Mavis Gallant - The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

We did not talk about what we could do with money now. I was thinking about Mallorca. I knew that if I invited them they would never come. They were polite. They understood that my new fortune cast me out. There was no evasion, but they were nice about it. They had no plans, and simply closed their ranks. We talked of a longer future, remembering Carlos and his fear. We talked of our thirties as if we were sliding toward an icy subterranean water; as if we were to be submerged and frozen just as we were: first Carlos, then Pablo and me, finally little Pilar. She had eight years to wait, but eight would be seven, and seven six, and she knew it.

I don’t know what became of them, or what they were like when their thirtieth year came. I left Madrid. I wrote, for a time, but they never answered. Eventually they were caught, for me, not by time but by the freezing of memory. And when I looked in the diary I had kept during that period, all I could find was descriptions of the weather.

1960

“WHEN THAT Jean Harlow died,” Mrs. Thompson said to Jeannie, “I was on the 83 streetcar with a big, heavy paper parcel in my arms. I hadn’t been married for very long, and when I used to visit my mother she’d give me a lot of canned stuff and preserves. I was standing up in the streetcar because nobody’d given me a seat. All the men were unemployed in those days, and they just sat down wherever they happened to be. You wouldn’t remember what Montreal was like then. You weren’t even on earth. To resume what I was saying to you, one of these men sitting down had an American paper — the Daily News , I guess it was — and I was sort of leaning over him, and I saw in big print ‘JEAN HARLOW DEAD.’ You can believe me or not, just as you want to, but that was the most terrible shock I ever had in my life. I never got over it.”

Jeannie had nothing to say to that. She lay flat on her back across the bed, with her head toward Mrs. Thompson and her heels just touching the crate that did as a bedside table. Balanced on her flat stomach was an open bottle of coral-pink Cutex nail polish. She held her hands up over her head and with some difficulty applied the brush to the nails of her right hand. Her legs were brown and thin. She wore nothing but shorts and one of her husband’s shirts. Her feet were bare.

Mrs. Thompson was the wife of the paymaster in a road-construction camp in northern Quebec. Jeannie’s husband was an engineer working on the same project. The road was being pushed through country where nothing had existed until now except rocks and lakes and muskeg. The camp was established between a wild lake and the line of raw dirt that was the road. There were no towns between the camp and the railway spur, sixty miles distant.

Mrs. Thompson, a good deal older than Jeannie, had become her best friend. She was a nice, plain, fat, consoling sort of person, with varicosed legs, shoes unlaced and slit for comfort, blue flannel dressing gown worn at all hours, pudding-bowl haircut, and coarse gray hair. She might have been Jeannie’s own mother, or her Auntie Pearl. She rocked her fat self in the rocking chair and went on with what she had to say: “What I was starting off to tell you is you remind me of her, of Jean Harlow. You’ve got the same teeny mouth, Jeannie, and I think your hair was a whole lot prettier before you started fooling around with it. That peroxide’s no good. It splits the ends. I know you’re going to tell me it isn’t peroxide but something more modern, but the result is the same.”

Vern’s shirt was spotted with coral-pink that had dropped off the brush. Vern wouldn’t mind; at least, he wouldn’t say that he minded. If he hadn’t objected to anything Jeannie did until now, he wouldn’t start off by complaining about a shirt. The campsite outside the uncurtained window was silent and dark. The waning moon would not appear until dawn. A passage of thought made Mrs. Thompson say, “Winter soon.”

Jeannie moved sharply and caught the bottle of polish before it spilled. Mrs. Thompson was crazy; it wasn’t even September.

“Pretty soon,” Mrs. Thompson admitted. “Pretty soon. That’s a long season up here, but I’m one person doesn’t complain. I’ve been up here or around here every winter of my married life, except for that one winter Pops was occupying Germany.”

“I’ve been up here seventy-two days,” said Jeannie, in her soft voice. “Tomorrow makes seventy-three.”

“Is that right?” said Mrs. Thompson, jerking the rocker forward, suddenly snappish. “Is that a fact? Well, who asked you to come up here? Who asked you to come and start counting days like you was in some kind of jail? When you got married to Vern, you must of known where he’d be taking you. He told you, didn’t he, that he liked road jobs, construction jobs, and that? Did he tell you, or didn’t he?”

“Oh, he told me,” said Jeannie.

“You know what, Jeannie?” said Mrs. Thompson. “If you’d of just listened to me, none of this would have happened. I told you that first day, the day you arrived here in your high-heeled shoes, I said, ‘I know this cabin doesn’t look much, but all the married men have the same sort of place.’ You remember I said that? I said, ‘You just get some curtains up and some carpets down and it’ll be home.’ I took you over and showed you my place, and you said you’d never seen anything so lovely.”

“I meant it,” said Jeannie. “Your cabin is just lovely. I don’t know why, but I never managed to make this place look like yours.”

Mrs. Thompson said, “That’s plain enough.” She looked at the cold grease spattered behind the stove, and the rag of towel over by the sink. “It’s partly the experience,” she said kindly. She and her husband knew exactly what to take with them when they went on a job, they had been doing it for so many years. They brought boxes for artificial flowers, a brass door knocker, a portable bar decorated with sea shells, a cardboard fireplace that looked real, and an electric fire that sent waves of light rippling over the ceiling and walls. A concealed gramophone played the records they loved and cherished — the good old tunes. They had comic records that dated back to the year 1, and sad soprano records about shipwrecks and broken promises and babies’ graves. The first time Jeannie heard one of the funny records, she was scared to death. She was paying a formal call, sitting straight in her chair, with her skirt pulled around her knees. Vern and Pops Thompson were talking about the Army.

“I wish to God I was back,” said old Pops.

“Don’t I?” said Vern. He was fifteen years older than Jeannie and had been through a lot.

At first there were only scratching and whispering noises, and then a mosquito orchestra started to play, and a dwarf’s voice came into the room. “Little Johnnie Green, little Sallie Brown,” squealed the dwarf, higher and faster than any human ever could. “Spooning in the park with the grass all around.”

“Where is he?” Jeannie cried, while the Thompsons screamed with laughter and Vern smiled. The dwarf sang on: “And each little bird in the treetop high/Sang ‘Oh you kid!’ and winked his eye.”

It was a record that had belonged to Pops Thompson’s mother. He had been laughing at it all his life. The Thompsons loved living up north and didn’t miss cities or company. Their cabin smelled of cocoa and toast. Over their beds were oval photographs of each other as children, and they had some Teddy bears and about a dozen dolls.

Jeannie capped the bottle of polish, taking care not to press it against her wet nails. She sat up with a single movement and set the bottle down on the bedside crate. Then she turned to face Mrs. Thompson. She sat cross-legged, with her hands outspread before her. Her face was serene.