Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

The seats were covered with plastic leopard skin. At every stop, the car gave a great sigh and sank down like a tired dog. The children loved this. They sat behind, with Eve between them, telling riddles, singing songs. They quarreled across their mother as if she were a hedge. “Silly old sow,” Walter heard his nephew saying. He realized the boy was saying it to Eve. His back stiffened. Eve saw.

“Why shouldn’t he say it, if he wants to?” she said. “He doesn’t know what it means. Do you want me to treat them the way we were treated? Would you like to see some of that?”

“No,” said Walter, after a moment.

“Well, then. I’m trying another way.”

Walter said, “I don’t believe one person should call another a silly old sow.” He spoke without turning his head. The children were still as mice; then the little boy began to cry.

They drove home in the dark. The children slept, and the three adults looked at neon lights and floodlit palm trees without saying much. Suddenly Eve said, “Oh, I like that.” Walter looked at a casino; at the sea; at the Anglican church, which was thirty years old, Riviera Gothic. “That church,” she said. “It’s like home.”

“Alas,” said Walter.

“Terrible, is it?” said his brother-in-law, who had not bothered to look.

“I think I’ll make up my own mind,” said Eve. So she had sat, with her face set, when Walter tried to introduce her to some of his friends and his ideas, fifteen years before. She had never wanted to be anything except a mother, and she would protect anyone who wanted protection — Walter as well. But nothing would persuade her that a church was ugly if it was familiar and reminded her of home.

Walter did not desire Eve’s protection. He did not think he could use anything Eve had to give. Sometimes she persuaded him to come to the beach with the family, and then she fussed over him, seeing that the parasol was fixed so that he had full shade. She knew he did not expose his arms and legs to the sun, because of his scars. She made him sit on an arrangement of damp, sandy towels and said, “There. Isn’t that nice?” In an odd way, she still admired him; he saw it, and was pleased. He answered her remarks (about Riviera people, French politics, the Mediterranean climate, and the cost of things) with his habitual social fluency, but it was the children who took his attention. He marveled at their singleness of purpose, the energy they could release just in tearing off their clothes. They flung into the water and had to be bullied out. Mauve-lipped, chattering, they said, “What’s there to do now?”

“Have you ever wanted to be a ballet dancer?” Walter asked his niece.

“No,” she said, with scorn.

One day Angelo spent the morning with them. Frank had taken the car to the Citroën garage and looked forward to half a day with the mechanics there. In a curious way Angelo seemed to replace the children’s father. He organized a series of canals and waterways and kept the children digging for more than an hour. Walter noticed that Angelo was doing none of the work himself. He stood over them with his hand on one hip — peacock lad, cock of the walk. When an Italian marries, you see this change, Walter thought. He treats his servants that way, and then his wife. He said, “Angelo, put your clothes on and run up to the bar and bring us all some cold drinks.”

“Oh, Uncle Walter,” his niece complained.

“I’ll go, Uncle Walter,” said the little boy.

“Angelo will go,” Walter said. “It’s his job.”

Angelo pulled his shorts over his bathing suit and stood, waiting for Walter to drop money in his hand.

“Don’t walk about naked,” Walter said. “Put on your shirt.”

Eve was knitting furiously. She sat with her cotton skirt hitched up above her knees and a cotton bolero thrown over her head to keep off the sun. From this shelter her sunglasses gleamed at him, and she said in her plain, loud voice, “I don’t like this, Walter, and I haven’t been liking it for some time. It’s not the kind of world I want my children to see.” “I’m not responsible for the Riviera,” said Walter.

“I mean that I don’t like your bullying Angelo in front of them. They admire him so. I don’t like any of it. I mean to say, the master-servant idea. I think it’s bad taste, if you want my opinion.”

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t have a servant in South Africa?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Walter, what are you up to? That sad, crumbling house. Nothing has been changed or painted or made pretty in it for years. You don’t seem to have any friends here. Your telephone never rings. It hasn’t rung once since I’ve been here. And that poor boy.”

“Poor?” said Walter. “Is that what he’s been telling you? You should have seen the house I rescued him from. You should just see what he’s left behind him. Twelve starving sisters and brothers, an old harridan of a mother — and a grandmother. He’s so frightened of her even at this distance that he sends her every penny I give him. Twelve sisters and brothers …”

“He must miss them,” said Eve.

“I’ve sent him home,” Walter said. “I sent him for a visit with a first-class ticket. He sold the first-class ticket and traveled third. If I hadn’t been certain he wanted to give the difference to his people, I should never have had him back. I hate deceit. If he didn’t get home that time it was because the cat was worrying him. I’ve told you the story. You said it was sad. But it was his idea, taking the cat.”

“He eyes the girls in the market,” said Eve. “But he never speaks.”

“Let him,” said Walter. “He is free to do as he likes.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t think he is.”

“I can assure you he is, and knows it. If he is devoted to me because I’ve been kind to him, it’s his own affair.”

“It’s probably too subtle for me,” she said. She pulled her skirts a little higher and stroked her veined, stretched legs. She was beyond vanity. “But I still think it’s all wrong. He’s sweet with the children, but he’s a little afraid of me.”

“Perhaps you think he should be familiar with women and call them silly old sows.”

“No, not at his age,” she said mildly. “Johnny is still a baby, you know. I don’t expect much from him.” She was veering away from a row.

“My telephone never rings because my friends are away for the summer,” he said. “This summer crowd has nothing to do with my normal life.” He had to go on with that; her remark about the telephone had annoyed him more than anything else.

Yet he wanted her to approve of him; he wanted even Frank to approve of him. He was pushed into seeing himself through their eyes. He preferred his own images, his own creations. Once, he had loved a woman much older than himself. He saw her, by chance, after many years, when she was sixty. “What will happen when I am sixty?” he wanted to say. He wondered if Eve, with her boundless concern for other people, had any answer to that. What will happen fifteen years from now, when Miss Cooper claims the house?

That night, William of Orange, who lost no love on anyone, pulled himself onto the terrace table, having first attained a chair, and allowed Walter to scratch his throat. When he had had enough, he slipped away and dropped off the table and prowled along the wall. Eve was upstairs, putting the children to bed. It was a task she usually left to Angelo. Walter understood he and Frank had been deliberately left together alone. He knew he was about to be asked a favor. Frank leaned over the table. His stupid, friendly face wore its habitual expression of deep attention: I am so interested in you. I am trying to get the point of everything you say . He was easy enough; he never suggested Walter should be married, or working at something. He began to say that he missed South Africa. They had sold their property at a loss. He said he was starting over again for the last time, or so he hoped. He was thirty-seven. He had two children to educate. His face was red as a balloon. Walter let him talk, thinking it was good for him.