A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  He still had one of those beads. He used to roll it about his palm before exams. There were other times, the many times he said, “God, help me this once, and I’ll never bother you again,” and it was the bead he held on to, and perhaps addressed. It was a powerful charm; a piece of a day; a reminder that someone had once wished him dead but that he was still alive.

  Oh, there was no doubt that Florence had wished him dead. After lunch that day he and Flor had hung over rickety wooden railings and watched a small cargo loading what seemed in his memory to be telephone poles; although he must have been mistaken. Flor leaned forward, resting on her thin brown arms. Their faces were nearly level. She turned and looked at him, half smiling, eyes half closed, as people turn and look at each other sunbathing, on hot sand, and he was giving the smile timorously back when he met her eyes, green as water, bright with dislike, and she said, “It would be easy to push someone in right here. I could push you in.” He remembered the heavy green water closing out the sky and the weight of clouds. The clouds piled on the horizon moved forward and covered the lagoon. Once he had fallen in the pond at his grandmother’s house—the Fairlie grandmother he and Florence had in common. He was sailing a boat and took one false step. The water in this pond was kept dirty for the sake of some dirt-loving mosquito-eating Argentine fish his grandmother cherished—grown fish the size of baby minnows. These darting minnow fish came around him as he lay in the pond, unmoving, and he felt the soft tap of their heads against his cheeks. The most oppressive part of the memory was that he had lain there, passive, with the mossy water over his mouth. He must have been on his back; there was a memory of sky. The gardener heard the splash and fished him out and he was perfectly fine; not on his back at all, but on his face, splashing and floundering.

  He didn’t think about this in Venice. It was much later when he placed the two memories one on the other, glass over glass. In Venice, he didn’t reply: there wasn’t time. There wasn’t even time for rage or fear. Aunt Bonnie was waiting for them after her afternoon sleep. They were to find her in the Piazza, and feed the pigeons, and listen to the band. He stamped along on fat legs behind Flor, through heat like water, head down. They stopped and weighed themselves on a public scale that told them their fortunes as well as what they weighed. Their fortunes came down on colored cardboard rectangles. George’s said, “Do not refuse any invitations this evening,” and Flor’s said that she must take better care of her liver, and that she would soon be seeing someone off by train. “Mama’s waiting,” Flor said, throwing her fortune away. She grabbed his arm and made him walk faster. When they came up to Aunt Bonnie, sitting with tea and a plate of little cakes, they were both flushed with heat, but neither of them complained. They were acting in unison, without having been told. They were doing everything to please Aunt Bonnie. George had an instinctive awareness that this aunt loved him, not because he was Georgie Fairlie and ought to be loved, but because he was a relative, Aunt Bonnie’s brother’s son. He understood that Flor must know her cousins; she mustn’t become too strange. He was conscious of a quality of love that was a family and not a personal thing. Florence was playing up well too. Earlier, at lunch, out on the terrace of the hotel, when one of them said something funny the other laughed much harder than the joke deserved, and Aunt Bonnie laughed with a sad, grimacing pleasure that was painful to see. Her husband, Uncle Stanley, had been so dreadful to her, he had humiliated her so deeply that she couldn’t live in America; she couldn’t show her face. She was condemned to live abroad and bring Flor up in some harmful way: harmful for Flor, that is. That was what Aunt Bonnie told him, in a high wretched voice, and Flor listened, bent over her plate, flashing a glance sideways, now to her mother, now to George, to see how he was taking it. She listened as if she had never heard any of it before, although it must have been her daily fare. Flor was patient; she was patient even with George’s stammer. He asked long riddles, stammering like mad if he thought a waiter might be listening, and his cousin was good about guessing the answers, even when he had left out some clue, or given the whole thing away by telling it backward. That laughter, that patience, was for Aunt Bonnie. George had never been separated from his parents before and had fugitive thoughts that they might never come back, but he still understood about Aunt Bonnie, without having been told. It was the first time he had been expected to do anything for anyone in his life.

  To please Aunt Bonnie they stood on the edge of the Piazza, not too far away, because she would want to see them enjoying themselves. They shook grain out of newspaper cones and flung it around. Aunt Bonnie watched from her café table, and nodded, and smiled.

  Without looking at George, Flor said, “You saw Stanley, didn’t you?”

  “He came on the boat,” said George.

  “Was she with him?” said Flor. “What’s she like?”

  He didn’t hedge, as an older person might, and say, “What’s who like?” or anything of the kind. He thrust one foot toward a fat, feeding pigeon—taking a stand. He said, “She brought us all different things. She brought me candy.”

  “I see,” said Flor. “They came to see you off. That was loyal of your parents. That was nice.” He didn’t understand sarcasm. He went on scattering corn. “How old is she?” said Flor, after a time.

  “Around thirty-three,” said George solemnly, to whom “fifty-eight” or “thirty-one” might have meant much the same. He had heard said of his own mother that she was thirty-three.

  “She couldn’t even be my mother,” said Flor contemptuously. “Mama’s forty.”

  “What fun you’re having,” came Aunt Bonnie’s wailing voice.

  They bought new cones of grain and flung it out in an awful rite, in silence. The pigeons were too fat and lazy to fly. They waddled around George’s feet, pecking and squabbling and pushing one another away.

  “She took it all right,” Flor suddenly began again, “until some damn fool went and told her the other one was younger and better looking. She was all right, at first. She even said to me, ‘Your father is going to live with this other person. I’m sure she’s perfectly sweet.’ She couldn’t complain,” said Flor. “She’d had this man around for ages, this doctor. So she couldn’t complain. She used to take me to this doctor for sun lamps on my spine. She must have thought I was deaf and dumb and blind. The nurse of this doctor taught me to play gin rummy. Stanley never said anything and then all of a sudden he blew up and threw her out. Threw us both out,” said Flor. “Threw her out of the house and she took me too.” She was rather affected, telling this, although that was certainly not the word George would have used then. He mistrusted the toss of her head, and the glance she gave, seeing if he was impressed. The effect of this story was to increase his stolidness. He dropped corn one grain at a time, choosing his pigeons. “Nobody was loyal,” said Flor. “You stinking Fairlies weren’t loyal. You see him all the time. It doesn’t matter. She’s different now. She never looks at anyone.” In George’s memory it was here that Florence cried: “She’ll never do anything any more. I’ll always keep her with me.” That wasn’t affected. There was no toss of hair, but the same queer pushing attitude of hands he had seen after the necklace broke. She meant these words, they weren’t intended for George. It was a solemn promise, a cry of despair, love and resentment so woven together that even Flor couldn’t tell them apart.

  The paper cones were empty again. This time they threw them away and went back to Aunt Bonnie’s table. It was time to listen to the band. Flor ran to her mother and there, in front of everybody, all the strangers and waiters, flung her brown arms around Aunt Bonnie’s neck. She cried, “Oh, you look so tired, you look so fed up! Do you hate this place?”

  “Darling,” said Aunt Bonnie, who had been crying, “it’s only for you. You looked so sweet and pretty there with Georgie. I’m sure you hate me. You’ll hate me one day. I’m sure I should bring you up some other way. I’m no good at this.”

  “I’ll never hate you, I’ll love you,” Floren
ce said angrily. “I hate Stanley, I hate George, I hate everybody, I love you.”

  They sat close so their cheeks were pressed and both of them talked at once and began laughing and crying, with an easiness of emotion, as if they did this a lot. They didn’t care about the waiters and they had forgotten George, who stood apart, with an eddy of pigeons around his feet. He loathed his cousin and aunt. He was so embarrassed at what they were doing, he wanted to fly at them and punch them and make them stop. He was alone and ridiculous with pigeons. His parents had gone off for the day without him. They had sneaked off without saying goodbye. It came over him, the hollowness of having been left, the fury at having been made a fool. He dropped his hands to his sides and opened his mouth and howled and howled. His eyes were shut to crescents and his mouth a great cave. He was much too big to be crying this way.

  “I’ve scared him,” Florence said, from her mother’s side. “I told him something silly, for a joke.”

  But he wasn’t going to let her have the satisfaction of that, and he shut his mouth and opened it again to gasp: “It-wasn’t-you,” from the circle of waiters and his fluttering aunt, who had sped to take him in her arms. Flor thought he was being honorable, an honorable boy, and she looked at him in a perfect fury of contempt and then turned her back; until both of them were grown, she never really looked at him again. The look was enough to make him stop crying. He waited until his parents returned that evening, apprehensive in their guilt, then he staged the scene all over again, this time sure of the response. He wailed, “You left me all alone,” to which Aunt Bonnie gave an accompanying wail, “My word of honor, he was good as gold,” while his mother, rocking him, crooned, “I know, I know,” to both.

  Flor was dressed for dinner by then, in a dark blue dress. Her arms were bare, her pony-tail hair brushed, coppery, over one shoulder. George’s mother stopped mooning over him long enough to stare, admiring—this particular public scene took place in the hotel bar; George was by now getting the hang of attracting and ignoring the public, although he didn’t do it so well as Flor—and she exclaimed: “Flor, honey, do something tremendous. You’re too pretty to waste.”

  “Whatever happens,” Florence said, composedly, “I shall never marry a Fairlie. I’ve had enough family. Nothing would persuade me to marry a Fairlie and nothing would persuade me to marry George.”

  Why this should have made everyone laugh was beyond George: but it became a family expression, brought up, through the years, whenever George and Florence were made to meet. They met summers, two and three years apart, so that every time it was like meeting a different person. Florence paid no attention to him and they never spoke: although his parents never seemed to notice this. “Flor is sweet,” his mother said once, “but she’s not like a young girl at all. She’s too grown up. I wish Bonnie would send her to college here.”

  “She wouldn’t fit in any more,” his father said. “Anyway, why come back here? She doesn’t want to marry a Fairlie.”

  This reminded George’s mother of Venice and she smiled. George was in love with the daughter of the man who owned the garage in the place where they went summers. His parents hadn’t started worrying about Barbara Sim: not yet. They still thought it was young and touching and funny; young and funny like George’s reply to Florence in the Venice hotel bar: “I’d sooner get nothing for Christmas for nineteen years than marry you.”

  They met summers: an unreal meeting in hot New York, one year when Bonnie decided to brave it out and then found it was August, nobody there. Once there was a meeting in England, in a hotel, and then somewhere else, on a blowy sandy beach. It was always hot and Aunt Bonnie had a new thing now, migraine headache. Then there was the last meeting, when Flor married a man called Bob Harris she had known in Cannes, and they came back to New York, not creeping this time, but with clatter and circumstance.

  They met in an apartment someone had lent the Harris couple. It was full of dark wood and paintings of ships. “This stuff isn’t just old,” Bob Harris said. “It’s period.” George didn’t hear this: it was repeated to him later on. Because Aunt Bonnie couldn’t stand the air-conditioning, the windows were open, the room dense with heat and noise. Most of the people here were Fairlies. George counted eleven persons, including himself, who bore the Fairlie features in toto: white hair, white lashes, ruddy cheeks, and, in the case of the less fortunate, the big front teeth. They had come in from everywhere to see the bride. Once you were in the family, you were in to stay: death, divorce, scandal—nothing operated, nothing cut you away. Bob Harris was in it now too. He would fit in, sift down, find his place. Now that he was in there would be no criticism, not a flicker, not a glance. No one would recall that Bonnie had written from Cannes: “Well I don’t know what’s going to happen now but Florence has gone and married this Jew.” When George’s mother had read this bit aloud, she had taken on just a shade of Bonnie’s whiny accent, that sacred Fairlie drawl, and it came out: “Flounce has gonen married . . .” Nothing else was hinted: nothing survived except their manner of saying “Bob Harris” all the time, as if it were all one word.

  There were no Harrises in the room, although Harrises were known to exist. Harris père had given Florence a handsome wedding present, and someone had seen his name, quite dignified, on an advertisement for his wine-importing firm. Bob Harris ran the French end of the business: he lived in Paris. He was the same age as Florence, twenty-four. It was the good life. George heard all this and understood. He was part of this family, so much so that he understood their hints and suggestions, their stressed words, even when nothing important was said. It had all been settled for him in advance: his attitudes and perceptions had been decided for him before he was born. Perhaps because the room was so crowded and hot George began to sweat. He felt sweat breaking on his back and under his arms and was sure it showed through his clothes. Only, as it happened, no one was looking at him. They were much too interested in Florence, who was really a beauty now, straight and quiet, with the pretty coppery hair wound in a knot behind her head. They had all been told by Bonnie, separately, as a secret, that there was something wrong with Florence; she could never have children; she wasn’t well. There was a high tide of noise and Aunt Bonnie’s voice above them all. George and his parents had driven in from the country and come here late: everyone but Florence was loud and drunk. After a time George forgot what people might be thinking of him and he began covertly watching his cousin, from under his whitish lashes, looking for traces of illness, traces of love. He was seventeen that summer and always looking for things. He sat on a chair at right angles to the sofa on which Florence sat with his aunt. They were holding hands. He saw that every time Flor’s husband came near her he brushed some part of her skin with the back of his hand; and that although Flor never looked at him she was aware of that faintly brushing foreign masculine hand. It was as though some projection of the two, as a couple, was quite apart and in another room, or simply invisible.

  “She’ll never do anything any more. I’ll always keep her with me.” This voice came at him, hurled out of the past, with the violence of his cousin’s warm hair picked up by the wind and blown across his face.

  “Georgie,” said Florence, and she bent toward him, the first time she had said anything to him for years, “do you remember how hot it was in Venice when we were kids? I was just reminding Mama. Do you remember that?”

  “But New York is too hot,” said Aunt Bonnie, as if it were somebody’s fault.

  “Do you remember how green it was all the time?” Flor said to him. “Everything was so clear and green, green water, even the sky looked green to me.”

  He had been staring, but now he looked inadvertently into her eyes, dark-lashed, green as the lagoon had been—he thought he remembered it now. He couldn’t reply. Bob Harris kept moving around, too hospitable, doing too much: at least it seemed so to George, who was sensitive to how people did things. He wanted Bob Harris to be above reproach.