Read Online Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant - Free Book Online Page A

to be buried, how much money he owed, how many bastards he was leaving behind, and who was looking out for them. I imagined them in ports like this, with no-good mothers.
Somebody
should have been told—telling me didn’t mean telling the whole world. One of the advantages of having an Old Country in the family is you can always say the relations that give you trouble have gone there. You just say, “He went back to the Old Country,” and nobody asks any questions. So he could have told me the truth, and I’d have known and still not let the family down. But my father never confided anything. The trouble was he didn’t know he was dying—he’d been told, in fact, he was getting better—so he didn’t act like a dying man. He used what breath he had to say things like “I always liked old Lou,” and you would have thought she was someone else’s daughter, a girl he had hardly known. Another time he said, “Did Kenny do well for himself? I heard he went to college.”
    “Don’t talk,” I said.
    “No, I mean it. I’d like to know how Kenny made out.”
    He couldn’t speak above a whisper some days, and he was careful how he pronounced words. It wasn’t a snobbish or an English accent—nothing that would make you grit your teeth. He just sounded like a stranger. When I was sent for, my mother said, “He’s dying a pauper, after all his ideas. I hope he’s satisfied.” I didn’t answer, but I said to myself, This isn’t a question of satisfaction. I wanted to ask her, “Since you didn’t get along with him and he didn’t get along with you, what did you go and have three children for?” But those are the questions you keep to yourself.
    “What’s your wife like?” my father croaked. His eyes were interested. I hadn’t been prepared for this, for how long the mind stayed alive and how frivolous it went on being. Ithought he should be more serious. “
Wife
,” my father insisted. “What about her?”
    “Obedient” came into my head, I don’t know why; it isn’t important. “Older than me,” I said, quite easily, at last. “Better educated. She was a kindergarten teacher. She knows a lot about art.” Now, why that, of all the side issues? She doesn’t like a bare wall, that’s all. “She prefers the Old Masters,” I said. I was thinking about the Scotch landscape we’ve got over the mantelpiece.
    “Good, good. Name?”
    “You know—
Beryl
. We sent you an announcement, to that place in Mexico where you were then.”
    “That’s right, Beryl.” “Burrull” was what he actually said.
    I felt reassured, because my father until now had sounded like a strange person. To have “Beryl” pronounced as I was used to hearing it made up for being alone here and the smell of the ward and the coffee made of iodine. I remembered what the Old Master had cost—one hundred and eighty dollars in 1962. It must be worth more now. Beryl said it would be an investment. Her family paid for half. She said once, about my father, “One day he’ll be sick; we’ll have to look after him.” “We can sell the painting,” I said. “I guess I can take care of my own father.”
    It happened—I was here, taking care of him; but he spoiled it now by saying, “You look like you’ve done pretty well. That’s not a bad suit you’ve got on.”
    “Actually,” I said, “I had to borrow from Beryl’s father so as to get here.”
    I thought he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and I had my next answer ready, about not begrudging a cent of it. But my father closed his eyes, smiling, saving up more breath to talk about nothing.
    “I liked old Lou,” he said distinctly. I was afraid he would ask, “Why doesn’t she write to me?” and I would have to say, “Because she never forgave you,” and he was perfectlycapable of saying then, “Never forgave me for what?” But instead of that he laughed, which was the worst of the choking and wheezing noises he made now, and when he had recovered he said,