’m selling the store, May. I can’t afford to run it anymore.”

“Selling? Who’d buy it? Selling! ”

“I’ll see what I can get for it,” Ellerbee said.

“Social Security pays them benefits,” May said, picking up their quarrel again the next day. “Social Security pays up to the time the kids are eighteen years old, and they give it to the widow, too. Who do you think you are, anyway? We lose a house and have to move into one not half as good because it’s all we can afford, and you want to keep on paying the salaries not only of two people who no longer work for you, but to pay them out of a business that you mean to sell! Let Social Security handle it.”

Ellerbee, who had looked into it, answered May. “Harold started with me this year. Social Security pays according to what you’ve put into the system. Dorothy won’t get three hundred a month, May. And George’s girl is twenty. Evelyn won’t even get that much.”

“Idealist,” May said. “Martyr.”

“Leave off, will you, May? I’m responsible. I’m under an obligation.”

“Responsible, under an obligation!”

“Indirectly. God damn it, yes. Indirectly. They worked for me, didn’t they? It’s a combat zone down there. I should have had security guards around the clock.”

“Where are you going to get all this money? We’ve had financial reverses. You’re selling the store. Where’s this money coming from to support three families?”

“We’ll get it.”

“ We’ll get it? There’s no we’ll about it, Mister. You’ll . The stocks are in joint tenancy. You can’t touch them, and I’m not signing a thing. Not a penny comes out of my mouth or off my back.”

“All right, May,” Ellerbee said. “I’ll get it.”

In fact Ellerbee had a buyer in mind — a syndicate that specialized in buying up business in decaying neighborhoods — liquor and drugstores, small groceries — and then put in ex-convicts as personnel, Green Berets from Vietnam, off-duty policemen, experts in the martial arts. Once the word was out, no one ever attempted to rob these places. The syndicate hiked the price of each item at least 20 percent — and got it. Ellerbee was fascinated and appalled by their strong-arm tactics. Indeed, he more than a little suspected that it was the syndicate itself which had been robbing him — all three times his store had been held up he had not been in it — to inspire him to sell, perhaps.

“We read about your trouble in the paper,” Mr. Davis, the lawyer for the syndicate, had told him on the occasion of his first robbery. The thieves had gotten away with $300 and there was a four-line notice on the inside pages. “Terrible,” he said, “terrible. A fine old neighborhood like this one. And it’s the same all over America today. Everywhere it’s the same story. Even in Kansas, even in Utah. They shoot you with bullets, they take your property. Terrible. The people I represent have the know-how to run businesses like yours in the spoiled neighborhoods.” And then he had been offered a ridiculous price for his store and stock. Of course he turned it down. When he was robbed a second time, the lawyer didn’t even bother to come in person. “Terrible. Terrible,” he said. “Whoever said lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place was talking through his hat. I’m authorized to offer you ten thousand less than I did the last time.” Ellerbee hung up on him.