The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (92 page)

“That will be downstairs,” much-traveled Uncle Bebo said. He led the descent, opened another great door, and saw what he took to be the staff of the museum eating lunch. He swung his arm back, the confident gesture of a know-it-all, and the others followed him into a large dining room where some ten or twelve persons of all ages stared back at them without speaking.

“Good appetite!” the visitors cried. They urged the staff to take no notice, please—to eat up their veal and dumplings while the dish was still hot. Uncle Bebo tried to see if the guide to be tipped was here, but none of the stunned faces showed the required signs of leadership. The men at lunch wore country jackets with bone buttons. The women seemed so
dowdy that
nobody remembered later what they were wearing. The visitors were in their Sunday urban best—meaning, for the aunts, pinkish nylon stockings, flowered drip-dry frocks, white no-iron cardigans, Aunt Barbara in a no-iron skirt from Italy and shoes with needle heels and her hair rolled up in blond thimbles. The men wore high collars and stiff shiny ties, had hair newly trimmed so that a crescent of skin left each ear looking stranded. The men smelled of aftershave lotion—lilac and carnation—that they’d been given last Christmas by the family women.

The visitors followed Uncle Bebo once around the table. They paused when he did, to squint at an oval portrait, nodded when he said, “Baroque!” and cried out with wonder at the sweet bell-tone when he snapped his fingernails on a crystal punch bowl—all the while renewing their smiles and encouraging remarks to the staff. Finally all headed toward another door at the end of the room. This one had a pointed lintel beneath which Uncle Bebo paused for the last time. He raised his fist (still clenched around the five marks), looked up at the lintel, back at the frozen people of all ages clutching their knives and forks, did not cry, “Death to upper-class swine!”
as they might have feared in their collective bad dream, but only, “This door is Gothic! No mistake!” and led the visitors on, the marks in his knuckles going
cling-cling-cling
. Granny turned back, smiled, curtsied deeply, and gave them a blessing.

Now they began to look for
THIS WAY OUT
, for there had not been all that much to see in the museum. Aunt Barbara was still watching for the door she wanted. Uncle Bebo clamped his teeth together and made a hissing sound to torment Aunt Barbara, so that she couldn’t stop laughing, which was no help either. All at once they were outside again in the handsome park, with Aunt Barbara searching hard for a row of shrubs or a tree large enough to conceal her. As soon as she saw what she needed she cried to her mother-in-law, “Oh, Granny, a lovely tree, a thick fat beautiful tree,” and galloped off, hiking up her Italian pleated skirt. The grandmother was slower, bothered by her long petticoats—two of them navy blue, two of white linen-and-cotton, one of lawn—and mysterious bloomers that were long in the leg and had never been seen by her own daughters: They were washed apart, hung to dry between pillowcases, and ironed by Granny in the dead of night.

Granny grasped the edge of the innermost petticoat. The trick was to bundle all the other skirts within it and hang on to the hem with her teeth. Just as she had a good hold on the hem she happened to see two boys of sixteen or so running with large black dogs on leads in and out of shade down the sloping lawn. The dogs were barking and the boys were calling to the women, “Stop! Stop!”

But then from far away, from within the alley of lime trees, another cry sounded, and, running too, breaking free of the trees, came the steward, the horrible Jürgen, then sly-eyed Uncle Ludwig, and the owner of the trees with his little cloud of house dogs. Before these two parties could meet and lambaste each other with sticks and fists it was established that the ugliest of the intruders—Uncle Ludwig—was that godsent figure who might purchase thousands of Christmas trees. The boys backed off, pulled their dogs in short, and said, “We didn’t know.”

Aunt Barbara seemed thoroughly pleased to see everyone; she always liked a crowd. But she was bothered because her skirt was not hanging as she wanted it to, her undergarments having become tangled and twisted. She had to unzip the placket of her skirt, so that it looked as if she meant to take it off; but all she did was give a good wiggle and shake, and when everything had settled she zipped it up again and cried, “Oh, the dear sweet beautiful
dogs!” So everything ended well, and as the two boys led Granny back up to the little castle, through the still sunny day filled with such exquisite green lights and shadows, she could be heard saying that she had known all along it could not have been a museum; the beds looked too soft.

Now all this family of visitors save one, the child, were struck dead before long. Five of them carried the germ of the cancer that would destroy them, and one died of a stroke. The little boy was allowed to grow up, but his parents were killed when a military helicopter exploded over a crowded highway on a Saturday afternoon. As for the horrible Jürgen, he was found murdered in a parking lot. A man who signed an IOU for five hundred marks in Jürgen’s favor disappeared one day. The man’s wife said he was dead, but Jürgen had yet to see an account of the funeral. He grew tired of waiting and went to call on the widow. She was obstinate, said she knew nothing about a debt, that her husband was buried. The death certificate had been lost. There was no stone on the grave because she had no money to pay for one. When she began to contradict herself, turned vague and weepy, Jürgen gave up talking and looked to see what he could take instead of the money. He lifted a coffee table out of the way and began rolling up a small rug. All the while he was doing this the widow howled that it was her best carpet, the only thing she owned worth selling. True—everything else was trash, probably bought secondhand to begin with.

Instead of crossing the road to the parking lot Jürgen strode down to the corner and the traffic lights (he was law-abiding) and around the corner; made a detour to compare his new rug with some in a store window; turned up a side street and back to the parking lot across from the widow’s place. There he saw one of her sons, aged about thirteen. “What now?” Jürgen sang out. He held the rug overhead, thinking the kid would grab for it. He was good-tempered, laughing. He had an advantage; not only was he powerful and large, but he was not afraid of harming anyone.

The kid broke into a run, with a hand behind his back.

“You don’t want to do that,” said Jürgen. He was ready to cripple the kid with a knee and step on his right hand, but only if he had to. He must have seemed like a great statue to the boy, standing with both arms straight up supporting the carpet. Jürgen brought his knee up too high and too soon; he was used to fighting with men. The kid bent gracefully over the knee and pushed the length of the blade of a kitchen knife above the buckle of Jürgen’s belt.

The train trembled and slid round a curve, out of sight of the dappled lawn and the people climbing slowly up to the castle, on their last excursion together. Christine moved back to the compartment to make way for a vendor in a white coat pulling an empty trolley.

“We have had drinks without ice,” said Herbert. “Coffee without cups. Now nothing at all.”

The woman in the corner fanned herself briskly with a fan improvised out of postcards.
They came over every night and for lunch on Sundays. When the other couple had God’s own darling, our precious Carol Ann, they would bring her in a basket lined with dotted Swiss. I remember Carol Ann’s first veal cutlet. I had a wooden hammer—no American butcher knew how to slice veal thin enough. Later they went on their diets, wanted broiled steaks, string beans, Boston lettuce, fat-free yogurts. Carol Ann the little cow came home from summer camp with a taste for cold meat loaf made from stray cats and chili sauce. The little bitch grew older, demanded baker’s cakes, baker’s pies, cupcakes in cellophane, ready-mix peach ice cream, frozen lasagna, pineapple chunks, canned chop suey, canned spaghetti, while the big cow, the little cow’s mother, got a craving for canned fudge sauce their way, poured it over everything, poured it over my fresh spice cake. I stopped making spice cake
.

“We could move, you know,” said Christine to Herbert. “I’ve noticed one or two empty compartments.”

“I have seen them too,” said Herbert, “but the seats in those compartments have been reserved and we would eventually have to come back here.”

“It’s just that I don’t feel well,” she said.

“Heat and hunger and thirst,” said Herbert. He shrugged, though not through indifference; he meant that he was powerless to help.

They wanted Aunt Jemima pancakes, corn syrup, maple syrup, hot onion rolls, thousand-island dressing, butter that would give you jaundice just to look at, carrots grated in lemon Jell-O, and as for the piglet Carol Ann, one whole winter she would not eat anything but bottled sandwich spread on ready-sliced bread, said only Jews and krauts and squareheads ate the dark. Had been told this by her best friend at that time, Rose of Sharon Jasakowicz
.

“There’s too much interference!” said Christine, though little Bert was not being a bother at all, was nowhere near her. She sprang up and went back to the corridor, untied her scarf and let the wind lift her hair. The Norwegian stood close beside her and showed her his yoga method of breathing, pinching his nostrils and puffing like a bullfrog. The train stopped more and more erratically, sometimes every eight or nine minutes. Presently she noticed they were standing in a station yard that seemed so hopeless, so unlikely to offer even the most primitive sort of buffet, that none of them
made a move to go out. The yard buildings were saturated with heat, gray with drought, and the shrubs and trees beyond the station contained not a drop of moisture in their trunks and stems. A loudspeaker carried a man’s voice along the empty platform: “All the windows on the train are to be shut until further orders.”

“They can’t mean this train,” said the Norwegian.

Herbert, evidently annoyed by such a senseless direction, immediately went off to find the conductor. The woman in the corner began peeling an orange with her teeth. “I have diabetes, I am always hungry,” she said suddenly, apparently to little Bert.

Herbert soon came back with an answer: There had been grass and brush fires along the tracks. “They may even have been set deliberately,” he said. She could hear him explaining calmly to little Bert about the fires, so the child would not be alarmed.

“We can’t shut all the windows in this heat,” said Christine. “Certainly not for long.” No one answered her.

After the train had quit the gray station yard she continued to stand at the open window, her hair flying like the little girls’ purple crepe-paper streamers. Each time the train approached a curve she imagined the holocaust they might become. She thought of the ties consumed, flakes of fire on the compartment ceilings, sparks burned black on the first-class velvet. All the same, she kept hold of the two window handles, ready to slide the pane up at the first hint of danger. No one challenged her except for the bun-faced conductor, who asked if she had heard the order.

“Yes, but there aren’t any fires,” she said. “We need air.” It was true that there were no signs of trouble except for burned-out patches of grass. Not even a trace of ash remained on the sky, not even a cinder. The conductor continued to look at her in his jolly way, head to one side, a smile painted on his face, looking as round and as stuffed as a little clown. “All right,” she said. “I shall close the window, at least until Backnang. Then you can say that we all obeyed you.”

“The train has been rerouted because of the danger,” he said. “No Backnang.”

“That seems fairly high-handed of you,” she began, but of course she was wasting her breath. He was only a subaltern; he had no real power.

With its shut window, the compartment was unbearable now. Even little Bert was looking green.

“I was going to tell you about the change,” said Herbert. “But you were
having a yoga lesson and I didn’t want to interrupt. We go through Coburg now. We shall be a couple of hours late, I imagine. I believe we change trains. Coburg is a pretty place,” he added, to console her.

“Will it be explained at the station at home?” she said. “Someone is supposed to be meeting me.”

“Meeting
us,”
Herbert corrected, because in the eyes of these strangers he and Christine were married. The truth was that they would separate at their home station as if they were strangers.

The woman in the corner emptied one of her plastic bags of all the food it contained and filled it with the rubbish.
Sundays I had them for the two meals. They wanted just soup for supper, with cold ham and iceberg lettuce, dressing their way. The men ate Harvard beets in the factory canteen; they started wanting them. They wanted two or three different kinds of pizzas, mushroom ketchup, mustard pickles
.

Little Bert kept an eye on Christine. “You never finished reading,” he said.

“I can’t remember what I was reading about,” she said.