SOURCE: "Maturity and Old Age," in Jean Stafford, Twayne Publishers, 1985, pp. 61-76.

[In the following excerpt, Walsh examines Stafford's depiction of older, mature women in her short fiction.]

The fiction that portrays maturing women, women married, widowed, divorced, or alone by choice, women in their last years, develops characters who are generally more active in controlling the circumstances of their lives than are the girls and younger women that Stafford creates. Nevertheless, some of the characters are portrayed as victims, some as a result of their own detachment from or arrogance toward the world. Images of illness become prominent in this work. The real orphans in Stafford's other fiction give way mainly to the imagery of the orphan used to describe the lonely conditions of the older women. The apparent impossibility of a sustained and loving marriage relationship becomes an important theme. As with those about girls and young women, several of the stories reflect very closely Stafford's own personal history, her marriage to Robert Lowell, her divorces, her multiple illnesses. They also reveal her continuing sense of rejection by the Bostonian elite, which she turns into savage satire. Additionally, they reveal Stafford's own continuing sense of dislocation. All of the work is set east of the Rocky Mountains, in the places where Stafford lived out her own later life.

A story published when Stafford was forty-nine reveals the need of even the mature woman who has established her own life to try to overcome her sense of isolation from her beginnings and to reestablish connections no matter how tenuous they may be. "The Lippia Lawn" (1964) is set in the mountains of the Cumberland plateau. The narrator, a nameless woman, spends an afternoon searching in the woods with an old neighbor, Mr. Oliphant, for trailing arbutus to transplant to his garden in the village. The old man's memories of how the woods once were before the mountain people began to raid them for plants to send to New York awaken memories for the narrator as well. Stafford supplies no age, no reason for the narrator's residence for the winter in the mountains, no indication of family relationship, but the narrator's attempts to trace her memories of the arbutus identify her as an autobiographical character. She remembers the arbutus painted on the china coffee pot of a landlady when she was a student in Heidelberg. She is reminded of her childhood in Covina, California, and the strong resemblance to the arbutus of the lippia in her family's lawn. Other ephemeral memories from her childhood follow, along with facts she has been told but does not remember, such as the eighty-acre walnut grove that stretched behind the California house.

The narrator's lack of clear memories is contrasted to the old man's vivid recollections of the mountains when he was a boy—"this place was Eden!" His consolation, "Anyhow, a man can call the old things to mind," does not calm her own "disquieted" mind to which his words are "like a phrase of music once admired and now detested." Mr. Oliphant's rootedness contrasts with the narrator's wanderings, her memories gathered not only in California, but Santa Fe, Denver, Chicago, Toledo, and New Orleans. When she chooses, after all, not to dig up and bring back the arbutus from the special place Mr. Oliphant sends her, she responds to her perception of the plant's determination to remain rooted where it has always been: "It was as though the root was instinct with will. There was something . . . monstrous in its determination to remain where it grew. . . . " The plant and Mr. Oliphant measure the narrator's own rootlessness—or the roots she has perhaps wished to escape by her wandering.

When Stafford bought the house in Damariscotta Mills in 1945 with her royalties from the sales of Boston Adventure, she believed for a while that she had indeed stopped wandering and would have a place of her own. Although that dream was quickly dashed, the months she spent in Damariscotta Mills were particularly fruitful to her as a writer. Three of her stories very closely record her own experiences while living there. The Kavanagh mansion, which adjoined Stafford's property, provided the setting for The Catherine Wheel. She used the name Kavanagh several times as a place name. She also wrote a descriptive essay, "New England Winter," published with lavish illustrations in Holiday (February 1954), about winter in Maine as she and Lowell experienced it. One of the stories she sets there is a satire on the local inhabitants. The other stories reveal the deterioration of her marriage.

"Polite Conversation" (1949) is a thinly fictionalized account of Stafford's relationships with one set of her neighbors in Damariscotta Mills. She and Lowell (who appear as Margaret and Tommy Heath in the story) lived across a narrow road from an Episcopalian bishop's widow and her "rambunctious" brood of grown and half-grown children. When she could no longer find excuses, Stafford would give in to the widow's invitations to tea, where they were often joined by an Episcopalian nun. "Polite Conversation" immortalizes the widow as Mrs. Wainright-Lowe and the nun as Sister Evelyn. Stafford is particularly cruel in describing Eva, one of the Wainright-Lowe children, home on summer vacation from her teaching job in Salt Lake City, who "gurgled like a stomach" after being applauded for her well-known love of children. The story satirizes the small-mindedness of Sister Evelyn and Mrs. Wainright-Lowe, the intensity of their concentration on their own village matters, the inanity of their conversation, and their inability to understand the Heaths' unwillingness (because they are writers and because they are trying to work) to join in all the projects thought up by the Wainwright-Lowes. Tommy Heath is impervious to them: "he had irrefutably replied [to Margaret] that he would not go today or any other day, because he was an eccentric." But Margaret experiences the frustration of being sufficiently manipulated by the ladies to make her feel guilty for not complying with their wishes. She is helpless against them because of their inability to recognize the validity of any kind of life other than their own.

The other stories set in Damariscotta Mills describe, one indirectly, the other quite directly, the disintegration of Stafford and Lowell's marriage. "A Country Love Story" (1950) describes the hollowness and anger of the fifth year of the marriage of May, who is thirty, and Daniel, her senior by twenty years, a history professor who has just spent a year in a tuberculosis sanatorium. The two move from Boston to Maine at the insistence of Daniel's physician, despite May's own judgment that another year of isolation would be harmful to Daniel. May's judgment proves correct. What she did not recognize, however, is that the year would allow Daniel to drive her to the brink of questioning her own sanity.

In October, after a few months of pleasant, companionable work on their house and grounds, Daniel retreats to his study and closes May out of his life. The few conversations they have deteriorate into quarrels. Daniel refuses to recognize May's pleas to him for release from the isolation he has imposed upon her. He instead begins to accuse her of having "done something" that she is ashamed of while he was in the sanatorium and begins to suggest that she is going mad, a suggestion that remains with May as a "deep, bleeding injury."

The effect of Daniel's treatment is to push May into "a weighty but unviolent dislike" of Daniel. More dangerous to her, she is pushed to the edge of madness, into fantasizing a lover whom she eventually "not only believed in . . . but loved . . . and depended wholly on his companionship." She develops the guilt about this fantasy lover that Daniel tries to force on her about her supposed indiscretion. In a savage kind of irony, Daniel feeds her sense of disequilibrium by forgiving her "because you don't know how you persecute me." He continues, by the time she has reached such a state of depression that she is insomniac, by telling her that "perhaps when this is over, you will know the reason why you torture me with these obsessions and will stop."

On one of her nightly insomniac vigils, she hallucinates and clearly sees her fantasized lover sitting in the sleigh whose continued dilapidated presence on their front lawn has become a symbol of May and Daniel's inability to communicate and has also excited May's imagining of her lover. After this vision, she sleeps as if in a coma, dreams of her lover, and is awakened by Daniel's saying to her, "The winter is over, May. You must forgive the hallucinations of a sick man"; he begs her, "If I am ever sick again, don't leave me, May." Her affair ends. The pale, fair head of Daniel bending over her as she awakes is the fair head of her lover, who had "seemed rather frail, for there was a delicate pallor on his high intelligent forehead and there was an invalid's languor in his whole attitude." The return of the real Daniel is too late for May. She remembers his previous condescending treatment of her even before the long winter began. She knows the lover/Daniel she has fantasized will never appear. The terrible image Stafford uses to describe May's contemplation of her future life—"like an orphan in solitary confinement"—reveals the utter hopelessness of her situation.

This story provided another opportunity for Robert Lowell to vent his own emotions about Stafford and their marriage. According to C. David Heymann, "The fiction provided fragments of the imagery for Lowell's 'The Old Flame' [1964], with its hint of the poet's second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. A double link occurs in the poem in the lines, 'No one saw your ghostly / imaginary lover / stare through the window, / and tighten / the scarf at his throat.' Jean Stafford's imaginary lover had been mysteriously preempted by Elizabeth Hardwick ..., " whose first novel was The Ghostly Lover.

"An Influx of Poets" (1978), the last story published before Stafford's death, describes very openly the unhappy expanse of her marriage to Lowell and its ending weeks at Damariscotta Mills. It is so painfully autobiographical that it is difficult to view it separately as a work of art. Theron Maybank is Robert Lowell, Cora Maybank is Jean Stafford, Minnie Rosoff is Gertrude Buchman. Buchman did fly into Damariscotta Mills in a Piper Cub. In the summer of 1946, Stafford and Lowell did entertain various visiting poets, "baby bards .. . [who] would very soon usurp their elders' thrones and their dominions." She did type and retype Lowell's poems as he changed an a to a the. Eileen Simpson was astonished that, in the midst of her own work, Stafford seemed to accept this responsibility for playing typist for Lowell without question.

In the character of Cora, Stafford writes:

This was not the way I had planned the summer. We had limped painfully through the fifth year of our marriage, having changed the scene of our travail each year from the beginning. Cambridge was no better than New York, New York no better than Connecticut, Connecticut no better than Louisiana or the mountains of Tennessee. But we often limped on different routes, shedding our blood on sand and rocks miles apart. When we did meet in some kind oasis or quiet glade, we were at first shy and infatuated and glad, but the reunion did not last, the shade and water were part of a mirage, lightning smote and burned the hemlocks of our forest sanctuary.

She had expected their lives to be different in the house in Maine she had bought and furnished for them as their own: "My parlor! My own! I bought the house, I bought the furniture, the student lamps, the cachepots, the milk-glass bowls I used for water lilies from the lake...." She had seen it as a sanctuary from Theron's aberrant impulses resulting from his conversion to Catholicism: "immersed in the rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins the poet, [he] was explosively ignited by Gerard Manley Hopkins the Jesuit. . . . " Herself a convert at eighteen, Cora had not found in Catholicism what she was seeking. Despite her attempts to explain that she does not simply doubt, but repudiates the teachings of the Church, Theron insists on remarriage in the Catholic church and on Cora's performing the duties of the church: "He'd run hellbent for election into that blind alley . . . and yanked me along with him, and there we snarled like hungry, scurvy cats."

"Supinely," the word Cora uses to describe her acquiescence to her husband's religious fervor, is also apt as a description of her reaction to what she at first perceives as merely a flirtation between Theron and Minnie Rosoff. Even before the summer had begun, there had been warnings that Cora's hopes for the new life in Maine were doomed. The delay caused by the remodeling and preparation of the house cooled Theron's enthusiasm for the planned move. Thus, by Christmas of the preceding year Cora "was a witch again, and all day and all night my Godfearing yokemate burned me at the stake in Salem. He was right. I made no plea for myself, for I had the tongue of an adder and my heart was black with rage and hate." By the time Minnie arrives in Maine, Cora has spent the summer wracked by "brutish headaches," "lurching nausea," and insomnia, which she copes with by drinking herself to sleep. The day of Minnie's arrival, Cora has been to Boston for an examination to determine the cause of her headaches. The "appalling" diagnosis has been that they are caused by her mental state, which she perceives is caused by the conflict in her marriage.

Cora seeks a release from her pain by fantasizing an affair between Theron and Minnie: "Dishonored, I would ascend refreshed, putting aside the ruin of this marriage shattered so ignominiously by the other woman, by that most unseemly of disgraces, above all by something not my fault, giving me the uncontested right to hate him." Never believing her fantasy will come true, she encourages what is already a reality. Cora's "sensible and wifely side" was pleased that Theron was enjoying himself and was perhaps losing some of his inflexibility. Her "hermit side," the "secret boozehead side, looked on the alliance with even greater pleasure: I was blissfully addicted to the fantasies the genie of the bottle contrived for me each night. . . . " She is shocked from her passivity when Theron dismisses her by saying, "I don't want a wife .. . I want a playmate." Cora's fantasy has come true. She is "dishonored"; she does "taste the vilest degradation, the bitterest jealousy, the most scalding and vindictive rancor." Most shattering must be her knowledge that she had cooperated in her own victimization.

The futility of finding a release in marriage from isolation and pain provides the theme for other stories. In "The Connoisseurs" (1952), Mary Rand, a wealthy orphan from Boise, Idaho, and her husband, Donald, who have sought in travel a substitute for a married life of real communion and commitment, reach the end of their travels and the end of their marriage. Both committed travelers, Mary and her husband had several times encountered each other by chance in Europe and in Asia while each was traveling alone. They had married at the close of a few weeks of traveling together and had continued their honeymoon travel until World War II intervened. Mary, however, had considered her traveling self "as a pilgrim with a goal. She felt certain that when, with her guide, she entered Eden, she would be content to let her passport molder and her trunk keys rust."

When their enforced residence in the United States during the war reveals to Mary and Donald what their traveling has hidden—that they are in "obstinate and fundamental disaccord" on almost every subject conceivable—they choose to continue to believe that once they can again begin traveling they will rediscover a previous joy. As they begin a trip across Loch Lomond, during a rancorous tour of Europe after the war, "each had imagined . . . they could calmly talk again and could, with dignity concede. The solution to everything might lie on the farther bank; there was the possibility that in a tea shop in Inversnaid they might, in sudden revelation, learn how to accept."

The deus ex machina that finally saves them from their endless, loveless wandering is another traveler, a bore and a boor, who attaches himself to them on the morning of their Loch Lomond excursion. His endless monologues about his own travels, his boring anecdotes, his praise of Iceland above all places, because it is absolutely ugly and filled with nothing, not only prevent any of the wished-for communication between Donald and Mary but also grotesquely parody the Rands' own travels, their inability to find a paradise to which they can commit themselves. The Englishman's intrusions into their illusions brings them up short against a reality they had refused to admit, "that they had long since ceased to love each other and their guilt over their failure, constant and inadmissible, had wedded them far more rigidly than any marriage vows." The experience with the grotesque Englishman strips away their final pretense: "Politely on the bus they discussed Reno although, for the sake of the Englishman's idée fixe, they called it Reykjavik."

Beatrice Trueblood's experience of marriage drives her into an isolation that, ironically, frees her from what she finally perceives to be the most unbearable and the most characteristic reality of marriage. "Beatrice Trueblood's Story" (1955) begins starkly: "When Beatrice Trueblood was in her middle thirties and on the very eve of her second marriage, to a rich and reliable man—when, that is, she was in the prime of life and on the threshold of a rosier phase of it than she had ever known before—she overnight was stricken with total deafness." The "story" that leads to her deafness is a history of being traumatized by marital discord. As a child, she had nightly endured quarrels between her father and her alcoholic mother, who heaped "atrocious abuse upon each other, using sarcasm, threats, lies—every imaginable expression of loathing and contempt. They swam in their own blood, but it was an ocean that seemed to foster and nourish them; their awful wounds were their necessities." Not convinced that marriage must be like this, she entered her own first marriage determined not to be a party to such scenes. Unfortunately, Tom Trueblood fed on "rancor and contentiousness." After seven years of having "her dignity trampled to death, her honor multilated," her only escape was to run away, leaving behind a note.

Beatrice's engagement to the wealthy Marten ten Brink is celebrated in Newport. Her host, Jack Onslager, is the only one of her friends and acquaintances who realizes the tension between Beatrice and her lover, because it is revealed only on her face; it "was so still it could have been a painting of a face that had been left behind when the woman who owned it had faded from view." After the two have quarreled the night through, standing below Onslager's window, Onslager overhears the following exchange, which settles Beatrice's fate: to ten Brink's command, "You mustn't think you can shut your mind to these things. . . . You can't shut your ears to them," Beatrice replies, "I will not hear another word."

She does not. She escapes from what seem the inescapable quarrels of people who should love each other—and particularly ten Brink's outrageous jealousy of her first marriage—by willing herself deaf. She deliberately isolates herself from a cacophony that has literally become unbearable. She escaped from the psychological bloodbath of her parents' marriage, only to enter a mutilating marriage of her own. She does not receive the paradoxical sustenance her parents and her husband find in abuse. She flees into deafness to prevent a return to yet another degradation. Ironically, however, she is not finally able to break the cycle. Over a year later, after her hearing returns, she marries again. Once again it is Jack Onslager who finds the truth of Beatrice's new life when he overhears her husband say: "I have told you a thousand times that my life has to be exactly as I want it. So stop these hints. Any dedicated scientist worth his salt is bad-tempered." Beatrice Trueblood has reentered the only kind of relationship she has ever known.

In 1948 and in 1953, Stafford went to the Virgin Islands to obtain divorces from her first and second husbands. In 1949 and in 1955, she published stories that reflect, if not her actual experiences, her emotional responses to these events. The sordidness and the humiliation that accompany divorce is the theme of "A Modest Proposal" (1949). The setting is one of the Virgin Islands, where women waiting to be divorced are perceived in terms of flotsam and illness; they "littered the terrace and the lounges of the hotels, idling through their six weeks' quarantine. . . . They were spoken of as invalids; they were said to be here for the cure." Sophie Otis, from Massachusetts, is one of the favored "invalids" to have been invited by a local sybaritic Danishman to share his hospitality at his country home. During the course of an afternoon, she sits apart and observes the rest of the group, her fitting companion on the terrace a ruined head of Pan lying face down on the ground, a mocking symbol of the love that had brought the women eventually to where they are.

Mrs. Otis feels anesthetized and doomed to an unending exile, caught in the oppression and lonely heat of the windless Caribbean day. Trapped as they all are, by loneliness, by hopelessness, by futility, the guests are subjected to a revolting parody of Swift's essay—an apocryphal tale of their host's best friend serving him a charred baby islander for dinner. The tale especially torments the most fragile of the women guests, whom the host has deliberately provoked throughout the afternoon with his references to "coons," "niggers," and "jigaboos," just as he has subjected his other guests to sexual innuendos. The Danish captain's prized civilization is a guise that allows him to trample the humanity not only of his guests but also of the islanders, including his houseboy. It contrasts starkly with the islands and the cays Mrs. Otis views from the terrace: "They were intractably dry, and yet there was a sense everywhere of lives gathering fleshily and quietly, of an incessant, somnolent feeding, of a brutish instinct cleverer than any human thought." The only recognition of her own and others' humanity and dignity comes from the captain's abused houseboy: "His was all the sufferance and suffering of little children. In his ambiguous tribulation, he sympathized with her. . . . "

"The Warlock" (1955) also emphasizes the humiliation that women seeking divorce are subjected to. The seemingly inescapable maltreatment is magnified in this instance because the woman so treated is not in fact intending to get a divorce. Mrs. Mark Kimball is traveling to Antigua to visit friends and to recuperate from a long illness. Because she is traveling alone, at Christmas, on a ship that frequently transports divorcées-to-be to the Virgin Islands, she cannot convince anyone that she is not seeking a divorce. A natural reticence and a guilty conscience prevent her from discussing her illness it may have been an "unconscious blackmail" to restore a marriage that was on the brink of dissolving. Because of it, she will never be sure "whether it had been pity for her in her weakness and fear or the restitution of his married love that had brought [her husband] back to her from a long and serious digression."

The cruise that was to be the beginning of her restoration to health becomes a nightmare of dingy accommodations crowded with irritable and noisy passengers presided over by a scabrous crew whose captain takes more interest in a blonde passenger than in the safety of his ship. Mrs. Kimball's reticence, a bout of flu, and her fragile sense of her relationship to her husband subject her to the raucous innuendos of her cabinmate, who is happily on her way to a divorce, and, worse, to the unwanted and constant attention of the ship's doctor, the warlock of the title. The incredible Dr. Cortez lives in rococo splendor in the midst of the prevailing shabbiness of the ship. His interest in the arcane allies him strangely with the voodooism of the tropics rather than with the world of modern medicine that he supposedly represents. Mrs. Kimball cannot, however, offend or ignore the doctor: "she might need his care and she did not like to think of a hypodermic needle in the hands of an enemy. . . . "

Her sense of self is so fragile that she is relieved from her anxiety only by a cable from her husband saying he will meet her in Antigua. Finally freed from her fear of pursuit by Dr. Cortez, she takes on herself some of the blame for his reprehensible behavior; she is "partly ashamed" as well as "partly puzzled." She may have completely imagined a sequence in which she has felt him following her and observing her when she left the boat for an excursion, a possibility that suggests the illness attending the dissolution of her marriage may have been mental. The matter remains ambiguous, however, for as she last glimpses Dr. Cortez, he says, "I follow the pipes of Pan."

A widow is the character chosen by Stafford to display the ability of a mature woman to act decisively to dispel a sense of being a victim. Abby Reynolds, in "The Children's Game" (1958), is a New Yorker in her early forties. She has spent the year following her husband's death in Europe, moving from place to place. She finally realizes that she has become one of the "forlorn, brave orphans"—lonesome American women—that she and her husband had seen and sorrowed for on their earlier trips abroad. She belongs to "that group who have spent their lives leaning on someone—or being leaned on by—a father, a mother, a husband; and who, when the casket is closed or the divorce decree is final, find that they are waifs." They are humiliated in their loneliness and flee from the pity of their relatives and friends. In making her own trip, Abby has followed a pattern set by other women of her family, including her mother, who died in Rome.

Abby, however, finds that she is made of sterner fiber. She admits to herself that she hates what she is doing and resolves to return immediately to New York and her previous life. In the two weeks that intervene before her return passage, she agrees to meet an old friend, Hugh Nicholson, at a house party in England. Spending time with Hugh, Abby discovers that the enervation she has experienced was caused by "the removal from her life of John's energy" and that she requires the complement of such an energy; "she was not the sort of woman who could live alone satisfactorily." She is a woman who needs a husband.

Stafford sets the final development of Abby's resolve against the grotesque casino town of Knokke-le-Zoute in Belgium. The casino and its occupants are described in the imagery of sickness. The international collection of roulette players appear "chronically ill"; they all resemble "the invalid concentrating on the tides of his pain." The "air of apprehension and constraint" in the casino is appropriate to a hospital ward. The building is seedy and there is a "contagion in the atmosphere." The town itself is "monstrous," with "houses that looked like buses threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes." Trees are cut into shapes of inanimate objects. The hotels take on a horrible animation with "kidney-shaped balconies, . . . crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machiolations that looked like teeth."

Brought to Knokke-le-Zoute and the casino by Hugh, with whom she believes herself in love, Abby discovers that the grotesquerie about her reflects the sickness at the core of Hugh, a compulsive gambler, whose addiction has destroyed his first marriage. Hugh has brought her here to reveal this truth about himself. After playing an evening of roulette at Hugh's request, she understands the pull of the game to the gambler and with only a shade of remorse, "because she was fortunate and he was not," she leaves him with hardly a backward glance. Her brief interlude has been an "aberration," like the quixotic change of the roulette wheel. She belongs among her own kind: "in alien corn, it was imprudent to run risks."

In the stories of two other women in their forties, Stafford explores again the themes of isolation and disengagement. The emotional withdrawal for each woman has a different source but for each the result is a life of sterility. In "The End of a Career" (1956) Stafford satirizes the American emphasis on youth and beauty through the tragic story of Angelica Early. Praised and prized from her birth for her great physical beauty, Angelica is cut off from all other human understanding and enrichment, love, intellectual development, even close friendship. For Angelica, "aware of her responsibility to her beholders, dedicated herself to the cultivation of her gift and the maintenance of her role in life with the same chastity and discipline that guide a girl who has been called to the service of God." Her puzzled friends cannot see that she has married the man she has precisely because he is away most of the time and does not interfere with the ritual required to maintain her beauty. She remains childless for doubtless the same reason. Her only real friend and confidant is her maid, her accomplice in maintaining her beauty.

Her acquaintances require nothing of her but that she be beautiful. Hostesses plan parties around her beauty. Men happily escort her for the reflected glow. That she offers little beyond her beauty matters not. That her vocation has robbed her of normalcy is unnoticed: "she had been obliged to pass up much of the miscellany of life that irritates but also brings about the evolution of personality; the unmolested oyster creates no pearl. Her heart might be shivered, she might be inwardly scorched with desire or mangled with jealousy and greed, she might be benumbed by loneliness and doubt, but she was so unswerving in her trusteeship of her perfection that she would not allow anxiety to pleat her immaculate brow or anger to discolor her damask cheeks or tears to deflower her eyes." What Angelica perceives is that her friends expect her beauty never to change.

When at forty age inevitably begins to alter her, she fights more desperately to slow it, undergoing yearly and extremely painful facial restorations. Finally, her hands, which cannot be restored, show her years. With no resources open to her, with no sense of herself apart from her beauty, Angelica Early takes to her bed and dies, "her heart past mending."

Forty-three-year-old Jenny Peck, in "I Love Someone" (1952), has remained a spinster by choice. She lives isolated from the passion of the world, symbolically in her apartment high above the Manhattan streets where young gangsters torture each other, and emotionally in a heart that does not allow itself to feel love. Contrary to the myths her friends have created about her single state, Jenny is honest about herself: "From childhood I have unfailingly taken all the detours around passion and dedication; or say it this way, I have been a pilgrim without faith, traveling in an anticipation of loss, certain that the grail will have been spirited away by the time I have reached my journey's end. If I did not see in myself this skepticism, this unconditional refusal, this—I admit it—contempt, I would find it degrading that no one has ever proposed marriage to me. I do not wish to refuse but I do not know how to accept. In my unforgivingness, I am more dead now, this evening, than Marigold. . . . "

Moved from her routine by the funeral of her friend Marigold, who has inexplicably committed suicide, Jenny is attracted to the sounds of a gang beating occurring in the area way below her window. She not only looks out and watches the fight to the end, but also attempts to pursue the gang once it leaves: "to see if I can penetrate at last the mysterious energy that animates everyone in the world except myself." For once she is breaking from her "always rational behavior," which brings her no hope but also no despair. When she reaches the street, she is stopped by a childishly scrawled heart with a "fading proclamation, I LOVE SOMEONE." She sees in it a comment on her need for understanding of herself and other human beings: "As easily it could read, beneath a skull and crossbones, I HATE SOMEONE." She feels no need to search further. She returns to the well-appointed banquet that is her life, which ironically lacks "something to eat."

In three stories of elderly women, Stafford explores the results of both willful innocence and willful malevolence. In "The Captain's Gift" (1946) Stafford writes of the folly or perhaps the evil of a willful state of innocence which ignores evil. Mrs. Chester Ramsey, "an innocent child of seventy-five," resists change of all kinds. She refuses to move from her house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, although it has been condemned by the fire department and is surrounded by slums. She dresses as her mother dressed a generation before, an eccentricity that sometimes she feels renders her "invisible" to the anonymous and motley crowd that throngs the once elegant square on which she lives. Above all, she refuses to recognize that World War II is being fought. She is unmoved by this cataclysmic fact despite her correspondence with several young men who are fighting in Europe and the reality that all her children and grandchildren are involved in some way in the war effort.

Mrs. Ramsey has lost all trace of any physical beauty, but she is known for her charm, which brings frequent visitors to her unsuitable house. The charm lies in "her tenderness and pity, her delicate and imaginative love, her purity that makes her always say the right thing. . . . She has neither enemies or critics, so that like an angel she is unendangered by brutality or by 'difficult situations.'" Mrs. Ramsey's "purity" and innocence, however, do at last provoke brutality, from her favorite grandson, Arthur, who has been fighting in Europe. While he has sent her many affectionate letters and says he knows he will find her unchanged when he returns, he finally writes from Germany that he is sending her "the best present" he has yet found for her. When it arrives, it proves to be a long golden braid, cut from the nape of a girl's neck. Shaken, Mrs. Ramsey says aloud, "How unfriendly, Arthur," but through the "present" his message comes to her, "There's a war on, hadn't you heard?"

"The Hope Chest" (1947) portrays the painful loneliness of an irascible, impossible spinster, Miss Rhoda Bellamy. Despite her parents' wealth and social position, her debut into Boston society had been such a fiasco and such a "sensational" miscarriage that the family moved to Maine, her mother dying soon thereafter. There, on Christmas Eve of her eighty-second year, her need for human love brings Miss Bellamy to extort a kiss from a small boy in exchange for buying from him a homemade Christmas wreath. As she lies in bed on Christmas morning remembering where the wreath that disfigures her elegant wallpaper has come from, her thoughts reveal that her loneliness results from her own overbearing arrogance—possibly the cause of her disastrous debut, certainly the cause of her unnatural attachment to her father, who through their long years together had been her only "beau." At last, she remains true to her lifelong nature and uses her cantankerousness to hide her deep hurt, which she lies nursing "like a baby at a milkless breast, with tearless eyes."

Equally cantankerous, and sadistic, eighty-year-old Isobel Carpenter, in "Life Is No Abyss" (1952), spitefully lives in the poorhouse in order to cause as much pain as possible to her Cousin Will for losing her fortune in bad investments. Isobel is also a spinster; she proclaims, "I was too good to get married. . . . I was too good and too rich." Her insistence on staying in the poorhouse, despite numerous and frequent offers by various wealthy cousins for her to live in their homes, contrasts grotesquely—even evilly—with the hopelessness of those who are there because they have no choice. In the large ward which Lily Holmes, Isobel's twenty-year-old cousin, can view from Isobel's bedside, "every bed—and there were four long rows of them—was occupied by an ancient, twisted woman; the humps of their withered bodies under the seersucker coverlets looked truncated and deformed like amputated limbs or mounds of broken bones, and the wintry faces that stared from the stingy pillows had lost particularity; among them it would have been impossible to determine which was primarily bleak or mean or brave or imbecile, for age and humiliation had blurred the predominant humor and had all but erased the countenance." Closer by, Isobel's roommate Viola, a blind, perhaps mentally defective, woman presents to Lily a "generic face . . . a parody, the scaffolding of ageless bone; it was an illustration, a paradigm of total, lifelong want."

Lily, an orphan, penniless herself, but a ward of Cousin Will, is taunted by Isobel that she too will wind up in the poorhouse: "The lack of money is everything.... The lack of money is the eternal punishment." Isobel's total disregard of the genuine pain and suffering of the other inmates of the institution is revealed in her taunt. Lily, who has felt herself "drowning" as Isobel has dispassionately described the screams of dying old people, turns finally on Isobel and in doing so accurately describes the old woman: "You are a vulture! You haven't got a drop of love in you!" Privileged herself, however, Lily's thoughts of the paradoxical situation she has viewed between her hateful, spiteful old cousin and her roommate Viola, whom Lily thinks is the "only person who has love . . . who can't take anything and can't give anything," are rapidly erased by the sight of her favorite beau waiting for her return. Life is, after all, no abyss—for the privileged few.