Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

My son is a fool, said Roger to himself. Katia, who was certainly beautiful, perhaps even clever, loved him. She stood crying in the street, trying to see a light in his room.

“Luc’s cousin is rich,” said Simone. “Luc is too pure to understand the difference. He will have to learn something. What about computer training?”

“Luc has a mind too fluid to be restrained,” said Father Rousseau.

“Literature?” said Simone, bringing up the last resort.

Roger came to life. “Sorting letters in the post office?”

“Machines do that,” said Father Rousseau. “Luc would have to pass a test to show he understands the machine. I have been wondering if there might be in Luc’s close environment a family affair.” The Clairevoies fell silent. “A family business,” Father Rousseau repeated. “Families are open, airy structures. They take in the dreamy as well as the alert. There is always an extra corner somewhere.”

Like most of her women friends, Simone had given up wearing jewellery: the streets were full of anarchists and muggers. One of her friends knew of someone who had had a string of pearls ripped off her neck by a bearded intellectual of the Mediterranean type — that is, quite dark. Simone still kept, for luck, a pair of gold earrings, so large and heavy they looked fake. She touched her talisman earrings and said, “We have in our family a bank too small to be nationalized.”

“Congratulations,” said Father Rousseau, sincerely. When he got up to see them to the door, Roger saw he wore running shoes.

It fell to Roger to tell Luc what was to become of him. After military service of the most humdrum and unprotected kind, he would move to a provincial town and learn about banks. The conversation took place late one night in Luc’s room. Simone had persuaded Roger that Luc needed to be among his own things — the galleon lamp, the Foreign Legion recruiting poster that had replaced Che Guevara, the photograph of Simone that replaced Roger’s graduating class. Roger said, somewhat shyly, “You will be that much closer to Biarritz.”

“Katia is getting married,” said Luc. “His father has a riding school.” He said this looking away, rolling a pencil between thumb and finger, something like the way his mother had rolled a kitchen match. Reflected in the dark window, Luc’s cheeks were hollowed, his eyes blazing and black. He looked almost a hero and, like most heroes, lonely.

“What happened to your friends?” said Roger. “The friends you used to see every Sunday.”

“Oh, that … that fell apart. All the people they ever talked about were already dead. And some of the parents were worried. You were the only parents who never interfered.”

“We wanted you to live your own life,” said Roger. “It must have been that. Could you get her back?”

“You can do anything with a woman if you give her enough money.”

“Who told you a thing like that?” In the window Roger examined the reflected lamp, the very sight of which was supposed to have made a man of Luc.

“Everyone. Cousin Henri. I told her we owned a bank, because Cousin Henri said it would be a good thing to tell her. She asked me how to go about getting a bank loan. That was all.”

Does he really believe he owns a bank, Roger wondered. “About money,” he said. “Nothing of Cousin Henri’s is likely to be ours. Illegitimate children are allowed to inherit now, and my cousin,” said Roger with some wonder, “has acknowledged everyone. I pity the schoolteacher. All she ever sees is the same face.” This was not what Luc was waiting to hear. “You will inherit everything your mother owns. I have to share with my cousin, because that is how our grandparents arranged it.” He did not go on about the Freemasons and Protestants, because Luc already knew.

“It isn’t fair,” said Luc.

“Then you and your mother share my share.”

“How much of yours is mine?” said Luc politely.

“Oh, something at least the size of the tennis court,” said Roger.

On Luc’s desk stood, silver-framed, another picture of Simone, a charming one taken at the time of her engagement. She wore, already, the gold earrings. Her hair was in the upswept balloon style of the time. Her expression was smiling, confident but untried. Both Luc and Roger suddenly looked at it in silence.

It was Simone’s belief that, after Katia, Luc had started sleeping with one of her own friends. She thought she knew the one: the Hungarian wife of an architect, fond of saying she wished she had a daughter the right age for Luc. This was a direct sexual compliment, based on experience, Simone thought. Roger thought it meant nothing at all. It was the kind of empty declaration mothers mistook for appreciation. Simone had asked Roger to find out what he could, for this was the last chance either of them would ever have to talk to Luc. From now on, he would undoubtedly get along better with his parents, but where there had been a fence there would be a wall. Luc was on his own.

Roger said, “It was often thought, in my day, mainly by foreigners who had never been to France, that young men began their lives with their mother’s best friend. Absurd, when you consider it. Why pick an old woman when you can have a young one?” Buy a young one, he had been about to say, by mistake. “Your mother’s friends often seem young to me. I suppose it has to do with their clothes — so loose, unbuttoned. The disorder is already there. My mother’s best friends wore armour. It was called the New Look, invented by Christian Dior, a great defender of matronly virtue.” A direct glance from Luc — the first. “There really was a Mr. Dior, just as I suppose there was a Mr. Mercedes and a Mr. Benz. My mother and her friends were put into boned corsets, stiff petticoats, wide-brimmed, murderous hats. Their nails were pointed, and as red as your lampshade. They carried furled parasols with silver handles and metal-edged handbags. Even the heels of their shoes were contrived for braining people. No young man would have gone anywhere near.” Luc’s eyes met Roger’s in the window. “I have often wondered,” said Roger, “though I’m not trying to make it my business, what you and Katia could have done. Where could you have taken her? Well, unless she had some private place of her own. There’s more and more of that. Daughters of nice couples, people we know. Their own apartment, car, money. Holidays no one knows where. Credit cards, bank accounts, abortions. In my day, we had a miserable amount of spending money, but we had the girls in the Rue Spontini. Long after the bordellos were closed, there was the Rue Spontini. Do you know who first took me there? Cousin Henri. Not surprising, considering the life he has led since. Henri called it ‘the annex,’ because he ran into so many friends from his school. On Thursday afternoons, that was.” A slight question in Luc’s eyes. “Thursday was our weekly holiday, like Wednesdays for you. I don’t suppose every Wednesday — no, I’m sure you don’t. Besides, even the last of those places vanished years ago. There were Belgian girls, Spanish girls from Algeria. Some were so young — oh, very young. One told me I was like a brother. I asked Cousin Henri what she meant. He said he didn’t know.”

Luc said, “Katia could cry whenever she wanted to.” Her face never altered, but two great tears would suddenly brim over and course along her cheeks.

The curtains and shutters were open. Anyone could look in. There was no one in the street — not even a ghost. How real Katia and Luc had seemed; how they had touched what was left of Roger’s heart; how he had loved them. Giving them up forever, he said, “I always admired that picture of your mother.”

Simone and Roger had become engaged while Roger was still a lieutenant in Algeria. On the night before their wedding, which was to take place at ten o’clock in the morning in the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, Roger paid a wholly unwelcome call. Simone received him alone, in her dressing gown, wearing a fine net over her carefully ballooned hair. Her parents, listening at the door, took it for granted Roger had caught a venereal disease in a North African brothel and wanted the wedding postponed; Simone supposed he had met a richer and prettier girl. All Roger had to say was that he had seen an Algerian prisoner being tortured to death. Simone had often asked Roger, since then, why he had tried to frighten her with something that had so little bearing on their future. Roger could not remember what his reason had been.