Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

Katharine Moser, companion of genius, generator of talent, dispenser of comfort, and mind reader as well, said, without leading up to it, “I suppose you were close to your mother?” They were in the car, and she was driving him he did not know quite where — to fetch drinking water from a spring, she said.

“I was closer to my father, actually” — this reluctantly. He pinched his lips together, for he had in his pocket one of his mother’s long, self-justifying letters, jumpy with dates: “In January 1946,” “Just after the Korean War,” “When we met at Bonaventure” — that was the important date, when he was not conceived, was not present, was not even deaf, blind, and upside down. She defeated him by making him present on that occasion. He was still her witness, as if she had wanted nothing more than a witness. He saw her belted coat, her curly hair brushing the collar, her straight bare legs. He was afraid of contamination; his father’s sweetness, his gentleness were in the blood. He knew — because many times told — how she had been persuaded. Victory for the man! Yet it was she who stood up abruptly, slung her handbag over her shoulder, and took him home to bed.

“You are so quiet — you live in music, I can see that,” said Katharine, driving. “Do you have” — she sounded eighty-five and senile to him now — “time for girls?”

He had slept badly, and his legs were too long for the Mini-Minor. He edged slowly around so that he was facing her profile and, after the second’s reflection in which he decided not to say, “Mind your own damn business,” he suddenly told her about Sabine. He handed over Sabine, the slut, the innocent, the admirer of her own body, the good-natured, the stupid, the avaricious, the maker and seeker of love. The first woman he had spent a whole night with became an anecdote. He said, “Finally, she met an Arab prince. I mean a real one, in skirts. Jewelled dagger. He gave her some crappy bracelets that probably came from Hong Kong. She was excited. Every time you’d see her she’d be trying to write him a letter. But she made an awful mistake. When he left Berlin she said, ‘Well, shalom. ’ She thought it was a kind of Middle Eastern ‘Ciao.’ You know what the Arab said? He said, ‘That’s not exactly us.’ ” Ramsay’s laughter was loud.

“And that wiped her out as a wife for you? Her bêtise?”

“I’m not looking for a wife.” He wondered if she knew he was twenty and would have to live for a long time on grants and on the allowance his father gave him.

“Creative men should marry young. It stabilizes them.”

What was she getting at? He looked at her calm profile, at her competent hands. She had the habit of opening and closing her hands as she drove, and slightly lifting her foot, so that the car, for a fraction of time, had to drive itself — though never long enough to take them off the road. He muttered about affinities and someone whose interests, whose mind and background …

“That’s not marriage,” said Katharine impatiently. “You didn’t sleep with Sabine for her mind and background. Moser did his best work after he married me. I brought him back to the country, where he belonged. I made his life calm and easy, and kept him close to nature.”

Owing to a mistake in time, he was having a conversation with a very young girl who was somehow old enough to be his mother.

“I would have thought that anything Moser did was separated from nature,” he said. “He would have been what he was in a hotel room. In jail.”

“Without the wind in the trees and the larks?”

Ramsay reflected that these had probably been a nuisance. Katharine’s letters had been intelligent; she had used another vocabulary. If she had talked about the wind and larks, he would never have come. “I’ve explained it all wrong,” he said, though he thought he had not. “I mean that everything he did was intellectual. He was divorced from nature by intention. Now do you see?”

“Nothing can be divorced from nature and survive.” She looked angry, creased suddenly. He saw how she would be fifteen years from now. “Look at what has happened to music. To painting. It is the fault of people like you.”

He should have let it go, but he was angry too. Who was she to attack him? She had invited him here; he had not arrived like a baby on the doorstep. When the old man died, Ramsay had written a polite and thoughtful letter to his widow, in care of the Swiss nation, and had been surprised to receive a warm embrace of an answer, in English. She had kept on writing; she had — the fine, and humorous, and courageous hospital nurse. (He forgot how it had pleased him, for once in his life, to play up to a situation, to pretend it was not over his head, to show off his opinions, pretending all the while to be diffident — to gather favor, to charm.)

If, at this moment, she was thinking, You are not what I expected, she was to blame. She was ignorant of music. She was the persistent artists’ friend who inspires nothing but a profound lack of gratitude. He was feeling it now. He said, “Painters learn to paint by looking at pictures, not at hills and valleys, and musicians listen to music, not the wind in the trees. Everything Moser said and wrote was unnatural. It was unnatural because he was sophisticated.” Her head shot round, and to her blazing eyes he said, bewildered, “It is a compliment.”

They drove on in a silence that presently became unbearable. “Very soon it’s too late,” his mother had remarked, of quarrels. Her staccato letter jumped through his mind: “I said if you can’t take a holiday when I need one I had better go without you. I shall go where there are plenty of men, I promise you that. He said, Go where you like my darling. I said, A woman like me shouldn’t travel alone. I must have bitched up my life. He had the gall to say, All right I agree you’ve bitched it up but it wasn’t all my fault. I was driving and I felt his crippled existence beside me and I thought mine might not be better. The weather is beautiful as it always is in Montreal when he is being impossible. There must be more accidents more murders more nervous breakdowns more hell in October and June. Where was I? Oh yes. When I got out of the car I saw he was crying. Pity for himself? Guilt over me?”

All at once Katharine parked sharply. Reaching behind her for a basket of empty bottles that had been rattling on the floor, she said (smiling to show they were friends again), “Is it true you have never seen a spring?” In an evil grotto a trickle of water squeezed out of the rock. A mossy stone pipe rested on the edge of a very old bathtub and dispensed a stream that overflowed the tub and ran deviously along a bed of stones, under a stone bridge, and out of sight. They stood, she worshipping, he blinking merely, each crowned with a whirling wreath of gnats. “I own this source,” she said, and to his horror she immersed the bottles one by one in the tub. She filled each with typhoid fever, conjunctivitis, amoebic dysentery, blood poisoning, and boils. She capped them, smiling all the while, and put them back dripping in the basket; the basket was packed in the car, and they drove away.

Night after night he fought flies, midges, mosquitoes, and moths, most of which expired on his pillow or on the white bedsheet. They seemed determined to perish upon a white expansion — some mountaintop of their own insect literature and mythology — instead of going and dying in a corner where Ramsay need never see them again. One night a dying fly got in his wastebasket and thrashed and buzzed. Every time he thought it had stopped it began again. At luncheon next day he told how it had kept him awake.