Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger Read online

  Praise for Lee Smith’s

  Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

  “Lee Smith has long had a reputation as a master of the short story, and her new collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger galvanizes that reputation . . . Smith offers the grit of the domestic scene, the power of the written word, and the transcendent beauty of women as friends, lovers, daughters and mothers. We fall under the spell of her delicious Southern cadence, and we care for her characters, especially at the moment when one distilled event irrevocably alters everything. At the end, we are there, celebrating their strong and certain victories of the heart.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “[Smith] has a soft spot for incorrigibles like the dyspeptic ex-writer of ‘House Tour,’ who resists playing reindeer games with the local philistines at Christmas, or the former teacher in ‘The Happy Memories Club,’ who refuses to placate an amateur writing group that appears to prefer its fare upbeat and scrubby-clean. Smith’s book, you suspect, is the one those club members would sneak under their bedcovers to read by penlight.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Like Chekhov, Smith can lay out a world of social and personal connections in a few pages. Her new collection, mingling seven previously published short stories with seven new pieces, offers a marvelous panorama of Smith’s achievement over four decades. It’s funny, shrewd, and heartbreaking—often all three at once.”

  —AARP magazine

  “Lee Smith is a master storyteller with an inspired ability to express what gives people hope . . . A writer for 40 years, Smith’s true strength lies in the short story.”

  —The Charleston Post and Courier

  “This sensitive collection of short stories features an array of endearing players.”

  —Working Mother

  “Smith cares about her people . . . [She] is excellent at examining characters in cruel situations . . . ‘Mrs. Darcy’ is a remarkable story, as are others in this collection that spans decades of Lee Smith’s work.”

  —The Raleigh News and Observer

  “These stories are classic Lee Smith—each one alert to the moment of change, deftly built with a deeply comic sense of timing, and taut with compressed energy that most certainly will burst out of bounds. The characters living in her pages may seem as familiar as neighbors, but as they pass through Smith’s alchemical process, they reveal all we don’t know about what we know. Entertaining, yes they are, and what I love most is how the stories pull you back to read them again, simply for their big vision of life.”

  —Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun

  “With her trademark Southern charm and wicked humor, Smith draws us into the lives of people she’s about to fling off a cliff without so much as a polite ‘oops.’ It’s all for the best, though. On the way down, they get to know parts of themselves they’ve never met before.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Smith’s heroines find strength in the moments that push us all forward.”

  — People magazine

  “A lyrical, moving mix of tales featuring strong and complex characters, delivered with Smith’s trademark wit and insight . . . Filled with humor, pathos and satisfying moments of revelation and clarity . . . Whether you are a short story devotee or simply a lover of good fiction, you will find much to admire—and savor— in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger.”

  —BookPage

  “Smith’s character-driven tales are funny, touching and resonant, with a quirky honesty. A southern-fried charmer!”

  —Family Circle

  “This wonderful writer is a readers’-advisory librarian’s dream. Short stories, ordinarily a relatively hard sell to library patrons, are a different ‘animal’ when they are Lee Smith’s short stories. In a very hospitable way of ‘talking,’ reminiscent of Ellen Gilchrist’s style in her delicious writing, Smith offers stories that deliver an irresistible one-two punch. The first punch is . . . the humor that fills every page . . . The second punch is the meaningfulness of every story.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Smith slips effortlessly into the voices of her funny, smarter-than-they-look characters in her latest collection . . . Each tale is beautifully honed and captures in subtle detail and gentle irony the essential humanity of [the] characters . . . [A] thoroughly enjoyable collection.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Always colorful . . . Profoundly moving.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Mrs. Darcy

  and the

  Blue-Eyed Stranger

  ALSO BY LEE SMITH

  NOVELS

  The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed

  Something in the Wind

  Fancy Strut

  Black Mountain Breakdown

  Oral History

  Family Linen

  Fair and Tender Ladies

  The Devil’s Dream

  Saving Grace

  The Christmas Letters

  The Last Girls

  On Agate Hill

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Cakewalk

  Me and My Baby View the Eclipse

  News of the Spirit

  NONFICTION, EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION

  Sitting on the Courthouse Bench:

  An Oral History of Grundy, Virginia

  Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

  NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

  LEE SMITH

  A SHANNON R AVENE L BOOK

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225, Chapel Hill, north Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 varick Street, new York, new York 10014

  © 2010 by Lee Smith.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, May 2011.

  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2010.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the magazines where these stories were first published: to American Way for an early version of “Folk Art” (originally titled “Art Is My Life”); to Appalachian Heritage for the opening section of “Big Girl”; to The Atlantic Monthly for “Happy Memories Club”; to Blackbird for “Fried Chicken”; to Carolina Quarterly for “Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger” (originally titled “Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach”) and “Between the Lines”; to Mud Puppy Press for “Bob, a Dog”; to Oxford American for “The Southern Cross” (originally titled “native Daughter”); to Narrative for “Toastmaster”; to Shenandoah for “House Tour”; to The Southern Review for “Ultima Thule”; and to Special Report: Fiction 1991 for “Intensive Care.”

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to G.P. Putnam’s Sons for permission to reprint the stories “Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger” (originally published as “Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach”) and “Between the Lines,” from Cakewalk,© 1970 by Lee Smith; “Bob, a Dog,” “Intensive Care,” and “Tongues of Fire,” from Me and My Baby View the Eclipse,© 1990 by Lee Smith; “The Happy Memories Club” and “Southern Cross,” from News of the Spirit,© 1997 by Lee Smith. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The red-hat ladies of “House Tour” are inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning” (“When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple”).

  “Heartbreak Hotel,” © 1956 Sony/ATv Songs LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATv Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, nashville, Tn 37203.

  This is a work of fict
ion. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. no reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  LIBRARY OF COnGRESS CATALOGInG-In-PUBLICATIOn DATA

  Smith, Lee, 1944–

  Mrs. Darcy and the blue-eyed stranger : new and selected stories / by Lee Smith. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-915-3 (HC)

  I. Title.

  PS3569.M5376M77 2010

  813’.54 — dc22 2009027915

  ISBN 978-1-61620-049-7 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  For Hal, my dear companion

  CONTENTS

  Bob, a Dog

  Toastmaster

  Big Girl

  Ultima Thule

  Intensive Care

  Folk Art

  House Tour

  The Southern Cross

  Between the Lines

  Tongues of Fire

  Fried Chicken

  The Happy Memories Club

  Stevie and Mama

  Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

  The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

  —EUDORA WELTY

  Bob, a Dog

  It was early May, two days after his thirty-ninth birthday, when David left her forever. “Forever”— that’s what he said. He stood in the downstairs hallway turning an old brown hat around and around in his hands. Cheryl had never seen the hat before. She stood on the stairs above him, coming down, carrying towels. David said he needed a different life. Behind him, the door was wide open. It was sunny and windy outside. She had made him a carrot cake for his birthday, she was thinking — now what would she do with the rest? Nobody liked carrot cake except David and Angela, who was dieting. Angela was always dieting. David continued to talk in his calm, clipped way, but it was hard to hear what he said. He sounded like background noise, like somebody on the TV that Cheryl’s mother kept going all the time in the TV room now since she had retired from her job at the liquor store. David wore cutoff jeans and an old plaid shirt he’d had ever since she’d met him, nearly twenty years before. She must have washed that shirt a hundred times. Two hundred times. His knees were thin and square. He was losing his hair. At his back, the yard was a blaze of sun.

  Cheryl could remember the first time she ever saw him like it was yesterday, David standing so stiff and straight in the next-to-back pew of the Methodist church, wearing a navy blue suit, and everybody whispering about him and wondering who he was, him so prim and neat it never occurred to any of them he might be from the Peace Corps, which he was. He didn’t look like a northern hippie at all. He was real neat. Cheryl and her sister Lisa and her brother Tom were sitting right behind him, and after a while of looking at the careful part in his hair and his shoulder blades like wings beneath his navy suit, Cheryl leaned forward and gave him her program so he would know what was going on. He acted like somebody who had never been in a church before, which turned out to be almost true, while Cheryl’s own family was there of course every time they cracked the door.

  But oh, it seemed like yesterday! He was dignified. And he sat so straight. He might have been a statue in a navy blue suit, a figurine like all those in Mamaw’s collection. Cheryl had sucked in her breath and bitten her lip and thought, before she fell head over heels in love right then, that she ought to be careful. Because she had always been the kind of big, bouncy girl who jumps right in and breaks things without ever meaning to, a generous, sweet, well-meaning girl who was the apple of everybody’s eye.

  Cheryl handed him the program, and touched his hand too long. After the recessional she took him into the fellowship hall for a cup of Kool-Aid and wrote her telephone number down on a paper napkin before he even asked for it. “He’s just my type,” she said to her mother, Netta, later. “Ha!” Netta said. Netta thought he looked nervous. But Cheryl liked that about him, because everybody else she knew was exactly like their parents were, exactly like everyone else. David was older, a college graduate. Cheryl, who had finished high school two years before, was working then at Fabric World. She thought David was like a young man in a book, or a movie. Whatever he said seemed important, as if it had been written down and he was reading it aloud.

  Later, when she got to know him, she’d go to the room that he rented over Mrs. Bailey’s garage and lie with him on the mattress on the floor, where he slept — the mattress pulled over to the window where you could look right out on Thompson’s Esso and the back road and the river winding by — and sometimes afterward she’d open her eyes to find him looking out this window, over the river, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She never knew what he thought. Then, Cheryl found this romantic.

  But probably she should have gotten herself a big old man who could stand up to things, not that she didn’t have offers. Look at Jerry Jarvis, who had always loved her, or Kenny Purdue, who she was dating at the time. When she told Kenny she didn’t want to go out with him anymore because she was in love with David Stone from Baltimore, Maryland, Kenny went out and cried and rolled in the snow. That’s what his mother told Netta on the telephone: she said Kenny rolled in the snow. But David Stone had a kind of reserve about him, a sort of hollow in him, which just drove Cheryl wild. It was like she was always trying to make up to him for something, to make something be okay, or go away, but she never knew what it was.

  David came from a small, quiet family, one sister and a shy divorced mother with her hair in a little gray bun on the top of her head, and a father who was not mentioned. At the time she met David, Cheryl didn’t know anybody who was divorced. Now everybody was. Including her, it looked like. With David leaving forever, Cheryl would be divorced too. Should she put up her hair in a bun? Cheryl would be a divorcée. Like her sister Lisa, like her best friend, Marie, like everyone on television.

  This seemed totally crazy with all the towels she held in her arms, with how fresh and sweet they smelled. With the bedrooms upstairs behind her so full of all the children, of their shared life. Now Netta would say, “I told you so.” She’d swear up and down that she wasn’t a bit surprised. And even Cheryl knew — had known when she married him — that David wasn’t exactly a family man. She’d had four children knowing it, thinking that he would change. Because she loved him, and love conquers all. You can’t decide who you’re going to love.

  And even though David didn’t really believe in God and made fun of their cousin, Purcell, an evangelist, and taught at the community college all these years instead of getting a real job, and refused to help Louis make a car out of wood that time for the Pinewood Derby in Cub Scouts, even so, there were other things — good things — as well. He liked to cook, he read books to her out loud, he’d been the one who got up with the babies in the night. It was weird to find these traits in a man, although they were more common now since women’s lib than they had been when David and Cheryl got married, all those years ago.

  Cheryl looked down the stairs at David, memorizing him.

  “Please don’t blame yourself,” he said formally. “I feel terrible about doing this.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Cheryl said without thinking, because she had gone for so long pleasing men.

  David started to say something else, and didn’t. He turned sharp on his heel like a soldier and plunged out into the shiny day, right through Louis and his friends playing catch in the yard, and got in the Toyota and drove away. Cheryl stood in the doorway and watched him go and couldn’t imagine a different life. She wondered if David would wear the hat.

  NETTA DID NOT SAY “I told you so.” Inst
ead she cried and cried, sitting in her pink robe on the sofa in the TV room surrounded by blue clouds of Tareyton smoke. You would have thought that David Stone had left her, instead of her daughter Cheryl. But Netta, now sixty-two, had always been a dramatic woman. When her own husband, Cheryl’s father, George, died suddenly of a heart attack at forty-nine, Netta had almost died too. She referred to that time now as “when George was tragically taken from us,” but the truth was, it was tragic. Cheryl’s father had been a kindly, jovial man, a hard worker.

  Not like David Stone, who was, as Cheryl’s friend Marie put it, an enigma. Marie came over a lot after David left, to help Cheryl cope. Marie was divorced too. She went to group therapy. “He was just an enigma,” she said. That seemed to settle it as far as Marie was concerned, only of course it didn’t.

  For one thing, although David had left forever, he didn’t go very far, just about four miles out the Greensboro highway, where he rented an apartment in the Swiss Chalet Apartments, which looked like a row of gingerbread houses. At first the kids liked going over there, especially because of the pool, but then they didn’t because their daddy wouldn’t get a TV or buy soft drinks or meat. According to Angela, he said he was going to simplify his life.

  “Isn’t it a little bit late for that?” Lisa asked when she heard this news. Lisa, who ran the La Coiffure salon in the mall, had had one so-so marriage and one big disaster and always took a dim view of men anyway. She disagreed with Marie and felt that David was an asshole instead of an enigma.

  Cheryl sat among these women — Lisa, Marie, and Netta — in her own velvet armchair in her own TV room, feeling like she wasn’t even there. What Angela said about David simplifying his life reminded Cheryl of the old days, the really old days, when she lay with him on that mattress pulled over to the window in the room over Mrs. Bailey’s garage, when the sun fell through the uncurtained windows in long yellow blocks of light, warming their bodies. She remembered the way the leaves looked, yellow and red and gold, floating on the river that October. David had loved her so much then. Whatever weird stuff he might be saying or doing now, David had loved her then.