Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“I never drink,” she said. They stood on the edge of a broad avenue. The wrong turning now could lead them anywhere; it was the changeable avenue at the edge of towns that loses its houses and becomes a highway. She held his arm and spoke in a gentle voice. She said, “In our house we didn’t smoke or drink. My mother was ambitious for me, more than for Harry and the others.” She said, “I’ve never been alone before. When I was a kid I would get up in the summer before the others, and I’d see the ice wagon going down the street. I’m alone now. Mrs. Burleigh’s found me an apartment. It’s only one room. She likes it because it’s in the old part of town. I don’t like old houses. Old houses are dirty. You don’t know who was there before.”

“I should have a car somewhere,” Peter said. “I’m not sure where we are.”

He remembers that on this avenue they climbed into a taxi, but nothing about the drive. Perhaps he fell asleep. He does remember that when he paid the driver Agnes clutched his arm, trying to stop him. She pressed extra coins into the driver’s palm. The driver was paid twice.

“I’ll tell you one thing about us,” said Peter. “We pay everything twice.” This was part of a much longer theory concerning North American behavior, and it was not Peter’s own. Mike Burleigh had held forth about it on summer afternoons.

Agnes pushed open a door between a stationer’s shop and a grocery, and led the way up a narrow inside stair. They climbed one flight, frightening beetles. She had to search every pocket for the latchkey. She was shaking with cold. Her apartment seemed little warmer than the street. Without speaking to Peter she turned on all the lights. She looked inside the kitchen and the bathroom and then got down on her hands and knees and looked under the sofa. The room was neat and belonged to no one. She left him standing in this unclaimed room — she had forgotten him — and closed a door behind her. He looked for something to do — some useful action he could repeat to Madge. He turned on the electric radiator in the fireplace. Perhaps Agnes wouldn’t thank him for it; perhaps she would rather undress in the cold. “I’ll be on my way,” he called to the bathroom door.

She had taken off the tramp’s clothes and put on a dressing gown of orphanage wool. She came out of the bathroom and straight toward him. She pressed her face and rubbed her cheek on his shoulder as if hoping the contact would leave a scar. He saw her back and her profile and his own face in the mirror over the fireplace. He thought, This is how disasters happen. He saw floods of sea water moving with perfect punitive justice over reclaimed land; he saw lava covering vineyards and overtaking dogs and stragglers. A bridge over an abyss snapped in two and the long express train, suddenly V-shaped, floated like snow. He thought amiably of every kind of disaster and thought, This is how they occur.

Her eyes were closed. She said, “I shouldn’t be over here. In my family we didn’t drink or smoke. My mother wanted a lot from me, more than from Harry and the others.” But he knew all that; he had known from the day of the Bible, and because once, at the beginning, she had made him afraid. He was not afraid of her now.

She said, “It’s no use staying here, is it?”

“If you mean what I think, no.”

“It wouldn’t be better anywhere.”

She let him see full on her blotched face. He was not expected to do anything. He was not required to pick her up when she fell or wipe her tears. She was poor quality, really — he remembered having thought that once. She left him and went quietly into the bathroom and locked the door. He heard taps running and supposed it was a hot bath. He was pretty certain there would be no more tears. He looked at his watch: Sheilah must be home, now, wondering what had become of him. He descended the beetles’ staircase and for forty minutes crossed the city under a windless fall of snow.

The neighbor’s child who had stayed with Peter’s children was asleep on the living-room sofa. Peter woke her and sent her, sleepwalking, to her own door. He sat down, wet to the bone, thinking, I’ll call the Burleighs. In half an hour I’ll call the police. He heard a car stop and the engine running and a confusion of two voices laughing and calling goodnight. Presently Sheilah let herself in, rosy-faced, smiling. She carried his trenchcoat over her arm. She said, “How’s Agnes?”

“Where were you?” he said. “Whose car was that?”

Sheilah had gone into the children’s room. He heard her shutting their window. She returned, undoing her dress, and said, “Was Agnes all right?”

“Agnes is all right. Sheilah, this is about the worst …”

She stepped out of the Balenciaga and threw it over a chair. She stopped and looked at him and said, “Poor old Pete, are you in love with Agnes?” And then, as if the answer were of so little importance she hadn’t time for it, she locked her arms around him and said, “My love, we’re going to Ceylon.”

Two days later, when Peter strolled into his office, Agnes was at her desk. She wore the blue dress, with a spotless collar. White and yellow freesias were symmetrically arranged in the glass jar. The room was hot, and the spring snow, glued for a second when it touched the window, blurred the view of parked cars.

“Quite a party,” Peter said.

She did not look up. He sighed, sat down, and thought if the snow held he would be skiing at the Burleighs’ very soon. Impressed by his kindness to Agnes, Madge had invited the family for the first possible weekend.

Presently Agnes said, “I’ll never drink again or go to a house where people are drinking. And I’ll never bother anyone the way I bothered you.”

“You didn’t bother me,” he said. “I took you home. You were alone and it was late. It’s normal.”

“Normal for you, maybe, but I’m used to getting home by myself. Please never tell what happened.”

He stared at her. He can still remember the freesias and the Bible and the heat in the room. She looked as if the elements had no power. She felt neither heat nor cold. “Nothing happened,” he said.

“I behaved in a silly way. I had no right to. I led you to think I might do something wrong.”

“ I might have tried something,” he said gallantly. “But that would be my fault and not yours.”

She put her knuckle to her mouth and he could scarcely hear. “It was because of you. I was afraid you might be blamed, or else you’d blame yourself.”

“There’s no question of any blame,” he said. “Nothing happened. We’d both had a lot to drink. Forget about it. Nothing happened . You’d remember if it had.”

She put down her hand. There was an expression on her face. Now she sees me, he thought. She had never looked at him after the first day. (He has since tried to put a name to the look on her face; but how can he, now, after so many voyages, after Ceylon, and Hong Kong, and Sheilah’s nearly leaving him, and all their difficulties — the money owed, the rows with hotel managers, the lost and found steamer trunk, the children throwing up the foreign food?) She sees me now, he thought. What does she see?

She said, “I’m from a big family. I’m not used to being alone. I’m not a suicidal person, but I could have done something after that party, just not to see any more, or think or listen or expect anything. What can I think when I see these people? All my life I heard, Educated people don’t do this, educated people don’t do that. And now I’m here, and you’re all educated people, and you’re nothing but pigs. You’re educated and you drink and do everything wrong and you know what you’re doing, and that makes you worse than pigs. My family worked to make me an educated person, but they didn’t know you. But what if I didn’t see and hear and expect anything any more? It wouldn’t change anything. You’d all be still the same. Only you might have thought it was your fault. You might have thought you were to blame. It could worry you all your life. It would have been wrong for me to worry you.”