Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

Soon after the New Year, however, there came a message from the guidance counsellor of the Jesuit school, summoning the Clairevoies for “a frank and open discussion.”

“About being immortal?” said Roger to Simone, recalling an alarming talk with another Jesuit teacher long ago.

“About your son,” she replied.

A card on his door identified the counsellor as “F.-X. Rousseau, Orientation.” Orientation wore a track suit and did not look to Roger like a Jesuit, or even much like a priest. Leaning forward (the Clairevoies instinctively drew back), he offered American cigarettes before lighting his own. It was not Luc’s chances of passing that seemed to worry him but Luc’s fragmented image of women. On the Rorschach test, for instance, he had seen a ballet skirt and a pair of legs, and a female head in a fishing net.

“You brought me here to tell me what?” said Roger. “My son has poor eyesight?”

Simone placed her hand on Father Rousseau’s desk as she might have touched his sleeve. She was saying, Be careful. My husband is irritable, old-fashioned, ill. “I think that Father Rousseau is trying to tell us that Luc has no complete view of women because Luc has no complete view of himself as a man. Is that it?”

Father Rousseau added, “And he cannot see his future because he can’t see himself.”

It was Roger’s turn to remonstrate with Luc. Simone suggested masculine, virile surroundings for their talk, and so he took Luc to the café across the street. There, over beer for Luc and mineral water for Roger, he told Luc about satisfaction. It was the duty of children to satisfy their parents. Roger, by doing extremely well at his studies, had given Luc’s grandparents this mysterious pleasure. They had been able to tell their friends, “Roger has given us great satisfaction.” He took Luc on a fresh tour of things to come, showing him the slow-grinding machinery of state competitive examinations against which fathers measured their sons. He said, Your future. If you fail. A poor degree is worse than none. Thousands of embittered young men, all voting Socialist. If you fail, you will sink into the swamp from which there is no rising. Do you want to sell brooms? Sweep the streets? Sell tickets in the Métro? Do you want to spend your life in a bank?

“Not that there is anything wrong with working in a bank,” he corrected. Encrusted in his wife’s family was a small rural bank with a staff of seventeen. Simone did not often see her provincial cousins, but the bank was always mentioned with respect. To say “a small bank” was no worse than saying “a small crown jewel.” Simone, in a sense, personified a reliable and almost magical trade; she had brought to Roger the goods and the dream. What had Roger brought? Hideous Empire furniture and a dubious nineteenth-century title Simone scarcely dared use because of the Communists.

Only the word “Socialist” seemed to stir Luc. “We need a good little civil war,” he declared, as someone who has never been near the ocean might announce, “We need a good little tidal wave” — so Roger thought.

He said, “There are no good little civil wars.” But he knew what was said of him: that his heart attacks had altered his personality, made him afraid. On a November day, Roger and his father had followed the coffin of Charles Maurras, the nationalist leader, jailed after the war for collaboration. “My son,” said Roger’s father, introducing Roger to thin-faced men, some wearing the Action Française emblem. Roger’s father had stood for office on a Royalist platform, and had come out of the election the last of five candidates, one an impertinent youngster with an alien name, full of “z”s and “k”s. He was not bitter; he was scornful and dry, and he wanted Roger to be dry and proud. Roger had only lately started to think, My father always said, and, My father believed. As he spoke, now, to Luc about satisfaction and failure, he remembered how he had shuffled behind the hearse of a dead old man, perhaps mistaken, certainly dispossessed. They got up to leave, and Roger bowed to an elderly woman he recognized. His son had already turned away.

In order to give Luc a fully virile image, Simone redecorated his room. The desk lamp was a galleon in full sail with a bright red shade — the colour of decision and activity. She took down the photograph of Roger’s graduating class and hung a framed poster of Che Guevara. Stepping back to see the effect, she realized Guevara would never do. The face was feminine, soft. She wondered if the whole legend was not a hoax and if Guevara had been a woman in disguise. Guevara had no political significance, of course; he had become manly, decorative kitsch. (The salesman had assured her of this; otherwise, she would never have run the risk of offending Roger.) As she removed the poster she noticed for the first time a hole drilled in the wall. She put her eye to it and had a partial view of the maid’s bathroom, used in the past by a succession of au pair visitors, in Paris to improve their French and to keep an eye on a younger Luc.

She called Roger and made him look: “Who says Luc has no view of women?”

Roger glanced round at the new curtains and bedspread, with their pattern of Formula 1 racing cars. Near the bed someone — Luc, probably — had tacked a photo of Hitler. Roger, without saying anything, took it down. He did not want Luc quite that manly.

“You can’t actually see the shower,” said Simone, trying the perspective again. “But I suppose that when she stands drying on the mat … We’d better tell him.”

“Tell Luc?”

“Rousseau. Orientation.”

Not “Father Rousseau,” he noticed. It was not true that women were devoted guardians of tradition. They rode every new wave like so much plankton. My father was right, he decided. He always said it was a mistake to give them the vote. He said they had no ideas — just notions. My father was proud to stand up for the past. He was proud to be called a Maurrassien, even when Charles Maurras was in defeat, in disgrace. But who has ever heard of a Maurrassienne? The very idea made Roger smile. Simone, catching the smile, took it to mean a sudden feeling of tolerance, and so she chose the moment to remind him they would have an au pair guest at Easter — oh, not to keep an eye on Luc; Luc was too old. (She sounded sorry.) But Luc had been three times to England, to a family named Brunt, and now, in all fairness, it was the Clairevoies’ obligation to have Cassandra.

“Another learner?” Roger was remembering the tall, glum girls from northern capitals and their strides in colloquial French: That is my friend. He did not sleep in my bed — he spent the night on the doormat. I am homesick. I am ill. A bee has stung me. I am allergic and may die.

“You won’t have to worry about Cassandra,” Simone said. “She is a mature young woman of fifteen, a whole head taller than Luc.”

Simone clipped a leash to the dog’s collar and grasped Roger firmly by the arm. She was taking two of her charges for a walk, along streets she used to follow when Luc was still in his pram. On Boulevard Lannes a taxi stopped and two men wearing white furs, high-heeled white boots, and Marilyn Monroe wigs got out and made for the Bois. Roger knew that transvestites worked the fringe of the Bois now, congregating mostly towards the Porte Maillot, where there were hotels. He had heard the women in the café across the street complaining that the police were not vigilant enough, much the way an established artisan might grumble about black-market labour. Roger had imagined them vaguely as night creatures, glittering and sequined, caught like dragonflies in the headlights of roving automobiles. This pair was altogether real, and the man who had just paid the taxi-driver shut his gold-mesh handbag with the firm snap of a housewife settling the butcher’s bill. The dog at once began to strain and bark.