National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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March 2000 -- In this installment of the National Story Project, Paul reads stories by Barry Foy, Clayton Eshleman, Marcus Rosenbaum, Jerry Hoke,and Mary Grace Dembeck.

A couple of years ago, Barry Foy of Seattle, Washington was visiting a friend. The friend owned a cat, but at a certain point, a second cat appeared on the staircase. "But that's not a cat," the friend said. "It's my daughter's rabbit." Barry Foy remembered something he had once heard. "If you let rabbits roam around the house unsupervised," he asked, "aren't they inclined to bite into electrical cords?" "Yes, you have to keep an eye out," the friend answered.

Barry Foy goes on: "That's when I made my little joke. I had told her that if she ever found herself with a zapped rabbit, she should call me right away. I'd come over and take it home and cook it for supper ... The rabbit wandered off. A short time later, my friend left the room in search of a pencil. When she returned, she had a spooky look on her face. It seems that the rabbit had just bitten into a lamp cord and electrocuted itself - - exactly as I had described it. I ran into the next room. There lay the inert animal, its two front teeth still sunk in the brown cord. Every few seconds the teeth were bridged by an arc of electricity. My friend and I looked at each other, a little giddy and disoriented. Then my friend spoke up. 'Do you realize that you could have wished for ANYTHING?' she said. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'Back when you mentioned taking the rabbit home and cooking it, you could just as easily have wished for a million dollars or anything else you wanted. And that's what you would have gotten. It was that kind of moment, a moment in which any wish would have been granted.'" As Barry Foy puts it in the last line of his story: "There was never any doubt in my mind that she was right."

Another tale of a meal not eaten comes from Clayton Eshleman, a poet, translator, and editor from Ypsilanti, Michigan. "In 1958," Mr. Eshleman writes, "while still a student at Indiana University, I began to drive to New York City over vacations and holidays, and like countless aspiring artists before me, to 'knock on doors.' Allen Ginsberg came to the door of his Tenth Street flat and said that he would talk to me if I bought him a hamburger. I did, downstairs in the luncheonette, and he talked nonstop for an hour about Shelley and Mayakovsky. Then he told me to go meet Herbert Huncke -- and say that Allen had sent me. I knocked, and was met by a gentle-looking man who invited me into the living room, where several people were silently camped out on battered furniture. 'We're cookin' a poem, man,' Huncke said, 'com'ere.' He led me into the kitchen and opened the oven door. There it was! A typed poem on a sheet of paper turning brown around the edges in a 350-degree oven. Huncke closed the door and shuffled back to the living room. I followed him. Everyone was still silent. After hanging around for a few moments, I decided that I wasn't hungry, and slipped out."

O. Henry made his reputation as a writer by mastering the odd plot twist, the trick ending. As Marcus Rosenbaum recounts, O. Henry was an unknowing participant in a story that might have come from his own pen. In the 1930s, Mr. Rosenbaum's father worked as the business manager of the Southwest Review, the literary magazine of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Lon Tinkle (a Dickensian name if there ever was one) was the editor."Lon also taught English at SMU," Mr. Rosenbaum writes, "and there was a student in his class who had a severely deformed back. It was the Depression, and the young woman came from a family too poor to afford the operation she needed. Her mother ran a boarding house in Galveston, and one day when she was cleaning out the attic, she came across an old dusty manuscript. Scribbled across the top were the words 'By O. Henry.' It was a nice story, and she sent it along to her daughter at SMU, who showed it to Lon. Lon had never seen the story before, but it sounded like O. Henry, and he knew that William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O. Henry, had lived in Houston at one time. So it was entirely possible that he had gone to the beach and stayed in the Galveston boarding house, had written the story there, and had then inadvertently left it behind. Lon showed the manuscript to my father, who contacted an O. Henry expert at Columbia University in New York. The expert said he'd like to see it, so my father got on a train and took it to him. The expert authenticated the story as O. Henry's, and my father set out to sell it for the woman who had found it. Eventually, it was bought and published by the Des Moines Register. The money was just enough to pay for the operation the woman's daughter so desperately needed. "

As a teenager in the 1950s,Jerry Hoke went to visit his cousins in Bloomington, Illinois. "While walking together one day," he writes, "we were arguing about the wording of a popular song. I said that they were saying 'an Indian named Standing Bear.' My cousin said it was 'standing there.' As we continued along, I noticed a sheet of paper on the sidewalk. I picked it up, and it was the sheet music for that very song. There was no further argument. I was right, of course."

It is no longer Christmas-time, but a good story is a good story, and I have been waiting to read this one ever since it came in. It was written by Mary Grace Dembeck, and it's a bit longer than most of the stories I've presented so far. So make yourself comfortable, and listen to what Mrs. Dembeck has to say.

"I was a young girl of 11, then living in Brooklyn. My father had died unexpectedly that summer and times were suddenly very hard for my mother, my two brothers and me. My 18-year-old brother had been in the army a year now. My other brother, who was 13, worked as a deilvery boy after school to earn some sorely needed extra money. Mama had worked for a while, too, after Papa died, but had to stop when her health started to deteriorate.

Papa had always made a big thing out of Christmas. For as long as I could remember, the tree had been at the center of our celebrations, along with the creche and Santa Claus. There was a special little Kewpie doll ornament with a red velvet circle around it that Papa always kept in its own little box. Every Christmas, when we were about to decorate the tree, he would make a little ceremony out ot taking this doll out of its box, holding it up in front of me and saying, "Maria, this doll is as old as you are." Then he would hang the little Kewpie on the tree.

Papa had bought that little doll the year that I was born and, without planning to, it had become a small tradition in our house for him to put my Kewpie ornament on the tree first, before any other decorations.

But this Christmas we were to have no tree.

My mother was a very practical woman and she decided that the tree was a luxury we could well do without. I thought then, with quiet but keen resentment, that it had never meant as much to her as it had to Papa anyway. And if my brother minded, he didn't show it.

We had been to church that evening for a visit and were walking back home in silence. It was a beautiful, clear winter night, but all I could see were the tree-lit windows we passed. Their cheerful glow made my bitterness even more intense because I pictured whole, happy families in those houses, sharing laughter, exchanging presents, sitting at well-laden tables, talking, joking. Christmas held no deeper meaning for me that night than all of this. And I knew that when we finally got to our house, we would be greeted by darkened windows and, that once inside our door, we would be together, yet eventually alone, each immersed in the almost tangible emptiness that had come to settle on us.

As we passed my girlfriend's house, which was a few doors down from ours, I noticed that the lights were still on in her living room. I asked my mother to please let me drop in for a while, just for a visit, before I came home. She said I could.

Only I never did go into my friend's house that night.

Instead, I waited until my mother and brother disappeared inside our front door and then I impulsively turned and headed for my father's shop about five long avenue blocks away. It was a small grocery store on the corner of 45th Street and 11th Avenue. For some reason I wanted to be there in front of that shop that had meant so much to him, even though it was now empty and for rent. It was as if somehow I would be closer to him.

There weren't many people about. It was very dark, but I noticed for the first time how beautiful the night was, so cold and crisp with such a sky full of stars. The trees in the windows, still lit and glowing, didn't seem to be having the same effect on me as earlier that evening. Maybe it was the daring of being out and alone at night for the first time, or the sense that I was going to be closer to Papa somehow, that worked some strange effect on me. Whatever it was, it seemed to quiet my sense of resentment and grief.

When I finally got close to the shop, I noticed these great, odd-shaped masses on the sidewalk nearby. I stopped dead in my tracks. My imagination started to take hold and I nearly turned and headed back home. But something made me keep on going. As I got closer, I realized that those "masses" were not monsters after all, but left over Christmas trees from the store next to my father's shop. They were the trees that hadn't been sold and were left to be picked up by the garbage man or whoever it was that carted off such things.

I remember suddenly running to the pile of trees and trying, in the dark, to pick out the best one I could find. I seem to recall that the one I chose was huge, maybe ten or twelve feet high, but it couldn't have been that big. Anyway, I grasped my tree, grateful that I had worn my thick woolen mittens, and I began half carrying, half dragging my treasure home.

My soul was full of Christmas. I knew that Papa was mixed up in all of this somehow. I don't know that I ever felt closer to him than I did that night. It was as if he was in the stars above me, in every lighted window, in the very tree I was carrying. I don't recall if I met anyone along the way. I guess I must have, and if I did I must have seemed an odd sight: a young child, singing carols softly to herself, lugging a tree that was more than twice her size. But I know I wouldn't have cared what anyone thought.

When I got home, I rang the doorbell and was prepared to argue my tree into the house if need be. My brother answered the door and his startled look accompanied his amazed "Where'd you get THAT?" We got the tree inside and he managed to find the stand for it and we started to put it up. My mother came in and saw us, but said nothing. She took no part, but neither did she do anything to stop us. And though she knew I had not gone to my girlfriend's house after all, she never said a word in reproof.

When my brother and I were done, we stood back and looked at the tree. To us it was perfect, without one single flaw. I was so excited I could have stayed up all night decorating it, but my mother insisted that it was late, nearly midnight, and that we should all get to bed.

Christmas was almost over. I was sure that she didn't approve of what I had done and I even started to feel guilty, suddenly realizing what grief that tree might have brought to her, and the edge of my joy started to wear off.

I got ready for bed, my mind a confusion of excitement and sadness. I went in to look at my tree for one last time before Christmas was gone.

My mother was standing in front of it, holding a familiar small box. I don't know if she saw me in the doorway. Had she been crying?

Her hands seemed to tremble as she opened the box. She held the ornament up in front of her, not looking at me, but at the tree.

'Maria,' she said almost in a whisper, her voice somehow different, funny, ' ... this doll is as old as you are.'

And she hung the Kewpie on the tree."

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.