The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  There was only one nurse in the hospital, and a midwife on another floor. Summoning both, he told them to spread a rubber sheet under Alec, and wash him, and put clean linen on the bed.

  At that time, in that part of France, scarcely anyone had a telephone. The doctor walked down the slope on the far side of Rivabella and presented himself unshaven to Barbara in her nightdress to say that Alec was dead. She dressed and came at once; there was no one yet in the streets to see her and to ask who she was. Eric followed, bringing the clothes in which Alec would be buried. All he could recall of his prayers, though he would not have said them around Barbara, were the first words of the Collect: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”

  Barbara had a new friend—her French widowed landlady. It was she who arranged to have part of Barbara’s wardrobe dyed black within twenty-four hours, who lent her a black hat and gloves and a long crêpe veil. Barbara let the veil down over her face. Her friend, whose veil was tied around her hat and floated behind her, took Barbara by the arm, and they walked to the cemetery and stood side by side. The Webbs’ former servants were there, and the doctor, and the local British colony. Some of the British thought the other woman in black must be Barbara’s Irish mother: Only the Irish poor or the Royal Family ever wore mourning of that kind.

  The graveyard was so cramped and small, so crowded with dead from the time of Garibaldi and before, that no one else could be buried. The coffins of the recent dead were stored in cells in a thick concrete wall. The cells were then sealed, and a marble plaque affixed in lieu of a tombstone. Alec had to be lifted to shoulder level, which took the strength of several persons—the doctor, Mr. Cranefield, Barbara’s brothers, and Alec’s young sons. (Wilkinson would have helped, but he had already wrenched his shoulder quite badly carrying the coffin down the hospital steps.) Molly thrust her way into this crowd of male mourners. She said to her mother, “Not you—you never loved him.”

  God knows who might have heard that, Barbara thought.

  Actually, no one had, except for Mrs. Massie. Believing it to be true, she dismissed it from memory. She was composing her own obituary: “Two generations of gardeners owed their …” “Two generations of readers owed their gardens …”

  “Our Father,” Alec’s sister said, hoping no one would notice and mistake her for a fraud. Nor did she wish to have a scrap of consideration removed from Barbara, whose hour this was. Her own loss was beyond remedy, and so not worth a mention. There was no service—nothing but whispering and silence. To his sister, it was as if Alec had been left, stranded and alone, in a train stalled between stations. She had not seen him since the day he left England, and had refused to look at him dead. Barbara was aware of Diana, the mouse, praying like a sewing machine somewhere behind her. She clutched the arm of the older widow and thought, I know, I know, but she can get a job, can’t she? I was working when I met Alec, wasn’t I? But what Diana Webb meant by “work” was the fine stitching her own mother had done to fill time, not for a living. In Diana’s hotel room was a box containing the most exquisite and impractical child’s bonnet and coat made from some of the white silk Alec had sent her from India, before the war. Perhaps a luxury shop in Monte Carlo or one of Barbara’s wealthy neighbors would be interested. Perhaps there was an Anglican clergyman with a prosperous parish. She opened her eyes and saw that absolutely no one in the cemetery looked like Alec—not even his sons.

  The two boys seemed strange, even to each other, in their dark, new suits. The word “father” had slipped out of their grasp just now. A marble plaque on which their father’s name was misspelled stood propped against the wall. The boys looked at it helplessly.

  Is that all, people began wondering. What happens now?

  Barbara turned away from the wall and, still holding the arm of her friend, led the mourners out past the gates.

  It was I who knew what he wanted, the doctor believed. He had told me long before. Asked me to promise, though I refused. I heard his last words. The doctor kept telling himself this. I heard his last words—though Alec had not said anything, had merely breathed, then stopped.

  “Her father was a late Victorian poet of some distinction,” Mrs. Massie’s obituary went on.

  Will, who was fifteen, was no longer a child, did not look like Alec, spoke up in that high-pitched English of his: “Death is empty without God.” Now where did that come from? Had he heard it? Read it? Was he performing? No one knew. Later, he would swear that at that moment a vocation had come to light, though it must have been born with him—bud within the bud, mind within the mind. I will buy back your death, he would become convinced he had said to Alec. Shall enrich it; shall refuse the southern glare, the southern void. I shall pay for your solitude, your humiliation. Shall demand for myself a stronger life, a firmer death. He thought, later, that he had said all this, but he had said and thought only five words.

  As they shuffled out, all made very uncomfortable by Will, Mrs. Massie leaned half on her stick and half on James, observing, “You were such a little boy when I saw you for the first time at Lou Mas.” Because his response was silence, she supposed he was waiting to hear more. “You three must stick together now. The Three Musketeers.” But they were already apart.

  Major Lamprey found himself walking beside the youngest of the Laceys. He told Mike what he told everyone now—why he had not moved to Malta. It was because he did not trust the Maltese. “Not that one can trust anyone here,” he said. “Even the mayor belongs to an anarchist movement, I’ve been told. Whatever happens, I intend to die fighting on my own doorstep.”

  The party was filing down a steep incline. “You will want to be with your family,” Mrs. Massie said, releasing James and leaning half her weight on Mr. Cranefield instead. They picked up with no trouble a conversation dropped the day before. It was about how Mr. Cranefield—rather, his other self, E. C. Arden—was likely to fare in the second half of the 1950s: “It is a question of your not being too modern and yet not slipping back,” Mrs. Massie said. “I never have to worry. Gardens don’t change.”

  “I am not worried about new ideas,” he said. “Because there are none. But words, now. ‘Permissive.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was in the Observer last Sunday. I suppose it means something. Still. One mustn’t. One can’t. There are limits.”

  Barbara met the mayor coming the other way, too late, carrying a wreath with a purple ribbon on which was written, in gold, “From the Municipality—Sincere Respects.” Waiting for delivery of the wreath had made him tardy. “For a man who never went out, Alec made quite an impression,” Mrs. Massie remarked.

  “His funeral was an attraction,” said Mr. Cranefield.

  “Can one call that a funeral?” She was still thinking about her own.

  Mike Lacey caught up to his sister. They had once been very close. As soon as she saw him she stood motionless, bringing the line behind her to a halt. He said he knew this was not the time or place, but he had to let her know she was not to worry. She would always have a roof over her head. They felt responsible for Alec’s children. There were vague plans for fixing up the cottage. They would talk about it later on.

  “Ah, Mike,” she said. “That is so kind of you.” Using both hands she lifted the veil so that he could see her clear gray eyes.

  The procession wound past the hospital and came to the church square. Mr. Cranefield had arranged a small after-funeral party, as a favor to Barbara, who had no real home. Some were coming and some were not; the latter now began to say good-bye. Geneviève, whose face was like a pink sponge because she had been crying so hard, flung herself at James, who let her embrace him. Over his governess’s dark shoulder he saw the faces of people who had given him secondhand clothes, thus (he believed) laying waste to his life. He smashed their faces to particles, left the particles dancing in the air like midges until they dissolved without a sound. Wait, he was thinking. Wait, wai
t.

  Mr. Cranefield wondered if Molly was going to become her mother’s hostage, her moral bail—if Barbara would hang on to her to show that Alec’s progeny approved of her. He remembered Molly’s small, anxious face, and how worried she had been about St. George. “You will grow up, you know,” he said, which was an odd thing to say, since she was quite tall. They walked down the path Wilkinson had not been able to climb in his car. She stared at him. “I mean, when you grow up you will be free.” She shook her head. She knew better than that now, at fourteen: There was no freedom except to cease to love. She would love her brothers when they had stopped thinking much about her: women’s fidelity. This would not keep her from fighting them, inch by inch, over money, property, remnants of the past: women’s insecurity. She would hound them and pester them about Alec’s grave, and Barbara’s old age, and where they were all to be buried: women’s sense of order. They would by then be another James, an alien Will, a different Molly.

  Mr. Cranefield’s attention slipped from Molly to Alec to the funeral, to the extinction of one sort of Englishman and the emergence of another. Most people looked on Wilkinson as a prewar survival, what with his “I say’s” and “By Jove’s,” but he was really an English mutation, a new man, wearing the old protective coloring. Alec would have understood his language, probably, but not the person behind it. A landscape containing two male figures came into high relief in Mr. Cranefield’s private image of the world, as if he had been lent trick spectacles. He allowed the vision to fade. Better to stick to the blond pair on his desk; so far they had never let him down. I am not impulsive, or arrogant, he explained to himself. No one would believe the truth about Wilkinson even if he were to describe it. I shall not insist, he decided, or try to have the last word. I am not that kind of fool. He breathed slowly, as one does when mortal danger has been averted.

  The mourners attending Mr. Cranefield’s party reached the motor road and began to straggle across: It was a point of honor for members of the British colony to pay absolutely no attention to cars. The two widows had fallen back, either so that Barbara could make an entrance, or because the older woman believed it would not be dignified for her to exhibit haste. A strong west wind flattened the black dresses against their breasts and lifted their thick veils.

  How will he hear me, Molly wondered. You could speak to someone in a normal grave, for earth is porous and seems to be life, of a kind. But how to speak across marble? Even if she were to place her hands flat on the marble slab, it would not absorb a fraction of human warmth. She had to tell him what she had done—how it was she, Molly, who had led the intruder home, let him in, causing Alec, always courteous, to remove himself first to the hospital, then farther on. Disaster, the usual daily development, had to have a beginning. She would go back to the cemetery, alone, and say it, whether or not he could hear. The disaster began with two sentences: “Mummy, this is Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson wants to tell you how he came to drive me home.”

  Barbara descended the steps to Mr. Cranefield’s arm in arm with her new friend, who was for the first time about to see the inside of an English house. “Look at that,” said the older widow. One of the peacocks had taken shelter from the wind in Mr. Cranefield’s electric lift. A minute earlier Alec’s sister had noticed, too, and had thought something that seemed irrefutable: No power on earth would ever induce her to eat a peacock.

  Who is to say I never loved Alec, said Barbara, who loved Wilkinson. He was high-handed, yes, laying down the law as long as he was able, but he was always polite. Of course I loved him. I still do. He will have to be buried properly, where we can plant something—white roses. The mayor told me that every once in a while they turn one of the Russians out, to make room. There must be a waiting list. We could put Alec’s name on it. Alec gave me three children. Eric gave me Lou Mas.

  Entering Mr. Cranefield’s, she removed her dark veil and hat and revealed her lovely head, like the sun rising. Because the wind had started blowing leaves and sand, Mr. Cranefield’s party had to be moved indoors from the loggia. This change occasioned some confusion, in which Barbara did not take part; neither did Wilkinson, whose wrenched shoulder was making him feel ill. She noticed her children helping, carrying plates of small sandwiches and silver buckets of ice. She approved of this; they were obviously well brought up. The funeral had left Mr. Cranefield’s guests feeling hungry and thirsty and rather lonely, anxious to hold on to a glass and to talk to someone. Presently their voices rose, overlapped, and created something like a thick woven fabric of blurred design, which Alec’s sister (who was not used to large social gatherings) likened to a flying carpet. It was now, with Molly covertly watching her, that Barbara began in the most natural way in the world to live happily ever after. There was nothing willful about this: She was simply borne in a single direction, though she did keep seeing for a time her black glove on her widowed friend’s black sleeve.

  Escorting lame Mrs. Massie to a sofa, Mr. Cranefield said they might as well look on the bright side. (He was still speaking about the second half of the 1950s.) Wilkinson, sitting down because he felt sick, and thinking the remark was intended for him, assured Mr. Cranefield, truthfully, that he had never looked anywhere else. It then happened that every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say “No, thank you” or “Oh, really?” or “Yes, I see,” was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec’s span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.

  THE CAPTIVE NIECE

  Without the slightest regard for her feelings or the importance of this day, he had said, “Bring back a sandwich or some bread and pâté, will you, anything you see—oh, and the English papers.” He spoke as if she were going out on a common errand or an ordinary walk—to look at the Eiffel Tower, for instance. A telephone dangled on the wall just above his head; all he had to do was reach. It was true that her hotel gave no meals except breakfast, but he might have made a show of trying. He lay on the bed and watched her preparing for the interview. Her face in the bathroom mirror seemed frightened and small. She gave herself eyes and a mouth, and with them an air of decision. Knowing he was looking on made her jumpy; she kicked the bathroom door shut, but then, as though fearing a reprimand, opened it gently.

  He took no notice, no more than her aunt had ever taken of her tantrums, and when she came, repentant, tearful almost, to kiss him good-bye, he simply held out the three postcards he had been writing—identical views of the Seine for his children in England. How could he? There was only one reason—he was evil and jealous and trying to call thunderbolts down on her head. An old notion of economy prevented her from throwing the cards out the window—they were stamped, and stamps seemed for some reason more precious than coins. “I don’t want them,” she said. Her hand struck nervously on the bottle of wine beside the bed.

  “No, that’s dangerous,” he said quickly, thinking he saw what she was up to. She was something of a thrower, not at him, but away from him, and always with the same intention—to make him see he had, in some way, slighted her. As he might have done with a frantic puppy, he diverted her with a pack of cigarettes and the corkscrew.

  “I don’t want them, leave me alone!” she cried, and flung them out the open window into the court. “This is your fault,” she said, “and now you’ve got nothing to smoke.” But he had a whole carton of cigarettes, bought on the plane, the day before.

  He had to console her. “I know,” he said, “I know. But do bring another corkscrew, will you? I really can’t use my teeth.”

  Oh, she would pay him out! For this, and for the past, and for failing to see her as she was.

  Hours later he was exactly as she had left him—reading, under a torn red lampshade, on the ashy bed. The room smelled of smoke and hot iron radiators. You would not have known that a woman had ever lived in it. The first thing she did was open
the window, but the air was cold and the rain too noisy, and she had to close it again. He did not say, “Oh, it’s you,” or “There you are,” or anything that might infuriate her and set her off again. He said, as if he remembered what her day had been about, “How did it go?”

  She had no desire except to win his praise. “Leget wants me,” she said. “I don’t mean for this film, but another next summer. He’s getting me a teacher for French and a teacher only for French diction. What do you think of that? He said it was a pity I had spoken English all my life, because it’s so bad for the teeth. Funny that Aunt Freda never thought of it—she was so careful about most things.”

  “You could hardly have expected her to bring you up in a foreign language,” he said. “She was English. Millions of people speak English.”

  “Yes, and look at them!” She had never heard about the effects of English until today, but it was as if she had known it forever. She could see millions and millions of English-speaking people—black, Asian, and white—each with a misshapen upper jaw. Like her Aunt Freda, he had never been concerned. She gave him a look of slight pity. “Well, it’s happened,” she went on. “I shall be working in Paris, really working, and with him.” She untied her damp head scarf and unbuttoned her coat. “When I am R and F that coat will be lined with mink,” she said. “Coat sixteen guineas, lining six thousand.” R and F meant “rich and famous.” His response was usually “When I am old and ill and poor …” She remembered that he was ill, and she had not brought him his sandwich. She dropped on her knees beside the bed. “Are you all right? Feeling better?” The poor man lay there with an attack of lumbago—at least she supposed that was what it was. He had never been unwell before, not for a second. Perhaps he had put something out of joint carrying his things at the airport, but that seemed unlikely. He had come with just one small case and a typewriter, as if he were meeting her for the weekend instead of for life.