A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  “Surely you must be six sometimes?” Shirley said.

  “Never,” said Claudie. “Today is the first time.”

  “Yes, sometimes, when Mémé is here and I am here and Marie-Thérèse is here too,” said Gérald. He had found the sixth chair in a bedroom.

  “Sometimes, when my mother-in-law, our dear Mémé, lives with us,” began Maman, “we use the sixth chair quite often.” She trailed off, wondering what she had wanted to say. “But now she is with her cousins in Lyon.” Her face cleared. That must have been all she had been trying to remember—where her mother-in-law was.

  Everyone sat down. Shirley had a clean napkin, still damp from a recent ironing; the others unfolded a napkin personal to each, identified by a ring or a special knot.

  “This is all for you,” Claudie murmured, as a large dish of hors d’oeuvres was passed along to her.

  “What, the whole thing?” It still had not occurred to her that everything said here was serious.

  “No, not the whole thing,” said Gérald. “One slice of ham, two halves of hard-boiled egg,” and he paused, silently estimating.

  “You forgot to count the radishes,” said Claudie.

  “Papa has closed his eyes,” said Marie-Thérèse.

  Everyone looked at the head of the family. Papa’s face was a death mask.

  “Egg?” said Gérald to Shirley, urging her on. “You like eggs. You ate fried eggs when you and Claudie went to that restaurant.” This was to show how good his memory was and how important he considered Shirley.

  “Leave our guest in peace,” said Madame Maurel. “Our guest will think we count the food in this house.”

  “We do,” said Claudie. “Ask Gérald. He hates coming here.”

  “Our guest will think we quarrel,” said Maman.

  The dish was passed along. Everyone except Claudie took ham, egg, tomato salad, radishes and a pickle. Claudie, perhaps copying Shirley, had only a small slice of ham on her plate. “What diet are you pretending to be on now?” Marie-Thérèse asked her sister. She shrugged, admonishing herself. “Our guest will think we watch what everyone eats.”

  “Gérald does,” said Claudie.

  “This is intolerable,” said Marie-Thérèse. “Papa, I beg you, I plead with you, open your eyes. Gérald is too polite to help himself until you have taken what you want.”

  Papa returned to life. Without a glance at any of the family, he transferred one slice of tomato and five radishes to his plate. “The butter,” he said. Maman and Marie-Thérèse jumped up at the same time, but a clamor and quarrel at the children’s table diverted them. Marie-Thérèse walked slowly toward the children and dealt out four sharp slaps. She had her hand raised over the fifth child, Alain, when Papa’s eyes turned to her. Although her back was to her father, she lowered her hand. Maman, clutching the brooch at her throat, expelled her caught breath and sat down.

  Shirley whispered, “The butter!”

  The child who had been spared howled louder than anyone. “Come here, Alain,” said Papa, and the palest and frailest of the five, the blond boy with expressionless hazel eyes, climbed on his grand-father’s knee. “Dear little one,” said Maman without conviction. Marie-Thérèse strode out of the room. She had a manner of walking that made her shoes sound angry. But when she returned bearing a roasted chicken carved up on a mattress of watercress, she looked calm and bitter again. Gérald beamed, as if he enjoyed more than anything hearing four children giving tongue. Papa broke off a piece of dry bread, looked for butter, shrugged, and stuffed the dry morsel in Alain’s mouth. He picked up his glass, which was empty.

  “The wine,” he said.

  Shirley found that she was comparing this family with the Perrignys and this dining room with her mother-in-law’s. At Madame Perrigny’s table, generosity about food, if not of mind and spirit, was the rule. The Perrigny habit of discretion would have prevented a visitor from ever knowing how pinched and mean the Perrignys’ private thoughts could be: Shirley could not have imagined open bickering. There would have been plenty of butter, excellent wine, twice the amount of chicken, the very whitest Viennois bread, and none of this jumping up and down, for nothing would have been forgotten. Here the windows were smeared and streaked. Voices, either complaining or protesting, evoked the faintest echo, as if they were raised not in a room but in an abandoned factory. Madame Perrigny’s ramparts were her curtains—one layer of starched white net, then the lined, faded, disinfected, impeccable, dark green draperies. The Maurels had no curtains at all. Sunlight slanted across the Maurels’ grayish panes, as it did over the sparkling Perrigny windows—here, at last, was a similarity: both families ate their meals in sunless rooms. Shirley looked around her. She saw on a low table pushed in a corner a wooden souvenir bear with a clothesbrush between its paws and a length of folded chintz. Perhaps the Maurels had taken the curtains down to wash the windows; but no—there were no curtain rods and the edge of the chintz was unhemmed and ragged. She caught an ironic look from Claudie and bent myopically over her empty plate. This blank staring of hers was a habit carried over from a time when she had been too vain to wear glasses. Philippe had cured her by teasing and saying, “One day you will hit your plate with the end of your nose.” The world before Philippe and clear-sightedness had been a dark sky in which faces moved like planets. Trees were observed as if in rain, dark as if rain were covering them. Seeing created obligations: because she could now count every pebble in a handful, she felt as if she had to count them. In the old world she had identified people as infants do, by their scent and their voices. In the new, she had to look at people and see what they were like.

  Lunch was now completely sidetracked because of a difference of opinion between Marie-Thérèse and her mother. Were the french-fried potatoes ready (Madame Maurel said they were) or still pallid and underdone?

  “Bring them anyway,” said Gérald.

  “And spend the rest of the day digesting them?” asked his wife, introducing a brief reminder of the Perrignys.

  “Do you find it difficult to be married to a Frenchman?” said Claudie to Shirley, sweetly, perhaps meaning this for Gérald and Papa.

  The family stopped nagging and seemed suspended. Shirley knew the importance of such questions here. The difficulty was not in finding the right answer so much as in wondering why anyone should feel obliged to ask. She thought carefully and said, “All the people I have ever liked have had tuberculosis. I mean that when I become fond of anyone I usually find out that this person at one time or other was consumptive. So, quite naturally, after Philippe and I were married, I said, ‘Did you ever have tuberculosis?’ He seemed very upset and said, ‘Who could have told you?’ It is very difficult to get any information out of him about anything, but in this case he seemed to retreat into a private room and shut the door and stop his ears. Well, finally it came out that to the Perrignys this is such a shameful disease, such an affliction of the poor, that no middle-class person will ever admit to having had it, and it is called by another name—it is known as ‘having a little pulmonary accident.’ He said he’d had his little accident during the war, and that it was a bad time and that the sanatorium was full of miserable people. He said, ‘It was the sort of place where they give you coffee in bowls.’ Now this is the difficulty you were asking me about—it is things like having coffee in bowls or not. Because when my friends come to Paris the first thing they try to find and buy are those bowls, and they’ll insist on drinking out of them so as to seem French. I would never have guessed that the mark of a good or a bad sanatorium had to do with cups and bowls. How could I explain to Philippe that I drank out of a bowl because I thought it was the French thing to do? And why did he never tell me he wanted a cup? He took the conversation about tuberculosis as a roundabout way of making a point. I suppose it must be a class point. I don’t know.”

  She had thought she was giving a simple answer of the kind advised by Mrs. Cat Castle, but the looks and the silence that followed made her rea
lize she had taken a meaningless, impertinent question and turned it into a problem. She saw that her unshy reference to the disease was astonishing to the Maurels. They were obliged to put it down to a lack of education in the civilities. Also, she had confused them. Having established Philippe as a possible slum product, she had then attributed to him the woes and anxieties of a middle-class snob. About the bowls, no one could decide (once the Maurels began to speak again) if Philippe’s stand was a good thing. At least it was unexpected.

  “We use bowls,” said Claudie. “Don’t we, Maman? But then we’ve always had them and we never throw anything out.”

  Monsieur Maurel astonished everyone by remarking, “My uncle, with whom I lived for a time, never used anything for breakfast except large Sèvres cups. They were beautiful.”

  If a statue had spoken up the family would not have shown more fascination and alarm; all but Maman, who, at the word “uncle,” looked as if she had plenty to say but was biting it back. It was she who changed the subject. “Our guest kindly brought this wine,” she said, beginning all over again.

  He gave it the merest glance. The child on his lap slid down and stood nearby, still sucking on the piece of bread his grandfather had fed him. Shirley wondered if the little boy were toothless; he did look senile. Papa now stared at Shirley, who, having now put on her glasses, could see him perfectly. She smiled as if returning a smile.

  The chicken was cooling on its watercress: Gérald, with signals and grimaces, tried to prod Shirley into taking notice. Marie-Thérèse pushed the bottle an inch so that it stood on the round plastic doily intended for it.

  “Did you think there would be nothing to drink in this house?” said Papa.

  Maman watched helplessly as Claudie and Gérald, tired of waiting for Shirley, speared into the chicken with their own forks.

  “I didn’t bring the wine for myself,” Shirley said. “I brought it for you. If you don’t want it don’t drink it.” Her voice was as friendly as her intention had been.

  “I saw a second bottle in the kitchen,” said Maman. “Madame was too kind. Gérald has opened them both.” She was a born tattler and informer. She fed Papa’s wrath with twigs of news, hoping he would notice her and respect her.

  “Wine should be exposed to air so as to oxidize,” said Gérald.

  “I don’t like any of it,” said Marie-Thérèse, softly, looking down at her plate.

  Again deceived by language, Shirley thought she spoke of the wine, and she said, “Well, pour it down the sink then. I don’t care.”

  Papa at once got up from the table with the bottle in his hand. Maman dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. Claudie helped herself to watercress and ate nonchalantly, with her head on one side, as if showing an audience how to eat imaginary food. Marie-Thérèse cut up chicken on her own plate and spooned the pieces to smaller plates for the children.

  “Our guest has not been looked after,” said Maman, choking. “Look after her, please,” but Claudie and Gérald had taken the best of everything.

  Papa had not departed in order to commit suicide, as his wife’s tears suggested. He returned, still with the bottle, saying angrily, “Cork.” Shirley did not know if he wanted to cork the bottle again, or if he had seen bits floating and had gone to take them out. He did not sit down; he said, “Madame will excuse me,” and this time left the house. Shirley heard the door of the apartment closing, not slamming. She remembered what Maman had said to her on the staircase about Papa’s quarreling with Claudie. She guessed that many meals probably ended like this. She was overwhelmed at having been addressed by Papa in the third person with such respect. It made up for being hungry. Gérald, all at once full of courage, poured wine, bellowed for bread, demanded the second bottle. He snapped orders at the children, he was sarcastic with Claudie, and announced that he was ready at any moment to meet Shirley’s husband, the famous critic.

  “She is my friend,” said Claudie. “Not Gérald’s!”

  “Gérald can drive Madame home,” said Marie-Thérèse. “Then he can ask Madame all the questions he likes about her husband.” She spoke of Gérald as if he belonged at the children’s table.

  “We have not finished our meal!” said Maman. “There is the cheese, and Marie-Thérèse’s apple tart, and Papa’s ten coffee éclairs.”

  “If he brought ten, there’s one short,” said Gérald, looking at Claudie.

  “I meant when your meal was finished,” said Marie-Thérèse to her mother. Marie-Thérèse had the white brow and stained eyelids of someone whose childhood had been spent in bed. She had the persistent vitality of a child who has fought for life. None of her sons resembled her. They were square and blond and rather sly, like the Team-Brownings. Marie-Thérèse and Claudie did not resemble each other either, though something of their mother was in them both. Papa was the foreigner here. He was the father in authority, but Gérald might have been the actual father of both girls, had he been old enough.

  •

  “I wish my husband had not gone off that way,” said Maman as Shirley came into the kitchen carrying a stack of plates. No one had asked her to help—indeed, there had been protests, but the alternative to helping was conversation with Claudie.

  Shirley said, “Oh, my family is peculiar too.”

  Marie-Thérèse, who, like Shirley, was helping to clear the two tables, stood still, translating the remark into a private meaning in her mind. “So that is how we seem, now,” she said.

  “But my husband had nothing to eat, only radishes. And hardly any breakfast.” Maman seemed afraid of her elder daughter. She lifted pale, anxious eyes to meet Shirley’s for the first time that day. “He went out early this morning, quite angry. We were so glad to see him back. And with ten éclairs!”

  “He isn’t hungry,” Shirley said. “Even if he is, you shouldn’t worry. It’s only blackmail. He wants you to worry. He has probably gone to a restaurant.”

  “That is what Claudie did last Sunday,” said Maman. “She quarreled with Papa and I slapped her. You know how necessary it is to slap a girl. Papa told her to walk the dog—so she says—and she walked too far and fainted. Then you found her and saw to it that she was given food.”

  “What is the matter with my family?” said Marie-Thérèse, hating everyone. “Why is everyone in restaurants? First Claudie, then Papa. No wonder foreigners think we are greedy. What kind of people spend all their time in public places? Vagabonds, homeless, new-rich . . .”

  Before she finished Shirley had picked up her purse from a table in the hall and was trying to unlatch the front door. She was surprised when they ran after her, so upset and embarrassed. It seemed clear to Shirley that this hopeless party was over: she could not understand why they began asking each other menacingly, who, exactly, had caused “our guest” to run away? “Gérald, oh, where is Gérald?” cried his mother-in-law, as if his presence had ever mattered. Maman turned to Claudie saying, “Our guest will think . . .”

  “Nothing,” Shirley assured them. “I won’t think anything. I just feel that now, this minute, we have all had enough.” She ran down the stairs. Claudie called after her: “You will be hearing from me! I’m sorry about my family. I regret . . . regret . . . regret . . .”

  •

  Later she thought she had run all the way home. Although it was a bright afternoon, she recalled having run through the dark. She must have found a taxi or jumped aboard a bus. Without shutting the door of the flat behind her, she went straight to the telephone with the intention of calling for help. She would send Philippe a telegram. Help could not be had by talking into a dead line, but no one in his family would leave a telegram unread. Telegrams mean money spent. One does not simply let them lie. They may contain bad news about someone else. She was halfway to the telephone, having dropped her purse and shed her shoes, when she thought she heard him. She called his name. The telephone was not on the floor or on a chair, where she usually left it, trailing its cord like a snare, but neatly centered on a table. It lo
oked cleaned and polished. He must have been here; perhaps he had called his mother, cautiously, saying, “I couldn’t settle anything, finally. She was out.” He had emptied one ashtray. In the boxroom, the tiered trays on his desk were empty and one typewriter had disappeared.

  Suddenly she wanted to complain to someone. Talking to James was useless. What Shirley wanted was the friend Madame Roux had once been; a listener who was not forever dancing to her own piping, like Renata, and who did not present the mysteries and difficulties of intimately known men. Even when Madame Roux sat at the back of her shop watching the door for customers you knew she was attending. Shirley longed for the old Saturday afternoons before Philippe or when she had been between jobs. She and Madame Roux would sit drinking out of cracked cups, smoking Shirley’s Gitanes and Madame Roux’s Pall Malls, tearing Shirley’s life to confetti only to put it back together much better than before . . . She missed the smoke, and the street seen through a rainy window, and Madame Roux and her sharp common sense. She was homesick for a dark January just before whatever was right between them had gone wrong, before Madame Roux felt the need to choose between Philippe and Shirley—as if Shirley minded sharing. She could have preferred Philippe but still liked me, Shirley thought.

  The snow on the cobbles in the courtyard melted and froze to thin ice. The cups of coffee they held kept their hands warm. Shirley’s first mistake had been talking about her marriage. First it was a joke; then it was serious; then Madame Roux turned to Philippe. It had happened in that order.

  “Now he’s being patient with me because I leave the towels on the floor,” Shirley had said, giving an imitation of someone quietly outraged.

  “You both wash too much,” said Madame Roux, who seemed to know everything. “No one in this house had a hot water bill like yours. That may be what is affecting your nerves. If I bathed as often as you do, first my skin would become spongy, then it would detach itself in long strips. I thought when you had a shower put in that it would bring down your water bill, but I see it has not.”