Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [0]
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.
THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY
General Editor: David Staines
ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe
Copyright © 1993 by Mavis Gallant
Afterword copyright © 1997 by Pendragon Ink
First published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Inc. in 1993
New Canadian Library edition 1997
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mavis Gallant, 1922-
Across the bridge
(New Canadian library)
eISBN: 978-1-55199-626-4
I. Title.
PS8513.A593A73 1997 C813′.54 C96-932094-9
PR9199.3.G26A64 1997
The events and characters in these stories are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or happenings is coincidental.
All stories in this collection have originally appeared in The New Yorker save for “1933,” which first appeared in Mademoiselle as “Déclassé,” and “The Fenton Child.”
The publishers acknowledge the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
v3.1
The following dedication appeared in the original edition:
To
Kitty Crowe
Contents
Cover
The Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1933
The Chosen Husband
From Cloud to Cloud
Florida
Dédé
Kingdom Come
Across the Bridge
Forain
A State of Affairs
Mlle. Dias de Corta
The Fenton Child
Afterword
1933
ABOUT A YEAR after the death of M. Carette, his three survivors – Berthe and her little sister, Marie, and their mother – had to leave the comfortable flat over the furniture store in Rue Saint-Denis and move to a smaller place. They were not destitute: there was the insurance and the money from the sale of the store, but the man who had bought the store from the estate had not yet paid and they had to be careful.
Some of the lamps and end tables and upholstered chairs were sent to relatives, to be returned when the little girls grew up and got married. The rest of their things were carried by two small, bent men to the second floor of a stone house in Rue Cherrier near the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. The men used an old horse and an open cart for the removal. They told Mme. Carette that they had never worked outside that quarter; they knew only some forty streets of Montreal but knew them thoroughly. On moving day, soft snow, like graying lace, fell. A patched tarpaulin protected the Carettes’ wine-red sofa with its border of silk fringe, the children’s brass bedstead, their mother’s walnut bed with the carved scallop shells, and the round oak table, smaller than the old one, at which they would