Going Ashore by Mavis Gallant Page A

and Nora had gone out and left him on a snowy miserable afternoon, he saw in this picture everything missing in his life. He felt frozen and left out. Robbie had never been inside the kitchen of a working-class home; it did not occur to him that the image he had just been given might be idyllic or sentimental. He felt only that he and Nora had missed something, and that he ought to tell her so; but he knew that it would lead to a long bout of analytical talk, and he didn’t feel up to that. He blew his nose, pulled the collar of his dressing gown up around his ears, and settled back on the pillows.
    Bernadette knocked at the door. Nora had told her to prepare a tray of tea, rum, and aspirin at four o’clock. It was now half past four, and Bernadette wondered if Mr. Knight would betray her to Mrs. Knight. Bernadette’s sleeves were rolled up, and she brought with her an aura of warmth and good food. She had, in fact, been cooking a ham for the party. Her hair was up in the hideous snails again, but it gave her,Robbie thought, the look of a hardworking woman – a look his own wife achieved only by seeming totally exhausted.
    “
Y a un
book, too,” said Bernadette, in her coarse, flat little voice. She put the tray down with care.
“Je l’ai mis sur le
tray.” She indicated the new Prix Goncourt, which Robbie had lent her the day it arrived. He saw at once that the pages were still uncut.
    “You didn’t like it?”
    “Oh,
oui
,” she said automatically. “
Merci
.”
    Never before had a lie seemed to him more pathetic, or more justified. Instead of taking the book, or his tea, he gripped Bernadette’s plump, strong forearm. The room was full of warmth and comfort. Bernadette had brought this atmosphere with her; it was her native element. She was the world they had missed sixteen years before, and they, stupidly, had been trying to make her read books. He held her arm, gripping it. She stared back at him, and he saw that she was frightened. He let her go, furious with himself, and said, rather coldly, “Do you ever think about your home in Abitibi?”
    “
Oui,”
she said flatly.
    “Some of the farms up there are very modern now, I believe,” he said, sounding as if he were angry with her. “Was yours?”
    She shrugged.
“On a pas la
television,
nous,”
she said.
    “I didn’t think you had. What about your kitchen. What was your kitchen like at home, Bernadette?”
    “
Sais pas,”
said Bernadette, rubbing the released arm on the back of her dress. “It’s big,” she offered, after some thought.
    “Thank you,” said Robbie. He went back to his book, still furious, and upset. She stood still, uncertain, a fat dark little creature not much older than his own elder daughter. He turned a page, not reading, and at last she went away.
    Deeply bewildered, Bernadette returned to the kitchen and contemplated the cooling ham. She seldom thought about home. Now her memory, set in motion, brought up the image of a large, crowded room. The prevailing smell was the odor of the men’s boots as they came in from the outbuildings. The table, masked with oilcloth, was always set between meals, the thick plates turned upside down, the spoons in a glassjar. At the center of the table, never removed, were the essentials: butter, vinegar, canned jam with the lid of the can half opened and wrenched back, ketchup, a tin of molasses glued to its saucer. In winter, the washing hung over the stove. By the stove, every year but the last two or three, had stood a basket containing a baby – a wailing, swaddled baby, smelling sad and sour. Only a few of Bernadette’s mother’s children had straggled up past the infant stage. Death and small children were inextricably knotted in Bernadette’s consciousness. As a child she had watched an infant brother turn blue and choke to death. She had watched two others die of diphtheria. The innocent dead became angels; there was no reason to grieve. Bernadette’s mother did all she