Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

Larry refrained from asking questions, partly out of loyalty to his late, put-upon mother. Dead or alive, she had heard enough.

“Marriage is sex,” said his father. “But money is not necessarily anything along that line.” In spite of his wish not to be drawn, Larry could not help mulling this over. His father was always at his most dangerous, morally speaking, when he made no sense. “The richer she is, the lower the class of her lovers. If you marry a rich woman, keep an eye on the chauffeur. Watch out for unemployed actors, sailors, tailors. Customs officers,” he said, as though suddenly remembering. He may have been recalling Maggie’s mother. He sighed, though not out of discontent or sorrow, and lifted his firm blue gaze to an oil portrait of a woman wearing pearls Maggie’s mother would have swum the Amazon for. “I was never really excited by rich women,” he said calmly. “Actually, I think only homosexuals are. Well, it is all a part of God’s good plan, laid out for our pleasure, like the flower beds down there in the park.”

Larry’s father was a pagan who regularly prayed for guidance. He thought nothing of summoning God to smile on His unenlightened creations. Maggie, another object of close celestial attention, believed something should be done about the nature of the universe — some tidying-up job. She was ready to take it on and was only waiting to be asked. Larry lived at about eye level. He tried the Catholics, who said, “What would you like? Jam for breakfast? Eternal life? They’re yours, but there’s a catch.” The Protestants greeted his return with “Shut up. Sit down. Think it over.” It was like swimming back and forth between two crowded rafts.

“I met your mother just before I lost most of my money,” his father said, which was a whitewashed way of explaining he had been involved in a mining-stock scandal of great proportions. “Never make the mistake of imagining a dumb woman is going to be more restful than a smart one. Most men crack up on that. They think ‘dumb’ means ‘silent.’ They think it’s going to be like the baaing of a lamb and the cooing of a dove, and they won’t need to answer. But soon it’s ‘Do you still love me?’ and that can’t be left in the air. Then it turns into ‘Did you love me when we got married? Did you love me when I was pregnant? Did you love me last week? Do you love me now?’ ”

Larry said, “I saw Maggie about a year ago. She says she’s leaving everything to an arts foundation.”

“She can’t,” said his father.

“She thinks she can, and she’s got lawyers. It’s her way of wanting to be remembered. But it’s the wrong way. The French never remember anything except their own wars. She won’t even have her name on a birdbath.”

“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” his father said. “There’ll be a memorial birdbath and Maggie’s name — which, incidentally is yours and mine; I’m leaving you both a good name — and in the bowl of the birdbath there’ll be the Stars and Stripes in red-white-and-blue mosaic. That is exactly what they’ll give Maggie’s memory. Where they will choose to put the monument I can’t predict. No sane man wants to survive his own children, so I won’t say I’d like to see the inaugural ceremony. You’ll be there, though — well dressed and smiling. Life has been good to me. I hope it’s just as good to you.”

It was true that life had treated the old man gently; it had kept him out of jail and in cheerful company.

“I haven’t made a formal will yet,” he said, quite as though he had anything to leave. “But there’s one particular thing I want you to have. It’s a painting of me. I sat for it here, in Paris, before the war. Around 1912. I don’t remember the artist’s name, but he was big in those days. If you ever have a son, I want him to have the picture. Promise me you’ll come and get it no matter where you happen to be when I go.”

He helped himself to a drink and, as though no answer from Larry were needed, began to talk about something else he owned — an ancient hookah, a museum piece. Maggie would appreciate having it, he thought.

Larry noticed that their drinks were leaving rings on the inlaid table. He rubbed them with a corner of a dust sheet, but it was too late.

The next day, while he was trying to sandpaper the stains, Larry remembered the portrait. It showed his father wearing a hat at a jaunty angle, his hands clasped on a walking stick. He appeared to be elegant and reliable, the way things and people are always said to have been when one looks back at them across a war.

When Larry’s father left Larry and his mother, he took the portrait with him. It must have been hanging in a dining room, because Larry saw him taking it down, and then tossing a bundle of money, cash, on a polished table. His mother sat in profile, turned away, arms folded. She looked toward, but not at, the little glass shelves at the window, where she kept her collection of miniature cacti in pottery dishes. She wore the look of dark grieving no child can enter. When he saw that she was not going to turn back his way or say something to him, Larry’s father secured the portrait under his arm and walked out. There was a blank place on the wall, and on the table, deeply reflected, a packet of bills that seemed a lot but that never was or could be enough.

Over the next few days and until the end of August, when it was time for Larry to move on, he continued to work on the inlaid table, repeating the operation of sandpaper and wax until the rings showed but palely, and only under direct, strong light. Except for those faint circles, and a few sheets of hotel stationery and a few ounces of whiskey gone, he left no other trace behind him of loss or mischief.

The project for a three-volume dictionary of literary biography, Living Authors of the Fourth Republic , was set afloat in Paris in 1952, with an eleven-man editorial committee in the same lifeboat. The young and promising Henri Grippes, spokesman for a new and impertinent generation, waited on shore for news of mass drownings; so he says now. A few years later, when the working title had to be changed to Living Authors of the Fifth Republic , Grippes was invited aboard. In 1964, Grippes announced there were not enough living authors to fill three volumes, and was heaved over the side. Actually, he had just accepted a post as writer-in-residence at a women’s college in California; from the Pacific shore he sent a number of open letters to Paris weeklies, denouncing the dictionary scheme as an attempt to establish a form of literary pecking order. Anti-élitism was in the air, and Grippes’ views received great prominence. His return to Paris found a new conflict raging: two volumes were now to be produced, under the brusque and fashionable title Contemporary Writers, Women and Others . Grippes at once published a pamphlet revealing that it was a police dodge for feeding women and others into a multi — national computer. In the event of invasion, the computer would cough up the names and the authors would be lined up and marched to forced labour in insurance companies. He carried the day, and for a time the idea of any contemporary literary directory was dropped.

Grippes had by then come into a little money, and had bought himself an apartment over a cinema in Montparnasse. He wore a wide felt hat and a velvet jacket in cool weather and a panama straw and a linen coat when it was fine. Instead of a shopping bag he carried a briefcase. He wrote to the mayor of Paris — who answered, calling him “Maître” — to protest a plan to remove the statue of Balzac from Boulevard Raspail, just north of the Boulevard du Montparnasse intersection. It was true that the statue was hemmed in by cars illegally parked and that it was defiled by pigeons, but Grippes was used to seeing it there. He also deplored that the clock on the corner near the Dôme no longer kept time; Grippes meant by this that it did not keep the same time as his watch, which he often forgot to wind.