When her cousin runs in from the beach with the startling announcement that the body of a drowned woman has washed ashore, the narrator of Frances de Pontes Peebles's “The Drowned Woman” comments: “My father would have never allowed Dorany into the dining room like that under normal circumstances.” Yet in her family there are no normal circumstances. None of the relationships are what they appear to be, and the truths that emerge shatter their small community.
Jean Strouse, biographer of diarist Alice James and the industrialist J. Pier-pont Morgan, once said of biography that “the assumptions we make and the questions we ask about other people's lives serve as tacit guides to our own.” This could as easily be said of fiction. Reading stories can transform our natural nosiness into recognition of another person nothing like ourselves.
After a century of modernist questioning of our ideas and institutions, we still long, as Strouse says, “for models of wholeness… for evidence that individual lives and choices matter.” Models of wholeness, however different from ourselves, can reassure us that in a world that seems large and impersonal, each individual's choices are worthy of our attention.
The reader of fiction doesn’t require that models of wholeness be exemplary, only that they be fascinating. For as long as the story lasts, the reader doesn’t question whether or not individual lives and choices matter. We are willing captives, relieved for however long of our own burdens and complications.
There is another gift a story may give its reader. Our experience of the finest fiction changes; over time, we will reread the 2005 O. Henry Prize Stories and find new ways to understand and appreciate them.
– Laura Furman, Austin, Texas
Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Mudlavia
from The Atlantic Monthly
THE SUMMER of 1916 would later be known as the last summer of peace. Within a year the United States would be at war, but that summer we still believed that President Wilson could keep us out of it. As a nation, we were told, we were getting bigger, better, and more stylish. Our population had risen to 100 million. Prohibition laws had been passed in twenty-four states. Every household would soon own an automobile. Ostriches, grackles, blackbirds, orioles, egrets, herons, and doves were slaughtered by the thousands so that their feathers could adorn women's hats. Americans were full of all kinds of foolish hope, and my mother and I were no exception.
On the morning of July 20 Mother and I were riding in a small wooden bus over the rutted back roads of Indiana, heading for magical Mudlavia. Every time the bus jounced, I felt a sharp pain in my knee, a pain that shot through the dull ache that had been my constant companion for three months. I was sweating in my wool knickers and jacket, which my mother had insisted I wear. Whenever she saw pain on my face, she drew me against her. I was too hot to be so close to my mother, smelling her too-strong lavender scent, but I was also afraid, and I felt lucky to have her with me. Six other passengers were on our bus, all adults, all traveling alone. One had a cane, three others hobbled on crutches. A fat man had been carried onto the bus by four farmers in Attica. An elderly woman lay flat on a stretcher at the rear of the bus. She kept making little whimpering sounds that drove me mad.
I closed my eyes to the dust, the cripples, my mother's round face, her dimpled chin, her lips pursed with concern, her eyes searching for every nuance of my feelings, and imagined myself, older and more handsome, soaring over a six-foot crossbar as a stadium crowd roared. I was only ten years old, but I was already determined to become an Olympic track star, setting world records in the high jump and the long jump. That summer, because of my knee, I’d had to give up daily jumping practice in my backyard. I was looking forward to our stay at Mudlavia, because without jumping my life had become a bore. My father was often away on business. I was tired of playing silly games with the Dotties, tired of going calling with Mother on Wednesday afternoons. I was also tired of the ache in my knee, but, I must admit, that was the least of it.
Why hadn’t I told my parents as soon as my knee began to hurt? Had I sensed how serious it was? Perhaps I feared being totally smothered by my mother's love and concern-which felt stifling under ordinary circumstances. I’ll never know why I didn’t tell them, but I still take a peculiar pride in the fact that I managed to hide the pain for so long.
The night they found me out, we were putting on one of our plays- my best friends Dottie B. and Dottie G. and I. Each week Dottie B., who wanted to be a writer, wrote a new play. Every one featured the same two characters-a stupid married couple called Susanette and Losenette Floosenette, who were always having “misunderstandings” with friends, family, and everyone they met.
We put on the plays at my house, because my parents had the biggest house on Ninth Street. That night thirty or so neighbor children and parents were sitting on the new rose-colored carpet in our parlor. My mother's precious Globe Wernicke bookcase and her fumed-oak chairs and couch, with their elaborate carvings and spindles, had been pushed back against the wall. The new carpet was displayed to its best advantage.
I was playing Losenette, in my father's suit coat and bowler hat, and Dottie G., in her sister's red nightgown, was my wife, Susanette. We were visiting the Eiffel Tower on a trip we’d won through a soap-flakes sweepstakes. Dottie B. was the gendarme, telling us we couldn’t take our dog, Monique, up to the top with us. I was in love with Dottie B. then, and still am to this day.
“But you don’t understand,” I said, glaring at the gendarme and tweaking my imaginary moustache. “She's a French poodle.” I put all my weight on my left leg, accommodating the ache in my right one.
“Out out, miss-ouer,” Susanette said, patting her hair. She clutched my squirming cat, Flip Flop, who was playing Monique. Susanette went on, “We promised her she could see her native Paris from the Eiffel Tower.”
A ripple of laughter emerged from the audience. As always, I listened for my mother's laugh, and I heard it.
The gendarme drew herself up. Her reddish gold hair was tucked up under one of my newsboy hats, and she wore a pair of my knickers. So beautiful, Dottie B. “Sorry, mes amis” she said in a deep voice. “But what if she should do her business up there?”
This was the riskiest line in the play. Somebody tittered.
“We’ve come prepared,” I said, whipping one of my father's handkerchiefs from my pocket.
“Out, ” my wife said. “We’ll take it back to Indiana as a souvenir. They’ll display it in the courthouse, and people will line up to see it. Because it's French business, you see.”
More laughter-a few nervous chuckles from the adults, snickers from the children. I glanced at my mother, who was shrinking back against the wall. My father got up and left the room. To my surprise, instead of feeling afraid, I felt frustrated and angry. The whole purpose of the plays, I realize now, was to insult an audience that didn’t even have the sense to be insulted. The Dotties and I were imitating everything we hated about our stuffy parents, but most people thought we were poking fun at someone else, and some, like my father, took offense at a small impropriety and missed the point. I knew I was in for a spanking, so I decided to step off the plank and say something truly awful. Before I could speak, Flip Flop, for no apparent reason, went berserk. He began to twist and claw at Dottie G., who shrieked and held him out to me. I lunged for him, coming down hard on my right leg, which hurt so much that I collapsed in a ball on the floor. My mother rushed to my side. No spanking after all.