"Hinges" by Graham Swift: When Words Have a Role to Play

 Graham Swift, interviewed about his story "Hinges" in the Nov.14, 2022 electronic version of The New Yorker, says it's a story about words and indeed it is.

The tale leads up to the funeral of a father, to be "done" or perhaps "conducted" by a minister unknown to the family before surviving members awkwardly consult with him about the Order of Service and who will say what -- not that anyone really knows what they might say at that point. This makes what is almost always a ritualistic event -- certain words, certain phrases, safe, expected -- even more stilted than might otherwise be the case.

Moreover, it doesn't appear much actually can be said about the deceased father. He spent his working life in a blanket factory in the north of England and apparently much of his subsequent years, with his wife, in a retirement community located in the southern part of the country. Stock homilies -- "he was a family man" -- are about it.

From start to finish, certain words and phrases associated with death and funerals immediately come to the minds of family members and mainly, in this case, to the deceased man's daughter since the story is told from her point of view. There are roles to be played and lines associated with those roles to be spoken.

That's not quite all there is to it, of course. The daughter both wonders why she and others are stuck with some words and she recalls the mother of a childhood friend who wouldn't play the game. This stirs up other memories -- her first crush, on an older man who it appears her mother -- and other women -- might have found sexually attractive as well. Just a hint or perhaps a figment of imagination. But the man, a carpenter who comes to fix a door ("hinges")  also seems to have been a friend of the father, and that for some reason surprises the then-much-younger daughter.  

"I don't think I'm alone as a writer in seeing sex and death as a sort of inseparable combo," Swift says in the interview. Sex and death, heath and humor, humor and sex -- a wheel of narrative in Swift's view.

Swift is English and there is a distinctly English sense of understatement to the story. Most American writers in this day and age would exploit the potentially transgressive aspects of the tale to a far greater extent than does Swift. He simply intimates there may be a skeleton of one sort or another in a family closet and leaves it at that. Which families don't have something in their background that perhaps comes to mind because it can't be mentioned at a funeral as opposed to because it can?

The bottom line: this is a story with which a lot of readers can probably identify, English or not,

A New Yorker Short Story for Our Time by Graham Swift

 Graham Swift's story "Blushes," published in the Jan. 11, 2021 New Yorker, is a tale for our time, not because it is set in the current coronavirus pandemic, but because it is all about the uncertainties of gender.

The protagonist of the story is a lonely, retired doctor who has volunteered to go back to work in the prevailing crisis.  His second wife -- "the love of his life" -- died two years previously and neither marriage resulted in children. And his mother, to whom he was exceptionally devoted, is also deceased.

On the day of the story, as he drives to work, earlier than necessary, along silent suburban roads, his thoughts revert to his childhood as they often do on such occasions.  This time, he remembers an incident when he was 10 years old, sick in bed with his delightful mother stroking a foot or knee as a doctor examines him.  It was just after his birthday party.

The doctor say's the boy's illness is not hard to identify: scarlet fever.

 "Then his mother said, with a sly kind of smile, 'Unless he's just blushing.'"

The doctor, readers are told, "couldn't have known what special meaning this had. If his mother had been given to winking, she might at this point have winked."

After the doctor concludes his examination, declares it a minor case and writes a prescription, he gives some instructions among which is the following:

"As for blushing, young man, I can't cure that. You'll have to take care of that by yourself."

Although Swift's story is appropriately far from explicit in this delicate matter -- we are now back in about 1948 -- the source of the boy embarrassment, or even shame, stemmed from an incident in which his gender identity was called into question when he was teased by a woman who evidently had certain suspicions..

The young man is clearly a "mother's boy." His father, who soon divorces his mother, is depicted as uninterested and there is a hint his mother is unable to have another child -- perhaps the daughter she was hoping for.

His birthday party was in the afternoon of a working day and other mothers were the only grownups. The children were both boys and girls -- the girls and the mothers all wearing "party frocks." While there is no precise definition of a "frock," one can say with confidence that it is a dress that departs from the strictly utilitarian, sometimes significantly. You know one when you see one. It radiates desirable femininity,

The frock his mother wore, for instance, was "a mass of swirling red blooms on white, and in a delicate waft of perfume."

There was a moment "when the mothers all claimed him" and one wanted to have him -- like a piece of cake.   And as she said it, a piece of the cake she was eating fell into the plunge of her cleavage, the neckline of her own floral dress cut low.

"So come on, Jim, you've got to tell us ... which one is your favorite? ... Which party frock?"

Confused -- was the woman talking about just a dress, or a girl in a particular dress? -- Jim doesn't know how to answer and begins blushing.  With relief, he is gently saved from further questioning by his mother.

But his thoughts, about "party dresses, rustling, pressing, whispering around him" left him understanding that "for a moment, he'd been claimed by the women, even made to feel he belonged to them," and "he'd even seemed to see everything through their eyes."

Still driving along, Jim Cole,  ponders what is means to "blush like a girl."  Or a boy. And what about "that vexing question" the woman had put to him? Had it meant "that life itself might be a great choosing of girls. Girls! How delightful. What happiness."

Or, readers might easily suppose, had the woman --a certain Mrs. Simms -- perceived what we might now call a certain degree of gender fluidity within Jim and with her teasing, put her finger on it. Had he picked out a certain frock at the party as a favorite, would the next question have been would he like to wear it? Would he have liked to have been one of those delightful girls, or just like them, seeing the world as they did?"

The look his mother had on her face when she had told the doctor "unless he is just blushing" was meant for him, the boy had realized. She, too, knew and was happy with his latent femininity. It would make him a better person as a boy and a man, she no doubt thought and she was evidently right.

In the usual New Yorker author interview,  Summers is, in effect, asked the wrong question: what drew him to writing a story set in the coronavirus crisis, and in response he talks rather vaguely about ghosts, eventually explaining that "ghost worlds, lost worlds" became the atmosphere of the story.

The interviewer doesn't press him to explain how his character felt drawn into the world of women amid all the frocks, and Summers doesn't himself go there on  his own during the interview. That's a disappointment, but no disaster.

I think one can easily imagine the nature of at least some of the ghosts the author had in mind.