Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

“How many children should we have?” she said. “I’d say about ten. Well, seven. At least five.”

Her clothes were scattered all over the floor, and the room was cold, in spite of the fire, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “I hate children,” I said. I was amazed that I could say something so definite and so cruel, and that sounded so true. When had I stopped liking them? Perhaps when I adopted the colonel’s child, believing she would never grow up. I could have said, “I don’t like other children,” but nothing about this conversation was thought out.

“You will love them,” she said happily. “You’ll see.” She held her spread fingers against the gas flame, counting off their names. Each finger stood for a greedy, willful personality, as tough as a fist. An only child, she invented playmates and named them, and I was supposed to bring them to life.

“I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but I kept my dolls until I was fifteen. My mother finally gave them away.”

“Brothers and sisters,” I said.

“No, just dolls. But they did have names.”

“Is that one of your secrets?” “Secrets” had become charged with erotic meaning, when we were alone.

“You’ve got a special secret,” she said.

“Yes. I’ve torn up my novel.”

“Oh, how lovely for you! Or is that sad?”

“I’m just giving it up. I’ll never start another.”

“You’ve got another secret,” she said. “You’re married to someone.” As she said this, she seemed to become aware that the room was cold. She shivered and reached for her dress, and drew it around her like a shawl. “A person went to see your mother. She — your mother — said to tell you your wife was all right. Your wife,” said Juliette, trying to control her voice, “is in the South of France. She has managed to send your mother a pound of onions. To eat,” said Juliette, as I went on staring. “Onions, to eat.”

“I did get married,” I said. “But she’s not my wife. I did it to save her. I’ve got her yellow star somewhere.”

“I’d like to see it,” said Juliette, politely.

“It is made of cheap, ugly material,” I said, as if that were the only thing wrong.

“I think you should put some clothes on,” said Juliette. “If you’re going to tell about your wife.”

“She isn’t my wife,” I said. “The marriage was just something legal. Apart from being legal, it doesn’t count.”

“She may not be your wife,” said Juliette, “but she is your mother’s daughter-in-law.” She drew up her knees and bent her head on them, as if it were disgraceful to watch me dressing. “You mean,” she said, after a time, “that it doesn’t count as a secret?” I gathered up the rest of her clothes and put them beside her on the mattress. “Does it count as anything?”

“I’ll walk you home,” I said.

“You don’t need to.”

“It’s late. I can’t have you wandering around in the blackout.”

She dressed, slowly, sitting and kneeling. “I am glad she is safe and well,” she said. “It would be too bad if you had done all that for nothing. She must be very grateful to you.”

I had never thought about gratitude. It seemed to me that, yes, she was probably grateful. I suddenly felt impatient for the war to end, so that I could approach her, hand in hand with Juliette, and ask for a divorce and a blessing.

Juliette, kneeling, fastened the buttons of the latest flour sack her mother had chosen. “Why did you tear up your novel?” she said.

Because I can’t wrench life around to make it fit some fantasy. Because I don’t know how to make life sound worse or better, or how to make it sound true. Instead of saying this, I said, “How do you expect me to support ten children?” The colonel’s wife didn’t like me much, but she had said that after the war there were a few people she could introduce me to. She had mentioned something about radio broadcasting, and I liked the idea. Juliette was still kneeling, with only part of the hideous dress buttoned up. I looked down at her bent head. She must have been thinking that she had tied herself to a man with no money, no prospects, and no connections. Who wasn’t entirely single. Who might be put on a charge for making a false declaration. Who had a broken nose and a permanent limp. Who, so far, had never finished anything he’d started. Perhaps she was forgetting one thing: I had got to London.

“I could stay all night,” she said. “If you want me to.”

“Your mother would have the police out,” I said.

“She’d never dare,” said Juliette. “I’ve never called the police because she didn’t come home.”

“It would be …” I tried to think of what it could be for us. “It would be radical.”

Her hands began to move again, the other way, unbuttoning. She was the colonel’s child, she had already held her breath and jumped, and that was the start and the end of it.

“We may be in big trouble over this,” I said.

“Oh, what a pity,” she said. “We’ll always be together. We will always be happy. How lovely! What a shame!”

I think she still trusted me at that moment; I hope so.

In her prime, by which I mean in her beauty, my first wife, Magdalena, had no use for other women. She did not depend upon women for anything that mattered, such as charm and enjoyment and getting her bills paid; and as for exchanging Paris gossip and intimate chitchat, since she never confided anything personal and never complained, a man’s ear was good enough. Magdalena saw women as accessories, to be treated kindly — maids, seamstresses, manicurists — or as comic minor figures, the wives and official fiancées of her admirers. It was not in her nature to care what anyone said, and she never could see the shape of a threat even when it rolled over her, but I suspect that she was called some of the senseless things she was called, such as “Central European whore” and “Jewish adventuress,” by women.

Now that she is nearly eighty and bedridden, she receives visits from women — the residue of an early wave of Hungarian emigration. They have small pink noses, wear knitted caps pulled down to their eyebrows, and can see on dark street corners the terrible ghost of Béla Kun. They have forgotten that Magdalena once seemed, perhaps, disreputable. She is a devout Catholic, and she says cultivated, moral-sounding things, sweet to the ears of half a dozen widows of generals and bereft sisters of bachelor diplomats. They crowd her bedside table with bottles of cough mixture, lemons, embroidered table napkins, jars of honey, and covered bowls of stewed plums, the juice from which always spills. They call Magdalena “Lena.”

She occupies a bed in the only place that would have her — a hospital on the northern rim of Paris, the colour of jails, daubed with graffiti. The glass-and-marble lobby commemorates the flashy prosperity of the nineteen-sixties. It contains, as well as a vandalized coffee machine and a plaque bearing the name of a forgotten Minister of Health, a monumental example of the art of twenty years ago: a white foot with each toenail painted a different colour. In order to admire this marvel, and to bring Magdalena the small comforts I think she requires, I need to travel a tiring distance by the underground suburban train. On these expeditions I carry a furled umbrella: the flat, shadeless light of this line is said to attract violent crime. In my wallet I have a card attesting to my right to sit down, because of an accident suffered in wartime. I never dare show the card. I prefer to stand. Anything to do with the Second World War, particularly its elderly survivors, arouses derision and ribaldry and even hostility in the young.