The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (54 page)

The girl’s letter had been written on a line guide. Her hand was firm. “Dear Uncle Walter,” she said. “Thank you for letting us sleep in your house and for everything too. We had a lovely time. Will you please tell Angelo that on the way to Paris Daddy was fined 900 francs for overtaking in a village. He was livid. On Monday I had two teeth out, one on each side. I hope the hamster is healthy. Will you please tell Angelo that our trunks
have arrived with my books and he can have one as a present from me, if he will tell me which one he likes best.

“These are my favorites and so I would like him to have one. Also, here is a poem I have copied out for him from a book.

“Tell Angelo we miss him, and William of Orange, and the hamster too. Thank you again for everything. Your affectionate niece, Mary.”

Walking to the kitchen with the letters in his hand, he tried to see the passionate child—dancer, he had thought—on the summer beach. But although eight days had passed, no more, he had forgotten what she was like. He tried to think of England then. Someone had told him the elms were going, because of an American disease. He knew that all this thinking and drifting was covering one displeasure, one blister on his pride: It was Mary’s letter he had been waiting for.

“These letters are intended for you,” he said, and put them in Angelo’s hands. “They were addressed to me by mistake. Or perhaps the family didn’t know your full name. I didn’t know you were interested in horses, by the way.”

Angelo sat at the kitchen table, cleaning the hamster’s cage. Mme. Rossi sat facing him. Neither of them rose. “Master-servant,” Eve had said. She ought to have seen Angelo’s casual manner now, the way he accepted his morning’s post—as though Walter were the servant. The boy’s secretive face bent over the letters. Already Angelo’s tears were falling. Walter watched, exasperated, as the ink dissolved.

“You can’t keep on crying every time I mention the children,” he said. “Look at the letters now. You won’t be able to read them.”

“He is missing the family,” Mme. Rossi said. “Even though they made more work for him. He cries the whole day.”

Of course he was missing the family. He was missing the family, the children were missing him. Walter looked at the boy’s face, which seemed as closed and vain as a cat’s. “They meant more work for you,” he said. “Did you hear that?”

“We could have kept the children,” Angelo mumbled. His lips hung open. His face was Negroid, plump. One day he would certainly be fat.

“What, brought them up?”

“Only for one week,” said Angelo, wiping his eyes.

“It seems to me you overheard rather a good deal.” Another thought came to him: It would have been a great responsibility. He felt aggrieved that Angelo did not take into consideration the responsibilities Walter already had—for instance, he was responsible for Angelo’s being in France. If Angelo were to steal a car and smash it, Walter would have to make good the loss. He was responsible for the house, which was not his, and for William of Orange, who was no better and no worse, but lay nearly paralyzed in a cardboard box, demanding much of Angelo’s attention. Now he was responsible for a hamster in a cage.

“They would have taken me on the farm,” Angelo said.

“Nonsense.” Walter remembered how Eve avoided a brawl, and he imitated her deliberately mild manner. He understood now that they had been plotting behind his back. He had raised Angelo in cotton wool, taught him Kipling and gardening and how to wash the car, fed him the best food … “My brother-in-law is Irish,” he said. “You mustn’t think his promises are real.”

The boy sat without moving, expressionless, sly. He was waiting for Walter to leave the room so that he could have the letters to himself.

“Would you like to go home, Angelo?” Walter said. “Would you like to go back and live in Italy, back with your family?” Angelo shook his head. Of course he would say no to that; for one thing, they relied on his pocket money—on the postal orders he sent them. An idea came to Walter. “We shall send for your mother,” he said. The idea was radiant now. “We shall bring your old mother here for a visit. Why not? That’s what we shall do. Bring your mother here. She can talk to you. I’m sure that is all you need.”

“Can you imagine that lazy boy on an English farm?” said Walter to Mrs. Wiggott. “That is what I said to him: ‘Have you ever worked as a farmer?
Do you know what it means?’ ” He blotted imaginary tears with his sleeve to show how Angelo had listened. His face was swollen, limp.

“Stop it, Walter,” said Mrs. Wiggott. “I shall
perish.”

“And so now the mother is coming,” said Walter. “That is where the situation has got to. They will all sit in the kitchen eating my food, gossiping in Calabrian. I say ‘all’ because of course she is bound to come with a
covey
of cousins. But I am hoping that when I have explained the situation to the old woman she can reason with Angelo and make him see the light.”

“Darling Walter,” said Mrs. Wiggott. “This could only happen to you.”

“If only I could explain things to Angelo in
our
terms,” said Walter. “How to be a good friend, a decent host, all the rest. Not to expect too much. How to make the best of life, as we do.”

“As we do,” said Mrs. Wiggott, solemn now.

“Live for the minute, I would like to tell him. Look at the things I put up with, without complaint. The summer I’ve had! Children everywhere. Eggs and bacon in the
hottest
weather. High tea—my brother-in-law’s influence, of course. Look at the house I live in. Ugly box, really. I never complain.”

“That is true,” said his old friend.

“No heat in winter. Not an anemone in the garden. Les Anémones, they called it, and not an anemone on the place. Nothing but a lot of irises, and I put those in myself.”

B
ecause I was born on the first day of April, I was given April as a Christian name. Here in Switzerland they make Avril of it, which sounds more like a sort of medicine than a month of spring. “Take a good dose of Avril,” I can imagine Dr. Ehrmann saying, to each of the children. Today was the start of the fifty-first April. I woke up early and sipped my tea, careful not to disturb the dogs sleeping on the foot of the bed on their own Red Cross blanket. I still have nightmares, but the kind of terror has changed. In the hanging dream I am no longer the victim. Someone else is hanged. Last night, in one harrowing dream, one of my own adopted children drowned, there, outside the window, in the Lake of Geneva. I rushed about on the grass, among the swans. I felt dew on my bare feet; the hem of my velvet dressing gown was dark with it. I saw very plainly the children’s toys: the miniature tank Igor has always wanted, and something red—a bucket and spade, perhaps. My hair came loose and tumbled down my back. I can still feel the warmth and the comfort of it. It was auburn, leaf-colored, as it used to be. I think I saved Igor; the memory is hazy. I seemed very competent and sure of my success. As I sat in bed, summing up my progress in life as measured by dreams, trying not to be affected by the sight of the rain streaming in rivulets from the roof (I was not depressed by the rain, but by the thought that I could rely on no one,
no one
, to get up on the roof and clear out the weeds and grass that have taken root and are choking the gutter), the children trooped in. They are home for Easter, all three—Igor, with his small thief’s eyes, and Robert, the mulatto, who will not say
“Maman”
in public because it makes him shy, and Ulrich, whose father was a famous jurist and his mother a brilliant, beautiful girl but who will never be anything but dull
and Swiss. There they were, at the foot of the bed, all left behind by careless parents, dropped like loose buttons and picked up by a woman they call
Maman
.

“Bon anniversaire,”
said Igor, looking already like any postal clerk in Moscow, and the two others muttered it in a ragged way, like a response in church. They had brought me a present, an April fish, but not made of chocolate. It was the glass fish from Venice everyone buys, about twenty inches long, transparent and green—the green of geranium leaves, with chalky white stripes running from head to tail. These children have lived in my house since infancy, but their taste is part of their skin and hearts and fingernails. The nightmare I ought to be having is a projection into the future, a vision of the girls they will marry and the houses they will have—the glass coffee tables and the Venetian-glass fish on top of the television, unless that space has already been taken up with a lump of polished olive root.

Igor advanced and put the fish down very carefully on the table beside me, and, as he could think of nothing else, began again,
“Bon anniversaire, Maman.”
They had nothing to tell me. Their feet scuffled and scratched on the floor—the rug, soiled by the dogs, was away being cleaned.

“What are you going to do today?” I said.

“Play,” said Robert, after a silence.

A morning concert struck up on the radio next to me, and I looked for something—an appreciation, a reaction to the music—in their eyes, but they had already begun pushing each other and laughing, and I knew that the music would soon be overlaid by a second chorus, from me, “Don’t touch. Don’t tease the dogs,” all of it negative and as bad for them as for me. I turned down the music and said, “Come and see the birthday present that came in the mail this morning. It is a present from my brother, who is your uncle.” I slipped on my reading glasses and spread the precious letter on the counterpane. “It is an original letter written by Dr. Sigmund Freud. He was a famous doctor, and that is his handwriting. Now I shall teach you how to judge from the evidence of letters. The writing paper is ugly and cheap—you all see that, do you?—which means that he was a miser, or poor, or lacked aesthetic feeling, or did not lend importance to worldly matters. The long pointed loops mean a strong sense of spiritual values, and the slope of the lines means a pessimistic nature. The margin widens at the bottom of the page, like the manuscript of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ You remember that I showed you a photograph of it? Who remembers? Ulrich? Good for Ulrich. It means that Dr. Freud was the same kind of person as
Keats. Keats was a poet, but he died. Dr. Freud is also dead. I am sorry to say that the signature denotes conceit. But he was a great man, quite right to be sure of himself.”

“What does the letter say?” said Igor, finally.

“It is not a letter written to me. It is an old letter—see the date? It was sent about thirty years before any of you were born. It was written probably to a colleague—look, I am pointing. To another doctor. Perhaps it is an opinion about a patient.”

“Can’t you read what it says?” said Igor.

I tried to think of a constructive answer, for “I can’t read German” was too vague. “Someday you, and Robert, and even Ulrich will read German, and then you will read the letter, and we shall all know what Dr. Freud said to his colleague. I would learn German,” I went on, “if I had more time.”

As proof of how little time I have, three things took place all at once: My solicitor, who only rings up with bad news, called from Lausanne, Maria-Gabriella came in to remove the breakfast tray, and the dogs woke up and began to bark. Excessive noise seems to affect my vision: I saw the room as blurry and one-dimensional. I waved to Maria-Gabriella—discreetly, for I should never want the children to feel
de trop
or rejected—and she immediately understood and led them away from me. The dogs stopped barking, all but poor blind old Sarah, who went on calling dismally into a dark private room in which she hears a burglar. Meanwhile, Maître Gossart was telling me, from Lausanne, that I was not to have one of the Vietnam children. None of them could be adopted; when their burns have healed, they are all to be returned to Vietnam. That was the condition of their coming. He went on telling it in such a roundabout way that I cut him off with “Then I am not to have one of the burned children?” and as he still rambled I said, “But I want a little girl!” I said, “Look here. I want one of the Vietnam babies, and I want a girl.” The rain was coming down harder than ever. I said, “Maître, this is a filthy, rotten, bloody country, and if it weren’t for the income tax I’d pack up and leave. Because of the income tax I am not free. I am compelled to live in Switzerland.”

Maria-Gabriella found me lying on the pillows with my eyes full of tears. As she reached for the tray, I wanted to say, “Knock that fish off the table before you go, will you?” but it would have shocked her, and puzzled the boys had they come to learn of it. Maria-Gabriella paused, in fact, to admire the fish, and said, “They must have saved their pocket money for weeks.” It occurred to me then that
poisson d’avril
means a joke, it means playing an
April-fool joke on someone. No, the fish is not a joke. First of all, none of them has that much imagination, the fish was too expensive, and, finally, they wouldn’t dare. To tell the truth, I don’t really want them. I don’t even want the Freud letter. I wanted the little Vietnam girl. Yes, what I really want is a girl with beautiful manners, I have wanted her all my life, but no one will ever give me one.