[In the following essay, Chappell draws attention to the recurring motif of an outsider entering into an insular community, or “pocket society,” in Hoffman's short fiction. As Chappell notes, this theme in Hoffman's stories is often dramatized by episodes of violence and menacing reversals that give depth, suspense, and resolution to his narratives.]

The term pocket society describes a definable aggregate of individual people that possesses recognizable dynamic qualities and important, though often changeable, relationships among its different members. It is smaller than our world or national societies or our body politic, and in the immediate sense it is more important to us because we engage so intimately and continually with it. Our family comprises a pocket society and our professional colleagues comprise another and so do the members of our church; the same is true of a bridge club or a sewing circle or an army barracks. But we rarely think about the natures of these small societies because they envelop us: we are caught up in their webs of multiple tensions and have no way to break clear and discover an objective point of view. We are too much a part of them; they are too much a part of us.

Fiction writers like to take a pocket society as a subject in either the foreground or background. Its workings exhibit fascinating relationships and its attitudes can demonstrate in striking fashion both human community and human solitude. For this reason writers have devised narrative strategies designed to bring to light the various strains and conflicts, passions and affections, hopes and fears that animate such groups. This kind of matter is more or less standard fare for the mainstream short-story writer.

Among these strategies of exposure one of the most useful is to introduce an outsider into the pocket society, a figure whose presence makes overt what was covert, lays bare truths hitherto unknown or unacknowledged, causes the members of the society to take stock of one another and themselves and of the situation they inhabit. The title of Mark Twain’s novella “The Mysterious Stranger” describes the nature of this kind of story—which is a very ancient one indeed. The garden of Eden was a pocket society which remained untested, and therefore unknown, until the Serpent showed up.

William Hoffman is a sturdy traditional short-story writer; his three books of stories, Virginia Reels (1978), By Land, by Sea (1988), and Follow Me Home (1994) are collections I recommend happily to readers of my acquaintance who inquire, in sometimes plaintive tones, “Does no one any longer write solid stories, the kind with plots and themes?” Hoffman does, and in open-handed fashion. His relish for the accessible story line, for thematic clarity, informative detail, strong characterization, and satisfying structure is unmistakable. Almost any page shows his enjoyment of these customary elements of fiction composition as well as his quiet proficiency in their application. He rarely writes what we could call an “experimental” story; he probably feels no need, being so expert in the art of straightforward narrative.

It is his traditionalism, I believe, that draws him to tell this most familiar of stories, the intrusion of an outsider upon a pocket society. His three volumes contain thirty-two stories altogether, and at least nine of them are stories of interlopers. Perhaps five others could be included in this count, but I fear to stretch my description by including such pieces as “Moon Lady,” in which the mysterious stranger who dances naked in the moonlight turns out to be the local postmistress, or “Moorings,” in which an uptown couple from Norfolk charms a poor harbor fisherman to his destruction by tempting him with visions of the easy life.

There is no need to include ambiguous examples because the ones that are clear-cut comprise almost a third of Hoffman’s collected stories. And of these nine stories of intruders no fewer than six have violence as a major element. This fact surprises me. William Hoffman is not a melodramatic writer: even his military novels do not depend upon bloodshed for their emotional force. But, of his short stories “The Spirit in Me,” “The Darkened Room,” “A Walk by the River,” “Tides,” “Night Sport,” and “Business Trip,” all employ violence or the close threat of violence. It is not garish shoot-em-up comic-book mayhem, and Hoffman is not splatteringly graphic, yet violence is indispensably present upon his pages and provides energy and suspense in edgy plenteousness.

He does not always require violence to give force to his stories about interlopers. In “Sweet Armageddon” the intruder upon the lives of the outcast minister Amos and his wife Martha is an old college buddy. His nickname is Whale, and his deed is benevolent in intention rather than abusive; he invites his friend to breakfast at his plush private club. For the straitly religious Amos the meal is more ordeal than treat; he endures it with as much dignity and affability as he can muster. When he returns home from his too-opulent meal he finds his elderly wife sitting lonely at the kitchen table, dealing solitaire with a deck of handsome cards, “perhaps from a sorority or bridge club, a deck from another life.” Amos observes once more that her actions and her setting are unfit for her background, that her unwavering love for him has brought her to a pinched and gloomy existence. “Her fingers were so fragile, made for the holding of roses and fine porcelain.”

This sentence shows Hoffman’s Chekhovian leanings—the intruder stories that lack violence often imply a debt to the Russian master. “A Southern Sojourn” dramatizes the power that loneliness and boredom have upon even a highly educated and well-intended person—and of the sour disruption that can result. In this story an engineer is sent from Minnesota to a small town in Virginia to oversee the installation of a boiler in a new knitting mill. The evenings are long and he tries hard to keep occupied, but so much free time is too onerous a burden. Finally he initiates an affair with a young black woman, a college dropout who is unwilling to let herself be used in this fashion. But she is dreadfully poor, and she becomes not the man’s whore but his paid mistress; the distinction is perhaps a fine one but important to both of them.

Neither is happy with the arrangement, and the woman gives Orson no peace. Once, when he hands her twenty dollars, Eunice says, “You must think I’m choice meat. You must think I’m tenderloin.” There can be no solution to the problem; each of them is already married and, besides, the attraction they feel toward each other is not the kind that good marriages are based upon. Their needs are so different that their hearts could never be consonant. From the beginning they have foreseen the end: Orson will be called away, Eunice will be abandoned. Orson tries hard to see the episode as something different from what it has been. The last time they meet he asks Eunice if she ever came to him for his own sake or always only for the money. She counters by asking the same question: “Did you want me because of me? Or do you think you’re kind and noble?”

“A Southern Sojourn,” like “Sweet Armageddon,” affords no new revelation: the characters only experience an intensification of the knowledge and feelings they have already been living with. When the parting comes for Orson and Eunice, there is no tearful farewell, not even a bittersweet goodbye, but only a laconic acknowledgment of the meaninglessness of their relationship. As he drives away forever, he spots her at one of her daily tasks, burning trash in a wire incinerator. “He stopped the car to wave to her. She didn’t see him, or pretended not to. … She emptied the can, stepped away from the flames, and went inside.”

“A Southern Sojourn” has no resolution beyond this moment of inarticulate frustration: it ends with a stalemate that suggests some of the most uncomfortable aspects of our national race problem. Orson, the Yankee intruder, has only intensified a bad situation that was already in place.

In other stories, however, the intruder can bring about some measure of resolution. In “Tides” a father and son, Wilford and Dave, are taking their sailboat Wayfarer from Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay. Dave has just been graduated from Duke University, has landed a management-trainee position with a bank, and will soon be engaged. All these developments—and especially the latter—relieve some of Wilford’s concerns about his son: “As a child the boy had been frail, allergic to foods, plants, insects. During college he’d become interested in theater and talked of becoming an actor-playwright. Friends Dave brought home had been definitely faggy. Wilford struggled to prevent certain pictures from forming in his mind, though prepared to stand by his son come what might. The filling satisfaction was to have him as he was now.”

This celebratory excursion is interrupted by an intruder, a nasty customer who abducts the pair at gunpoint and orders them to sail him to Baltimore. He means business and, though he knows nothing about boats or sailing, is alert and cunning. He sees through every stratagem that crosses Wilford’s mind and asserts his authority by pistol-whipping the father. When Dave attempts to attack him with a flare gun, his plan goes awry, and the criminal orders the young man off the boat and into the bay to drown. Wilford pleads, offering to exchange his own life for his son’s, but Dave forestalls his father. “To Wilford’s horror, Dave wailed and did a shameful thing. As he begged, he reached to the man’s foot and kissed it. He kept kissing the foot.”

In this moment all the anxieties about his son’s virility come to the fore. Wilford loves Dave, although he is not someone who can speak his emotions openly. “He’d always assumed the intensity of his feelings for the boy would beam out, radiate, make themselves known.” In fact part of Wilford’s purpose in this celebratory voyage has been to try to communicate his feelings. “Perhaps before they headed south again, he could summon words to make the appreciation of his son official.” His doubts about Dave’s masculinity have prevented his opening his heart, and now in this moment of violent crisis these same doubts almost prove the undoing of them both. He watches horrified as his son kisses the gunman’s foot, but he has misunderstood the situation: “Cursing, the man stepped back off balance. On his belly Dave thrust after him and shouted, ‘Grab him, Dad!’”

They overpower their abductor then, and in the struggle Dave loses a front tooth. As he starts to pitch it overboard his father takes it from him, intending to keep it always, the way parents preserve their children’s baby teeth. Wilford goes to correct the boat’s course (“a father’s habit”), but then halts himself and gives control to Dave: “He pulled back and dropped the hand to the throttle, which he pushed full forward. Wayfarer had plenty of water under her and a good man at the helm.”

Unlike “A Southern Sojourn” and “Sweet Armageddon,” “Tides” is a fully resolved story. Its violent climax makes resolution possible. Wilford’s unspoken and largely unconscious uncertainties about Dave come to the surface and are dissipated in one swift triumphant moment, and without this melodramatic incident his doubts might have remained to nag at him for years.

I must say, however, that I do not find the agent of this violence convincing. He seems more a figure from film or television than a real person: “The man wore a Panama hat, a tightly fitted khaki suit, and a maroon tie over a purple shirt. His full black mustache seemed much too large for his face. His skin was sweat shiny, particularly scar tissue curved across a cheek.” His dialogue also sounds stagy: “‘You ever been to Baltimore?’ he asked. ‘You’ll love that whore of a city.’”

Yet elsewhere Hoffman can draw villainous types with broad colorful strokes, characters that loom in the memory as full of menace as when first met on the page. Foremost among them must be Gormer, the snake-handling fundamentalist lay preacher of “The Spirit in Me.” In this story, told from Gormer’s point of view, the intruder is the unnamed heiress of a coal magnate: “She comes from Virginia west to ancestral acres, a jagged country of rock outcroppings and mountains gutted and scarred. She rests in deep shade at the mansion her great-grandfather built, three stories of dungeonlike stone topped by a copper roof which glints in noon sun. She comes with sin.”

In this story it is the point of view that identifies the intruder. The woman of the mansion visits here only in the summers. The land belongs to the company she owns, but Gormer’s church is established on it, “a board-and-batten building hammered together by my father, the roughness of new lumber first against his hands and then against my own.” Gormer helped his father erect the church and has proprietary feelings about the ground it stands upon. He tells the deputy sheriff who has been sent to evict him, “It is my church.” The deputy replies: “You may think it’s yours, but the law says the land and building still belong to the company.” Gormer’s answer is the one he has ready for all such occasions of conflict: “I am an instrument, and the Holy Spirit works through me.”

The author gives us to know that there is something besides the Holy Spirit working through, and within, Gormer. His father, before dying in a mine accident, had instructed his son in his own terrifying religious faith, and his mother has prayed—“Take my boy and use him!”—that her son will follow the ways of his father. His father’s doctrine and the manner of his death and the desperate fervor of his mother combine to shape Gormer’s character and provide the revelation of his vocation:

I am afraid of dreams and the stains on myself. No water washes me clean. That summer I go into the mountain, into the wet blackness of the mine which has the sulphuric smell of the pit. The first day as I work setting locust props to hold the roof, a blue light flashes before me and cracks like a thousand whips. All the hair is singed from my body. I am thrown on the haulway floor among gobbets of coal. The whips crack through the mine, and a voice says, “You are my instrument!”

Gormer is, of course, the most unreliable of narrators. The experience he recounts is real to him, including the singeing of his hair, and so he is unable to know how powerfully his upbringing informs all his perceptions. Other factors besides overbearing parents and cramped religious thoughts are also in force. He has absorbed, all unknowingly, his father’s envy of the mine owners: “‘They was common once!’ my father rages when they arrest him because of snakes. ‘The old man didn’t have a pisspot when he first come to these mountains. My grandfather fed him. He’d have starved the winter withouten my grandfather’s hog and hominy!’”

Gormer is so sexually repressed that in one quick episode he badly injures a tipsy woman who tries his virtue, and he is so abysmally lonely that he takes his highly dangerous church companions to be his “children”:

Now I have children of my own, not from a wife, but from the Spirit. I feed and treat them tenderly. They lie among clean curls of wood shavings which rustle slightly. During spring and summer I harvest young rabbits hanging in my snares.

My children know me, the heat of my hand, and they raise their heads when I lower meals to them. They know my fingers when I lift them from their box. I hold them as gently as wafers.

Gormer never speaks explicitly of the contrast between his own miserable way of life and that of the coal heiress, but Hoffman makes clear the savage envy that possesses him. The heiress is a widow whose husband died in war, and the other citizens of the settlement praise her civic-minded charity in full chorus. When one of them recalls that she helped the town to get water, Gormer responds, “It is not the water of life.”

The episode that brings the story to its climax is one of sexual jealousy. A fair number of Hoffman’s stories are concerned with voyeurism: sometimes the voyeurs are only passive watchers; sometimes they harbor inimical plans. “The Darkened Room,” “Lover,” “Moon Lady,” “Altarpiece,” and “Boy Up a Tree” all contain voyeurist scenes and some other stories refer to the act. In “The Spirit in Me” the situation is strongly and deliberately reminiscent of the biblical story of a paradise with its natural free sexuality and an embittered intruding serpent. In the final scene the widow has invited a male guest to dinner and for a swim in the lake afterward. Gormer watches for a long while, then goes to his house, returns with a package, and begins to watch once more:

I return with the box. Biting my breath, I kneel among laurel. She and her man swim in from the float. They rise from the dark water. She starts away, but he reaches after her and draws her. In moon I see him put his mouth on her. She holds to him as he unties the top of her bathing suit. He kisses her, and I whimper. Her hands are splayed over his temples. He lifts and carries her into the bathhouse. A click causes lights to die.

Because the story is told from Gormer’s point of view and because his range of vision is so excruciatingly narrow, “The Spirit in Me” offers little room for a reader to gain perspective upon the situation as a whole. The villagers with their litany of praise for the woman give some broad notion of what she is actually like, yet Gormer’s outlook is so dark and tainted and intense in expression that it is hard to stand back from it. But one remark of Gormer’s tells more about him than any amount of authorial exposition ever could: “He kisses her, and I whimper.”

That is a master sentence. It readies us for the sudden ending in which Gormer secures all the exits of the bathhouse while the amorous couple is inside. He also cuts off the electric power and then accomplishes his plan: “Kneeling on the steps, I lovingly feed my children through the doorway. They flow off my palms into darkness.”

Figures like Gormer are hardly uncommon in southern literature and have been limned with wonderful skill by Davis Grubb, Harry Crews, Madison Jones, and other writers. But I think no one has done the job so deadly—and with such deft economy—as William Hoffman. “The Spirit in Me” is a nightmare as deep and dark as they come, but it finishes in six thousand words.

In fact few of Hoffman’s stories are much longer than seven thousand words, and sometimes it appears a bit of a struggle for him to fit everything in. “A Walk by the River” feels cramped; too many incidents are crowded into a small space—an encounter with a young tough and his hippie girlfriend, a theft by the young man, a sexual episode between the girl and the protagonist, the return of the tough and a subsequent robbery, a shift in the allegiance of the girl.

But for the most part the lengths of these stories are satisfying. They are lean but strong, moving with quick grace from point to point; and, when they conclude, the figure they have shaped is a memorable and pleasing one. Much of their impact derives from brevity; I have mentioned Chekhov as a writer who surely has influenced Hoffman, and I think he must also have read his Kipling.

“Business Trip” is as laconic a story as “A Walk by the River” and, though it presents fewer incidents, contains as many surprises. These are skillfully handled and do not tumble over one another; they proceed in a smooth taut sequence, and the final revelation they produce is not only—as it first seems—of one character’s hidden nature but of a much larger situation.

Here the pocket society contains only two individuals, the unnamed narrator and his friend Harrison, a couple of grouse hunters inordinately proud of their sport and extremely protective of their partnership. They have built a purposefully spartan cabin in the mountains, and when they invite other hunters as their guests—something they very rarely do—they subject them to a ruthless scrutiny: “We were damn particular whom we invited each season. First, a guest had to be serious in his pursuit of grouse. Second, he had to see hardship as homage to the king of birds. Third, the guest needed to find joy in adversity. Last, in the high country truth prevailed.” This latter demand is pompous and hubristic, and it is fulfilled in a way the narrator could never have predicted or desired.

Circumstances alter cases, the old saw tells us, and the two men are forced to bend their rules to accommodate the presence of Clarence Toller. Clarence is a soft effeminate man and evidently no Nimrod, but he is the employer of Trixie, the narrator’s wife, and she prevails upon her husband to allow Clarence to accompany the two men as their unwanted third partner. The deciding factor is money. Trixie’s job is necessary for the couple to keep up the standard of living to which they are accustomed; she has been forced to work for their second income because of an unwise political choice on the part of her husband, and now she must keep in the good graces of her boss.

The trial is a sore one. Clarence is everything a macho man is not. Harrison suspects him of being “a fag”: “Manicured nails, silver cuff links, cologne, and way he sits with his knees together. Bet he has pajamas.” Clarence has indeed brought pajamas, “white with red horizontal stripes, and a bathrobe and slippers.” He is also frightened of the woods in the nighttime, anxious about the lack of indoor plumbing, careless with firearms, clumsy-footed, squeamish about killing game, and unable to eat the birds the others shoot. They are not surprised when on the second day Clarence chooses not to go into the woods but to stay in the cabin reading a book related to his antique business, Early American Silversmiths.

But on the third day he decides to try his sporting skills once more, and when the other two split up to pursue separate trails he accompanies the narrator. Almost as soon as they are alone Clarence brings up the subject of Trixie. She has been thinking, he says, of leaving her husband. The narrator counters that this is no one’s business but their own and then, while they are bickering, a grouse breaks cover. Clarence brings it down with an expert shot. He turns out to be an excellent marksman, and explains why: “Daddy had all us redneck boys out hunting as soon as we could carry guns. When you killed your first buck deer, they made you cut its throat, gut it, and drink a cup of hot blood. I puked and shamed Daddy.” He parries the narrator’s astonishment with an offhand but sinister comparison. “‘Shooting’s like screwing,’ he said and winked. ‘You don’t forget.’”

Expert though he is, Clarence does not enjoy hunting game. He calls the sport “ridiculous macho madness,” a “Daniel Boone charade.” He reveals that his true purpose in joining the hunters was to find an opportunity to broach the subject of Trixie. “She needs tender loving care, which you’re not providing,” he says. “So I’ve been hoping to help.” When the narrator balks at this suggestion Clarence attempts a more urgent sort of persuasion, raising his Browning in the other’s direction. The narrator is taken aback but not finally convinced: “You’re being stupid, I told myself. Afraid of a damn queer.” But now the possibilities become precipitately less moot. “You read about hunting accidents,” Clarence says. “Harrison would be an expert witness. He’d honestly testify what a booby I am in the woods. What jury would convict a sweetie like me?”

The climax of “Business Trip” is a gunshot. No one is injured, but the narrator is so frightened by it that he wets his pants and flings his Parker shotgun away. Clarence retrieves it: “‘Look what I found!’ he called. ‘Look what I discovered!’” He has discovered not only the expensive firearm but the narrator’s true character. Finding that he has become prey, the narrator disgraces himself. His bravado does not sustain him, and it is clear that he is going to lose everything to a hunter whose like he has never imagined until now. The episode has fulfilled in brutally ironic fashion the most stringent demand of this pocket society: “Last, in the high country truth prevailed.”

In “Business Trip” the society intruded upon by Clarence consists of only two men; but Hoffman has written at least two stories, “The Darkened Room” and “Night Sport,” in which the pocket society is made up of a single individual. Both of them are tense and disturbing stories and both contain thieves as characters. And in both cases it is the thief who comes to understand—too late—the meaning of the situation he has intruded upon.

“Night Sport” tells the story of a veteran named Chip who has lost his legs in the war in Vietnam. The chronicle of his embittered withdrawal from his family, his marriage, and the other comforts of social life is powerful, and all the more so because Chip’s motives are not revealed until the end of the story. He has moved out of his well-off parents’ rather grand house in order to live in squalor in a small cottage that he purposely allows to acquire a rundown, almost abandoned, appearance. Chip arms himself with an L. C. Smith double-barreled shotgun and a generous supply of whiskey, and he waits.

At last an intruder arrives; it is a student from St. John’s, “a private Episcopal academy housed in Georgian buildings and surrounded by grassy playing fields.” The school is expensive and traditional: “Life was patterned after English schools, with emphasis on classics and sports. Students wore blazers and ties to class. … Young southern gentility being formed.” The student, whose name is Tommy, has broken into Chip’s house in order to steal a television set; the act is part of his initiation into John’s Jesters, one of the clubs of the academy. “Initiation requires you have to do something daring,” Tommy explains.

His explanation and the long, deceptively friendly chat that follows it take place at gunpoint. Chip keeps his shotgun trained upon the young man as they discuss campus clubs, tea dances, track and field sports, and Tommy’s future plans. He intends, he says, to go to Washington and Lee; Chip had attended the University of Virginia after his years at St. John’s. The conversation is polite, almost casual, according to Tommy’s perception. He cannot know what Chip is thinking:

The little prick felt not only sorry for but also superior to him. The new breed, chosen, anointed, the slickies he saw tooling around the shopping center with blue-lidded piglets in rock-pounding Corvettes and TransAms. Righteous little farts. He stiffened as if about to be scorched again by the great exploding truth. Goddamn it, they ought to have to learn. They needed to know.

Chip, like the religious zealot Gormer in “The Spirit in Me,” believes that he is possessed of a truth, one great truth that gives him justification to make it known to the world in any way he pleases and at whatever cost. Chip’s fervor is not religious, but it is a Faith nonetheless and, like Gormer’s, twisted into a terrifying shape by his own personal history—by the things he has witnessed and experienced, by the loss of his legs.

The rundown cottage Chip inhabits has been a trap; he had expected that he would snare a thief with it, though he had not expected his prey to be so thoroughly to his desires. With his reminiscent palaver about prep school and college Chip has only been toying with Tommy in cat-and-mouse fashion. He starts to send him away with a knife that would prove the boy had actually effected entry into his house, then casually calls him back at the last moment:

As Tommy turned back politely, Chip thumbed the L. C. Smith’s safety forward. He pulled each trigger, firing the right barrel for Tommy’s left calf, the left barrel for the right—the shells No. 8 dove load. Tommy’s legs were slammed back beneath him. The front length of his body pounded the floor. … Dazed and astonished, he lifted his head, and the terrible knowledge, the deepest knowledge of all, flowed into those honey brown eyes. He struggled to right himself, howled, and now sobbing on his side, hinged forward as if exercising to touch his toes.

After shooting Tommy, Chip tosses his victim a towel, then telephones the sheriff’s office to send an ambulance, saying that his house has been broken into by a knife-wielding burglar. After telephoning he raises the window blinds, turns on the house lights and gathers in the mail and newspapers he has allowed to accumulate on his front porch. He obliterates any impression that his house could have been intended as a baited trap. Like Clarence in “Business Trip” Chip gets away with his deception scot-free.

Many stories that deal with one-person societies are contes cruels. Edgar Allen Poe is the master of this subgenre, and “Night Sport” has more than an incidental resemblance to “The Cask of Amontillado,” while “The Spirit in Me” is similar to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “Your Hand, Your Hand,” Hoffman’s story of alcoholic nightmare, is a bit reminiscent of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” These are all stories in which a single individual is subjected to an ordeal he can neither comprehend nor escape. Their unfolding is hypnotic, their power horrific; they reveal the utter helplessness of the isolated person.

“The Darkened Room,” one of Hoffman’s strongest tales, is a neat variation upon the familiar theme. It begins, however, in a most familiar way: a young thief named Richard is spying on the house of a rich but dissolute married couple. Like the murderous preacher Gormer, his malevolent motives stem from his family history. His mother is a nurse, bitter and resentful of the husband who deserted her. “He cheated me out of my life,” she tells her son. “He lied, robbed, and gave me a filthy disease from his whoring. … I wish I’d killed him. I wish I could put a knife in him right now. And you’re like him!”

After meticulous preparation, and making sure that the couple has left to attend a party, Richard breaks into the house he has surveilled. Hoffman builds considerable suspense as he describes the thief’s progress from room to room, his careful caution and his skillful stealthiness. But, like Tommy in “Night Sport,” Richard has entered a situation he does not understand. When he enters the last room, the one he has observed to remain dark always, the light snaps on, and he finds himself in the presence of “a fat old woman who sat in a high-backed cane wheelchair.” She is a figure so grotesque that Richard tastes vomit and almost fouls himself:

She bulged through the chair, and it dented her flesh. She wore a black, powder-dusted dress which had buttons missing, cotton stockings, and flowered bedroom slippers that were split along the seams. Her legs were as thick at the ankles as at the knees. Creases of her face were so deep they held shadows. On her neck was a growth which lapped over her white collar to her shoulder. Kinks of white hair grew from a flaking pinkish scalp. Her green eyes had chips of darkness in them. Her lashes and brows were gone.

This strange woman is the mother of the houseowner. She is the house’s shameful secret, hidden away from all eyes but the family’s. Richard’s presence does not alarm her; she has seen too much hardship and violence in her life to be frightened of the young man, even when he threatens her. She tells Richard that he is unable to harm her. “You won’t because you’re afraid to touch me.”

It is the daughter-in-law who keeps her prisoner, the old woman says. “She’s afraid people will find out we’re coal camp. When her friends come, she pulls the blinds and locks me in the room. She won’t let me eat at the table evenings. Why she’d turn to rain water and sink right into the ground if any of her new friends saw me.”

She sides with Richard, but her motive is not revenge upon her son and daughter-in-law. Her allegiance to the thief seems instinctive, a bonding, a recognition of their kinship as shameful, miserable outcasts. The difference is that she is old and has seen through the sham of false expectation while Richard still hopes to elude his destiny. When the couple returns home from the party, quarreling loudly and drunkenly, she helps Richard escape capture in the house. Pride is the reason she gives for her action: “I know I’m a burden. … What a lot of people want is for me to drop into the grave, but it’s my pride. I won’t. Us Ackers has always been gifted with long life. I’ll sit here in the dark and not show myself, but I won’t go to the grave till a team of angels’ mules drags me. It’s my pride.”

Under the hoard of parvenu wealth sits this grotesque and abandoned old woman, the dirty secret at the heart of a false economy, hidden away out of shame and because of her origins that have long been denied but cannot be forgotten. She is there always to remind her son and daughter-in-law of what and who they really are; she is the truth they cannot forget but cannot admit, and it is the hypocrisy in regard to her existence that is ruining the lives of the married couple. All their money cannot rescue them.

This is the truth the old woman knows and has tried to demonstrate to the housebreaker. But Richard is too young; his situation is so desperate that he must harbor some hope, however forlorn and blind. He evades arrest and makes his way home by a circuitous route and goes to bed. He is safe from the police and from that unhappy house with its terrible secret. But he is not safe from the torture of hope, and sleep does not come easy: “He finally slept but woke during the night. It was still snowing. The horn of a coal tug sounded along the muffled river valley. His right hand was stretched up into darkness toward the hill as if there were something for him to touch.”

Here, as in other stories by Hoffman, the traditional trope of microcosm-macrocosm is put to good use. The situation that Richard discovers when he breaks into the pocket society of a wealthy house mirrors in small a larger situation in our national society. The microcosm-macrocosm metaphor is well suited to the tradition-oriented talents of Hoffman, and he employs it with admirable results in such stories as “Indian Gift,” “Smoke,” “A Southern Sojourn,” “Sea Treader,” and still others.

But it is perhaps most effective in those stories in which an act of violence exposes, as suddenly and nakedly as switching on a klieg light, the underlying scaffolding of the framework in which it takes place. Inexpressive in itself, the violence brings to sharp focus truths that go generally unremarked in the course of daily events. Whether sordid, as in “The Darkened Room,” or pitiable, as in “Night Sport,” or sanguine, as in “Tides,” these truths are always present; but they require the right kind of incident to lend them the force of revelation. It is difficult to give violence in fiction any stronger value than the merely sensational, but William Hoffman is more than equal to the task. It is one, among many others, that he has mastered.