Overhead in a Balloon by Mavis Gallant

Author:Mavis Gallant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780224024266
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
Published: 1985-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A Painful Affair

Grippes’ opinion remains unchanged: He was the last author to have received a stipend from the Mary Margaret Pugh Arts Foundation, and so it should have fallen to him – Henri Grippes, Parisian novelist, diarist, essayist, polemical journalist, and critic – to preside at the commemoration of the late Miss Pugh’s centenary. (This celebration, widely reported in Paris, particularly in publications that seemed to have it in for Grippes, took place in a room lent by the firm of Fronce & Baril, formerly drapers and upholsterers, now purveyors of bluejeans from Madras. The firm’s books reveal that Miss Pugh was the first person ever to have opened a charge account – a habit she brought from her native America and is thought to have introduced into France.) But the honour did not fall to M. Grippes. The Pugh Memorial Committee, made up of old-age pensioners from the American Embassy, the Chase Manhattan Bank (Paris), the French Ministry for Culture, and other intellectual oatcakes, chose instead to invite Victor Prism, winkling him with no trouble out of his obscure post at a university in the North of England. Prism’s eagerness to get away from England whatever the season, his willingness to travel under foul conditions, for a trifling sum of money, make him a popular feature of subsidized gatherings throughout the Free World. This is still the way Grippes sees things.

Prism, author of Suomi Serenade: A Key to the Kalevala, much praised in its day as an outstandingly skillful performance, also thinks Grippes should have been chairman. The fact that the Pugh centenary celebration coincided with the breakup of the M. M. Pugh Investment Trust, from which the Foundation – and, incidentally, M. Grippes – had drawn considerable funds over the years, might have made Grippes’ presence in the chair especially poignant. It could also have tested his capacity for showing humility – an accommodation already strained more than once. Think of Grippes, Miss Pugh’s youthful protégé, fresh from his father’s hog farm in Auvergne, dozing on a bed in her house (a bed that had belonged to Prism a scant six months before), with Rosalia, the maid, sent along every half hour to see how he was getting on with Chapter 2. Think of Grippes at the end, when Miss Pugh’s long-lost baby brother, now seventy-something – snappy Hong Kong forty-eight-hour tailoring, silk shirt from Bangkok, arrogant suntan – turned up at her bedside, saying, “Well, Maggie, long time no see.”

“She died in his arms,” wrote Grippes, in an unusually confidential letter to Prism, “though not without a struggle.”

Prism says he had been promised Miss Pugh’s library, her collection of autograph letters (Apollinaire to Zola), her matching ormolu-mounted opaline urns, her Meissen coffee service, her father’s cufflinks, her Louis XVI period writing table, and the key to a safe-deposit vault containing two Caillebottes and a Morisot. The promise was not kept, but no trick of fortune could possibly erode his gratitude for earlier favours. He still visits Miss Pugh’s grave, in a mossy corner of Passy Cemetery, whenever he happens to be in Paris.

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