New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
Annie Proulx
Born August 22, 1935

Fragility of Childhood

Joss McKinley

August 25, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “One Saturday Morning”: Ten-year-old Carrie of 1960s London is mesmerized by and also a bit frightened by a family friend, who shows up at their door while her parents are out shopping. ¶ The circumstances lead the more lascivious reader to suspect that Dom, the visitor, has some evil purpose in mind, primarily because Carrie innocently lets him into the house when, for now, she is all alone. ¶ It turns out that Dom has recently lost his wife. This is the reason why he’s so goofy: playing her Bartók piece on the piano, as she skulks around upstairs, bearishly embracing her mother on a balcony below Carrie’s room, his grief overwhelming her mother’s presence with something that resembles dancing. ¶ As often happens in life, a child doesn’t understand until years later the evanescence of that moment:

---

Already, Carrie hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had happened only her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be—something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.”

Hadley’s Married Love: And Other Stories was published in 2012.
Joss McKinley, Photographer

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD