OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 7

What doors do

Day off from the store today, so rose late, 4.45. Morning chorus beginning, the robins picking up on a hint of light I’m too dull and human and tired to sense. Gusty, rain on the rattling windows, cold, the reluctant spring of 2022 still playing its cards close to its chest. Chickens were on sale yesterday, a good deal, bought two, cooked them both on well-made bed of root vegetables. Wait. No. Brussel sprouts were involved, too. Stripped them of their outer leaves — exfoliating — and remembered another year, another season, not so long back, when there was a vogue among green grocers — who are prey to fashion, like everyone else — for selling Brussels on the stalk. They must have been the bane of the vegetable stockers — not stalkers — lives; they were big as walking sticks, required all kinds of special attention and binning for presentation. I bought one, for the novelty — one must shake things up when and as one can — and saved the long, dense stem, deepened the umbilical pocks where the sprouts had been, turned it into a menorah. It was extremely persuasive, my finest work, really. Spent a few weeks looking over my shoulder for whatever photographer might come by and commemorate my insight and genius, place the image in the glossy pages of — what? Veggie Crafts Magazine? Anyway, the menorah served its purpose, and by the time Christmas came along the stalk was beginning to soften and smell — the fate of us all — and it was consigned to the compost bin. This was shortly after the city had made them a requirement for all apartment buildings, under threat of fine, which excited a lot of speculation that inspectors would be hired to go through the regular trash, sniffing out signs of organic matter, and then applying detective work — reassembling shredded utility bills and so on — to track down whoever the miscreant. We are, I think, the only species capable of casting ourselves as the stars and co-stars of conspiracies, however unlikely. I doubt the robins, singing away, hard at their procreative work, are talking about how the slow spring is a plot against them.

We know what the early bird catches and, in apartment living, with shared laundry, the washers and dryers are a tasty worm. (Oh, Billy, that was strained, never mind, forge on.) It’s good to get up pre-dawn, and avail yourself of the facilities. (There’s another still-dark riser here who sometimes beats me to it, and that person, whoever it is, has a dedicated spot on the shelf of my heart where I store the bitters.) As I write this, the filth of the week just gone is being expunged in the basement — including from my three-pocket grocer’s apron, the regular application of which has made me adept at knotting drawstrings behind my back, a skill I never thought I’d acquire and which I’ll be sure to note the next time I update my CV — and, on the stove, the stock I put on to simmer before I went to bed — I stripped the meat from the two chickens, set it aside for tonight’s soup, and boiled the skeletal remains — has gathered its strength, earned its rest, and is cooling, steeping. I love making stock, which requires taking stock of all the bits I’ve set aside over a few weeks — the peelings, the stem ends, the bones of whatever, no need to worry about mixing the lights and the darks — and giving them a last hurrah before they comply with whatever the bylaw that requires they take their place in the compost. As with stock, so with this diary. Throw in whatever’s on hand, see how it turns out.

Mavis Gallant, MG, is my mission here, and I do have her in mind; this I note, lest you think I’ve thrown salience into the stock pot and forgotten about it. There’s a path that will take us there, we’re on it now, scattering bread crumbs behind us, something for the robins who identify as vegan. (Sorry about the gluten, robins, I’ll try to do better next time.) My writing of “menorah,” see above, was preceded by a pause as I searched for the word. “Mezuzah” kept intruding where “menorah” was called for, and this would be because of a conversation at dinner the other night. A woman at the table had converted to Judaism, in the remote past, at the time of her marriage. She has lived alone for many years, now, isn’t religiously observant, and is reassessing her connection to her chosen faith, is thinking she might remove the mezuzah from outside her door: a small task, but a telling gesture. Doorways matter, the access and egress rituals we enact, even if only the pause to pat our pockets, to search for our keys. Other Bill, Billy, is very rigorous about removing his shoes before he enters his own home, or anyone else’s: he’s spent a lot of time in Japan, it was a habit that took. I wouldn’t say it’s a sacred gesture, exactly, but it has that kind of weight to it. If he’s traveling the two blocks from his apartment to mine, I place his pink, feather-festooned Crocs outside the door. I leave the door open. Here’s a photo he took last night when he arrived to eat the chicken that’s now becoming stock.

Doorways. Luck comes through, good and bad. At that same dinner a few days back, a friend gave me a copy of Isadora Duncan’s memoir, My Life, 1927. It’s fabulous in its extravagance. You can open it to any page and find something you’ll want to read aloud. This morning, on waking, wind and rain and robins, I randomly chose p. 229. Isadora, in her dressing room after a performance, is concerned about the future of her school for young dancers of free spirit, money is tight, and she tells the universe she needs a millionaire. Her maid enters. On the other side of the door, as it turns out, waits a millionaire. He is tall, blond, and striking. He minds her of Lohengrin. Within a moment or two of their meeting, as Isadora tells it, he says:

“I admire your art, your courage in the ideal of your school. I have come to help you. What can I do? Would you like, for instance, to go with all these dancing children to a little villa on the Riviera, by the sea, and there compose new dances? The expense you don’t need to worry about. I will bear it all. You have done a great work; you must be tired. Now let it rest on my shoulders.”

It takes only a paragraph for Isadora and the children to make their way to the Mediterranean, and to be prancing about in blue tunics, their hands full of fruit.

It had been my intention to write about MG’s 1965 short story “Virus X,” but this sign from Isadora, delivered in the pre-dawn hours when the stock was still bubbling and my laundry was yet undone, was a clear indication I should hold off on that. I was reminded of the Mediterranean, the Riviera, and of the story that opened, for me, the MG door and made me step across the threshold. (Here, if I had the nerve, I would use the word “liminal,” but then I’d waste a lot of time, falling about laughing.) It’s one of her most celebrated, “The Moslem Wife.” It’s set, as many of her stories are, in a hotel, this one on the Riviera. The hotel has long been in the keeping of the Asher family, and it passes into the keeping of Netta, who has always loved her cousin, Jack, and who marries him, against the wishes of both their families. There are golden years, when the trauma of the First World War has been blunted and the possibility of a new conflagration is easy enough to deny. The hotel is busy, Netta and Jack are in love, Katherine Mansfield is nearby, writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and, I guess, not far off, Isadora capers. Netta is steadfast, but Jack is restless, has a wandering eye, what’s more. Netta understands she must cut him some slack. He travels. Then comes the war. Netta rides it out in the hotel with Jack’s horrible mother, the bane of her life. The Germans take over the place, then the Italians. The war ends. Jack, eventually returns. Netta has to decide what to do. It is a story about constancy, about memory, about how men and women tend to be differently inhabited by them.

In the last entry in this tribute diary, I mentioned a CBC documentary from the mid-60’s, a long interview with MG that aired on a show called Telescope. The interviewer — I must find out his name — has a bit of a hard go with her — she’s impatient, reticent — and, at the end, he tries a game of word association. It doesn’t go well. “Three in the morning,” he says, at one point, and she shrugs and says, “It’s late,” or “I’m asleep,” or some such dead stop remark. It wasn’t, on the interviewer’s part, a random choice, I’m sure. He had reason to think she would have something to say, he was referencing something in one of her stories. But what? Ten years later, were she in a co-operative mood, she could have said, “Oh, yes. That passage in ‘The Moslem Wife.’”

“She suddenly knew to a certainty that if Jack were to die she would search the crowd of mourners for a man she could live with. She would not return from the funeral alone. Grief and memory, yes, she said to herself, but what about three o’clock in the morning?”

That was the passage — I remember this vividly — that pushed me over the edge. Grief and memory, yes, but what about three o’clock in the morning? In a single phrase, MG celebrates and dismantles all our sentiment and striving. It’s as good as a theorem, or formula. A panacea. It’s specific to all of life. It’s a sentence any writer would want to claim.

“The Moslem Wife” is perfect throughout. It does what a great short story can do, contains a universe in 40 pages. It is so rich, so wise, so sad, so wry, so beautifully measured and told. I know I read MG before I met “The Moslem Wife,” but I couldn’t tell you what. It’s one of those rare works of art that dogs one’s steps. It sneaks up on me, unbidden, as it did this morning, thanks to Isadora and Lohengrin. I remember a strange episode from many years back. I was at a party, sitting with a group of men, talking about this and that. I don’t think I was saying anything out of line, or untoward, I don’t think I was saying anything much at all. One of the other fellows in the group, out of nowhere, out of the blue, took his glass of wine and slowly, deliberately, poured it out on my jeans, stained them red. There was no good reason for it. I wasn’t angry, just surprised and, more than surprised, fascinated. I understood that there was nothing he could offer by way of explanation. He did what he did because, in that moment, he could. And I remember remembering then, everyone looking on in stunned silence, the wine soaking through the denim, onto my leg, how Netta, as a little girl, meeting her cousin Jack for the first time — he’s a few years younger, and just a toddler — kicks him, kicks him so hard that he has a slight limp for the rest of his life. Her father demands to know why, but there’s no reason. It just something she did. Not everything can be explained. Some things are just — irrational. The guy who upended his wine glass just had Netta moment. Well. The jeans got clean. I never limped.

“The Moslem Wife” was collected in From the Fifteenth District, which was published in Canada in 1979. It originally appeared in The New Yorker, August 23, 1976. It was exactly at that time, perhaps even on that date, that I was on a plane, bound for France, to spend a year abroad, teaching (badly) English in a lycée in the south, not near the Riviera, but in a small town a few miles from Toulouse. I carried in my suitcase all the horrible poems I was writing, and I’d write more in that year away, my golden year. The nostalgia I feel for it, have felt for it for over 40 years, no doubt has something to do with my deep, abiding fondness for MG, her dab hand at celebrating the comforting disorientation of travel. From the Fifteenth District, she often said, was the first of her books to find a Canadian audience of any size. She had always been, so she felt, discounted by her home country. (She left in 1950, didn’t spend any substantial length of time in Canada again until she took an appointment in 1984 at Massey College, as the writer in residence. Yesterday, hunting around online, I found a copy of Home Truths which contains, according to the bookseller’s bibliographic description, a flyleaf inscription, I’m not sure to whom, in which she thanks whoever the dedicatee for their counsel, then something to do with Australia, and then the date: Easter Monday, 1984. It was more than I could afford. I bought it, anyway.)

Doors open. We go through or we don’t, entering, exiting. I met MG only once, at the CBC, in Vancouver. She was in town for a reading - what was the year? 1990? 91? — and came for an interview with Vicki Gabereau. I set it up — self-interest at work. I remember Vicki asking MG if she smoked. She said she’d quit, many years back, but that she missed having the first cigarette of the morning, and I thought of “The Moslem Wife,” and how Netta and Jack enjoy the first cigarette of the morning; that detail was with me. I walked her to the lobby, once the conversation was done, and asked her, “Do you like to know which stories are your reader’s favourites?” She said, “I suppose I do.” I said, “Mine is ‘The Moslem Wife.’” She said, “Ah. Yes. That’s what men always say.” And then we were at the door. Then, it slid open. Then, she was gone.

Thanks for reading. Taking tomorrow off. Will check in again on Wednesday. XO.