Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [22]
Like his father, the magistrate, he will offer neutrality before launching into dissent. “I’m ready to admit,” he will begin, or “I don’t want to take over the whole conversation …” Sometimes the sentence comes to nothing. Like his father, he lets his eyelids droop, tries to speak lightly and slowly. The magistrate is famous for fading out of a discussion by slow degrees. At one time he was said to be the youngest magistrate ever to fall asleep in court: he would black out when he thought he wasn’t needed and snap to just as the case turned around. Apparently, he never missed a turning. He has described his own mind to Pascal: it is like a superlatively smooth car with an invisible driver in control. The driver is the magistrate’s unconscious will.
To Pascal a mind is a door, ajar or shut. His grades are good, but this side of brilliant. He has a natural gift – a precise, perfectly etched memory. How will he use it? He thinks he could as easily become an actor as a lawyer. When he tells his parents so, they seem not to mind. He could turn into an actor-manager, with a private theatre of his own, or the director of one of the great national theatres, commissioning new work, refurbishing the classics, settling questions at issue with a word or two.
The Brouets are tolerant parents, ready for anything. They met for the first time in May of 1968, a few yards away from a barricade of burning cars. She had a stone in her hand; when she saw him looking at her, she put it down. They walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel together, and he told her his plan for reforming the judiciary. He was a bit older, about twenty-six. Answering his question, she said she was from Alsace. He reminded her how the poet Paul Éluard had picked up his future wife in the street, on a rainy evening. She was from Alsace, too, and starving, and in a desperate, muddled, amateurish way pretending to be a prostitute.
Well, this was not quite the same story. In 1968 the future Mme. Brouet was studying to be an analyst of handwriting, with employment to follow – so she had been promised – in the personnel section of a large department store. In the meantime, she was staying with a Protestant Reformed Church pastor and his family in Rue Fustel-de-Coulanges. She had been on her way home to dinner when she stopped to pick up the stone. She had a mother in Alsace, and a little brother, Amedée – “Dédé.”
“Sylvie and I have known both sides of the barricades,” the magistrate likes to say, now. What he means is that they cannot be crowded into a political corner. The stone in the hand has made her a rebel, at least in his recollections. She never looks at a newspaper, because of her reputation for being against absolutely everything. So he says, but perhaps it isn’t exact: she looks at the pages marked “Culture,” to see what is on at the galleries. He reads three morning papers at breakfast and, if he has time, last evening’s Le Monde. Reading, he narrows his eyes. Sometimes he looks as though everything he thinks and believes had been translated into a foreign language and, suddenly, back again.
When Pascal was about nine, his father said, “What do you suppose you will do, one day?”
They were at breakfast. Pascal’s Uncle Amedée was there. Like everyone else, Pascal called him Dédé. Pascal looked across at him and said, “I want to be a bachelor, like Dédé.”
His mother moaned, “Oh, no!” and covered her face. The magistrate waited until she had recovered before speaking. She looked up, smiling, a bit embarrassed. Then he explained,