Montreal Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  At the bottom of the steps was a black-painted door. She waited for me to catch up before touching the handle. Behind us, a guide called that we were looking at the tomb of a local poet, not yet part of the tour. On the grave, a rose bloomed and shed. Askew on a heap of masonry—the rubble of a chapel—a sign read “Please do not stand on the main altar when taking photographs.” Roses and honeysuckle clung to the sign. Around this oasis a gardener moved, clipping box hedge. A lavender-edged walk led nowhere. A sprinkler turned lopsidedly on a blanket-size lawn.

  “Do you remember ‘The Secret Garden’?” Lily said.

  “My aunt tried to read it to me.”

  “Could we have something like this? I don’t mean a whole castle. Just a garden.”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “The whole of Europe is for sale.”

  I wondered where she was getting this. Lapwing’s wife had gone sour on France. She was sick of cooking on a coal-and-wood stove and hauling ashes.

  I didn’t want to own anything. It was my Aunt Elspeth who advanced the money for the house where I spent my honeymoon—the whole of my marriage, really. At first I went on renting it for holidays. The rent gradually rose from eight to twenty-four dollars a month. The owner decided to sell because he thought our part of the coast would never be developed, and my aunt came over to see what it was worth. There was no trace of Lily by then, apart from some damp, spotted books she had drawn from English libraries and blithely inscribed with her own name. I had kept meaning to take them back, but I was not often there. As the British colonies dwindled, the libraries closed. The libraries were often run by parish committees attached to churches in the diocese of Gibraltar. For some of my neighbors, the whole of the western Mediterranean was just a bishop’s district.

  Five thousand dollars: not much of a buy—a seaside wreck with a view over another damaged roof. All the same, said my aunt, her hand shading her eyes, there was the sea. “When you start to earn money, Steve, you should buy that other place and tear it down.” She wanted me to have something. If it could not be Lily, let it be a tumbledown house.

  Lily never needed to own an inch of Europe. She could make it up. She began to invent her own Europe from the time she learned to read. There were no mermaids in Canadian waters; no one rode to Canterbury. She had to invent something or perish from disappointment. She imagined a place where trees were enchanted, stones turned into frogs, frogs into princes. Later, she seemed to be inventing Bach and Mozart, then a host of people who lived with Bach and Mozart easily, so that she could keep good company in her mind. Sometimes I hear a dash of Lily’s music over a radio and I wish I were still young—twenty-four would do—and could find Lily’s inventions, and watch her trying to live in them again.

  I would like to provide the justice lacking in her biography. I would like to say that she married an Italian composer-conductor. A German novelist-essayist-political thinker. An Argentinian playwright-designer-poet-revolutionary: nothing harebrained—a fellow respected, consulted by chancellors and presidents. Better still, the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer, generous toward the arts and all his wives. But she married me, young and broke and hardworking (Lily’s transcription: immature and tightfisted); left me for a nineteen-year-old English vagabond employed to work in the garden of an ambiguous bachelor neighbor; surfaced in Montreal as Mrs. Ken Peel; lived in a series of tidy and overheated apartments; had Carlotta and sent her to one of the Catholic schools she had once professed to despise. After the rocking-chair disaster she married Harrower, got the income, the travel, the friends in Paris and Monaco, with or without magic. (According to Carlotta, Lily’s chronicler, Harrower had been in the background for some time, “chasing after Mummy.”)

  When she finally deserted me, in the southern house, the elements of my work in plastic bags to protect them from the seeping rain, I thought she might have waited, might have found the place more to her liking with the roof tiled. She had nothing against Talleyrand, even took a bus to Nice to look things up in the municipal library, so that she and I could talk as equals. Came back with the news that Talleyrand was the father of Eugène Delacroix.

  I had to tell her that history is contrary in position to gossip. What offended her? That I wouldn’t play games with my work? I think it must have been then she decided I might not turn into an ambassador (she was miles ahead of me) but a teacher of history at some boggy university. She saw herself driving children to basketball practice. Saw a row of tiny shoes, cleaned with liquid whitener, on a kitchen windowsill, drying in the sun. Saw icicles dripping and snowy backyards.

  I was ready for university at fifteen, won a gold medal for history two years later. My photograph was in the Montreal Star. When an interviewer on CJAD said I looked like F. Scott Fitzgerald, everyone my Aunt Elspeth knew tried to find Fitzgerald’s books. Most of the work was out of print, and French translations were banned in Quebec. (Not that anyone in my aunt’s circle could have read them.) My aunt owned two novels and a collection of short stories which she would not lend: she had the habit of underlining, and she did not want outsiders to know her private thoughts and feelings. Besides, the books were hallowed now, in some way connected to my prospects.

  At twenty-four, the best the prodigy had to say was that history isn’t gossip. Was that my whole mind? When Lily asked me that, I saw I had hurt her feelings. I apologized. She said, “It doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. You’re still the same man.” I thought she was being unreasonable because she was a woman. We were sitting half turned away from each other on the stony beach. We had expected the French South to be something like Florida, but the sky was wet flannel and we wore sweaters over sweaters.

  My aunt never liked my engagement to Lily: she saw Catholic entrapment, a soul floundering in the Vatican net. She still spent most of the year in Châtelroux. Some of the furniture in her house was supposed to have been brought north by ancestors who’d refused the American Revolution. Family legends had them walking all the way from Virginia, carrying chairs on their heads.

  Engaged to Lily, I sat in my aunt’s green-and-white kitchen, at a table drawn up to the window. There was a crust of spring snow on the sill, melting in the sun. I had a room in Montreal, near the university. I came down on weekends whenever I could, whenever Lily was not available. She had a job in Montreal, secretary to a dentist in the Medical Arts Building. Quale relatives in one of the suburbs—Verdun, I think—kept an eye on her. She must have been twenty-two, but her family pretended she was fourteen and still a virgin.

  My aunt was making pancakes. She walked back and forth between stove and table; I’d never known her as restless. She said that if I really meant to marry the Quale girl the marriage had to work. Catholics won’t divorce. (It couldn’t fail, I knew—buttering pancakes, smiling.) Let me tell you what women won’t stand for, she said. They don’t want to be deprived of sex or money. One or the other, if it can’t be helped, but never both. Well, sometimes even both, so long as there is no public humiliation. “Such as the husband’s spending a lot of money on another woman,” she said.

  She had mentioned two subjects, sex and money, that until now she had pretended did not exist. I had just been made an honorary member of a closed society—the association of women who stop talking when a man (or child) comes into the room.

  About money: I had none—not yet—but Lily knew. Later, I tried to remember if I had ever neglected her or tried to make a fool of her. The public teasing to which Harry Lapwing subjected his wife disgusted me. No; what went wrong had nothing to do with either of the things my aunt had mentioned. Lily must have seen me—my mind, my life, my future, my Europe—as a swindle. She began to enjoy long conversations with Watt Chadwick’s gardener. He had thin yellow hair, was drifting, desperate, homesick. Told her he was a music student, that gardening was destroying his hands. Talked about the glories of England: he must have glossed over Oliver Cromwell. One day the two blond truants plodded up the hill to the r
ailway station. “Leaving everything,” said Mr. Chadwick, when he came over to cry about it. (Such tears! No woman could have inspired them.) In fact, they had left nothing but two men who could not even comfort each other.

  Carlotta looked with strengthened disgust at her surroundings—the flagged courtyard and rusted cannons. The tour was over. “We were ripped off,” she said. “We never got up the tower, and the German guide told his group a lot more.”

  “It’s just the language,” I said. “It sounds like more.”

  “I’ve never been anywhere important. I need to know the right things.” So that was the trouble. I made her tell me some of the places she had been to—New York, Boston, Jamaica, Bermuda—and tried to explain why they mattered. Her parents had never taken her really away, she said, shaking her head. Ben and Lily went to England, or Japan, or those other, great destinations, during the school term, when there were out-of-season rates.

  She seemed dejected beyond any cause I could think of. Perhaps she was hungry. “We’ll stop somewhere for lunch on the way back,” I said, remembering all the places Lily and I could never afford. We were half across the bridge (the graffito by now trodden to a blur) when I saw Victor de Stentor and Irma Baes get to their feet out of some dry stubble behind the trees and start down the avenue, hand in hand.

  My first reaction was to draw Carlotta’s attention away from the pair. Her remarks in the restaurant in Nice had shown her to be a dangerous girl, inquisitive and censorious. She carried, intact, deeply buried, a moral legacy from the Quales. There was also her terrible, shadeless social goodness. She would be capable of telling Irma, “You shouldn’t be holding hands with that old Victor. You could do a lot better. Why, he even tried to take me out. He’d try anything.”

  It was I who was thinking this, not Carlotta. On second thought, I was not sure Irma could do better, or that she could do anything at all. A long line of good-looking women came before her in Victor’s life. She had nothing to show but a bogus affair with a dead driver. Had she been to Victor’s house? Did he invite her to dinner parties without the rest of us? He still had the same drab yellow villa on Cap Martin where Lily had dined, believing herself in Riviera society. The gravel lawn was the same, except that occasionally a truckload of fresh stones was raked over the old. By way of a garden he had two stubby palm trees, like leafy cigars. He still kept as servants clandestine foreigners, who led a stealthy, watchful, and perhaps half-starved existence. (For as long as I’d known him, Victor offered his guests the same dinner of roast chicken with saffron rice, which he ate contentedly, often explaining that saffron contained every wholesome element required for the nutrition of rich and poor.) In the old days, they had been Italians and Yugoslavs; now they were likely to be Tamil or Pakistani.

  The house had seemed strange to Lily and me. It was furnished with Edwardian oddments, bought on the cheap just after the war, when a number of villas and their contents were sold up. Some of the owners were too old to pick up a way of life so changed; some could not afford to. Foamy, gauzy curtains used to blow in and out the dining-room windows, which simply means there were no screens. Mosquito bites on Lily’s thin skin swelled like hives. She mentioned screens once, at one of his dinner parties, and everyone laughed. People laughed at screens in all those civilized places that abounded in flying, stinging, poisonous insects.

  Victor made his servants spray the dining room with a substance now banned in the industrial world, although stocks of it remain on other continents, left behind by industrial developers. The servants used large cans with pump handles. They bumped into one another, not looking where they were going. Lily and I inhaled the stuff, ate it and drank it (it fell in droplets over the saffron rice and into our wine); Lily rubbed it over her arms and neck.

  I’m reminded of Lily whenever I read about DDT and how our generation stocked it in our bodies. Nobody knows the specific harm it may have caused; it is just there, in me and in Lily—all we have left that is still alike. In powdered form it was a palliative against fleas and lice. (Nothing killed the French strains.) Fleas and lice were the mid-century European plague, Divine castigation for sex among strangers. It was Lily who first noticed that when European men had nothing in particular to do, were just standing idle, they scratched themselves, in a dreamy, somnolent way. At first, she supposed their clothes were too tight. She wanted my opinion: I was supposed to know about Europe, because my Aunt Elspeth had taken me to England when I was a child. But the Burnets and Copes (my aunt was a widowed Mrs. Cope) did not consider England to be a part of Europe. I could not tell Lily a thing about the clothes of European men. She had to find out for herself.

  What she found out kept her faithful, at least for a time. Lapwing’s wife, of wide and casual experience, told her that the men were more entertaining than North Americans, but conceited, grudge-bearing, and dirty. Edie Lapwing used to go down to the harbor at night and make close investigations in the shelter of beached fishing boats.

  “So long as her hobby lets Lapwing get on with his work,” I said, when Lily told me, though it was not the way I felt about men and women and marriage. I wished Lily could find a line of interest apart from Edie and Edie’s men, but I wasn’t sure if I should say it. I did not want her to turn from DDT to Talleyrand. Her interests might be trivial, but they were not inconvenient. “I don’t think you’ve picked a very pleasant subject,” I said. It was the way I’d been brought up to show disapproval—qualifying, modifying. She laughed, and said her research was as valuable as mine. She knew as much about the acquired resistance of French fleas as I did about French history. Of course, there was less to learn, and her only source of inquiry was Edie.

  Victor was never attracted by Lily’s frail beauty. Her absolute personal poverty (he had antennae for that) canceled any sexual pull. He believed, and told me, that she would fade out before thirty. He was separated from a wife of his own, Angelica, who lived down in Genoa. You have to be grim and rich to put up with that climate, and, in fact, all the Genoese I got to know (I had a stretch of career in Italy) were grim and rich. The rich, engaged in the struggles of richness, always choose a gray and flinty climate to do their struggling in: Hamburg, Milan, Lyons. The laws of Italy still forbade divorce. Victor could easily have convinced a French court that Angelica had deserted him, but it suited his hugger-mugger business arrangements to have an extra, legal domicile in another country. A separation agreement did not prevent him from giving Angelica’s address as his own. The agreement itself caused nothing more disruptive than fitful grappling over household goods. Once, Angelica came over while Victor was giving a dinner party and took the dining-room furnishings away. His guests were still at their drinks, in the stiff, ugly salon across the hall. They pretended not to see (he favored the British colony)—all but Lily, who held her glass of Campari in both hands and stood in the doorway and stared.

  It was our first sight of Angelica. She carried in a crocodile attaché case an Italian court order, signed by a relative of hers, and six copies of a permit to carry the stuff over the frontier, duty-free. She came in a van, which she made the driver park straight across the front door, as in a police raid. Lily took an inventory of her red dress, tightly belted, her hat of glossy red straw, the nail polish that was the exact color of the hat. Her hair, the yellow of nasturtiums, was longer than Lily’s. She dragged a stepladder out of the kitchen, kicked off her thin red sandals, climbed in bare feet. (The table had already been removed, the carpet rolled up and hoisted aboard the van.)

  Angelica examined the chandelier, seeing if it could be taken down, while Victor, at the foot of the ladder, observed with unabashed displeasure his wife’s naked legs. “Angelica, this is undignified,” he said. She said the equivalent of “What is dignity?,” but in language more violent and personal, and started to unscrew the light bulbs. (Lily reminded me later that Victor never stopped scratching the back of his neck.) He finally gave up, left her there, and took his party of seven to a restaurant, where he p
aid with a check that may have been dud: he made a great show of waving his signature dry and advised the headwaiter to have it framed.

  Angelica still lives in Genoa; Victor will never retire. He continues to deal in crumbling property—villas with their shutters askew, their gardens crowded with those wild shrubs that bear clusters of spines. Two dead villas, side by side, razed to make way for an apartment block, or a small shopping center and parking space. Most clearances were completed about fifteen years ago. Victor’s operations consist of mopping up. For a long time he looked at our enclave of shabby villas and saw them reduced to a framed photograph of southern decay hanging on the wall of the “Old Riviera” room at some local museum. In place of houses he envisioned three or four different things, all tall and white, inspired by the look of Beirut when it was still a good place for real estate.

  Now here was Victor, with no eyebrows left, forever married to Angelica, venturing to replace the dead racing-car driver who haunted poor Irma’s imagination. He was proposing a neck that, so far, no one had broken. He may even have promised never to die, thinking it would please her—although, I suspect now, it is not at all what women want.

  Watching the two make their way hand in hand down the road, I experienced love’s opposite, which is resentment. Neither of them possessed the least qualification for being loved. Irma had never been able to stir up friendship. Some people had imitated her Belgian accent; the Admiral swore she had tried to entangle him in a conversation about art (he was too smart to be caught), and that when she mentioned the Bauhaus he had understood “the bowwows.” I was not so unjust as to think she and Victor deserved each other. He was still the man at the foot of the ladder, scratching his neck and pleading for dignity. Irma was no more a pirate than most of the rest of us; she would have clutched the chandelier and said, “Help me! I’m falling!” She was a sad little amateur, failed before she was launched. Nevertheless, love’s opposite reflected Irma’s vision of Victor. She turned to him there in the road, and it was like watching a tree burst into wild blossom because a saint had touched it. Now my mind changed in a second. She was too good for Victor de Stentor. I believed the story of the lover drowned in the canal: brave, disinterested, superior to Victor. For the sake of his memory, I would have seen Victor dead, bloated, devoured by crabs.