Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Read Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger Online
Authors: Lee Smith
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
N
EW AND
S
ELECTED
S
TORIES
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 fiction. 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
C
ONTENTS
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.
—E
UDORA
W
ELTY
Bob, a Dog
I
t 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.