Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome Edith Wharton

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each timeit was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office youmust have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and draghimself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It wasnot so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lanklongitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of alameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachablein his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised tohear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stagefrom Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on hisline."He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago come nextFebruary," Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses. The "smash-up" it was-I gathered from the same informant-which, besides drawing the redgash across Ethan Frome's forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him avisible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive infrom his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I oftenpassed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributinghand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom received anythingbut a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. Atintervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia-orMrs. Zeena-Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address ofsome manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents myneighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at theirnumber and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.