Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [30]
What to take on the Christmas exploration? The first rule of excursions into uncankered societies is: Don’t bring presents. Not unless one wants to face charges of corruption. But then, like any scholar fending off a critic, he could justify the gifts, telling himself that another visitor might taint the society in a manner deadlier still, whereas he, Missierna, sat lightly. He had been a featherweight on his children; he had scarcely gone near them. A present from parent to child surely reinforces a natural tie. When they were young, he used to bring home one wristwatch and make them draw lots. For professional trips he had packed radio batteries; his travels had taught him that new republics run out of them soon. He had taken ski boots wherever there were snowy mountains, except in places where snow was sacred. He had always shown a sense of patience, a good-tempered approach to time, as he cut through the thorn patch of transit visas, six-month-residence permits, five-year research grants. To enter one’s own family, he supposed, one needed to fill out forms. All he would have to understand was the slant of the questions.
From his hotel room in Helsinki, Missierna saw the Baltic and gulls skimming over the whitecaps. At night ghosts floated along the horizon. He took it for granted they were ghosts – having lived among people who saw a great many – and not simply the white shadows of summer.
An insurance actuarial study gave him six more years to live if he went on as he was, eight if he gave up smoking, nine and a half if he adopted an optimistic outlook. What about white magic? What about trying to add a few more summer nights by means of poems and incantations? Why not appeal to a saint – a saint so obscure that the direct line from Missierna’s mind to the saint’s memory of a mind would be clean, without the clutter of other, alien voices? He could begin by repeating his own name, before deciding what conjury should come next.
His grandchildren surely lived on magic. There was fresh daylight every morning. Clothes dropped on the floor were found clean and folded. A gray-haired man at the congress, who said he had once been Missierna’s student, had told him that very soon, by law, children were going to be asked to acknowledge their parents, instead of the other way. There would be some cold refusals, Missierna supposed, and some selfish ones, and some inspired by embarrassment. There might be cases of simple antipathy, too. Most children would probably accept their parents, out of pity, or to keep a strong thread of filiation, or to claim an inheritance, or to conform to an astral pattern. Some, to avoid the sight of adult tears. A few might show the blind trust that parents pray for. The new insecurity, the terror of being cast off, was already causing adults to adopt the extreme conservatism that is usually characteristic of the very young. A mistrust of novelty and change surely accounted for Missierna’s sparse audience, the silence in the auditorium, the unwillingness to know something more.
In Saltnatek, toward the end, he had heard some of the cool remarks that said, plainly, he was not a father; heard them from students he had taught, reared, nurtured, and who now were ready to send him packing: “You can’t say we didn’t warn you.” “I tried to tell you that someday you’d be sorry.” “I’m sorry if you’re sorry. But that’s all I have to be sorry about.” From his own children there had been monitory signals, too, which he had mistaken for pertness: “Can’t you ask a waitress for a cup of coffee without telling your life story?” “Other parents don’t take the wrong bus.” “Please don’t get up and dance. It makes you look so silly.” Their eyes were clean, pure, but bedevilled by unease and mortification. The eyes