The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (60 page)

Roma whispered, “Michael thinks he has me, but wait and see. Papa said he could live with us, but I would never let anyone take Aunt Bibi’s room.”

I heard, and thought, Now I shall have Bibi for the rest of my life.

Was that such a bad prospect? While Bibi had been gaining experience and writing those despairing letters, I had fallen ill. One day Julius asked me to unpack a suitcase for him and I found myself unable to move or speak. This passed, but the attack returned each time Julius gave me an order. The neurologist he sent me to said that my paralytic seizures were caused by nothing more serious than a calcium deficiency. I was instructed to eat sixty grams of cheese four times a day. With Bibi there, I had no more calcium problems. She took over her old duties of ironing and washing the supper dishes—anything the Italian had forgotten or had left undone—and I began reading again. I read fewer books and more magazines. Possner now owned several. It was at Julius’s suggestion that a sign was put up in the editorial offices of each, saying
YOUR READERS NEVER WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL
.

Julius was now a colonel, and we moved here, to the newest and best of our homes. It was our house, and Julius put it in my name, as he had promised me long ago. Every windowpane belongs to me.

I knew quite a great deal about Julius; not everything. One summer evening we sat on our terrace, all five of us, with a portable television between us, and the remains of a sunset. Julius went indoors to fetch a bottle of white wine. With two wives and a daughter to serve him he need not have lifted a finger, but he was particular about wine (his cellar is shock-proof and soundproof) and he thought no one else knew how to take the cork out of a bottle. Presently I followed to see if he had everything he needed. He was in the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand, and he stood sipping it in front of a mirror, deep in silent conversation. “What a good time you and I are having,” he might have been saying. He smiled, and his face went wry. “Oh, you know how it is sometimes,” he might have said now. He was seducing someone in the mirror—only it was himself. Julius was watching Julius seducing Julius. I remembered how confident he was when he was in love. I went back to the terrace and sat down.

I said, “Julius is a brilliant, clever man.” No one answered. That opinion was the rule of the house.

The sunset died; Michael switched on lights hidden in trees and at the bottom of the pool. Waiting for the evening news, we watched, with some disgust, a beer-drinking contest.

“Why show this to us?” said Julius. He had a bouquet of long-stemmed glasses between his fingers. He set the glasses down carefully. “No one here is Bavarian.”

“Right,” cried Michael. “We are not Bavarian! Roma is not, and her mother is from Dortmund, and Aunt Bibi is from … and … and
you
are from …” He should have known where Julius was born. He must surely have read the vital facts about Julius in Possner house publications often enough. “… here, in Cologne,” Michael gasped, correctly.

On the screen a slight girl downed a stein of beer in six seconds. Her throat worked in anguish and tension. She turned out to be a Berliner, not a Bavarian, either. She said she had noticed her gift of rapid drinking when still very young. It worked with milk or beer, but not so well with water.

As soon as the news came on, Julius showed signs of annoyance. The conversational aspect of world affairs has always been an irritant to him. What good is talk? In the middle of a remark about the Common Market he turned it off. He said that everyone was incompetent.

Michael the sycophant said, “Why don’t you send very efficient well-trained men from Possner into politics? You could take someone promising and give him a sound education and launch him in a good party—in fact, you could launch several in all parties. Then no matter who was elected you would be certain everything would run efficiently.…” He always let his sentences run down. Even when a sentence normally might have come to a stop, it sounded as if the end were nowhere. Sometimes my future son-in-law looked like a terrier too, peering from one large human to the other, wondering who would slip him a morsel of something good.

“Wouldn’t that strike you as immoral, Michael?” Here was Bibi sitting in the shadows—lumpy, wearing heavy stockings, saying prickly, difficult things. Bibi is raving, I thought. It seemed to me that the girl’s voice had grown rasping. A “girl,” I called her, but the person determined to spoil our enjoyment of the summer weather was nearly forty, had popping blue eyes, and had failed as an emigrant.

As if Bibi’s remark weren’t enough, now impertinent Roma spoke up:
“You aren’t much of a generation to talk about morality.” This was annoying, for it meant she was mixing up the generations and making us older than we really were.

Bibi laughed and said, “Little girl, what do you know about some of us?”

“Enough of that,” said Julius, who did not need to shout to be frightening. “Enough from Bibi. Bibi, don’t you dare touch my daughter’s innocence.”

My heart was pounding. For the first time I felt that Julius and I were thinking as one. Our marriage was our house. I said to myself, Here we are together in the fortress. The bodies pile up outside. Don’t look at them. I forgave him for Bibi, the girl of the diary, the twin beds, the long-distance calls, for being a peacock who preened before mirrors. I put a hundred injuries and injustices behind me.

Bibi had pushed her chair back and risen and, after hesitating, looking over our heads and all round the garden, she walked away, down the sloping lawn. The pool, the trees, the imported white camellias in pots were beautifully lighted. We—particularly Roma—had looked charming, I thought, and now here was one person walking out of the picture. Michael suddenly said, “The neighbors!” and pressed a switch—a foolish gesture that left us sitting in semidarkness. Later he said he thought Bibi was about to drown herself in the pool and that our neighbors, excited by the sound of a quarrel (What sound? We were speaking quietly), might peer at us through field glasses.

“Turn the lights on immediately,” said Julius, without moving.

We saw Roma clinging to Bibi and we heard her sobbing, “I didn’t mean you, I meant everybody else.”

“Now they have made my daughter cry on a lovely summer evening,” said Julius, but quite casually, as if it were only one complaint on a long list of misdemeanors. But we were able to laugh, finally, because Michael, in his anxiety, had pressed all the buttons he could find, causing the gate in the driveway to slide back and forth, the garage doors to open and shut, and the pool in the garden to blink like a star. The lilies on the surface of the pool flashed negative-positive-negative. (It was thanks to an idea of Bibi’s that Julius had been able to grow the lilies; their roots feed on a chemical mixture encased in a sphere. Even with flowers the pool looks sterile. I always found the water lilies unpleasant; they attract dragonflies.) I had a vision that cramped my stomach, of Bibi facedown among the negative-positive lilies, with dragonflies darting at her wet hair.

Bibi now let Roma lead her back to us. Julius poured wine as if nothing had happened, and he answered Michael’s question. He said, “An idea similar to yours was discussed, but we have decided against it.” We all let Julius have the last word.

Bibi finally died in America, by gas. She had gone out to an American branch of Possner at her own request. She left her passport and bankbook and some loose money on her kitchen table. The money was weighed down with the marble darning egg I had brought her from Italy years before. She named Julius as her closest living relative and Roma as her direct heir. There was also a sealed letter for Julius, which the police had opened before he arrived. Julius flew over, of course, though he was not a relative. After twenty years of Bibi we still did not know if she had any real family. In the letter she said she willed her body to a medical school, but since she also said she hoped there was enough money on the table to pay for a modest funeral, no one could tell exactly what she had wanted. Because of the circumstances there was a police autopsy. Julius brought back a photocopy of her letter—the police kept the original. Instead of telling why she had wanted to kill herself Bibi explained that she had chosen early morning so that she would be discovered at some time during the day and not after dark. She knew of accidents that had been caused by someone’s turning on a light in a room filled with gas. I said to Julius that all she needed to have done was turn off the electricity; there must have been a switch somewhere in the apartment. But no, said Julius, Bibi had probably thought of that too. What if she remained alone and undiscovered for days, as she had after that first failed mess of a try with gardénal? Some stranger might have broken down the door, tried a light, and, failing to find one, might have absentmindedly struck a match. This sounded involved, not very sensible. Actually, she was found in broad daylight and no one was hurt.

Later, much later, on an evening when Julius was in a pleasant mood, I asked him about that girl’s diary—if he knew how it had come to be on the shelf of a linen cupboard. It took him minutes to understand what I was talking about, and then he said the diary belonged to a silly uneducated person. He could not recall anything about a shelf. He was certain, in fact, that he had thrown the diary, unread, in a wastebasket.

“What did she mean by ‘everything’?” I said.

He did not remember.

“You can see how unimportant she was,” Julius said. “I wanted to have
nothing to do with her, and so she sent me the diary so I could read about her soul. We are discussing an imaginary situation. There was no evidence that I was involved. My name was not mentioned anywhere,” Julius concluded.

We were sitting on the terrace during this conversation. Julius, not yet fifty, had been made a general, and we drank to his triumph and his life. I had the nausea and dizziness of the repeated moment, as though we had sat in exactly the same position once before and I had heard Julius explain the same portion of his past. I saw the water lilies.

“I have dreams about Bibi,” I said.

“She had an incurable illness,” he replied.

This had never been mentioned. The water lilies seemed enormous. “Was it in the autopsy report?”

“Naturally.”

Divinities invent convenient fables, but they are never mistaken. It must have been true; Bibi had an incurable illness and died to spare herself useless pain. Our conversation could have ended there, since we had no further use for it. Unfortunately I had still another question.

“That first time,” I said. “The first time you traveled over there with Bibi for company and left her and came back alone. You remember? The day you were to leave, something happened. I was in the living room with Roma when we heard shrieks of hysterical laughter from the hall. Roma ran out ahead of me and began to scream in the same strident way. Bibi was in front of the looking glass trying on a hat. It was a hat specially bought for the journey. An ignoble hat. A disgusting and hideous hat of cheap turquoise jersey. She had no taste—any salesgirl could fob off anything. The salesgirl had told her she had a bad hairline, and this criminal hat covered her head from the eyebrows to the nape of her neck. Michael the subaltern, having already seen that you were laughing, was doubled up, yelling, outdoing himself in laughter. You said to Roma, ‘I shall take you to a corner of the airport where the wind can blow it away.’ Roma—she was fifteen or sixteen—said, ‘Aunt Bibi looks like a little piglet dressed up as an actress.’ At that, Bibi, who had been laughing too, moved away from the mirror and said, ‘That was unkind.’ All at once you saw I was not laughing at all. You turned and knelt down to buckle a suitcase as if the scene did not concern you anymore. Bibi was finished then. Michael had felt the shift of power too.
I
mattered.”

All this had been meant to lead up to a question, but I had lost it. Anyway,
Julius had stopped listening almost from the beginning. He sipped his wine and looked attentive, but his thoughts were floating. In the same voice, as if continuing my boring anecdote, I said, “… and tigers and zebras and ants and bees …”

“Yes, yes,” said Julius, pretending to hear.

“Oh, Julius, Julius,” I said in the same voice. “Now a general, tomorrow a field marshal. Last night in a dream I had you were nothing but a little dog who kept on barking, and Bibi had to thrash you to make you stop.”

I
never like to leave Canada, because I’m disappointed every time. I’ve felt disappointed about places I haven’t even seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a sign saying
NO CANADIANS
. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another time I had to go and look after my brother Kenny in Buffalo. He had stolen a credit card and was being deported on that account. I went down to vouch for him and pay up for him and bring him home. Neither of us cared for Buffalo.