John O’Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York’s so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O’Hara’s finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.
John O’Hara was born in Pennsylvania on 31 January 1905. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), won him instant acclaim, and he quickly came to be regarded as one of the most prominent writers in America. He won the National Book Award for his novel Ten North Frederick and had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. His fourteen novels include A Rage to Live, Pal Joey, BUtterfield 8 and From the Terrace. John O’Hara died on 11 April 1970.
ALSO BY JOHN O’HARA
Appointment in Samarra
BUtterfield 8
Hope of Heaven
Pal Joey
A Rage to Live
The Farmers Hotel
Ten North Frederick
A Family Party
From the Terrace
Ourselves to Know
The Big Laugh
Elizabeth Appleton
The Lockwood Concern
The Instrument
Lovey Childs
The Ewings
The Second Ewings
Selected Stories
Dozens of John O’Hara’s most powerful stories are set in New York City, where he lived from the age of twenty-three, on and off, throughout his long career. Born and raised in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a small city he called Gibbsville in his fiction, O’Hara lived intermittently in Hollywood as well. Those two locales have already been presented in the collections Gibbsville, PA (1992) and John O’Hara’s Hollywood (2007), both edited by the late Matthew J. Bruccoli, leaving New York City as a major locale not represented by a geographical volume. A fourth setting of O’Hara’s stories is a general “suburbia,” usually the suburbs of New York, many of which could have been presented here if not for the abundance of strong stories set in the confines of the city itself, and perhaps a fifth geographical setting would be “Miscellaneous”: O’Hara set one of his finest stories in Washington, D.C., but only one, as far as I can tell, and one story is set in rural Ohio, and one other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and so on. But these three locations—New York City, Hollywood, and “Gibbsville”—constitute the bulk of his stories’ settings. Presenting them in geographical collections gives readers a concentrated sense of what O’Hara felt made each place special.
O’Hara’s short fiction falls into two discrete temporal groups: the stories dating from before 1950, when, because of a falling-out, O’Hara stopped writing for The New Yorker, and those dating from after 1960 (O’Hara eschewed the short story entirely in the 1950s). The pre-1950 group has already been extensively represented in collections, some chosen by O’Hara and then, after his death in 1970, others chosen by various editors. For example, The Selected Stories of John O’Hara, published in 2003, draws exclusively from stories written before 1949. The present volume, unlike Gibbsville, PA or John O’Hara’s Hollywood, does not seek to include every O’Hara story set in New York City: The large number of very brief stories published by The New Yorker in the late 1920s and early 1930s would alone present too much material for inclusion here, and are of varying quality and historical interest. The New York Stories includes many more of the later, less frequently reprinted stories, as well as the strongest of O’Hara’s early New York stories.
O’Hara’s stories could, of course, easily be arranged by subject matter or theme instead of geography. While it might seem that O’Hara’s stories about show business, for example, would naturally be set in Hollywood, some excellent show-business stories, such as “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor” and “The Portly Gentleman,” are set on Broadway. In fact one of O’Hara’s finest examinations of show business, “Arnold Stone,” is even set mostly in Gibbsville (oddly it is omitted from the inclusive 854-page volume Gibbsville, PA). O’Hara’s keen interest in business, as differentiated from show business, might appear to belong to New York City, but again some of his strongest stories about the intricacies of business, such as “The Hardware Man” and “Yostie,” are set, seemingly incongruously, in the “third-class city,” as he called it, of Gibbsville. For the most part, however, O’Hara’s stories about business, about tycoons and their private clubs, or about working-class people and their struggles and pleasures, are set in New York City.
In the early twentieth century, New York City was the world capital of literature, and the ambitious young O’Hara aimed to succeed there as a writer before he ever left Pottsville, submitting items to New York columnists from his hometown until his physical arrival in the spring of 1928, when he worked for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and press agencies as well as freelancing his accounts of sporting events, celebrity interviews, and “casuals,” a term covering all types of short pieces, including supposedly overheard conversations, which may or may not have been fictional, but which did get his foot in the door of The New Yorker, a brand-new slick magazine that ended up publishing most of his later short fiction. His earliest work for The New Yorker was journalistic—punchy, demotic, and fact-based—but O’Hara’s aim was to write fiction, an aim he consistently realized after publishing his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934.
In the six years between 1928 and 1934, the young O’Hara hustled a living by writing what the market demanded, and he was busily acquainting himself with the widest variety imaginable of New Yorkers with interesting stories to tell. What he learned was that people are rarely what they seem, and that they often turned expectations on their heads to anyone willing to listen and to relate their stories to the public. He became a skilled listener, and a sensitive renderer of New Yorkers’ voices—of what they had to say, what they were omitting, and how they expressed themselves. As he grew more settled as a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright (the turning point of his career was the success of the musical Pal Joey in 1940), he widened his social circle but retained the lesson he had learned as a young journalist: Every simple surface truth has a complicated and very rarely wholesome past, a principle he applied to the bankers, CEOs, and Broadway stars as well as to the bartenders, car-washers, and waitresses he continued to write about. His stories warn readers not to understand his characters too quickly—their motives will always be mixed, their emotions always mutable, their voices always revealing.
In a few of his early stories, O’Hara characterized people through techniques such as dialect, which is perhaps less amusing and less lucid today than it was in the 1930s. (One of these, “I Never Seen Anything Like It,” omitted here, is narrated in wall-to-wall Brooklynese, and today practically requires a translator.) He gradually abandoned such glitzy quirks in favor of more subtle ways of developing character, and of playing with readers’ expectations. With so varied a city as his subject, he worked at elevating his characters above clichés and stereo-types, and challenging his readers to abandon any easy assumptions they might have held based on superficial signifiers of social class.
In selecting the stories for this volume, I have been struck by the number of high-quality New York stories that take the form of dialogues between married couples. O’Hara’s curiosity, always keen, was piqued particularly by the mystery of what went on between couples behind closed doors, especially bedroom doors. He was criticized for this by a generation of critics, but his curiosity ranged wider, and his prurient interests are so mild by current standards that it is the critics whose comments seem badly dated, not O’Hara’s work, which seems insightful, psychologically and thematically. In a letter to a couple O’Hara knew well, written as they were divorcing, he observed, “No outsider knows what is between a husband and a wife,” concluding that he pretended to know least of all: “But I know nothing. I know nothing.” In his fiction, however, O’Hara explored what he guessed, what he believed, what seemed possible, what private actions might be deduced from public ones.
In this volume, such stories include “Late, Late Show” and “The Private People,” both exploring complicated marital relationships using very different techniques. The scope of “Late, Late Show” is very narrow; the story takes the form of a single conversation between husband and wife as they watch a late-night movie on TV. Issues from their past emerge over the course of the conversation, which closes with the husband cutting it off as he realizes how near they are drawing to a topic he has long ago sworn secrecy on, even from his wife, who seems to accept this limit to their intimacy. In “The Private People,” O’Hara makes his reader into a fly on the wall of another New York couple’s apartment, though the scope of this story is much wider, stretching literally from coast to coast and taking in months and years of the couple’s evolving relationship. The husband is a successful and famous actor who retires at an early age on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife, who is far less happy than he is with the relocation—so unhappy that she takes to heavy drinking, then decides to separate from her husband and move back to Hollywood, where she continues making an alcoholic spectacle of herself. Her estranged husband flies out to California, where he rescues her from the clutches of the quack running a pernicious rest-home/detox-center, and they repair their broken marriage, settling once again in Manhattan with vastly reduced expectations of happiness. In the story’s final lines, O’Hara writes that the wife requires a night light in order to sleep, but reassures his reader, “Oh, it is not a very bright light,” a typically elliptical ending.
O’Hara’s endings increasingly intrigue and sometimes puzzle readers, often seeming to confirm the story’s theme, and at other times introducing a twist in the final moments that changes that theme, as in the show-business story “The Portly Gentleman.” The titular character, a somewhat crude entertainer, finds his career suddenly thriving, then finds himself escorting a socially refined woman, to whom he proposes marriage. Though his outlandish proposal is rebuffed, the two characters seem to reach an empathetic understanding at the story’s conclusion. One of O’Hara’s gifts, which shines more or less directly in different stories, is to make plausible the improbable connections and sympathies between his characters.
O’Hara makes equally plausible the ways in which relationships suddenly deteriorate. “The Portly Gentleman” and “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor,” a pair of New York stories that combine show-business and marital relationships, turn with startling ferocity when everyday conversations between the title characters and, respectively, an agent and a producer turn suddenly ugly. O’Hara’s gradual introduction of tension into the quotidian conversations prepares the reader for the ugliness even as it shocks the reader when the volcanic action erupts. O’Hara teaches us to pay attention to the most casual exchanges between his characters, who are often perilously close to professing deep affection for each other or to voicing their fiercest animosity. The most succinct example of this sudden switching of moods might be in the suburban story “The Golden,” not included here. O’Hara describes two dogs playing for a long time, until the observing protagonist “saw that they had reached the nipping stage. Then one dog’s fang touched another dog’s nerve, and in an instant both animals were making the horrible gurgling sound that meant a fight.” With O’Hara, this process between people is more nuanced but no less shocking in its suddenness.
The longer stories, which are generally the later stories (the date of first publication appears in parentheses at the end of each story), frequently take a reminiscent tone, and delve further back into the earlier years of the characters’ lives. This is particularly so with the novella included here, “We’re Friends Again,” which traces the course of the marriage of Charles Ellis and Nancy Preswell through the perspective of Ellis’s closest friend, O’Hara’s alter-ego narrator, James Malloy. As the title indicates, their friendship goes through peaks of affection and valleys of deep animosity. Like many of O’Hara’s later stories, “We’re Friends Again” is longer not only because it contains more narrative material, but also because O’Hara’s 1960s style became increasingly discursive. The novella opens with a mini-essay on the subject of men’s clubs, particularly on a summer’s weekend evening, and in the course of telling the story, Malloy holds forth on several subjects that do not advance the plot very much but that add to an understanding of his character. Malloy pauses in his narration to pass judgment on clubs, Lord Byron’s character, loneliness, the cachet of extra-long telephone extensions, the difference between New York society and Boston society, and several other topics. He also pins the story’s plot upon an appreciation, doubtless hazy to today’s readers, of 1930s politics, particularly the positive and negative nuances of the patrician class’s response to the byzantine policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt over the course of the decade. Similarly knotty are the love lives of O’Hara’s characters: Malloy is involved with an actress (named, presciently, Julianna Moore), who is engaged to a stage designer, and his friend Charley is seeing a married woman whose husband gets killed in the course of the story, while Charley is also secretly in love with a cousin of his, married to a multimillionaire, who eventually marries a WAVE ensign, while the multimillionaire’s ex-wife is carrying on an affair with a Boston socialite, whom Malloy meets by chance in a theater and ends up working with on an espionage unit during World War II. The multiplicity of characters is sufficient for a much longer work than a novella, but “We’re Friends Again” succeeds despite the crowded cast in two ways: The passages of reminiscence are among O’Hara’s finest, philosophizing on subjects O’Hara cares deeply about, and Malloy’s career as a writer is examined at length here, providing a window on O’Hara as a writer. One fictional story is discussed extensively, as Malloy explains and listens to a reader’s interpretation of his work, and also discusses his work habits: Like O’Hara’s, his workday typically ended at dawn and, also like O’Hara’s, Malloy’s stories often begin when he overhears casual conversations between strangers. Malloy is among O’Hara’s most hard-boiled narrators. In the novel Hope of Heaven (1939), for example, Malloy is a hard-hearted Hollywood scriptwriter, caught up in a tale of theft, false identity, and finally gunplay—it’s easy to understand how Edmund Wilson included O’Hara in his 1941 review of hard-boiled writers, “The Boys in the Back Room.” But in “We’re Friends Again,” Malloy’s sentimental side prevails: When his friend accuses him of being “the lonesomest son-of-a-bitch I know,” Malloy’s response is not to laugh, or to grunt in agreement, or to take a swing at his accuser, but to break down in tears: “I bowed my head and wept. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ I said. ‘I wish you’d go.’”
The three-novella collection that “We’re Friends Again” first appeared in, Sermons and Sodawater—a title taken from Byron’s poem Don Juan—marked a crucial point in O’Hara’s short fiction. The tone in “We’re Friends Again” is distinctly more bookish and reflective—O’Hara quotes not only Byron but also Shakespeare, Milton, and Walter Scott—and reintroduces his recurring narrator, James Malloy, whose voice here is both reminiscent and moralizing, neither of which typified O’Hara’s short fiction before 1960. From then on, when O’Hara wished to reminisce or moralize, he would do so in Malloy’s voice; when he preferred his reader to infer the moral of his story, he would do so without Malloy. In the 1950s, when O’Hara eschewed the short story entirely, he was busy thinking about different ways to structure stories, and about how to employ the full array of techniques at his disposal, so that when he started up again with Sermons and Sodawater, he was prepared to begin the most productive and varied short-story writing of his career.
Which is not to diminish his pre-1960 stories, only to note that in complexity and craft they were comparatively hit-or-miss. “Bread Alone,” to take one example from the 1930s, is one of his hits: As in so many of his finest stories during the Depression, such as “Pleasure” and “Sportmanship,” O’Hara empathized with the working poor but never patronized their struggles. In “Bread Alone” he introduces a black working-man (an extremely rare protagonist for a white middle-class writer from the political center) with a practical dilemma: He wants to hide from his wife the fact that he wagered some money in an office pool, but he won a pair of baseball tickets, and he would like to take his young son, from whom he feels disconnected, to the ballgame. As the story develops, O’Hara’s reader sympathizes with this character, coming to understand the delicate problems faced by black people in a white society and, in the story’s final epiphany, the rich feelings between the two estranged males. In the tight constraints of a very short story, O’Hara both moves and educates his white audience to appreciate a side of American society that few of them would have had any prior access to.
The earlier, shorter stories usually lack the sweeping scope of his later stories, but nearly all O’Hara’s stories share an elliptical quality that is one of their trademarks, eventually becoming an identifying trait of the prototypical New Yorker story, which O’Hara is largely responsible for inventing. The majority of the stories collected here were originally published in The New Yorker, whose legendary founding editor, Harold Ross, supposedly declared he would never purchase another O’Hara story he couldn’t understand. But Ross was also aware that decoding the subtle events in an O’Hara story and deciding on their significance was a great pleasure for O’Hara’s fans, so he and his successors continued purchasing them.
There is a quirk of arrangement in this volume that is worth discussing briefly: In his final five collections, from 1962 to 1969, O’Hara presented the stories as they are presented here, in alphabetical order by title, as if to suggest that the quality of the stories could be neither improved nor diminished by any artful arrangement. (The order in which stories in a collection are presented is typically discussed by authors and editors at astonishing length and with surprising passion, such as you might expect among the floral arrangers at a royal wedding, but O’Hara was foreclosing that discussion entirely, by authorial fiat: “This is it,” he was saying in effect. “The stories themselves can choose their own order.”) He was inordinately proud of the quality of his work, and I believe this alphabetical arrangement was one of the ways he expressed his pride in the consistently high level of his writing. At the same time, he tempered his pride with a reluctance to overexplain, or even to explain: He never, as far I can tell, discussed with anyone his thinking behind arranging his stories alphabetically. It wasn’t until I read his third or fourth collection of alphabetically arranged stories that I even became aware of what O’Hara was doing, and what he might have been trying to communicate by it.
O’Hara’s assertion of the absolute equality of all his stories, if that is what he was asserting, is one I’d quibble with—he wrote many masterpieces in the genre, but there are a few New York stories that continue to puzzle me: “The Sun-Dodgers” and “The Brain” and “A Phase of Life” are even more elusive than O’Hara’s typically elusive gems. “The Sun-Dodgers” devotes a paragraph to a minor character who, the narrator promises, will reappear at a crucial point later in the story, “when he is needed.” But the minor character becomes instead a noncharacter—he does not reappear. The problem in “The Brain” seems even less like an authorial oversight, because O’Hara tells the story of the titular “Brain,” a New York businessman who is asked to resign, and O’Hara tells it twice. On the first go-around, his titular character is interrupted by a troubleshooter reporting directly to their boss, who, after being admitted by the Brain’s secretary, a Miss Hathaway, discusses the possible reassignment of the Brain to Montana, finally telling him that he has the same chance of being fired as anyone in the company except their boss. O’Hara then switches to a more removed narrator who tells a similar story, except in the second version the troubleshooter is not admitted by the secretary, whose name is now Miss Hawthorne, and the state in question is not Montana but Colorado, and the “Brain” is unambiguously instructed to clear his desk out immediately. Since O’Hara could not possibly have gotten so many small details wrong, the likeliest explanation is that he was conveying something about how different versions of an event can change the event’s essence, but if so, this is one of the few times O’Hara’s point in telling a story gets muffled in the telling. “A Phase of Life” is clearer, though still a little hazier than usual: a relatively early story, it may typify O’Hara’s early elliptical stories. Some unsavory characters get together for an evening of sex for pay, though the precise nature of the sex, and the pay, and the characters for that matter, never becomes explicit. This may be another of those stories that, as O’Hara said of his New Yorker stories in a 1936 letter, “I almost include a plea to the editors that if they can understand them, please to let me in on the secret.”
In his best stories, O’Hara is a master of pacing and of action, of knowing when to paint a scene in fine detail and when to summarize. There is a moment in “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor” that is amazing in its understated pace: The title character, having made an ego-satisfying but self-destructive career decision, reviews his suits hanging in his closet, and considers the hanging and rehanging of them—a duller subject can hardly be imagined. But in writing lively sentences on such a dull subject, O’Hara is not only showcasing his virtuosity but also suspending his narrative to build anticipation for the blowout marital fight that results from his character’s cogitation. When that quarrel comes, his reader has been both entertained and prepared for it, though without knowing fully why and how. O’Hara excelled in the dual roles of entertainer and educator: He enlightened readers seeking amusement, and he amused readers seeking enlightenment, and at times he did so, as his tombstone claims, better than any other writer of the mid-twentieth century.
STEVEN GOLDLEAF
There hasn’t been much scholarship on John O’Hara, for largely incomprehensible reasons other than personal antipathy or a prejudice against clear English prose that doesn’t require much parsing, but there has been some, starting with the most inclusive and judicious biography, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s The O’Hara Concern (New York: Random House, 1975). Bruccoli also compiled a detailed bibliography of O’Hara’s publications, John O’Hara: A Checklist (New York: Random House, 1972), which contains a speech O’Hara gave late in his career. Of the other biographies, Finis Farr’s O’Hara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) has the dubious advantage of being the first written, as well as the only one written by an acquaintance of O’Hara’s. Frank MacShane’s The Life of John O’Hara (New York: Dutton, 1980) is perfectly serviceable if slightly less inclusive than Bruccoli’s. Geoffrey Wolff’s The Art of Burning Bridges (New York: Knopf, 2003) is not quite a biography of O’Hara, and not completely satisfactory as an extended literary essay or as an autobiographical essay, either. It is a strange book.
Of the shorter criticism, Phillip Eppard collected some essays in his Critical Essays on John O’Hara (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), which seems more insightful and various than some previous pamphlet-length attempts at criticism by such authors as Russell E. Carson, Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Robert Emmet Long, and Charles C. Walcutt, who have studied mainly O’Hara’s novels. My own John O’Hara: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1999) contains a number of essays on O’Hara’s stories, which Eppard didn’t include (or couldn’t have included), and also a long essay on the stories in which I attempt to chart O’Hara’s story-writing career, more or less systematically.
Although copies of the John O’Hara Journal, published from 1979 to 1983, are all but impossible to come by, there is a website—oharasociety.blogspot.com—sponsored by the John O’Hara Society, a small group of non-academic O’Hara fans who meet on the Internet (and occasionally in New York City, Princeton, or Philadelphia) to discuss the man, his books, his career, and related matters. Those interested in reading O’Hara’s short nonfiction (he wrote columns in various newspapers and magazines from time to time) can find them collected in Sweet and Sour (New York: Random House, 1954) and My Turn (New York: Random House, 1966), while his critical work on writers and writing has been collected by Bruccoli in An Artist Is His Own Fault (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). Like the prefaces to the short story collections, these collections contain O’Hara’s literary views at their most acerbic, and the Selected Letters of John O’Hara (New York: Random House, 1978), edited also by Bruccoli, contains insights into the composition and themes of many of O’Hara’s stories.
But mostly, for the dedicated reader of the short fiction, there are the stories themselves. O’Hara published more than four hundred of them; reading them all is a satisfying goal for any O’Hara completionist.
The stories in this collection have been taken from the periodicals in which they first appeared (mostly The New Yorker) and the hardcover collections they typically appeared in shortly afterward. I have also used some paperback editions and collections published after O’Hara’s death to see how certain textual discrepancies have been resolved.
The difficulty in editing O’Hara is that he declared his independence from convention in rendering colloquial American English, particularly in dialogue and in the dialect he used heavily at the beginning of his career. For example, in the story “First Day in Town,” when he has a show-business outsider speak of “Eli Kazan,” referring to the famous director, a scrupulous proofreader might simply flag this as a misspelling of “Elia,” or it might be O’Hara’s deliberate attempt to show how this outsider had mistaken “Elia” for the more common “Eli,” or how this character clipped the “a” in his pronunciation of “Elia.” Because O’Hara enjoyed playing phonetic tricks to indicate his speaker’s eccentricities, it is never safe to assume that a seeming error was due to O’Hara’s negligence, and so it remains rendered here as “Eli Kazan.” When some editor tried correcting O’Hara’s usage, in a story not included here, of the 1960s slang term “Cloud 90,” saying that the dictionary did not recognize it, O’Hara dismissed him, saying, “Dictionary people consult me, not I them.” O’Hara famously relied on his ear to guide him in rendering spoken English, though I question his infallibility. Anyone who listens closely to English being spoken will commit an error now and then, and I have corrected the occasional obvious error but have mostly left O’Hara’s idiosyncrasies as they appeared in his published works.
In the story “Bread Alone,” the protagonist, a black New Yorker during the Depression, speaks of his “sets” at Yankee Stadium. Is this a dialectal rendering intended to show how this character would have pronounced “seats,” or a typo that O’Hara (and his various editors) did not catch? I was inclined to retain “sets”—it appears this way in the original New Yorker story and the reprinted version in Pipe Night—but I found that in The Collected Stories of John O’Hara, published in 1984, and in Selected Stories of John O’Hara, published in 2003, it is spelled “seats.” So there is precedent both ways; which way is the error? Never having heard the word pronounced by any New Yorker, of any race or background, as “sets,” I’ve decided to follow recent editorial precedent.
Another example of ambiguity: In the story “Good-bye, Herman,” the title character’s last name is “Wasservogel,” which the protagonist’s wife mispronounces slightly as “Wasserfogel.” (The authentic Germanic “v” has a good deal of “f” in its sound.) The protagonist himself, who grew up with Wasservogel, is shown to pronounce it properly, and his rendering is spelled correctly. But toward the end of the story, the wife’s pronunciation seems to change, and in her speech, the name is now spelled with a “v.” Some editors have changed the spelling of “Wasservogel” in her dialogue as the story progresses; because I think it’s interesting that this pronunciation change could reflect a subtle sign of some change in her attitude, I leave it in.
In all cases I have simply tried to do right by O’Hara, and to make changes only where I think he would have concurred. But even in trying to respect his wishes, there are some tricky points. In one early, and wonderful, O’Hara morality tale, the ambiguous moral is expressed in a single word that happens to be the story’s title: “sportsmanship.” Except that isn’t exactly the word O’Hara uses, either in the title or in the climax of the tale—not in The New Yorker or in any of the several hard-bound, softbound, or collected reprints. In those, O’Hara has (intentionally or carelessly?) omitted the middle “s,” and the word appears as “sportmanship” throughout. This story is one in which O’Hara is still employing freely the use of dialect (his characters say things like “I think I smell sumpn” and “How long id take you?”), so it is possible that in omitting the “s” he is indicating some obscure local pronunciation, but if he is, as with “sets,” it is a pronunciation that no New Yorker I’ve known has ever employed, nor any dictionary, either. On the off chance that O’Hara is purposefully omitting a letter, and with no precedent for anyone having previously treated “sportmanship” as a typo, I have let it stand, if only as a token of respect for his stylistic idiosyncrasies and innovations.
Elsewhere, O’Hara’s idiosyncratic spellings mostly prevail (“cheque,” “theatre,” “glamor,” etc.), except where they are internally inconsistent—O’Hara uses “gray” and “grey” interchangeably and without any pattern I can find, so I’ve standardized the spelling in the American style. He consistently omits the comma in the phrase “No, thanks,” which would change the meaning from a polite negation to a rude assertion, but I have let that stand, too, in deference to his consistent usage.
STEVEN GOLDLEAF
Both dogs had been out. She could tell by the languid way they greeted her and by the fact that Jimmy, the elevator operator, had taken his twenty-five-cent piece off the hall table. Or was it Jimmy? Yes, Jimmy was on mornings this week; Ray was on afternoons and evenings. Jimmy liked dogs, Ray did not. The day was off to a better start when Jimmy took the dogs for their morning walk; it was nicer to start the day with the thought that Jimmy, who liked dogs, had exercised them, and not Ray, who made no attempt to conceal his distaste for the chore. Ray was paid a quarter, just the same as Jimmy, for taking the dogs down to the corner, but Mrs. Child had very good reason to believe that that was all he did—take them to the corner, and hurry right back without letting them stop at the curb.
“Good morning, boys,” she said, addressing the dogs. They shook their tails without getting up. “Oh, you’re such spoiled boys, you two. You won’t even rise when a lady enters the room. Muggsy, don’t you know that a gentleman always stands up when a lady comes in? You do know it, too, and you’re not a very good example to your adopted brother, are you? How can I expect Percy to have good manners if you don’t show him how? Percy, don’t you pay a bit of attention to Muggsy and his bad manners.” The dogs raised their heads at the sound of their names, but when she finished speaking they slowly put their heads back on their paws. “Oh, you’re hopeless, the two of you. Really hopeless. I don’t see why I put up with two such uncouth rascals.”
She proceeded to the kitchen door and pushed it open. “Good morning, Mary,” she said.
“Good morning, Mrs. Child,” said the maid. “I heard you running your tub. Will you have toast this morning?”
“Just one slice, please. Maybe two slices, but bring me my coffee first, will you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I didn’t see any mail. Was there any?”
“Got it here on the tray. Which’ll you have? Marmalade, or the blackberry jam?”
“Mary, you’re not cooperating at all. You know perfectly well if you mention marmalade or jam, I’ll have marmalade or jam, and I’m trying not to.”
“Oh, if I don’t mention it you’ll ask for it.”
“I’m such a weak, spineless creature. All right, you mean old Mary Moran, you. You know me much too well. I’ll have the blackberry jam. Were there any packages?”
“None so far, but United Parcel don’t usually get here before noontime. That’s the way it works out. Some neighborhoods they only deliver in the afternoon, some in the morning. I guess they have a system.”
“And speaking of other neighborhoods, when am I going to be able to lure you away from Mrs. Brown?”
“Oh—I don’t know about that, Mrs. Child,” said Mary Moran. “Will you have your first cup standing up?”
“No, I’ll wait. I’ll be in the livingroom,” said Mrs. Child.
Mary Moran would have been expensive, and there really wasn’t enough work to keep her busy, but Mrs. Child knew that Mary’s other employer, Mrs. Brown, had been trying to persuade her to give up Mrs. Child and work full-time for her. It did no harm, every once in a while, to remind Mary that she had a full-time job waiting for her with Mrs. Child—and subtly to remind Mary that she had been with Mrs. Child a good two years longer than she had been with Mrs. Brown. There were a lot of things Mary could not do, but in what she could do, or would do, she was flawless. Mrs. Child did not need Mary Moran at all, when you came right down to it. The building provided maid service of a-lick-and-a-promise sort, and you could have all your meals sent up and served by the room-service waiters. But Mary Moran was acquainted with every article of clothing that Mrs. Child possessed; she was a superb laundress of things like lingerie; a quick and careful presser; very handy with needle and thread. She could put together a light meal of soup and salad, and she could do tiny sandwiches and a cheese dip for a small cocktail group. But she would not serve luncheon or pass a tray among cocktail guests; not that she was ever there at cocktail time, but as a matter of principle she had made it one of her rules that serving was not to be expected of her. She was not very good about taking telephone messages, either; it had taken Mrs. Child two years to discover that Mary was ashamed of her handwriting and spelling. Nevertheless she would have been an excellent personal maid, and Agatha Child never gave up hoping that she could lure—lure was the word—Mary away from the Browns, whoever they were beyond the fact that they had a small apartment on Seventy-ninth Street and were away a good deal of the time. It would have been worth the money to have Mary Moran on a full-time basis, not only for the work she did, but because her coming to work full-time would have been an expression of the approval that Agatha Child suspected that Mary withheld.
“We haven’t talked about that for quite some time,” said Agatha Child.
Mary Moran had just brought in the breakfast tray. “What’s that, Mrs. Child?”
“About your coming to work for me full-time.”
Mary Moran smiled. “Well, it suits me, the way it is,” she said.
“You’d make just as much money. And don’t you find it a nuisance, to finish up here and then have to take the bus to Seventy-ninth Street?”
“I usually walk. I enjoy the walk. I get a breath of fresh air.”
“Do you know what I think? I think you have a gentleman friend that you have lunch with. You almost never have lunch here.”
“Well, there may be some truth to that. We have a bite to eat. It’s on the way.”
“Oh, my guess was right? How fascinating. Tell me about him.”
“No, I don’t think I’ll do that.”
“Of course not. It’s none of my business, and I don’t want to appear inquisitive. But of course I’m dying of curiosity. You’ve been with me eight years and this is really the first time we ever got on that subject.”
“Well, you made a good guess for your first try.”
“Is he Catholic?”
“No ma’am.”
“You’d rather not say any more.”
“Rather not. It’s him and I.”
“Yes. Well, I won’t badger you any more. I just want to say that I hope he appreciates you, and if you ever feel the need to talk to someone about it—about him.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Remember, I’ve been married three times.”
“I know that, yes.”
“And I’m a lot older than you. Probably fifteen years.”
“Not quite. I’ll be forty-one.”
“Well, almost fifteen years. How did you know my age? Did you see it on my passport?”
“No ma’am. Your scrapbook, where you have that newspaper cutting of when you eloped and all. The big green scrapbook.”
“Oh, yes. That’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it? Well, what difference does it make? Anybody can find out my age if they want to take the trouble. All they have to do is go to the Public Library, and there it is in big headlines, seventeen-year-old heiress and all that tommyrot. Never lived it down. But that’s where I can be of help to you, Mary, in case you ever need any help.”
“They’d never put me in the headlines, whatever I did.”
“You can be thankful for that,” said Agatha Child.
“Will you want me to—changing the subject—will I send the black suit to the dry cleaner’s, or do you want to give it another wear?”
“I guess it could stand a cleaning. Whatever you think,” said Agatha Child.
“I had a look at it this morning. It’s about ready to go.”
The day’s mail was fattened up by the usual bills and appeals. She put a rubber band around the unopened bills, for forwarding to Mr. Jentzen, who would scrutinize them, make out the appropriate cheques, and send her the cheques for signature. She saw Mr. Jentzen just once a year, at income tax time, when he would deliver his little lecture on her finances, show her where to sign the returns, and have one glass of sherry with her. On these occasions Mr. Jentzen could almost make her feel that he was paying for the sherry and for everything else. Bald, conscientious Mr. Jentzen, who looked like a dark-haired version of the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” and who in some respects knew her better than any husband or lover she had ever had, but who politely declined her suggestion that he call her Agatha. “Not even if I call you Eric? It’s such a nice name, Eric.” And so unlike Mr. Jentzen, she did not add. She could have gone right ahead and called him Eric; she was, after all, at least five years older than he, but she knew that he was afraid of even so slight an intimacy because he was the kind of man who would be afraid to get entangled with a woman who had had three husbands and an undetermined number of gentlemen friends.
It occurred to her now, as she doubled the rubber band about the bills, that her life was full of small defeats at the hands of people who rightfully should have obeyed her automatically. Mary Moran, Eric Jentzen, and Ray the bellboy were three she could name offhand who refused to yield to her wishes. With Ray the bellboy it was a case of attitude rather than outright disobedience; he did what she asked, but so churlishly that his obedience became an act of defiance. Mary Moran, crafty little Irishwoman that she was, was practically an illiterate but she was adroit enough to avoid a showdown on the question of giving up the Browns. And Eric Jentzen used his sexual timidity to keep from losing the arrogated privilege of lecturing her on her extravagances. (It was quite possible that Mr. Jentzen got some sort of mild kick out of that safe intimacy.)
The dogs were now sitting up. “One little piece of toast is all you’re going to get,” she said. “No, Percy, you must wait till your older stepbrother has his. See there, Muggsy? If you’d taught him better manners he wouldn’t be so grabby. One piece is all you’re going to get, so don’t bother to look at me that way. Down, boys. I said down. Down, God damn it! Percy, you scratched me, you son of a bitch. You could cause me all sorts of trouble, explaining a scratch like that. If there was anybody I had to explain to.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke in the dogs’ muzzles. “Now stay down, and don’t interrupt me while I see whose sucker list I’m on today.”
Two of the appeals were for theatrical previews at twenty-five dollars a crack. By an amusing coincidence both contained similarly worded personal touches. “Do try to come” was written across the top of the announcements; one was signed with initials, identifiable by going down the list of patronesses; the other was signed “Mary,” and didn’t mean a damned thing. Mary. What a crust a woman had, to sign just Mary and expect people to know who Mary was. Agatha Child went through the list and discovered three Marys behind the married names and one Mary who was a Miss. “I’ll tell you what you can do, Mary dear. You can invite me to dinner and the benefit and shell out fifty dollars for me and some likely gentleman, and I will do-try-to-come.” She dropped the announcements in the wastebasket. She immediately retrieved them and went over one of the lists again. Yes, there it was: Mrs. W. B. Harris, the wife of her second husband. What a comedown that would be for Wally, if he should ever learn that she had seen that name, which once she bore, and it had failed to register. True, she had always given the name the full treatment: Wallace Boyd Harris. True, too, there were so many Harrises. One too many, or two too many, if it came to that, which was how she happened to become Agatha Child. For the second time she dropped the announcements in the wastebasket, but at least they had given her some amusement. Wally Harris, afraid of his own shadow—more accurately, afraid of the shadow of her first husband. Well, it hadn’t been a mere shadow; more like a London peasouper that lasted four years. Four dark, miserable years that she could recall in every detail and had succeeded in suspending from her active memory, by sandwiching the whole period in between her first marriage and her third, so that it was worthless even as a wasted segment of her time on earth to cry over. He was an intimate man, Wally, wanting to know everything about everything she did, until there was nothing left to learn except all the things she felt and could not tell him, that no one can tell anyone unless she is asked the right questions, at the right moment, in the right tone of voice, and for the right reason which is love. Finally he had learned just about every fact of her marriage to her first husband and had accidentally discovered a few facts about the man who was to be her third. All that time that he had consumed in pumping her about Johnny Johns, in contemning Johnny Johns, in emulating Johnny Johns—a little of that time, only a little, Wally could more profitably have devoted to the maneuverings of his friend Stanley Child. When the blow fell and there was that tiresome scene that Wally had insisted upon (“I want you to hear everything I say to Stanley”), the thought kept running through her mind that Wally hated Johnny much more than he did Stanley. Despite the fact that she had been having her affair with Stanley right under his nose, Wally managed to bring up Johnny Johns, whom she had not seen or heard from in five years. “I thought you were all through with that kind of thing when you got rid of that Johns fellow,” said Wally.
“I was—to marry you,” she said. “Johnny could have been very unpleasant about you, don’t forget.”
“That lightweight,” said Wally, unmistakably implying that Johnny was incapable of sustained indignation. Two years later Wally married the present Mrs. Harris, the lady of the patroness list, and immediately started having lunch with Stanley again. By Wally’s lights it was all right to resume the friendship with Stanley Child as soon as he remarried, but not before. The friendship in its second phase was stronger than it had ever been, and it did not include the wives. “Wally and I are going over to play Pine Valley … Wally got me an invitation to Thomasville. Will you be all right?” At first she was not all right, at all; it was not her idea of fun to sit in a New York apartment while the two big boys, her husband and her ex, went off to play. She was not worried about what they would say about her; Stanley Child was simply not the kind of man who would discuss his wife with another man on any terms, and insensitive though he may have been about many things, Wally Harris would know better than to mention Agatha except when it was unavoidable. No, it was not the fear of their talking about her that annoyed her; it was her growing conviction that she could be the wife of two men and yet remain completely outside their lives, one after the other and the two together. In olden days they might well have fought a duel over her; in the fifth decade of the twentieth century they played golf together and tacitly denied her existence.
It was a dismal record for a girl who had only wanted to be liked, who had only tried to be pleasant to people. She loved Johnny Johns now, today, so many years later, but she had not even believed at the time that she was marrying Johnny for love. He was a screwy boy who would come charging into Canoe Place late Saturday nights, arriving alone and always leaving with some other boy’s girl. Nothing vicious about him; he made no phony promises, and he nursed no hard feelings against the girls who refused to ditch the boys they had come with. To such steadfast types he would say, “Okay, but you don’t know what you’re missing,” and it was as close as he ever came to the surliness of some of the other wolf types. At this point in her reminiscing she smiled.
Canoe Place, a Saturday night after a dance at the Meadow Club. He came and sat down beside her—actually in back of her—pulling up a chair from the next table. “Aggie Todd, I’ve a bone to pick with you. I hear you said I wasn’t a wolf.”
“You heard I said you weren’t a wolf? Were not? Why is that a bone to pick with me?”
“You trying to ruin my reputation?”
“You’re getting me all confused,” she said.
“Did you or did you not say I was not a wolf?”
“I said you were not,” she said.
“That’s what I heard. What right have you got to go around saying nice things about me?”
“Huh?”
“The first thing you know, all the mothers and fathers will start approving of me. Then where will I be?”