Mavis Gallant - Montreal Stories

No matter where I was posted, whether abroad or back in Ottawa, I usually managed to spend a brief summer vacation in France. There I dispensed with women altogether, caught up on my reading, and tried to write a book. I meant it to be a summary of recent times, with my experiences and judgment used tactfully, never intrusively, as a binding thread. I would have called it “My Century,” but the title had already been employed by a celebrated Polish poet. Every year at high summer, I was driven to unpack my Hermes, set it on the marble table in the shadiest part of the terrace, roll in a sheet of Extra Strong, and type “Chapter 1.” I could see a tamed and orderly design of streams and rivulets (early youth, intellectual awakening) feeding a tranquil river that debouched into a limpid sea. Unfortunately, it wanted only a few minutes for the sea to churn up and disgorge a ton of dead fish. Most people considered great were in reality only average; middling masters I held in contempt; as for amateurs in any field, I saw no reason why they should not be airlifted to Mongolia and left to forage. Obviously, this was of no interest to anyone except cranks; yet I felt no spite, no disappointment, no envy of younger men. I had done nearly everything I wanted, and had been as successful as my aunt had hoped.

After half an hour I would push the typewriter aside, open a thick notebook, uncap the gold Parker I was given years ago for having passed, unexpectedly well, an examination in political science, and write, “Chapter 1.” Then I would cap the pen and stare at the Mediterranean, wondering if the wisp of darkness on the horizon could be a mirage projection of Corsica.

Apart from this activity I ate breakfast and lunch at home, went down for a swim early, when no one was around, played some tennis at a court up near the railway station, and dined with elderly neighbors. At the end of a few weeks I bolted the window shutters, disconnected and locked up the telephone (so that burglars would not be tempted to make long-distance calls), and returned to the wrack and low tide of my profession.

Not long ago, I sold the house where Carlotta came to look for me. The wreckers may have saved some of the tiles from the terrace floor, with their worn pattern of olive leaves. It used to be reached by a downhill flight of steps from a noisy highway. The steps continued almost all the way to the sea and came to a stop at a hedge of scarred cactus, bounding a narrow and stony public beach. Prewar cottages and villas descended the slope, with the stairs as common thoroughfare. My terrace overlooked a particularly ugly and derelict cottage; for years I had tried to buy it from its greedy absentee owner, so that I might have it razed and a garden put there instead. Unfortunately, while I was lingering in the Tuamotu Archipelago, trying to give Sandra enough rope, my Belgian tenant had met the asking price, and now maintained the wreck as a picturesque eyesore. That summer, it was occupied by his niece, Irma Baes, an amateur artist of great stamina and enthusiasm.

There was a gate at the top of the steps, kept locked. The postman no longer included us in his rounds. This, and the shape and variety of aerials on every rooftop, and the installation of Irma Baes, were the most remarkable changes on my side of the gate. Beyond it nearly everything had altered.

“I just jiggled the lock,” said Carlotta, when I asked how she’d got inside. There was a taxi up on the road, with an eight-kilometer fare on its meter, which was still ticking over. She had no money, she said — no cash, that is; just a lot of traveler’s checks. She talked in the accents of modern Montreal — accents that render the speaker unplaceable except within vast regional boundaries. One would have guessed she was not from Mississippi or California, not much else. Lily had had the old Quebec-Irish inflection.

I settled the cab, locked the iron gate, and fastened the chain bolt; it could be removed by reaching through iron bars, but no matter. Carlotta meantime had carried the telephone outside and lay prone on the warm terrace, talking to Lily, or perhaps to some transatlantic drifter she had picked up and turned into an intimate friend. I wondered if she knew enough French to deal with a local operator and to reverse charges. I am sure I was not niggardly, but I would be retiring before long on a tight pension; my personal capital, scrupulously amassed, judiciously invested, might need a long stretch. In my family, old people seemed to hang on forever, exacting and hale. My parents lasted nearly a century, offering to the brink of speechlessness their unsolicited advice.

Carlotta said, “Kiss, kiss,” and “Bye,” and “O.K., I’ll tell him that.” She smiled up at me and said, “It’s all right for me to stay here, Steve. I mean, if it’s all right with you. Just two days. I’m going to Paris, but my mother’s friends can’t take me right away. Their place is full up.”

Only a few women still called me Steve. She was using inherited form. When I was much younger, around the time when Lily ran away with Mr. Chadwick’s gardener, I changed my signature from “Steven B. Burnet” to “S. Blake Burnet” and became, I thought, a different person. Old school friends went on saying “Burney,” but new acquaintances took it for granted my name must be Blake. I was just twenty-five, the age when new acquaintances gradually begin to fill one’s life.

I was not accustomed to addressing recumbent adolescents. I wished Carlotta would stand or at least sit up. I said the first thing that came into my head: “Do you mean to say that your family let you come to France without making any arrangements for you?” I kept back a question just as insistent: how it was that Lily knew I still had this house. My aunt and her parents had once been settled in the same town, Châtelroux, just south of Montreal, but several significant streets apart. The Quales were rooted in Catholic, English-speaking, bungalow territory. Most Catholics were French Canadian. The Quales and their kind seemed wedged like a piece from the wrong puzzle between English Protestants and French Catholics, matching neither in coloration or design. (The Quales were probably capable of making great sacrifices, my aunt had once said. They had eked out a year of boarding school for their unaccountable daughter.)

“No,” said Carlotta, trailing scorn for elderly hebetude. She had just spent a week with a couple in Monaco, people her stepfather knew. The lady was nice, but the man had tried.

“Tried what?”

“Just tried. I had to lock my bedroom door.” She raised an arm, as though signaling, and imitated turning a key.

“Where do these people live?”

“I just told you. In Monaco. They’ve got a house, and a sort of dried-up garden. There was no water in the shower half the time.”

“Where was his wife while you were locking your door?”

“In the Princess Grace Hospital,” she said, without a dot of hesitation. “She got a bleeding ulcer from some stuff she drank.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Some sort of cleaning fluid.”

“I must speak to your mother,” I said. “Where is she? In Montreal?”

Carlotta got to her feet. I was confronted by myself in her opaque dark glasses. “Not in summer. In summer they’re mostly in Vermont. Anyway, I’ve just talked to her.”

“I’ve only your word for it.”

A harsh thing to say to someone young, but she answered equably, “When I called them from Monaco, they said if I couldn’t find you I was to fly home. So I said I’d found you. Anyway, my stepfather’s going to call you. You never gave me a chance to say. He’s waiting for midnight. He never calls before midnight, except on business.”

“How did you get away from the house? Didn’t that man try to stop you?”