reviewed by Adrian McKinty
Dorothy B Hughes’s “The Homecoming” is the story of three friends: Benny, his ex girlfriend Nan and Jim who has just returned from the Korean War as a hero. It isn’t clear whether Nan and Benny were ever really boyfriend and girlfriend or whether they were an item only in Benny’s mind. Either way, now that Jim has returned, Nan, has dumped the creepy and obsessive Benny and is trying to cultivate a relationship with Jim by having come over for pancakes on the Thursday night when her parents always go out.
The story is told stream of consciousness fashion, through Benny’s POV. It’s an excellent device for this kind of short and fairly quickly into the piece we see that Benny is an unreliable narrator. His take on the situation and especially his perception of Jim is completely out of whack. Yes Jim was the captain of the basketball team and class president but only in Benny’s mind does he have a sense of entitlement or any desire to hurt and humiliate Benny.
Benny exits a street car in an unnamed northern city in the United States with a gun in his pocket. It’s fall and there is a gothic tinge to the air. We are in what Ray Bradbury called “The October Country” when winter is looming on the horizon and the concepts of life and death seem more fluid than other times of the year.
It’s one of Nan’s Thursday Nights but on this particular Thursday Benny has been told that he is not welcome because she’s having Jim over instead. Seething with jealous rage has gone and got himself a gun. His plan is to burst in on Jim and Nan, ideally catch them coitus interruptus and then point the gun at Jim to prove to Nan that he’s yellow and no hero at all. Jim will no doubt break down and cry and beg for his life and Benny will laugh at him and laugh at Nan and, thus satisfied, he’ll leave and laugh himself all the way home again.
Of course this being a noir we know that things aren’t going to work out that way.
Benny gets to Nan’s house and knocks on the door. Jim answers it and couldn’t be more happy to see Benny, an old high school acquaintance (friend is probably too strong a word) from before he went off to Korea. He invites Benny in and tells him to take off his coat and have a Coke with them.
Nan is less pleased to see Benny. Hadn’t he got the message? She specifically told him not to come by tonight.
Take your coat off, sit down, have a Coke, Jim says. This seems to seems to enrage Benny even more. How dare Jim give him orders and offer him a Coke like he was a little kid. Well, little kids don’t carry guns do they?
Benny takes out the gun and before he quite knows what’s happening Nan and Jim are both lying on the floor for some reason. Benny stares at them, at first fascinated and then aghast. He turns and runs out of the house, tears streaming down his cheeks. This isn’t what he wanted to happen. How did all of this happen?
“The Homecoming” reminded me of the classic John Cheever story “The Five Forty Eight”. A secretary working for a Don Draper-ish ad man confronts him as he gets off the 5.48 train from Grand Central. She was the ad man’s forgotten fling and has been shamed and humiliated. She too has bought herself a gun and is going to use it to enact her revenge. But perhaps this is the essential difference between a noir and a non-noir story. When we’re reading “The Homecoming” we know from the first paragraph how it’s all going to turn out. When we’re reading “The Five Forty Eight” we don’t. “The Five Forty Eight,” is also a gothic tale but John Cheever turns it in something more transcendent and rich. What a genre writer must do then is entertain and thrill us within the limitations of the genre. Dorothy B. Hughes does that to some extent. The story was written in the early 50′s and there’s an unfortunate writerly echo of Hemingway and Faulkner in the first few paragraphs, but once she gets that out of her system she tells the story in believable, dark, interior monologue.
What I liked most about “The Homecoming” was its touches of black comedy and Hughes’s ability to keep the tension simmering almost right to the end. But (and this is probably unfairly projecting a twenty first sensibility on a mid twentieth century one) I would have loved to have seen that final scene in the kitchen unfold in a different way: perhaps Benny takes out the gun but is too chicken to use it, or has loaded it incorrectly, or has forgotten to take off the safety or is easily disarmed by the big competent, confident, Korean War vet, Jim.
The interior monologue of a humiliated Benny lying on the kitchen floor while Nan sinks into her new boyfriend’s arms and Jim expresses pity for Benny’s temporary derangement would have maybe been even more interesting than the predictable post execution guilt.
Adrian McKinty is the author of Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, The Bloomsday Dead, The Lighthouse Land, The Lighthouse War, The Lighthouse Keepers, Orange Rhymes With Everything, Hidden River, Fifty Grand, and the forthcoming Falling Glass.
