Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

They all look like servants, thought the unhappy guest. I can’t help it. That’s what they look like. They dress like maids. I’m having a rotten time. She glanced at the Colonel and thought, They’re his type. But he must have been good-looking once.

The Colonel was able to learn the structure of any language, given a few pages of colloquial prose and a dictionary. His wife was deaf to strangers, and she barely noticed the people she could not understand. As a result, the Colonel had grown accustomed to being alone among hordes of ghosts. With Amabel still mewing beside him, he heard in the ghost language only he could capture, “Yes, but are you happy?”

His look went across the ceiling and came down to the girls. The one who had whispered the question was rapt; she held a section of orange suspended a few inches from her lips as she waited. But the lights dimmed. “Cht,” her friend cautioned. She gathered up the peelings on her lap in a paper bag.

Mrs. Plummer suddenly said clearly to herself or to Amabel, “My mother used to make her children sing. If you sing, you must be happy. That was another idea of happiness.”

Amabel thought, Every day of the year will be like tonight.

He doesn’t look at women now, said Mrs. Plummer silently. Doesn’t dare. Every girl is a wife screaming for justice and revenge; a mistress deserted, her life shrunk down to a postage stamp; a daughter dead.

He walked away in Italy, after a violent drinking quarrel, with Catherine there in the house. Instead of calling after him, Mrs. Plummer sat still for an hour, then remembered she had forgotten to leave some money for the postman for Easter. It was early morning; she was dressed; neither of them had been to bed. She found an envelope, the kind she used for messages to servants and the local tradesmen, and crammed a thousand-lire note inside. She was sober and cursing. She scribbled the postman’s name. Catherine, in the garden, on her knees, tore out the pansy plants she had put in the little crevices between paving stones the day before. She looked up at her mother.

“Have you had your breakfast?” her mother said.

“It’s no use chasing them,” Catherine answered. “They’ve gone.”

That was how he had done it — the old shuffler: chosen the Easter holiday, when his daughter was home from school, down in Italy, to creep away. And Catherine understood, for she said “them,” though she had never known that the other person existed. Well, of course he came shuffling back, because of Catherine. All was safe: Wife was there, home safe, daughter safe, books in place, wine cellar intact, career unchipped. He came out of it scot-free, except that Catherine died. Was it accurate to say, “Serves you right”? Was it fair?

Yes! Yes! “Serves you right!”

Amabel heard, and supposed it could only have to do with the plot of the opera. She said to herself, It will soon be over.

The thing he was most afraid of now was losing his memory. Sometimes he came to breakfast wearing two kinds of shoes. He could go five times to a window to see if snow was falling and forget each time why he was standing there. He had thrown three hundred dollars in a wastepaper basket and carefully kept an elastic band. It was of extreme importance that he remember his guest’s name. The name was royal, or imperial, he seemed to recall. Straight down an imperial tree he climbed, counting off leaves: Julia, Octavia, Livia, Cleopatra — not likely — Messalina, Claudia, Domitia. Antonia? It was a name with two a’s but with an m and not an n .

“Marcia,” he said in the dark, half turning to her.

“It’s Amabel, actually,” she said. “I don’t even know a Marcia.” Like a child picking up a piece of glass and innocently throwing it, she said, “I don’t think Catherine knew any Marcias either.”

The woman behind them hissed for silence. Amabel swung round, abruptly this time, and saw that the little girl had fallen asleep. Her ribbon was askew, like a frayed birthday wrapping.

The Colonel slept for a minute and dreamed that his mother was a reed, or a flower. “If only you had always been like that!” he cried, in the dream.

Amabel thought that the scene of the jewel case still might take place: A tap at the hotel-room door tomorrow morning, and there would be Mrs. Plummer, tall and stormy, in her rusty-orange ancient mink, with her square fur bonnet, first visitor of the year, starting the new cycle with a noble gesture. She undid a hastily wrapped parcel, saying, “Nothing really valuable — Catherine was too young.” But no, for everything of Catherine’s belonged to the gardener’s children in Italy now. Amabel rearranged tomorrow morning: Mrs. Plummer brought her own case and said, “I have no one to leave anything to except a dog hospital,” and there was Amabel, sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, loved at last, looking at emeralds.

Without speaking, Colonel Plummer and his wife each understood what the other had thought of the opera, the staging, and the musical quality of the evening; they also knew where Mrs. Plummer would wait with Amabel while he struggled to the cloakroom to fetch their wraps.

He had taken great care to stay close behind the two girls. For one thing, he had not yet had the answer to “Are you happy?” He heard now, “I am twenty-one years old and I have not succeeded …” and then he was wrenched out of the queue. Pushing back, pretending to be armored against unknown forces, like his wife, he heard someone insult him and smiled uncomprehendingly. No one knew how much he understood — except for his wife. It was as though he listened to stones, or snow, or trees speaking. “… even though we went to a restaurant and I paid for his dinner,” said the same girl, who had not even looked round, and for whom the Colonel had no existence. “The next night he came to the door very late. My parents were in bed. He had come from some stuffy place — his coat stank. But he looked clean and important. He always does. We went into the kitchen. He said he had come up because he cared and could not spend an evening without seeing me, and then he said he had no money, or had lost his money somewhere. I did not want my mother to hear. I said, ‘Now I know why you came to see me.’ I gave him money — how could I refuse? He knows we keep it in the same drawer as the knives and forks. He could have helped himself, but instead he was careful not to look at the drawer at all. When he wants to show tenderness, he presses his face to my cheek, his lips as quiet as his forehead — it is like being embraced by a dead animal. I was ashamed to think he knew I would always be there waiting. He thinks he can come in whenever he sees a light from the street. I have no advantage from my loyalty, only disadvantages.”

Her friend seemed to be meditating deeply. “If you are not happy, it might be your fault,” she said.

The cloakroom attendant flung first the girls’ coats and woollen caps on the counter, and then their boots, which had been stored in numbered cubbyholes underneath, and it was the Colonel’s turn to give up plastic tokens in exchange for his wife’s old fur-lined cloak, Amabel’s inadequate jacket, his own overcoat — but of course the girls were lost, and he would never see them again. What nagged at him was that disgraceful man. Oh, he could imagine him well enough: an elegant black marketeer, speaking five languages, wearing a sable hat, following tourists in the snow, offering icons in exchange for hard currency. It would explain the watch and perhaps even the chocolates and oranges. “His coat stank” and “he looked clean and important” were typically feminine contradictions, of unequal value. He thought he saw the girls a moment later, but they may have been two like them, leaning on a wall, holding each other’s coats as they tugged their boots on; then he saw them laughing, collapsed in each other’s arms. This is unusual, he told himself, for when do people laugh in public anywhere in the north — not only in this sullen city? He thought, as though suddenly superior to the person he had been only a minute ago, what an iron thing it would be never to regret one’s losses.