The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Why did they get married if they barely knew each other?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it was different then.” My father frowned. “Marriage wasn’t always about love.”

“Was it about love with Elsa and Hans?”

“Not at first. Feet and feet of snow fell, trapping them inside with no food for days, and nothing to keep them warm. My mother always said that by being snowbound, they were forced to endure an entire lifetime in one week. And only then did they fall in love. She always said it was love that kept them alive. Neither could bear to watch the other die. So they lived-for a long time, anyway.”

“How did they keep each other alive with love?” I wanted to know.

My father shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, it's just a story.”

My grandmother liked to tell that story, my father said, in an effort to point out the positive. Though families without heat were freezing, good men who had lost jobs lined up downtown in the hopes of laying their hands on a government shovel. My grandfather had always paid my father to dig out the driveway, but now he hired men, the first three strangers who came to the back door wearing ragged coats and desperate faces.

When Aunt Portia first heard about Elsa and Hans, she went directly to her room and cut the hair off all her dolls. Then she took off the clothes and examined the plastic bodies, turning them over and over in her hands, looking between legs at nothing, tapping hollow chests, pulling arms and legs so the elastic ligaments snapped.

My father found her standing beside a pile of mutilated dolls examining her auburn braids suspiciously in the mirror, as if she meant to cut them next. “What did you do that for?” my father said, picking up a bald glassy-eyed doll, and dropping it back on the pile.

“I cut off the hair,” she said bitterly. “They are what they are now, and they’re not real. I’m done with dolls. I’m done with games. Somebody loves me, and I’m running away with him.”

“Nobody loves ten-year-olds,” my father said.

Aunt Portia marched downstairs and put on her coat and hat and slid the mittens my grandmother had knitted over her freckled little hands. She opened the French doors and stepped out into the snowy garden. My father tracked her around the side of the house, and watched her secretly from the cover of darkness. Portia dug a hole in the snow with her hands, lay down in the shallow grave, and covered herself as best she could. She had positioned herself outside the study, and through the window she could see my grandmother knitting sweaters for the Johannsons who had lost their farm in the dust storms. My grandfather put down his book and lit a cigarette, then went to the window. He couldn’t see Portia because of the reflection, but Portia didn’t understand this, and when she called for help, he couldn’t hear her either. “Save me,” Portia screamed. My grandfather peered out at the darkness for a moment, and then went back to his chair. “Help,” Portia said, and then she started crying. My father paused before making his presence known. He was thirteen. He didn’t want to seem like he cared too much.

“Save me,” she sniffed.

“Stand up,” he said.

“I’m stuck, Thatcher.”

“You’re not stuck, Portia,” my father said, but he crouched down and cleared the snow off her anyway. He offered Portia his hand and pulled her up, and tried to shake the snow out of her coat.

“I killed my dolls,” she said. “I want them back.”

“They’re not real. Remember?”

“I killed a promise.”

“You’re crazy,” my father said, taking her hand in his and dragging her back around the side of the house.

“I promised myself I’d give them to Katharine Johannson,” she said. “Now she won’t even want them.” My aunt's teeth were chattering.

“Come on,” my father said. “Come inside. I’ll make hot chocolate.”

But Aunt Portia sat down in the snow against the French doors and refused to move. I pictured my aunt sitting there crying in the same garden, the same snow into which, years later, I’d press the ruler on the night my mother disappeared.

After that they watched Portia carefully, my father told me. She was too serious for a girl her age, easily excitable. She wrote anonymous love letters addressed to no one and left them in places for people to find: Meet me behind the elm in the garden. I’ll be swinging from the branches. I love you, I love you, I love you. Was there a suggestion of suicide in

those words? Could a ten-year-old even be capable of suicide? My grandparents studied the notes carefully for a clue, but none revealed itself. And then one day, Aunt Portia stopped writing. She got her hair cut short in a bob and waited for love to find her.

“Uncle Freddy was love?” I said.

“There were men before him, but I’m not getting into it,” my father said. “She was older than you though. Keep that in mind. You know, your mother found me. We were at a party. She turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you wish you were black?’” My father laughed. “I should have known what I was getting into.”

“Was she drunk?” I said.

“Of course not, Susan. Why would you say that?”

“Well, it's kind of a stupid question.”

My father shook his head and got up and put the cans in the sink. “It was charming. I thought it was charming.” Peach juice had dripped over the table in sticky little trails. The snow had begun to let up.

“So Daddy, why do you think Aunt Portia buried herself?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just wanted to be saved.”

“From what?”

“Well, don’t we all want that in some way?” my father said.

I wanted to know what it was he wanted to be saved from.

“From humanity, Susan. There's too much brutality and unfairness in the world. People do horrible things to hurt each other.”

“Like Starkweather,” I said.

“And Hitler. And all the Communists.” But we both knew what we were really talking about. Loving my mother scratched you raw, and that rawness only made you want to be more tender.

There was no school for two days, but on the second day, my father went to work, and I was left all alone to wander the house. I took an old album off the bookcase and opened it to a photograph of my father and Aunt Portia standing on either side of the elm tree in the garden. My father looked about my age. His face was smooth without the creases of worrying, and one of his arms snaked around the back of the trunk, the hand reaching out to pull my aunt's long auburn braid. My aunt's eyes were piercing. She stared directly at the camera without smiling, unaware of what her brother was about to do. I could see the future in that shot, the tug of hair, the pulling away the very second after the picture was taken, but I could not see any farther, even though I knew all that had come to pass. The elm looked tall and stately, as if it could never die, and there was no hint of my father's coming back to the very same house to fill his father's shoes, or that my mother would leave him just before a crippling blizzard in November of 1962. There was no hint of plumpness in Aunt Portia's features, or Uncle Freddy, or the three unremarkable children she would bear him. Portia and Thatcher were names that held the promise of Victorian love affairs. What had they dreamed of in their beds at night?

The snow had stopped falling, but the world was still hushed under its spell, and it seemed to me like everything would be frozen forever. The sun flitted in and out behind the clouds. The icy voices of wind rustled in the hedges and icicles dripped from the roof with the rhythm of metronomes. You're beautiful, the wind told me. I love you, the drops spelled out. It felt like something was about to happen.

I put on an Everly Brothers record and fluttered around the living room wringing my hands. I confused that sensation of waiting with the prickle of love, the anticipation of a first kiss though none was coming. My mind went to a dark unimaginable place where my mother's first husband took my face in his hands and kissed my lips. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. He spoke sweet words to me. You're a real Roman candle.