...Janet snorted with amusement, then twisted around to glance at the electric clock on her bedside table. It was a present from a grateful author of historical romances, and Janet regarded it ungratefully, remembering how muzzy the woman had been on dates and epochs-- once she'd sent Marie Antoinette to a ball with Charles the Second-- and whenever she was corrected, saying, "But the mood is so much more important, I always think." It was typical of her well-meaning muddleheadedness to have chosen an expensive modern clock of the no-hands variety. At that moment, it was either ten minutes after twelve or two o'clock, and Janet plumped wishfully for the latter because she was paid by the hour for copy-editing.

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that was no help--4:13-- having stopped at the hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she'd wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

She had become so adept at shutting off her awareness of people that now that the odd noises had aroused her, she was as restless as someone who's been awakened suddenly, inexplicably, and can't get back to sleep. After deciding it was only 12:10 she wound her watch and thought crossly, How did it get to be so early? The sun feels more like July than October. The soil around the mums will be baked, and just when the buds are starting. A mirage of cracked, parched earth was so menacingly clear she jumped up from the desk just as another burst of noise overhead gave her an added excuse.

--from Open the Door (1966)

I was looking around dreamily. "I worked here twenty-five years ago. In the basement."

"You worked in the basement!" Edward exclaimed. "What did you do-- shovel coal?"

"I was the receptionist. All I had to do was look cordial."

He said it was the first time he'd ever heard of a receptionist being kept in the basement, and he even looked more skeptical when I explained it was Anne Morgan's idea. "You mean J.P.Morgan's sister?"

That was who I meant all right. She was noted for her philanthropies, and as a fighter for women's rights, and I guess she lumped the two together when she founded the New York Working Women's Association and built a combination hotel-clubhouse for members, most of them single women in business. Officially, it was called the W.W.A., but many of the people who worked there referred to it simply as Anne Morgan's Club.

She was a great believer in keeping fit, which is how I happened to be in the basement, sneezing and smiling. The entire Physical Education Department was down there: swimming pool, gymnasium, and locker rooms with billowing serge gym bloomers and grey tank suits as shapeless as ectoplasm. Anne Morgan used the pool sometimes, but more often she just brought visitors down to show them how we were teeming with healthy physical exercise. She was a tall, wide-striding, briskly good-humored woman in hand-knit suits that must have been blocked on a barber pole. she wore her white hair neatly chopped, and when she spoke, at least to minor employees like myself, it was like a cannon firing a friendly salute, boom, boom, boom. In a basement, a cannon sounds louder and longer.

-from "Unmixed Company"

Every Sunday morning, Culbertson McClintock and the strong, agile Johnny would finish up the farm chores early. Then they all piled into the lumber wagon, with a picnic lunch, and went off to spend the day at the little Seceders' church-- a meeting house-- deep in the woods. The Seceders were old style Presbyterians, and their services resembled the early settlers' "meetings." farmers hitched their horses to trees around the grove, and the children played quietly while the grownups gossiped. Boys, their hair slicked down with marrow grease, eyed demure young girls in linsey-woolsey. Sunday School was from ten to eleven; for the next two hours, Elder Slentz hollered and pounded on the pulpit in the tiny church, in a sermon reeking of brimstone for sinners. Johnny, raised in the strict, devout McClintock household, had learned his Catechism, the first four Gospels, and most of the Acts, almost before he could spell. But the long Sunday sessions were hard on even the most docile children, and Johnny, an exuberant normal boy,  got a warning pinch from his aunt whenever he fidgeted.

The picnic bench was a blessed escape, but all too brief. Afterwards, men, women and children went back inside for another hour, or sometimes two, of the Elder's damning the Devil, and offering the Kingdom of Heaven like a bribe for model deportment. Prayers were a droning filibuster to keep Satan at bay. To please his aunt, Johnny, who could carry a tune as well as a tree toad, even sang in the choir.

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

The little fan whirring in the back room of the Thrift Shop was no more adequate for ventilation than a scrawny bird flapping its wings. The only thing it riffled was the sales chart thumbtacked on the wall directly above the fan and kept up to date by the volunteer who had a firmer grasp of arithmetic than any of the other ladies. She had filled in neatly, with black marking pencil, the weekly and monthly figures on the secondhand merchandise sold for charity; the totals for April, may, June and July had shot up so violently it looked as if the ladies had robbed a bank and added their loot to the take.

--Beauty Sleep (1977)

As an example of Mather's talents, Silas tells the rather ghoulish story of a mother who kept grieving because she hadn't had a picture taken of her teen-age son before he died. Six months after the funeral, she was still brooding about it, and a relative said, "I'll bet Mather could do it."

The glass-topped coffin was dug up, and Mather, happy over this interesting challenge, ordered it propped up endwise, against a hitching post. Silas, who was there as a helper, ends the tale, "And you know, he no sooner got a good picture than that corpse crumbled into dust. That kind of bothered Mather. He said, 'I don't think I'll take another job like this-- unless I need the money'."

-- from The Great Oildorado (1959)

When I was a senior in high school in Franklin, Pennsylvania, avant-garde was still only a murky gleam in some foreigner's eye, and Lady Gregory was considered pretty far out as a playwright. What we wanted for our senior class play was a drawing-room comedy, or at least that's what the English teacher who doubled as our drama coach wanted. The fact that none of us on the play-reading committee had ever seen a drawing room, to our knowledge, was no handicap at all. We had the Samuel French catalogue to guide us, and it not only gave clear plot synopses, but even more vital, it told right off how many characters and which sex-- say, 5 m., 9 f. We had more females than males around-- perhaps a chronic imbalance of all amateur theater groups-- so the more f. the better.

I wasn't in the actual cast-- I had a voice which has since been described as having "the timbre of a cuckoo clock"-- but I took a very active part in the production as left-wing prompter. If it hadn't been for me, the heroine, Olivia Dangerfield, would have wrecked one of the most important lines in the play, when she said to her negro mammy, "Old dear, don't forget to feed my doves." This established her character in a flash, showing as it did that although Olivia might behave like a madcap, underneath she was a romantic, well-born Virginia lady, the sort who kept doves to flutter with. Even her saying "Old dear" proved that her ancestors came straight from England.

On opening night the girl playing Olivia read the line as, "Mandy, remember to feed my pigeons," which is not the same thing at all, as I was quick to point out in a carrying tone from the wings. Thanks to my helpful prompting, she had to go back and say, "I mean, old dear, forget the pigeons and feed the doves." For some reason, the audience took this for wit, and laughed harder than they did at some of the real bon mots in the dialogue, such as, "It's the motor car that makes country life possible-- and the Ford that makes it probable."

-- from "A Stage Full of Legs without Bodies"

She didn't look like an advocate of revolution-- black, red, or even white. She looked more like the kind of woman who would clap for Tinkerbell. She was built like a bean pot, but a soft, melted-down bean pot, with short legs and a flattish lid sprouting gray frizzled hair. She was beaming at Chester so nicely, with such a ladylike air, he decided she was merely barmy. One of those barmy old maids of good family that New Englad overproduced. But the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with any crackpots, however harmless. His new public relations man had warned him on that. He turned away and made a show of listening to Four Elbows' windup: "...six lessons in teen-age POISE-- or conversational RUSSIAN made EASY." She folded her elbows to subside.

The fixed-versus-floating-zone belligerents were still muttering when the chairman called eagerly, "Ah, Miss Washburn, there you are, just in time." He didn't add, "to create a diversion," but the thought hung in the air.

--from Heat Lightning (1969)