Some Luck

by Jane Smiley

“That was a piece of luck, Walter,” said Granny. “But what would we do without some luck after all?”

That was life, as far as Walter was concerned—you surveyed the landscape and took note of what was needed, and then you did it, and the completed tasks piled up behind you like a kind of treasure, or at least evidence of virtue. What life was for Frankie he could not imagine.

Six children, six different degrees of love and respect for her parents, and occasional discussions about exactly in what ways Mary and Otto Vogel deserved what they had gotten.

“Ja, gut, haben die letzten Worte an dieser Stelle nicht gesagt worden, egal was du sagst.”

As if on cue, Walter turned from Andrea and looked at Rosanna, and they agreed in that instant: something had created itself from nothing—a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious. Rosanna wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and sat

reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.”

Mama and Lillian that he loved college, that he was perfectly happy with his part-time job reshelving books in the library, and that he was dating off and on (he did take a girl from Davenport to the Christmas dance, and they looked great in the photograph), he knew they were imagining a life that he was not living. But that was fine.

There was a ghost in him that would someday emerge from those books that he could not yet read, and that, he knew, would be the real Henry Langdon.

“Corporal, here’s what I learned in the war. There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother

“A plane doesn’t have that kind of existence. It’s like a thought. It’s either flying or it’s vanished. It doesn’t linger to haunt you, to make you wonder what you did wrong, to make you ponder your sins.”