Free Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant Page B

pleasantly than the whole of Mrs. Plummer ever talked to anybody.
    “Serves you right,” she said.
    Amabel gave a little jump. She wondered if Mrs. Plummer’s remark had anything to do with the opera. She turned her head cautiously. Mrs. Plummer had again closed her eyes.
    The persistence of memory determines what each day of the year will be like, the Colonel’s wife decided. Not what happens on New Year’s Eve. This morning I was in Moscow; between the curtains snow was falling. The day had no color. It might have been late afternoon. Then the smell of toast came into my room and I was back in my mother’s dining room in Victoria, with the gros-point chairs and the framed embroidered grace on the wall. A little girl I had been ordered to play with kicked the baseboard, waiting for us to finish our breakfast. A devilish little boy, Hume something, was on my mind. I was already attracted to devils; I believed in their powers. My mother’s incompetence about choosing friends for me shaped my life, because that child, who kicked the baseboard and left marks on the paint …
    When she and her husband had still been speaking, this was how Frances Plummer had talked. She had offered him hours of reminiscence, and the long personal thoughts that lead to quarrels. In those days red wine had made her aggressive, whiskey made him vague.
    Not only vague, she corrected; stubborn too.
Speak?
said one half of Mrs. Plummer to the other. Did we speak? We yelled!
    The quiet twin demanded a fairer portrait of the past, for she had no memory.
    Oh, he was a shuffler, back and forth between wife and mistress, said the virago, who had forgotten nothing. He’d desert one and then leave the other—flag to flag, false convert, double agent, reason why a number of women had long,hilly conversations, like the view from a train—monotonous, finally. That was the view a minute ago, you’d say. Yes, but look now.
    The virago declared him incompetent; said he had shuffled from embassy to embassy as well, pushed along by a staunch ability to retain languages, an untiring recollection of military history and wars nobody cared about. What did he take with him? His wife, for one thing. At least she was here, tonight, at the opera. Each time they changed countries he supervised the packing of a portrait of his mother, wearing white, painted when she was seventeen. He had nothing of Catherine’s: When Catherine died, Mrs. Plummer gave away her clothes and her books, and had her little dog put to sleep.
    How did it happen? In what order? said calm Mrs. Plummer. Try and think it in order. He shuffled away one Easter; came shuffling back; and Catherine died. It is useless to say “Serves you right,” for whatever served him served you.
    The overture told Amabel nothing, and by the end of the first act she still did not know the name of the opera or understand what it was about. Earlier in the day the Colonel had said, “There is some uncertainty—sore throats here and there. The car, now—you can see what has happened. It doesn’t start. If our taxi should fail us, and isn’t really a taxi, we might arrive at the Bolshoi too late for me to do anything much in the way of explaining. But you can easily figure it out for yourself.” His mind cleared; his face lightened. “If you happen to see Tartar dances, then you will know it is
Igor
. Otherwise it is
Boris.
”
    The instant the lights rose, Amabel thrust her program at him and said, “What does that mean?”
    “Why,
Ivan
.
It’s
Ivan.”
    “There are two words, aren’t there?”
    “Yes. What’s-His-Name had a sore throat, d’you see? Weknew it might all be changed at any moment. It was clever of them to get these printed in time.”
    Mrs. Plummer, who looked like the Red Queen sometimes, said, “A life for the tsar,” meanwhile staring straight ahead of her.
    “Used to be, used to be,” said the Colonel, and he smiled at Amabel, as if to say to her, “Now you know.”
    The