Free 8 Plus 1 by Robert Cormier Page B

suddenly, the meaning of the title becomes clear as the story is being read. I love that kind of surprise in stories and, frankly, I try to write the kind of stories I would enjoy reading.
    There’s a big difference between titling a book and titling a story. For one thing, magazine editors don’t advise me when a title change has been made. I learned about “A Bad Time for Fathers” when I opened the magazine. Book titles are discussed at length, are even researched to see if other authors have used them. The title is usually decided upon long before the manuscript goes to the printers.
    Perhaps I’m sensitive about the subject because my first published novel—few events can compare with the publication of that first novel—was retitled by the publisher. The novel was about a man dying of cancer, and my title had been
Every DayThey Die Among Us
from a W. H. Auden poem which contained the following:
    Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good,
And knew it was never enough but
Hoped to improve a little by living.
    This was such a perfect reflection of the story that I was dismayed when the publisher said my title couldn’t be used. Why? Because it contained the word
die. Die
is a downer. But the novel was about dying. Yes, the publisher said, but we must avoid the word because it would discourage people from reaching for the book. Eventually, the publisher settled on
Now and at the Hour,
which was a reasonable choice, I suppose, because it has a certain ominous ring and it also derives from a Catholic prayer: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.” Thus, it evokes the aura of death without using the word. Clever. But someone else had baptized my child. I vowed to fight for my titles in the future. Which I have done, when given the chance.
    The only other title change in this collection concerns the story that appeared in
McCall’s
as “Another of Mike’s Girls.” Here again, I learned about the change when I turned to the index on the day the magazine arrived. The original title was “Except When You’re Shaving, Don’t Look into Mirrors. “Frankly, I didn’t expect
McCall’s
to keep the original, but how I loved it—and still do.
    “A Bad Time for Fathers” was written when I was feeling sentimental about the imminent departureof our oldest daughter, Bobbie, to college. The trick was to write the story with feeling but without sentimentality. The party in the story never occurred, and the character of the boy friend, Sam, is a complete fabrication, although I myself have been Sam in a thousand manifestations.
    A Bad Time for Fathers
    Probably the party had been a mistake, after all, because it provided a focus for the farewells, a time and place to say goodbye, the kind of thing “The Imp” disliked intensely. (She wasn’t “The Imp” anymore, either, but simply
Jane
, startlingly formal, almost regal at unexpected moments.) Anyway, it had started out as a small gathering of girls, all of them leaving for college or jobs out of town, an informal get-together at summer’s end, with hamburgers and hot dogs, and probably some activity in the backyard—horseshoes (“So square, Dad”), or croquet, which she didn’t consider square at all because she was expert at the game. But it turned into a party simply because Ellen loves to get her hands on a menu and an invitation list and all the rest of it. What we didn’t realize, Ellen and I, was that the party emphasized Jane’s departure. If we had avoided an official event and merely driven her to college on Sunday, then her entrance into another way of life wouldn’t have been so marked, so jagged in our hearts.
    All of which, of course, was much too dramatic for her. And corny.
    “Look, guys,” she said, “I’m only going to college. In Boston. I’ll only be a hundred miles away, for crying out loud.” She called everybody guys. Even girls.
    “A hundred twelve,” I said.
    But she