Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Mrs. Essling recalls that at seventeen this seemed entirely within her possibilities, and she replied something like “Yes, I see,” or “I quite understand,” or “You needn’t mention it again.”

Mrs. Essling brought up her husband’s four children and had two more of her own, and died after thirty-six years of marriage at the age of fifty-three. Her husband haunts her with proof of her goodness. He tells people that Mrs. Essling was born an angel, lived like an angel, and is an angel in eternity. Mrs. Essling would like relief from this charge. “Angel” is a loose way of speaking. She is astonished that the Professor cannot be more precise. Angels are created, not born. Nowhere in any written testimony will you find a scrap of proof that angels are “good.” Some are merely messengers; others have a paramilitary function. All are stupid.

After her death, Mrs. Essling remained in the Fifteenth District. She says she can go nowhere without being accosted by the Professor, who, having completed the last phase of his work Malebranche and Mysticism , roams the streets, looking in shopwindows, eating lunch twice, in two different restaurants, telling his life story to waiters and bus drivers. When he sees Mrs. Essling, he calls out, “There you are!” and “What have you been sent to tell me?” and “Is there a message?” In July, catching sight of her at the open-air fruit market on Dulac Street, the Professor jumped off a bus, upsetting barrows of plums and apricots, waving an umbrella as he ran. Mrs. Essling had to take refuge in the cold-storage room of the central market, where, years ago, after she had ordered twenty pounds of raspberries and currants for making jelly, she was invited by the wholesale fruit dealer, Mr. Lobrano, aged twenty-nine, to spend a holiday with him in a charming southern city whose Mediterranean Baroque churches he described with much delicacy of feeling. Mrs. Essling was too startled to reply. Mistaking her silence, Mr. Lobrano then mentioned a northern city containing a Gothic cathedral. Mrs. Essling said that such a holiday was impossible. Mr. Lobrano asked for one good reason. Mrs. Essling was at that moment four months pregnant with her second child. Three stepchildren waited for her out in the street. A fourth stepchild was at home looking after the baby. Professor Essling, working on his Malebranche and Money , was at home, too, expecting his lunch. Mrs. Essling realized she could not give Mr. Lobrano one good reason. She left the cold-storage room without another word and did not return to it in her lifetime.

Mrs. Essling would like to be relieved of the Professor’s gratitude. Having lived an exemplary life is one thing; to have it thrown up at one is another. She would like the police to send for Professor Essling and tell him so. She suggests that the police find some method of keeping him off the streets. The police ought to threaten him; frighten him; put the fear of the Devil into him. Philosophy has made him afraid of dying. Remind him about how he avoided writing his Malebranche and Mortality . He is an old man. It should be easy.

S he was a bony slow-moving girl from a small bombed Baroque German city, where all that was worthwhile keeping had been rebuilt and which now looked as pink and golden as a pretty child and as new as morning. By the standards of a few years ago she would have been thought plain; she was so tall that she bumped her head getting in and out of airplanes, and in her childhood she had often been told that her feet were like canal boats. Her light hair would have been brown, about the color of brown sugar, if she had not rinsed it in chamomile and whenever possible dried it in sunlight; she could not use a commercial bleach because of some vague promise she had given her late grandmother when she was fourteen.

She had a striking density of expression in photographs, though she seemed unchanging and passive in life, and had caught sight of her own face looking totally empty-minded when, in fact, her thoughts and feelings were pushing her in some wild direction. She had heard a man say of her that you could leave her in a café for two hours and come back to find she was still smoking the same cigarette. She had done some modeling, not well paid, in middling ready-to-wear centers such as Berlin and Zurich, but now she was trying to be less conscious of her body. She was at one of those turnings in a young life where no one can lead, no one can help, but where someone for the sake of love might follow.

She lived with her family and was engaged to marry a student of theology, but the person closest to her was Herbert, who was thirty-one, divorced, and who with the help of a housekeeper was bringing up his only child. Unlike the student of theology, he had not put up barriers such as too much talk, self-analysis, or second thoughts. In fact, he tended to limit the number of subjects he would discuss. He had no hold on her mind, and no interest in gaining one. The mind that he constantly took stock of was his child’s; apparently he could not be captivated in the same way by two people at once. He often said he thought he could not live without her, but a few minutes after making such a declaration he seemed unable to remember what he had just said, or to imagine how his voice must have sounded to her.

After they had known each other about seven months, they came to Paris for a holiday, all three of them — she, Herbert, and the child, who was called little Bert. Christine had just turned twenty-one and considered this voyage a major part of her emancipation. It was during the peak of a heat wave — the warmest July on record since 1873. They remained for a week, in an old hotel that had not been repainted for years because it was marked for demolition. They had two dusty, velvety rooms with a bathroom between. The bathroom was as large as the bedrooms together and had three doors, one of which gave on the passage. Leaving the passage door unlocked soon turned out to be a trick of little Bert’s — an innocent trick; the locks were unlike those he was used to at home and he could not stop fiddling with them. The view from every window was of a church covered with scaffolding from top to bottom, the statue of a cardinal lying on its side, and a chestnut tree sawed in pieces. During the week of their stay nothing moved or was changed until a sign went up saying that a new car park was to be built under the church and that after its completion the chestnut tree would be replaced by something more suited to the gassy air of cities . The heat at night made sheets, blankets, curtains, blinds, or nightclothes unthinkable: She would lie awake for a long time, with a lock of her hair across her eyes to screen out the glare of a street lamp. Sometimes she woke up to find herself being inspected from head to foot by little Bert, who had crept to their room in search of his father. It was his habit to waken at two, and on finding the bed next to his empty, to come padding along in bare feet by way of the bathroom. Through her hair she would watch him taking a long look at her before he moved round the bed and began whimpering to Herbert that he was all alone and afraid of the dark.

Herbert would turn at once to little Bert. His deepest feelings were linked to the child. He sometimes could reveal anguish, of which only the child was the source. His first move was always to draw the sheet over Christine, to protect little Bert from the shock of female nakedness. Without a breath of reproach he would collect his dressing gown, glasses, watch, cigarettes, and lighter and take little Bert by the hand.