Love (A Short Story) By William Maxwell

Mitch reads and chats about William Maxwell's short story Love published in 1983 and found in A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker 1925-2025.

Transcript

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It's story time with Mitch Juzerich. Today, a short story called Love by William Maxwell. Recently I came across this story for voice acting lessons I was taking. I frustrated every voice acting teacher I've had. Perhaps you sense their pain. Love by William Maxwell was a story I read for such a session. I didn't like it at first, but with time it grew on me, kind of like hearing a song for the first time you don't get, but give it some time, and well, you'll find yourself still humming the tune into old age. William Maxwell was born in nineteen oh eight and died in two thousand. He was a longtime literary editor at the New Yorker. He edited the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, JD Salinger, all who have been canceled, and many, many others, including Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty. I'll let today's story speak for itself, although I will read it. But it became more meaningful to me when I learned William Maxwell and his mother both contracted the flu during the nineteen eighteen pandemic. An estimated fifty million people worldwide and six hundred seventy thousand Americans alone died of the flu that year. William Maxwell was not one of them. But his mother was. That's not what this short story is about, but maybe in a small way it is. I remember being a kid and always worrying that something might happen to my mom too. Luckily she's still here, but when I meet others who lost their mom at an early age, I know it left an indelible mark, a mark that is expressed in so many unseen ways. I was also struck that William Maxwell died just eight days after his wife, the acclaimed painter Emily Gilman Noyas died after fifty five years of marriage. Obviously that happened after he published this short story in nineteen eighty three, but it suggests to me, and that is all it can do, that there was an aching tenderness somewhere in his being, somewhere close to the center of his being. I have no idea how he was as a person. Editors have a reputation of being gruff and cranky, scowling at every run on sentence and cliche. But somewhere that tenderness expresses itself, perhaps in a short story, perhaps in the love of a deceased partner. Again, this is called Love by William Maxwell, published in nineteen eighty three. I found it in the book A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker nineteen twenty five to twenty twenty five. Miss Vera Brown She wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter and flawlessly oval palmer method, our teacher for the fifth grade, the name might as well have been graven in stone. As she called the role, her voice was as gentle as the expression in her beautiful, dark brown eyes. She reminded me of Pansies. When she called on Alvin Arens to recite and he said, I know, but I can't say, the class snickered, but she said try, encouragingly, and waited to be sure that he didn't know the answer, and then said to one of the hands waving in the air, tell Alvin what one fifth of three eighths is. If we arrived late to school, red faced and out of breath, and bursting with the excuse we had thought up on the way, before we could speak she said, I'm sure you couldn't help it. Close the door, please, and take your seat. If she kept us after school, it was not to scold us, but to help us past the hard part. Somebody left a big red apple on her desk for her to find when she came into the classroom, and she smiled and put it in her desk, out of sight. Somebody else left some purple asters, which she put in her drinking glass. After that, the presents kept coming. She was the only pretty teacher in the school. She never had to ask us to be quiet or to stop throwing erasers. We would not have dreamed of doing anything that would displease her. Somebody wormed it out of her when her birthday was. While she was out of the room, the class voted to present her with flowers from the greenhouse. Then they took another vote, and sweet peas won. When she saw the florist box waiting on her desk, she said, Oh look inside, we all said. Her delicate fingers seemed to take forever to remove the ribbon. In the end, she raised the lid of the box and exclaimed. Read the card, we shouted. Many happy returns to Miss Vera Brown from the fifth grade, it said. She put her nose in the flowers and said, Thank you all very, very much, and then turned our minds to the spelling lesson for the day. After school we escorted her downtown in a body to a special matinee of D W Griffith's Hearts of the World. She was not allowed to buy her ticket, we paid for everything. We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We intended to pass right up through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades and on into high school taking her with us. But that isn't what happened. One day, there was a substitute teacher. We expected our real teacher to be back the next day, but she wasn't. Week after week passed, and the substitute continued to sit at Miss Brown's desk, calling on us to recite and giving out tests and handing them back with grades on them, and we went on acting the way we had when Miss Brown was there because we didn't want her to come back and find we hadn't been nice to the substitute. One Monday morning she cleared her throat and said that Miss Brown was sick and not coming back for the rest of the term. In the fall we had passed into the sixth grade and she still was not back. Benny Irish's mother found out that she was living with an aunt and uncle on a farm a mile or so beyond the edge of town and told my mother who told somebody in my hearing. One afternoon after school, Benny and I got on our bikes and rode out to see her. At the place where the road turned off to go to the cemetery in the Chattaqua grounds, there was a red barn with a huge circus poster on it, showing the entire inside of the cell's Floto circus tent and everything that was going on in all three rings. In the summertime, riding in the back seat of my father's open chalmers, I used to crane my neck as we passed that turn, hoping to see every last tiger and flying trapeze artist. But it was never possible. The poster was weather beaten now, with loose strips of paper hanging down. It was getting dark when we wheeled our bikes up the lane of the farmhouse where Miss Brown lived. You knock, Benny said as we started up on the porch. No, you do it, I said. We hadn't thought ahead to what it would be like to see her. We wouldn't have been surprised if she had come to the door herself and thrown up her hands in astonishment when she saw who it was. But instead, a much older woman opened the door and said, What do you want? We came to see Miss Brown, I said. We're in her class at school, Benny explained. I could see the woman was trying to decide whether she should tell us to go away, but she said I'll find out if she wants to see you, and left us standing on the porch for what seemed like a long time. Then she appeared again and said You can come in now. As we followed her through the front parlour, I could make out in the dim light that there was an old fashioned organ, like the kind you used to see in country churches, and linoleum on the floor, and stiff, uncomfortable chairs, and family portraits behind curved glass and big oval frames. The room beyond it was lighted by a coal oil lamp, but seemed ever so much darker than the unlighted room we had just passed through. Propped up on pillows in a big double bed was our teacher, but so changed. Her arms were like sticks, and all the life in her seemed concentrated in her eyes, which had dark circles around them and were enormous. She managed a flicker of recognition, but I was struck dumb by the fact that she didn't seem glad to see us. She didn't belong to us anymore. She belonged to her illness. Benny said, I hope you get well soon. The angel who watches over little boys, who know, but they can't say it, saw to it that we didn't touch anything. And in a minute we were outside, on our bicycles, riding through the dusk toward the turn in the road and town. A few weeks later I read in the Lincoln Evening Courier that Miss Vera Brown, who taught the fifth grade in central school, had died of tuberculosis, aged twenty three years and seven months. Sometimes I went with my mother when she put flowers on the graves of my grandparents. The cinder roads wound through the cemetery in ways she understood and I didn't. I would read the names on the monuments Brower, Cadwalleter, Andrews, Bates, Mitchell, in loving memory of infant daughter of beloved wife of The Cemetery was so large and so many people were buried there, it would have taken a long time to locate a particular grave if you didn't know where it already was. But I know, the way I sometimes know what is in wrapped packages, that the elderly woman who led us in and who took care of Miss Brown during her last illness, went to the cemetery regularly and poured the rancid water out of the tin receptacle that was sunk below the level of the grass at the foot of her grave, and filled it with fresh water from a nearby faucet, and arranged the flowers she had brought in such a way as to please the eye of the living, and the closed eyes of the dead.