FATIMAS AND KISSES
by John O'Hara, 1966

The 1966 short story "Fatimas and Kisses" is narrated by Jim Malloy, who served as John O'Hara's recurring fictional alter ego. O'Hara began using Malloy—much as J. D. Salinger used the figure of Buddy Glass and Ernest Hemingway used Nick Adams—in his long 1935 story "The Doctor's Son" and continued using Malloy to stand in for him in fictional settings throughout his career, finally telling some two dozen short stories and novellas and one novel, Hope of Heaven, through Malloy's voice and perspective. Although critics singled out the early Malloy-told stories for special praise, O'Hara dropped Malloy as a narrator during the 1940s and 1950s. In their praise of Malloy's affecting narrative style, critics noted the biographical connections between the narrator and author—in 1937, for example, John Peale Bishop drew mistaken conclusions about O'Hara's life from "The Doctor's Son"—making O'Hara leery of his frankly confessional tone. He later overcame this discomfort by having a middle-aged Malloy confess and boast about the long-distant sins of his youth, which is what he does in "Fatimas and Kisses."

A coming-of-age story, "Fatimas and Kisses" concerns Malloy's changing view of Gibbsville, his hometown, from adolescence to young manhood. As a young teenager, Jimmy Malloy sharply observes small but telling traits in the townspeople, a skill he puts to use when he grows up to be the town's slickest newspaper reporter. Between these points Malloy's father's suddenly and traumatically dies. The Malloy household, which had been riding high on a steady stream of income, stability, and love while Dr. Malloy was alive, now struggles to keep its structure and social status afloat. The eldest son, Jim, who is in his late teens, is forced to use his habit of close observation to earn a living.

The title "Fatimas and Kisses" is quickly explained. The story opens as Malloy, age 14, trying to buy Camel and Fatima cigarettes to smoke with his girlfriend, observes that the woman who owns the grocery store where he goes to make the crucial purchase takes a suspiciously long time to wait on him: "They never knew—older people—at just what age you started to notice things like a driverless truck and a husband's absence and a delayed appearance, and put them all together." But Malloy knows now that Mrs. Lintz, the grocer's wife, realizes that he has drawn the correct conclusion from these hints. He knows that she has been entertaining a salesman in the upstairs bedroom while Mr. Lintz is gone, and he accepts the cigarettes for free as the price of his silence. As in "The Doctor's Son," the young Malloy contrasts the relative innocence of his own love life with the sordid assignations of adults.

When he grows up, however, Malloy befriends the grocer, Mr. Lintz, without ever revealing what he knows about Lintzie's wife. One afternoon, without his help, Lintzie catches on and shoots her and another salesman in bed, murdering his two children for good measure. Malloy is the reporter on duty who analyzes the crime scene, proving to the police that Lintzie is deranged and should not stand trial.

The early Malloy-told stories stick closely to a single event or period of his youth and so make their points implicitly, as in the comparison of the adults' secret love affairs with Jimmy's in "The Doctor's Son." "Fatimas and Kisses," however, takes in a long sweep of events and shows Malloy's evolving consciousness. And unlike some later Malloy-told stories, such as "The Man with the Broken Arm" or "Imagine Kissing Pete," Malloy is both present to observe the tale he tells and plausibly enough involved with its plot to justify his presence there. In comparison with his earlier stories, O'Hara also shows restraint in using technical effects in "Fatimas and Kisses."

In the use of dialect, for example, the young O'Hara, pleased with his acclaimed ear for spoken language, overrelied on spelling to convey pronunciation. Lintz had grown up as an uneducated Pennsylvania Dutch farm boy whose speech pattern the younger O'Hara would have taken as an open invitation to wild and imaginative spellings. Here he limits his creative spelling to a word or two per paragraph. Instead of a constant stream of phonetic dialect, which must be appreciated in its totality, O'Hara encouraged his readers to mull over the oddly spelled word, sounding it out in their minds or even aloud, making the rest of Lintz's dialect resonate even more sharply. When Malloy asks him how he came to join the Marines in his youth, Lintz responds, "How I heart abaht the Marines?" A man who pronounces "heard about" like that almost certainly pronounces "the Marines" as "da Mah-reence," but O'Hara effectively leaves the vast majority of Lintz's dialect to his readers' imaginations.

The two main sections of the plot, involving Malloy in his early teens and then in his early 20s, are tied together with consistent plot threads. The early conversation about Lintzie being enticed to join the Marines by a recruiting poster connects with the later murders, in which he uses his Marine pistol and which are inspired by another poster. Lintzie's description of his wife's lover matches a cartoon figure in a beer ad Lintzie stared at every day, which gives Malloy the idea that he is clinically insane.

Malloy explains the economic status of Lintz's store and, at the same time, explains how the store served Gibbsville's social needs. His economic and social examples show the effects not only on Gibbsville but on Malloy personally. The story's second sentence reads as follows:

If you wanted ice cream, by the quart or by the cone, you could get it at Lintzie's; you could buy cigarettes and the less expensive cigars, a loaf of bread, canned goods, meats that did not require the services of a butcher, penny candy and boxed bon-bons, writing tablets and pencils, and literally hundreds of articles on display-cards that novelty salesmen had persuaded Lintzie to put on his shelves and which he never seemed to reorder.

At the same time that this informative catalogue describes Lintzie's grocery, it also includes plot-operative information on the Lintzes' relationship with salesmen. Mrs. Lintz is persuaded into bed, and fairly easily, by a series of salesmen, the last of whom winds up shot to death.

The catalogue also shows Malloy's small but key part in the plot, created by his close observation of the grocery as a middle-class boy whose family preferred to patronize the tonier downtown stores. After the death of Malloy's father, however, the family came to rely on the Lintzes' willingness to keep irregular hours, letting the Malloys and other poorer families stock their meager larders on short notice. Too, the Lintzes are willing to extend credit to poorer families, unlike the middle-class stores. (The garage in O'Hara's "Pat Collins" fills a need similar to Lintzie's store, offering the same no-questions-asked policy to their sometimes disheveled clients, including "semi-emergency" service at off-hours.) Malloy's understanding of the quadruple murder is plausibly revealed to be soundly based because of his previous observations about the Lintzes and their lives. Through a lifetime of close observation of the Lintzes, Malloy is perfectly positioned to narrate their story, combining the necessary involvement with the plot and detachment from it.

O'Hara earned his reputation in the 1930s and 1940s as a writer of oblique, dialogue-laden vignettes, but by the 1960s he had had a change of heart. He was now quite deliberately making his stories accessible to his readers. In a 1963 letter he explained that "having been one of the leading practitioners of the oblique and the plotless, I have recently been putting action back into my stories."

These plots, as in "Fatimas and Kisses," were often preceded by long expository sections. Although plenty of background information about Malloy, the Lintzes, and Gibbsville is given in the first few pages of "Fatimas and Kisses," for example, the first plot element is not introduced until halfway through the story: "One afternoon, after the paper had gone to press and the other reporters had gone home, the phone rang on the city editor's desk and I went to answer it. 'Malloy speaking,' I said." In the 1930s O'Hara would have begun the story there, specifying the time (by inserting after "One afternoon" the phrase "in 1925") and location (substituting "the Gibbsville Standard " for "the paper"). But the development of Malloy precludes such a terse structure. Malloy's importance in the plot, and not simply in its telling, becomes clear in the final few lines after the police chief has accepted Malloy's view that Lintz was insane at the time of the killing:

We walked in silence halfway to Lintzie's, then the chief spoke. "I thought a great deal of your father. What's a young fellow with your education throwing it all away when you could be doing some good in the world?"

"What education? I had four years of high school," I said.

"You were away to college," he said.

"Away, but not to college."

"Oh, then you're not much better than the rest of us," he said.

"I never said I was, Chief."

"No, you never said it, but you act it. Your father was better than most of us, but he didn't act it."

"No, he didn't have to," I said.

Lacking Dr. Malloy's self-confidence, his insecure son will not be happy measuring himself against the challenges of Gibbsville. If he does not leave town soon, he will never know if he could have been more than just the best reporter in the "third class city." He understands that he needs a more adventurous life than Gibbsville can afford him, and he realizes, in the final conversation with the chief, that he has a long way to go to grow up completely.

—Steven Goldleaf