Across the Bridge

by Mavis Gallant

  “You’d better clean him up right away,” said Mrs. Clopstock.

  Missy, whose silences were astonishingly powerful, managed to suggest that cleaning Neil up was not in her working agreement. She did repeat that a bottle was ready for some reason, staring hard at the doctor.

  “The child is badly dehydrated,” he said, as if replying to Missy. “He should be given liquid right away. He is undernourished and seriously below his normal weight. As you can tell, he has a bad case of diarrhea. I’ll take his temperature after lunch.”

  “Is he really sick?” said Nora.

  “He may have to be hospitalized for a few days.” He was increasingly solemn and slower than ever.

  “Hospitalized?” said Mr. Fenton. “We’ve only just got him here.”

  “The first thing is to get him washed and changed,” said Mrs. Clopstock.

  “I’ll do it,” said Nora. “He knows me.”

  “Missy won’t mind.”

  Sensing a private exchange between Mrs. Clopstock and Missy, Nora held still. She felt a child’s powerful desire to go home, away from these strangers. Mrs. Clopstock said, “Let us all please go and sit down. We’re standing here as if we were in a hotel lobby.”

  “I can do it,” Nora said. She said again, “He knows me.”

  “Missy knows where everything is,” said Mrs. Clopstock. “Come along, Alex, Boyd. Nora, don’t you want to wash your hands?”

  “I’m feeling dehydrated too,” said Mr. Fenton. “I hope Missy put something on ice.”

  Nora watched Missy turn and climb the stairs, and disappear around the bend in the staircase. There’ll be a holy row about this, she thought. I’ll be gone.

  “It was very nice meeting you,” she said. “I have to leave now.”

  “Come on, Nora,” said Mr. Fenton. “Anybody could have made the same mistake. You came in out of bright sunlight. The hall was dark.”

  “Could we please, please go and sit down?” said his mother-in-law.

  “All right,” he said, still to Nora. “It’s O.K. You’ve had enough. Let’s have a bite to eat and I’ll drive you home.”

  “You may have to take Neil to the hospital.”

  Mrs. Clopstock took the doctor’s arm. She was a little woman in green linen, wearing pearls and pearl earrings. Aunt Rosalie would have seen right away if they were real. The two moved from the shaded hall to a shaded room.

  Mr. Fenton watched them go. “Nora,” he said, “just let me have a drink and I’ll drive you home.”

  “I don’t need to be driven home. I can take the Sherbrooke bus and walk the rest of the way.”

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong? It can’t be my mother-in-law. She’s a nice woman. Missy’s a little rough, but she’s nice too.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Fenton?” said Nora. “Why didn’t she at least come to the door? It’s her child.”

  “You’re not dumb,” he said. “You’re not Ray’s girl for nothing. It’s hers and it isn’t.”

  “We all signed,” Nora said. “I didn’t sign to cover up some story. I came here to do a Christian act. I wasn’t paid anything.”

  “What do you mean by ‘anything’? You mean not enough?”

  “Who’s Neil?” she said. “I mean, who is he?”

  “He’s a Fenton. You saw the register.”

  “I mean, who is he?”

  “He’s my son. You signed the register. You should know.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “He has English eyes.” Her voice dropped. He had to ask her to repeat something. “I said, was it Ninette?”

  It took him a second or so to see what she was after. He gave the same kind of noisy laugh as when she had tried to place the child in Missy’s arms. “Little Miss Cochefert? Until this minute I thought you were the only sane person in Montreal.”

  “It fits,” said Nora. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I don’t know. There are two people that know. Your father, Ray Abbott and Alex Marchand.”

  “Did you pay my Dad?”

  “Pay him? I paid him for you. We wouldn’t have asked anyone to look after Neil for nothing.”

  “About Ninette,” she said. “I just meant that it fits.”

  “A hundred women in Montreal would fit, when it comes to that. The truth is, we don’t know, except that she was in good health.”

  “Who was the girl in the lane? The one you were talking about.”

  “Just a girl in the wrong place. Her father was a school principal.”

  “You said that. Did you know her?”

  “I never saw her. Missy and Louise did. Louise is my wife.”

  “I know. How much did you give my dad? Not for Neil. For me.”

  “Thirty bucks. Some men don’t make that in a week. If you have to ask, it means you never got it.”

  “I’ve never had thirty dollars in one piece in my life,” she said. “In my family we don’t fight over money. What my dad says, goes. I’ve never had to go without. Gerry and I had new coats every winter.”

  “Is that the end of the interrogatory? You’d have made a great cop. I agree, you can’t stay. But would you just do one last Christian act? Wash your hands and comb your hair and sit down and have lunch. After that, I’ll put you in a taxi and pay the driver. If you don’t want me to, my mother-in-law will.”

  “I could help you take him to the hospital.”

  “Forget the Fenton family,” he said. “Lunch is the cutoff.”

  Late in the afternoon Ray came home and they had tea and sandwiches at the kitchen table. Nora was wearing Gerry’s old white terrycloth robe. Her washed hair was in rollers.

  “There was nothing to it, no problem,” she said again. “He needed a hospital checkup. He was run-down. I don’t know which hospital.”

  “I could find out,” said Ray.

  “I think they don’t want anybody around.”

  “What did you eat for lunch?” said her mother.

  “Some kind of cold soup. Some kind of cold meat. A fruit salad. Iced tea. The men drank beer. There was no bread on the table.”

  “Pass Nora the peanut butter,” said Ray.

  “Did you meet Mr. Fenton because of Ninette,” said Nora, “or did you know him first? Did you know Dr. Marchand first, or Mr. Fenton?”

  “It’s a small world,” said her father. “Anyways, I’ve got some money for you.”

  “How much?” said Nora. “No, never mind. I’ll ask if I ever need it.”

  “You’ll never need anything,” he said. “Not as long as your old dad’s around.”

  “You know, that Mrs. Clopstock?” said Nora. “She’s the first person I’ve ever met from Toronto. I didn’t stare at her, but I took a good look. Maman, how can you tell real pearls?”

  “They wouldn’t be real,” said Ray. “The real ones would be on deposit. Rosalie had a string of pearls.”

  “They had to sell them on account of Ninette,” said her mother.

  “Maybe you could find out the name of the hospital,” Nora said. “He might like to see me. He knows me.”

  “He’s already forgotten you,” her mother said.

  “I wouldn’t swear to that,” said Ray. “I can remember somebody bending over my baby buggy. I don’t know who it was, though.”

  He will remember that I picked him up, Nora decided. He will remember the smell of the incense. He will remember the front door and moving into the dark hall. I’ll try to remember him. It’s the best I can do.

  She said to Ray, “What’s the exact truth? Just what’s on paper?”

  “Nora,” said her mother. “Look at me. Look me right in the face. Forget that child. He isn’t yours. If you want children, get married. All right?”

  “All right,” her father answered for her. “Why don’t you put on some clothes and I’ll take you both to a movie.” He began to whistle, not “Don’t Let It Bother You,” but some other thing just as easy.

  Afterword

  BY RO
BERTSON DAVIES

  How pleasant to be asked for an Afterword, instead of a Preface. A Preface always suggests criticism, and I do not want to criticize Mavis Gallant’s book, but to celebrate it and, in so far as I can, express my own enjoyment of it. Criticism is a weariness of the spirit to writers, who are all too conscious of the aptness of Christopher Fry’s words: “everywhere today can be heard the patter of tiny criticism, the busy sound of men [and women] continually knowing what they like. How anything manages to create itself at all is a wonder.”

  As Fry suggests, even positive criticism imposes a restriction on a writer; it tells him who and what he is, when he is struggling to discover those things for himself. Mavis Gallant has had plenty of criticism and much of it has been warm praise. But does it help her to be told by one critic that she puts him in mind of Jane Austen, and by another that her social vision is worthy of Chekov? To my mind she is not a bit like Jane Austen or Chekov. She is splendidly like herself and that is a fine achievement. What is it? She knows, and it would be impertinence on my part to seek to explain her to herself. I can only say what she means to me, and doubtless there will be readers to whom my words of praise, though obviously well meant, are wide of the mark.

  To my mind, she is a great mistress of the art of implication. Her writing is beautifully economical, and by a hint here and a simple statement of fact there she contrives to give us finely realized portraits of her characters, so that by the end of one of her short stories we know the people better than those we meet in many a full-length novel. We have learned enough about their past, and have had enough hints about their future, to make their present firmly apparent. Though it is unwise to speak of one art in terms of another, her manner might be likened to pointillism; as we read we pay attention to each small dot, and when we have read, and as it were stepped back from the picture, it is suddenly full of light and meaning and we may be startled by what we have found. As with pointillism, the art lies in knowing what dots to choose. If Mavis Gallant were a painter she might be known in the galleries as The Mistress of the Right Dot.

  Consider the title story of the book you hold in your hand, “Across the Bridge.” What bridge? The bridge from the Place de la Concorde, to begin with, but when we have finished the story is there not another, and perhaps a third, that has been crossed by the hapless Sylvie Castelli, who is desolate at the thought of her approaching marriage to Arnaud Pons, because she is deeply in love with Bernard Brunelle? Not an unusual situation, at first glance, until we learn that the marriage with Arnaud is of the “arranged” variety and that she barely knows Bernard, and he has not written the letter her mother very sensibly wants to see, in which marriage is plainly offered. Mme. Castelli is a decisive woman and not one to stand in the way of true love. She throws the invitations to Sylvie’s wedding to Arnaud over the bridge into the river, and a difficult situation is thereby set in motion.

  What is difficult about it? The nature of the people involved, of course. They are not extraordinary; indeed, they are commonplace. Sylvie’s father is a well-doing physician, an ear specialist; he is also rather a crook, as he demands his fees in cash, so that they need not be revealed to the tax authorities. Mme. Castelli, though no enemy of romance, is essentially a practical person, and wants facts to support her in quashing the engagement to Arnaud. Arnaud himself is a young man against whom not a word can be said, except that he is a dreadful bore and a music snob, and tight with money. But of course they are all tight with money.

  The concern of the French middle class – the French of the Continent and of Montreal – with money is one of the things Mavis Gallant understands, down to the last grudged sou. Money, for these people, is not a medium of exchange or an aid to some kind of freedom, but a mystical essence, loved for its own sake and cherished with a darkly religious fervour. The loss of money or of any advantage that might lead to money is the hobgoblin of these bourgeois, and betrays them into covert cheats and mean economies which they persuade themselves are examples of a laudable prudence, and it is of these that they weave the web from which weakly aspiring souls like Sylvie Castelli cannot hope, ever in this world, to escape.

  Sylvie is a retiring girl possessed of one puny talent; she can make watercolour copies of pictures that someone else has already painted, and painted infinitely better. Mavis Gallant is unerring in her understanding of that unhappy and large class of persons who have some talent, and some artistic impulse, but not nearly enough to sustain a career or carry them far into an understanding of what art really is. But in Sylvie this feeble aspiration is evidence of a romantic nature and a rather nice, but weak, character. This is what leads her to project her yearning for real love and real romance upon Bernard Brunelle, who not merely fails to reciprocate but rejects her with brusqueness.

  Her dream topples. She must make it up with the deadly Arnaud. In the end she finds a shadow of happiness, and we hope that it will illuminate, however feebly, the life before her.

  This is comedy, but of a special sort which may be described as comic because it is not tragic. And why not tragic? Because, as Sir Philip Sidney reminds us, “tragedy concerneth a high fellow” and there are no high fellows in this tale; they cannot rise high, and thus they cannot fall low. We are invited to see them as they are, and they are set before us without any nudging by the author to turn us for or against her creations. They are set out simply as they are and all they are is implied by brilliantly chosen detail. This is true social comedy, and as well as making us laugh it provokes our pity and causes us some pain. We cannot take Sylvie as a heroine, done down by Fate; with the best will in the world we cannot imagine a destiny for her much better than what lies ahead with Arnaud. Is hers, then, to be a life of quiet desperation? No; she is not strong enough to despair; she can only endure. She has not the swollen egotism, the sense that her destiny is a mirror of mankind, that makes the truly tragic figure.

  We are very sorry for Sylvie, but the sorrow is ours. The author is not sorry on our behalf. She lets us pity, if that is our choice. Or would we prefer to laugh?

  This is art of a special kind. How is it done? By suggestion. By implication. We see it at work in the first three stories in the book. Not a word can be said against the Carette family except perhaps that they are utterly unendurable. Not unendurable on a great scale; they do not cheat greatly, betray largely, or eat their young. That is to say, they do not eat their young corporately; psychologically, things are quite different. But in lives so sodden with orthodox religion, psychology, as turned within, is not a factor. We may think that they create their own hell, but we are wrong. The hell they create arises in our own understanding; to them the lives they live are dutiful, impeccably moral, in so far as morality can be squared with financial prudence, loving in so far as love can be offered and accepted in their world. We read of them with fascination, and – no, no, never let it be said – some measure of self-recognition.

  And what does the author make of it? She does not say: she reports. She does not pursue anything to its conclusion; she implies what is to come. The result, by some magic that I cannot pin down, is delightful. Its quality is shown by the fact that I cannot “pin it down.” If it could be explained, it would not be magic, but conjuring. We are complimented in having been introduced to a mind so serene, so unjudging. And so sly.

  Yes, that’s the word. Sly.

  BY MAVIS GALLANT

  DRAMA

  What Is To Be Done? (1983)

  ESSAYS

  Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986)

  FICTION

  The Other Paris (1956)

  Green Water, Green Sky (1959)

  My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel (1964)

  A Fairly Good Time (1970)

  The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories (1973)

  The End of the World and Other Stories (1974)

  From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories (1979)

  Home Truths: Selected
Canadian Stories (1981)

  Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985)

  In Transit (1988)

  Across the Bridge: New Stories (1993)

  The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (1994)

  The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996)

  Paris Stories, ed. Michael Ondaatje (2002)

  Montreal Stories, ed. Russell Banks (2004)

  Going Ashore (2009)