Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

Ramsay had accepted the old man’s bed, but the bath repelled him. He was glad when, one day, the taps ran nothing but rust and he was obliged to share one of the bathrooms in the house. He came into an early-morning house, with the cook stirring and the little boy eating bread on the stairs, and Nanette, encountered in the hall, wearing a striped bathrobe. Nanette had left the room full of steam and lavender. Wet washcloths festooned the tub. He removed a wire hanger holding six stockings, and, just before he turned the shower on, he listened to church bells and to thunder. Ten minutes later the lawn was obliterated by gray smoke. The tree where Pip had hunted was still. Over the thunderclap came more bells, as if to silence the sky. The wind rose all in a moment, and the first drops of rain were flung against the house. By the time he had finished shaving, soft silent rain fell from a bright sky. The air was cold. Birds sang, but the strongest sound was a brook. Now a voice covered it — Katharine’s voice, complaining about last night’s supper. “The soup was out of a can, the hamburger was cooked black, and I don’t call half a slice of tinned pineapple on a bit of rusk a pudding. It really is unfair — I take the boy over entirely. I keep him out of the kitchen. You’ve got nothing to do but the meals. As for the salad, there was too much vinegar and too much oil. I don’t know how you manage to have too much of both.”

In the room where the young girls slept, light came through flimsy curtains. Ramsay, coming into the room, saw Peggy hunched, sheet up to her forehead, tufts of coarse fair hair showing like bristles. Her pillows were on the floor. Anne lay with a leg and an arm and a small breast outside the blanket. On the pillow a wreath of dead wild flowers was half crushed by her head. Her brown smooth face was lightly oiled. Watching the sleeping girl, he knew what he could be capable of, provided she loathed him, or was frightened of him. Better fear than hate. When he touched Anne her breathing changed; he thought he saw a gleam between her lashes. Watching, she made no move. She was waiting to see what could happen. Outside, Katharine called, “Pip, Pip!” beating her hands. Peggy awoke and, with a rapidity he would never have thought possible in the dull girl, sat up and looked. There they were, Anne cold and excited, her heart like a machine under his hand, and Ramsay the vivisectionist, and poor Peggy, who had been in love.

To amuse Ramsay, Katharine now organized excursions. She took them to restaurants where they lunched sitting on balconies brilliant with roses, where she ordered the food with frowning care, putting on her glasses to read the menu, suggesting and planning for them all. She had noticed that he was greedy. She watched him, sagely and fondly. She had wakened something — perhaps only a craving for strawberries and cream — she later intended to curb. Nanette looked at her, and at Ramsay, and began having headaches, and finally dropped out of their party altogether. She looked dark and wretched when she was left behind. “The truth is, she gets carsick,” said Katharine, as if some other excuse had been offered and was a lie. The young girls looked through Ramsay and round him and not much at each other. They played an acquisitive game called Take It Home and fought over museums, ancient jewelry, ski lifts, whole restaurants, a view, a horse, other people’s cars, but stopped short of people. Peggy was pink with joy at being included, but Ramsay knew that she, and not Anne, had been scared to death that morning in their bedroom.

After these excursions he was stiff and sore, and could hardly move his arms and legs at night or turn in bed. His memory of each day was of eating and drinking beer on blowy terraces and of parasols knocked down by wind. Katharine took him to see a famous church treasure, and to Zurchers for tea, where they sat next to Noël Coward, and to Lausanne for an exhibition of French sculpture and painting. She brought the cook’s child this time, and the two girls went to a movie. Katharine wore her glasses, and looked at the catalogue in her hand before examining any of the paintings. The two men of the household walked one on each side of her. Ramsay, shut up in a series of large rooms full of paintings, rid of three out of four of the women, began to breathe.

“These Impressionists,” he began. “They seem kind of tied to their wives, you know what I mean. They were limited to their wives’ gardens. You feel they all had something wrong with them and that the wife was waiting with a cup of tea and some medicine.” Katharine glanced at him. That had been her role, and she knew that he knew it.

“Sit down, Douglas,” she said, suggesting the circular sofa in the middle of the room. “You must be tired, after all this walking around. There is nothing more tiring than looking at things that don’t interest one.”

Ramsay found himself sitting and looking at the headless statue of an adolescent girl. He looked at the small breasts, slightly down-pointed. The hips were wider than the chest, the legs columns. A piece of bronze, he told himself. No one had ever been like that. He put Anne’s head on the bronze neck, and presently was conscious of being watched. It was the boy, who was running round and round the sofa. The little boy circled closer. He sat down, and Ramsay smiled into what seemed an open face. The child breathed something difficult to hear. He pointed at Ramsay (and he had to bring his hand all the way from a far place to do so; he liked great gestures). He breathed again — something that sounded like “Idiot.”

“What?”

“Idiot,” the child said. The index finger still pointed; the arm was a soft arc.

“Who?”

“Vous .”

Ramsay stared down at him in fury and outrage. “Idiot, am I? What do you think you are? You supposed to be clever?”

The child did not understand English, but he understood the tone. A mistake had been made; he had been bolder than he intended. “You, for instance,” said Ramsay. “What are you supposed to be? Tu n’es pas un peu idiot?”

“Moi, je suis gentil,” said the child, sliding off the sofa and beginning to back away. His face trembled. He said “zentil,” but this evidence of his age — his inability to pronounce some letters — did not endear him to Ramsay, who rushed on, “You’re a rude little bastard. Gentil! You’re a little bastard, that’s what you are.”

From the safety of Katharine, the child looked boldly back. What a fool I’ve been, Ramsay thought. Of course the child had not remarked he was looking at the statue of an adolescent girl and thinking spellbound thoughts about Anne.

“Peggy wants to go back to England,” said Katharine, and sighed.

“But she hates her family,” Nanette protested.

“She may not know she does.”

“She’s fourteen and old enough to admit that her father isn’t a god and her mother an angel,” said Nanette.

“That is true.” Katharine bowed her head with simulated meekness.

Anne appeared, with wet hair plastered on her cheeks. She washed it daily. She was struggling with a pullover. “Are you talking about me?” she said as her head emerged. “I thought I heard my name. Peggy is packing, by the way.” She plunged down on the grass at their feet and said, “We’ve decided she’s leaving because I’ve been so awful to her.”

“I shall speak to her,” Katharine said, looking oddly like the woman Ramsay had imagined before he ever saw her.

“I have been awful to her,” said Anne. “You won’t make her change her mind.”

“It is the same story every time she comes here,” said Katharine. “That wretched girl always threatens to leave because of some nonsense she has imagined. It used to be —” Nanette stopped her. “Now it is Anne she complains of,” Katharine said.