Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

An empty space, as blank and infinite as the rectangle of sky above the court, occurred in his mind, somewhere between the sliding of the invitation — if one could call it that — under her door and the materialization of the omelette. The question was, How to fill the space? He was like someone reading his own passport, the same information over and over. “My dearest Marthe,” he began (going back to the first thing). “Don’t you think the time has come …” But he did not think it. “Remember that woman who said she had known van Gogh?” She had no connection to their dilemma. It was just something he liked to consider. “You should not be living alone. Solitude is making you …” No; above all, not that. “Perhaps if one of those nephews of yours came to live with you …” They were all married, some with grown children. “I think it only fair to point out that I never once made a firm …” The whine of the dissembler. “The occasional meal taken together …” The thin edge. “You know very well that it is against the law to feed pigeons and that increasingly heavy fines …”

How good it would be to lie down on the kitchen floor and let his inspiring goddess kneel beside him, anxiously watching for the flutter of an eyelid, as he deftly lifts her wallet. As it turns out, there is nothing in it except “Residents are again reminded …” Like Grippes, like the prosecutor, like poor Marthe, in a way, his goddess is a victim of the times, hard up for currency and short of ideas, ideas of divine origin in particular. She scarcely knows how to eke out the century. Meanwhile, she hangs on to “Residents are again …,” hoping (just as Grippes does) that it amounts to the equivalent of the folding money every careful city dweller keeps on hand for muggers.

MAVIS GALLANT once told an interviewer that she could no more stop being Canadian than she could change the colour of her eyes. Born in Montreal in 1922, she left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write.

Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker , many of which have been anthologized. Her worldwide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths , which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and remains a much sought-after public speaker.

She continues to live in Paris, where she is at work on a novel.