Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

All this had been meant to lead up to a question, but I had lost it. Anyway, Julius had stopped listening almost from the beginning. He sipped his wine and looked attentive, but his thoughts were floating. In the same voice, as if continuing my boring anecdote, I said, “… and tigers and zebras and ants and bees …”

“Yes, yes,” said Julius, pretending to hear.

“Oh, Julius, Julius,” I said in the same voice. “Now a general, tomorrow a field marshal. Last night in a dream I had you were nothing but a little dog who kept on barking, and Bibi had to thrash you to make you stop.”

I never like to leave Canada, because I’m disappointed every time. I’ve felt disappointed about places I haven’t even seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a sign saying NO CANADIANS. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another time I had to go and look after my brother Kenny in Buffalo. He had stolen a credit card and was being deported on that account. I went down to vouch for him and pay up for him and bring him home. Neither of us cared for Buffalo.

“What have they got here that’s so marvelous?” I said.

“Proust,” said Kenny.

“What?”

“Memorabilia,” he said. He was reading it off a piece of paper.

“Why does a guy with your education do a dumb thing like swiping a credit card?” I said.

“Does Mother know?” said Kenny.

“Mum knows, and Lou knows, and I know, and Beryl knows. It was in the papers. ‘Kenneth Apostolesco, of this city …’ ”

“I’d better stay away,” my brother said.

“No, you’d better not, for Mum’s sake. We’ve only got one mother.”

“Thank God,” he said. “Only one of each. One mother and one father. If I had more than one of each, I think I’d still be running.”

It was our father who ran, actually. He deserted us during the last war. He joined the Queen’s Own Rifles, which wasn’t a Montreal regiment — he couldn’t do anything like other people, couldn’t even join up like anyone else — and after the war he just chose to go his own way. I saw him downtown in Montreal one time after the war. I was around twelve, delivering prescriptions for a drugstore. I knew him before he knew me. He looked the way he had always managed to look, as if he had all the time in the world. His mouth was drawn in, like an old woman’s, but he still had his coal-black hair. I wish we had his looks. I leaned my bike with one foot on the curb and he came down and stood by me, rocking on his feet, like a dancer, and looking off over my head. He said he was night watchman at a bank and that he was waiting for the Army to fix him up with some teeth. He’d had all his teeth out, though there wasn’t anything wrong with them. He was eligible for new ones provided he put in a claim that year, so he thought he might as well. He was a bartender by profession, but he wasn’t applying for anything till he’d got his new teeth. “I’ve told them to hurry it up,” he said. “I can’t go round to good places all gummy.” He didn’t ask how anyone was at home.

I had to leave Canada to be with my father when he died. I was the person they sent for, though I was the youngest. My name was on the back page of his passport: “In case of accident or death notify WILLIAM APOSTOLESCO. Relationship: Son.” I was the one he picked. He’d been barman on a ship for years by then, earning good money, but he had nothing put by. I guess he never expected his life would be finished. He collapsed with a lung hemorrhage, as far as I could make out, and they put him off at a port in France. I went there. That was where I saw him. This town had been shelled twenty years ago and a lot of it looked bare and new. I wouldn’t say I hated it exactly, but I would never have come here of my own accord. It was worse than Buffalo in some ways. I didn’t like the food or the coffee, and they never gave you anything you needed in the hotels — I had to go out and buy some decent towels. It didn’t matter, because I had to buy everything for my father anyway — soap and towels and Kleenex. The hospital didn’t provide a thing except the bedsheets, and when a pair of those was put on the bed it seemed to be put there once and for all. I was there twenty-three days and I think I saw the sheets changed once. Our grandfathers had been glad to get out of Europe. It took my father to go back. The hospital he was in was an old convent or monastery. The beds were so close together you could hardly get a chair between them. Women patients were always wandering around the men’s wards, and although I wouldn’t swear to it, I think some of them had their beds there, at the far end. The patients were given crocks of tepid water to wash in, not by their beds but on a long table in the middle of the ward. Anyone too sick to get up was just out of luck unless, like my father, he had someone to look after him. I saw beetles and cockroaches, and I said to myself, This is what a person gets for leaving home.

My father accepted my presence as if it were his right — as if he hadn’t lost his claim to any consideration years ago. So as not to scare him, I pretended my wife’s father had sent me here on business, but he hardly listened, so I didn’t insist.

“Didn’t you drive a cab one time or other?” he said. “What else have you done?”

I wanted to answer, “You know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been supporting your wife and educating your other children, practically single-handed, since I was twelve.”

I had expected to get here in time for his last words, which ought to have been “I’m sorry.” I thought he would tell me where he wanted to be buried, how much money he owed, how many bastards he was leaving behind, and who was looking out for them. I imagined them in ports like this, with no-good mothers. Somebody should have been told — telling me didn’t mean telling the whole world. One of the advantages of having an Old Country in the family is you can always say the relations that give you trouble have gone there. You just say, “He went back to the Old Country,” and nobody asks any questions. So he could have told me the truth, and I’d have known and still not let the family down. But my father never confided anything. The trouble was he didn’t know he was dying — he’d been told, in fact, he was getting better — so he didn’t act like a dying man. He used what breath he had to say things like “I always liked old Lou,” and you would have thought she was someone else’s daughter, a girl he had hardly known. Another time he said, “Did Kenny do well for himself? I heard he went to college.”

“Don’t talk,” I said.

“No, I mean it. I’d like to know how Kenny made out.”

He couldn’t speak above a whisper some days, and he was careful how he pronounced words. It wasn’t a snobbish or an English accent — nothing that would make you grit your teeth. He just sounded like a stranger. When I was sent for, my mother said, “He’s dying a pauper, after all his ideas. I hope he’s satisfied.” I didn’t answer, but I said to myself, This isn’t a question of satisfaction. I wanted to ask her, “Since you didn’t get along with him and he didn’t get along with you, what did you go and have three children for?” But those are the questions you keep to yourself.