Ethan Frome
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✒ Author | Edith Wharton |
📖 Pages | 187 |
⏰ Reading time | 6 hours |
💡 Originally published | 1911 |
🌏 Original language | English |
📌 Type | Novels |
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I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office.
If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself 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 was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain.
There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.
I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.
“He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago come next February,” Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses.
The “smash-up” it was — I gathered from the same informant — which, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome's forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office window.
He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating.
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