Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Not only vague, she corrected; stubborn too. Speak? said one half of Mrs. Plummer to the other. Did we speak? We yelled!

The quiet twin demanded a fairer portrait of the past, for she had no memory.

Oh, he was a shuffler, back and forth between wife and mistress, said the virago, who had forgotten nothing. He’d desert one and then leave the other — flag to flag, false convert, double agent, reason why a number of women had long, hilly conversations, like the view from a train — monotonous, finally. That was the view a minute ago, you’d say. Yes, but look now.

The virago declared him incompetent; said he had shuffled from embassy to embassy as well, pushed along by a staunch ability to retain languages, an untiring recollection of military history and wars nobody cared about. What did he take with him? His wife, for one thing. At least she was here, tonight, at the opera. Each time they changed countries he supervised the packing of a portrait of his mother, wearing white, painted when she was seventeen. He had nothing of Catherine’s: When Catherine died, Mrs. Plummer gave away her clothes and her books, and had her little dog put to sleep.

How did it happen? In what order? said calm Mrs. Plummer. Try and think it in order. He shuffled away one Easter; came shuffling back; and Catherine died. It is useless to say “Serves you right,” for whatever served him served you.

The overture told Amabel nothing, and by the end of the first act she still did not know the name of the opera or understand what it was about. Earlier in the day the Colonel had said, “There is some uncertainty — sore throats here and there. The car, now — you can see what has happened. It doesn’t start. If our taxi should fail us, and isn’t really a taxi, we might arrive at the Bolshoi too late for me to do anything much in the way of explaining. But you can easily figure it out for yourself.” His mind cleared; his face lightened. “If you happen to see Tartar dances, then you will know it is Igor . Otherwise it is Boris.”

The instant the lights rose, Amabel thrust her program at him and said, “What does that mean?”

“Why, Ivan . It’s Ivan.”

“There are two words, aren’t there?”

“Yes. What’s-His-Name had a sore throat, d’you see? We knew it might all be changed at any moment. It was clever of them to get these printed in time.”

Mrs. Plummer, who looked like the Red Queen sometimes, said, “A life for the tsar,” meanwhile staring straight ahead of her.

“Used to be, used to be,” said the Colonel, and he smiled at Amabel, as if to say to her, “Now you know.”

The Plummers did not go out between acts. They never smoked, were seldom thirsty or hungry, and they hated crowds. Amabel stood and stretched so that the Russians could appreciate her hair, her waist, her thin arms, and, for those lucky enough to glimpse them, her thighs. After a moment or two Mrs. Plummer thought the Russians had appreciated Amabel enough, and she said very loudly, “You might be more comfortable sitting down.”

“Lakmé is coming,” said the Colonel, for it was his turn to speak. “It’s far and away my favorite opera. It makes an awful fool of the officer caste.” This was said with ambiguous satisfaction. He was not really disowning himself.

“How does it do that?” said Amabel, who was not more comfortable sitting down.

“Why, an officer runs off with the daughter of a temple priest. No one would ever have got away with that. Though the military are awful fools most of the time.”

“You’re that class — caste, I mean — aren’t you?”

The Colonel supposed that like most people he belonged to the same caste as his father and mother. His father had worn a wig and been photographed wearing it just before he died. His mother, still living, rising eighty, was given to choked melancholy laughter over nothing, a habit carried over from a girlhood of Anglican giggling. It was his mother the Colonel had wanted in Moscow this Christmas — not Amabel. He had wanted to bring her even if it killed her; even if she choked to death on her own laughter as she shook tea out of a cup because her hand trembled, or if she laughed and said, “My dear boy, nobody forced you to marry Frances.” The Colonel saw himself serene, immune to reminders; observed a new Colonel Plummer crowned with a wig, staring out of a photograph, in the uniform his father had worn at Vimy Ridge; sure of himself and still, faded to a plain soft neutral color; unhearing, at peace — dead, in short. He had dreamed of sending the plane ticket, of meeting his mother at the airport with a fur coat over his arm in case she had come dressed for the wrong winter; had imagined giving her tea and watching her drink it out of a glass set in a metal base decorated all over with Soviet cosmonauts; had sat beside her here, at the Bolshoi, at a performance of Eugene Onegin , which she once had loved. It seemed fitting that he now do some tactful, unneeded, appreciated thing for her, at last — she who had never done anything for him.

One evening his wife had looked up from the paperback spy novel she was reading at dinner and — having waited for him to notice she was neither eating nor turning pages — remarked that Amabel Bacon, who had been Amabel Fisher, that pretty child Catherine roomed with in school, had asked if she might come to them for ten days at Christmas.

“Nothing for children here,” he said. “And not much space.”

“She must be twenty-two,” said his wife, “and can stay in a hotel.”

They stared at each other, as if they were strangers in a crush somewhere and her earring had caught on his coat. Their looks disentangled. That night Mrs. Plummer wrote to Amabel saying that they did not know any young people; that Mrs. Plummer played bridge from three to six every afternoon; that the Colonel was busy at the embassy; that it was difficult to find seats at the ballet; that it was too cold for sight-seeing; Lenin’s tomb was temporarily closed; there was nothing in the way of shopping; the Plummers, not being great mixers, avoided parties; they planned to spend a quiet Christmas and New Year’s; and Amabel was welcome.

Amabel seemed to have forgotten her question about the officer caste. “… hissing and whispering behind us the whole time” was what she was saying now. “I could hardly hear the music.” She had a smile ready, so that if the Colonel did look at her he would realize she was pleased to be at the Bolshoi and not really complaining. “I suppose you know every note by heart, so you aren’t bothered by extra noise.” She paused, wondering if the Colonel was hard of hearing. “I hate whispering. It’s more bothersome than something loud. It’s like that hissing you get on stereo sometimes, like water running.”

“Water running?” said the Colonel, not deafly but patiently.

“I mean the people behind us.”

“A mother explaining to a child,” he said, without looking.

Amabel turned, pretending she was only lifting her long, soft hair away from her neck. She saw a little girl, wearing a white hair ribbon the size of a melon, leaning against, and somehow folded into, a seal-shaped mother. The two shared a pear, bite for bite. Everyone around them was feeding, in fact. It’s a zoo, Amabel thought. On the far side of the Colonel, two girls munched on chocolates. They unwrapped each slowly, and dropped the paper back in the box. Amabel sighed and said, “Are they happy? Cheap entertainment isn’t everything. Once you’ve seen Swan Lake a hundred times, what is there to do here?”

Mrs. Plummer slapped at her bangles and said, “We were told when we were in Morocco that children with filthy eye diseases and begging their food were perfectly happy.”