A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  “I am free today,” said Marie-Thérèse. “The three older boys have been asked to the house of a school friend—something I do not approve of—and the little one is with my mother, and Gérald has a business lunch.” She made a thin line of her mouth. She wanted all her men at home, where she could control them.

  Oh, what does she want? Shirley wondered. Why doesn’t she say she knows where Claudie is? She has been there.

  “Here we are in thin dresses,” said Marie-Thérèse, still meandering. “And Paris is so unsettled—tomorrow we may be wearing our coats and sweaters again. But you are so competent and organized, I am sure nothing can surprise you. You must be ready for every change. You were not astonished to see me, for example. You accept everything as it happens. If someone came to my door, I would ask who it was through the closed door, or I would be very still and hold my breath and wait for the intruder to go away. I think of the person at the door as a man with a little suitcase, which he will open and then try to sell me laces and bits of embroidery which I don’t want and can’t afford. This man has only one arm, he has no home, and he has an incurable illness. I am always afraid of this man. I always have been. I am afraid of the blind. I buy the soap that the blind make, but I give it to my grandmother. I am afraid to use it. I am afraid it could be unlucky. Supposing I opened the door one day and someone came in and talked as if answering questions, when no questions had been asked? But you accept all this.”

  “I don’t want to seem rude, but I’ve heard it before,” said Shirley. “I never expected it from you, though. I’ve already heard people try one subject after another without getting to the point. That’s why I’m not surprised. When you live the way I have, everything seems natural.”

  “What is the way you live?”

  After a few moments Shirley said, “I know a lot of people, but I don’t depend on anyone. I wish you could see the view in that mirror—your profile, the sweetpeas and the light from the window.”

  “The way you live would never do for Claudie. She will never be independent, though she likes saying she knows people too. Once she showed me her address book and said, ‘I could see a different person every day for five months if I wanted to.’ But she will never be independent.”

  “You’ve never let her. You’ve never let her learn anything.”

  “At home, there is a large wardrobe the top shelves of which are filled with the textbooks of courses Claudie began and gave up. We had to let her try subjects that could be taught to someone who hadn’t finished school. She tried typing and Spanish and sewing and bookbinding, but nothing lasted. Maman would have forced her to stick to something, but Papa always gave in.”

  “He wants it that way,” said Shirley. “The dependent daughter. She’ll never marry anyone.”

  “It would be a blessing for us if some man did marry her, but a catastrophe for him.”

  Shirley did not know if Marie-Thérèse meant a catastrophe for Papa or for the husband.

  Now rain blackened the street. The mirror was darkened. In a cold, sudden draft a door banged.

  Shirley thought, I was hoping someone would remember me, but it was only Marie-Thérèse. I can’t spend a summer this way. A summer is as long as a lifetime. What will become of me now?

  “I was wondering,” she said. “What will become of Claudie?”

  “I have been wondering for ten years,” said Marie-Thérèse. “I was eight when she was born.” Here came a new pause. She seemed to be looking for a topic, but gave it up. She cast one more clear look about, and then, seeing the cloudburst, stopped and gathered up her parcels. She made a last attempt: “When you invited Claudie to leave home and live with you . . .”

  “Did I?” Shirley was standing. “Claudie’s never lived here. The only people from that family who have come here without invitation are Gérald and you. The two I know least. The Flying Ziffs. I may have thought Claudie should leave home, but I doubt if I said so. I wouldn’t want her here. What would I do with her? I haven’t said a word—I promise you that. Claudie does the talking, just as you’ve been doing. Though I did put in quite a long bit about my wedding, I must admit. I wouldn’t interfere with your father, not unless Claudie asked me to.” She remembered that Claudie had asked something.

  “I must tell you one more thing,” said Marie-Thérèse, hugging her parcels, cold in the draft. “It is our mother who is afraid of losing Claudie, not Papa. She is bound to, one day, and she will lose her stupidly, because anything to do with Claudie has to be stupid. Whatever happens, I pray there will not be any outsiders involved, and no scandal.”

  “Your family doesn’t seem to have any friends, so there can hardly be any scandal.”

  Marie-Thérèse stared, then smiled. “It is like a dream, having this conversation outside my own family.”

  “If we were both dreaming it could hardly be sillier, I know.”

  “I dreamed I saw myself sleeping,” said Marie-Thérèse, unaware she now owed Shirley a quarter, to be accepted in her late father’s name. “I was ugly. I saw myself with my ugly pointed ears.”

  “Oh, poor Marie-Thérèse!” Shirley cried, hurt by the picture the other woman had of herself.

  Marie-Thérèse turned away. She had not liked being called “poor,” and seemed to fear that Shirley might touch her.

  “Let’s have lunch together,” Shirley said, for now she was looking at Marie-Thérèse—looking at her, and not at her effect on the mirror. She saw her as pale and thin-skinned, and so unlucky with her questions that led nowhere. “I’ve been living on vin rosé and breakfasts, and finally even the marmalade ran out. You don’t have to go home. You just said so.”

  “I never care what I eat, or even if I do,” said Marie-Thérèse, which seemed a cold way of accepting. “I never go out. You will have to decide everything. Only foreigners know where restaurants are in Paris.”

  Shirley thought, I don’t even care how that was meant. Her attention was fixed on the pretty gilt-framed mirror in the hall, Renata’s wedding present. Am I all right? she asked the mirror. Am I fit to be seen? Her face bore an unexpected resemblance to her mother’s. She remembered the anxious energy she had put into getting ready on the day Gérald had come for her—how carefully she had dressed for an unknown family who were half hoping she would not turn up. My purse, my cigarettes, my money, no, not my gloves; gloves make you look foreign here. Am I ready? Am I wearing shoes? My hair, my wedding ring, my smile—are they handicaps or will they help me?

  •

  Madame Roux, caught in the act of placing an authentic 1914 bidet (now a plantstand) in the window, opened her mouth as the two went by. It was a wide sign of astonishment, as in a silent film.

  “It is because we look so respectable,” Shirley explained.

  But Marie-Thérèse, in the bitter voice of someone recalling a dim, old injustice, was speaking about food: “Around Strasbourg, where Gérald was born, they have so much food that they play games with it. At Christmas the charcuteries are decorated with Nativity scenes made out of garlic sausage and potato salad. The Infant Jesus is a dill pickle, a radish and toothpicks. A normally built woman can eat a dozen snails, pike tart, foie gras in aspic, a haystack of choucroute, Munster cheese, and apple pudding, and then, for digestion, a pear weighing half a pound. She will also have bread and beer, or white wine, and then coffee. They are particular about their coffee. When I met Gérald I asked him how coffee was made in Alsace. He said that it was easy: one bought the best, and used a lot of it. Imagine! What I’ve described might be a luncheon. At five o’clock this same woman will drink thick hot chocolate with little croissants stuffed with almond paste, or a piece of pastry rolled around apples, raisins and walnuts. That will keep her peaceful until dinnertime. Dinner will be a heavy soup of pork, potatoes, leeks. Then she will have potato salad and a cold breaded pork chop, and perhaps some of the apple pudding left over from lunch, if something else hasn’t been made in the meantime—perhaps plum tart. In spite of all that fo
od, their eyes are bright and the whites very clear. They get fat, their busts are imposing, but their skin is like peach down. These women are calmer, less complicated than we are. The sky is cleaner than in Paris. The air seems unpolluted. The stars in the heavens spell f-o-o-d. Until he married me, Gérald had never sat down to a meal where there were fewer than six people, and with less food than could feed sixteen.”

  And then he married this frugal daughter of Paris, who was enjoying her cold description of meals she would have thought it immoral to prepare. Shirley said, almost absently, “I wonder why we all got married so young?”

  “My mother must have told you. No? Did she tell you that when I married Gérald she lost part of herself? It’s a thing she tells sometimes. It is from our mother that Claudie has her taste for phrases.”

  “I’ve never had a real conversation with your mother. We haven’t often been alone.”

  Marie-Thérèse said very lightly, “She talks as if she had seen you often. No matter. I was tied to her skirts. She made me too religious. Oh, it is of no importance now. I was afraid I might become a nun, and so I married. I was afraid I would feel I had to be a nun. My mother’s best girlhood friend, whom we called Aunt Françoise, was a nun. Whenever Maman took me to visit her I felt that she wanted to give me away as a present to her old friend. Each of them had a brooch with two gold doves on a little branch. They had exchanged them when they were young girls. I think the two girls were supposed to be those doves. When Maman married Papa, Aunt Françoise sent hers back to Maman, like someone turning in the Legion of Honor. That’s the story I’ve heard. It made Maman feel she had done something wrong in getting married. Later, Maman may have regretted being married because Papa was hard to understand. Hard for her to understand. I’ve never found him difficult. He seems indifferent now, but I can remember . . . It doesn’t matter. Maman would sit in Aunt Françoise’s convent parlor with me beside her and weep and weep. Aunt Françoise—I still called her that, though she had another name in religion—seemed cool and triumphant. She laid her hand on my head and said she could see the bridal veil. Maman stopped crying at once, saying ‘Do you?’ with so much joy, as if with those words Aunt Françoise had forgiven her for having had me. After Claudie came, I was so out of favor that I would have done anything to please Maman. But not that, not become a nun. I couldn’t promise that, even at nine, at ten. I didn’t want that veil. It was the other veil I wanted, the real bridal veil, and I shut myself off from Maman deliberately, so that she couldn’t get at my affections. I already knew I would keep my affection for my children. I still did not know who my husband would be; I had no idea about him. I cut myself off from Maman abruptly, without explaining. And I was so young! She may have suffered. Until I was eight years old she had fed me with a spoon. I never learned to use my hands. I sat with my hands on the table and she fed me. From time to time I must have refused to swallow, the way Alain does now. That was a long time ago. I was seventeen when I met Gérald. A year later I went to Papa and said ‘It will be Gérald or no one.’ He and Gérald dined alone—the first and last time they ever had a conversation. They never speak—did you notice? There is no anger between them, but what can they say? Papa told him there would not be a marriage settlement, not one centime. But Gérald still wanted me and he has never reproached me. Never.”

  Shirley briefly compared the cloister with having Gérald as a husband. There should have been a third chance. Marie-Thérèse’s voice created transparent pictures; the noise of the traffic on the boulevard Saint Germain slipped through the account of a life—part of a life. Shirley saw them as she saw cars starting and stopping and one taxi sliding like an eel around a corner past a red light.

  “She had fed me with a spoon,” said Marie-Thérèse, “and I hated eating. It bored me. Yes, I was like Alain. You see, she is doing it all over again. She is doing to Alain what she did to me. I would open my mouth, like a little bird . . .”

  Over her voice, through the traffic, slid a third picture: Alain opening his bird mouth and Papa slipping into it a morsel of bread.

  “One day my mother seemed nervous and tired and she said, ‘I am having another child, and if you don’t feed yourself you will die.’ That was how I began to eat. When they took me to the clinic to look at Claudie I thought she was hideous, black as a monkey. I knew even then Maman would have the hold on her she’s had on me, that she would tie her up, and that it would take another form. I didn’t hate the dark baby, but I must have decided then to have only blond children. By the time Claudie was two or three she was fair as a Scandinavian, but I still see her ugly and dark.”

  •

  I congratulate you, Shirley said to herself. That serve was more than adequate. As you will see, I know the rules: confidence for confidence, mine will be equal to yours. That is how we avoid blackmail at the end of the game. No one will need to say, “Don’t say I said it.” You limit your play to food and money, and you bring in your mother. My turn, now—what would you like to know? If only I knew what you were after! But that is the one thing you can’t tell. I wasn’t jealous of a younger sister; I never had one. My father? Not interesting—an old man. Are you wondering about Philippe? You have seen him on television and you say to yourself now, “With all of France and Navarre to choose from, why Shirley Higgins?” “Never wonder, Louisa . . .” (C. Dickens) is the way we will head this. You may be asking yourself how we met. When I first came to France I used to wonder how people met at all. They seemed so separate, so uninvolved with each other that I wondered they could testify at trials—how they recognized each other at all, let alone knew anyone’s name.

  The first time I saw him was at a party Renata had taken me to, and the second was by accident, in the street. I was carrying a basket of groceries—to be exact, scotch and salted peanuts. I was holding an umbrella. At the party he had been the bewildered Frenchman, charming and polite, wondering what he was doing there with all those drunks. It was the first time he had ever seen pretty, respectable, drunken girls. We sat next to each other on the floor and I poured all my life out, except the part that mattered. When we met in the street a week later he fell in step beside me. I may have recognized him first—yes, I probably waved my umbrella and smiled the wide, dumb welcome that makes us seem like children to them. We discussed straight away in the rain whether the Hitler movement had really been black magic. It was the big topic that season. His information was a best-selling book about all kinds of magic, and mine came from Renata. As I listened to Philippe talking, I realized she had read the same book. When we came to the door of the courtyard (Madame Roux meanwhile peering, pop-eyed and avid, over her fortune of wigless dolls and soup tureens) I saw him through fogged-up glasses. I had been expecting a miracle for some time.

  “You are wearing a wedding ring,” he remarked.

  “I am a widow.”

  “A young widow.”

  “I don’t know. I’m twenty-five.”

  “Young widows don’t exist any more,” he said. “They belong to the 1914 war.”

  Whenever I did not know why something had been said, I thought it was because I did not understand French well enough or else that I was stupid. I translated us both from the beginning into characters out of books, but they were children’s books he had never heard of. Under the umbrella, I was Jo, and he was Professor Bhaer. A few days later, when he turned up to fetch me for dinner, by appointment, I had forgotten all about him. I lived a small, dogged life then. I didn’t depend on anyone in particular and I knew a lot of people. He said, “Shall I come back a little later?” I was wearing a hideous Mexican shift Renata had passed on to me. I was drinking rye and water and eating my supper, a peanut-butter sandwich. “I have never been in an American apartment before,” he said, looking around. The rooms were different then. He brought the desks and the shelves and the wine rack and the blue sofa later on. What we called “the box-room” later had nothing in it but an ironing board and a picture frame. There were no proper cupb
oards. My clothes were everywhere. I kept a flashlight for weeks in the bathroom because I didn’t know where the fusebox was.

  “The furniture is French, I guess,” I said, as though I hadn’t seen it before. “I’ve hardly ever been in a real French apartment, so that makes us even. I took this over from another girl. I’m not American. I’m Canadian.”

  “Then you are French,” he said politely.

  “With my accent? I could hardly speak a word until I came here. Now I do pretty well, don’t you think? Or haven’t you heard me? People here are always saying, ‘You must be Maria Chapdelaine.’ Sometimes I just say yes, to make things easier. I get her mixed up with that other one, Madeleine something, who saved I don’t know which place from the Iroquois.”

  I sat down, facing him, tugging the shift down over my knees. I was cold with shame, not over my appearance, but because of the gnawed sandwich, which I tried to hide under a crumpled paper napkin in an ashtray. All I could think of to say next was, “Make you a sandwich?”

  “Le Miroir, where I work, published a series of nine articles on the Canadian question,” said polite Philippe.

  “Oh, the question. I don’t know all that much. Just what people keep telling me. No, that’s not fair. I know a little, but when I try to explain I keep having to start from zero every time, and it wears me out. I saw the things in Le Miroir. I didn’t read them; I just looked at the pictures to see if there was anyone I knew. I thought they were kind of melodramatic. You don’t know how dull and stubborn people can be. These articles—weren’t they called ‘The Scream’ or something?”

  “ ‘The Silent Cry.’ That was the name of the series.” He sat on the edge of a chair as if he were waiting for news of some kind. I see him there and I remember your saying, “It will be Gérald or no one.” He can grow old, fret about his digestion, lose his hair, he still will be that one. We had met before, but now we looked. Presently he said, “I wrote the articles. I wrote the first two, which were in the form of a general essay, and I wrote the summing up. The others were a matter of editing.” Then he quoted in the elegant beautiful French he speaks, “ ‘It is a silent cry, torn from the lungs piercing as pain, rending the firmament.’ Surely that sounds like your country, as the situation is now?”