William Maxwell

What do you expect from a short story with such a title as “Love”?

It’s not about familial or romantic love. It isn’t about a friendship either.

This is a story about a teacher. Sure, the narrator seems to have been infatuated with the teacher—a young woman named Miss Vera Brown—when he was in the fifth grade.

His nostalgic recollection of her classroom imbues here with a kind of saintliness. She was angelic in his telling.

And then something happens and the boy must learn a difficult lesson about what ends up happening when we have love, give love, are loved.

In this discussion, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides also make mention of Charles Baxter and his ideas of what he calls “the half-known world.”

This is the way we come to know characters in stories. They are only half-known to us. And it's enough. It's necessary.

This is how we know our teachers, after all. They stand before us—fully who they are as teachers.

But who they are and what they do outside of the classroom is not known to us.

And the mysteries inherent in the relationship we have with our teachers take on even more significance in a story like this one by the great William Maxwell.

Find the story in "All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories" by William Maxwell.