The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (47 page)

Peering into Madame Gisèle’s magic hand mirror again to see what
she
can see, Amalia does not recognize her own face. Two years ago, when she knew that Marie would be coming to Paris, Amalia dyed her graying hair. Later, she saw her reflection in the glass covering an old photograph of Marie (the photograph taken to Madame Gisèle for mystical guesswork) and she saw two faces and believed them to be both her own. What am I now, she wondered. I am the one I left and the other one I became. Marie is still herself.… Now Amalia knows she was mistaken; Marie is also two. When Marie did arrive in Paris, when she got down from the train that terrifying morning and lumbered toward them, out of the past, holding out her arms, Dino and Amalia would never have known her if Marie had not cried out their names. They had been waiting all night for the past, and they were embraced by a ridiculous stranger who had no one to love but them. Dino pushed out his lips in the Eastern grimace of triumph and contempt, but close to his frightened heart, with his work permit and residence permit and proof of existence and assurance of identity and evidence of domicile, he carried—still carries—a folded piece of paper covered with figures in red ink. It is a statement of account for Marie, if ever she should ask for it. It will show how little Dino received for the rings and gold pieces she gave Amalia when Dino and Amalia left Bucharest sixteen years ago. “Send for me later,” Marie had said, and they kissed on the promise. Dino has a round face, blond hair, small uptilted blue eyes, and a nose like a cork on a bottle, but of course he is pure Romanian—a Latin, that is. There is not a drop of foreign blood in any of them: no Greek, no Turkish, no Magyar, no Slav, no Teuton, no Serb. He is represented in the cards by the king of clubs, a dark card, but Amalia prefers it to diamonds. Diamonds mean “stranger.”

Madame Gisèle turns the hand mirror facedown, because when Amalia looks in it she is getting more than her money’s worth.

“Oh, why did Marie ever come here?” Amalia says. In Bucharest they would have given her a pension, in time. They might have sent her to a rest home on the Black Sea. Who will look after her during the long, last illness every émigré dreads? Amalia wonders, What if Marie is insane?

With the word “insane” she is trying to describe Marie’s wishing, her belief that the planets can hear. Amalia is an old expatriate; she knows
how to breathe underwater. Marie is too old to learn. She belongs to irrecoverable time—that has been the trouble from the beginning. She came to Paris nearly two years ago, and has been wishing for something ever since.

This is a common story. Madame Gisèle’s clients are forever worried about lunacy in friends and loved ones. With her left hand she cuts the deck and peers at the queen of diamonds—the stranger, the mortal enemy, the gossip and poisoner of the mind. Surely not Marie?

“Your friend is not insane,” says Madame Gisèle abruptly. “She found work without your help. She has found a room to live in.”

“Yes, by talking to a Romanian on the street! What Romanian? What do we know about him? She talks to anybody. Why did she leave certain people who made a home for her even when they had no room, and even bought her a bed? She found work, yes, but she spends like a fool. Why does she bring certain people the first strawberries of the season? They haven’t asked for anything. They can live on soup and apples. Marie is old and sick and silly. She says, ‘Look, Amalia, look at the new moon.’ What do you know about Marie? You don’t know anything.”

“Why do you come, if you don’t want to hear what I say?” shouts Madame Gisèle, in her village dialect. “Your brain is mildewed, your husband murdered his mother, your friend is a whore!”

These are standard insults and no more offensive than a sneeze.
“Parlons français,” says
Amalia, folding her hands on Marie’s X rays. She will furnish proof of Marie’s dementia, if she can—it seems an obligation suddenly.

“I am the last to deny that Marie was a whore,” she begins. “She was kept by a married man. When Dino and I were engaged and I brought him to her flat for the first time, she answered the door dressed in her underwear. But remember that in Bucharest we are a Latin race, and in the old days it was not uncommon for a respectable man to choose an apartment, select the furniture, and put a woman in it. After this man’s wife died, he would have married Marie, but it was too late. He was too ill. Marie nursed this man when he was dying. She could have left with Dino and me but she stayed.”

“It was easier for two to come out then than three,” says Madame Gisèle, to whom this is not a complete story. “Certain people may have encouraged her to stay behind.”

“If everyone left, what would become of the country?” says Amalia, which is what every old émigré has to say about new arrivals. “Listen to me. I think Marie is insane.”

One day, soon after Marie had come to Paris, before she had found work in a shop by talking to a Romanian on the street, Amalia walked with her in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. It was by no means a promenade; Amalia was on one of the worried errands that make up her day—this time, going to the snack bar where the cook, who is from Bucharest, saves stale bread for people who no longer need it. Once you have needed this bread, you cannot think of its going to anyone else. Marie walked too slowly—her legs hurt her, and she was admiring the avenue. Amalia left her under a chestnut tree. If the tree had opened and encased Marie, Amalia would have thought, God is just, for Marie was a danger, and her presence might pull Amalia and Dino back and down to trouble with the police, which is to say the floor of the sea.

“Listen, Marie,” began Amalia to herself, having disposed of Marie on a bench. “We never sent for you because we never were ready. You’ve seen the hole we live in? We bought it with your rings. We sleep in a cupboard—it has no windows. That piece of cotton hanging is a door. We call this a dining room because it has a table and three chairs—we bought the third chair when we knew you were coming. There is your new bed, between the chair and the curtain. Dino will curse you every time he stumbles against it. The trees of Paris? The flower stalls? We have the biggest garage of Paris in the middle of our square. The square should be called Place du Garage St.-Honoré now. I want to tell you also that most of the things you gave me were worth nothing. Only diamonds matter, and the best were stolen when we were coming through Bulgaria and Greece. When we first came to live here, where the garage stands now there were baskets of fruit and flowers.”

Returning with her newspaper parcel of stale bread, Amalia looks for Marie. Marie has vanished. Amalia understands that some confused wishing of her own, some abracadabra pronounced without knowing its powers, has caused her old friend to disintegrate. She, Amalia, will be questioned about it.

Marie is not far away. She has left the bench and is sitting on the ground. Pigeons cluster around her—they go to anyone. Her eyes are globed with tears. The tears are suspended, waiting, and every line of her body seems hurt and waiting for greater pain. Whatever has hurt her is nothing to what is to come. Amalia rushes forward, calling. Marie is not crying at all. She holds out a chestnut. “Look,” she says.

“Where did it come from?” cries Amalia wildly, as if she has forgotten where she is.

Marie gets to her feet like a great cow. “It was still in its case; it must be left over from last year.”

“They turn dark and ugly in a minute,” says Amalia, and she throws it away.

As proof of madness this is fairly thin, except for the part about sitting on the ground. Amalia, remembering that she is paying for time, now takes the tack that Madame Gisèle is concealing what she knows. “It is up to you to convince me,” she says.
“Will Marie go to America?”

“Everyone travels,” says Madame Gisèle.

Well, that is true. The American consulate is full of ordinary tourists who can pay their passage and will see, they hope, Indian ceremonial dances. Amalia is told that scholars are admitted to the great universities for a year, two years, with nothing required, not even a knowledge of English. Who will want Marie, who actually does speak a little English but has nonsensical legs, no relations, and thinks she can sell corsets in a store? Marie filled out the forms they gave her months ago, and received a letter saying, “You are not legible.”

“How funny,” said the girl in the consulate when Marie and Amalia returned with the letter. “They mean eligible.”

“What does it mean?” said Marie.

“It is a mistake, but it means you can’t go to the United States. Not as your situation is now.”

“If it is a mistake—”

“One word is a mistake.”

“Then the whole letter might be wrong.”

To Amalia, standing beside her, Marie seems unable to support something just then—perhaps the weight of her own clothes. Amalia reviews her friend’s errors—her broken English, her plucked eyebrows, her flat feet in glossy shoes, the fact that she stayed in Romania when it was time to leave and left when it was better to stay. “Will my clothes be all right for there?” says Marie, because Amalia is staring.

“You may not be going. Didn’t you hear the young lady?”

“This isn’t the last word, or the last letter. You will see.” Marie is confident—she shows her broken teeth.

Madame Gisèle is interested, though she has heard this before. She cuts the deck and says, “Here it is—
réception d’une missive peu compréhensible.”

“Pff—fourteen months ago that was,” says Amalia. “Then they wrote and asked for centimeter-by-centimeter enlargements of the pictures of her lungs. You haven’t told me why Marie left the friends who had bought her a bed.”

“Because she found a room by talking to another Romanian on the street.”

“That is true. But she had the room for days, weeks even, before she decided to leave.”

“Something must have made her decide,” says Madame Gisèle. “No one can say I am not trying, but your questions are not clear. I am expecting another client, and I have to take the dog out.”

“There must be another reason. Look again.”

Every evening when she came home from work, Marie helped Amalia chop the vegetables for the evening soup. They sat face-to-face across a thick board on which were the washed leeks, the potatoes, the onions, and the parsley. Amalia wondered if she and Marie looked the same, with their hands misshapen and twisted and the false meekness of their bent heads. Living had bent them, Amalia would begin to say, and emigration, and being women, and oh, she supposed, the war. “At least you didn’t marry a peasant,” Amalia said once. “At least I know what class I am from. My ancestors could read and write from the time of Julius Caesar, and my grandfather owned his own house.” Marie said nothing. “If only we had been men,” said Amalia, “or had any amount of money, or lived on a different continent …” She looked up, dreaming, the knife in abeyance.

Sometimes Amalia spoke of Dino. Sometimes she giggled as if she and Marie were still Bucharest girls, convent-trained, French-prattling, with sleek Turkish hair, Greek noses, long amber eyes, and not a drop of foreign blood. “Your apartment, Marie?” It was white and gold, Amalia remembered, and there was a row of books that turned out to be not Balzac at all but a concealed bar. There was an original pastel drawing of a naked girl on a diving board, and a musical powder box that played “Valentine.” “After I married Dino, we came back sometimes and sat on the white chairs and watched your friends dancing—do you remember, Marie?—and we waited until they had gone, and you would lend us a little money—we always paid it back—and you gave me a fox scarf, and a pin that showed a sleeping fawn, and a hat made of sequins, and perfume from France—Shalimar. I kept the empty bottle. Your life was French.…” It has always seemed that the old flat furnished by Marie’s dead friend is the real Paris, and the row of Balzac that turns into a bar is the truth about France. “Dino was apprenticed to a glovemaker at the beginning,” Amalia said, “and his hands had a queer smell, something to do with the leather, and he never
dared ask the girls to dance.” Marie went on chopping leeks, holding the knife by the handle and blade in both swollen hands. Amalia said, “He’s afraid of you, Marie, because you remember all that. He was always mean and stingy, and he hasn’t changed. Remember the first present he ever gave me?”

“A gold locket,” said Marie gently.

“Gold? Don’t make me laugh. I put it around my neck and said, ‘I’ll never take it off,’ and he said, ‘You had better sometimes because the yellow will wear off.’ ”

She laughed, laughing into the past as if she were no longer afraid of it. “He hasn’t changed. I thought of leaving him. Yes, I was going to write to you and say, ‘I am leaving him now.’ But by then we had so many years of worry behind us, and everywhere I looked that worry was like a big stone in the road.”

Marie nodded, as if she knew. She never said much, never confided. Amalia snatched away the last of the vegetables and said, “Let me finish. You are so slow,” and then Dino came in and slapped the table with the flat of his hand, so as to send the women flying apart, one to put the soup on the stove and the other to go out and buy the evening paper, which he had forgotten. It happens every night for a year, it can happen all your life, Amalia was thinking, and suddenly you have all those years like a stone. But Marie once sat quietly and said, “Listen, Dino,” so carefully that he did seem to hear. “I am not your slave. Perhaps I will be a slave one day, but I don’t want to learn the habit of slavery. I am well and strong, and my whole life is before me, and I am working, and I have a room. Yes, I am going to live alone now. Oh, not far away, but somewhere else.”