Overhead in a Balloon
PRAISE FOR
MAVIS GALLANT’S FICTION:
“Gallant is a master of montage; the overlapping angles of lives on view here hint deliciously at the full picture.…”
– Publishers Weekly
“Mavis Gallant’s stories are so tightly constructed, their tone so wry that they need to be digested a little at a time, like a large piece of rich cake. And it’s hard to leave even a bit untasted.”
– Newsday
“Each story is a gem.”
– Virginia Quarterly Review
“Worldly and sophisticated, worthy of lingering over, sniffing, swirling in one’s mouth, tasting again and again.”
– Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Mavis Gallant is a master of contemporary prose and Overhead in a Balloon is a superb and triumphant collection.”
– Chapel Hill Newspaper
“ [An] authority of presence coupled with Gallant’s Chekhovian eye for the intricacies of personal relationships has made Overhead in a Balloon an outstanding addition to her previous books.”
– Pittsburgh Press
BOOKS BY MAVIS GALLANT
DRAMA
What Is to Be Done? (1983)
ESSAYS
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986)
FICTION
The Other Paris (stories, 1956)
Green Water, Green Sky (novel, 1959)
My Heart Is Broken (stories, 1964)
A Fairly Good Time (novel, 1970)
The Pegnitz Junction (stories, 1973)
The End of the World (stories, 1974)
From the Fifteenth District (stories, 1979)
Home Truths (stories, 1981)
Overhead in a Balloon (stories, 1985)
In Transit (stories, 1988)
Across the Bridge (stories, 1993)
The Moslem Wife (stories, 1994)
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (stories, 1996)
Copyright © 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985 by Mavis Gallant
First published by Macmillan of Canada, 1985
First Emblem Editions publication 2002
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 the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gallant, Mavis, 1922-
Overhead in a balloon / Mavis Gallant.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-630-1
I. Title.
PS8513.A593096 2002 C813’.54 C2002-901240-6
PR9199.3.G2609 2002
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.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
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Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
For G. de D. M.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Speck’s Idea
Overhead in a Balloon
Luc and His Father
A Painful Affair
Larry
A Flying Start
Grippes and Poche
A Recollection
Rue de Lille
The Colonel‘s Child
Lena
The Assembly
About the Author
Speck’s Idea
Sandor Speck’s first art gallery in Paris was on the Right Bank, near the Church of St. Elisabeth, on a street too narrow for cars. When his block was wiped off the map to make way for a five-story garage, Speck crossed the Seine to the shadow of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where he set up shop in a picturesque slum protected by law from demolition. When this gallery was blown up by Basque separatists, who had mistaken it for a travel agency exploiting the beauty of their coast, he collected his insurance money and moved to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Here, at terrifying cost, he rented four excellent rooms – two on the loggia level, and a clean dry basement for framing and storage. The entrance, particularly handsome, was on the street side of an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier built around an elegant court now let out as a parking concession. The building had long before been cut up into dirty, decaying apartments, whose spiteful, quarrelsome, and avaricious tenants were forgiven every failing by Speck for the sake of being the Count of this and the Prince of that. Like the flaking shutters, the rotting windowsills, the slops and oil stains in the ruined court, they bore a Proustian seal of distinction, like a warranty, making up for his insanely expensive lease. Though he appreciated style, he craved stability even more. In the Faubourg, he seemed at last likely to find it: not a stone could be removed without the approval of the toughest cultural authorities of the nation. Three Marxist embassies installed in former ducal mansions along the street required the presence of armed policemen the clock around. The only commercial establishments anywhere near Speck’s – a restaurant and a bookstore – seemed unlikely targets for firebombs: the first catered to lower-echelon civil servants, the second was painted royal blue, a conservative colour he found reassuring. The bookstore’s name, Amandine, suggested shelves of calm regional novels and accounts of travel to Imperial Russia signed “A Diplomat.” Pasted inside the window, flat on the pane, was an engraving that depicted an old man, bearded and mitred, tearing a small demon limb from limb. The old man looked self-conscious, the imp resigned. He supposed that this image concealed a deep religious meaning, which he did not intend to plumb. If it was holy, it was respectable; as the owner of the gallery across the street, he needed to know nothing more.
Speck was now in the parish of St. Clotilde, near enough to the church for its bells to give him migraine headache. Leaves from the church square blew as far as his door – melancholy reminders of autumn, a season bad for art. (Winter was bad, too, while the first chestnut leaves unfolding heralded the worst season of all. In summer the gallery closed.) In spite of his constant proximity to churches he had remained rational. Generations of highly intellectual Central European agnostics and freethinkers had left in his bones a mistrust of the bogs and quicksands that lie beyond reality perceived. Neither loss nor grief nor guilt nor fear had ever moved him to appeal to the unknown – any unknown, for there were several. Nevertheless, after signing his third lease in seven years, he decided to send Walter, his Swiss assistant, a lapsed Calvinist inching towards Rome, to light a candle at St. Clotilde’s. Walter paid for a five-franc taper and set it before St. Joseph, the most reliable intermediary he could find: a wave of post-conciliar puritanism seemed to have broken at St. Clotilde’s, sweeping away most of the mute and obliging figures to whom desires and gratitude could be expressed. Walter was willing to start again in some livelier church – Notre Dame de Paris, for instance – but Speck thought enough was enough.
On a damp October evening about a year after this, there could be seen in Speck’s window a drawing of a woman drying her feet (Speck permanent collection); a poster announcing the current exhibition, “Paris and Its Influence on the Tirana School, 1931-2”; five catalogues displayed attractively;
and the original of the picture on the poster – a shameless copy of Foujita’s “Mon Intérieur” re-entitled “Balkan Alarm Clock.” In defiance of a government circular reminding Paris galleries about the energy crisis Speck had left the lights on. This was partly to give the lie to competitors who might be putting it about that he was having money troubles. He had set the burglar alarm, bolted the security door, and was now cranking down an openwork iron screen whose Art Nouveau loops and fronds allowed the works inside to be seen but nothing larger than a mouse to get in. The faint, floating sadness he always felt while locking up had to do with the time. In his experience, love affairs and marriages perished between seven and eight o’clock, the hour of rain and no taxis. All over Paris couples must be parting forever, leaving like debris along the curbs the shreds of cancelled restaurant dates, useless ballet tickets, hopeless explanations, and scraps of pride; and towards each of these disasters a taxi was pulling in, the only taxi for miles, the light on its roof already dimmed in anticipation to the twin dots that in Paris mean “occupied.” But occupied by whom?
“You take it.”
“No, you. You’re the one in a hurry.”
The lover abandoned under a dripping plane tree would feel a damp victory of a kind, awarding himself a first-class trophy for selfless behaviour. It would sustain him ten seconds, until the departing one rolled down the taxi window to hurl her last flint: “You Fascist!” Why was this always the final shot, the coup de grâce delivered by women? Speck’s wife, Henriette, book critic on an uncompromising political weekly, had said it three times last spring – here, in the street, where Speck stood locking the iron screen into place. He had been uneasily conscious of his wellborn neighbours, hanging out their windows, not missing a thing. Henriette had then gone away in a cab to join her lover, leaving Speck, the gallery, her job – everything that mattered.
He mourned Henriette; he missed her steadying influence. Her mind was like a one-way thoroughfare, narrow and flat, maintained in repair. As he approached the age of forty he felt that his own intellect needed not just a direction but retaining walls. Unless his thoughts were nailed down by gallery business they tended to glide away to the swamps of imagination, behind which stretched the steamier marshland of metaphysics. Confessing this to Henriette was unlikely to bring her back. There had been something brisk and joyous about her going – her hailing of a taxi as though of a friend, her surprised smile as the third “Fascist!” dissolved in the April night like a double stroke from the belfry of St. Clotilde’s. He supposed he would never see her again now, except by accident. Perhaps, long after he had forgotten Henriette, he would overhear someone saying in a restaurant, “Do you see that poor mad intellectual talking to herself in the corner? That is Henriette, Sandor Speck’s second wife. Of course, she was very different then; Speck kept her in shape.”
While awaiting this sop, which he could hardly call consolation, he had Walter and the gallery. Walter had been with him five years – longer than either of his marriages. They had been years of spiritual second-thinking for Walter and of strain and worry for Speck. Walter in search of the Eternal was like one of those solitary skippers who set out to cross an ocean only to capsize when barely out of port. Speck had been obliged to pluck his assistant out of Unitarian waters and set him on the firm shore of the Trinity. He had towed him to Transubstantiation and back; had charted the shoals and perils of careless prayer. His own aversion to superstitious belief made Speck particularly scrupulous; he would not commit himself on Free Will, for instance, uncertain if it was supposed to be an uphill trudge wearing tight boots or a downhill slide sitting on a tea tray. He would lie awake at night planning Walter’s dismissal, only to develop a traumatic chest cold if his assistant seemed restless.
“What will the gallery do without you?” he would ask on the very morning he had been meaning to say, “Walter, sit down, please. I’ve got something to tell you.” Walter would remind him about saints and holy men who had done without everything, while Speck would envision the pure hell of having to train someone new.
On a rainy night such as this, the street resembled a set in a French film designed for export, what with the policemen’s white rain capes aesthetically gleaming and the lights of the bookstore, the restaurant, and the gallery reflected, quivering, in European-looking puddles. In reality, Speck thought, there was not even hope for a subplot. Henriette had gone forever. Walter’s mission could not be photographed. The owner of the restaurant was in his eighties; the waiters were poised on the brink of retirement. As for the bookseller, M. Alfred Chassepoule, he seemed to spend most of his time wiping blood off the collected speeches of Mussolini, bandaging customers, and sweeping up glass. The fact was that Amandine’s had turned out to have a fixed Right Wing viewpoint, which made it subject to attack by commandos wielding iron bars. Speck, who had chosen the street for its upper-class hush, had grown used to the hoarse imprecation of the Left and shriller keening of the Right; he could tell the sob of an ambulance from the wail of a police van. The commerce of art is without bias: when insurance inspectors came round to ask what Speck might have seen, he invariably replied, “Seen where?” to which Walter, unsolicited, would add, “And I am Swiss.”
Since Henriette’s departure, Speck often ate his meals in the local restaurant, which catered to his frugal tastes, his vegetarian principles, and his desire to be left in peace. On the way, he would pause outside Amandine’s, just enough to mark the halt as a comforting bachelor habit. He would glance over the second-hand books, the yellowing pamphlets, and the overpriced cartoons. The tone of the window display seemed old-fashioned rather than dangerous, though he knew that the slogan crowning the arrangement, “Europe for Europeans,” echoed from a dark political valley. But even that valley had been full of strife and dissension and muddle, for hadn’t the Ur-Fascists, the Italian ones, been in some way against an all-Europe? At least, some of their poets were. But who could take any of that seriously now? Nothing political had ever struck Speck as being above the level of a low-grade comic strip. On the cover of one volume, Uncle Sam shook hands with the Russian Bear over prostrate Europe, depicted as a maiden in a dead faint. A drawing of a spider on a field of banknotes (twelve hundred francs with frame, nine hundred without) jostled the image of a crablike hand clawing away at the map of France. Pasted against the pane, survivor of uncounted assaults, the old man continued to dismember his captive imp. Walter had told Speck he believed the old man to be St. Amand, Apostle of Flanders, Bishop in 430. “Or perhaps,” said Walter, after thinking it over, “435.” The imp probably stood for Flemish paganism, which the Apostle had been hard put to it to overcome.
From the rainy street Speck could see four or five of Amandine’s customers – all men; he had never noticed a woman in the place – standing, reading, books held close to their noses. They had the weak eyes, long chins, and sparse, sparrow-coloured hair he associated with low governmental salaries. He imagined them living with grim widowed mothers whose company they avoided after work. He had seen them, or young men like them, staggering out of the store, cut by flying glass, kicked and beaten as they lay stunned on the pavement; his anxious imagination had set them on their feet, booted and belted, the right signal given at last, swarming across to the gallery, determined to make Speck pay for injuries inflicted on them by total strangers. He saw his only early Chagall (quite likely authentic) ripped from its frame; Walter, his poor little spectacles smeared with blood, lambasted with the complete Charles Maurras, fourteen volumes, full morocco; Speck himself, his ears offended by acute Right Wing cries of “Down with foreign art!” attempting a quick counterstroke with Significant Minor French Realists, Twentieth Century, which was thick enough to stun an ox. Stepping back from the window, Speck saw his own smile reflected. It was pinched and tight, and he looked a good twenty years older than thirty-nine.
His restaurant, crammed with civil servants at noon, was now nearly empty. A smell of lunchtime pot roast hung in the air. He made
for his own table, from which he could see the comforting lights of the gallery. The waiter, who had finally stopped asking how Henriette was liking Africa, brought his dinner at once, setting out like little votive offerings the raw-carrot salad, the pot-roast vegetables without the meat, the quarter ounce of low-fat cheese, and a small pear. It had long been established that Speck did not wish to be disturbed by the changing of plates. He extracted a yellow pad and three pencils from his briefcase and placed them within the half circle of dishes. Speck was preparing his May-June show.
The right show at the right time: it was trickier than getting married to the right person at any time. For about a year now, Paris critics had been hinting at something missing from the world of art. These hints, poignant and patriotic on the right, neo-nationalist and pugnacious on the Left, wistful but insistent dead Centre, were all in essence saying the same thing: “The time has come.” The time had come; the hour had struck; the moment was ripe for a revival of reason, sanity, and taste. Surely there was more to art than this sickness, this transatlantic blight? Fresh winds were needed to sweep the museums and galleries. Two days ago there had been a disturbing article in Le Monde (front page, lower middle, turn to page 26) by a man who never took up his pen unless civilization was in danger. Its title, “Redemption Through Art – Last Hope for the West?” had been followed by other disturbing questions: When would the merchants and dealers, compared rather unfairly to the money-changers driven from the temple, face up to their share of responsibility as the tattered century declined? Must the flowering gardens of Western European culture wilt and die along with the decadent political systems, the exhausted parliaments, the shambling elections, the tired liberal impulses? What of the man in the street, too modest and confused to mention his cravings? Was he not gasping for one remedy and one only – artistic renovation? And where was this to come from? “In the words of Shakespr,” the article concluded, supposedly in English, “That is the qustn.”