A curious document, long dormant in my files, nearly as old as The Paris Review itself; the young author, irritated by causes now beyond his recall, seems to be parodying what he sees as an all too typical New Yorker story in the 1930s, full of slant family feeling and foreign phrases. —J.U.

 

Imogene pressed her face against the window, making a lozenge of cold wetness on her left cheek. It was raining. Great gray streamers hung from the sky, in mourning for an angel. Today was the day Aunt Ula came, with her stiff carapace of black and her face framed in a square of frilly white paper like the fancy muffins Mummy sometimes brought home from the city. Aunt Ula frightened Imogene with her little rectangle of face all pursed up behind the square spectacles with the pink nose guards like baby shrimp. Imogene knew about shrimp from the time Mummy took her to Truro, or Southhampton, or one of those well-thought-of places where everything smelled of salt and prickly bushes.

“Choice, opti…