Free Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant

unpleasantly. He carefully selected a necklace when she told him he might take one for his mother, and he rubbed it with a soft cloth. She showed him how to make the beads magnetic by rolling them in his palms.
    “You can do that even with plastic,” he said.
    “Can you? How very sad. It is dead matter.”
    “Amber is too,” he said politely.
    “What do you want to be later on? A scientist?”
    “A ski instructor.” He looked all round the room, at the shelves and curtains and at the bamboo folding screen, and said, “If you didn’t live here, who would?”
    She replied, “If you see anything that pleases you, you may keep it. I want you to choose your own present. If you don’t see anything, we’ll go out tomorrow and look in the shops. Does that suit you?” He did not reply. She held the necklace he had pickedand said, “Your mother will remember seeing this as I bent down to kiss her good night. Do you like old coins? One of my sons was a collector.” In the wicker basket was a lacquered box that contained his uncle’s coin collection. He took a coin but it meant nothing to him; he let it fall. It clinked, and he said, “We have a dog now.” The dog wore a metal tag that rang when the dog drank out of a china bowl. Through a sudden rainy blur of new homesickness he saw that she had something else, another lacquered box, full of old canceled stamps. She showed him a stamp with Hitler and one with an Italian king. “I’ve kept funny things,” she said. “Like this beautiful Russian box. It belonged to my grandmother, but after I have died I expect it will be thrown out. I gave whatever jewelry I had left to my daughters. We never had furniture, so I became attached to strange little baskets and boxes of useless things. My poor daughters—I had precious little to give. But they won’t be able to wear rings any more than I could. We all come into our inherited arthritis, these knotted-up hands. Our true heritage. When I was your age, about, my mother was dying of … I wasn’t told. She took a ring from under her pillow and folded my hand on it. She said that I could always sell it if I had to, and no one need know. You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares. After appraising all the decoration, the new owner would undo the knots.”
    “Where is that ring?” he said. The blur of tears was forgotten.
    “I tried to sell it when I needed money. The decoration on the brown paper parcel was disposed of by then. Everything thrown, given away. Not by me. My pearl necklace was sold for Spanish refugees. Victims, flotsam, the injured, the weak—they were important. I wasn’t. The children weren’t. I had my ring. I took it to a municipal pawnshop. It is a place where you take things and they give you money. I wore dark glasses and turned up my coat collar, like a spy.” He looked as though he understood that. “The man behind the counter said that I was a married woman and I needed my husband’s written consent. I said the ring wasmine. He said nothing could be mine, or something to that effect. Then he said he might have given me something for the gold in the band of the ring but the stones were worthless. He said this happened in the finest of families. Someone had pried the real stones out of their setting.”
    “Who did that?”
    “A husband. Who else would? Someone’s husband—mine, or my mother’s or my mother’s mother’s, when it comes to that.”
    “With a knife?” said Riri. He said, “The man might have been pretending. Maybe he took out the stones and put in glass.”
    “There wasn’t time. And they were perfect imitations—the right shapes and sizes.”
    “He might have had glass stones all different