Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [37]
By this time, of course, Arnaud had been invited by my father to have an important talk. But then my father balked, saying he would undertake nothing unless my mother was there. After all, I had two parents. He thought of inviting Arnaud to lunch in a restaurant – Lipp, say, so noisy and crowded that any shock Arnaud showed would not be noticed. Maman pointed out that one always ended up trying to shout over the noise, so there was a danger of being overheard. In the end, Papa asked him to come round to the apartment, at about five o’clock. He arrived with daffodils for my mother and a smaller bunch for me. He believed Papa was planning a change in the marriage contract: he would buy an apartment for us outright instead of granting a twenty-year loan, adjustable to devaluation or inflation, interest free.
They received him in the parlor, standing, and Maman handed him the sealed rejection she had helped me compose. If I had written the narrowest kind of exact analysis it would have been: “I have tried to love you, and can’t. My feelings toward you are cordial and full of respect. If you don’t want me to hate the sight of you, please go away.” I think that is the truth about any such failure, but nobody says it. In any case, Maman would not have permitted such a thing. She had dictated roundabout excuses, ending with a wish for his future happiness. What did we mean by happiness for Arnaud? I suppose, peace of mind.
Papa walked over to the window and stood drumming on the pane. He made some unthinking remark – that he could see part of the Church of Saint-Augustin, the air was so clear. In fact, thick, gray, lashing rain obscured everything except the nearest rank of trees.
Arnaud looked up from the letter and said, “I must be dreaming.” His clever, melancholy face was the color of the rain. My mother was afraid he would faint, as Mme. Pons so liked doing, and hurt his head on the marble floor. The chill of the marble had worked through everyone’s shoes. She tried to edge the men over to a carpet, but Arnaud seemed paralyzed. Filling in silence, she went on about the floor: the marble came from Italy; people had warned her against it; it was hard to keep clean and it held the cold.
Arnaud stared at his own feet, then hers. Finally, he asked where I was.
“Sylvie has withdrawn from worldly life,” my mother said. I had mentioned nothing in my letter about marrying another man, so he asked a second, logical question: Was I thinking of becoming a nun?
The rain, dismantling chestnut blossoms outside, sounded like gravel thrown against the windows. I know, because I was in my bedroom, just along the passage. I could not see him then as someone frozen and stunned. He was an obstacle on a railway line. My tender and competent mother had agreed to push him off the track.
That evening I said, “What if his parents turn up here and try to make a fuss?”
“They wouldn’t dare,” she said. “You were more than they had ever dreamed of.”
It was an odd, new way of considering the Ponses. Until then, their education and background and attention to things of the past had made up for an embarrassing lack of foresight: they had never acquired property for their only son to inherit. They lived in the same dim apartment, in a lamentable quarter, which they had first rented in 1926, the year of their marriage. It was on a street filled with uninviting stores and insurance offices, east of the Saint-Lazare