Robert said only that his first marriage had been so happy that he could hardly wait to start over. The others sat staring at him. Walter had a crazy idea, which he kept to himself: Would Robert get married overhead in a balloon? “I am happy,” Robert said, once or twice. Walter fixed his eyes on the bright, silent screen.
Monique prepared their mother’s meals and carried them from Robert’s kitchen on a tray. She had to make a wide detour around Walter’s locked apartment. Everything was stone cold by the time the old lady had been coaxed to sit down. Their mother had her own kitchen, but she filled the oven with whatever came to hand when she was tidying—towels, a shoebox full of old Bic pens. Once, Monique found a bolster folded in two, looking like a bloated loaf. She disconnected the stove, so that her mother could not turn on the gas and start a fire.
Robert showed them a picture of his bride-to-be. She and Robert stood smiling, with arms linked, both wearing track suits. “Does she run as well as float?” said Aymeric. He turned the snapshot over and read a date and the initial B.
“Brigitte,” said Robert.
“Brigitte what?”
“I don’t want anyone driving to Tonnerre for long talks,” said Robert. He did say that she taught French grammar to semi-delinquents in a technical high school. She was trying to obtain a transfer to a Paris suburb. There could be no question of the capital itself: One had to know someone, and there was a waiting list ten years long.
Monique’s arrival was followed closely by a new shock from the administrative authorities of Paris: a telephone number old people could call in the summertime, free of charge, in case their families were away and they felt lonely. Robert’s mother dialed the number on Aymeric’s phone. The woman at the other end—young, from the sound of her—seemed surprised to hear that Robert’s mother lived with a son, a daughter, and a nephew, all attentive; had the use of a large television set with plenty of buttons and dials; and still suffered from feelings of neglect and despair. She was afraid of dying alone in the dark. All night long, she tried to stay on her feet.
The young voice reminded her about old people who had absolutely no one, who lived at the top of six steep flights of stairs, who did not dare go down to buy a packet of macaroni for fear of the long climb back. Robert’s mother replied that the lives of such people were at the next-to-final stage of hopelessness and terror. Her own meals were brought to her on a tray. She was not claiming more for her sentiments than blind panic.
Aymeric took the telephone out of her hand, said a few words into it, and hung up. His aunt gave him her sweet, steady smile before remarking, “Your poor mother, Aymeric, was nothing much to look at.”
Walter, trying to find a place to go for his summer holiday where there would be no reminders of art, fell back on Switzerland and his mother and father. He scrubbed and vacuumed his rooms and put plastic dust sheets over the furniture. Just before calling for a taxi to take him to the airport, he asked Robert if he could have a word with him. He was more than usually nervous, and kept flexing his hands. Terrible things had been said at the gallery that day; Walter had threatened his employer with the police. Robert could not understand the story—something incoherent to do with the office safe. He removed a bundle of clothes fresh from the launderette (he did his own ironing) and invited Walter to sit down. Walter wanted to know if the imminent change in Robert’s life and Monique’s constant hints about the best space in the house meant that Walter’s apartment was coveted. “Coveted” was a heavy word, but Robert finally answered, “You’ve got your lease.”
“According to the law,” said Walter, more and more fussed, “you can throw me out if you can prove you need the space.” Robert sat quietly, and seemed to be waiting for something else. “I’ve got to be sure I have a home to come back to—a home I can keep for a long time. This time I really intend to give notice. I don’t care about the pension. He’s making me an accomplice in crime. I’ll stay just until he can train a replacement for me. If he sees I am worried about something else as well, it will give him the upper hand. And then, I’m like you and Aymeric. I feel as if my own family had been living here forever.” Robert at this looked at him with a terrible politeness. Walter rushed on, mentioning a matter that other tenants, he thought, would have brought up first. Since moving in, he had painted the kitchen, paved the bathroom with imported tiles, and hung custom-made curtains on rods designed to fit the windows. All this, he said, constituted an embellishment of space.
“Your vacation will do you good,” said Robert.
Walter gave Robert his house keys and said he hoped Monique would feel free to use his apartment as a passageway while he was gone. Handing them over, he was reminded of another gesture—his hand, outstretched, opening to reveal the snuffbox.
Their mother had begun polishing furniture, as in some of her dreams. A table in Walter’s sitting room was like a pond. Everything else was dusty. The plastic sheets lay like crumpled parachutes in a corner. On Aymeric’s birthday, late in August, he and Robert and Monique sat at the polished table eating pastries out of a box. Robert picked out a few of the kind his mother liked and put them aside for her on a plate. They could hear her, in Walter’s bedroom, telling City Hall that they had disconnected her stove.
Perhaps because there was an empty chair, Robert suddenly said that Brigitte was immensely sociable and liked to entertain. She played first-class bridge. She had somehow managed to obtain a transfer to Paris after all. They would be getting married in October.
“How did she do it?” Aymeric asked.
“She knows someone.”
They fell silent, admiring the empty chair.
“Who wants the last strawberry tart?” said Monique. When no one answered, she cut it in three.
“We will have to rearrange the space,” said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out.
Aymeric said, “Try to find out what she did with that snuffbox. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding present.”
“I’ll look again in the oven,” Monique said.
“Ask her carefully,” said Aymeric. “Don’t frighten her. Sometimes she remembers.”
Robert went on tracing invisible lines.
Walter came back in September to find his kitchen under occupation, full of rusted sieves and food mills and old graters. On the stove was a saucepan of strained soup for the old woman’s supper; a bowl of pureed apricots stood uncovered in the sink. He removed everything to the old woman’s kitchen.
I was brought up so soundly, he said to himself. He had respected his parents; now he admired them. At home, nothing had made him feel worried or tense, and he hadn’t minded his father’s habit of reading the newspaper aloud while Walter tried to watch television. When his father answered the telephone, his mother called, “What do they want?” from the kitchen. His father always repeated everything the caller said, so that his mother would not miss a word of the conversation. There were no secrets, no mysteries. What Walter saw of his parents was probably all there was.
After cleaning his rooms and unpacking his suitcase, Walter called on Robert. He had meant to ask how they had spent their holidays, if in spite of the old lady they had managed to get away, but instead he found himself telling about a remarkable dream he’d had in Switzerland: A large badger had burst into the gallery and taken Walter’s employer hostage. Trout Face had said, “You’re not getting away with this. I’m not having anybody running around here with automatic weapons.” It was not a nightmare, said Walter. He had seen himself, aloof and nonchalant, enjoying the incident.
Robert said he would look it up. That night he made a neat stack of the books Walter had lent him—all that he could still find—and left it outside his locked front door. He wrote on the back of a page torn off a calendar, “Dream of badger taking man hostage means a change of residence, for which the dreamer should be prepared. R.” He rewrote this several times, changing a word here and there. In t
he morning, after starting the record and opening all the windows, he sat down and read his message again. He kept running his finger over the note, as he had traced new boundaries on Walter’s table, and seemed to be wondering if there was any point in trying to say the same thing some other way.
KINGDOM COME
After having spent twenty-four years in the Republic of Saltnatek, where he established the first modern university, recorded the vocabulary and structure of the Saltnatek tongue, and discovered in a remote village an allophylian language unknown except to its speakers, Dr. Domini Missierna returned to Europe to find that nobody cared. Saltnatek was neither lush nor rich nor seductive, nor poor enough to arouse international pity. The university survived on grants left over from the defense budget, and even Missierna had to admit he had not attracted teachers of the first order. He had wasted his vitality chasing money for salaries and equipment, up to the day when an ungrateful administration dismissed him and the latest revolutionary council, thanking him for nothing, put him on a plane.
He was still in mourning for his Saltnatek years. It grieved him to hear, at a linguistic congress in Helsinki, younger colleagues in the most offhand way confusing Saltnatek with Malta and Madagascar. Saltnatek consisted of an archipelago of naked islands, one of which had been a port of call for cruise ships early in the century. Most tourists had not even bothered to go ashore: There was nothing to admire except straight rows of undecorated houses, and nothing to buy except shells of giant sea snails, on which the nation’s artists had carved in a spiral pattern WHEN THIS YOU SEE, REMEMBER ME. The motto was thought to have been copied from the lid of a snuffbox found in the pocket of a drowned naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. (Missierna supposed the box was probably a lucky piece, even though it had not turned out to be providential. He kept this to himself; he was not in the business of offering speculations.) Even that trifling commerce had come to a stop when, just after the First World War, a society for the protection of sea snails urged a boycott of mutilated shells—a prohibition that caused Saltnatek great bewilderment and economic distress.
In Helsinki, his heart galloping, his voice trembling sometimes, Missierna disclosed the existence of a complex and living language, spoken by an inbred population that produced children of much thievishness, cunning, and blank beauty. He stood on a stage too large for him, fuzzily lighted, in an auditorium the size of a concert hall. Nine men and three women sat, singly, in the first fifteen rows. They were still and unresponsive, and as soon as he had finished reading they got up in the same quiet way and filed out. There were no questions: He had brought back to Europe one more system, and no one knew how to make the old ones work.
If he was disappointed, it was in part because he was no longer young, and it was almost too late for his competence, perhaps his genius, to receive the rewards it deserved. Although he was far less vain than any of the substandard teachers he had interviewed and hired for Saltnatek, he still hoped that at least one conclusion might be named for him, so that his grandchildren, coming across his name in a textbook, could say, “So this is what he was like—modest, creative.” But all that anyone said at the Helsinki congress was “You have demonstrated nothing that cannot be shown through Hungarian.”
During the years when he was so obsessively occupied, Europe had grown small, become depleted, as bald in spirit as Saltnatek’s sandy and stony islands. The doubting voices were thin and metallic. No one was listening. His colleagues said, “One step after the other,” and “One at a time.” They trod upon discarded rules of address, raked the ground to find shreds of sense and reason. Salvation was in the dust or it was nowhere. Even if he were to reveal twenty new and orderly and poetic methods of creating order by means of words, he would be told, “We had better deal with matters underfoot, closer to home.”
He was a divorced parent, which meant he had children and grandchildren but no place in particular to go. Saltnatek had been like a child, and he had stayed with it longer than with any other, had seen it into maturity, and it had used and rejected him, as children do, as it is their right. It was not in his nature to put out emotional ultimatums. In the past, it could have been his business—he should have made it his business—to observe the patterns of exchange among his real children, even if the information, tabulated, had left him depressed and frightened. He could have taken them as an independent republic and applied for entry. Even now, he considered inviting himself for next Christmas. He would surely obtain the limited visa no one dares refuse a homeless old man, a distinguished relative, not poor, needing only consideration—notice taken of his deafness, his stiff shoulder, his need to get up and eat breakfast at five o’clock, his allergies to butter and white wine.
What to take on the Christmas exploration? The first rule of excursions into uncankered societies is: Don’t bring presents. Not unless one wants to face charges of corruption. But then, like any scholar fending off a critic, he could justify the gifts, telling himself that another visitor might taint the society in a manner deadlier still, whereas he, Missierna, sat lightly. He had been a featherweight on his children; he had scarcely gone near them. A present from parent to child surely reinforces a natural tie. When they were young, he used to bring home one wristwatch and make them draw lots. For professional trips he had packed radio batteries; his travels had taught him that new republics run out of them soon. He had taken ski boots wherever there were snowy mountains, except in places where snow was sacred. He had always shown a sense of patience, a good-tempered approach to time, as he cut through the thorn patch of transit visas, six-month-residence permits, five-year research grants. To enter one’s own family, he supposed, one needed to fill out forms. All he would have to understand was the slant of the questions.
From his hotel room in Helsinki, Missierna saw the Baltic and gulls skimming over the whitecaps. At night ghosts floated along the horizon. He took it for granted they were ghosts—having lived among people who saw a great many—and not simply the white shadows of summer.
An insurance actuarial study gave him six more years to live if he went on as he was, eight if he gave up smoking, nine and a half if he adopted an optimistic outlook. What about white magic? What about trying to add a few more summer nights by means of poems and incantations? Why not appeal to a saint—a saint so obscure that the direct line from Missierna’s mind to the saint’s memory of a mind would be clean, without the clutter of other, alien voices? He could begin by repeating his own name, before deciding what conjury should come next.
His grandchildren surely lived on magic. There was fresh daylight every morning. Clothes dropped on the floor were found clean and folded. A gray-haired man at the congress, who said he had once been Missierna’s student, had told him that very soon, by law, children were going to be asked to acknowledge their parents, instead of the other way. There would be some cold refusals, Missierna supposed, and some selfish ones, and some inspired by embarrassment. There might be cases of simple antipathy, too. Most children would probably accept their parents, out of pity, or to keep a strong thread of filiation, or to claim an inheritance, or to conform to an astral pattern. Some, to avoid the sight of adult tears. A few might show the blind trust that parents pray for. The new insecurity, the terror of being cast off, was already causing adults to adopt the extreme conservatism that is usually characteristic of the very young. A mistrust of novelty and change surely accounted for Missierna’s sparse audience, the silence in the auditorium, the unwillingness to know something more.
In Saltnatek, toward the end, he had heard some of the cool remarks that said, plainly, he was not a father; heard them from students he had taught, reared, nurtured, and who now were ready to send him packing: “You can’t say we didn’t warn you.” “I tried to tell you that someday you’d be sorry.” “I’m sorry if you’re sorry. But that’s all I have to be sorry about.” From his own children there had been monitory signals, too, which he had mistaken for pertness: “Can’t you ask a waitress for a cu
p of coffee without telling your life story?” “Other parents don’t take the wrong bus.” “Please don’t get up and dance. It makes you look so silly.” Their eyes were clean, pure, but bedeviled by unease and mortification. The eyes of children are the eyes of petit bourgeois, he decided. They can’t help it; they are born wondering if their parents are worth what the bus driver thinks.
For twenty-four years the eyes of Saltnatek had appraised him, and had then turned away. He had become to himself large and awkward—a parent without authority, dispossessed, left to stumble around in an airport, as if he were sick or drunk.
He could still recite by rote the first test sentences he had used for his research:
“Now that you mention it, I see what you mean.”
“There is no law against it, is there?”
“I am not comfortable, but I hope to be comfortable soon.”
“Anyone may write to him. He answers all letters.”
“Look it up. You will see that I was right all along.”
At the outset, in Saltnatek, he had asked for a governmental ruling to put a clamp on the language: The vocabulary must not grow during the period of his field work. Expansion would confuse the word count. They had not been sure what to call him. Some had said “Father,” which was close in sound to his name, as they pronounced it. His own children had for a while avoided saying even “you,” dropping from their greetings such sentences as “What did you bring us?” and “Are you staying long?” They were like long-term patients in a hospital, or rebels interned. Their expression, at once careful and distant, seemed to be telling him, “If you intend to keep coming and going, then at least bring us something we need.”
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Page 81