The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Read online

  “I had a woman next to me on the bus who kept a hedgehog all winter in a basketful of shavings,” he said. “He can drink milk out of a wineglass.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry about the books you asked for. I was sick of books by then. I was sick of rhetoric and culture and patriotic crap.”

  “I suppose it is all very different over there,” said Netta.

  “God, yes.”

  He seemed to expect her to ask questions, so she said, “What kind of clothes do they wear?”

  “They wear quite a lot of plaids and tartans. They eat at peculiar hours. You’ll see them eating strawberries and cream just when you’re thinking of having a drink.”

  She said, “Did you visit the tin mines, where Truman sends his political prisoners?”

  “Tin mines?” said Jack. “No.”

  “Remember the three little girls from the maharaja trade?”

  Neither could quite hear what the other had to say. They were partially deaf to each other.

  Netta continued softly, “Now, as I understand it, she first brought an American to London, and then she took an Englishman to America.”

  He had too much the habit of women, he was playing too close a game, to waste points saying, “Who? What?”

  “It was over as fast as it started,” he said. “But then the war came and we were stuck. She became a friend,” he said. “I’m quite fond of her”—which Netta translated as, “It is a subterranean river that may yet come to light.” “You wouldn’t know her,” he said. “She’s very different now. I talked so much about the south, down here, she finally found some land going dirt cheap at Bandol. The mayor arranged for her to have an orchard next to her property, so she won’t have neighbors. It hardly cost her anything. He said to her, ‘You’re very pretty.’ ”

  “No one ever had a bargain in property because of a pretty face,” said Netta.

  “Wasn’t it lucky,” said Jack. He could no longer hear himself, let alone Netta. “The war was unsettling, being in America. She minded not being active. Actually she was using the Swiss passport, which made it worse. Her brother was killed over Bremen. She needs security now. In a way it was sorcerer and apprentice between us, and she suddenly grew up. She’ll be better off with a roof over her head. She writes a little now. Her poetry isn’t bad,” he said, as if Netta had challenged its quality.

  “Is she at Bandol now, writing poetry?”

  “Well, no.” He laughed suddenly. “There isn’t a roof yet. And, you know, people don’t sit writing that way. They just think they’re going to.”

  “Who has replaced you?” said Netta. “Another sorcerer?”

  “Oh, he … he looks like George the Second in a strong light. Or like Queen Anne. Queen Anne and Lady Mary, somebody called them.” Iris, that must have been. Queen Anne and Lady Mary wasn’t bad—better than King Charles and his spaniel. She was beginning to enjoy his story. He saw it, and said lightly, “I was too preoccupied with you to manage another life. I couldn’t see myself going on and on away from you. I didn’t want to grow middle-aged at odds with myself.”

  But he had lost her; she was enjoying a reverie about Jack now, wearing one of those purple sunburns people acquire at golf. She saw him driving an open car, with large soft freckles on his purple skull. She saw his mistress’s dog on the front seat and the dog’s ears flying like pennants. The revulsion she felt did not lend distance but brought a dreamy reality closer still. He must be thirty-four now, she said to herself. A terrible age for a man who has never imagined thirty-four.

  “Well, perhaps you have made a mess of it,” she said, quoting Iris.

  “What mess? I’m here. He—“

  “Queen Anne?”

  “Yes, well, actually Gerald is his name; he wears nothing but brown. Brown suit, brown tie, brown shoes. I said, ‘He can’t go to Mitten Todd. He won’t match.’ ”

  “Harmonize,” she said.

  “That’s it. Harmonize with the—”

  “What about Gerald’s wife? I’m sure he has one.”

  “Lucretia.”

  “No, really?”

  “On my honor. When I last saw them they were all together, talking.”

  Netta was remembering what the middle sister had said about laughter on the balcony. She couldn’t look at him. The merest crossing of glances made her start laughing rather wildly into her hands. The hysterical quality of her own laughter caught her in midair. What were they talking about? He hitched his chair nearer and dared to take her wrist.

  “Tell me, now,” he said, as if they were to be two old confidence men getting their stories straight. “What about you? Was there ever …” The glaze of laughter had not left his face and voice. She saw that he would make her his business, if she let him. Pulling back, she felt another clasp, through a wall of fog. She groped for this other, invisible hand, but it dissolved. It was a lost, indifferent hand; it no longer recognized her warmth. She understood: He is dead … Jack, closed to ghosts, deaf to their voices, was spared this. He would be spared everything, she saw. She envied him his imperviousness, his true unhysterical laughter.

  Perhaps that’s why I kicked him, she said. I was always jealous. Not of women. Of his short memory, his comfortable imagination. And I am going to be thirty-seven and I have a dark, an accurate, a deadly memory.

  He still held her wrist and turned it another way, saying, “Look, there’s paint on it.”

  “Oh, God, where is the waiter?” she cried, as if that were the one important thing. Jack looked his age, exactly. She looked like a burned-out child who had been told a ghost story. Desperately seeking the waiter, she turned to the café behind them and saw the last light of the long afternoon strike the mirror above the bar—a flash in a tunnel; hands juggling with fire. That unexpected play, at a remove, borne indoors, displayed to anyone who could stare without blinking, was a complete story. It was the brightness on the looking glass, the only part of a life, or a love, or a promise, that could never be concealed, changed, or corrupted.

  Not a hope, she was trying to tell him. He could read her face now. She reminded herself, If I say it, I am free. I can finish painting the radiators in peace. I can read every book in the world. If I had relied on my memory for guidance, I would never have crept out of the wine cellar. Memory is what ought to prevent you from buying a dog after the first dog dies, but it never does. It should at least keep you from saying yes twice to the same person.

  “I’ve always loved you,” he chose to announce—it really was an announcement, in a new voice that stated nothing except facts.

  The dark, the ghosts, the candlelight, her tears on the scarred bar—they were real. And still, whether she wanted to see it or not, the light of imagination danced all over the square. She did not dare to turn again to the mirror, lest she confuse the two and forget which light was real. A pure white awning on a cross street seemed to her to be of indestructible beauty. The window it sheltered was hollowed with sadness and shadow. She said with the same deep sadness, “I believe you.” The wave of revulsion receded, sucked back under another wave—a powerful adolescent craving for something simple, such as true love.

  Her face did not show this. It was set in adolescent stubbornness, and this was one of their old, secret meetings when, sullen and hurt, she had to be coaxed into life as Jack wanted it lived. It was the same voyage, at the same rate of speed. The Place seemed to her to be full of invisible traffic—first a whisper of tires, then a faint, high screeching, then a steady roar. If Jack heard anything, it could be only the blood in the veins and his loud, happy thought. To a practical romantic like Jack, dying to get Netta to bed right away, what she was hearing was only the uh-hebb and flo-ho of hormones, as Dr. Blackley said. She caught a look of amazement on his face: Now he knew what he had been deprived of. Now he remembered. It had been Netta, all along.

  Their evening shadows accompanied them over the long square. “I still have a car,” she remarked. “But no petrol. There’s a train.” She did keep on
hearing a noise, as of heavy traffic rushing near and tearing away. Her own quiet voice carried across it, saying, “Not a hope.” He must have heard that. Why, it was as loud as a shout. He held her arm lightly. He was as buoyant as morning. This was his morning—the first light on the mirror, the first cigarette. He pulled her into an archway where no one could see. What could I do, she asked her ghosts, but let my arm be held, my steps be guided?

  Later, Jack said that the walk with Netta back across the Place Masséna was the happiest event of his life. Having no reliable counter-event to put in its place, she let the memory stand.

  THE FOUR SEASONS

  I

  The school Carmela attended for much of six years was founded by Dr. Barnes, a foreigner who had no better use for his money. It had two classrooms, with varnished desks nailed to the floor, and steel lockers imported from England, and a playing field in which stray dogs collected. A sepia picture of the founder reading a book hung near a likeness of Mussolini. The two frames were identical, which showed the importance of Dr. Barnes—at least in Castel Vittorio. Over their heads the King rode horseback, wearing all his medals. To one side, somewhat adrift on the same wall, was the Sacred Heart. After Carmela was twelve and too old to bother with school anymore, she forgot all the history and geography she’d learned, but she remembered the men in their brown frames, and Jesus with His heart on fire. She left home that year, just after Easter, and came down to the Ligurian coast between Ventimiglia and Bordighera. She was to live with Mr. and Mrs. Unwin now, to cook and clean and take care of their twin daughters. Tessa and Clare were the children’s names; Carmela pronounced them easily. The Unwins owned a small printing press, and as there was a large Anglo-American colony in that part of the world they never lacked for trade. They furnished letterhead stationery, circulars, and announcements for libraries, consulates, Anglican churches, and the British Legion—some printed, some run off the mimeograph machine. Mr. Unwin was also a part-time real-estate agent. They lived in a villa on top of a bald hill. Because of a chronic water shortage, nothing would grow except cactus. An electric pump would have helped the matter, but the Unwins were too poor to have one put in. Mrs. Unwin worked with her husband in the printing office when she felt well enough. She was the victim of fierce headaches caused by pollen, sunshine, and strong perfumes. The Unwins had had a cook, a char, and a nanny for the children, but when Carmela joined the household they dismissed the last of the three; the first two had been gone for over a year now. From the kitchen one could look down a slope into a garden where flowering trees and shrubs sent gusts of scent across to torment Mrs. Unwin, and leaves and petals to litter her cactus bed. An American woman called “the Marchesa” lived there. Mrs. Unwin thought of her as an enemy—someone who deliberately grew flowers for the discomfort they created.

  Carmela had never been anywhere except her own village and this house, but Mrs. Unwin had no way of knowing that. She pressed a cracked black change purse in Carmela’s hand and sent her down the hill to the local market to fetch carrots and not over a pound of the cheapest stewing beef. Carmela saw walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ocher walls and black licorice balconies. Near the shore, work had stopped on some new houses. One could look through them, where windows were still holes in the walls, and catch a glimpse of the sea. She heard someone comment in an Italian more precious than her own, “Hideous. I hope they fall down on top of the builder. Unwin put money in it, too, but he’s bankrupt.” The woman who made these remarks was sitting under the pale blue awning of a café so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea, small round tables and colored ices in silver dishes. All at once she recognized a chauffeur in uniform leaning with his back to a speckless motorcar. He was from Castel Vittorio. He gave no sign that he knew Carmela. Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and the strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater.

  At the beginning, she did not always understand what was said, or what Mrs. Unwin expected. When Mrs. Unwin remarked, “The chestnut trees flower beautifully up where you come from, though, of course, the blossoms are death for me,” Carmela stopped peeling vegetables for the English stew Mrs. Unwin was showing her how to make and waited for something more. “What have I said now to startle you?” said Mrs. Unwin. “You’re like a little sparrow!” Carmela still waited, glancing sidelong, hair cut unevenly and pushed behind her ears. She wore a gray skirt, a cotton blouse, and sandals. A limp black cardigan hung on her shoulders. She did not own stockings, shoes, a change of underwear, a dressing gown, or a coat, but she had a medal on a chain, an inheritance from a Sicilian grandmother—the grandmother from whom she had her southern name. Mrs. Unwin had already examined Carmela’s ears to see if the lobes were pierced. She couldn’t stand that—the vanity of it, and the mutilation. Letting Carmela’s ears go, she had said to her husband, “Good. Mussolini is getting rid of most of that. All but the medals.”

  “Have I pronounced ‘chestnut’ in some peculiar way? My Italian can’t be that bad.” She got a little green dictionary out of the pocket of her smock and ruffled its pages. She had to tilt her head and close an eye because of the cigarette she kept in her mouth. “I don’t mean horse chestnuts,” she said, the cigarette waving. “How very funny that is in Italian, by the way. I mean the Spanish chestnuts. They flower late in the season, I believe.”

  “Every flower has its season,” said the child.

  Carmela believed this conversation to have a malignant intent she could not yet perceive. The mixture of English and unstressed Italian was virtually impossible for her to follow. She had never seen a woman smoking until now.

  “But your family are up the Nervia Valley?” Mrs. Unwin insisted. “Your father, your mother, your sisters and your cousins and your aunts?” She became jocular, therefore terrifying. “Maria, Liliana, Ignazio, Francamaria …” The names of remembered servants ran out.

  “I think so,” said Carmela.

  Her mother had come down to Bordighera to work in the laundry room of a large hotel. Her little brother had been apprenticed to a stonemason. Her father was dead, perhaps. The black and the gray she wore were half-mourning.

  “Mussolini is trying to get away from those oversized families,” said Mrs. Unwin with confidence. She sat on a high stool, arranging flowers in a copper bowl. She squashed her cigarette suddenly and drank out of a teacup. She seemed to Carmela unnaturally tall. Her hands were stained, freckled, old, but she was the mother of Tessa and Clare, who were under three and still called “the babies.” The white roses she was stabbing onto something cruel and spiked had been brought to the kitchen door by the chauffeur from Castel Vittorio. This time he had given Carmela a diffident nod.

  “Do you know him?” said Mrs. Unwin instantly.

  “I think I saw him in the town,” said Carmela.

  “Now, that is deceitful,” said Mrs. Unwin, though without reproach. “He knows who you are, because he vouched for your whole family. ‘Hardworking, sober, the pride of the Nervia Valley.’ I hope there is to be none of that,” she added, in another voice. “You know what I mean. Men, giggling, chatting men up in the doorway, long telephone calls.”

  The white roses were a peace offering: A dog belonging to the next-door neighbor had torn up something precious in the Unwins’ garden. Mrs. Unwin suddenly said that she had no time to stroll out in pink chiffon, wearing a floppy hat and carrying a sprinkling can; no time to hire jazz bands for parties or send shuttlecocks flying over the hedge and then a servant to retrieve them; less time still to have a chauffeur as a lover. Carmela could not get the drift of this. She felt accused.

  “I don’t know, Signora,” she said, as though some yes-or-no answer had been required point-blank.

  Where the roses had come from everything was white, green, lavish, sweet-smelling. Plants Carmela could not have put a name to bent
over with the weight of their blooms. She could faintly hear a radio. All of that belonged to the Marchesa. She was the one who had said, “Hideous.”

  Pollen carried on the wind from the Marchesa’s garden felled Mrs. Unwin in May. She was also assaulted by a large treelike shrub on the Marchesa’s side called a datura; some of its bell-like creamy flowers hung over the cactus patch. Their scent, stronger than jasmine, was poison to Mrs. Unwin’s nervous system. From her darkened room she sent for Carmela. She opened a leather box with a little key and showed her a sapphire set in diamonds and a loose emerald. She told Carmela the names of the stones and said, “I do not believe in hiding. I am telling you where they are and that the key is in my handkerchief case.” Again Carmela felt she had been accused.

  The babies sat on their mother’s bed meanwhile. They were placid, sleepy children with yellow hair Carmela enjoyed brushing; only one thing was tiring about them—they were too lazy to walk. One or the other had to be carried by Carmela, hooked like a little monkey above her left hip. She began to stand with her spine slightly bent to one side, as a habit. What she remembered of that spring was the weight of Clare or Tessa pulling her shoulder down, and that she was always hungry. Carmela had never known people to eat so little as the Unwins, not even among the poor. They shared a thin cutlet for lunch, or the vegetable remains of a stew, or had an egg apiece or a bit of cooked ham. The children’s food and Carmela’s was hardly more abundant. Mrs. Unwin did not mean to undernourish her own children; she sincerely believed that very little was enough. Also, meat was expensive. Fruit was expensive. So were cheese, butter, coffee, milk, and bread. The Unwins were pinched for money. They had a house, a printing establishment, furniture, a garden, a car, and they had Carmela, but they had nothing to spend. The drawing-room carpet was scuffed and torn, and the wine-red wallpaper displayed peony-shaped stains of paler dampmold. Mrs. Unwin counted out the coins she gave Carmela for shopping, and she counted the change.