The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  His wife, Georgina, could lower her blood pressure or stop her heartbeat nearly at will. Netta sometimes wondered why Dr. Blackley had brought her to a soft climate rather than to the man at Vienna he so admired. Georgina was well enough to play fierce bridge, with Jack and anyone good enough. Her husband usually came to fetch her at the end of the afternoon when the players stopped for tea. Once, because he was obliged to return at once to a patient who needed him, she said, “Can’t you be competent about anything?” Netta thought she understood, then, his resigned repetition of “It’s all su-hex.” “Oh, don’t explain. You bore me,” said his wife, turning her back.

  Netta followed him out to his car. She wore an India shawl that had been her mother’s. The wind blew her hair; she had to hold it back. She said, “Why don’t you kill her?”

  “I am not a desperate person,” he said. He looked at Netta, she looking up at him because she had to look up to nearly everyone except children, and he said, “I’ve wondered why we haven’t been to bed.”

  “Who?” said Netta. “You and your wife? Oh. You mean me.” She was not offended, she just gave the shawl a brusque tug and said, “Not a hope. Never with a guest,” though of course that was not the reason.

  “You might have to, if the guest were a maharaja,” he said, to make it all harmless. “I am told it is pu-hart of the courtesy they expect.”

  “We don’t get their trade,” said Netta. This had not stopped her liking the doctor. She pitied him, rather, because of his wife, and because he wasn’t Jack and could not have Netta.

  “I do love you,” said the doctor, deciding finally to sit down in his car. “Ee-nee-ormously.” She watched him drive away as if she loved him too, and might never see him again. It never crossed her mind to mention any of this conversation to Jack.

  That very spring, perhaps because of the doctor’s words, the hotel did get some maharaja trade – three little sisters with ebony curls, men’s eyebrows, large heads, and delicate hands and feet. They had four rooms, one for their governess. A chauffeur on permanent call lodged elsewhere. The governess, who was Dutch, had a perfect triangle of a nose and said “whom” for “who,” pronouncing it “whum.” The girls were to learn French, tennis, and swimming. The chauffeur arrived with a hairdresser, who cut their long hair; it lay on the governess’s carpet, enough to fill a large pillow. Their toe- and fingernails were filed to points and looked like a kitten’s teeth. They came smiling down the marble staircase, carrying new tennis racquets, wearing blue linen skirts and navy blazers. Mrs. Blackley glanced up from the bridge game as they went by the cardroom. She had been one of those opposed to their having lessons at the English Lawn Tennis Club, for reasons that were, to her, perfectly evident.

  She said, loudly, “They’ll have to be in white.”

  “End whay, pray?” cried the governess, pointing her triangle nose.

  “They can’t go on the courts except in white. It is a private club. Entirely white.”

  “Whum do they all think they are?” the governess asked, prepared to stalk on. But the girls, with their newly cropped heads, and their vulnerable necks showing, caught the drift and refused to go.

  “Whom indeed,” said Georgina Blackley, fiddling with her bridge hand and looking happy.

  “My wife’s seamstress could run up white frocks for them in a minute,” said Jack. Perhaps he did not dislike children all that much.

  “Whom could,” muttered Georgina.

  But it turned out that the governess was not allowed to choose their clothes, and so Jack gave the children lessons at the hotel. For six weeks they trotted around the courts looking angelic in blue, or hopelessly foreign, depending upon who saw them. Of course they fell in love with Jack, offering him a passionate loyalty they had nowhere else to place. Netta watched the transfer of this gentle, anxious gift. After they departed, Jack was bad-tempered for several evenings and then never spoke of them again; they, needless to say, had been dragged from him weeping.

  When this happened the Rosses had been married nearly five years. Being childless but still very loving, they had trouble deciding which of the two would be the child. Netta overheard “He’s a darling, but she’s a sergeant major and no mistake. And so mean.” She also heard “He’s a lazy bastard. He bullies her. She’s a fool.” She searched her heart again about children. Was it Jack or had it been Netta who had first said no? The only child she had ever admired was Jack, and not as a child but as a fighter, defying her. She and Jack were not the sort to have animal children, and Jack’s dotty mother would probably soon be child enough for any couple to handle. Jack still seemed to adopt, in a tribal sense of his, half the women who fell in love with him. The only woman who resisted adoption was Netta – still burned-out, still ardent, in a manner of speaking still fourteen. His mother had turned up meanwhile, getting down from a train wearing a sly air of enjoying her own jokes, just as she must have looked on the day of the April Fool. At first she was no great trouble, though she did complain about an ulcerated leg. After years of pretending, she at last had something real. Netta’s policy of silence made Jack’s mother confident. She began to make a mockery of his music: “All that money gone for nothing!” Or else, “The amount we wasted on schools! The hours he’s thrown away with his nose in a book. All that reading – if at least it had got him somewhere.” Netta noticed that he spent more time playing bridge and chatting to cronies in the bar now. She thought hard, and decided not to make it her business. His mother had once been pretty; perhaps he still saw her that way. She came of a ramshackle family with a usable past; she spoke of the Ashers and the Rosses as if she had known them when they were tinkers. English residents who had a low but solid barrier with Jack and Netta were fences-down with his mad mother: they seemed to take her at her own word when it was about herself. She began then to behave like a superior sort of guest, inviting large parties to her table for meals, ordering special wines and dishes at inconvenient hours, standing endless rounds of drinks in the bar.

  Netta told herself, Jack wants it this way. It is his home too. She began to live a life apart, leaving Jack to his mother. She sat wearing her own mother’s shawl, hunched over a new, modern adding machine, punching out accounts. “Funny couple,” she heard now. She frowned, smiling in her mind; none of these people knew what bound them, or how tied they were. She had the habit of dodging out of her mother-in-law’s parties by saying, “I’ve got such an awful lot to do.” It made them laugh, because they thought this was Netta’s term for slave-driving the servants. They thought the staff did the work, and that Netta counted the profits and was too busy with bookkeeping to keep an eye on Jack – who now, at twenty-six, was as attractive as he ever would be.

  A woman named Iris Cordier was one of Jack’s mother’s new friends. Tall, loud, in winter dully pale, she reminded Netta of a blond penguin. Her voice moved between a squeak and a moo, and was a mark of the distinguished literary family to which her father belonged. Her mother, a Frenchwoman, had been in and out of nursing homes for years. The Cordiers haunted the Riviera, with Iris looking after her parents and watching their diets. Now she lived in a flat somewhere in Roquebrune with the survivor of the pair – the mother, Netta believed. Iris paused and glanced in the business room where Mr. Asher had signed the hundred-year lease. She was on her way to lunch – Jack’s mother’s guest, of course.

  “I say, aren’t you Miss Asher?”

  “I was.” Iris, like Dr. Blackley, was probably younger than she looked. Out of her own childhood Netta recalled a desperate adolescent Iris with middle-aged parents clamped like handcuffs on her life. “How is your mother?” Netta had been about to say “How is Mrs. Cordier?” but it sounded servile.

  “I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “I remember her well. Your father too. He was a nice person.”

  “And still is,” said Iris, sharply. “He lives with me, and he always will. French daughters don’t abandon their parents.” No one had ever sounded more Englis
h to Netta. “And your father and mother?”

  “Both dead now. I’m married to Jack Ross.”

  “Nobody told me,” said Iris, in a way that made Netta think, Good Lord, Iris too? Jack could not possibly seem like a patriarchal figure where she was concerned; perhaps this time the game was reversed and Iris played at being tribal and maternal. The idea of Jack, or of any man, flinging himself on that iron bosom made Netta smile. As if startled, Iris covered her mouth. She seemed to be frightened of smiling back.

  Oh, well, and what of it, Iris too, said Netta to herself, suddenly turning back to her accounts. As it happened, Netta was mistaken (as she never would have been with a bill). That day Jack was meeting Iris for the first time.

  The upshot of these errors and encounters was an invitation to Roquebrune to visit Iris’s father. Jack’s mother was ruthlessly excluded, even though Iris probably owed her a return engagement because of the lunch. Netta supposed that Iris had decided one had to get past Netta to reach Jack – an inexactness if ever there was one. Or perhaps it was Netta Iris wanted. In that case the error became a farce. Netta had almost no knowledge of private houses. She looked around at something that did not much interest her, for she hated to leave her own home, and saw Iris’s father, apparently too old and shaky to get out of his armchair. He smiled and he nodded, meanwhile stroking an aged cat. He said to Netta, “You resemble your mother. A sweet woman. Obliging and quiet. I used to tell her that I longed to live in her hotel and be looked after.”

  Not by me, thought Netta.

  Iris’s amber bracelets rattled as she pushed and pulled everyone through introductions. Jack and Netta had been asked to meet a young American Netta had often seen in her own bar, and a couple named Sandy and Sandra Braunsweg, who turned out to be Anglo-Swiss and twins. Iris’s long arms were around them as she cried to Netta, “Don’t you know these babies?” They were, like the Rosses, somewhere in their twenties. Jack looked on, blue-eyed, interested, smiling at everything new. Netta supposed that she was now seeing some of the rather hard-up snobbish – snobbish what? “Intelligum-hen-sia,” she imagined Dr. Blackley supplying. Having arrived at a word, Netta was ready to go home; but they had only just arrived. The American turned to Netta. He looked bored, and astonished by it. He needs the word for “bored,” she decided. Then he can go home, too. The Riviera was no place for Americans. They could not sit all day waiting for mail and the daily papers and for the clock to show a respectable drinking time. They made the best of things when they were caught with a house they’d been rash enough to rent unseen. Netta often had them then en pension for meals: a hotel dining room was one way of meeting people. They paid a fee to use the tennis courts, and they liked the bar. Netta would notice then how Jack picked up any accent within hearing.

  Jack was now being attentive to the old man, Iris’s father. Though this was none of Mr. Cordier’s business, Jack said, “My wife and I are first cousins, as well as second cousins twice over.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  Everyone began to speak at once, and it was a minute or two before Netta heard Jack again. This time he said, “We are from a family of great .…” It was lost. What now? Great innkeepers? Worriers? Skinflints? Whatever it was, old Mr. Cordier kept nodding to show he approved,

  “We don’t see nearly enough of young men like you,” he said.

  “True!” said Iris loudly. “We live in a dreary world of ill women down here.” Netta thought this hard on the American, on Mr. Cordier, and on the male Braunsweg twin, but none of them looked offended. “I’ve got no time for women,” said Iris. She slapped down a glass of whiskey so that it splashed, and rapped on a table with her knuckles. “Shall I tell you why? Because women don’t tick over. They just simply don’t tick over.” No one disputed this. Iris went on: Women were under-informed. One could have virile conversations only with men. Women were attached to the past through fear, whereas men had a fearless sense of history. “Men tick,” she said, glaring at Jack.

  “I am not attached to a past,” said Netta, slowly. “The past holds no attractions.” She was not used to general conversation. She thought that every word called for consideration and for an answer. “Nothing could be worse than the way we children were dressed. And our mothers – the hard waves of their hair, the white lips. I think of those pale profiles and I wonder if those women were ever young.”

  Poor Netta, who saw herself as profoundly English, spread onsternation by being suddenly foreign and gassy. She talked the English of expatriate children, as if reading aloud. The twins looked shocked. But she had appealed to the American, He sat beside her on a scuffed velvet sofa. He was so large that she slid an inch or so in his direction when he sat down. He was Sandra Braunsweg’s special friend: they had been in London together. He was trying to write.

  “What do you mean?” said Netta. “Write what?”

  “Well – a novel, to start,” he said. His father had staked him to one year, then another. He mentioned all that Sandra had borne with, how she had actually kicked and punched him to keep him from being too American. He had embarrassed her to death in London by asking a waitress, “Miss, where’s the toilet?”

  Netta said, “Didn’t you mind being corrected?”

  “Oh, no. It was just friendly.”

  Jack meanwhile was listening to Sandra telling about her English forebears and her English education. “I had many years of undeniably excellent schooling,” she said. “Mitten Todd.”

  “What’s that?” said Jack.

  “It’s near Bristol. I met excellent girls from Italy, Spain. I took him there to visit,” she said, generously including the American. “I said, ‘Get a yellow necktie.’ He went straight out and bought one. I wore a little Schiaparelli. Bought in Geneva but still a real … A yellow jacket over a gray … Well, we arrived at my excellent old school, and even though the day was drizzly I said, ‘Put the top of the car back.’ He did so at once, and then he understood. The interior of the car harmonized perfectly with the yellow and gray.” The twins were orphaned. Iris was like a mother.

  “When Mummy died we didn’t know where to put all the Chippendale,” said Sandra, “Iris took a lot of it.”

  Netta thought, She is so silly. How can he respond? The girl’s dimples and freckles and soft little hands were nothing Netta could have ever described: she had never in her life thought a word like “pretty.” People were beautiful or they were not. Her happiness had always been great enough to allow for despair. She knew that some people thought Jack was happy and she was not.

  “And what made you marry your young cousin?” the old man boomed at Netta. Perhaps his background allowed him to ask impertinent questions; he must have been doing so nearly forever. He stroked his cat; he was confident. He was spokesman for a roomful of wondering people.

  “Jack was a moody child and I promised his mother I would look after him,” said Netta. In her hopelessly un-English way she believed she had said something funny.

  At eleven o’clock the hotel car expected to fetch the Rosses was nowhere. They trudged home by moonlight. For the last hour of the evening Jack had been skewered on virile conversations, first with Iris, then with Sandra, to whom Netta had already given “Chippendale” as a private name. It proved that Iris was right about concentrating on men and their ticking – Jack even thought Sandra rather pretty.

  “Prettier than me?” said Netta, without the faintest idea what she meant, but aware she had said something stupid.

  “Not so attractive,” said Jack. His slight limp returned straight out of childhood. She had caused his accident.

  “But she’s not always clear,” said Netta. “Mitten Todd, for example.”

  “Who’re you talking about?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Iris, of course.”

  As if they had suddenly quarrelled they fell silent. In silence they entered their room and prepared for bed. Jack poured a whiskey, walked on the clothes he had dropped, carried his drin
k to the bathroom. Through the half-shut door he called suddenly, “Why did you say that asinine thing about promising to look after me?”

  “It seemed so unlikely, I thought they’d laugh.” She had a glimpse of herself in the mirrors picking up his shed clothes.

  He said, “Well, is it true?”

  She was quiet for such a long time that he came to see if she was still in the room. She said, “No, your mother never said that or anything like it.”

  “We shouldn’t have gone to Roquebrune,” said Jack. “I think those bloody people are going to be a nuisance. Iris wants her father to stay here, with the cat, while she goes to England for a month. How do we get out of that?”

  “By saying no.”

  “I’m rotten at no.”

  “I told you not to be too pally with women,” she said, as a joke again, but jokes were her way of having floods of tears.

  Before this had a chance to heal, Iris’s father moved in, bringing his cat in a basket. He looked at his room and said, “Medium large.” He looked at his bed and said, “Reasonably long.” He was, in short, daft about measurements. When he took books out of the reading room, he was apt to return them with “This volume contains about 70,000 words” written inside the back cover.

  Netta had not wanted Iris’s father, but Jack had said yes to it. She had not wanted the sick cat, but Jack had said yes to that too. The old man, who was lost without Iris, lived for his meals. He would appear at the shut doors of the dining room an hour too early, waiting for the menu to be typed and posted. In a voice that matched Iris’s for carrying power, he read aloud, alone: “Consommé. Good Lord, again? Is there a choice between the fish and the cutlet? I can’t possibly eat all of that. A bit of salad and a boiled egg. That’s all I could possibly want.” That was rubbish, because Mr. Cordier ate the menu and more, and if there were two puddings, or a pudding and ice cream, he ate both and asked for pastry, fruit, and cheese to follow. One day, after Dr. Blackley had attended him for faintness, Netta passed a message on to Iris, who had been back from England for a fortnight now but seemed in no hurry to take her father away.