The Moslem Wife and Other Stories Read online

  The Author

  MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in 1922. She spent her childhood years in Quebec, Ontario, and the eastern United States. After completing high school in New York City, she returned to Montreal, where, among other jobs, she worked at the National Film Board. At the age of twenty-one, she became a reporter for the Montreal Standard and stayed with the newspaper for six years. In 1950 she left Canada for Europe, living at various times in Austria, Italy, Spain, and the south of France before settling in Paris.

  One of the most acclaimed writers of fiction of our time, Gallant invests the characters of her novels and short stories with a sense of their ambiguous and haunting past, their dilemmas often reflecting more public expressions of postwar anxiety and dislocation. She leavens her vision with a deft irony which reaches at once towards the comic and the tragic.

  Gallant is a Companion of the Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Mavis Gallant resides in Paris, France.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Copyright © 1994 by Mavis Gallant

  Afterword copyright © 1994 by Mordecai Richler

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collective – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gallant, Mavis, 1922-

  The Moslem wife and other stories

  (New Canadian library)

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-632-5

  I. Richler, Mordecai. II. Title III Series.

  PS8513.A593M65 1993 C813′.54 C93-093798-8

  PR9199.3.G35M68 1993

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/NCL

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  The Author

  Series Information

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  About Geneva

  When We Were Nearly Young

  My Heart Is Broken

  The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street

  An Autobiography

  Saturday

  The Latehomecomer

  In Youth Is Pleasure

  The Moslem Wife

  Grippes and Poche

  Overhead in a Balloon

  Afterword

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgements

  The year printed at the end of each story indicates its original date of publication. In this collection I have reprinted the text of each story as it appeared in the author’s most recent published version: “About Geneva” (The Other Paris 1956); “When We Were Nearly Young” (In Transit 1988); “My Heart Is Broken” and “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (My Heart Is Broken 1964); “An Autobiography” (The Pegnitz Junction 1973); “Saturday” and “In Youth Is Pleasure” (Home Truths 1981); “The Latehomecomer” and “The Moslem Wife” (From the Fifteenth District 1979); “Grippes and Poche” and “Overhead in a Balloon” (Overhead in a Balloon 1985).

  D.S.

  About Geneva

  GRANNY was waiting at the door of the apartment. She looked small, lonely, and patient, and at the sight of her the children and their mother felt instantly guilty. Instead of driving straight home from the airport, they had stopped outside Nice for ice cream. They might have known how much those extra twenty minutes would mean to Granny. Colin, too young to know what he felt, or why, began instinctively to misbehave, dragging his feet, scratching the waxed parquet. Ursula bit her nails, taking refuge in a dream, while the children’s mother, Granny’s only daughter, felt compelled to cry in a high, cheery voice, “Well, Granny, here they are, safe and sound!”

  “Darlings,” said Granny, very low. “Home again.” She stretched out her arms to Ursula, but then, seeing the taxi driver, who had carried the children’s bags up the stairs, she drew back. After he had gone she repeated the gesture, turning this time to Colin, as if Ursula’s cue had been irrevocably missed. Colin was wearing a beret. “Wherever did that come from?” Granny said. She pulled it off and stood still, stricken. “My darling little boy,” she said, at last. “What have they done to you? They have cut your hair. Your lovely golden hair. I cannot believe it. I don’t want to believe it.”

  “It was high time,” the children’s mother said. She stood in the outer corridor, waiting for Granny’s welcome to subside. “It was high time someone cut Colin’s hair. The curls made such a baby of him. We should have seen that. Two women can’t really bring up a boy.”

  Granny didn’t look at all as if she agreed. “Who cut your hair?” she said, holding Colin.

  “Barber,” he said, struggling away.

  “Less said the better,” said Colin’s mother. She came in at last, drew off her gloves, looked around, as if she, and not the children, had been away.

  “He’s not my child, of course,” said Granny, releasing Colin. “If he were, I can just imagine the letter I should write. Of all the impudence! When you send a child off for a visit you expect at the very least to have him returned exactly as he left. And you,” she said, extending to Ursula a plump, liver-spotted hand, “what changes am I to expect in you?”

  “Oh, Granny, for Heaven’s sake, it was only two weeks.” She permitted her grandmother to kiss her, then went straight to the sitting room and hurled herself into a chair. The room was hung with dark engravings of cathedrals. There were flowers, red carnations, on the rickety painted tables, poked into stiff arrangements by a maid. It was the standard seasonal Nice meublé. Granny spent every winter in rented flats more or less like this one, and her daughter, since her divorce, shared them with her.

  Granny followed Ursula into the room and sat down, erect, on an uncomfortable chair, while her daughter, trailing behind, finally chose a footstool near the empty fireplace. She gave Granny a gentle, neutral look. Before starting out for the airport, earlier, she had repeated her warning: There were to be no direct questions, no remarks. It was all to appear as natural and normal as possible. What, indeed, could be more natural for the children than a visit with their father?

  “What, indeed,” said Granny in a voice rich with meaning.

  It was only fair, said the children’s mother. A belief in fair play was so embedded in her nature that she could say the words without coloring deeply. Besides, it was the first time he had asked.

  “And won’t be the last,” Granny said. “But, of course, it is up to you.”

  Ursula lay rather than sat in her chair. Her face was narrow and freckled: She resembled her mother who, at thirty-four, had settled into a permanent, anxious-looking, semi-youthfulness. Colin, blond and fat, rolled on the floor. He pulled his mouth out at the corners, then pulled down his eyes to show the hideous red underlids. He looked at his grandmother and growled like a lion.

/>   “Colin has come back sillier than ever,” Granny said. He lay prone, noisily snuffing the carpet. The others ignored him.

  “Did you go boating, Ursula?” said Granny, not counting this as a direct question. “When I visited Geneva, as a girl, we went boating on the lake.” She went on about white water birds, a parasol, a boat heaped with colored cushions.

  “Oh, Granny, no,” said Ursula. “There weren’t even any big boats, let alone little ones. It was cold.”

  “I hope the house, at least, was warm.”

  But evidently Ursula had failed to notice the temperature of her father’s house. She slumped on her spine (a habit Granny had just nicely caused her to get over before the departure for Geneva) and then said, unexpectedly, “She’s not a good manager.”

  Granny and her daughter exchanged a look, eyebrows up.

  “Oh?” said Ursula’s mother, pink. She forgot about the direct questions and said, “Why?”

  “It’s not terribly polite to speak that way of one’s hostess,” said Granny, unable to resist the reproof but threatening Ursula’s revelation at the source. Her daughter looked at her, murderous.

  “Well,” said Ursula, slowly, “once the laundry didn’t come back. It was her fault, he said. Our sheets had to be changed, he said. So she said Oh, all right. She took the sheets off Colin’s bed and put them on my bed, and took the sheets off my bed and put them on Colin’s. To make the change, she said.”

  “Dear God,” said Granny.

  “Colin’s sheets were a mess. He had his supper in bed sometimes. They were just a mess.”

  “Not true,” said Colin.

  “Another time …,” said Ursula, and stopped, as if Granny had been right, after all, about criticizing one’s hostess.

  “Gave us chocolate,” came from Colin, his face muffled in carpet.

  “Not every day, I trust,” Granny said.

  “For the plane.”

  “It might very well have made you both airsick,” said Granny.

  “Well,” said Ursula, “it didn’t.” Her eyes went often to the luggage in the hall. She squirmed upright, stood up, and sat down again. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Ursula, do you want a handkerchief?” said Granny.

  “No,” said Ursula. “Only it so happens I’m writing a play. It’s in the suitcase.”

  Granny and the children’s mother looked at each other again. “I am pleased,” Granny said, and her daughter nodded, agreeing, for, if impertinence and slumping on one’s spine were unfortunate inherited tendencies, this was something else. It was only fair that Ursula’s father should have bequeathed her something to compensate for the rest. “What is it about?” said Granny.

  Ursula looked at her feet. After a short silence she said, “Russia. That’s all I want to tell. It was her idea. She lived there once.”

  Quietly, controlled, the children’s mother took a cigarette from the box on the table. Granny looked brave.

  “Would you tell us the title, at least?” said Granny.

  “No,” said Ursula. But then, as if the desire to share the splendid thing she had created were too strong, she said, “I’ll tell you one line, because they said it was the best thing they’d ever heard anywhere.” She took a breath. Her audience was gratifyingly attentive, straining, nearly, with attention and control. “It goes like this,” Ursula said. “ ‘The Grand Duke enters and sees Tatiana all in gold.’ ”

  “Well?” said Granny.

  “Well, what?” said Ursula. “That’s it. That’s the line.” She looked at her mother and grandmother and said, “They liked it. They want me to send it to them, and everything else, too. She even told me the name Tatiana.”

  “It’s lovely, dear,” said Ursula’s mother. She put the cigarette back in the box. “It sounds like a lovely play. Just when did she live in Russia?”

  “I don’t know. Ages ago. She’s pretty old.”

  “Perhaps one day we shall see the play after all,” said Granny. “Particularly if it is to be sent all over the Continent.”

  “You mean they might act in it?” said Ursula. Thinking of this, she felt sorry for herself. Ever since she had started “The Grand Duke” she could not think of her own person without being sorry. For no reason at all, now, her eyes filled with tears of self-pity. Drooping, she looked out at the darkening street, to the leafless trees and the stone façade of a public library.

  But the children’s mother, as if Granny’s remark had for her an entirely different meaning, not nearly so generous, said, “I shall give you the writing desk from my bedroom, Ursula. It has a key.”

  “Where will you keep your things?” said Granny, protesting. She could not very well say that the desk was her own, not to be moved: Like everything else – the dark cathedrals, the shaky painted tables – it had come with the flat.

  “I don’t need a key,” said the children’s mother, lacing her fingers tightly around her knees. “I’m not writing a play, or anything else I want kept secret. Not any more.”

  “They used to take Colin for walks,” said Ursula, yawning, only vaguely taking in the importance of the desk. “That was when I started to write this thing. Once they stayed out the whole afternoon. They never said where they’d been.”

  “I wonder,” said her mother, thoughtful. She started to say something to Ursula, something not quite a question, but the child was too preoccupied with herself. Everything about the trip, in the end, would crystallize around Tatiana and the Grand Duke. Already, Ursula was Tatiana. The children’s mother looked at Ursula’s long bare legs, her heavy shoes, her pleated skirt, and she thought, I must do something about her clothes, something to make her pretty.

  “Colin, dear,” said Granny in her special inner-meaning voice, “do you remember your walks?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder why they wanted to take him alone,” said Colin’s mother. “It seems odd, all the same.”

  “Under seven,” said Granny, cryptic. “Couldn’t influence girl. Too old. Boy different. Give me first seven years, you can have rest.”

  “But it wasn’t seven years. He hasn’t been alive that long. It was only two weeks.”

  “Two very impressionable weeks,” Granny said.

  “I understand everything you’re saying,” Ursula said, “even when you talk that way. They spoke French when they didn’t want us to hear, but we understood that, too.”

  “I fed the swans,” Colin suddenly shouted.

  There, he had told about Geneva. He sat up and kicked his heels on the carpet as if the noise would drown out the consequence of what he had revealed. As he said it, the image became static: a gray sky, a gray lake, and a swan wonderfully turning upside down with the black rubber feet showing above the water. His father was not in the picture at all; neither was she. But Geneva was fixed for the rest of his life: gray, lake, swan.

  Having delivered his secret he had nothing more to tell. He began to invent. “I was sick on the plane,” he said, but Ursula at once said that this was a lie, and he lay down again, humiliated. At last, feeling sleepy, he began to cry.

  “He never once cried in Geneva,” Ursula said. But by the one simple act of creating Tatiana and the Grand Duke, she had removed herself from the ranks of reliable witnesses.

  “How would you know?” said Granny bitterly. “You weren’t always with him. If you had paid more attention, if you had taken care of your little brother, he wouldn’t have come back to us with his hair cut.”

  “Never mind,” said the children’s mother. Rising, she helped Colin to his feet and led him away to bed.

  She stood behind him as he cleaned his teeth. He looked male and self-assured with his newly cropped head, and she thought of her husband, and how odd it was that only a few hours before Colin had been with him. She touched the tender back of his neck. “Don’t,” he said. Frowning, concentrating, he hung up his toothbrush. “I told about Geneva.”

  “Yes, you did.” He had fed swans.
She saw sunshine, a blue lake, and the boats Granny had described, heaped with colored cushions. She saw her husband and someone else (probably in white, she thought, ridiculously bouffant, the origin of Tatiana) and Colin with his curls shorn, revealing ears surprisingly large. There was nothing to be had from Ursula – not, at least, until the Grand Duke had died down. But Colin seemed to carry the story of the visit with him, and she felt the faintest stirrings of envy, the resentfulness of the spectator, the loved one left behind.

  “Were you really sick on the plane?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Colin.

  “Were they lovely, the swans?”

  But the question bore no relation to anything he had seen. He said nothing. He played with toothpaste, dawdling.

  “Isn’t that child in bed yet?” called Granny. “Does he want his supper?”

  “No,” said Colin.

  “No,” said his mother. “He was sick on the plane.”

  “I thought so,” Granny said. “That, at least, is a fact.”

  They heard the voice of Ursula, protesting.

  But how can they be trusted, the children’s mother thought Which of them can one believe? “Perhaps,” she said to Colin, “one day, you can tell me more about Geneva?”

  “Yes,” he said perplexed.

  But, really, she doubted it; nothing had come back from the trip but her own feelings of longing and envy, the longing and envy she felt at night, seeing, at a crossroad or over a bridge, the lighted windows of a train sweep by. Her children had nothing to tell her. Perhaps, as she had said, one day Colin would say something, produce the image of Geneva, tell her about the lake, the boats, the swans, and why her husband had left her. Perhaps he could tell her, but, really, she doubted it. And, already, so did he.

  1955

  When We Were Nearly Young

  IN MADRID, nine years ago, we lived on the thought of money. Our friendships were nourished with talk of money we expected to have, and what we intended to do when it came. There were four of us – two men and two girls. The men, Pablo and Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. I was not Spanish and not a relation, and a friend almost by mistake. The thing we had in common was that we were all waiting for money.