The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (59 page)

All Bibi was ever able to explain to me later was that somewhere between my room and the front door of the hospital she had asked God to strike her with lightning. She stood still and counted up to ten; ten seconds was the limit she gave Him to prove He could hear. Nothing happened. She saw a rubbery begonia on a windowsill; an aide pushing along a trolley of tea mugs; a father and two children waiting on a bench with the patience of the ignorant. She could not recall whether or not she had ever sent the telegram. She next remembered being at home, in the room Julius had insisted would be in keeping with her new position, and that there she had taken gardénal. The gardénal was in the form of large flat tablets, like salt pills. She said she had “always” had them, even in her refugee camp. For someone who had access to every sort of modern poison at Possner, she had chosen an old-fashioned, feminine way of death. She broke up the tablets patiently, one after the other, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was obliged to swallow so much water that she began to be sick on it, and finally she heated a little milk on the gas ring. The milk probably saved her.

She had imagined dying would be like a slow anesthetic; she thought death could be inhaled, like fresh air. But it was a black cloak being blown down on one, she told me—like a cape slipping off a hook and falling in soft folds over your hands and face.

By the time Bibi was well enough to tell me these things, Julius had forgotten her, and had all but forgotten me. He was in love with no one but Roma, a baby ten days old, named for a holiday. This was a quiet love affair that gave us all a period of relative peace. I don’t believe he visited Bibi once, though he paid for her private room, the skin-graft operations, and her long convalescence. Bibi begged to be put in a ward, for being alone made her feel miserable, but Julius refused. She finally came home to us, because I needed someone; my health had broken down. I had fits of crying so prolonged that my eyelids became allergic to daylight and I had to spend hours lying down in the dark. Bibi worked part-time at Possner, looked after Roma, ran the house, and saw that I was allowed to recover very, very slowly.

Julius was now a major, and we moved into the first of our new, beautiful homes. We had a room for Bibi, next to Roma’s. She kept that room for ten years and never once made a change in it. She would not admit any furniture except a bed, a wardrobe, a small bookcase that served as her night table, and a lamp. She did not correspond with anyone. Her books, concerned with one subject, were called
Tetrahedron Letters, The Chemistry of Steroids, Steroid Reactions
, and so on. I tried to read her thesis but I could not take in “… washed repeatedly in a solution of bicarbonate of soda, then in distilled water, and dried on sulphate of sodium. After evaporation, a residue of 8.78 …” I discovered that she kept a journal, but it told me nothing. “Monday—Conversation with Arab student in canteen. Interesting.” “Tuesday—
Funtumia latifolia
is a tree in Western Africa. Flowers white. Wood white. Used for matches, fruit crates.” “Wednesday—Heidi dead.” “Thursday—Roma draws Papa, Mama, Aunt Bibi, self, a tombstone for Heidi. Accept drawing as gift.” “Friday—Menses.” “Saturday—Allied powers forbid demonstration against rearmament.” “Sunday—Visit kennel. New puppy for Roma. Roma undecided.” This was Bibi’s journal in a typical week.

Bibi had no sense of beauty. It was impossible to make her room attractive or interesting, and I avoided showing it to strangers. She never left a towel or a toothbrush in the bathroom she and Roma shared. I sometimes wondered if she had been raised in an orphanage, where every other bed held a potential thief. All her life she used only the smallest amount of water. At first, when she washed dishes I could never persuade her to rinse them. Water was something to be rationed, but I never learned why. She could keep a cake of soap or a tube of toothpaste for months. She wanted to live
owning nothing, using nothing. On the other hand, once an object had come into her hands, and if she did not give it away immediately, to be parted from it later on was anguish. Sometimes I took her handbag and dumped it upside down. I would get rid of the broken comb, the thumbed mirror, the pencil stubs, and replace all this rubbish with something clean and new. But she was miserable until everything became old, cracked, and “hers” again. Most refugees talked too much. Bibi said too little, and that in disturbing fragments. Drink went straight to her head. At our parties I looked out for her, and when I saw the bad signs—her eyes pressed to slits, her head thrown back, a trusting smile—I would take her glass away. Once, during a dinner party, her voice floated over the rest of the talk: “Some adolescents, under difficult circumstances, were instructed in algebra and physics by distinguished professors. A gypsy girl named Angela, who had been in a concentration camp, was taught to read and write by a woman doctor of philosophy whose husband had been shot in the cellar of a prison in Moscow in 1941.”

After that, I came to a quiet agreement with Julius that Bibi be given nothing to drink except when we were alone. I could not expect Julius’s guests to abandon their own homes and their own television to hear nothing but disjointed anecdotes. This was the year when every television network celebrated the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Roma sat on a low stool with her elbows on her knees and saw everything. We now had a fifth person in the family, a young man from Possner named Michael. Julius had brought him in. Michael must already have decided to marry Julius’s daughter if only he could remain important to Julius while Roma was growing up. I noticed that he thought Aunt Bibi was also someone who had to be pleased. In a way, Michael was a new kind of Bibi. The firm intended to send him to an advanced course in business management, just as Bibi had been sent to the university.

Michael was trying to take the political temper of the house. He would stand up and sit down and seem alternately interested in Roma’s television program and wretchedly uneasy. He wondered if he would bother the three older people by too much attention to the screen, or lose Roma forever by not showing enough interest. Roma was so young then that Michael, at twenty-two, must have seemed like a parent. Bibi sat reading a speech Julius was to make at a congress where English would be the working language. From time to time she glanced at the screen, then went on making corrections with a green pencil. Her English was better than Julius’s, but he said
it was too perfect. Afterward he would alter half the changes she had made, saying, “It may be good English, but nobody talks that way.” The look on Bibi’s face as she glanced at the screen seemed to me overly patient, as though “the children,” as she called Roma and Michael, were in above their heads. What does it matter now, she seemed to be telling herself. As for me, I went about my business. I never interfered with Roma, and certainly never with Julius in the room. As I watched the program, my allegiances shifted back and forth. Sometimes I hated the men and women who had done something in my name, and sometimes I hated the victims—yes, passionately. It is not normal conversation to talk about old deaths. No matter what was shown on television, no matter what we had to reconsider or see in a new light, my house was large and I had no servant except for an Italian half the day. Even with Bibi helping after work in the evenings, the house was too much for me. I saw that Roma’s myths might include misery and sadness, but my myths were bombed, vanished, and whatever remained had to be cleaned and polished and kept bright. At times like these, Bibi seemed to know more than I did. She seemed so lofty, so superior, with her knowledge of hardship, that I wanted to scream at her, “Damn you, Bibi, I saw my mother running, running out of a burning house with her hair on fire. Her hands and face were like black paper when she died.” Then the program came to an end and Julius stood before the screen lecturing Michael. He said, “A mission in life—a goal. Without an ideal, life is nothing.” He stood with his hands behind his back. He has never smoked, not even when cigarettes were hard to get and everyone craved them. He is frugal, neat; every other day he eats nothing for dinner but yogurt. He said, “These unfortunate people you have just seen had a mission.” Michael, the future executive, sat worshiping every word that fell from Julius. “Oh, a highly spiritual mission,” said Julius easily. “A goal of a highly—spiritual—nature. That is why they are remembered.” Bibi said (had she been drinking too much?), “Encouraging people to buy synthetic products they don’t really need will be Michael’s mission. Do you think it compares?”

The roof did not cave in. Julius merely laughed. How soft, how easy Julius had become!

“Papa is so short that when he sits down he looks like a little dog begging for sugar,” said his beloved Roma, somewhere about that period. Roma had just tasted her first champagne. Julius smiled and touched her
bright hair. It was shameful, but once Roma had made that remark about the little dog Julius began appearing in my dreams in that form. He was a terrier who simply would not stop barking. Roma was growing up, but he did not seem jealous. He had, in fact, selected the husband he wanted for her. He chose Michael when Roma was only fourteen or so, and began to train him, and then he went back to having other women again.

The girl and the diary had long been forgotten. Some new person called Julius on the telephone day after day. He trailed the long wire of the bedroom phone to his bathroom. Even Roma would never have dared to listen to an extension; he could smile if Roma was impertinent and pretty and had just drunk a glass of wine, but he could also be frightening. I have never seen anyone outstare him. He would take the phone to the bathroom and talk for a long time. The ringing stopped. In the weeks of lull that followed I dreamed of gunfire, of someone who claimed to be my mother, and of dogs. Julius suddenly ordered me to go with him on a long business journey to Hong Kong, Japan, California, and Vancouver. He said he was sick of traveling alone. I understood that he wanted protection from a woman who had become tiresome—someone who was either over there and waiting, or planning to follow. I remembered the telephone and the peculiar long ring of long-distance calls, the ring that continued after you lifted the receiver. Sometimes I thought I would take Roma and vanish, but the thought never lasted. I did not want to live outside my own house.

“If it is only for the sake of company, then take Bibi,” I said. “Roma is at a delicate age. I can’t leave her. Bibi has never been anywhere. You said you wanted her to study at one of the Anglo-Saxon universities.” He had said that once, but fifteen years ago. However, because the idea had once been his, he now decided it would do Bibi, and thus Possner, some good. There was something else—being honorably rid of her. It was obvious that the idea of traveling with Bibi for company bored him. She was an old friend of the family now, plain and pedantic. He was a busy man with not much time for conversation. He had personal and professional acquaintances in South Africa, Argentina, Sweden, Milan, and many other places I had never seen. He was still very kind to young people if they were worth his while and knew how to make good use of an education. In what manner was he ever less than fair to Bibi? What would Bibi have done without Julius? How many refugees would have given years of their lives
to have been in Bibi’s place? Julius was very fit. He did yoga exercises every Sunday. I had given in to twin beds, but I refused the idea of separate rooms.

Bibi accepted the interesting journey and the chance to study at an Anglo-Saxon university without thanks and without joy. It meant an interruption of work that interested her, and she was frightened of planes. “It will be like a fairy tale,” she said sadly. She must have been remembering stories where little children are abandoned in deep woods by parents who no longer can feed them. She was thinking of dark branches, night, crows spreading their wings, inch-high demons squealing a hideous language.

“Well, of course you are thinking of fairy tales,” I said. “But do remember you are a grown woman.” I looked at her pale cheeks and tried to see another Bibi, with spokes of sunflower hair. She had nothing in common with Julius now except an adoration for Roma. I had showed her that other girl’s diary and she had been shocked. “An
ignorant
person,” she said, and I saw how little she knew about him. If Bibi herself had not at one time had the
appearance
of an inferior, if she had not said “Heidi, you swine!” in a farm girl’s accent, then Julius would never have looked at her twice.

Julius, who was good at arrangements, abandoned Bibi at a university in the west of Canada and came home alone. Her wounded, homesick letters followed, one a day. She told about a sign reading
GAS AT CITY PRICES
, which she never understood and which became the symbol of everything she never would grasp over there. She went to an Italian grocery and stood weeping because it was Europe. She had knifelike memories of towns and streets. Every girl reminded her of Roma. She wrote that she had suddenly learned she was old and plain. Her gestures were awkward; her hair was changing color with age. She entered a bookstore and found a shelf of German poetry. She congratulated the owner, who said, “Oh, we try” so sarcastically that she knew her accent and her appearance were offensive. She wanted to answer, but the English Julius had considered “too perfect” turned out to be full of holes. She became frightened of shops and when she went into one she would stand near the door, not daring to say what she wanted, letting other customers push in front of her. She stopped a stranger in the street to ask a direction. “Go to hell,” he said. She counted the weeks, days, and minutes
until she could be with us again. The first person she embraced at the airport was Roma.