The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  “Oh, I know,” said Juliette. “The Germans would catch you and shoot you. They’d look for a secret agent all covered with scars. Oh, what a nuisance!”

  Sweet Juliette. Her dark eyes held all the astonished eagerness of a child of twelve. I often think I should want to be back there, with a Juliette still virginal, untouched, saying encouraging things such as “all covered with scars,” but at the age I am now it would bore me.

  She came to the hospital twice a week, then every day. Her mother was at work, and I felt the girl had time on her hands and was often lonely. She was with me when they took the last of the mask off. “Well?” I said. “Tell me the worst.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how you were before.” She held up a pocket mirror. My nose was broken, all right, and I had thick, bruised cheekbones, like a Cossack. For someone who had never been to war, I was amazingly the image of an old soldier.

  I left the hospital on crutches. There was no such thing as therapy—you got going or you did not. The organization found me a room on Baker Street, not far from where Juliette lived with her mother, as it turned out, and they gave me low-grade and harmless work to do. As my instructor had predicted, I was let nowhere near a typewriter, and once, I remember, someone even snatched a pencil sharpener away. Juliette used to come to the office, though she wasn’t supposed to, and sit by my desk as if it were a bed. She had got rid of the uniform, but her new clothes, chosen by her mother, were English and baggy, in the grays and mustards Englishwomen favored. They seemed picked deliberately to make her creamy skin sallow, her slenderness gaunt. The mother was keeping her plain, I thought, perhaps to keep her out of trouble. Why didn’t Juliette rebel? She was eighteen by now, but forty years ago eighteen was young. I wondered why she hung around me, what she wanted. I thought I guessed, but I decided not to know. I didn’t want it said I had destroyed two items of French property—a motorcycle and a colonel’s child. It was here, in London, that I was starting to get the hang of French society. In our reduced world, everyone in it a symbol of native, inborn rank, Juliette stood higher than some random young man who had merely laid his life on the line. She had connections, simply by the nature of how things were ordered.

  I asked her once if there was a way of getting a message to my mother, in Paris—just a word to say I was safe. She pretended not to hear but about a month later said, “No, it’s too dangerous. Besides, they don’t trust you.”

  “Don’t trust me? Why not?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “That’s different.”

  Her mother was out most evenings. When Juliette was alone, I brought my rations around, and she cooked our supper. We drank—only because everybody did—replacing the whiskey in her mother’s precious Haig bottle with London tap water. Once, Juliette tried restoring the color with cold tea, and there was hell to pay. When the news came from France that her father had been arrested and identified, she came straight to me.

  “I’ll never see him again,” she said. “I haven’t even got a decent snapshot of him. My mother has them all. She’s got them in a suitcase. I feel sick. Feel my forehead. Feel my cheeks.” She took my hand. “Feel the back of my neck. Feel my throat,” she said, dragging my hand. We left the office and went to her flat and pulled the blackout curtain. The sun was shining on the other side of the street, where everything was bombed, but she didn’t want to see it.

  “How do you know your mother’s not going to walk in?” I said. “She may want to be alone with you. She may want a quiet place to cry.”

  Juliette shook her head. “We’re not like that. We don’t do those things.”

  I think of the love and despair she sent out to me, the young shoots wild and blind, trusting me for support. She asked me to tell my most important secret, so that we would be bound. The most intimate thing I could say was that I was writing less poetry and had started a merciless novel about the French in London.

  “I could tell you a lot,” said Juliette. “Heroes’ wives sleeping with other men.”

  “It’s not that sort of novel,” I said. “In my novel, they’re all dead, but they don’t know it. Every character is in a special Hell, made to measure.”

  “That’s not how it is,” she said. “We’re not dead or in Hell. We’re just here, waiting. We don’t know what Hell will be like. Nobody knows. And some of us are going to be together in Heaven.” She put her face against mine, saying this. It never occurred to me that she meant it, literally. I thought her Calvinism was just an organized form of disbelief. “Haven’t you got some better secret?” she said. I supposed that schoolgirls talked this way, pledging friendship, and I wondered what she was taking me for. “Well,” she said presently, “will you marry me anyway, even without a secret?”

  Nobody coerced me into a life with Juliette. There were no tears, no threats, and I was not afraid of her mother. All I had to say was “I don’t know yet” or “We’ll see.” I think I wanted to get her out of her loneliness. When for all her shyness she asked if I loved her, I said I would never leave her, and I am sure we both thought it meant the same thing. A few days later she told her mother that we were engaged and that nothing would keep her from marrying me after the war, and, for the first time since she could remember, she saw her mother cry.

  Instead of a ring I gave Juliette some of the Algerian soil. She thanked me but confessed she had no idea what to do with it. Should it be displayed in a saucer, on a low table? Should she seal it up in a labeled, dated envelope? Tactful from infancy, she offered the gift to her mother, her rival in grief.

  Now that we were “engaged,” I began to see what the word covered for Juliette, and I had no qualms about smuggling her into my room—though never, of course, late at night. We took the mattress off the sagging daybed and put it on the floor, in front of the gas fire. Juliette would take her clothes off and tell me about her early years, though I didn’t always listen. Sometimes she talked about the life waiting for us in Paris, and the number of children we would have, and the names we would give them. I remember a Thomas and a Claire.

  “How many children should we have?” she said. “I’d say about ten. Well, seven. At least five.”

  Her clothes were scattered all over the floor, and the room was cold, in spite of the fire, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “I hate children,” I said. I was amazed that I could say something so definite and so cruel, and that sounded so true. When had I stopped liking them? Perhaps when I adopted the colonel’s child, believing she would never grow up. I could have said, “I don’t like other children,” but nothing about this conversation was thought out.

  “You will love them,” she said happily. “You’ll see.” She held her spread fingers against the gas flame, counting off their names. Each finger stood for a greedy, willful personality, as tough as a fist. An only child, she invented playmates and named them, and I was supposed to bring them to life.

  “I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but I kept my dolls until I was fifteen. My mother finally gave them away.”

  “Brothers and sisters,” I said.

  “No, just dolls. But they did have names.”

  “Is that one of your secrets?” “Secrets” had become charged with erotic meaning, when we were alone.

  “You’ve got a special secret,” she said.

  “Yes. I’ve torn up my novel.”

  “Oh, how lovely for you! Or is that sad?”

  “I’m just giving it up. I’ll never start another.”

  “You’ve got another secret,” she said. “You’re married to someone.” As she said this, she seemed to become aware that the room was cold. She shivered and reached for her dress, and drew it around her like a shawl. “A person went to see your mother. She—your mother—said to tell you your wife was all right. Your wife,” said Juliette, trying to control her voice, “is in the south of France. She has managed to send your mother a pound of onions. To eat,” said Juliette, as
I went on staring. “Onions, to eat.”

  “I did get married,” I said. “But she’s not my wife. I did it to save her. I’ve got her yellow star somewhere.”

  “I’d like to see it,” said Juliette, politely.

  “It is made of cheap, ugly material,” I said, as if that were the only thing wrong.

  “I think you should put some clothes on,” said Juliette. “If you’re going to tell about your wife.”

  “She isn’t my wife,” I said. “The marriage was just something legal. Apart from being legal, it doesn’t count.”

  “She may not be your wife,” said Juliette, “but she is your mother’s daughter-in-law.” She drew up her knees and bent her head on them, as if it were disgraceful to watch me dressing. “You mean,” she said, after a time, “that it doesn’t count as a secret?” I gathered up the rest of her clothes and put them beside her on the mattress. “Does it count as anything?”

  “I’ll walk you home,” I said.

  “You don’t need to.”

  “It’s late. I can’t have you wandering around in the blackout.”

  She dressed, slowly, sitting and kneeling. “I am glad she is safe and well,” she said. “It would be too bad if you had done all that for nothing. She must be very grateful to you.”

  I had never thought about gratitude. It seemed to me that, yes, she was probably grateful. I suddenly felt impatient for the war to end, so that I could approach her, hand in hand with Juliette, and ask for a divorce and a blessing.

  Juliette, kneeling, fastened the buttons of the latest flour sack her mother had chosen. “Why did you tear up your novel?” she said.

  Because I can’t wrench life around to make it fit some fantasy. Because I don’t know how to make life sound worse or better, or how to make it sound true. Instead of saying this, I said, “How do you expect me to support ten children?” The colonel’s wife didn’t like me much, but she had said that after the war there were a few people she could introduce me to. She had mentioned something about radio broadcasting, and I liked the idea. Juliette was still kneeling, with only part of the hideous dress buttoned up. I looked down at her bent head. She must have been thinking that she had tied herself to a man with no money, no prospects, and no connections. Who wasn’t entirely single. Who might be put on a charge for making a false declaration. Who had a broken nose and a permanent limp. Who, so far, had never finished anything he’d started. Perhaps she was forgetting one thing: I had got to London.

  “I could stay all night,” she said. “If you want me to.”

  “Your mother would have the police out,” I said.

  “She’d never dare,” said Juliette. “I’ve never called the police because she didn’t come home.”

  “It would be …” I tried to think of what it could be for us. “It would be radical.”

  Her hands began to move again, the other way, unbuttoning. She was the colonel’s child, she had already held her breath and jumped, and that was the start and the end of it.

  “We may be in big trouble over this,” I said.

  “Oh, what a pity,” she said. “We’ll always be together. We will always be happy. How lovely! What a shame!”

  I think she still trusted me at that moment; I hope so.

  RUE DE LILLE

  My second wife, Juliette, died in the apartment on Rue de Lille, where she had lived—at first alone, more or less, then with me—since the end of the war. All the rooms gave onto the ivy-hung well of a court, and were for that reason dark. We often talked about looking for a brighter flat, on a top floor with southern exposure and a wide terrace, but Parisians seldom move until they’re driven to. “We know the worst of what we’ve got,” we told each other. “It’s better than a bad surprise.”

  “And what about your books?” Juliette would add. “It would take you months to get them packed, and in the new place you’d never get them sorted.” I would see myself as Juliette saw me, crouched over a slanting, shaking stack of volumes piled on a strange floor, cursing and swearing as I tried to pry out a dictionary. “Just the same, I don’t intend to die here,” she also said.

  I once knew someone who believed drowning might be easy, even pleasant, until he almost drowned by accident. Juliette’s father was a colonel who expected to die in battle or to be shot by a German firing squad, but he died of typhus in a concentration camp. I had once, long ago, imagined for myself a clandestine burial with full honors after some Resistance feat, but all I got out of the war was a few fractures and a broken nose in a motorcycle accident.

  Juliette had thirty-seven years of blacked-out winter mornings in Rue de Lille. She was a few days short of her sixtieth birthday when I found her stretched out on the floor of our bedroom, a hand slackened on a flashlight. She had been trying to see under a chest of drawers, and her heart stopped. (Later, I pulled the chest away from the wall and discovered a five-franc coin.) Her gray-and-dark hair, which had grown soft and wayward with age, was tied back with a narrow satin ribbon. She looked more girlish than at any time since I’d first met her. (She fell in love with me young.) She wore a pleated flannel skirt, a tailored blouse, and one of the thick cardigans with gilt buttons she used to knit while watching television. She had been trained to believe that to look or to listen quietly is to do nothing; she would hum along with music, to show she wasn’t idle. She was discreet, she was generous to a sensible degree, she was anything but contentious. I often heard her remark, a trifle worriedly, that she was never bored. She was faithful, if “faithful” means avoiding the acknowledged forms of trouble. She was patient. I know she was good. Any devoted male friend, any lover, any husband would have shown up beside her as selfish, irritable, even cruel. She displayed so little of the ordinary kinds of jealousy, the plain marital do-you-often-have-lunch-with-her? sort, that I once asked her if she had a piece missing.

  “Whoever takes this place over,” she said, when we spoke of moving, “will be staggered by the size of the electricity bills.” (Juliette paid them; I looked after a number of other things.) We had to keep the lights turned on all day in winter. The apartment was L-shaped, bent round two sides of a court, like a train making a sharp turn. From our studies, at opposite ends of the train, we could look out and see the comforting glow of each other’s working life, a lamp behind a window. Juliette would be giving some American novel a staunch, steady translation; I might be getting into shape my five-hour television series, Stendhal and the Italian Experience, which was to win an award in Japan.

  We were together for a duration of time I daren’t measure against the expanse of Juliette’s life; it would give me the feeling that I had decamped to a height of land, a survivor’s eminence, so as to survey the point at which our lives crossed and mingled and began to move in the same direction: a long, narrow reach of time in the Rue de Lille. It must be the washy, indefinite colorations of blue that carpeted, papered, and covered floors, walls, and furniture and shaded our lamps which cast over that reach the tone of a short season. I am thinking of the patches of distant, neutral blue that appear over Paris in late spring, when it is still wet and cold in the street and tourists have come too early. The tourists shelter in doorways, trying to read their soaked maps, perennially unprepared in their jeans and thin jackets. Overhead, there are scrapings of a color that carries no threat and promises all.

  That choice, Juliette’s preference, I sometimes put down to her Calvinist sobriety—call it a temperament—and sometimes to a refinement of her Huguenot taste. When I was feeling tired or impatient, I complained that I had been consigned to a Protestant Heaven by an arbitrary traffic cop, and that I was better suited to a pagan Hell. Again, as I looked round our dining-room table at the calm, clever faces of old friends of Juliette’s family, at their competent and unassuming wives, I saw what folly it might be to set such people against a background of buttercup yellow or apple green. The soft clicking of their upper-class Protestant consonants made conversation distant and neutral, too. It was a voice t
hat had puzzled me the first time I’d heard it from Juliette. I had supposed, mistakenly, that she was trying it on for effect; but she was wholly natural.

  The sixteenth-century map of Paris I bought for her birthday is still at the framer’s; I sent a check but never picked it up. I destroyed her private correspondence without reading it, and gave armfuls of clothes away to a Protestant charity. To the personal notice of her death in Le Monde was attached a brief mention of her father, a hero of the Resistance for whom suburban streets are named; and of her career as a respected translator, responsible for having introduced postwar American literature to French readers; and of her husband, the well-known radio and television interviewer and writer, who survived her.

  Another person to survive her was my first wife. One night when Juliette and I were drinking coffee in the little sitting room where she received her women friends, and where we watched television, Juliette said, again, “But how much of what she says does she believe? About her Catholicism, and all those fantasies running round in her head—that she is your true and only wife, that your marriage is registered in Heaven, that you and she will be together in another world?”

  “Those are things people put in letters,” I said. “They sit down alone and pour it out. It’s sincere at that moment. I don’t know why she would suddenly be insincere.”

  “After all the trouble she’s made,” said Juliette. She meant that for many years my wife would not let me divorce.

  “She couldn’t help that,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know. It’s what I think. I hardly knew her.”

  “You must have known something.”

  “I haven’t seen her more than three or four times in the last thirty-odd years, since I started living with you.”

  “What do you mean?” said Juliette. “You saw her just once, with me. We had lunch. You backed off asking for the divorce.”

  “You can’t ask for a divorce at lunch. It had to be done by mail.”