Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

In his room, which had been his father’s, down and feathers rose and hovered with every approaching step. One of the visitors took a book down from a shelf over the washstand. He made the remark that he had never seen books in a bedroom before. Henri started to answer that these were his father’s old schoolbooks but remembered he was not to mention him. The man gave the book a shake, releasing a shower of handwritten verse: Henri’s father’s adolescent attempts to reconcile the poetry of sexual craving, as explained in literature, with barnyard evidence. The second stranger offered Henri an American cigarette. It was too precious to waste in smoke. He placed it carefully behind an ear and waited for the question. It was, “Where would you put a lot of contraband money, if you had any?”

Henri answered, truthfully, “In the dark and in plain sight.”

They went down to the cellar, pushing Henri, and ran beams of yellow light along racks of wine and shelves of preserved fruit in earthenware crocks. About every fourth crock was stuffed with gold coins and banknotes. The men asked for a crate. Henri, promoted to honest member of the clan, checked the count. He droned, “… four, five, six …” while his grandmother wept. A few minutes later, he and his grandmother watched his grandfather being handcuffed and hustled into the Renault. He could have brained all three men with his locked hands but held still.

“Forgive me,” said Henri. “I didn’t know it was down there.”

“You had better be a long way from here before he gets back,” his grandmother said.

“Won’t they keep him, this time?”

“They’ll work something out,” she said, and dried her eyes.

Today Grippes was wakened abruptly at about eleven-thirty. Two policemen were at the door, wanting to know if he had heard anything suspicious during the night. There had been another incident concerning Mme. Parfaire. This time, the intruders had broken a Sèvres sugar bowl and threatened the dog. All Grippes could say was that the dog was nineteen years old and deaf and had certainly not taken the threat to heart. After they went away, he shuffled along the passage to the kitchen. The cats — a tabby and a young stray — ran ahead. (He swears they are the last.) The first things he saw were the jacket on its wire hanger and the soiled windowpanes. At a window across the court a woman, another early riser according to Grippes time, parted her curtains. She had nothing on except a man’s shirt, unbuttoned. Standing between the flowery folds, she contemplated the sunless enclosure. (The cobblestones below are never dry, owing to a stopped drain. For years now tenants on the lower floors have been petitioning to have the drain repaired. Their plight gets not much sympathy from occupants of upper stories, who suffer less inconvenience or accept the miasma of mosquitoes and flies in summer as the triumph of nature over urban sterility.)

Having observed that nothing had changed during the night, the woman closed the curtains with a snap and (Grippes supposes) went back to bed. He had seen her before, but never at that hour. The entrance to her building must be somewhere around the corner. He cannot place it on a map of Montparnasse, which is half imagined anyway. For a time he supposed she might be a hostess in a club along the boulevard, a remnant of the Jazz Age, haunted by the ghost of Josephine Baker. The other day, he noticed that the club had become an ordinary restaurant, with a fixed-price menu posted outside. Inquiring, he was told the change had come about in the seventies.

He put some food down for the cats, plugged in the coffeemaker, and started to clean the window and stone sill. The jacket got in the way, so he removed it from its wire hanger and put it on. The movement of opinion in the building concerning Mme. Parfaire and pigeons has turned against Grippes. She seems to be suffering from a wasting and undiagnosed fatigue of the nerves — so such ailments of the soul are called. Some think the two men who keep breaking in are nephews impatient to come into their inheritance. They hope to scare her to death. Others believe they are professional thugs hired by the nephews. The purpose is to induce her to sell her apartment and move into a residence for the elderly and distribute the money before she dies. Greedy families, the avoidance of death duties are among the basic certainties of existence. No one can quite believe Grippes does not know what is taking place upstairs. Perhaps he is in on the plot. Perhaps he is lazy or just a coward or slumps dead drunk with his head on the typewriter. Perhaps he doesn’t care.

Whispered echoes, mean gossip, ignorant assurances reach his ears. Mme. Parfaire when she descends the curving staircase clutches the banister, halts every few steps, wears a set expression. Strands of hair hang about her face. Even in her wan and precarious condition, popular sentiment now runs, she finds enough strength to open her windows and sustain the life of pigeons. Garbage-throwing, once seen as a tiresome and dirty habit, has become a demonstration of selflessness. Once a week she totters across the Seine to the Quai de la Mégisserie and buys bird food laced with vitamin E, to ensure the pigeons a fulfilled and fertile span. “Residents are again reminded …” is viewed with a collective resentment. Not long ago an anonymous hand wrote “Sadist!”—meaning Grippes.

Yesterday he happened to see her in the lobby, talking in a low voice to a neighbor holding a child by the hand. She fell silent as Grippes went by. The women watched him out of sight; he was sure of it, could feel the pressure of their staring. He heard the child laugh. It was clear to him that Mme. Parfaire was doped to the eyes on tranquilizers, handed out in Paris like salted peanuts, but he could not very well put up a notice saying so. People would shrug and say it was none of their business. Would they be interested in a revelation such as “Mme. Parfaire wants to spend her last years living in sin, or quasi-sin, or just in worshipful devotion, with the selfish and disagreeable and eminently unmarriageable Henri Grippes”? True, but it might seem unlikely. As an inventor of a great number of imaginary events Grippes knows that the reflection of reality is no more than just that; it is as flat and mute as a mirror. Better to sound plausible than merely in touch with facts.

He had just finished cleaning the window when the siren began to wail. He looked at the electric clock on top of the refrigerator: twelve sharp. Today was a Wednesday, the first one of the month. He could hear two distinct tones and saw them as lines across the sky: a shrill humming — a straight, thin path — and a lower note that rose and dipped and finally descended in a slow spiral, like a plane shot down. Five minutes later, as he sat drinking coffee, the warning started again. This time, the somewhat deeper note fell away quite soon; the other, more piercing cry streamed on and on, and gradually vanished in the bright day.

Stirring his coffee, using his old friend’s spoon, Grippes thought of how he might put a stop to the pigeon business, her nighttime fantasies, and any further possibility of being wakened at an unacceptable hour. He could write a note inviting himself to lunch, take it upstairs, and slide it under her door. He would go as he was now, with the plastic jacket on top of a bathrobe. Serving lunch would provide point and purpose to her day. It would stop the downward spiral of her dreams. Composing the note (it would require tact and skill) might serve to dislodge “Residents are again reminded …” from his typewriter and his mind.

He pictured, with no effort, a plate of fresh mixed seafood with mayonnaise or just a bit of lemon and olive oil, saw an omelette folded on a warmed plate, marinated herring and potato salad, a light ragout of lamb kidneys in wine. He could see himself proceeding along the passage and sitting down on the chair where, as a rule, he spent much of every night and writing the note. From the window, if he leaned a bit to the right, he would see the shadow of the Montparnasse tower, and the office building that had replaced the old railway station with its sagging wooden floor. Only yesterday, he started to tell himself — but no. A generation of Parisians had never known anything else.