Overhead in a Balloon by Mavis Gallant

long time. This time I really intend to give notice.I don’t care about the pension. He’s making me an accomplice in crime. I’ll stay just until he can train a replacement for me. If he sees I am worried about something else as well, it will give him the upper hand. And then, I’m like you and Aymeric. I feel as if my own family had been living here forever.” Robert at this looked at him with a terrible politeness. Walter rushed on, mentioning a matter that other tenants, he thought, would have brought up first. Since moving in, he had painted the kitchen, paved the bathroom with imported tiles, and hung custom-made curtains on rods designed to fit the windows. All this, he said, constituted an embellishment of space.
    “Your vacation will do you good,” said Robert.
    Walter gave Robert his house keys and said he hoped Monique would feel free to use his apartment as a passage way while he was gone. Handing them over, he was reminded of another gesture – his hand, outstretched, opening to reveal the snuffbox.
    T heir mother had begun polishing furniture, as in some of her dreams. A table in Walter’s sitting room was like a pond. Everything else was dusty. The plastic sheets lay like crumpled parachutes in a corner. On Aymeric’s birthday, late in August, he and Robert and Monique sat at the polished table eating pastries out of a box. Robert picked out a few of the kind his mother liked and put them aside for her on a plate. They could hear her, in Walter’s bedroom, telling City Hall that they had disconnected her stove.
    Perhaps because there was an empty chair, Robert suddenly said that Brigitte was immensely sociable and liked to entertain. She played first-class bridge. She had somehow managedto obtain a transfer to Paris after all. They would be getting married in October.
    “How did she do it?” Aymeric asked.
    “She knows someone.”
    They fell silent, admiring the empty chair.
    “Who wants the last strawberry tart?” said Monique. When no one answered, she cut it in three.
    “We will have to rearrange the space,” said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out.
    Aymeric said, “Try to find out what she did with that snuff box. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding present.”
    “I’ll look again in the oven,” Monique said.
    “Ask her carefully,” said Aymeric. “Don’t frighten her. Sometimes she remembers.”
    Robert went on tracing invisible lines.
    W alter came back in September to find his kitchen under occupation, full of rusted sieves and food mills and old graters. On the stove was a saucepan of strained soup for the old woman’s supper; a bowl of pureed apricots stood uncovered in the sink. He removed everything to the old woman’s kitchen.
    I was brought up so soundly, he said to himself. He had respected his parents; now he admired them. At home, nothing had made him feel worried or tense, and he hadn’t minded his father’s habit of reading the newspaper aloud while Walter tried to watch television. When his father answered the telephone, his mother called, “What do they want?” from the kitchen. His father always repeated everything the caller said, so that his mother would not miss a word of the conversation.There were no secrets, no mysteries. What Walter saw of his parents was probably all there was.
    After cleaning his rooms and unpacking his suitcase, Walter called on Robert. He had meant to ask how they had spent their holidays, if in spite of the old lady they had managed to get away, but instead he found himself telling about a remarkable dream he’d had in Switzerland: A large badger had burst into the gallery and taken Walter’s employer hostage. Trout Face had said, “You’re not getting away with this. I’m not having anybody running around here with automatic weapons.” It was not a nightmare, said Walter. He had seen himself, aloof and nonchalant, enjoying the