The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  “We saw three firemen in gleaming metal helmets. They fished for him so languidly—the whole day was like that. They had a grappling hook. None of them knew what to do with it. They kept pulling it up and taking the rope from each other.”

  “They might have been after water lilies, from the look of them.”

  “One of them bailed out the boat with a blue saucepan. I remember that. They’d got that saucepan from the restaurant.”

  “Where we had lunch,” he said. “Trout, and a coffee cream pudding. You left yours.”

  “It was soggy cake. But the trout was perfection. So was the wine. The bridge over the river filled up slowly with holiday people. The three firemen rowed to shore.”

  “Yes, and one of them went off on a shaky bicycle and came back with a coil of frayed rope on his shoulders.”

  “The railway station was just behind us. All those people on the bridge were waiting for a train. When the firemen’s boat slipped off down the river, they moved without speaking from one side of the bridge to the other, just to watch the boat. The silence of it.”

  “Like the silence here.”

  “This is planned silence,” she said.

  Riri played back his own voice. A tinny, squeaky Riri said, “ ‘Go, went, gone. Eat, ate, eaten. See, saw, sen.’ ”

  “ ‘Seen’!” called his grandmother from the balcony. “ ‘Seen,’ not ‘sen.’ His mother made exactly that mistake,” she said to the old man. “Oh, stop that,” she said. He was crying. “Please, please stop that. How could I have left five children?”

  “Three were grown,” he gasped, wiping his eyes.

  “But they didn’t know it. They didn’t know they were grown. They still don’t know it. And it made six children, counting him.”

  “The secretary mothered him,” he said. “All he needed.”

  “I know, but you see she wasn’t his wife, and he liked saying to strangers ‘my wife,’ ‘my wife this,’ ‘my wife that.’ What is it, Riri? Have you come to finish doing the thing I asked?”

  He moved close to the table. His round glasses made him look desperate and stern. He said, “Which room is mine!” Darkness had gathered round him in spite of the sparkling sky and a row of icicles gleaming and melting in the most dazzling possible light. Outrage, a feeling that consideration had been wanting—that was how homesickness had overtaken him. She held his hand (he did not resist—another sign of his misery) and together they explored the apartment. He saw it all—every picture and cupboard and doorway—and in the end it was he who decided that Mr. Aiken must keep the spare room and he, Riri, would be happy on the living-room couch.

  The old man passed them in the hall; he was obviously about to rest on the very bed he had just been within an inch of losing. He carried a plastic bottle of Evian. “Do you like the bland taste of water?” he said.

  Riri looked boldly at his grandmother and said, “Yes,” bursting into unexplained and endless-seeming laughter. He seemed to feel a relief at this substitute for impertinence. The old man laughed too, but broke off, coughing.

  At half past four, when the windows were as black as the sky in the painting of tulips and began to reflect the lamps in a disturbing sort of way, they drew the curtains and had tea around the table. They pushed Riri’s books and belongings to one side and spread a cross-stitched tablecloth. Riri had hot chocolate, a croissant left from breakfast and warmed in the oven, which made it deliciously greasy and soft, a slice of lemon sponge cake, and a banana. This time he helped clear away and even remained in the kitchen, talking, while his grandmother rinsed the cups and plates and stacked them in the machine.

  The old man sat on a chair in the hall struggling with snow boots. He was going out alone in the dark to post some letters and to buy a newspaper and to bring back whatever provisions he thought were required for the evening meal.

  “Riri, do you want to go with Mr. Aiken? Perhaps you should have a walk.”

  “At home I don’t have to.”

  His grandmother looked cross; no, she looked worried. She was biting something back. The old man had finished the contention with his boots and now he put on a scarf, a fur-lined coat, a fur hat with earflaps, woolen gloves, and he took a list and a shopping bag and a different walking stick, which looked something like a ski pole. His grandmother stood still, as if dreaming, and then (addressing Riri) decided to wash all her amber necklaces. She fetched a wicker basket from her bedroom. It was lined with orange silk and filled with strings of beads. Riri followed her to the bathroom and sat on the end of the tub. She rolled up her soft sleeves and scrubbed the amber with laundry soap and a stiff brush. She scrubbed and rinsed and then began all over again.

  “I am good at things like this,” she said. “Now, unless you hate to discuss it, tell me something about your school.”

  At first he had nothing to say, but then he told her how stupid the younger boys were and what they were allowed to get away with.

  “The younger boys would be seven, eight?” Yes, about that. “A hopeless generation?”

  He wasn’t sure; he knew that his class had been better.

  She reached down and fetched a bottle of something from behind the bathtub and they went back to the sitting room together. They put a lamp between them, and Irina began to polish the amber with cotton soaked in turpentine. After a time the amber began to shine. The smell made him homesick, but not unpleasantly. He carefully selected a necklace when she told him he might take one for his mother, and he rubbed it with a soft cloth. She showed him how to make the beads magnetic by rolling them in his palms.

  “You can do that even with plastic,” he said.

  “Can you? How very sad. It is dead matter.”

  “Amber is too,” he said politely.

  “What do you want to be later on? A scientist?”

  “A ski instructor.” He looked all round the room, at the shelves and curtains and at the bamboo folding screen, and said, “If you didn’t live here, who would?”

  She replied, “If you see anything that pleases you, you may keep it. I want you to choose your own present. If you don’t see anything, we’ll go out tomorrow and look in the shops. Does that suit you?” He did not reply. She held the necklace he had picked and said, “Your mother will remember seeing this as I bent down to kiss her good night. Do you like old coins? One of my sons was a collector.” In the wicker basket was a lacquered box that contained his uncle’s coin collection. He took a coin but it meant nothing to him; he let it fall. It clinked, and he said, “We have a dog now.” The dog wore a metal tag that rang when the dog drank out of a china bowl. Through a sudden rainy blur of new homesickness he saw that she had something else, another lacquered box, full of old canceled stamps. She showed him a stamp with Hitler and one with an Italian king. “I’ve kept funny things,” she said. “Like this beautiful Russian box. It belonged to my grandmother, but after I have died I expect it will be thrown out. I gave whatever jewelry I had left to my daughters. We never had furniture, so I became attached to strange little baskets and boxes of useless things. My poor daughters—I had precious little to give. But they won’t be able to wear rings any more than I could. We all come into our inherited arthritis, these knotted-up hands. Our true heritage. When I was your age, about, my mother was dying of … I wasn’t told. She took a ring from under her pillow and folded my hand on it. She said that I could always sell it if I had to, and no one need know. You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares. After appraising all the decoration, the new owner would undo the knots.”

  “Where is that ring?” he said. The blur of tears was forgotten.

  “I tried to sell it when I needed money. The decoration on the brown paper parcel was disposed of by then. Everything thrown, given away. Not by
me. My pearl necklace was sold for Spanish refugees. Victims, flotsam, the injured, the weak—they were important. I wasn’t. The children weren’t. I had my ring. I took it to a municipal pawnshop. It is a place where you take things and they give you money. I wore dark glasses and turned up my coat collar, like a spy.” He looked as though he understood that. “The man behind the counter said that I was a married woman and I needed my husband’s written consent. I said the ring was mine. He said nothing could be mine, or something to that effect. Then he said he might have given me something for the gold in the band of the ring but the stones were worthless. He said this happened in the finest of families. Someone had pried the real stones out of their setting.”

  “Who did that?”

  “A husband. Who else would? Someone’s husband—mine, or my mother’s or my mother’s mother’s, when it comes to that.”

  “With a knife?” said Riri. He said, “The man might have been pretending. Maybe he took out the stones and put in glass.”

  “There wasn’t time. And they were perfect imitations—the right shapes and sizes.”

  “He might have had glass stones all different sizes.”

  “The women in the family never wondered if men were lying,” she said. “They never questioned being dispossessed. They were taught to think that lies were a joke on the liar. That was why they lost out. He gave me the price of the gold in the band, as a favor, and I left the ring there. I never went back.”

  He put the lid on the box of stamps, and it fitted; he removed it, put it back, and said, “What time do you turn on your TV?”

  “Sometimes never. Why?”

  “At home I have it from six o’clock.”

  The old man came in with a pink-and-white face, bearing about him a smell of cold and of snow. He put down his shopping bag and took things out—chocolate and bottles and newspapers. He said, “I had to go all the way to the station for the papers. There is only one shop open, and even then I had to go round to the back door.”

  “I warned you that today was Christmas,” Irina said.

  Mr. Aiken said to Riri, “When I was still a drinking man this was the best hour of the day. If I had a glass now, I could put ice in it. Then I might add water. Then if I had water I could add whiskey. I know it is all the wrong way around, but at least I’ve started with a glass.”

  “You had wine with your lunch and gin instead of tea and I believe you had straight gin before lunch,” she said, gathering up the beads and coins and the turpentine and making the table Riri’s domain again.

  “Riri drank that,” he said. It was so obviously a joke that she turned her head and put the basket down and covered her laugh with her fingers, as she had when she’d opened the door to him—oh, a long time ago now.

  “I haven’t a drop of anything left in the house,” she said. That didn’t matter, the old man said, for he had found what he needed. Riri watched and saw that when he lifted his glass his hand did not tremble at all. What his grandmother had said about that was true.

  They had early supper and then Riri, after a courageous try at keeping awake, gave up even on television and let her make his bed of scented sheets, deep pillows, a feather quilt. The two others sat for a long time at the table, with just one lamp, talking in low voices. She had a pile of notebooks from which she read aloud and sometimes she showed Mr. Aiken things. He could see them through the chinks in the bamboo screen. He watched the lamp shadows for a while and then it was as if the lamp had gone out and he slept deeply.

  The room was full of mound shapes, as it had been that morning when he arrived. He had not heard them leave the room. His Christmas watch had hands that glowed in the dark. He put on his glasses. It was half past ten. His grandmother was being just a bit loud at the telephone; that was what had woken him up. He rose, put on his slippers, and stumbled out to the bathroom.

  “Just answer yes or no,” she was saying. “No, he can’t. He has been asleep for an hour, two hours, at least.… Don’t lie to me—I am bound to find the truth out. Was it a tumor? An extrauterine pregnancy? … Well, look.… Was she or was she not pregnant? What can you mean by ‘not exactly’? If you don’t know, who will?” She happened to turn her head, and saw him and said without a change of tone, “Your son is here, in his pajamas; he wants to say good night to you.”

  She gave up the telephone and immediately went away so that the child could talk privately. She heard him say, “I drank some kind of alcohol.”

  So that was the important part of the day: not the journey, not the necklace, not even the strange old guest with the comic accent. She could tell from the sound of the child’s voice that he was smiling. She picked up his bathrobe, went back to the hall, and put it over his shoulders. He scarcely saw her: He was concentrated on the distant voice. He said, in a matter-of-fact way, “All right, good-bye,” and hung up.

  “What a lot of things you have pulled out of that knapsack,” she said.

  “It’s a large one. My father had it for military service.”

  Now, why should that make him suddenly homesick when his father’s voice had not? “You are good at looking after yourself,” she said. “Independent. No one has to tell you what to do. Of course, your mother had sound training. Once when I was looking for a nurse for your mother and her sisters, a great peasant woman came to see me, wearing a black apron and black buttoned boots. I said, ‘What can you teach children?’ And she said, ‘To be clean and polite.’ Your grandfather said, ‘Hire her,’ and stamped out of the room.”

  His mother interested, his grandfather bored him. He had the Christian name of a dead old man.

  “You will sleep well,” his grandmother promised, pulling the feather quilt over him. “You will dream short dreams at first, and by morning they will be longer and longer. The last one of all just before you wake up will be like a film. You will wake up wondering where you are, and then you will hear Mr. Aiken. First he will go round shutting all the windows, then you will hear his bath. He will start the coffee in an electric machine that makes a noise like a door rattling. He will pull on his snow boots with a lot of cursing and swearing and go out to fetch our croissants and the morning papers. Do you know what day it will be? The day after Christmas.” He was almost asleep. Next to his watch and his glasses on a table close to the couch was an Astérix book and Irina’s Russian box with old stamps in it. “Have you decided you want the stamps?”

  “The box. Not the stamps.”

  He had taken, by instinct, the only object she wanted to keep. “For a special reason?” she said. “Of course, the box is yours. I am only wondering.”

  “The cover fits,” he said.

  She knew that the next morning he would have been here forever and that at parting time, four days later, she would have to remind him that leaving was the other half of arriving. She smiled, knowing how sorry he would be to go and how soon he would leave her behind. “This time yesterday …,” he might say, but no more than once. He was asleep. His mouth opened slightly and the hair on his forehead became dark and damp. A doubled-up arm looked uncomfortable but Irina did not interfere; his sunken mind, his unconscious movements, had to be independent, of her or anyone, particularly of her. She did not love him more or less than any of her grandchildren. You see, it all worked out, she was telling him. You, and your mother, and the children being so worried, and my old friend. Anything can be settled for a few days at a time, though not for longer. She put out the light, for which his body was grateful. His mind, at that moment, in a sunny icicle brightness, was not only skiing but flying.

  POTTER

  Piotr was almost forty-one when he fell in love with Laurie Bennett. She lived in Paris, for no particular reason he knew; that is, she had not been drawn by work or by any one person. She seemed young to him, about half his age. Her idea of history began with the Vietnam War; Genesis was her own Canadian childhood. She was spending a legacy of careless freedom with an abandon Piotr found thrilling to watch, for he had long conside
red himself to be bankrupt—of belief, of love, of license to choose. Here in Paris he was shackled, held, tied to a visa, then to the system of mysterious favors on which his Polish passport depended. His hands were attached with a slack rope and a slipknot. If he moved abruptly, the knot tightened. He had a narrow span of gestures, a prudent range. His new world of love seemed too wide for comfort sometimes, though Laurie occupied it easily.

  He called his beloved “Lah-ow-rie,” which made her laugh. She could not pronounce “Piotr” and never tried; she said Peter, Prater, Potter, and Otter, and he answered to all. Why not? He loved her. If she took some forms of injustice for granted, it was because she did not know they were unjust. Piotr was supposed to know by instinct every shade of difference between Victoria, British Columbia, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, whereas he, poor Potter, came out of a cloudy Eastern plain bereft of roads, schools, buses, elevators, perhaps even frontiers—this because she could not have found Warsaw on a map. She knew he was a poet and a teacher, but must have considered him a radical exception. She had been touchingly pleased when he showed her poems of his in an American university quarterly. Three pages of English were all he had needed to get past her cultural customs barrier. She kept a copy of the review in a plastic bag, and so far as he knew had never read more than his name on the cover. None of this disturbed him. It was not as a poet that Laurie had wanted Piotr but as a lover—thank God. The surprise to him after their first conversations was that there were any roads, schools, etc., in Canada, though she talked often of an Anglican boarding school where she had been “left” and “abandoned” and which she likened to a concentration camp. “You’ve really never heard of it, Potter?” It seemed incredible that a man of his education knew nothing about Bishop Purse School or its famous headmistress, Miss Ellen Jones. Bishop Purse, whatever its advantages, had not darkened Laurie’s sunny intelligence with anything like geography, history, or simple arithmetic. She had the handwriting of a small boy and could not spell even in her own language. For a long time Piotr treasured a letter in which he was described as “a really sensative person,” and Laurie herself as “mixed-up in some ways but on the whole pretty chearfull.”