Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to the weekend!
Today’s piece is about the everyday fictions we write for ourselves, especially regarding our neighbors’ lives. In most cases, we can’t help ourselves. We see them come and go, the F-150 leaves at 5:50 a.m. and returns around 4:30 p.m. — where has he been? What great works of industry must he be up to for those eleven or so hours? Does his wife miss him? Or is she relieved to see him depart? Truthfully, I’d rather not know because it’s more exciting to invent a life for him than to accept what is almost certainly a more mundane, less romantic answer.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), an editor for The Atlantic and the progenitor of adolescent-rapscallion fiction who influenced and captured the admiration of Mark Twain (who was not a fan of Aldrich’s wife, finding her to be a “vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite“), wrote in 1901 a short story titled “Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog.” I’ll admit it took more than a minute to “get it,” but the payoff is worth a short spell with a furrowed brow.
Aldrich writes:
When I saw the little house building, an eighth of a mile beyond my own, on the Old Bay Road, I wondered who were to be the tenants. The modest structure was set well back from the road, among the trees, as if the inmates were to care nothing whatever for a view of the stylish equipages which sweep by during the summer season. For my part, I like to see the passing, in town or country; but each has his own unaccountable taste. The proprietor, who seemed to be also the architect of the new house, superintended the various details of the work with an assiduity that gave me a high opinion of his intelligence and executive ability, and I congratulated myself on the prospect of having some very agreeable neighbors.
It was quite early in the spring, if I remember, when they moved into the cottage–a newly married couple, evidently: the wife very young, pretty, and with the air of a lady; the husband somewhat older, but still in the first flush of manhood. It was understood in the village that they came from Baltimore; but no one knew them personally, and they brought no letters of introduction.
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Hemingway, Poe, and the Brothers Grimm have conditioned the modern short story reader to tragic conclusions. Death, especially one revealed in the concluding line, is the currency of the medium. So to read “Neighbors at Ponkapog” and arrive at the end with a surplus of characters (three young ones), was such a relief — though one might argue that Aldrich killed the human couple we thought he was describing and swapped in a pair of Baltimore orioles in their place. Written toward the end of his life, Aldrich’s story has that easy warmth older men produce when satisfied in their semi-retirement. The playfulness with which he describes his wife’s instincts and honeymooners, his satisfaction that the mail comes only once per day, and his closely held but seldom-revealed interest in the minutiae of the village make it a story that could be told in a thousand places — and he knows this. The tale is as mature as the man, elegant in its simplicity distilled from his lifetime of elevated words and ideas — in fact, it strikes me as a century-separated kin to Rick Broohiser’s columns issued from his city and country desks. Good stuff.
It is cold. It has been so cold that the observation of the temperature being an absolute, without the scarf of an adjective, has passed as a greeting and fare-thee-well the last week or two. “It is cold.” “Yes, and also with me.” “It is cold.” [Departs to the sound of sub-zero snow cronchcronchcronch.] Sadly, we put the Christmas tree on hospice a few days ago. Alarming needle accumulation one of these mornings will tell us when it’s time to move the balsam to the back lot for the sparrows and cardinals to launch sorties from (assuming the homeowner remembers to fill the feeder punctually — never a guarantee). Other than that, we were up north at the cottage last week celebrating my mom’s birthday with the — now, how did she put it? — yes, the “Inaugural Sharon Abel Hockey/Curling Classic.” My dad dug a 30’x35′ pond last year, and, with the cold snap, it was thoroughly frozen (10″ of ice), so the extended family had fun sliding around and playing curckey/hockling.
Last, for those concerned after hearing Charlie share news of my “late colleague” status, I still draw breath in the employment of National Review. Thank you for the many wellness checks; I will have my revenge, I assure you.
Appreciation for Christmas Hosts
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to luther.abel@nationalreview.com.