Free Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant Page A

the wall.
    “Thanks, Billy,” said my father.
    I really was scared. I had been waiting for something without knowing what it would mean. I can tell you how it was: It was like the end of the world.
    “I didn’t realize you were worried,” I said. “You should of asked me right away.”
    “I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” my father said. “That’s why I wanted you, not the others.”
    That was all. Not long after that, he couldn’t talk. He had deserted his whole family once, but I was the one he abandoned twice. When he died, a nurse said to me, “I am sorry.” It had no meaning, from her, yet only a few days before, it was all I thought I wanted to hear.

NEW YEAR’S EVE
    O N NEW YEAR’S Eve the Plummers took Amabel to the opera.
    “Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” said Amabel, feeling secure because she had a Plummer on either side.
    Colonel Plummer’s car had broken down that afternoon; he had got his wife and their guest punctually to the Bolshoi Theater, through a storm, in a bootleg taxi. Now he discovered from his program that the opera announced was neither of those they had been promised.
    His wife leaned across Amabel and said, “Well, which is it?” She could not read any Russian and would not try.
    She must have known it would take him minutes to answer, for she sat back, settled a width of gauzy old shawl on her neck, and began telling Amabel the relative sizes of the Bolshoi and some concert hall in Vancouver the girl had never heard of. Then, because it was the Colonel’s turn to speak, she shut her eyes and waited for the overture.
    The Colonel was gazing at the program and putting off the moment when he would have to say that it was
Ivan Susanin
, a third choice no one had so much as hinted at. He wanted to convey that he was sorry and that the change was not his fault. He took bearings: He was surrounded by women. To his left sat the guest, who mewed like a kitten, who had been a friend of his daughter’s, and whose name he could not remember. On the right, near the aisle, two quietunknown girls were eating fruit and chocolates. These two smelled of oranges; of clothes worn a long time in winter; of light recent sweat; of women’s hair. Their arms were large and bare. When the girl closest to him moved slightly, he saw a man’s foreign wristwatch. He wondered who she was, and how the watch had come to her, but he had been here two years now—long enough to know he would never be answered. He also wondered if the girls were as shabby as his guest found everyone in Moscow. His way of seeing women was not concerned with that sort of evidence: Shoes were shoes, a frock was a frock.
    The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.
    He felt his guest’s silence, then his wife’s. The visitor’s profile was a kitten’s, to match her voice. She was twenty-two, which his Catherine would never be. Her gold dress, packed for improbable gala evenings, seemed the size of a bathing suit. She was divorcing someone, or someone in Canada had left her—he remembered that, but not her name.
    He moved an inch or two to the left and muttered, “It’s
Ivan.
”
    “What?” cried his wife. “What did you say?”
    In the old days, before their Catherine had died, when the Colonel’s wife was still talking to him, he had tried to hush her in public places sometimes, and so the habit of loudness had taken hold.
    “It isn’t
Boris
. It isn’t
Igor
. It’s
Ivan
. They must both have had sore throats.”
    “Oh, well, bugger it,” said his wife.
    Amabel supposed that the Colonel’s wife had grown peculiar through having lived so many years in foreign parts. Having no one to speak to, she conversed alone. Half of Mrs. Plummer’s character was quite coarse, though a finer Mrs. Plummer somehow kept order. Low-minded Mrs. Plummerchatted amiably and aloud with her high-minded twin—far more