Montreal Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  “What’s your wife like?” my father croaked. His eyes were interested. I hadn’t been prepared for this, for how long the mind stayed alive and how frivolous it went on being. I thought he should be more serious. “Wife,” my father insisted. “What about her?”

  “Obedient” came into my head, I don’t know why; it isn’t important. “Older than me,” I said, quite easily, at last. “Better educated. She was a kindergarten teacher. She knows a lot about art.” Now, why that, of all the side issues? She doesn’t like a bare wall, that’s all. “She prefers the Old Masters,” I said. I was thinking about the Scotch landscape we’ve got over the mantelpiece.

  “Good, good. Name?”

  “You know—Beryl. We sent you an announcement, to that place in Mexico where you were then.”

  “That’s right, Beryl.” “Burrull” was what he actually said.

  I felt reassured, because my father until now had sounded like a strange person. To have “Beryl” pronounced as I was used to hearing it made up for being alone here and the smell of the ward and the coffee made of iodine. I remembered what the Old Master had cost—one hundred and eighty dollars in 1962. It must be worth more now. Beryl said it would be an investment. Her family paid for half. She said once, about my father, “One day he’ll be sick; we’ll have to look after him.” “We can sell the painting,” I said. “I guess I can take care of my own father.”

  It happened—I was here, taking care of him; but he spoiled it now by saying, “You look like you’ve done pretty well. That’s not a bad suit you’ve got on.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I had to borrow from Beryl’s father so as to get here.”

  I thought he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and I had my next answer ready, about not begrudging a cent of it. But my father closed his eyes, smiling, saving up more breath to talk about nothing.

  “I liked old Lou,” he said distinctly. I was afraid he would ask, “Why doesn’t she write to me?” and I would have to say, “Because she never forgave you,” and he was perfectly capable of saying then, “Never forgave me for what?” But instead of that he laughed, which was the worst of the choking and wheezing noises he made now, and when he had recovered he said, “Took her to Eaton’s to choose a toy village. Had this shipment in, last one in before the war. Summer ’39. The old man saw the ad, wanted to get one for the kid. Old man came—each of us had her by the hand. Lou looked round, but every village had something the matter, as far as Her Royal Highness was concerned. The old man said, ‘Come on, Princess, hurry it up,’ but no, she’d of seen a scratch, or a bad paint job, or a chimney too big for a cottage. The old man said, ‘Can’t this kid make up her mind about anything? She’s going to do a lot more crying than laughing,’ he said, ‘and that goes for you, too.’ He was wrong about me. Don’t know about Lou. But she was smart that time—not to want something that wasn’t perfect.”

  He shut his eyes again and breathed desperately through his mouth. The old man in the story was his father, my grandfather.

  “Nothing is perfect,” I said. I felt like standing up so everyone could hear. It wasn’t sourness but just the way I felt like reacting to my father’s optimism.

  Some days he seemed to be getting better. After two weeks I was starting to wonder if they hadn’t brought me all this way for nothing. I couldn’t go home and come back later, it had to be now; but I couldn’t stay on and on. I had already moved to a cheaper hotel room. I dreamed I asked him, “How much longer?” but luckily the dream was in a foreign language—so foreign I don’t think it was French, even. It was a language no one on earth had ever heard of. I wouldn’t have wanted him to understand it, even in a dream. The nurses couldn’t say anything. Sometimes I wondered if they knew who he was—if they could tell one patient from another. It was a big place, and poor. These nurses didn’t seem to have much equipment. When they needed sterile water for anything, they had to boil it in an old saucepan. I got to the doctor one day, but he didn’t like it. He had told my father he was fine, and that I could go back to Canada anytime—the old boy must have been starting to wonder why I was staying so long. The doctor just said to me, “Family business is of no interest to me. You look after your duty and I’ll look after mine.” I was afraid that my dream showed on my face and that was what made them all so indifferent. I didn’t know how much time there was. I wanted to ask my father why he thought everything had to be perfect, and if he still stood by it as a way of living. Whenever he was reproached about something—by my mother, for instance—he just said, “Don’t make my life dark for me.” What could you do? He certainly made her life dark for her. One year when we had a summer cottage, he took a girl from the village, the village tramp, out to an island in the middle of the lake. They got caught in a storm coming back, and around fifty people stood on shore waiting to see the canoe capsize and the sinners drown. My mother had told us to stay in the house, but when Kenny said, to scare me, “I guess the way things are, Mum’s gone down there to drown herself,” I ran after her. She didn’t say anything to me, but took her raincoat off and draped it over my head. It would have been fine if my father had died then—if lightning had struck him, or the canoe gone down like a stone. But no, he waded ashore—the slut, too, and someone even gave her a blanket. It was my mother that was blamed, in a funny way. “Can’t you keep your husband home?” this girl’s father said. I remember that same summer some other woman saying to her, “You’d better keep your husband away from my daughter. I’m telling you for your own good, because my husband’s got a gun in the house.” Someone did say, “Oh, poor Mrs. Apostolesco!” but my mother only answered, “If you think that, then I’m poor for life.” That was only one of the things he did to her. I’m not sure if it was even the worst.

  It was hard to say how long he had been looking at me. His lips were trying to form a word. I bent close and heard, “Sponge.”

  “Did you say ‘sponge’? Is ‘sponge’ what you said?”

  “Sponge,” he agreed. He made an effort: “Bad night last night. Awful. Wiped everything with my sponge—blood, spit. Need new sponge.”

  There wasn’t a bed table, just a plastic bag that hung on the bedrail with his personal things in it. I got out the sponge. It needed to be thrown away, all right. I said, “What color?”

  “Eh?”

  “This,” I said, and held it up in front of him. “The new one. Any special color?”

  “Blue.” His voice broke out of a whisper all at once. His eyes were mocking me, like a kid seeing how far he can go. I thought he would thank me now, but then I said to myself, You can’t expect anything; he’s a sick man, and he was always like this.

  “Most people think it was pretty good of me to have come here,” I wanted to explain—not to boast or anything, but just for the sake of conversation. I was lonely there, and I had so much trouble understanding what anybody was saying.

  “Bad night,” my father whispered. “Need sedation.”

  “I know. I tried to tell the doctor. I guess he doesn’t understand my French.”

  He moved his head. “Tip the nurses.”

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “Don’t make me talk.” He seemed to be using a reserve of breath. “At least twenty dollars. The ward girls less.”

  I said, “Jesus God!” because this was new to me and I felt out of my depth. “They don’t bother much with you,” I said, talking myself into doing it. “Maybe you’re right. If I gave them a present, they’d look after you more. Wash you. Maybe they’d put a screen around you—you’d be more private then.”

  “No, thanks,” my father said. “No screen. Thanks all the same.”

  We had one more conversation after that. I’ve already said there were always women slopping around in the ward, in felt slippers, and bathrobes stained with medicine and tea. I came in and found one—quite young, this one was—combing my father’s hair. He could hardly lift his head from the pillow, and still she thought he was interesting. I thought, Kenn
y should see this.

  “She’s been telling me,” my father gasped when the woman had left. “About herself. Three children by different men. Met a North African. He adopts the children, all three. Gives them his name. She has two more by him, boys. But he won’t put up with a sick woman. One day he just doesn’t come. She’s been a month in another place; now they’ve brought her here. Man’s gone. Left the children. They’ve been put in all different homes, she doesn’t know where. Five kids. Imagine.”

  I thought, You left us. He had forgotten; he had just simply forgotten that he’d left his own.

  “Well, we can’t do anything about her, can we?” I said. “She’ll collect them when she gets out of here.”

  “If she gets out.”

  “That’s no way to talk,” I said. “Look at the way she was talking and walking around …” I could not bring myself to say “and combing your hair.” “Look at how you are,” I said. “You’ve just told me this long story.”

  “She’ll seem better, but she’ll get worse,” my father said. “She’s like me, getting worse. Do you think I don’t know what kind of ward I’m in? Every time they put the screen around a patient, it’s because he’s dying. If I had TB, like they tried to make me believe, I’d be in a TB hospital.”

  “That just isn’t true,” I said.

  “Can you swear I’ve got TB? You can’t.”

  I said without hesitating, “You’ve got a violent kind of TB. They had no place else to put you except here. The ward might be crummy, but the medicine … the medical care …” He closed his eyes. “I’m looking you straight in the face,” I said, “and I swear you have this unusual kind of TB, and you’re almost cured.” I watched, without minding it now, a new kind of bug crawling along the base of the wall.

  “Thanks, Billy,” said my father.

  I really was scared. I had been waiting for something without knowing what it would mean. I can tell you how it was: It was like the end of the world.

  “I didn’t realize you were worried,” I said. “You should of asked me right away.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” my father said. “That’s why I wanted you, not the others.”

  That was all. Not long after that, he couldn’t talk. He had deserted his whole family once, but I was the one he abandoned twice. When he died, a nurse said to me, “I am sorry.” It had no meaning, from her, yet only a few days before, it was all I thought I wanted to hear.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  ON NEW YEAR’S Eve the Plummers took Amabel to the opera.

  “Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” said Amabel, feeling secure because she had a Plummer on either side.

  Colonel Plummer’s car had broken down that afternoon; he had got his wife and their guest punctually to the Bolshoi Theater, through a storm, in a bootleg taxi. Now he discovered from his program that the opera announced was neither of those they had been promised.

  His wife leaned across Amabel and said, “Well, which is it?” She could not read any Russian and would not try.

  She must have known it would take him minutes to answer, for she sat back, settled a width of gauzy old shawl on her neck, and began telling Amabel the relative sizes of the Bolshoi and some concert hall in Vancouver the girl had never heard of. Then, because it was the Colonel’s turn to speak, she shut her eyes and waited for the overture.

  The Colonel was gazing at the program and putting off the moment when he would have to say that it was Ivan Susanin, a third choice no one had so much as hinted at. He wanted to convey that he was sorry and that the change was not his fault. He took bearings: He was surrounded by women. To his left sat the guest, who mewed like a kitten, who had been a friend of his daughter’s, and whose name he could not remember. On the right, near the aisle, two quiet unknown girls were eating fruit and chocolates. These two smelled of oranges; of clothes worn a long time in winter; of light recent sweat; of women’s hair. Their arms were large and bare. When the girl closest to him moved slightly, he saw a man’s foreign wristwatch. He wondered who she was, and how the watch had come to her, but he had been here two years now—long enough to know he would never be answered. He also wondered if the girls were as shabby as his guest found everyone in Moscow. His way of seeing women was not concerned with that sort of evidence: Shoes were shoes, a frock was a frock.

  The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.

  He felt his guest’s silence, then his wife’s. The visitor’s profile was a kitten’s, to match her voice. She was twenty-two, which his Catherine would never be. Her gold dress, packed for improbable gala evenings, seemed the size of a bathing suit. She was divorcing someone, or someone in Canada had left her—he remembered that, but not her name.

  He moved an inch or two to the left and muttered, “It’s Ivan.”

  “What?” cried his wife. “What did you say?”

  In the old days, before their Catherine had died, when the Colonel’s wife was still talking to him, he had tried to hush her in public places sometimes, and so the habit of loudness had taken hold.

  “It isn’t Boris. It isn’t Igor. It’s Ivan. They must both have had sore throats.”

  “Oh, well, bugger it,” said his wife.

  Amabel supposed that the Colonel’s wife had grown peculiar through having lived so many years in foreign parts. Having no one to speak to, she conversed alone. Half of Mrs. Plummer’s character was quite coarse, though a finer Mrs. Plummer somehow kept order. Low-minded Mrs. Plummer chatted amiably and aloud with her high-minded twin—far more pleasantly than the whole of Mrs. Plummer ever talked to anybody.

  “Serves you right,” she said.

  Amabel gave a little jump. She wondered if Mrs. Plummer’s remark had anything to do with the opera. She turned her head cautiously. Mrs. Plummer had again closed her eyes.

  The persistence of memory determines what each day of the year will be like, the Colonel’s wife decided. Not what happens on New Year’s Eve. This morning I was in Moscow; between the curtains snow was falling. The day had no color. It might have been late afternoon. Then the smell of toast came into my room and I was back in my mother’s dining room in Victoria, with the gros-point chairs and the framed embroidered grace on the wall. A little girl I had been ordered to play with kicked the baseboard, waiting for us to finish our breakfast. A devilish little boy, Hume something, was on my mind. I was already attracted to devils; I believed in their powers. My mother’s incompetence about choosing friends for me shaped my life, because that child, who kicked the baseboard and left marks on the paint …

  When she and her husband had still been speaking, this was how Frances Plummer had talked. She had offered him hours of reminiscence, and the long personal thoughts that lead to quarrels. In those days red wine had made her aggressive, whiskey made him vague.

  Not only vague, she corrected; stubborn too. Speak? said one half of Mrs. Plummer to the other. Did we speak? We yelled!

  The quiet twin demanded a fairer portrait of the past, for she had no memory.

  Oh, he was a shuffler, back and forth between wife and mistress, said the virago, who had forgotten nothing. He’d desert one and then leave the other—flag to flag, false convert, double agent, reason why a number of women had long, hilly conversations, like the view from a train—monotonous, finally. That was the view a minute ago, you’d say. Yes, but look now.

  The virago declared him incompetent; said he had shuffled from embassy to embassy as well, pushed along by a staunch ability to retain languages, an untiring recollection of military history and wars nobody cared about. What did he take with him? His wife, for one thing. At least she was here, tonight, at the opera. Each time they changed countries he supervised the packing of a portrait of his mother, wearing white, painted when she was seventeen. He had nothing of Catherine’s: When Catherine died, Mrs. Plummer gave away her clothes and her books, and had her little dog put to sl
eep.

  How did it happen? In what order? said calm Mrs. Plummer. Try and think it in order. He shuffled away one Easter; came shuffling back; and Catherine died. It is useless to say “Serves you right,” for whatever served him served you.

  The overture told Amabel nothing, and by the end of the first act she still did not know the name of the opera or understand what it was about. Earlier in the day the Colonel had said, “There is some uncertainty—sore throats here and there. The car, now—you can see what has happened. It doesn’t start. If our taxi should fail us, and isn’t really a taxi, we might arrive at the Bolshoi too late for me to do anything much in the way of explaining. But you can easily figure it out for yourself.” His mind cleared; his face lightened. “If you happen to see Tartar dances, then you will know it is Igor. Otherwise it is Boris.”

  The instant the lights rose, Amabel thrust her program at him and said, “What does that mean?”

  “Why, Ivan. It’s Ivan.”

  “There are two words, aren’t there?”

  “Yes. What’s-His-Name had a sore throat, d’you see? We knew it might all be changed at any moment. It was clever of them to get these printed in time.”

  Mrs. Plummer, who looked like the Red Queen sometimes, said, “A life for the tsar,” meanwhile staring straight ahead of her.

  “Used to be, used to be,” said the Colonel, and he smiled at Amabel, as if to say to her, “Now you know.”

  The Plummers did not go out between acts. They never smoked, were seldom thirsty or hungry, and they hated crowds. Amabel stood and stretched so that the Russians could appreciate her hair, her waist, her thin arms, and, for those lucky enough to glimpse them, her thighs. After a moment or two Mrs. Plummer thought the Russians had appreciated Amabel enough, and she said very loudly, “You might be more comfortable sitting down.”