Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“I want to see you alone,” said Anne to her mother casually, “when you’ve finished with Peggy.”

Katharine was already walking across the lawn, in her striped dress, in an old, large straw hat, with all her bracelets rattling. Throughout this exchange Ramsay might as well have been invisible. The group was disintegrating. The cook’s child no longer came to lunch. Ramsay could observe all he liked now, for there was no one to catch him at it. Even the old man’s phantom had vanished. Ramsay no longer saw or felt him, demanding chocolate, querulous and lost, too cosseted, smothered, destroyed. “Yesterday,” said Nanette’s small radio, “was the hottest twenty-second of June since 1873.” Ramsay isolated three birds by sound: one asking a question, one cackling derisively, one talking to itself in a conversational tone.

Picked out in the headlights, a badger crossed the road, steadily, like an enormous dachshund. It turned and looked into the lights, and Ramsay, sitting next to Katharine, experienced the revulsion he felt in the presence of animals and wild creatures in particular. They had taken Peggy to the airport at Geneva and there — as at the exhibition of French paintings — he had felt completely himself and at home.

Back at the chalet was the incomprehensible language of birds, and the cat with its savage nature, and the cannibal magpies, the cannibal jays.

“If we park here, the car will be in shade tomorrow,” he said.

“No, the trees are on the wrong side,” Katharine said.

“There must be some shade, no matter which side they’re on.”

“You would have thought that after years of this, they would either have enlarged the garage,” Ramsay remarked to himself, “or built another, or figured out which side of the trees received the morning sun.” The car lights were put out, and flashlights distributed. Larch branches pressed on the car windows, white in the night. Katharine sat as the others — Anne and Nanette — got out. Ramsay, holding the door for her, shone his flashlight on her face.

“Do you think much about that girl in Berlin?” she said.

No. He thought of his mother in a camel-hair coat, her legs thrust out, staring straight before her. He said, “Most of the time I never think about her.”

“Anne had a conversation with me today,” she said. His stomach contracted; his hands were without strength. He released the switch of the pocket light. “Never mind about it,” said Katharine. “There’s a moon. Anne wants to go to Ascona with Nanette this week. She wants to stay all July. She and Peggy have funny holidays — school in August.”

“Are you letting her?”

“Why not?” she said, without looking at him. “She wants to get away from home, which is normal. I told her she could go wherever she liked. She is old enough. I can’t …”

You can’t read her mail forever, he thought.

“What are your plans, Douglas? You can stay as long as you like. I feel there have been too many people around. We’ve never had a real conversation, have we? I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my cooking in July. I’ve fired the cook.”

The cuckoo, at daybreak, was an interruption to his sleep.

He saw the notes — not as notes of music but as a new kind of shorthand. He did not know enough of the shorthand to read the notes, or enough of the new language to reply. He dreamed that everyone was skeletal, while he had got enormously fat. He got up and dressed — by flashlight, to avoid doing battle with insects — and packed, not caring much what he left behind, and stepped out into the garden. Across the front of the house was a carved inscription, naming the builder, and giving a date — 1780 — and reminding Ramsay, or anyone who stopped to read it, that death waits for life. The motto did not belong to this chalet but came from another region. Katharine had bought it and put it there about a year before Moser’s last stroke. The chalet — like a bison, like a bear — watched him slip and slide down the path with his two suitcases. He sat down in the station shelter in a state of such lunatic joy at his deliverance that presently he was close to tears.

At the pension he went to in Montreux, a tall, dignified woman wearing a white apron greeted Ramsay. His cases were put in an ice-cold room with a linoleum floor. He looked through the north window at another pension, then at the varnished bed, the eiderdown, the table, and the clean, unironed checked cloth. A small Buddha, the only ornament in the room, sat on the chest of drawers. Ramsay picked him up, but no matter how he tried he could not catch Buddha’s eye.

“That was left behind,” the woman said, “by a Professor Doctor. The meal hours are eight, twelve, and seven. Breakfast in your room will be fifty centimes more. With the prices we charge we cannot afford extras.” From the kitchen came a crash of plates and loud cursing. When that died away he heard the soft silent crunching, like silkworms feeding, that came from the dining room, where the others were all at breakfast.

The first thing he unpacked was the unopened box of caramels: Caramels à la crème de Gruyères. He tangled with the Scotch Tape and pulled the box open. It’s only fudge, he thought. He did not know what he had been expecting. He ate half the box — Moser’s legacy — and felt sick, and drank tap water. “Good thing I left,” he told himself, realizing indignantly what he had been driven to. By now they would know he had gone. He had left them up there with the cat and the cannibals. He was down where there were signs of life and work. He found one of the signs in a drawer, left by the Professor Doctor — a drawing of a naked and faceless woman wearing a pearl necklace. At ten he went to a film and watched a pretty German girl mixed up with some man who looked like a toad. But they were all so comfortable and so well dressed, and their problems were real problems, such as money lost and found. He could not sit in the cinema forever, but first things first: his room in the students’ residence in Berlin was taken by someone else until July. He said, “Look here, Katharine, I’m not interested in weather and the color of the sky. I hate knowing what the weather is. I don’t know what you mean by having inner resources. Are you supposed to recite poems from memory while the whole world dissolves into fog, goes away, and stays gone?” He blinked at the sleepy noon streets, the petunias in tubs, the brown balconies with washing under the eaves. He bought a newspaper and saw a prime minister wearing a miner’s helmet. In the middle of the front page, boxed to show its importance, was this:

LES PREMIÈRES FRAMBOISES

Les premières framboises mûrissent sur la rive droite de la vallée .

He translated everything except “mûrissent,” which he could have sworn he had never seen before. He substituted for it “have exploded,” which gave the item some stature. He did not know what he was doing here, unless he was waiting for Katharine to come and find him. In the pension dining room he was the victim of provincial staring, because of his youth and his limp. There came the memory of the months he had spent after his accident completely at the mercy of other people, depending on nurses and resenting it. He had always been active, had lived on decisions; he remembered how his parents had respected him, let him make his own choices about what he would study and the life he would lead. He ate steadily grated carrots, meat, potatoes, wet salad, gray bread. A bowl of custard was placed beside him. He spooned some of it onto his plate, where it ran everywhere. Since the orgy of caramels sweets disgusted him. He dreaded the mattress in his room, but it was only for a night. In the morning he would take the train to Zurich and from there fly to Berlin. His room there was taken, and his girl had vanished — she was too old for him anyway. “Listen, Sabine,” he had said, “is the guy really a prince?” “No, only his bodyguard. But I ruined it anyway with ‘shalom.’ ” Ramsay laughed. “Is not funny,” Sabine said. She showed him what remained of the railway station where both her parents were killed. “Who cares?” she said, meaning “Do you?”