The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

MAVIS GALLANT
was born in Montreal in 1922. She spent her childhood years in Quebec, Ontario, and the eastern United States. After completing high school in New York City, she returned to Montreal, where, among other jobs, she worked at the National Film Board. At the age of twenty-one, she became a reporter for the Montreal
Standard
and stayed with the newspaper for six years. In 1950 she left Canada for Europe, living at various times in Austria, Italy, Spain, and the south of France before settling in Paris.

One of the most acclaimed writers of fiction of our time, Gallant invests the characters of her novels and short stories with a sense of their ambiguous and haunting past, their dilemmas often reflecting more public expressions of postwar anxiety and dislocation. She leavens her vision with a deft irony which reaches at once towards the comic and the tragic.

Gallant is a Companion of the Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mavis Gallant resides in Paris, France.

General Editor: David Staines

ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe

The year printed at the end of each story indicates its original date of publication. In this collection I have reprinted the text of each story as it appeared in the author’s most recent published version: “About Geneva” (
The Other Paris
1956); “When We Were Nearly Young” (
In Transit
1988); “My Heart Is Broken” and “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (
My Heart Is Broken
1964); “An Autobiography” (
The Pegnitz Junction
1973); “Saturday” and “In Youth Is Pleasure” (
Home Truths
1981); “The Latehomecomer” and “The Moslem Wife” (
From the Fifteenth District
1979); “Grippes and Poche” and “Overhead in a Balloon” (
Overhead in a Balloon
1985).

D.S.

G
RANNY
was waiting at the door of the apartment. She looked small, lonely, and patient, and at the sight of her the children and their mother felt instantly guilty. Instead of driving straight home from the airport, they had stopped outside Nice for ice cream. They might have known how much those extra twenty minutes would mean to Granny. Colin, too young to know what he felt, or why, began instinctively to misbehave, dragging his feet, scratching the waxed parquet. Ursula bit her nails, taking refuge in a dream, while the children’s mother, Granny’s only daughter, felt compelled to cry in a high, cheery voice, “Well, Granny, here they are, safe and sound!”

“Darlings,” said Granny, very low. “Home again.” She stretched out her arms to Ursula, but then, seeing the taxi driver, who had carried the children’s bags up the stairs, she drew back. After he had gone she repeated the gesture, turning this time to Colin, as if Ursula’s cue had been irrevocably missed. Colin was wearing a beret. “Wherever did that come from?” Granny said. She pulled it off and stood still, stricken. “My darling little boy,” she said, at last. “What have they done to you? They have cut your hair. Your lovely golden hair. I cannot believe it. I don’t want to believe it.”

“It was high time,” the children’s mother said. She stood in the outer corridor, waiting for Granny’s welcome to subside. “It was high time someone cut Colin’s hair. The curls made such a baby of him. We should have seen that. Two women can’t really bring up a boy.”

Granny didn’t look at all as if she agreed. “Who cut your hair?” she said, holding Colin.

“Barber,” he said, struggling away.

“Less said the better,” said Colin’s mother. She came in at last, drew off her gloves, looked around, as if she, and not the children, had been away.

“He’s not my child, of course,” said Granny, releasing Colin. “If he were, I can just imagine the letter I should write. Of all the impudence! When you send a child off for a visit you expect at the very least to have him returned exactly as he left. And you,” she said, extending to Ursula a plump, liver-spotted hand, “what changes am I to expect in you?”

“Oh, Granny, for Heaven’s sake, it was only two weeks.” She permitted her grandmother to kiss her, then went straight to the sitting room and hurled herself into a chair. The room was hung with dark engravings of cathedrals. There were flowers, red carnations, on the rickety painted tables, poked into stiff arrangements by a maid. It was the standard seasonal Nice
meublé
. Granny spent every winter in rented flats more or less like this one, and her daughter, since her divorce, shared them with her.

Granny followed Ursula into the room and sat down, erect, on an uncomfortable chair, while her daughter, trailing behind, finally chose a footstool near the empty fireplace. She gave Granny a gentle, neutral look. Before starting out for the airport, earlier, she had repeated her warning: There were to be no direct questions, no remarks. It was all to appear as natural and normal as possible. What, indeed, could be more natural for the children than a visit with their father?

“What, indeed,” said Granny in a voice rich with meaning.

It was only fair, said the children’s mother. A belief in fair play was so embedded in her nature that she could say the words without coloring deeply. Besides, it was the first time he had asked.

“And won’t be the last,” Granny said. “But, of course, it is up to you.”

Ursula lay rather than sat in her chair. Her face was narrow and freckled: She resembled her mother who, at thirty-four, had settled into a permanent, anxious-looking, semi-youthfulness. Colin, blond and fat, rolled on the floor. He pulled his mouth out at the corners, then pulled down his eyes to show the hideous red underlids. He looked at his grandmother and growled like a lion.

“Colin has come back sillier than ever,” Granny said. He lay prone, noisily snuffing the carpet. The others ignored him.

“Did you go boating, Ursula?” said Granny, not counting this as a direct question. “When I visited Geneva, as a girl, we went boating on the lake.” She went on about white water birds, a parasol, a boat heaped with colored cushions.

“Oh, Granny, no,” said Ursula. “There weren’t even any big boats, let alone little ones. It was cold.”

“I hope the house, at least, was warm.”

But evidently Ursula had failed to notice the temperature of her father’s house. She slumped on her spine (a habit Granny had just nicely caused her to get over before the departure for Geneva) and then said, unexpectedly, “She’s not a good manager.”

Granny and her daughter exchanged a look, eyebrows up.

“Oh?” said Ursula’s mother, pink. She forgot about the direct questions and said, “Why?”

“It’s not terribly polite to speak that way of one’s hostess,” said Granny, unable to resist the reproof but threatening Ursula’s revelation at the source. Her daughter looked at her, murderous.

“Well,” said Ursula, slowly, “once the laundry didn’t come
back. It was her fault, he said. Our sheets had to be changed, he said. So she said Oh, all right. She took the sheets off Colin’s bed and put them on my bed, and took the sheets off my bed and put them on Colin’s. To make the change, she said.”

“Dear God,” said Granny.

“Colin’s sheets were a mess. He had his supper in bed sometimes. They were just a mess.”

“Not true,” said Colin.

“Another time …,” said Ursula, and stopped, as if Granny had been right, after all, about criticizing one’s hostess.

“Gave us chocolate,” came from Colin, his face muffled in carpet.

“Not every day, I trust,” Granny said.

“For the plane.”

“It might very well have made you both airsick,” said Granny.

“Well,” said Ursula, “it didn’t.” Her eyes went often to the luggage in the hall. She squirmed upright, stood up, and sat down again. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

“Ursula, do you want a handkerchief?” said Granny.

“No,” said Ursula. “Only it so happens I’m writing a play. It’s in the suitcase.”

Granny and the children’s mother looked at each other again. “I
am
pleased,” Granny said, and her daughter nodded, agreeing, for, if impertinence and slumping on one’s spine were unfortunate inherited tendencies, this was something else. It was only fair that Ursula’s father should have bequeathed her
something to
compensate for the rest. “What is it about?” said Granny.

Ursula looked at her feet. After a short silence she said, “Russia. That’s all I want to tell. It was her idea. She lived there once.”

Quietly, controlled, the children’s mother took a cigarette from the box on the table. Granny looked brave.

“Would you tell us the title, at least?” said Granny.

“No,” said Ursula. But then, as if the desire to share the splendid thing she had created were too strong, she said, “I’ll tell you one line, because they said it was the best thing they’d ever heard anywhere.” She took a breath. Her audience was gratifyingly attentive, straining, nearly, with attention and control. “It goes like this,” Ursula said. “ ‘The Grand Duke enters and sees Tatiana all in gold.’ ”

“Well?” said Granny.

“Well, what?” said Ursula. “That’s it. That’s the line.” She looked at her mother and grandmother and said,
“They
liked it. They want me to send it to them, and everything else, too. She even told me the name Tatiana.”

“It’s lovely, dear,” said Ursula’s mother. She put the cigarette back in the box. “It sounds like a lovely play. Just when did she live in Russia?”

“I don’t know. Ages ago. She’s pretty old.”

“Perhaps one day we shall see the play after all,” said Granny. “Particularly if it is to be sent all over the Continent.”

“You mean they might act in it?” said Ursula. Thinking of this, she felt sorry for herself. Ever since she had started “The Grand Duke” she could not think of her own person without being sorry. For no reason at all, now, her eyes filled with tears of self-pity. Drooping, she looked out at the darkening street, to the leafless trees and the stone façade of a public library.