Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

“ ‘What is your ideal?’ Miss Pugh liked to ask. ‘At your age, you can’t live without one.’

“Thirty, forty years ago, ‘ideal’ opened the way to tumbledown houses like Miss Pugh’s that were really fairy castles. The moat was flooded with American generosity and American contrition. Probably no moat in history was ever so easy to bridge. (Any young European thinking of making that crossing today should be warned that the contrition silted up in the early nineteen seventies, after which the castle was abandoned.) Miss Pugh did not expect gratitude for material favours, and would have considered it a base emotion. But she had no qualms about showing a stern face to any protégé who revealed himself to be untalented, bereft of an ideal in working order, mentally idle, or coarsely materialistic. This our poor Victor Prism was to learn before the summer was out. Miss Pugh belonged to a small Christian congregation that took its substance from Buddhism. She treated most living creatures equally and made little distinction between man and worm.

“How did Prism turn into a protégé? Easily; he rang a doorbell. Rosalia answered to a young man who was carrying a manila envelope, manuscript-sized, and a letter. She reached for the letter of introduction but did not let Prism in, even though large drops of rain had started to fall.

“Miss Pugh, upstairs in the Balzac sitting room, addressed, from the window, a troubled-looking patch of sky. ‘Hasn’t this been going on long enough?’ Rosalia heard her say. ‘Why don’t you do something?’

“The answer to Miss Pugh’s cosmic despair, or impertinence, was Victor Prism. She had been acknowledged by the universe before now, but perhaps never so quickly. She sat down with her back to the window, read the letter Rosalia gave her, folded it, thought it over, and said, ‘All right. Bring him up.’

“Prism came into her presence with a step that lost its assurance as he drew near. He asked permission to sit down. Having obtained a nod, he placed his manila envelope on a low table, where Miss Pugh could reach it easily, and repeated everything she had just read in the letter: He was promising but poor. He had been staying with Mrs. Hartley-Greene on Avenue Gabriel. Mrs. Hartley-Greene had been indescribably helpful and kind. However, she was interested in painters, not in writers — particularly writers of prose.

“Miss Pugh said, ‘Then you aren’t that poet.’

“ ‘No, no,’ said Prism. ‘I am not that … that.’

“He was puzzled by the house, believing that it had deliberately been built at the heart of a hollow square, perhaps by a demented architect, for nonsensical people. Rain poured down on the ash tree and naked Cupid. In a flat across the way a kitchen light went on. Miss Pugh pressed the switch of a green-shaded lamp and considered Prism. He turned his head slightly and observed an oil painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He thought of mile upon mile of museum portraits — young men, young saints pierced with arrows, with nothing to protect them from the staring of women but a coat of varnish.

“The passage of the envelope from his hands to Miss Pugh’s was crucial to his adventure. He wondered if he should speak. At the same time, he hated to let the envelope go. It held his entire capital — two chapters of a novel. He did not know if he would ever write anything better, or even if he could write anything else at all.

“Miss Pugh settled the matter by picking it up. ‘It’s for me to read, isn’t it? I’ll do so at once. Perhaps you could come back after dinner tonight.’

“During dinner would have suited Prism better: Mrs. Hartley-Greene was under the impression he had already moved out and would not be back except to pick up some luggage. Goldfinches gives a vivid account of his retreat: ‘Christopher seemed to leave a trail of sawdust. There were arrow wounds everywhere. He did not know what other people thought and felt about anything, but he could sense to a fine degree how they thought and felt about him. He lived on the feelings he aroused, sought acquaintances among those in whom these feelings were not actively hostile, and did not know of any other way to be.’

“Eighty pages were in the envelope, thirty of them blank. Miss Pugh was not forced to spend every minute between tea and dinner reading, though she would have done so gladly. She read anything recommended to her, proceeding slowly, pausing often to wonder if the author was sure of his facts. She had a great fear of being hoodwinked, for she knew by now that in art deception is the rule.

“What Prism had described was an elderly duchess, a loyal old manservant named Norbert, a wounded pigeon, and a nation at war. His fifty completed pages were divided into two chapters.

“Chapter 1: In a city under siege, a duchess wonders how to save the priceless eighteenth-century china presented to her family by the Empress. Whatever food Norbert manages to forage she feeds to her cats. She and Norbert adopt and discard schemes for saving the china. They think about this and discuss it all day long.

“Chapter 2: A pigeon flutters in the window. A cat jumps at it, breaking its wing. The duchess and Norbert hear gunfire moving closer. They discuss a plan for saving the pigeon.

“That was as far as it went. Either Prism did not know what came next or did not want to say. It seemed to Miss Pugh that a good deal had been left in the air. The first thing she asked when he came back that night was if the china was really worth saving. If it was priceless, as he claimed, then Norbert ought to pack it into cases lined with heavy silver paper. The cases could then be buried in the garden, if the ground was soft. That would depend on the season, which Prism had not described.

“She had begun a process that Prism had not foreseen and that was the most flattering success he might have imagined. Everything in the story was hers , from the duchess to the pigeon.

“Next, she gave her attention to the duchess’s apartments, which seemed to be in the wing of a palace. Prism had not mentioned the style of architecture of the palace, or its condition. Most palaces nowadays were museums. Miss Pugh advised Prism to give the duchess an address more realistic and to eliminate from her life the threat of war.

“Then, at last, she said the only thing that mattered: she was ready to offer Prism the opportunity for creative endeavour Mrs. Hartley-Greene had been obliged to refuse because of her predilection for painters. Prism could return in the morning, by which time Rosalia would have his room ready. In the meantime, Miss Pugh would comb through the manuscript again.

“In Goldfinches , Prism skims over the next few hours. We have only the testimony of Rosalia, which is that he turned up in the morning looking as if he had spent the night curled up in a doorway.

“Miss Pugh was eating her breakfast in the sitting room with the green-shaded lamp and the portrait of St. Sebastian. Through a half-open door Prism caught a glimpse of her large, canopied bed. There was an extra place laid at the table.

“ ‘I was expecting my brother,’ said Miss Pugh. ‘But he has been delayed.’

“Instead of breakfast, Pugh was to have the manila envelope. In his account of the scene, Prism makes a curious mistake: ‘The morning sun, kept from Christopher by the angle of the yellow awning, slid into view and hit him square in the face. His eyes watered, and as if a film of illusion had been removed …’ and so on. There was no awning, no sun; the house was down a well.

“Miss Pugh asked Prism what he thought of Picasso. He understood the question as a test. Her rooms gave no clue to her own opinion; there were no Picassos in sight, but that was not to say there never could be. He drew a square in his mind, as a way of steadying his thoughts, and put Picasso in it.