We were joined now by Michael Hagen-Beck. The stir caused by his arrival may have seemed welcoming, but it was merely surprise. On the way to the restaurant Mrs. Biesel had set forth considerable disapproval of the way he had left the concert before the Ravel. Lily had defended him (she believed he had gone to look for a bathroom and felt too shy to come back), but Lapwing had said gravely, “I’m afraid Hagen-Beck will have to be wiped off the board,” and I had pictured him turning in a badge of some kind and slinking out of class.
He nodded in the curt way that is supposed to conceal diffidence but that usually means a sour nature, removed the empty chair next to David, dragged it to the far end of the table, and wedged it between Mrs. Biesel and Lily.
“Hey, there’s Hagen-Beck,” said Lapwing, as if he were astonished to find him this side of the Atlantic.
“I’m afraid he is too late for the soup,” said Mr. Chadwick.
“He won’t care,” said Lapwing. “He’d sooner talk than eat. He’s brilliant. He’s going to show us all up, one day. Well, he may show some people up. Not everybody.”
Lily sat listening to Hagen-Beck, her cheek on her hand. In the dying light her hair looked silvery. I could hear him telling her that he had been somewhere around the North Sea, to the home of his ancestors, a fishing village of superior poverty. He spoke of herrings — how many are caught and sold in a year, how many devoured by seagulls. Beauty is in the economics of Nature, he said. Nowhere else.
“But isn’t what people build beautiful, too?” said Lily, pleading for the cracked and faded church.
A waiter brought candles, deepening the color of the night and altering the shade and tone of the women’s skin and hair.
“This calls for champagne,” Mr. Chadwick said, in a despairing voice.
David had not touched the fish soup or the fresh langouste especially ordered for him. He stared at his plate, and sometimes down the table to the wall of candlelight, behind which Lily and Hagen-Beck sat talking quietly. Mr. Chadwick looked where David was looking. I saw that he had just made a complex and understandable mistake; he thought that David was watching Hagen-Beck, that it was for Hagen-Beck he had tried to keep the empty chair.
“Great idea, champagne,” said Lapwing, once he had made certain Mr. Chadwick was paying for it. “We haven’t toasted David’s wonderful performance this afternoon.” From a man who detested the very idea of music, this was a remarkable sign of good will.
Hagen-Beck would not drink wine, probably because it had been unknown to his ancestors. Summoning a waiter, who had better things to do, he asked for water — not false, bottled water but the real kind, God’s kind, out of a tap. It was brought to him, in a wine-stained carafe. Two buckets of ice containing champagne had meanwhile been placed on the table, one of them fatally close to Fergus. The wine was opened and poured. Hagen-Beck swallowed water. Mr. Chadwick struck his glass with a knife: he was about to estrange David still further by making a speech.
Fergus and Edie, deep in some exchange, failed to hear the call for silence. In the sudden hush at our table Edie said distinctly, “When I was a kid, we made our own Christmas garlands and decorations. We’d start in November, the whole family. We made birds out of colored paper, and tied them to branches, and hung the branches all over the house. We spent our evenings that way, making these things. Now my father won’t even open my Christmas cards. My mother writes to me, and she sends me money. I wouldn’t have anything to wear if she didn’t. My father doesn’t know. Harry doesn’t know. I’ve never told it to anybody, until now.”
She must have meant “to any man,” because she had told it to Lily.
“It’s boring,” said Fergus. “That’s why you don’t tell it. Nobody cares. If you were playing an old woman, slopping on in a bathrobe and some old slippers, it might work. But here you are — golden hair, golden skin. You look carved in butter. The dress is too tight for you, though. I wouldn’t let you wear it if I had any say. And those god-awful earrings — where do they come from?”
“London, Woolworth’s.”
“Well, get rid of them. And your hair should be longer. And nobody cares about your bloody garlands. Don’t talk. Just be golden, be quiet.”
I suppose the others thought he had insulted her. I was the only one who knew what had gone on before, and how easily she had said, “Wife or girlfriend?” Lapwing merely looked interested. Another man might have challenged Fergus, or, thinking he was drunk, drawn his attention away from Edie and let it die. But Lapwing squeaked, “That’s what I keep telling her, Bray. Nobody cares! Nobody cares! Be quiet! Be quiet!”
I saw Lapwing’s heavy head bowing and lifting, and Edie’s slow expression of shock, and Fergus pouring himself, and nobody else, champagne. This time there surely must have been a flash of telepathy between two people with nothing in common. Fergus and I must have shared at least one thought: Lapwing had just opened his palm, revealing a miniature golden wife, and handed her over.
Then Edie looked at Fergus, and Fergus at Edie, and I watched her make up her mind. The spirit of William Morris surrounded the new lovers, evading his most hardworking academic snoop. Lapwing ought to have stood and quoted, “Fear shall not alter these lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover,” but he seemed to see nothing, notice nothing; or like Mr. Chadwick he continued to see and notice the wrong things.
Three of the future delinquents at our table were ex-Catholics. They took it for granted that the universe was eternal and they could gamble their lives. Whatever thin faith they still had was in endless renewal — new luck, new love. Nothing worked out for them, but even now I can see what they were after. Remembering Edie at the split second when she came to a decision, I can find it in me to envy them. The rest of us were born knowing better, which means we were stuck. When I finally looked away from her it was at another pool of candlelight, and the glowing, blooming children. I wonder now if there was anything about us for the children to remember, if they ever later on reminded one another: There was that long table of English-speaking people, still in bud.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in 1922, and left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write. Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published to universal acclaim. Paris Stories, a selection edited by Michael Ondaatje, appeared in 2002.
Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and has won numerous awards, including the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts, the inaugural Matt Cohen Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
She continues to live in Paris.
RUSSELL BANKS is a novelist and short story writer. His most recent works are