Mavis Gallant - The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

The year printed at the end of each story indicates its original date of publication. In this collection I have reprinted the text of each story as it appeared in the author’s most recent published version: “About Geneva” ( The Other Paris 1956); “When We Were Nearly Young” ( In Transit 1988); “My Heart Is Broken” and “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” ( My Heart Is Broken 1964); “An Autobiography” ( The Pegnitz Junction 1973); “Saturday” and “In Youth Is Pleasure” ( Home Truths 1981); “The Latehomecomer” and “The Moslem Wife” ( From the Fifteenth District 1979); “Grippes and Poche” and “Overhead in a Balloon” ( Overhead in a Balloon 1985).

D.S.

GRANNY was waiting at the door of the apartment. She looked small, lonely, and patient, and at the sight of her the children and their mother felt instantly guilty. Instead of driving straight home from the airport, they had stopped outside Nice for ice cream. They might have known how much those extra twenty minutes would mean to Granny. Colin, too young to know what he felt, or why, began instinctively to misbehave, dragging his feet, scratching the waxed parquet. Ursula bit her nails, taking refuge in a dream, while the children’s mother, Granny’s only daughter, felt compelled to cry in a high, cheery voice, “Well, Granny, here they are, safe and sound!”

“Darlings,” said Granny, very low. “Home again.” She stretched out her arms to Ursula, but then, seeing the taxi driver, who had carried the children’s bags up the stairs, she drew back. After he had gone she repeated the gesture, turning this time to Colin, as if Ursula’s cue had been irrevocably missed. Colin was wearing a beret. “Wherever did that come from?” Granny said. She pulled it off and stood still, stricken. “My darling little boy,” she said, at last. “What have they done to you? They have cut your hair. Your lovely golden hair. I cannot believe it. I don’t want to believe it.”

“It was high time,” the children’s mother said. She stood in the outer corridor, waiting for Granny’s welcome to subside. “It was high time someone cut Colin’s hair. The curls made such a baby of him. We should have seen that. Two women can’t really bring up a boy.”

Granny didn’t look at all as if she agreed. “Who cut your hair?” she said, holding Colin.

“Barber,” he said, struggling away.

“Less said the better,” said Colin’s mother. She came in at last, drew off her gloves, looked around, as if she, and not the children, had been away.

“He’s not my child, of course,” said Granny, releasing Colin. “If he were, I can just imagine the letter I should write. Of all the impudence! When you send a child off for a visit you expect at the very least to have him returned exactly as he left. And you,” she said, extending to Ursula a plump, liver-spotted hand, “what changes am I to expect in you?”

“Oh, Granny, for Heaven’s sake, it was only two weeks.” She permitted her grandmother to kiss her, then went straight to the sitting room and hurled herself into a chair. The room was hung with dark engravings of cathedrals. There were flowers, red carnations, on the rickety painted tables, poked into stiff arrangements by a maid. It was the standard seasonal Nice meublé . Granny spent every winter in rented flats more or less like this one, and her daughter, since her divorce, shared them with her.

Granny followed Ursula into the room and sat down, erect, on an uncomfortable chair, while her daughter, trailing behind, finally chose a footstool near the empty fireplace. She gave Granny a gentle, neutral look. Before starting out for the airport, earlier, she had repeated her warning: There were to be no direct questions, no remarks. It was all to appear as natural and normal as possible. What, indeed, could be more natural for the children than a visit with their father?

“What, indeed,” said Granny in a voice rich with meaning.

It was only fair, said the children’s mother. A belief in fair play was so embedded in her nature that she could say the words without coloring deeply. Besides, it was the first time he had asked.

“And won’t be the last,” Granny said. “But, of course, it is up to you.”

Ursula lay rather than sat in her chair. Her face was narrow and freckled: She resembled her mother who, at thirty-four, had settled into a permanent, anxious-looking, semi-youthfulness. Colin, blond and fat, rolled on the floor. He pulled his mouth out at the corners, then pulled down his eyes to show the hideous red underlids. He looked at his grandmother and growled like a lion.

“Colin has come back sillier than ever,” Granny said. He lay prone, noisily snuffing the carpet. The others ignored him.

“Did you go boating, Ursula?” said Granny, not counting this as a direct question. “When I visited Geneva, as a girl, we went boating on the lake.” She went on about white water birds, a parasol, a boat heaped with colored cushions.

“Oh, Granny, no,” said Ursula. “There weren’t even any big boats, let alone little ones. It was cold.”

“I hope the house, at least, was warm.”

But evidently Ursula had failed to notice the temperature of her father’s house. She slumped on her spine (a habit Granny had just nicely caused her to get over before the departure for Geneva) and then said, unexpectedly, “She’s not a good manager.”

Granny and her daughter exchanged a look, eyebrows up.

“Oh?” said Ursula’s mother, pink. She forgot about the direct questions and said, “Why?”

“It’s not terribly polite to speak that way of one’s hostess,” said Granny, unable to resist the reproof but threatening Ursula’s revelation at the source. Her daughter looked at her, murderous.

“Well,” said Ursula, slowly, “once the laundry didn’t come back. It was her fault, he said. Our sheets had to be changed, he said. So she said Oh, all right. She took the sheets off Colin’s bed and put them on my bed, and took the sheets off my bed and put them on Colin’s. To make the change, she said.”

“Dear God,” said Granny.

“Colin’s sheets were a mess. He had his supper in bed sometimes. They were just a mess.”

“Not true,” said Colin.

“Another time …,” said Ursula, and stopped, as if Granny had been right, after all, about criticizing one’s hostess.

“Gave us chocolate,” came from Colin, his face muffled in carpet.

“Not every day, I trust,” Granny said.

“For the plane.”

“It might very well have made you both airsick,” said Granny.

“Well,” said Ursula, “it didn’t.” Her eyes went often to the luggage in the hall. She squirmed upright, stood up, and sat down again. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

“Ursula, do you want a handkerchief?” said Granny.

“No,” said Ursula. “Only it so happens I’m writing a play. It’s in the suitcase.”

Granny and the children’s mother looked at each other again. “I am pleased,” Granny said, and her daughter nodded, agreeing, for, if impertinence and slumping on one’s spine were unfortunate inherited tendencies, this was something else. It was only fair that Ursula’s father should have bequeathed her something to compensate for the rest. “What is it about?” said Granny.

Ursula looked at her feet. After a short silence she said, “Russia. That’s all I want to tell. It was her idea. She lived there once.”

Quietly, controlled, the children’s mother took a cigarette from the box on the table. Granny looked brave.