TEN MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORIESYouth in conflict, rebellion and love.
Remarkable stories by ten contemporary writers including John Knowles, James Jones, John Updike and Carson McCullers
Bantam Books, 1981
zostavil David A. Sohn
edícia Bantam Pathfinder (1981)
ISBN 0-553-20654-0
beletria, próza krátka, poviedky,
angličtina
hmotnosť: 84 g
mäkká väzba
stav: dobrý, na predsádke 2 pečiatky
0,90 €
*kamag* in **S4P**
The Scarlet Letter
BY JEAN STAFFORD
I KNEW from the beginning that Virgil Meade was crazy, but I didn’t know he was a crook until it was too late and he had got me into a fine how-do-you-do that might have altered the whole course of my life. I mean I might have killed him and either gone to the gallows or spent the rest of my natural days in the pen.
Virgil unofficially became my fellow when he put a big valentine in the box for me. At first I was sorely affronted because it was a very insulting comic one he had made himself—when you opened it up, there was the outline of a huge foot on each page and underneath it said: “All policemen have big feet but Emily Vanderpool’s got them beat.” Moreover, he had signed it so there would be no doubt in my mind who was trying to hurt my feelings. I couldn’t decide whether to write him a poison pen letter beginning “Dear (oh yeah?) Four-Eyes” or to beat him on the head with an Indian club. But then I discovered that he had written “s.w.a.k.” on the back of the envelope and I knew what that stood for because my sister Stella, who was popular and was therefore up on codes and slang, had told me: “Sealed With a Kiss.” Ordinarily such mushiness would have made me go ahead and write the letter or take out after him with the Indian club; but it so happened that at that particular time I didn’t have a friend to my name, having fought with everyone I knew, and the painful truth was that Virgil’s valentine was positively the only one I got that year except for a dinky little paper-doily thing, all bumpy with homemade paste, from my baby sister, Tess. And besides being all alone in the world, I was a good deal impressed by Virgil because he was as clever as a monkey on the parallel bars (the way he skinned the cat was something), and I had heard that at the age of eleven he already had a wisdom tooth, a rumor that seemed somehow the more likely because his father was a dentist. And so, on second thought, although he had insulted me and although he wore glasses (a stigma far more damning than the biggest clodhoppers in the world), I decided that he was better than nobody and I looked across the room at him. He was staring moodily out the window at the icicles, cracking his knuckles to the tune of “Shave and a haircut.” To attract his attention I cracked mine in harmony, and he turned around and smiled at me. He had a nice smile, rather crooked and wry, and I liked his pert pug nose and the way his shiny black hair came to a neat widow’s peak in the exact middle of his forehead.
We kept up our antiphony for about a minute and then Miss Holderness heard us and looked up from the valentine box she had been grubbing in. Her snappish brown eyes went darting around the room as, in her ever irascible voice, she cried: “Valentine’s Day or no Valentine’s Day, I decidedly will not tolerate any levity in this class. Who is making that barbarous noise?” She pushed up the paper cuffs that protected the sleeves of her tan challis dress and glared. There was one of those weighty, stifling silences in which everyone held his breath, everyone feeling accused and everyone feeling guilty. Finally, unable to single out any faces that looked more blameworthy than any others, she had to give up with the threat: “If there is ever again any knuckle-cracking in this class, the miscreant will go straight to Mr. Colby for his or her punishment. I have reiterated ad infinitum that levity is out of place in the sixth grade.” (Miss Holderness abhorred children and she loved hard words. Once, after making me sing a scale by myself, she put her fingers in her ears and she said: “I have never heard such cacophony. Try it again, Emily, and this time
