Montreal Stories
Page 33
I saw Lapwing’s heavy head bowing and lifting, and Edie’s slow expression of shock, and Fergus pouring himself, and nobody else, champagne. This time there surely must have been a flash of telepathy between two people with nothing in common. Fergus and I must have shared at least one thought: Lapwing had just opened his palm, revealing a miniature golden wife, and handed her over.
Then Edie looked at Fergus, and Fergus at Edie, and I watched her make up her mind. The spirit of William Morris surrounded the new lovers, evading his most hardworking academic snoop. Lapwing ought to have stood and quoted, “Fear shall not alter these lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover,” but he seemed to see nothing, notice nothing; or like Mr. Chadwick he continued to see and notice the wrong things.
Three of the future delinquents at our table were ex-Catholics. They took it for granted that the universe was eternal and they could gamble their lives. Whatever thin faith they still had was in endless renewal—new luck, new love. Nothing worked out for them, but even now I can see what they were after. Remembering Edie at the split second when she came to a decision, I can find it in me to envy them. The rest of us were born knowing better, which means we were stuck. When I finally looked away from her it was at another pool of candlelight, and the glowing, blooming children. I wonder now if there was anything about us for the children to remember, if they ever later on reminded one another: There was that long table of English-speaking people, still in bud.
MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in 1922, and left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write. Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published to universal acclaim. Paris Stories, a selection edited by Michael Ondaatje, appeared in 2002.
Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and has won numerous awards, including the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts, the inaugural Matt Cohen Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
She continues to live in Paris.
RUSSELL BANKS is a novelist and short story writer. His most recent works are Cloudsplitter, a novel, and The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Stories. He is president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in upstate New York.