Across the Bridge by Mavis Gallant

silver, the pattern on my dinner plate, my own hands. The men, meanwhile, went on about the lowering of morality and the lack of guts of the middle class. They split over what was to be done: our cousin was a Socialist, though not a fierce one. He saw hope in the new postwar managerial generation, who read Marx without becoming dogmatic Marxists, while my father thought the smart postwar men would be swept downhill along with the rest of us.
    Once, Cousin Gaston mentioned why his office was so seedily fitted out. It seemed that the government had to spend great sums on rebuilding roads; they had gone to pieces during the war and, of course, were worse today. Squads of German prisoners of war sent to put them right had stuffed the road beds with leaves and dead branches. As the underlay began to rot, the surfaces had collapsed. Now repairs weremade by French workers – unionized, Communist-led, always on the verge of a national strike. There was no money left over.
    “There never has been any money left over,” Papa said. “When there is, they keep it quiet.”
    He felt uneasy about the franking business. The typist in the hall might find out and tell a reporter on one of the opposition weeklies. The reporter would then write a blistering piece on nepotism and the misuse of public funds, naming names. (My mother never worried. She took small favors to be part of the grace of life.)
    It was hot on the bridge, July in April. We still wore our heavy coats. Too much good weather was not to be trusted. There were no clouds over the river, but just the kind of firm blue sky I found easy to paint. Halfway across, we stopped to look at a boat with strings of flags, and tourists sitting along the bank. Some of the men had their shirts off. I stared at the water and saw how far below it was and how cold it looked, and I said, “If I weren’t a Catholic, I’d throw myself in.”
    “Sylvie!” – as if she had lost me in a crowd.
    “We’re going to so much trouble,” I said. “Just so I can marry a man I don’t love.”
    “How do you know you don’t love him?”
    “I’d know if I did.”
    “You haven’t tried,” she said. “It takes patience, like practicing scales. Don’t you want a husband?”
    “Not Arnaud.”
    “What’s wrong with Arnaud?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well,” after a pause, “what
do
you know?”
    “I want to marry Bernard Brunelle. He lives in Lille. His father owns a big textile business – the factories, everything. We’ve been writing. He doesn’t know I’m engaged.”
    “Brunelle? Brunelle? Textiles? From Lille? It sounds like a mistake. In Lille they just marry each other, and textiles marry textiles.”
    “I’ve got one thing right,” I said. “I want to marry Bernard.”
    My mother was a born coaxer and wheedler; avoided confrontation, preferring to move to a different terrain and beckon, smiling. One promised nearly anything just to keep the smile on her face. She was slim and quick, like a girl of fourteen. My father liked her in flowered hats, so she still wore the floral bandeaux with their wisps of veil that had been fashionable ten years before. Papa used to tell about a funeral service where Maman had removed her hat so as to drape a mantilla over her hair. An usher, noticing the hat beside her on the pew, had placed it with the other flowers around the coffin. When I repeated the story to Arnaud he said the floral-hat anecdote was one of the world’s oldest. He had heard it a dozen times, always about a different funeral. I could not see why Papa would go on telling it if it were not true, or why Maman would let him. Perhaps she was the first woman it had ever happened to.
    “You say that Bernard has written to you,” she said, in her lightest, prettiest, most teasing manner. “But where did he send the letters? Not to the house. I’d have noticed.”
    No conspirator gives up a network that easily. Mine consisted of Chantal Nauzan, my trusted friend, the