The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (96 page)

“There isn’t a restaurant,” said Herbert, again in French. “It’s hard on little Bert. Only a newsstand. I think on a day like today one might allow a comic book. Do you agree?”

But she was not the child’s mother: She would not be drawn.

Herbert’s answer to her silence was to march into the waiting room and across to a newsstand. She knew that by making an issue over something unimportant she had simply proved once again that willful obstinacy was part and parcel of a slow-moving nature. She suffered from its effects as much as Herbert did. Holding little Bert, she trailed along behind him, thinking that she would show her affection for Herbert now by being particularly nice to little Bert.

Herbert waited for the curator of the local museum to be served before choosing the mildest of the comic books on display. The curator walked off, reading the local paper as he walked. A ferocious war of opinion took up three of its pages. Was it about the barbed wire? About the careless rerouting of trains that had stranded dozens of passengers in this lamentable, godforsaken, Prussian-looking town? No, it was about an exhibition of photographs Dr. Ischias had commissioned and sponsored for his new museum—an edifice so bold in conception and structure that it was known
throughout the region as “the teacup with mumps.” Dr. Ischias was used to Philistine aggression; indeed, he secretly felt that his job depended to some extent upon the frequency and stridency of the attacks. But it seemed to him now that some of the letters in today’s paper might have been written a good fifty years in the past. This time he was accused not just of taking the public for dimwits, but also of sapping morals and contributing to the artistic decline of a race.

“Once again” (he now read, walking out of the waiting room, holding the paper to his nose) “art has not known how to toe the mark or draw the line. Can filth be art? If so, let us do without it. Let us do without the photographer in question and his archangel, the curator with the funny name.”

Well … that was unpleasant. Perhaps the show had been a mistake. It happened that the photographer in question had reproduced every inch of a model he said was his wife; in fact, the exhibition was entitled “Marriage.” These pictures had been blown up and cropped so peculiarly that only an abstract, grainy surface remained. As the newspaper had to admit, most adults honestly did not know what the pictures were about. However, most children, with their instinctive innocence, never failed to recognize that this or that form was really part of something else, which they named quite eagerly. And the local paper did not tiptoe round the matter, but asked, in a four-column double head on page two:

This was followed up by a cartoon drawing of a creature, a gorilla probably, with his head under the dark hood of an old-fashioned camera on a tripod, about to take the picture of three Graces, or three Rhine maidens, or three stout local matrons who had somehow lost their clothes.

Now all this was libel—every word, and the drawing too. The curator folded his copy of the paper and began to walk up and down the platform, composing an answer.

Christine knew that Herbert could have helped him, because he was good at that kind of letter, taking a droll, dry tone, ending with, “Of course I am prepared to withdraw my allegations at any time,” mockingly humble. His letters always drew a deluge of new correspondence, praising and honoring Doctor Engineer Herbert B. But the curator did not know that Doctor Engineer Herbert B. was just behind him; in any case he was not doing badly
with his own reply: “A ray of light has just as much chance of penetrating into the thick swamp of the German middle-class mind as …” He clasped and unclasped his hands, the newspaper tucked high under one arm. “The myth of German womanhood, a myth belied every day …” Walking up and down the platform near the sandy road, seen by the man in uniform looking through field glasses. “As for the photographer in question, his international status places him above …” “Only the small-minded could possibly …” “People who never set foot in museums until drawn by the promise of pornography can hardly judge …” “Only children should be allowed into art galleries …” Excellent. That had never been said.

Meanwhile the photographer had descended from a local train and started to tell a story about grass fires. He was wearing his tartan waistcoat with George the Fourth buttons, his cream corduroy jacket from Rome, his cream silk turtleneck sweater, an American peace emblem on a chain, dark green shorts, Japanese sandals, and, because the sandals pinched, a pair of brown socks. His legs were tanned and covered with blond fur. Although slim and fit, he seemed older than usual. This was on account of his teeth. He had recently acquired two new bridges, upper and lower, which took years off his face but were a torture, so today he had changed back to the earlier set. The dentist had told the photographer’s wife, “His jaw is underdeveloped, like a child’s, difficult to fit.”

And she answered, “Yes, I see. Classic, aesthetic—no?”

“Well, jaws are always classical,” said the dentist.

The photographer wanted to look a bit younger for the sake of his wife. Every season the difference in time between them seemed to increase. Most young wives of middle-aged men bridged the gap by looking older, but his wife grew more and more childlike. On their honeymoon in Florence he had shown her the marble likeness of a total stranger, saying, “There, the ideal—classic, aesthetic,” and so forth; and she told her mother later and they had a good laugh. When the dentist made the remark about his jaws she saved it up for her mother too. Now the dentist had said he could make a third lot of teeth that would make the photographer appear to be twenty-eight and would not hurt as much as the last set, but the work would cost six hundred marks more.

As soon as he saw the photographer the curator began to shout everything he had just been thinking about the newspaper. The very sight of the photographer with his collapsed face and brown socks made the curator feel tense. He had to defend art as far as the first row of barbed wire,
but he would have preferred doing this without ever meeting an artist, for they took up time. The curator’s angry voice carried along the platform to the waiting room, where a cultural traveling group, tossed up between trains like Christine and the others, sat hungry and miserable with their cultural group leader. These people distinctly heard the curator say that he was opposed to womanhood. They put their heads together and began to whisper.

The group were on their way to the opera and had dressed for a cultural evening in July—that is, the men in white dinner jackets and the women with long skirts, and fur stoles they hugged around themselves in spite of the heat. They knew pretty well what the curator was yelling about because the most revolting of the photographs had been shown on television and in the picture magazines, and had been discussed in a syndicated editorial of the opposition press. The result was that this little frontier town, with its teacup-with-mumps museum, its reputation for pornography, and its forward-looking curator, was quite famous now. Most members of the group had actually heard the curator mouthing cultural insults in their own living rooms, with the color TV lending a strange mauve tinge to his ears and chin. The photographer had scarcely been interviewed at all. He had nothing in the way of a social theory; he could only bleat that he loved his wife and thought marriage was noble and fulfilling. For some reason this irritated the public. He said nothing but simple and gentle things, yet everyone hated him and people had written letters to the government saying he ought to be lynched.

Now he walked along the platform with the curator in the boiling heat and said he had been wondering if the caricature of himself as a gorilla might not be just a little libelous. And the curator, sweating and cross, sick to death of art and artists, looked down at his legs and socks and snapped, “Oh, it’s probably not libelous at all.”

Little Bert stayed close to Christine and curled his hand tightly around her fingers. She remembered how he had wakened night after night in a strange room and found himself alone in the dark. At first he had not even known how the foreign light switch worked. She and Herbert had spoken French much of the time; no wonder the child had finally preferred to have conversation with a sponge.

“You’ll soon be home,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

The station buffet had run out of food and the newsstand sold nothing to eat except cough drops and chewing gum. Little Bert did not seem to notice;
at least he did not say he was hungry. He was only slightly interested in the comic book. He was taking in the opera party, all in their sixties or so, looking rather alike. They sat facing one another on two long rows of benches, the women holding their fat knees together under their long gowns. Perhaps these people did not know each other well, except for their cultural meetings. There was too much shy laughter, and too many Oh, do you think so’s after every remark. What they had in common at this moment was their need of comfort; here they were, forced to change trains, the new train late, and the women in particular having a bad time of it, their makeup melting in the heat and having to hear their sex and station in life criticized by the trumpet-voiced curator. Luckily to console them they had their own cultural group leader, a match for the curator any day.

The group leader, whose long chin all but hid his collar, and whose eyes seemed startled and wise because his glasses magnified them, sat with one hand on each knee, legs wide apart, shoulders forward. It was not quite the position of a cultured person, more the way a train conductor might perch between rounds, but this might have been only because the bench was so narrow. He spoke to them softly, looking from face to face, and leaning left and right for those sharing his bench.

Within a few minutes he had wiped out of their memories every vexation and discomfort they had been feeling. He mentioned

and went on until he had mentioned perhaps one hundred familiar names. Just as everyone was beginning to feel pleasantly lulled, and even to feel oddly well fed, though a moment ago they had all been saying that they could eat the wooden benches, their leader suddenly said, “The Adolftime …”

In the silence that followed he looked into every face, one after the other, sadly and accusingly, like a dog about to be left behind; the reproachful silence and sliding dog’s glance went on for so long that one could have heard a thought. Christine did hear some, in fact: They were creaking thoughts, as old chairs creak. The whole cultural group held its breath and the thoughts creaked, “Oh, God, where is this kind of talk taking us?” Finally the cultural leader had to end his sentence because they could not go on holding their breath that way, especially those who were stout and easily winded. He concluded, “… was a sad time for art in this country.”

Who could disagree? Certainly no cultivated person on his way to the opera. Yes, a sad time for art, though no one could remember much preoccupation with art at the time, rather more with coal and margarine. There had been no public exhibitions of women showing their private parts like baboons, if
that
was art. There had been none of that, said some of the creaking thoughts. Yet others creaked, “But stop! What does he mean when he says ‘art’? For isn’t music art too?” There had been concerts, hadn’t there? And the Ring Cycle, never before so rich and full of meaning, and
The Magic Flute
, with its mysterious trials, the Mass in B Minor, the various Passions, and the Ninth Symphony almost whenever you wanted it? There must have been architecture, sculpture, historical memoirs, bookbinding, splendid color films. Plays, ballet—all that went on. Cranach, Dürer, the museums. Surely the cultural leader must have meant that it was a sad time
in general
, especially toward the end.

He was still speaking: “As I stood before the new opera house, the same house you are about to see—if our train ever does arrive—” (smiles and anxiety) “a distinguished foreigner said to me, ‘If only you Germans had thought more about
that
…’ ” pointing as the distinguished foreigner had pointed, but really indicating a gap between two women sitting with their knees clenched. He continued, “ ‘… instead of material things, it would have been better for you and for everybody …’ ”

Following this closely, little Bert turned to where the man had pointed and saw nothing but the newsstand, which was not any kind of a house. Christine saw little Bert looking at a row of pornographic magazines, the
sort that were sold everywhere now, and wanted to cover his eyes, but as Herbert had said, one could not protect him forever.

The cultural group exhaled, then breathed in deeply and gently. The women did something melancholy with the corners of their mouths. “As for the orchestras in those days,” said the leader cheerfully, “they played like cows and they knew it. I remember how one execrable fiddle said to another, equally vile, ‘Are you a Party member too?’ ”

This was a comic story—it must be. Their sad faces began to clear. All the same, no one was doing much more than breathing carefully in and out. Their creaking thoughts were scattered and lost as two new people, the Norwegian and the American Army wife, appeared. The Norwegian greeted Herbert rather formally; the girl marched up to the newsstand, and after giving the rack of pornography a short, cool glance, indicated, somewhere beyond it,
Time, Life
, and
Newsweek
.

“They take their culture with them,” said the Norwegian. “And what a culture it has become. Drugs, madness, sadism, poverty, lice, syphilis, and several other diseases believed to have died out in the Middle Ages.”