The Dead

I HAD JUST turned seventeen, and my mother and I had moved to the lower half of a duplex that had a backyard with a grapevine, where we sat one Sunday morning in October when the leaves were turning, and while she folded the laundry she had dried on the line, I opened the little Dell paperback I had bought from a rack in a drugstore around the corner, Six Great Short Novels, in which the first was called The Dead, by a James Joyce I had never heard of.

I was only an average reader, but I was very sensitive to the music of English prose, and I was suddenly grabbed by the first sentence, which began “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter,” as if it were the opening of a song.

I didn’t know then that the lily was a funeral flower, nor did I know what the story was really about, but the sentences flowed so beautifully I couldn’t