Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

“No, thanks,” my father said. “No screen. Thanks all the same.”

We had one more conversation after that. I’ve already said there were always women slopping around in the ward, in felt slippers, and bathrobes stained with medicine and tea. I came in and found one — quite young, this one was — combing my father’s hair. He could hardly lift his head from the pillow, and still she thought he was interesting. I thought, Kenny should see this.

“She’s been telling me,” my father gasped when the woman had left. “About herself. Three children by different men. Met a North African. He adopts the children, all three. Gives them his name. She has two more by him, boys. But he won’t put up with a sick woman. One day he just doesn’t come. She’s been a month in another place; now they’ve brought her here. Man’s gone. Left the children. They’ve been put in all different homes, she doesn’t know where. Five kids. Imagine.”

I thought, You left us . He had forgotten; he had just simply forgotten that he’d left his own.

“Well, we can’t do anything about her, can we?” I said. “She’ll collect them when she gets out of here.”

“If she gets out.”

“That’s no way to talk,” I said. “Look at the way she was talking and walking around …” I could not bring myself to say “and combing your hair.” “Look at how you are,” I said. “You’ve just told me this long story.”

“She’ll seem better, but she’ll get worse,” my father said. “She’s like me, getting worse. Do you think I don’t know what kind of ward I’m in? Every time they put the screen around a patient, it’s because he’s dying. If I had TB, like they tried to make me believe, I’d be in a TB hospital.”

“That just isn’t true,” I said.

“Can you swear I’ve got TB? You can’t.”

I said without hesitating, “You’ve got a violent kind of TB. They had no place else to put you except here. The ward might be crummy, but the medicine … the medical care …” He closed his eyes. “I’m looking you straight in the face,” I said, “and I swear you have this unusual kind of TB, and you’re almost cured.” I watched, without minding it now, a new kind of bug crawling along the base of the wall.

“Thanks, Billy,” said my father.

I really was scared. I had been waiting for something without knowing what it would mean. I can tell you how it was: It was like the end of the world.

“I didn’t realize you were worried,” I said. “You should of asked me right away.”

“I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” my father said. “That’s why I wanted you, not the others.”

That was all. Not long after that, he couldn’t talk. He had deserted his whole family once, but I was the one he abandoned twice. When he died, a nurse said to me, “I am sorry.” It had no meaning, from her, yet only a few days before, it was all I thought I wanted to hear.

O n New Year’s Eve the Plummers took Amabel to the opera.

“Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” said Amabel, feeling secure because she had a Plummer on either side.

Colonel Plummer’s car had broken down that afternoon; he had got his wife and their guest punctually to the Bolshoi Theater, through a storm, in a bootleg taxi. Now he discovered from his program that the opera announced was neither of those they had been promised.

His wife leaned across Amabel and said, “Well, which is it?” She could not read any Russian and would not try.

She must have known it would take him minutes to answer, for she sat back, settled a width of gauzy old shawl on her neck, and began telling Amabel the relative sizes of the Bolshoi and some concert hall in Vancouver the girl had never heard of. Then, because it was the Colonel’s turn to speak, she shut her eyes and waited for the overture.

The Colonel was gazing at the program and putting off the moment when he would have to say that it was Ivan Susanin , a third choice no one had so much as hinted at. He wanted to convey that he was sorry and that the change was not his fault. He took bearings: He was surrounded by women. To his left sat the guest, who mewed like a kitten, who had been a friend of his daughter’s, and whose name he could not remember. On the right, near the aisle, two quiet unknown girls were eating fruit and chocolates. These two smelled of oranges; of clothes worn a long time in winter; of light recent sweat; of women’s hair. Their arms were large and bare. When the girl closest to him moved slightly, he saw a man’s foreign wristwatch. He wondered who she was, and how the watch had come to her, but he had been here two years now — long enough to know he would never be answered. He also wondered if the girls were as shabby as his guest found everyone in Moscow. His way of seeing women was not concerned with that sort of evidence: Shoes were shoes, a frock was a frock.

The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.

He felt his guest’s silence, then his wife’s. The visitor’s profile was a kitten’s, to match her voice. She was twenty-two, which his Catherine would never be. Her gold dress, packed for improbable gala evenings, seemed the size of a bathing suit. She was divorcing someone, or someone in Canada had left her — he remembered that, but not her name.

He moved an inch or two to the left and muttered, “It’s Ivan.”

“What?” cried his wife. “What did you say?”

In the old days, before their Catherine had died, when the Colonel’s wife was still talking to him, he had tried to hush her in public places sometimes, and so the habit of loudness had taken hold.

“It isn’t Boris . It isn’t Igor . It’s Ivan . They must both have had sore throats.”

“Oh, well, bugger it,” said his wife.

Amabel supposed that the Colonel’s wife had grown peculiar through having lived so many years in foreign parts. Having no one to speak to, she conversed alone. Half of Mrs. Plummer’s character was quite coarse, though a finer Mrs. Plummer somehow kept order. Low-minded Mrs. Plummer chatted amiably and aloud with her high-minded twin — far more pleasantly than the whole of Mrs. Plummer ever talked to anybody.

“Serves you right,” she said.

Amabel gave a little jump. She wondered if Mrs. Plummer’s remark had anything to do with the opera. She turned her head cautiously. Mrs. Plummer had again closed her eyes.

The persistence of memory determines what each day of the year will be like, the Colonel’s wife decided. Not what happens on New Year’s Eve. This morning I was in Moscow; between the curtains snow was falling. The day had no color. It might have been late afternoon. Then the smell of toast came into my room and I was back in my mother’s dining room in Victoria, with the gros-point chairs and the framed embroidered grace on the wall. A little girl I had been ordered to play with kicked the baseboard, waiting for us to finish our breakfast. A devilish little boy, Hume something, was on my mind. I was already attracted to devils; I believed in their powers. My mother’s incompetence about choosing friends for me shaped my life, because that child, who kicked the baseboard and left marks on the paint …

When she and her husband had still been speaking, this was how Frances Plummer had talked. She had offered him hours of reminiscence, and the long personal thoughts that lead to quarrels. In those days red wine had made her aggressive, whiskey made him vague.