Earlier this year I purchased “The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.” I had no idea what I was in for. As it turned out the first story I read from her oeuvre was “The Hope Chest.” The story is about a spinster in New England, a woman named Rhoda. She is feisty, proud, a snob, and suffering in unspeakable ways.

Miss Rhoda Bellamy lives on the capital of the past, is unwilling to love anyone, romanticizes her past memories to such an extent that she shuts out her contemporary life as being unworthy of her time and certainly her respect.

When a neighborhood boy comes to her door to she if she will purchase a Christmas ornament for twenty-five cents (the boy’s name is Ernest, by the way, a well-chosen name), Rhoda shuts him down, arguing over price and humiliating the boy.

But finally Rhoda, for unvoiced reasons of her own, finally gives in and says she’ll purchase the boy’s labor of love, but that Ernest must give lonely Rhoda a kiss. Rhoda pays the price agreed upon. The boy, too, keeps his side of the bargain. But rather than opening up to love, instead of loving another, she again retreats, and the story ends with one of the most heart-rending paragraphs I have read in a long time. The paragraph is sheer pathos, the last sentence ending with these words: “she [Rhoda] nursed her hurt like a baby at a milkless breast, with tearless eyes” (119).

If you have a heart, this short story will break it.