The Eclipse by Elizabeth Spencer, 1958
The magic trick:
Keeping a desperate desire for change at the center of the story
It’s eclipse day here in the United States, so of course we have to read a good eclipse story. Sadly, this story is about a more metaphorical eclipse. The sun and moon don’t really feature in this one. But the good news is it’s Elizabeth Spencer at the height of her powers. So sit back and enjoy.
Weston is a 12-year-old boy who lives in Stilton, Mississippi. He has fallen in love with his voice instructor, who herself has perhaps fallen in love with his voice as a means to renew her hopes of having an excuse to leave her godforsaken hometown and find her way back to the big city after her own singing music appears to have flamed out.
If that seems like a lot of dynamics to keep track of, it’s because it is. This is a dense story that never feels overstuffed.
Crucially, the idea that remains at the center of all the changing feelings is Weston and Miss Eavers’ separate but similar desires to somehow transcend Stilton. The reader feels that desperation in nearly every sentence.
And that’s quite a trick on Spencer’s part.
The selection:
Going back, they had the lounge car to themselves most of the time. It got dark along about Picayune, and Weston tried to think of some way to make Miss Eavers not notice when they got to Stilton, so that they could go on to Chicago together in the coach with the soft gray rugs and the green easy chairs and the lamplight, and maybe never come home at all. She could change her printed silk dresses for black satin. It would be as simple as that. Better and better night clubs would pay them more and more. They would show the world.
The fact was that the director of the boys’ choir had not chosen Weston after the audition; worse still, he had not mentioned him at all. But now that Weston and Miss Eavers had been through every detail of the audition four times and had decided that the director, if not actually crazy, knew nothing about his job, he began to feel drowsy and comforted, just as he felt after any other kind of misfortune – a bump on the head, for instance. In Chicago, they all came around to his dressing room to shake hands.
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