Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [36]
As a way of thanking M. Pons, as well as getting to know him better, Papa asked my mother to invite him to dinner. For some reason, M. Pons waited several days before calling to say he had a wife. She turned out to be difficult, I remember, telling how she had fainted six times in eighteen months, and announcing, just as the roast lamb was served, that the smell of meat made her feel sick. However, when my mother discovered there was also a Pons son, aged twenty-six, unmarried, living at home, and working in the legal department of a large maritime-insurance firm, she asked them again, this time with Arnaud.
During the second dinner Maman said, “Sylvie is something of an artist. Everything on the dining-room walls is Sylvie’s work.”
Arnaud looked around, briefly. He was silent, though not shy, with a thin face and brown hair. His mind was somewhere else, perhaps in livelier company. He ate everything on his plate, sometimes frowning; when it was something he seemed to like, his expression cleared. He glanced at me, then back at my depictions of the Roman countryside and the harbor at Naples in 1850. I was sure he could see they were replicas and that he knew the originals, and perhaps despised me.
“They are only copies,” I managed to say.
“But full of feeling,” said Maman.
He nodded, as if acknowledging a distant and somewhat forward acquaintance – a look neither cold nor quite welcoming. I wondered what his friends were like and if they had to pass a special test before he would consent to conversation.
After dinner, in the parlor, there was the usual difficulty over coffee. Claudine was slow to serve, and particularly slow to collect the empty cups. A chinoiserie table stood just under the chandelier, but Maman made sure nothing ever was placed on it. She found an excuse to call attention to the marble floor, because she took pleasure in the icy look of it, but no one picked up the remark. Mme. Pons was first to sit down. She put her cup on the floor, crossed her legs, and tapped her foot to some tune playing in her head. Perhaps she was recalling an evening before her marriage when she had danced wearing a pleated skirt and ropes of beads: I had seen pictures of my mother dressed that way.
I had settled my own cup predicament by refusing coffee. Now I took a chair at some distance from Mme. Pons: I guessed she would soon snap out of her dream and start to ask personal questions. I looked at my hands and saw they were stained with paint. I sat on them: nobody paid attention.
My mother was showing Arnaud loose sketches and unframed watercolors of mine that she kept in a folder – more views of Italy, copies, and scenes in Paris parks drawn from life.
“Take one! Take one!” she cried.
My father went over to see what kind of taste Arnaud had. He had picked the thing nearest him, a crayon drawing of Vesuvius – not my best work. My father laughed, and said my idea of a volcano in eruption was like a haystack on fire.
Bernard’s father did not respond to my father’s first approach – a letter that began: “I understand that our two children, Bernard and Sylvie, are anxious to unite their destinies.” Probably he was too busy finding out if we were solvent, Papa said.
My mother cancelled the wedding dates, civil and church. There were just a few presents that had to be returned to close relatives. The names of the other guests had dissolved in the Seine. “It should be done quickly,” she had told my father, once the sudden change had been explained half a dozen times and he was nearly over the shock. He wondered if haste had anything to do with disgrace, though he could hardly believe it of me. No, no, nothing like that, she said. She wanted to see me safe and settled and in good hands. Well, of course, he wanted something like that, too.
As for me, I was sure I had been put on earth to marry Bernard Brunelle and move to Lille and live in a large stone house. (“Brick,” my friend Chantal corrected, when I told her. “It’s all brick up in Lille.”) A