Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Little Bert yawned and pressed the sponge against his mouth. His muffled voice said, “Read!”

The trouble about the grave is that he’s got family living around Muggendorf. My cousin-in-law tipped them off. They’re watching the grave closely. At the first sign of drought, weeds, plant lice, cyclamen mites, leafhoppers, thrips, borers, whiteflies, beetles feeding, they’ll take color photographs of the disaster and use them as evidence. Which would mean the end of the eight hundred dollars .

“What are we waiting for now?” said little Bert.

“For the conductor to tell us about our train. It is much cooler in here.” She had been going to add, “and there is less interference,” but that wasn’t true. At least the other women were silent; ever since Christine had put the conductor in his place they seemed afraid of her too.

“Read,” said little Bert. “You never finished anything.”

“What do you want as a beginning this time?”

“Whatever it says.”

“I did read you a bit of that,” she said. “You didn’t like it.”

Last Sunday they happened to find one bare spot and they planted an ageratum. A reproach. What nobody understands is that it isn’t usual to buy a plot for just a can of ashes. I would have kept them at home, but his will had one whole page of special instructions. What can you put on a plot that size? Not much bigger than a cat’s grave and the stone takes up room. The begonias are choking the roses and vice versa .

Little Bert yawned again, even wider. “You’ll soon be home,” she said.

“What do we do when we get home?” He had been away for a whole week, plus this long day.

And yet they managed to find room for one ageratum. Only one year to go. Hang on, I keep telling myself. Hang on for the eight hundred dollars. Worth hanging on for. After that I’ll be ready to go. Plot purchased and paid up. Nowhere near him .

“You’re not reading,” said little Bert.

She waited a few seconds longer, until the air was clear. Perhaps the silent women were attracting everything to themselves without being conscious of it. Then she distinctly heard Herbert saying, “En quel honneur?” It was loud, for him, and rather frantic. She guessed it must have been his response to a piece of irritating news — that there would be a long delay, for instance. She wondered if she and little Bert should go out to him; but the child was tired and once they had left the waiting room they would have to stand, perhaps for a long time. While she was wondering and weighing, as reluctant as ever to make up her mind, a great stir started up in the gray and wintry-looking freight yards they could see from the window. Lights blazed, voices bawled in dialect, a dog barked. As if they knew what this animation meant and had been waiting for it, the women picked up their parcels and filed out without haste and without looking back.

“No, you stay here,” said Christine, holding little Bert, who had made a blind move forward. He looked at her, puzzled perhaps, but not really frightened. When the door had closed softly behind the last of them she felt a relief, as at the cessation of pain. She relaxed her grip on the child, as if he were someone she loved but was not afraid of losing.

“Read,” said little Bert. “Look in the book.”

“I’ll read for a minute,” she said. “Then we will have to do something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Go out, or wait here. I’m sorry to be so uncertain.” He sat as near to her as when the room had been full. She opened her book and saw, “ ‘The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.’ Well,” she said, “no use going on with that. Don’t be frightened, by the way,” she told little Bert, who was not frightened of anything, though in Paris he had pretended to be afraid of the dark.

That was the end of it. He’s in Muggendorf and I’m hanging on. When Carol Ann learned to pronounce “th” did that make her a better Christian? Perhaps it did. Perhaps it took just that one thing to make her a better Christian .

She had been hoping all day to have the last word, without interference. She held little Bert and said aloud, “Bruno had five brothers, all named Georg. But Georg was pronounced five different ways in the family, so there was no confusion. They were called the Goysh, the Yursh, the Shorsh …”

T o the astonishment of no one except his father and mother, Luc Clairevoie failed the examination that should have propelled him straight into one of the finest schools of engineering in Paris; failed it so disastrously, in fact, that an examiner, who knew someone in the same ministry as Luc’s father, confided it was the sort of labor in vain that should be written up. Luc’s was a prime case of universal education gone crazy. He was a victim of the current belief that any student, by dint of application, could answer what he was asked.

Luc’s father blamed the late President de Gaulle. If de Gaulle had not opened the schools and universities to hordes of qualified but otherwise uninteresting young people, teachers would have had more time to spare for Luc. De Gaulle had been dead for years, but Roger Clairevoie still suspected him of cosmic mischief and double-dealing. (Like his wife, Roger had never got over the loss of Algeria. When the price of fresh fruit went high, as it did every winter, the Clairevoies told each other it was because of the loss of all those Algerian orchards.)

Where Luc was concerned, they took a practical course, lowered their sights to a lesser but still elegant engineering school, and sent Luc to a crammer for a year to get ready for a new trial. His mother took Luc to the dentist, had his glasses changed, and bought him a Honda 125 to make up for his recent loss of self-esteem. Roger’s contribution took the form of long talks. Cornering Luc in the kitchen after breakfast, or in his own study, now used as a family television room, Roger told Luc how he had been graduated with honors from the noblest engineering institute in France; how he could address other alumni using the second person singular, even by Christian name, regardless of whether they spoke across a ministerial desk or a lunch table. Many of Roger’s fellow-graduates had chosen civil-service careers. They bumped into one another in marble halls, under oil portraits of public servants who wore the steadfast look of advisers to gods; and these distinguished graduates, Roger among them, had a charming, particular way of seeming like brothers — or so it appeared to those who could only envy them, who had to keep to “Have I the honor of” and “If Mr. Assistant Under-Secretary would be good enough to” and “Should it suit the convenience.” To this fraternity Luc could no longer aspire, but there was still some hope for future rank and dignity: He could become an engineer in the building trades. Luc did not reply; he did not even ask, “Do you mean houses, or garages, or what?” Roger supposed he was turning things over in his mind.

The crammer he went to was a brisk, costly examination factory in Rennes, run by Jesuits, with the reputation for being able to jostle any student, even the dreamiest, into a respectable institute for higher learning. The last six words were from the school’s brochure. They ran through Roger Clairevoie’s head like an election promise.

Starting in September, Luc spent Monday to Friday in Rennes. Weekends, he came home by train, laden with books, and shut himself up to study. Sometimes Roger would hear him trying chords on his guitar: pale sound without rhythm or sequence. When Luc had studied enough, he buckled on his white helmet and roared around Paris on the Honda. (The promise of a BMW R/80 was in the air, as reward or consolation, depending on next year’s results.) On the helmet Luc had lettered IN CASE OF ACCIDENT DO NOT REMOVE. “You see, he does think of things,” his mother said. “Luc thinks of good, useful things.”