I cannot say what was taking place in the world that spring; my father did not like to see young women reading newspapers. Echoes from Indochina came to me, and news of our cousin Julien drifted around the family, but the war itself was like the murmur of a radio in a distant room. I know that it was the year of Imperial Violets, with Luis Mariano singing the lead. At intermission he came out to the theater lobby, where his records were on sale, and autographed programs and record sleeves. I bought “Love Is a Bouquet of Violets,” and my mother and I got in line, but when my turn came I said my name so softly that she had to repeat it for me. After the performance he took six calls and stood for a long time throwing kisses.
My mother said, “Don’t start to dream about Mariano, Sylvie. He’s an actor. He may not mean a word he says about love.”
I was not likely to. He was too old for me, and I supposed that actors were nice to everybody in the same way. I wanted plenty of children and a husband who would always be there, not traveling and rehearsing. I wanted him to like me more than other people. I dreamed about Bernard Brunelle. I was engaged to Arnaud Pons.
Arnaud was the son of another man my father admired, I think more than anyone else. They had got to know each other through one of my father’s patients, a M. Tarre. My father had treated him for a chronically abscessed ear—eight appointments—and, at the end, when M. Tarre asked if he wanted a check at once or preferred to send a bill, my father answered that he took cash, and on the nail. M. Tarre inquired if that was his usual custom. My father said it was the custom of every specialist he had ever heard of, on which M. Tarre threatened to drag him before an ethics committee. “And your secretary, too!” he shouted. We could hear him in the other wing. “Your accomplice in felony!” My mother pulled me away from the window and said I was to go on being nice to Melle Coutard.
It turned out that M. Tarre was retired from the Ministry of Health and knew all the rules. Papa calmed him down by agreeing to meet a lawyer M. Tarre knew, called Alexandre Pons. He liked the sound of the name, which had a ring of the south. Even when it turned out that those particular Ponses had been in Paris for generations, my father did not withdraw his goodwill.
M. Pons arrived a few days later, along with M. Tarre, who seemed to have all the time in the world. He told my father that a reprimand from an ethics committee was nothing compared with a charge of tax fraud. Imagine, M. Pons said, a team of men in English-style suits pawing over your accounts. He turned to his friend Tarre and continued, “Over yours, too. Once they get started.”
M. Tarre said that his life was a house of glass, anyone was welcome to look inside, but after more remarks from M. Pons, and a couple of generous suggestions from my father, he agreed to let the thing drop.
As a way of thanking M. Pons, as well as getting to know him better, Papa asked my mother to invite him to dinner. For some reason, M. Pons waited several days before calling to say he had a wife. She turned out to be difficult, I remember, telling how she had fainted six times in eighteen months, and announcing, just as the roast lamb was served, that the smell of meat made her feel sick. However, when my mother discovered there was also a Pons son, aged twenty-six, unmarried, living at home, and working in the legal department of a large maritime-insurance firm, she asked them again, this time with Arnaud.
During the second dinner Maman said, “Sylvie is something of an artist. Everything on the dining-room walls is Sylvie’s work.”
Arnaud looked around, briefly. He was silent, though not shy, with a thin face and brown hair. His mind was somewhere else, perhaps in livelier company. He ate everything on his plate, sometimes frowning; when it was something he seemed to like, his expression cleared. He glanced at me, then back at my depictions of the Roman countryside and the harbor at Naples in 1850. I was sure he could see they were replicas and that he knew the originals, and perhaps despised me.
“They are only copies,” I managed to say.
“But full of feeling,” said Maman.
He nodded, as if acknowledging a distant and somewhat forward acquaintance—a look neither cold nor quite welcoming. I wondered what his friends were like and if they had to pass a special test before he would consent to conversation.
After dinner, in the parlor, there was the usual difficulty over coffee. Claudine was slow to serve, and particularly slow to collect the empty cups. A chinoiserie table stood just under the chandelier, but Maman made sure nothing ever was placed on it. She found an excuse to call attention to the marble floor, because she took pleasure in the icy look of it, but no one picked up the remark. Mme. Pons was first to sit down. She put her cup on the floor, crossed her legs, and tapped her foot to some tune playing in her head. Perhaps she was recalling an evening before her marriage when she had danced wearing a pleated skirt and ropes of beads: I had seen pictures of my mother dressed that way.
I had settled my own cup predicament by refusing coffee. Now I took a chair at some distance from Mme. Pons: I guessed she would soon snap out of her dream and start to ask personal questions. I looked at my hands and saw they were stained with paint. I sat on them: Nobody paid attention.
My mother was showing Arnaud loose sketches and unframed watercolors of mine that she kept in a folder—more views of Italy, copies, and scenes in Paris parks drawn from life.
“Take one! Take one!” she cried.
My father went over to see what kind of taste Arnaud had. He had picked the thing nearest him, a crayon drawing of Vesuvius—not my best work. My father laughed, and said my idea of a volcano in eruption was like a haystack on fire.
Bernard’s father did not respond to my father’s first approach—a letter that began: “I understand that our two children, Bernard and Sylvie, are anxious to unite their destinies.” Probably he was too busy finding out if we were solvent, Papa said.
My mother canceled the wedding dates, civil and church. There were just a few presents that had to be returned to close relatives. The names of the other guests had dissolved in the Seine. “It should be done quickly,” she had told my father, once the sudden change had been explained half a dozen times and he was nearly over the shock. He wondered if haste had anything to do with disgrace, though he could hardly believe it of me. No, no, nothing like that, she said. She wanted to see me safe and settled and in good hands. Well, of course, he wanted something like that, too.
As for me, I was sure I had been put on earth to marry Bernard Brunelle and move to Lille and live in a large stone house. (“Brick,” my friend Chantal corrected, when I told her. “It’s all brick up in Lille.”) A whole floor would be given over to my children’s nurseries and bedrooms and classrooms. They would learn English, Russian, German, and Italian. There would be tutors and governesses, holidays by the sea, ponies to ride, birthday parties with huge pink cakes, servants wearing white gloves. I had never known anyone who lived exactly that way, but my vision was so precise and highly colored that it had to be prompted from Heaven. I saw the curtains in the children’s rooms, and their smooth hair and clear eyes, and their neat schoolbooks. I knew it might rain in Lille, day after day: I would never complain. The weather would be part of my enchanted life.
By this time, of course, Arnaud had been invited by my father to have an important talk. But then my father balked, saying he would undertake nothing unless my mother was there. After all, I had two parents. He thought of inviting Arnaud to lunch in a restaurant—Lipp, say, so noisy and crowded that any shock Arnaud showed would not be noticed. Maman pointed out that one always ended up trying to shout over the noise, so there was a danger of being overheard. In the end, Papa asked him to come round to the apartment, at about five o’clock. He arrived with daffodils for my mother and a smaller bunch for me. He believed Papa was planning a change in the marriage contract: He would buy an apartment for us outright instead of granting a twenty-year loan, adjustable to devaluation or inflation, interest-free.
They received him in the parlor, standing, and Maman handed him the sealed rejec
tion she had helped me compose. If I had written the narrowest kind of exact analysis it would have been: “I have tried to love you, and can’t. My feelings toward you are cordial and full of respect. If you don’t want me to hate the sight of you, please go away.” I think that is the truth about any such failure, but nobody says it. In any case, Maman would not have permitted such a thing. She had dictated roundabout excuses, ending with a wish for his future happiness. What did we mean by happiness for Arnaud? I suppose, peace of mind.
Papa walked over to the window and stood drumming on the pane. He made some unthinking remark—that he could see part of the Church of Saint-Augustin, the air was so clear. In fact, thick, gray, lashing rain obscured everything except the nearest rank of trees.
Arnaud looked up from the letter and said, “I must be dreaming.” His clever, melancholy face was the color of the rain. My mother was afraid he would faint, as Mme. Pons so liked doing, and hurt his head on the marble floor. The chill of the marble had worked through everyone’s shoes. She tried to edge the men over to a carpet, but Arnaud seemed paralyzed. Filling in silence, she went on about the floor: The marble came from Italy; people had warned her against it; it was hard to keep clean and it held the cold.
Arnaud stared at his own feet, then hers. Finally, he asked where I was.
“Sylvie has withdrawn from worldly life,” my mother said. I had mentioned nothing in my letter about marrying another man, so he asked a second, logical question: Was I thinking of becoming a nun?
The rain, dismantling chestnut blossoms outside, sounded like gravel thrown against the windows. I know, because I was in my bedroom, just along the passage. I could not see him then as someone frozen and stunned. He was an obstacle on a railway line. My tender and competent mother had agreed to push him off the track.
That evening I said, “What if his parents turn up here and try to make a fuss?”
“They wouldn’t dare,” she said. “You were more than they had ever dreamed of.”
It was an odd, new way of considering the Ponses. Until then, their education and background and attention to things of the past had made up for an embarrassing lack of foresight: They had never acquired property for their only son to inherit. They lived in the same dim apartment, in a lamentable quarter, which they had first rented in 1926, the year of their marriage. It was on a street filled with uninviting stores and insurance offices, east of the Saint-Lazare station, near the old German church. (Arnaud had taken me to the church for a concert of recorded music. I had never been inside a Protestant church before. It was spare and bare and somehow useful-looking, like a large broom closet. I wondered where they hatched the Protestant plots Cousin Gaston often mentioned, such as the crushing of Mediterranean culture by peaceful means. I remember that I felt lonely and out of place, and took Arnaud’s hand. He was wearing his distant, listening-to-music expression, and seemed not to notice. At any rate, he didn’t mind.)
Families such as the Ponses had left the area long before, but Arnaud’s father said his belongings were too ancient and precious to be bumped down a winding staircase and heaved aboard a van. Papa thought he just wanted to hang on to his renewable lease, which happened to fall under the grace of a haphazard rent-control law: He still paid just about the same rent he had been paying before the war. Whatever he saved had never been squandered on paint or new curtains. His eleven rooms shared the same degree of decay and looked alike: You never knew if you were in a dining room or somebody’s bedroom. There were antique tables and bedsteads everywhere. All the mirrors were stained with those dark blotches that resemble maps. Papa often wondered if the Ponses knew what they really looked like, if they actually saw themselves as silvery white, with parts of their faces spotted or missing.
One of the first things Mme. Pons had ever shown me was a mute harpsichord, which she wanted to pass on to Arnaud and me. To get it to look right—never mind the sound—would have required months of expert mending, more than Arnaud could afford. Looking around for something else to talk about, I saw in a far, dim corner a bathtub and washstand, valuable relics, in their way, streaked and stained with age. Someone had used them recently: The towels on a rack nearby looked damp. I had good reason for thinking the family all used the same towels.
What went wrong for M. Pons, the winter of my engagement? Even Papa never managed to find out. He supposed M. Pons had been giving too much taxation advice, on too grand a scale. He took down from his front door the brass plate mentioning office hours and went to work in a firm that did not carry his name. His wife had an uncommon past, at once aristocratic and vaguely bohemian. My parents wondered what it could mean. My children would inherit a quarter share of blue blood, true, but they might also come by a tendency to dance naked in Montmartre. Her father had been killed in the First World War, leaving furniture, a name, and a long tradition of perishing in battle. She was the first woman in her circle ever to work. Her mother used to cry every morning as she watched her pinning her hat on and counting her lunch money. Her name was Marie-Eugénie-Paule-Diane. Her husband called her Nenanne—I never knew why.
Arnaud had studied law, for the sake of family tradition, but his true calling was to write opinions about music. He wished he had been a music critic on a daily newspaper, incorruptible and feared. He wanted to expose the sham and vulgarity of Paris taste; so he said. Conductors and sopranos would feel the extra edge of anxiety that makes for a good performance, knowing the incorruptible Arnaud Pons was in the house. (Arnaud had no way of judging whether he was incorruptible, my father said. He had never tried earning a living by writing criticism in Paris.)
We spent most of our time together listening to records, while Arnaud told me what was wrong with Toscanini or Bruno Walter. He would stop the record and play the same part again, pointing out the mistakes. The music seemed as worn and shabby as the room. I imagined the musicians in those great orchestras of the past to be covered with dust, playing on instruments cracked, split, daubed with fingerprints, held together with glue and string. My children in Lille had spotless instruments, perfectly tuned. Their music floated into a dark garden drenched with silent rain. But then my thoughts would be overtaken by the yells and screams of one of Arnaud’s doomed sopranos—a Tosca, a Mimi—and I would shut my eyes and let myself fall. A still surface of water rose to meet me. I was not dying but letting go.
Bernard’s father answered Papa’s second approach, which had been much like the first. He said that his son was a student, with no roof or income of his own. It would be a long time before he could join his destiny to anyone’s, and it would not be to mine. Bernard had no inclination for me; none whatever. He had taken me to be an attractive and artistic girl, anxious to please, perhaps a bit lonely. As an ardent writer of letters, with pen friends as far away as Belgium, Bernard had offered the hand of epistolary comradeship. I had grabbed the hand and called it a commitment. Bernard was ready to swear in court (should a lawsuit be among my father’s insane intentions) that he had taken no risks and never dropped his guard with an unclaimed young person, encountered in a public park. (My parents were puzzled by “unclaimed.” I had to explain that I used to take off my engagement ring and carry it loose in a pocket. They asked why. I could not remember.)
M. Brunelle, the answer went on, hoped M. Castelli would put a stop to my fervent outpourings in the form of letters. Their agitated content and their frequency—as many as three a day—interfered with Bernard’s studies and, indeed, kept him from sleeping. Surely my father did not want to see me waste the passion of a young heart on a delusion that led nowhere (“on a chimera that can only run dry in the Sahara of disappointment” was what M. Brunelle actually wrote). He begged my father to accept the word of a gentleman that my effusions had been destroyed. “Gentleman” was in English and underlined.
My parents shut themselves up in their bedroom. From my own room, where I sat at the window, holding Bernard’s messages, I could hear my father’s shouts. He was blaming Maman. Eventually she
came in, and I stood up and handed her the whole packet: three letters and a postcard.
“Just the important one,” she said. “The one I should have made you show me last April. I want the letter that mentions marriage.”
“It was between the lines,” I said, watching her face as she read.
“It was nowhere.” She seemed sorry for me, all at once. “Oh, Sylvie, Sylvie. My poor Sylvie. Tear it up. Tear every one of them up. All this because you would not try to love Arnaud.”
“I thought he loved me,” I said. “Bernard, I mean. He never said he didn’t.”
The heaven-sent vision of my future life had already faded; the voices of my angelic children became indistinct. I might, now, have been turning the pages of an old storybook with black-and-white engravings.
I said, “I’ll apologize to Papa and ask him to forgive me. I can’t explain what happened. I thought he wanted what I wanted. He never said that he didn’t. I promise never to paint pictures again.”
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Page 18