A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  So they had come for nothing. They were not to see him or bury him, or fetch home his bride. All I had to show them was a still unlabeled grave.

  When I dared look at them, I saw their way of being was not Pete’s. Neither had his soft selective stare. Mr. Higgins’s eyes were a fanatic blue. He was thin and sunburned and unused to nonsense. Summer and winter he traveled with his wife in climates that were bad for her skin. She had the fair, papery coloring that requires constant vigilance. All this I knew because Pete had told me.

  They saw his grave at the best time of day, in the late afternoon, with the light at a slant. The cemetery was in a valley between two plaster towns. A flash of the sea was visible, a corner of ultramarine. They saw a stone wall covered with roses, pink and white and near-white, open, without secrets. The hiss of traffic on the road came to us, softer than rain; then true rain came down and we ran to our waiting taxi through a summer storm. Later they saw the station where Pete had left our luggage but had never come back. Like Pete—as Pete had intended to, rather—they were traveling to Nice. Under a glass shelter before the station I paused and said, “That was where it happened, down there.” I pointed with my white glove. I was not as elegant as Mrs. Higgins, but I was not a source of embarrassment either. I wore gloves, stockings, shoes.

  The steep street under rain was black as oil. Everything was reflected upside down. The neon signs of the change office and the pharmacy swam deeply in the pavement.

  “I’d like to thank the people who were so kind,” said Mrs. Higgins. “Is there time? Shirley, I suppose you got their names?”

  “Nobody was kind,” I said.

  “Shirley! We’ve met the doctor and the minister, but you said there was a policeman and a Dutch gentleman and a lady—you were in this lady’s living room.”

  “They were all there, but no one was kind.”

  “The bike’s paid for?” asked Mrs. Higgins suddenly.

  “Yes. I paid. And I paid for having the sofa cushions cleaned.”

  What sofa cushions? What was I talking about? They seemed petrified, under the glass shelter, out of the rain. They could not take their eyes away from the place I had said was there. They never blamed me, never by a word or a hidden meaning. I had explained more than once how the porter that day had not put our bags on the train after all but had stood waiting at the customs barrier, wondering what had become of us. I told them how I had found everything intact—passports and cheques and maps and sweaters and shoes. They could not grasp the importance of it. They knew that Pete had chosen me and gone away with me, and they never saw him again. An unreliable guide had taken them to a foreign graveyard and told them, without evidence, that now he was there.

  “I still don’t see how anyone could have thought Pete was stealing,” said his mother. “What would Pete have wanted with someone’s old bike?”

  •

  They were flying home from Nice. They loathed Italy now, and they had a special aversion to the sunny room where I had described Pete’s death. We three sat in the restaurant at the airport, and they spoke quietly, considerately, because some people at the table next to ours were listening to a football match on a portable radio.

  I closed my hand into a fist and let it rest on the table. I imagined myself at home, saying to my mother, “All right, real life has begun. What’s your next prophecy?”

  I was not flying with them. I was seeing them off. Mrs. Higgins sat poised and prepared in her linen coat, with her large handbag, and her cosmetics and airsickness tablets in her dressing case, and her diamond maple leaf so she wouldn’t be mistaken for an American, and her passport ready to be shown to anyone. Pale gloves lay folded over the clasp of the dressing case. “You’ll want to go to your own people, I know,” she said. “But you have a home with us. You mustn’t forget it.” She paused. I said nothing, and so she continued, “What are you going to do, dear? I mean, after you have visited your friend in Paris. You mustn’t be lonely.”

  I muttered whatever seemed sensible. “I’ll have to get a job. I’ve never had one and I don’t know anything much. I can’t even type—not properly.” Again they gave me this queer impression of expecting something more. What did they want? “Pete said it was no good learning anything if you couldn’t type. He said it was the only useful thing he could do.”

  In the eyes of his parents was the same wound. I had told them something about him they hadn’t known.

  “Well, I understand,” said his mother presently. “At least, I think I do.”

  They imagine I want to be near the grave, I supposed. They think that’s why I’m staying on the same side of the world. Pete and I had been waiting for a train; now I had taken it without him. I was waiting again. Even if I were to visit the cemetery every day, he would never speak. His last words had not been for me but to a policeman. He would have said something to me, surely, if everyone hadn’t been in such a hurry to get him out of the way. His mind was quenched, and his body out of sight. “You don’t love with your soul,” I had cried to the old clergyman at the funeral—an offensive remark, judging from the look on his face as he turned it aside. Now I was careful. The destination of a soul was of no interest. The death of a voice—now that was real. The Dutchman suddenly covering his mouth was horror, and a broken elbow was true pain. But I was careful; I kept this to myself.

  “You’re our daughter now,” Pete’s father said. “I don’t think I want you to have to worry about a job. Not yet.” Mr. Higgins happened to know my exact status. He knew my father had not left us well off, and my mother had given everything she owned to a sect that did not believe in blood transfusions. She expected the end of the world and would not eat an egg unless she had first met the hen. That was Mr. Higgins’s view.

  “Shirley must work if that’s what she wants to do,” Mrs. Higgins said softly.

  “I do want to!” I imagined myself that day in a river of people pouring into subways.

  “I’m fixing something up for you just the same,” said Mr. Higgins hurriedly, as if he would not be interrupted by women.

  Mrs. Higgins allowed her pale forehead to wrinkle, under her beige veil. Was it not better to struggle and to work? she asked. Wasn’t that real life? Would it not keep Shirley busy, take her mind off her loss, her disappointment, her tragedy, if you like (though “tragedy” was not an acceptable way of looking at fate), if she had to think about her daily bread?

  “The allowance I’m going to make her won’t stop her from working,” he said. “I was going to set something up for the kids anyway.”

  She seemed to approve, she had questioned him only out of some prudent system of ethics.

  He said to me, “I always have to remember I could go any minute, just like that. I’ve got a heart.” He tapped it, tapped his light suit. “Meantime you better start with this.” He gave me the envelope that had been close to his heart until now. He seemed diffident, made ashamed by money and by death, but it was he and not his wife who had asked if there was a hope that Pete had left a child. No, I had told him. I had wondered too, but now I was sure. “Then Shirley is all we’ve got left,” he had said to his wife, and I thought they seemed bankrupt, having nothing but me.

  “If that’s a check on the bank at home it might take too long to clear,” said his wife. “After all Shirley’s been through, she needs a fair-sized sum right away.”

  “She’s had that, Betty,” said Mr. Higgins, smiling.

  I had lived this: three around a table, the smiling parents.

  Pete had said, “They smile, they go on talking. You wonder what goes on.”

  “How you manage everything you do without a secretary with you all the time I just don’t know,” said his wife, all at once admiring him.

  “You’ve been saying that for twenty-two years,” he said.

  “Twenty-three, now.”

  With this the conversation came to an end and they sat staring, puzzled, not overcome by life but suddenly lost to it, out of touch. The photog
raph Pete carried of his mother, which was in his wallet when he died, had been taken before her marriage, with a felt hat all to one side and an organdy collar and Ginger Rogers hair. It was easier to imagine Mr. Higgins young—a young Gary Cooper. My father-in-law’s blue gaze rested on me now. Never in a million years would he have picked me as a daughter-in-law. I knew that: I understood. Pete was part of him, and Pete, with all the girls he had to choose from, had chosen me. When Mr. Higgins met my mother at the wedding, he thanked God, and was overheard being thankful, that the wedding was not in Calgary nor in Virginia, where his wife had relations. Remembering my mother that day, with her glasses on her nose and a strange borrowed hat on her head, and recalling Mr. Higgins’s face, I thought of words that would keep me from laughing. I found at random, “threesome,” “smother,” “gambling,” “habeas corpus,” “sibling” . . .

  “How is your mother, Shirley?” said Mrs. Higgins.

  “I had a letter . . . She’s working with a pendulum now.”

  “A pendulum?”

  “Yes. A weight on a string, sort of. It makes a diagnosis whether you’ve got something wrong with your stomach, if it’s an ulcer, or what. She can use it to tell when you’re pregnant and if the baby will be a girl or a boy. It depends whether it swings north-south or east-west.”

  “Can the pendulum tell who the father is?” said Mr. Higgins.

  “They are useful for people who are afraid of doctors,” said Mrs. Higgins, and she fingered her neat gloves and smiled to herself. “Someone who won’t hear the truth from a doctor will listen to any story from a woman with a pendulum or a piece of crystal.”

  “Or a stone that changes color,” I said. “My mother had one of those. When our spaniel had mastoids it turned violet.”

  She caught in her breath then and glanced at me, but her husband, by a certain amount of angry fidgeting, made us change the subject. That was the only time she and I were close to each other—something to do with quirky female humor.

  Mr. Higgins did not die of a heart attack, as he had confidently expected, but a few months after this Mrs. Higgins said to her maid in the kitchen, “I’ve got a terrible pain in my head. I’d better lie down.” Pete’s father wrote, “She knew what the matter was, but she never said. Typical.” I inherited a legacy and some jewelry from her, and I have always wondered why. I had been careless about writing. I could not write the kind of letters she seemed to want. How could I write to someone I hardly knew about someone else who did not exist? Mr. Higgins married the widow of one of his closest friends, a woman six years older than he. They came to Europe for their wedding trip. I had the summer job I’ve just lost as interpreter in a department store. When my father-in-law saw me in a neat suit, with his name, Higgins, pinned to my jacket, he seemed to approve. He was the only person then who did not say I was wasting my life and my youth and ought to go home. The new Mrs. Higgins asked to be taken to an English-speaking hair-dresser, and there, under the roaring dryer, she yelled that Mr. Higgins may not have been Pete’s father. Perhaps he had been, perhaps he hadn’t, but one thing he was, and that was a saint. She came out from under the helmet and said in a normal voice, “Martin doesn’t know I dye my hair.” I wondered if he had always wanted this short, fox-colored woman. The new marriage might for years have been in the maquis of his mind, and of Mrs. Higgins’s life. She may have known it as she sat in the airport that day, smiling to herself, touching her unstained gloves. Mr. Higgins had drawn up a new way of life, like a clean will with everyone he loved cut out. I was trying to draw up a will too, but I was patient, waiting, waiting for someone to tell me what to write. He spoke of Pete conventionally, in a sentimental way that forbade any feeling. Talking that way was easier for both of us. We were responsible for something—for surviving, perhaps. Once he turned to me and said defiantly, “Well, she and Pete are together now, aren’t they? And didn’t they leave us here?”

  •

  I forget him for months. I’ve kept nothing. I sent his mother all our Italian pictures and I gave her his camera with the last roll of film still in it. He never came back to me except in dreams, and then only after his mother died. There was a young girl with him. He said, “Everything I could feel has been killed.” “But I am here,” I cried. He never looked at me. The girl was not Mrs. Higgins, not even Mrs. Higgins disguised. In their private coldness he and the girl had eyes only for each other. She was someone belonging to me who had gone over to him. I knew I had lost two people, not one.

  4. HOW I HAPPENED TO WRITE MY MOTHER A PERSONAL LETTER

  I forgot my mother’s birthday, and when I remembered it I cabled her a dozen red roses. My mother answered telling me not to waste money that way, but rather to send it to India. She said the roses brought to her door were obviously not the roses I had chosen in Paris. Now that Mr. Light has given up his business, the shop we always liked is full of artificial flowers from Hong Kong. A few dull, scentless blooms are kept in cold storage, but Mother does not think that is how flowers should be stored. Her birthday roses, delivered from Mr. Light’s former place, were the color of dried blood, were congealed, and dropped their petals without ever having opened them. She thanked me for my impulsive concern and wondered if Mrs. Cat Castle had been at me, making me think I should cable flowers because Mother had a foot in the grave. She said Cat Castle was an old friend but a famous Cassandra and spreader of gloom.

  Next time I wrote I sent her a bluebell. I picked it in Orsay on a Sunday, with you. You and I had been invited to lunch by your friend Hervé and his wife. They say they live “in the country” but it is really a fungus extension of Paris. Do you remember the Sunday traffic? The lights hung over the road like dead animals. At Orsay we parked between two cars like our own in front of a block of flats that looked like a hospital. “Our car is cleaner,” you remarked. I know it is important if cars are clean or dusty. I suppose it must be. The entrance to the building was full of prams. We shouted into the crackling telephone system above the mailbox and even though Hervé wasn’t expecting anyone except us, he made you yell your name three or four times. Hervé and his wife were new here. They used to live in a furnished room in a hotel, sneaking the milk and bread in, and cooking on an alcohol stove. Now they showed us the Venetian blinds, the wall-to-wall carpet in the bedroom, the garbage chute in the kitchen, and the bathroom with its real tub and real hot water. We were given a thimble of sweet port to drink, and I asked Hervé about his new job at the Science Faculty in Orsay, which was as new as their apartment. He turned his mouth down and looked at his wife, and they laughed with a bitter kind of meaning.

  It wouldn’t be such a bad job, he said, if he weren’t dealing with fools and scholars. Did I know that the greatest discoveries and inventions had always been made by men who had no schooling? Nobel prize winners were fakes and parasites. I began to understand that Hervé’s job was, perhaps, fetching sandwiches and coffee for the others, or going about with one of those mysterious keys and banging on the air conditioning or central heating.

  You said to Hervé, “She isn’t listening. Shirley never listens after the first ten words.”

  You smiled at me as if to say the remark had no edge to it.

  You and Hervé were in Algeria, and you know something you will never say. When Renata sits next to a young man in the Métro, she finds herself wondering what he did in Algeria. She thinks of that young Algerian girl they raped with a bottle and she looks at the young man’s hands and his calm reflection in the dark window and she wants to say, “Excuse me, but was it you?”

  Now that both you and Hervé are married you never meet, except formally. Hervé’s wife has a golden mustache and a gold heart on a chain. She gave us our lunch on a chrome-legged formica table dragged out of the kitchen. First we had canned sardines (to you and to Hervé and his wife, a delicacy; to me, a food of the unemployed) and then steaks, and chips out of a cellophane packet, quantities of very good bread, a Camembert, and a chocolate mousse. The mousse was what m
y mother calls “store pudding.” I recognized the small plastic cups. You can see them at the grocer’s on the same shelf as the yogurt.

  “We are not bourgeois. We live like students,” Hervé said. He loves his wife and seems proud of her.

  “Shirley lives like a student too,” you said. I wondered what you meant. Did you mean that you sometimes opened a door, looked in on my prolonged, youthful squalor and shut the door again? You and I were married. We lived in the same rooms.

  “When we have children we shall have to stop being children too,” said Hervé’s wife. “But now we want to be young.”

  They didn’t seem young: they might have been your age, twenty-nine or thirty. They had, as you have, a revulsive distaste for the furniture they had grown up with, but I thought that their children—for whose sakes they intended to be larger than life one day—might have an opinion about the chrome-legged table. You and Hervé discussed “the American economic takeover in France,” of which you know a lot, and Hervé, who did most of the talking, nothing whatever. You didn’t seem bored. I wondered, looking around the living room, noticing the absence of books and of lamps, where and what they read. I have suspected for some time now that you are the person who buys all the books sold in Paris. You and Hervé were still talking, outside now, on the balcony in comfortable chairs. I was in the kitchen, helping his wife scrape the plates and put the bread away. When I realized what had happened and that we were in exile I put down the butter dish I was holding and without a word to her came out to join you on the balcony. I was determined to find the place that belonged to me in this conversation. I said, “What do you mean when you say the Americans are in here—you mean they’re running for mayor?”