The Moslem Wife and Other Stories by Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler Page B

my family. But by now he must have believed that whatever came into his head was true, for he did not thank me – neither then nor later. I leaned over the table andsaid, “I see what is making the difference. It is the dark glasses.” He immediately took them off, but I saw that I still did not recognize him.
    An excursion party now trooped into the buffet. Their accents were, I think, industrial England over, I think, Viennese. One of the women smeared thick white cream on her sunburned arms. “Let’s finish and pay and get out of here,” said Peter’s wife, sharply. I stared at him then, but his face showed nothing. He did not add or contribute. It might have had nothing to do with him. She slipped him folded money so that he could pay the bill. I tried to think, but they had stuffed me with food. I clung to one idea: no one would get me out of Switzerland again, as he once had to a city on the Rhine, as my old aunt had got me to Paris. Each time I returned I was wounded, or had failed. Outside the station, I stopped at the kiosk, but of course my newspapers were gone.
    The next afternoon, I sat in the lobby of their hotel. His wife now looked through the windows to the station, as if afraid of missing the train out. She poured tea from a leaky pot, and passed chocolate biscuits, shell-shaped, in a thin coating of sugar. They were Poodlie’s favorites; she was sorry he wasn’t here. She poured with a tense, strong hand – I admired the long fingers, and the short nails, on which the red was thickly spread. Absently but politely, she asked about my work, as if she were a headmistress interviewing me for a post.
    I described flowers next to snow, and plants so perfect and minute, rooted on stone, that they must be like the algae on Mars.
    “Oh, yes, edelweiss,” she said.
    He was a parcel posted without an address, and he had come to her. Now I heard her inviting me to join them. I heard the words “The twins would adore you, and he is a different person when you’re there. I’ve never seen him so gay and happy as he was yesterday at lunch.” He had put her up to it, and now he was out, walking around in the village, waiting forthe barter to be completed. “He has talked about you such a lot,” she said.
    “What did he tell you?”
    “Why, that you were a wonderful person. He said you had been so kind to him.”
    That part of it ended there. She explained that Peter was walking, not in the village, as I had supposed, but somewhere up a mountain. He had gone up in a cable car. “I didn’t bring the right clothes,” she said. “We could drive somewhere, but we never do.” It was the only sign of her discontent. The person she had gone to consult when she contemplated this marriage – a rapid psychotherapy, she explained – had warned her not to take over too many head-of-the-family functions from a young husband. That meant, among other things, that she was never to drive the car. But Poodlie was too wild to drive. She gave him cars, but could not trust him to drive them. I thought of him wandering along a steep, windy slope now, not knowing how to keep a foothold in his slippery shoes. He was up above the village in his dark suit and dark glasses and shoes. How could she let him go that way – as if he were lost or had strayed from the towns? He was alone, shivering (no one had told him how cold it would be), dreaming and inventing things to be remembered.
    I did not meet her children, but I saw her with them in a tearoom: two plump girls of about fourteen, in clay-colored tights and long pullovers that covered their sturdy hips. They were not girls I had ever seen before. They looked sullen there in the dark shop, which was suffocating with the smell of chocolate. They were choosing éclairs, pointing, discontented and curt. Their school had not yet taught them manners, and their mother, with a stiff smile on her lips and her sunglasses hiding her opinion, could see only the distance between what