Complete Stories Read online

  Writing with the full force of true passion—writing the way this character speaks—Parker has indeed been chastised for believing that the literary world was big enough to let her say, in all honesty, whatever she meant. Even as her character misgauges her beloved, so did Parker misgauge a gang of critics who sought to punish her for the authenticity and lack of pretense in her writing. And yet even as her character makes us look at ourselves, and makes us the laugh in the mirror image presented, so does Parker hold a glass up to life, lightly. She wins, finally, because her success affords her the last laugh.

  —Regina Barreca

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  CRITICISM

  Bunkers, Suzanne L. “ ‘I am Outraged Womanhood’: Dorothy Parker as Feminist and Social Critic.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination 4 (1978): 25-35.

  Douglas, George. Women of the Twenties. New York: Saybrook, 1989.

  Gray, James. “Dream of Unfair Women: Nancy Hale, Clare Booth Luce, and Dorothy Parker.” In James Gray, On Second Thought. Minne apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1946.

  Hagopian, John. “You Were Perfectly Fine.” Insight I: Analyses of American Literature. Frankfurt: A. M. Hirschgraben, 1962.

  Labrie, Ross. “Dorothy Parker Revisited.” Canadian Review of American Studies 7 (1976): 48-56.

  Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

  Miller, Nina. “Making Love Modern: Dorothy Parker and Her Public.” American Literature 64, no. 4 (1992): 763-784.

  Shanahan, William. “Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker: Punch and Judy in Formal Dress.” Rendevous 3, no. 1 (1968): 23-34.

  Toth, Emily. “Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, and New Feminist Humor.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination 2, no. 2 (1977): 70-85.

  Trichler, Paula A. “Verbal Subversions in Dorothy Parker: ‘Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap.’ ” Language and Style: An International Journal 13, no. 4 (1980): 46-61.

  Walker, Nancy. “Fragile and Dumb: The ‘Little Woman’ in Woman’s Humor, 1900-1940.” Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 5 (1982), no. 2: 24-49.

  Yates, Norris. “Dorothy Parker’s Idle Men and Women.” In Norris Wilson Yates, The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964.

  BACKGROUND

  Capron, Marion. “Dorothy Parker.” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1957. Reprinted in Women Writers at Work. Edited by George Plimpton. New York: Penguin, 1989.

  Case, Frank. Tales of a Wayward Inn. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1938.

  Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995.

  Drennan, Robert, ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Citadel Press, 1968.

  Gaines, James R. Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt, 1977.

  Grant, Jane. Ross, The New Yorker, and Me. New York: Raynel & Morrow, 1968.

  Harriman, Margaret Case. The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt, 1977.

  Kramer, Dale. Ross and The New Yorker. New York: Doubleday, 1951.

  Kunkel, Thomas. Genius at Work: Harold Ross of The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1995.

  DOROTHY PARKER BIOGRAPHIES

  Frewin, Leslie. The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker. New York: Macmillan, 1986.

  Keats, John. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

  Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard Books, 1988.

  ANTHOLOGY

  The Viking Portable Library: Dorothy Parker. New York: Viking, 1944. Republished as The Indispensable Dorothy Parker. New York: Book Society, 1944. Published again as Selected Short Stories. New York: Editions for the Armed Services, 1944. Revised and enlarged as The Portable Dorothy Parker. New York: Viking, 1973; revised, 1976. Republished as The Collected Dorothy Parker. London: Duck-worth, 1973.

  CHRONOLOGY

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The stories are republished here from the texts of their original sources except in those instances where Dorothy Parker herself emended them in subsequent collections. The original sources are noted at the end of each story; variants and emendations are noted below. Minor orthographic emendations have been silently incorporated throughout the collection.

  “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” (1926) was originally subtitled “A Story Proving that No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative.” The subtitle was dropped when the story was first collected in Laments for the Living (1930) and subsequently in The Viking Portable Library: Dorothy Parker (1944).

  “Lucky Little Curtis” (1927) was retitled simply “Little Curtis” in Laments for the Living and thereafter in the Portable.

  “Long Distance” (1928), subtitled “Wasting Words, or an Attempt at a Telephone Conversation Between New York and Detroit,” was retitled “New York to Detroit” in Laments for Living and in the Portable.

  “The Waltz” (1933): The $50 figure at the end of the story was retained in Parker’s collection After Such Pleasures (1933) but changed to $20 in Parker’s Here Lies (1939) and the Portable.

  “The Custard Heart” first appeared in Here Lies (1939). Unlike her other stories, there was no original magazine publication.

  “The Game” (1948) was co-authored by Ross Evans, Parker’s collaborator on the play The Coast of Illyria (1949).

  STORIES

  Such a Pretty Little Picture

  Mr. Wheelock was clipping the hedge. He did not dislike doing it. If it had not been for the faintly sickish odor of the privet bloom, he would definitely have enjoyed it. The new shears were so sharp and bright, there was such a gratifying sense of something done as the young green stems snapped off and the expanse of tidy, square hedge-top lengthened. There was a lot of work to be done on it. It should have been attended to a week ago, but this was the first day that Mr. Wheelock had been able to get back from the city before dinnertime.

  Clipping the hedge was one of the few domestic duties that Mr. Wheelock could be trusted with. He was notoriously poor at doing anything around the house. All the suburb knew about it. It was the source of all Mrs. Wheelock’s jokes. Her most popular anecdote was of how, the past winter, he had gone out and hired a man to take care of the furnace, after a seven-years’ losing struggle with it. She had an admirable memory, and often as she had related the story, she never dropped a word of it. Even now, in the late summer, she could hardly tell it for laughing.

  When they were first married, Mr. Wheelock had lent himself to the fun. He had even posed as being more inefficient than he really was, to make the joke better. But he had tired of his helplessness, as a topic of conversation. All the men of Mrs. Wheelock’s acquaintance, her cousins, her brother-in-law, the boys she went to high school with, the neighbors’ husbands, were adepts at putting up a shelf, at repairing a lock, or making a shirtwaist box. Mr. Wheelock had begun to feel that there was something rather effeminate about his lack of interest in such things.

  He had wanted to answer his wife, lately, when she enlivened some neighbor’s dinner table with tales of his inadequacy with hammer and wrench. He had wanted to cry, “All right, suppose I’m not any good at things like that. What of it?”

  He had played with the idea, had tried to imagine how his voice would sound, uttering the words. But he could think of no further argument for his case than that “What of it?” And he was a little relieved, somehow, at being able to find nothing stronger. It made it reassuringly impossible to go through with the plan of answering his wife’s public railleries.

  Mrs. Wheelock sat, now, on the spotless porch of the neat stucco house. Beside her was a pile of her husband’s shirts and drawers, the price-tags still on them. She was going over all the buttons before he wore the garments, sewing them on more firmly. Mrs. Wheelock never waited for a button to come off, before sewing it on. She worked with quick, decided mov
ements, compressing her lips each time the thread made a slight resistance to her deft jerks.

  She was not a tall woman, and since the birth of her child she had gone over from a delicate plumpness to a settled stockiness. Her brown hair, though abundant, grew in an uncertain line about her forehead. It was her habit to put it up in curlers at night, but the crimps never came out in the right place. It was arranged with perfect neatness, yet it suggested that it had been done up and got over with as quickly as possible. Passionately clean, she was always redolent of the germicidal soap she used so vigorously. She was wont to tell people, somewhat redundantly, that she never employed any sort of cosmetics. She had unlimited contempt for women who sought to reduce their weight by dieting, cutting from their menus such nourishing items as cream and puddings and cereals.

  Adelaide Wheelock’s friends—and she had many of them—said of her that there was no nonsense about her. They and she regarded it as a compliment.

  Sister, the Wheelocks’ five-year-old daughter, played quietly in the gravel path that divided the tiny lawn. She had been known as Sister since her birth, and her mother still laid plans for a brother for her. Sister’s baby carriage stood waiting in the cellar, her baby clothes were stacked expectantly away in bureau drawers. But raises were infrequent at the advertising agency where Mr. Wheelock was employed, and his present salary had barely caught up to the cost of their living. They could not conscientiously regard themselves as being able to afford a son. Both Mr. and Mrs. Wheelock keenly felt his guilt in keeping the bassinet empty.

  Sister was not a pretty child, though her features were straight, and her eyes would one day be handsome. The left one turned slightly in toward the nose, now, when she looked in a certain direction; they would operate as soon as she was seven. Her hair was pale and limp, and her color bad. She was a delicate little girl. Not fragile in a picturesque way, but the kind of child that must be always undergoing treatment for its teeth and its throat and obscure things in its nose. She had lately had her adenoids removed, and she was still using squares of surgical gauze instead of handkerchiefs. Both she and her mother somehow felt that these gave her a sort of prestige.

  She was additionally handicapped by her frocks, which her mother bought a size or so too large, with a view to Sister’s growing into them—an expectation which seemed never to be realized, for her skirts were always too long, and the shoulders of her little dresses came halfway down to her thin elbows. Yet, even discounting the unfortunate way she was dressed, you could tell, in some way, that she was never going to wear any kind of clothes well.

  Mr. Wheelock glanced at her now and then as he clipped. He had never felt any fierce thrills of father-love for the child. He had been disappointed in her when she was a pale, large-headed baby, smelling of stale milk and warm rubber. Sister made him feel ill at ease, vaguely irritated him. He had had no share in her training; Mrs. Wheelock was so competent a parent that she took the places of both of them. When Sister came to him to ask his permission to do something, he always told her to wait and ask her mother about it.

  He regarded himself as having the usual paternal affection for his daughter. There were times, indeed, when she had tugged sharply at his heart—when he had waited in the corridor outside the operating room; when she was still under the anesthetic, and lay little and white and helpless on her high hospital bed; once when he had accidentally closed a door upon her thumb. But from the first he had nearly acknowledged to himself that he did not like Sister as a person.

  Sister was not a whining child, despite her poor health. She had always been sensible and well-mannered, amenable about talking to visitors, rigorously unselfish. She never got into trouble, like other children. She did not care much for other children. She had heard herself described as being “old-fashioned,” and she knew she was delicate, and she felt that these attributes rather set her above them. Besides, they were rough and careless of their bodily well-being.

  Sister was exquisitely cautious of her safety. Grass, she knew, was often apt to be damp in the late afternoon, so she was careful now to stay right in the middle of the gravel path, sitting on a folded newspaper and playing one of her mysterious games with three petunias that she had been allowed to pick. Mrs. Wheelock never had to speak to her twice about keeping off wet grass, or wearing her rubbers, or putting on her jacket if a breeze sprang up. Sister was an immediately obedient child, always.

  II

  Mrs. Wheelock looked up from her sewing and spoke to her husband. Her voice was high and clear, resolutely good-humored. From her habit of calling instructions from her upstairs window to Sister playing on the porch below, she spoke always a little louder than was necessary.

  “Daddy,” she said.

  She had called him Daddy since some eight months before Sister was born. She and the child had the same trick of calling his name and then waiting until he signified that he was attending before they went on with what they wanted to say.

  Mr. Wheelock stopped clipping, straightened himself and turned toward her.

  “Daddy,” she went on, thus reassured, “I saw Mr. Ince down at the post office today when Sister and I went down to get the ten o’clock mail—there wasn’t much, just a card for me from Grace Williams from that place they go to up on Cape Cod, and an advertisement from some department store or other about their summer fur sale (as if I cared!), and a circular for you from the bank. I opened it; I knew you wouldn’t mind.

  “Anyway, I just thought I’d tackle Mr. Ince first as last about getting in our cordwood. He didn’t see me at first—though I’ll bet he really saw me and pretended not to—but I ran right after him. ‘Oh, Mr. Ince!’ I said. ‘Why, hello, Mrs. Wheelock,’ he said, and then he asked for you, and I told him you were finely, and everything. Then I said, ‘Now, Mr. Ince,’ I said, ‘how about getting in that cordwood of ours?’ And he said, ‘Well, Mrs. Wheelock,’ he said, ‘I’ll get it in soon’s I can, but I’m short of help right now,’ he said.

  “Short of help! Of course I couldn’t say anything, but I guess he could tell from the way I looked at him how much I believed it. I just said, ‘All right, Mr. Ince, but don’t you forget us. There may be a cold snap coming on,’ I said, ‘and we’ll be wanting a fire in the living-room. Don’t you forget us,’ I said, and he said, no, he wouldn’t.

  “If that wood isn’t here by Monday, I think you ought to do something about it, Daddy. There’s no sense in all this putting it off, and putting it off. First thing you know there’ll be a cold snap coming on, and we’ll be wanting a fire in the living-room, and there we’ll be! You’ll be sure and ’tend to it, won’t you, Daddy? I’ll remind you again Monday, if I can think of it, but there are so many things!”

  Mr. Wheelock nodded and turned back to his clipping—and his thoughts. They were thoughts that had occupied much of his leisure lately. After dinner, when Adelaide was sewing or arguing with the maid, he found himself letting his magazine fall face downward on his knee, while he rolled the same idea round and round in his mind. He had got so that he looked forward, through the day, to losing himself in it. He had rather welcomed the hedge-clipping; you can clip and think at the same time.

  It had started with a story that he had picked up somewhere. He couldn’t recall whether he had heard it or had read it—that was probably it, he thought, he had run across it in the back pages of some comic paper that someone had left on the train.

  It was about a man who lived in a suburb. Every morning he had gone to the city on the 8:12, sitting in the same seat in the same car, and every evening he had gone home to his wife on the 5:17, sitting in the same seat in the same car. He had done this for twenty years of his life. And then one night he didn’t come home. He never went back to his office any more. He just never turned up again.

  The last man to see him was the conductor on the 5:17.

  “He come down the platform at the Grand Central,” the man reported, “just like he done every night since I been working on this road. He put
one foot on the step, and then he stopped sudden, and he said ‘Oh, hell,’ and he took his foot off of the step and walked away. And that’s the last anybody see of him.”

  Curious how that story took hold of Mr. Wheelock’s fancy. He had started thinking of it as a mildly humorous anecdote; he had come to accept it as fact. He did not think the man’s sitting in the same seat in the same car need have been stressed so much. That seemed unimportant. He thought long about the man’s wife, wondered what suburb he had lived in. He loved to play with the thing, to try to feel what the man felt before he took his foot off the car’s step. He never concerned himself with speculations as to where the man had disappeared, how he had spent the rest of his life. Mr. Wheelock was absorbed in that moment when he had said “Oh, hell,” and walked off. “Oh, hell” seemed to Mr. Wheelock a fine thing for him to have said, a perfect summary of the situation.

  He tried thinking of himself in the man’s place. But no, he would have done it from the other end. That was the real way to do it.

  Some summer evening like this, say, when Adelaide was sewing on buttons, up on the porch, and Sister was playing somewhere about. A pleasant, quiet evening it must be, with the shadows lying long on the street that led from their house to the station. He would put down the garden shears, or the hose, or whatever he happened to be puttering with—not throw the thing down, you know, just put it quietly aside—and walk out of the gate and down the street, and that would be the last they’d see of him. He would time it so that he’d just make the 6:03 for the city comfortably.