Free From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant Page A

– Jack’s mother’s guest, of course.
    “I say, aren’t you Miss Asher?”
    “I was.” Iris, like Dr. Blackley, was probably younger than she looked. Out of her own childhood Netta recalled a desperate adolescent Iris with middle-aged parents clamped like handcuffs on her life. “How is your mother?” Netta had been about to say “How is Mrs. Cordier?” but it sounded servile.
    “I didn’t know you knew her.”
    “I remember her well. Your father too. He was a nice person.”
    “And still is,” said Iris, sharply. “He lives with me, and he always will. French daughters don’t abandon their parents.” No one had ever sounded more English to Netta. “And your father and mother?”
    “Both dead now. I’m married to Jack Ross.”
    “Nobody told me,” said Iris, in a way that made Netta think, Good Lord, Iris too? Jack could not possibly seem like a patriarchal figure where she was concerned; perhaps this time the game was reversed and Iris played at being tribal and maternal. The idea of Jack, or of any man, flinging himself on that iron bosom made Netta smile. As if startled, Iris covered her mouth. She seemed to be frightened of smiling back.
    Oh, well, and what of it, Iris too, said Netta to herself, suddenly turning back to her accounts. As it happened, Netta was mistaken (as she never would have been with a bill). That day Jack was meeting Iris for the first time.
    The upshot of these errors and encounters was an invitation to Roquebrune to visit Iris’s father. Jack’s mother was ruthlessly excluded, even though Iris probably owed her a return engagement because of the lunch. Netta supposed that Iris had decided one had to get past Netta to reach Jack – an inexactness if ever there was one. Or perhaps it was Netta Iris wanted. In that case the error became a farce. Netta had almost no knowledge of private houses. She looked around at something that did not much interest her, for she hated to leave her own home, and saw Iris’s father; apparently too old and shaky to get out of his armchair. He smiled and he nodded, meanwhile stroking an aged cat. He said to Netta, “You resemble your mother. A sweet woman. Obliging and quiet. I used to tell her that I longed to live in her hotel and be looked after.”
    Not by me, thought Netta.
    Iris’s amber bracelets rattled as she pushed and pulled everyone through introductions. Jack and Netta had been asked to meet a young American Netta had often seen in her own bar, and a couple named Sandy and Sandra Braunsweg,who turned out to be Anglo-Swiss and twins. Iris’s long arms were around them as she cried to Netta, “Don’t you know these babies?” They were, like the Rosses, somewhere in their twenties. Jack looked on, blue-eyed, interested, smiling at everything new. Netta supposed that she was now seeing some of the rather hard-up snobbish – snobbish what? “Intelligumhen-sia,” she imagined Dr. Blackley supplying. Having arrived at a word, Netta was ready to go home; but they had only just arrived. The American turned to Netta. He looked bored, and astonished by it. He needs the word for “bored,” she decided. Then he can go home, too. The Riviera was no place for Americans. They could not sit all day waiting for mail and the daily papers and for the clock to show a respectable drinking time. They made the best of things when they were caught with a house they’d been rash enough to rent unseen. Netta often had them then
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for meals: a hotel dining room was one way of meeting people. They paid a fee to use the tennis courts, and they liked the bar. Netta would notice then how Jack picked up any accent within hearing.
    Jack was now being attentive to the old man, Iris’s father. Though this was none of Mr. Cordier’s business, Jack said, “My wife and I are first cousins, as well as second cousins twice over.”
    “You don’t look it.”
    Everyone began to speak at once, and it was a minute or two before Netta heard Jack