Mavis Gallant: The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

“Would you tell us the title, at least?” said Granny.

“No,” said Ursula. But then, as if the desire to share the splendid thing she had created were too strong, she said, “I’ll tell you one line, because they said it was the best thing they’d ever heard anywhere.” She took a breath. Her audience was gratifyingly attentive, straining, nearly, with attention and control. “It goes like this,” Ursula said. “ ‘The Grand Duke enters and sees Tatiana all in gold.’ ”

“Well?” said Granny.

“Well, what?” said Ursula. “That’s it. That’s the line.” She looked at her mother and grandmother and said, “They liked it. They want me to send it to them, and everything else, too. She even told me the name Tatiana.”

“It’s lovely, dear,” said Ursula’s mother. She put the cigarette back in the box. “It sounds like a lovely play. Just when did she live in Russia?”

“I don’t know. Ages ago. She’s pretty old.”

“Perhaps one day we shall see the play after all,” said Granny. “Particularly if it is to be sent all over the Continent.”

“You mean they might act in it?” said Ursula. Thinking of this, she felt sorry for herself. Ever since she had started “The Grand Duke” she could not think of her own person without being sorry. For no reason at all, now, her eyes filled with tears of self-pity. Drooping, she looked out at the darkening street, to the leafless trees and the stone façade of a public library.

But the children’s mother, as if Granny’s remark had for her an entirely different meaning, not nearly so generous, said, “I shall give you the writing desk from my bedroom, Ursula. It has a key.”

“Where will you keep your things?” said Granny, protesting. She could not very well say that the desk was her own, not to be moved: Like everything else — the dark cathedrals, the shaky painted tables — it had come with the flat.

“I don’t need a key,” said the children’s mother, lacing her fingers tightly around her knees. “I’m not writing a play, or anything else I want kept secret. Not any more.”

“They used to take Colin for walks,” said Ursula, yawning, only vaguely taking in the importance of the desk. “That was when I started to write this thing. Once they stayed out the whole afternoon. They never said where they’d been.”

“I wonder,” said her mother, thoughtful. She started to say something to Ursula, something not quite a question, but the child was too preoccupied with herself. Everything about the trip, in the end, would crystallize around Tatiana and the Grand Duke. Already, Ursula was Tatiana. The children’s mother looked at Ursula’s long bare legs, her heavy shoes, her pleated skirt, and she thought, I must do something about her clothes, something to make her pretty.

“Colin, dear,” said Granny in her special inner-meaning voice, “do you remember your walks?”

“No.”

“I wonder why they wanted to take him alone,” said Colin’s mother. “It seems odd, all the same.”

“Under seven,” said Granny, cryptic. “Couldn’t influence girl. Too old. Boy different. Give me first seven years, you can have rest.”

“But it wasn’t seven years. He hasn’t been alive that long. It was only two weeks.”

“Two very impressionable weeks,” Granny said.

“I understand everything you’re saying,” Ursula said, “even when you talk that way. They spoke French when they didn’t want us to hear, but we understood that, too.”

“I fed the swans,” Colin suddenly shouted.

There, he had told about Geneva. He sat up and kicked his heels on the carpet as if the noise would drown out the consequence of what he had revealed. As he said it, the image became static: a gray sky, a gray lake, and a swan wonderfully turning upside down with the black rubber feet showing above the water. His father was not in the picture at all; neither was she . But Geneva was fixed for the rest of his life: gray, lake, swan.

Having delivered his secret he had nothing more to tell. He began to invent. “I was sick on the plane,” he said, but Ursula at once said that this was a lie, and he lay down again, humiliated. At last, feeling sleepy, he began to cry.

“He never once cried in Geneva,” Ursula said. But by the one simple act of creating Tatiana and the Grand Duke, she had removed herself from the ranks of reliable witnesses.

“How would you know?” said Granny bitterly. “You weren’t always with him. If you had paid more attention, if you had taken care of your little brother, he wouldn’t have come back to us with his hair cut.”

“Never mind,” said the children’s mother. Rising, she helped Colin to his feet and led him away to bed.

She stood behind him as he cleaned his teeth. He looked male and self-assured with his newly cropped head, and she thought of her husband, and how odd it was that only a few hours before Colin had been with him. She touched the tender back of his neck. “Don’t,” he said. Frowning, concentrating, he hung up his toothbrush. “I told about Geneva.”

“Yes, you did.” He had fed swans. She saw sunshine, a blue lake, and the boats Granny had described, heaped with colored cushions. She saw her husband and someone else (probably in white, she thought, ridiculously bouffant, the origin of Tatiana) and Colin with his curls shorn, revealing ears surprisingly large. There was nothing to be had from Ursula — not, at least, until the Grand Duke had died down. But Colin seemed to carry the story of the visit with him, and she felt the faintest stirrings of envy, the resentfulness of the spectator, the loved one left behind.

“Were you really sick on the plane?” she said.

“Yes,” said Colin.

“Were they lovely, the swans?”

But the question bore no relation to anything he had seen. He said nothing. He played with toothpaste, dawdling.

“Isn’t that child in bed yet?” called Granny. “Does he want his supper?”

“No,” said Colin.

“No,” said his mother. “He was sick on the plane.”

“I thought so,” Granny said. “That, at least, is a fact.”

They heard the voice of Ursula, protesting.

But how can they be trusted, the children’s mother thought Which of them can one believe? “Perhaps,” she said to Colin, “one day, you can tell me more about Geneva?”

“Yes,” he said perplexed.

But, really, she doubted it; nothing had come back from the trip but her own feelings of longing and envy, the longing and envy she felt at night, seeing, at a crossroad or over a bridge, the lighted windows of a train sweep by. Her children had nothing to tell her. Perhaps, as she had said, one day Colin would say something, produce the image of Geneva, tell her about the lake, the boats, the swans, and why her husband had left her. Perhaps he could tell her, but, really, she doubted it. And, already, so did he.

1955

IN MADRID, nine years ago, we lived on the thought of money. Our friendships were nourished with talk of money we expected to have, and what we intended to do when it came. There were four of us — two men and two girls. The men, Pablo and Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. I was not Spanish and not a relation, and a friend almost by mistake. The thing we had in common was that we were all waiting for money.

Every day I went to the Central Post Office, and I made the rounds of the banks and the travel agencies, where letters and money could come. I was not certain how much it might be, or where it was going to arrive, but I saw it riding down a long arc like a rainbow. In those days I was always looking for signs. I saw signs in cigarette smoke, in the way ash fell and in the cards. I laid the cards out three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday were no good, because the cards were mute or evasive; and on Sundays they lied. I thought these signs — the ash, the smoke and so on — would tell me what direction my life was going to take and what might happen from now on. I had unbounded belief in free will, which most of the people I knew despised, but I was superstitious, too. I saw inside my eyelids at night the nine of clubs, which is an excellent card, and the ten of hearts, which is better, morally speaking, since it implies gain through effort. I saw the aces of clubs and diamonds, and the jack of diamonds, who is the postman. Although Pablo and Pilar and Carlos were not waiting for anything in particular — indeed, had nothing to wait for, except a fortune — they were anxious about the postman, and relieved when he turned up. They never supposed that the postman would not arrive, or that his coming might have no significance.