The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  “It was a movie,” he said. “Your dream. I saw it, I think, in a movie about an old man. You’ve dreamed an old man’s dream. I’ve looked through the paper,” he said, pushing it toward his son. “There’s nothing about that funeral. It couldn’t have been a funeral. Anyway, not anyone important.”

  “Leave him,” said the mother, patiently. “He dreamed it. There is something you can do today. Take over the dog. Completely. Léopold has him now.” Gérard knew it was his father thus addressed. He held his cup in both hands. “As for you, Gérard, I want a word with you.”

  “Another thing I thought,” continued the old man. “Maybe they were making a movie around there and you got mixed up with the crowd. What you took for a railway was some kind of scaffolding, cameras. Eh?”

  “Gérard, I want you to …” She turned to her husband: “Back me up! He’s your son, too! Gérard, I want you to tell that girl you’re too young to be tied to one person.” Her face was blazing, her eyes brilliant and clear. “What will you do when she starts a baby? Marry her? I want you to tell that girl there’s no money to inherit in this family, and that after Léopold’s education is finished there won’t be a cent for anybody. Not even us.”

  “She’s not really a dancer,” said the old man, forestalling the next bit. “She gives dancing lessons. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I don’t care what she gives. What about your son?”

  Gérard was about to say, “I did tell her,” but he remembered, “I never got there. I only started out.”

  He stopped hearing them. He had set his cup down as his mother spoke his name, and pushed it to the back of the counter. As his father handed him the paper, he remembered, he had taken it with his left hand, and opened it wide instead of carefully folding it, as he usually did. This was so important that he did not hear what was said after a minute or two. He had always given importance to his gestures, noticing whether he put his watch or his glasses to the left or the right of a bedlamp. He always left his coffee cup about four inches from the edge of the counter. When he studied, he piled his books on the right, and whatever text he was immediately using was at his left hand. His radio had to be dead center. He saw, and had been noticing for some time, that his mind was not keeping quiet order for him anymore and that his gestures were not automatic. He felt that if he did not pay close attention to everything now, something literally fantastic could happen. Gestures had kept things controlled, as they ought to be. Whatever could happen now was in the domain of magic.

  II

  The conviction that she was married against her will never leaves her. If she had been born royal it could not have been worse. She has led the life of a crown princess, sapped by boredom and pregnancies. She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines and the autumn smell of their hair, by their froglike movements and their animal wails. She liked them when they could reason, and talk, and answer back – when they became what she calls “people.”

  She makes the girls laugh. She is French-Canadian, whether she likes it or not. They see at the heart of her a sacrificial mother, her education has removed her in degree only from the ignorant, tiresome, moralizing mother, given to mysterious female surgery, subjugated by miracles, a source of infinite love. They have heard her saying, “Why did I get married? Why did I have all these large dull children?” They have heard, “If any of my children had been brilliant or unusual, it would have justified my decision. Yes, they might have been narrow and warped in French, but oh how commonplace they became in English!” “We are considered traitors and renegades,” she says. “And I can’t point to even one of my children and say, ‘Yes, but it was worth it – look at Pauline – or Lucia – or Gérard.’ ” The girls ought to be wounded at this, but in fact they are impermeable. They laugh and call it “Mother putting on an act.” Her passionate ambition for them is her own affair. They have chosen exactly the life she tried to renounce for them; they married young, they are frequently pregnant, and sometimes bored.

  This Saturday she has reunited them, the entire family and one guest, for Léopold’s ninth birthday. There are fourteen adults at the dining-room table and eight at the children’s, which is in the living room, through the arch. Léopold, so small he seems two years younger than nine, so clever and quick that other children are slightly afraid of him, keeps an eye on his presents. He has inherited his brother’s electric train. It is altogether old-fashioned; Gérard has had it nine years. Still, Léopold will not let anyone near it. It is his now, and therefore charmed. If any of these other children, these round-eyed brats with English names, lays a hand on the train, he disconnects it; if the outrage is repeated, he goes in the kitchen and stands on a stool and turns off the electricity for the whole house. No one reprimands him. He is not like other children. He is more intelligent, for one thing, and so much uglier. Unlike Gérard, who speaks French as if through a muslin curtain, or as if translating from another language, who wears himself out struggling for one complete dream, Léopold can, if he likes, say anything in a French more limpid and accurate than anything they are used to hearing. He goes to a private, secular school, the only French one in the province; he has had a summer in Montreux. Either his parents have more money than when the others were small, or they have chosen to invest in their last chance. French is Léopold’s private language; he keeps it as he does his toys, to himself, polished, personal, a lump of crystalline rock he takes out, examines, looks through, and conceals for another day.

  Léopold’s five sisters think his intelligence is a disease, and one they hope their own children will not contract. Their mother is bright, their father is thoughtful (deep is another explanation for him), but Léopold’s intelligence will always show him the limit of a situation and the last point of possibility where people are concerned; and so, of course, he is bound to be unhappy forever. How will he be able to love? To his elder brother, he seems like a small illegitimate creature raised in secret, in the wrong house. One day Léopold will show them extraordinary credentials. But this is a fancy, for Léopold is where he belongs, in the right family; he has simply been planted – little stunted, ugly thing – in the wrong generation. The children at his table are his nieces and nephews, and the old gentleman at the head of the adult table, the old man bowed over a dish of sieved, cooked fruit, is his father. Léopold is evidence of an old man’s foolishness. His existence is an embarrassment. The girls wish he had never been born, and so they are especially kind, and they load him with presents. Even Gérard, who would have found the family quite complete, quite satisfactory, without any Léopold, ever, has given the train (which he was keeping for his own future children) and his camera.

  When Léopold is given something, he walks round it and decides what the gift is worth in terms of the giver. If it seems cheap, he mutters without raising his eyes. If it seems important, he flashes a brief, shrewd look that any adult, but no child, mistakes for a glance of complicity. The camera, though second-hand, has been well received. It is round his neck; he puts down his fork and holds the camera and makes all the children uneasy by staring at each in turn and deciding none of them worth an inch of film.

  “Poor little lad,” says his mother, who flings out whatever she feels, no matter who is in the way. “He has never had a father – only a grandfather.”

  The old man may not have heard. He is playing his private game of trying to tell his five English-Canadian sons-in-law apart. The two Bobs, the Don, the Ian, and the Ken are interchangeable, like postage stamps of the Queen’s profile. Two are Anglicans, two United Church, and the most lackluster is a Lutheran, but which is he? The old man lifts his head and smiles a great slow smile. His smile acquits his daughters; he forgives them for having ever thought him a shameless old person; but the five sons-in-law are made uneasy. They wonder if they are meant to smile back, or something weird like
that. Well, they may not have much in common with each other, but here they are five together, not isolated, not alone. Their children, with round little noses, and round little blue eyes, are at the next table, and two or three babies are sleeping in portable cots upstairs.

  It is a windy spring day, with a high clean sky, and black branches hitting on the windows. The family’s guest that day is Father Zinkin, who is dressed just like anyone, without even a clerical collar to make him seem holy. This, to the five men, is another reason for discomposure; for they might be respectful of a robe, but what is this man, with his polo-necked sweater and his nose in the wine and his rough little jokes? Is he really the Lord’s eunuch? I mean, they silently ask each other, would you trust him? You know what I mean … Father Zinkin has just come back from Rome. He says that the trees are in leaf, and he got his pale jaundiced sunburn sitting at a sidewalk café. This is Montreal, it is still cold, and the daughters’ five fur coats are piled upstairs on their mother’s bed. They accept the news about Rome without grace. If he thinks it is so sunny in Rome, why didn’t he stay there? Who asked him to come back? That is how every person at that table feels about news from abroad, and it is the only sentiment that can ever unite them. When you say it is sunny elsewhere, you are suggesting it is never sunny here. When you describe the trees of Rome, what you are really saying is there are no trees in Montreal.

  Why is he at the table, then, since he brings them nothing but unwelcome news? The passionately anti-clerical family cannot keep away from priests. They will make an excuse: they will say they admire his mind, or his gifts with language – he speaks seven. He eats and drinks just like anyone, he has travelled, and been psychoanalyzed, and is not frightened by women. At least, he does not seem to be. Look at the way he pours wine for Lucia, and then for Pauline, and how his tone is just right, not a scrap superior. And then, he is not Canadian. He does not remind them of anything. None of the children, from Lucia, who is twenty-nine, to Léopold, nine today, has been baptized. Father Zinkin sits down and eats with them as if they were. Until the girls grew up and married they never went to church. Now that they are Protestants they go because their husbands want to; so, their mother thinks, this is what all the fighting and the courage came to, finally; all the struggling and being condemned and cut off from one’s own kind: the five girls simply joined another kind, just as stupid.

  No, thinks the old father at the head of the table: more stupid. At any rate, less interesting. Less interesting because too abstract. You would have to be a genius to be a true Protestant, and those he has met … At night, when he is trying to get to sleep, he thinks of his sons-in-law. He remembers their names without trouble: the two Bobs, the Don, the Ian, and the last one – Keith, or Ken? Ken. Monique married Ken. Alone, in the dark, he tries to match names and faces. Are both Bobs thin? Pink in the face? Yes, and around the neck. They lose their hair young – something to do with English hairbrushes, he invents. The old man droops now, for the sight of his sons-in-law can send him off to sleep. His five daughters – he knows their names, and he knows his own sons. His grandchildren seem to belong to a new national type, with round heads, and quite large front teeth. You would think some Swede or other had been around Montreal on a bicycle so as to create this new national type. Sharon, and Marilyn and Cary and Gary and Gail. Cary and Gary.

  “Nobody cares,” his wife says, very sharply.

  He has been mumbling, talking to himself, saying the names of children aloud. She minds because of Father Zinkin. When she and her husband are alone, and he talks too much, repeats the same thing over and over, she squeezes her eyes until only a pinpoint of amber glows between the lids, and she squeezes out through a tight throat, “All right, all right,” and even, “Shut UP” in a rising crescendo of three. Not even her children know she says “Shut up” to the old man; “nobody cares” is just a family phrase. When it is used on Don Carlos, the basset, now under the children’s table, it makes him look as if he might cry real tears.

  She speaks lightly, quickly now, in English. She sits, very straight, powdered and pretty, and says, in a musical English all her own, not the speech of the city at all, “They say Jews look after their own people, but it’s not true. I was told about some people who had a very old sick father. They had to tie him to a chair sometimes, because he would go downtown and steal things or start to cry in the street. As they couldn’t afford a home for him, and he wouldn’t have gone anyway, they decided to leave him. They moved half the furniture away and the old man sat crying on a chair and saw his family go. He sat weeping, not protesting, and his children slouched out without saying goodbye. Yes, he sat weeping, a respectable old man. Now, this man’s wife gave Russian lessons to earn her living, and one day, when she was giving a lesson to a woman I know, she said, ‘Come to the window.’ My friend looked out and saw an old-fashioned Jew going by. The woman said, ‘That was my husband.’ She seemed pleased with herself, as though she had done what was right for her children.”

  “Was he dead?” asks Gérard. He is always waiting for some simple, casual confirmation about the existence of ghosts.

  “No, of course not. He was just an old man, and someone had taken him in. Some Russian. So,” she concedes, “he was looked after.” But, as she likes her stories cruel, so that her children will know more about life than she once did, unhappy endings are her habit. She feels obliged to add, “Someone took him in, but probably gave him a miserable time. He must be dead now. This was long ago, during the last war, when people were learning Russian. It was the thing to do then.”

  Her children are worried by this story, but perhaps the father has not heard it. He is still eating his fruit, taking a mouthful and then forgetting to swallow. Suddenly something he has been thinking silently must have excited him, for he taps his spoon on the edge of the glass dish.

  “As you get old you lose everything,” he says. “You lose your God, if you ever had one. When you know they want you to die, you want to live. You want to be loved. Even that.”

  His children are so embarrassed, so humiliated, they feel as if ashes and sand were being ground in their skins. The sons-in-law are revolted. They look at their plates. Honestly, they can never come to this house without something being said about religion or something personal.

  “You lose your parents,” the old man continues. “You have to outlive them. Everything is loss.” Before they can say “nobody cares” he is off once more: “No need for priests,” he mutters. “If there is no sin, then no need for redemption. Dead words. Tell me, Father whoever you are,” (he asks the glass dish of fruit) “will you explain why these words should be used?” Muttering – he has been muttering all his life.

  “Oh, shut up,” they are thinking. A chorus of silent English: “Shut up!” If only the old man could hear the words, he would see a great black wall; he would hear a sigh, a rattle, like the black trees outside the windows, hitting the panes.

  The old man shakes his head over his plate: No, no, he never wanted to marry. He wanted to become a priest. Either God is, or He is not. If He is, I shall live for Him. If He is not, I shall fight His ghost. At forty-nine he was married off by a Jesuit, who was an old school friend. He and the shy, soft, orphaned girl who had been placed in a convent at six, and had left it, now, at eighteen, exchanged letters about comparative religion. She seemed intelligent – he has forgotten now what he imagined their life could ever be like. Presently what they had in common was her physical horror of him and his knowledge of it, and then they had in common all their children.

  III

  When the old man had finished his long thoughts, everyone except Gérard and Father Zinkin had disappeared. The small children were made to kiss him – moist reluctant mouths on his cheek– “before Granpa takes his nap.” Léopold, who never touched anyone, looked at him briefly through his new camera and said softly to him, and only to him, “Il n’y a pas assez de lumière.” Their dark identical eyes reflected each other. Then everyone vanished
, the women to rattle plates in the kitchen, Léopold to his room, the five fathers to play some game with the children at the back of the house. He sat in his leather armchair, sometimes he slept, and he heard Gérard protesting, “I know the difference between seeing and dreaming.”

  “Well, it was a waking dream,” said the priest. “There is no snow on the streets, but you say there had been a storm.”

  The old man looked. The white light in the room surely was the reflection of a snowy day? The room seemed filled with white furniture, white flowers. The priest, because he was dressed like Gérard, tried to sound like a young man and an old friend. Only when the priest turned his head, seeking an ashtray, did the old man see what Father Zinkin knew. His interest in Gérard was intellectual. His mind was occupied with its own power. The old man imagined him, narrow, suspicious, in a small parish, lording it over a flock of old maids. They were thin, their eyebrows met over their noses.

  Gérard said, “All right, what if I was analyzed? What difference would it make?”

  “You would be yourself. You would be yourself without eVort.”

  The old man had been waiting for him to say, “it would break the mirror;” for what is the good of being yourself, if you are Gérard?

  “What I mean is, you can’t understand about this girl. So there’s no use talking about her.”

  “I know about girls,” said the other. “I went out. I even danced.”

  It struck the old man how often he had been told by priests they knew about life because they had, once, danced with girls. He was willing to let them keep that as a memory of life, but what about Gérard, as entangled with a woman as a man of thirty? But then Gérard lost interest and said, “I’d want to be analyzed in French,” so it didn’t matter.