Since I began this project of rereading through Mavis Gallant’s stories, in January 2017, I’ve had this story in the back of my mind, unable to place it. I should have suspected it would reside here, in my first Gallant collection. Instead, I had begun to wonder if it even existed.
Writing about her passion for Mavis Gallant’s short stories, Francine Prose quotes a single paragraph from this story to illustrate how deftly Gallant draws relationships.
In a single adjective or gesture, in a scenic detail or an omission, readers tacitly understand a relationship’s core nature. (This New Yorker article from 2008 has the quotation about halfway through: if you didn’t already want to read Mavis Gallant, this article will secure your intention.)
Very little happens in this story. Also, everything happens in this story. Sylvie Mireille Castelli loves Bernard Brunelle, who lives in Lille, but she is engaged to Arnaud Pons, who lives in Paris. Everything turns on this matter, against the background of Paris.
The machinery in the story is largely interior, but the shifts in understanding are so marked and so many characters’ perspectives shift diametrically, that it feels both subdued and dramatic. There is gritty quotidian detail about women’s daily lives and sweeping generalizations what they can fairly expect during their lifetimes (but, also, how quickly those expectations can alter).
Sylvie is poised to cross the bridge, but when she reaches the middle something completely unexpected happens. The route from that point is not as planned. For while Sylvie’s feet are still moving towards her desired destination, her consciousness is spinning between beginnings and middles and ends.
She does know, however, exactly how things are supposed to be:
“A whole floor would be given over to my children’s nurseries and bedrooms and classrooms. They would learn English, Russian, German, and Italian. There would be tutors and governesses, holidays by the sea, ponies to ride, birthday parties with huge pink cakes, servants wearing white gloves. I had never known anyone who lived exactly that way, but my vision was so precise and highly colored that it had to be prompted from Heaven. I saw the curtains in the children’s rooms, and their smooth hair and clear eyes, and their neat schoolbooks. I knew it might rain in Lille, day after day: I would never complain. The weather would be part of my enchanted life.”
She soon realizes, however, that other women have also dreamed of an enchanted life. Other women have leafed through the pages of Paris Match and imagined themselves as Ingrid Bergman.
When she observes Arnaud’s mother, she sees wonders about the gap that exists between married women’s lives and the enchanted lives they’d once dreamed of:
“Perhaps she was recalling an evening before her marriage when she had danced wearing a pleated skirt and ropes of beads: I had seen pictures of my mother dressed that way.”
Her perception of there being an understanding between women, however, soon devolves into something more sinister:
“For the first time I understood about the compact of mothers and the conspiracy that never ends. They stand together like trees, shadowing and protecting, shutting out the view if it happens to suit them, letting in just so much light.”
It would have been possible to tell this story with Sylvie decidedly at the centre of it, but Gallant includes the perspectives of several characters and in a score of pages their perspectives change and develop.
Okay, not always: some opinions remain solidly rooted. Like this one: “Men earning pittance salaries always married young. It was not an opinion, my mother said. It was a statistic.”
Various opinions (and statistics!) draw attention to the different experiences of women of different generations, and well as to the different experiences of people of different classes.
Sylvie’s father, for instance, often meets his cousin Gustav for dinner, sometimes even in their old neighbourhood, but they “knew the difference between a sentimental excursion and a good meal”. And Sylvie’s mother chats with Claudine in the kitchen, who is the same age as Sylvie, but has been trained in cooking and serving, and is “informed about all the roads and corners of life”.
There are multiple ways of crossing the bridge presented here. At one point in the story, Sylvie’s father catches a glimpse of the Church of St. Augustin out of a window. Such a seemingly innocuous detail.
Even in this instance, Mavis Gallant is informing readers about a salient detail. One which not only frames her father’s view, but situates Sylvie’s experience for us later: “I had never been inside a Protestant church before. It was spare and bare and somehow useful-looking, like a large broom closet.”
There are limited ways to credibly resolve a story which hinges on a marriage proposal. What makes this story stand out is not its resolution, but a single moment within that resolution—a single moment which contains both celebration and resignation, right as Sylvie steps off the bridge into just one of those states.
Across the Bridge’s Stories: 1933 / The Chosen Husband / From Cloud to Cloud / Florida / Dédé / Kingdom Come / Across the Bridge / Forain / A State of Affairs / Mlle. Dias de Corta / The Fenton Child
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Mavis Gallant’s stories, as I read through her short fiction. This is the seventh story in Across the Bridge. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company. Next story: “Forain”.
I love how you’ve described this story by saying that very little happens in it, and yet everything happens too. That’s something the very best character-driven stories can do, eschewing page-turning plot for something more psychological, often providing a deep insight into a character’s interior world.
As you’ve probably seen on Twitter, I’m in the midst of reading some of Gallant’s early stories, largely prompted by your enthusiasm for her work here. So far, so very, very good. They’re like little novels in miniature, full of depth and meaning. I’m planning to spread the collection out over the year with a post or two as I go along. That’s the plan, anyway — so thank you for giving me the push I needed to finally read her!
The most important parts circle around an inner realization and it’s something that many readers can probably relate to (with details shifting, of course) and, like you, I love that kind of story.
Yes! I smiled when I saw that you’d begun and am particularly excited because, even though that volume does contain some of her earliest works (so it’s a great place to start), there are a lot of shorter stories in it, so if you’re already identifying elements to admire in that volume, I feel certain that this is just the beginning of your Gallant explorations. Many of those stories were published in her first and second collections, so I tucked it into my reading between those and her third.
No, you’re right… It doesn’t seem as though she’ll be really happy with her marriage. However, she might be content. And she wants children so badly, so I’m hoping that her children will bring her joy. The other alternative seems to be, according to others, teaching nursery children. Which just isn’t the same.
Arnaud does seem to be a bit of a cold fish. It’s hard to believe that he actually loves her, even though he says he does. But maybe he does… In which case, her marriage seems just as hopeful as anyone else’s. (Hmm… it sounds as though I have a dismal view of marriages, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s all those LW books!)
I haven’t watched Unorthodox. I think I’ve seen it advertised, though – is it on NF?
You’re free to hope, of course! 🙂 In the meantime, I will rustle up the phone numbers of some of the other women in Gallant’s stories whose dreams about marriage and family fell short. They can start a little drinking club. I mean, she thought she wanted a certain kind of romance, too, but then realized that it wasn’t at all what she had imagined and wanted nothing to do with him/it, so I’m guessing that her idealistic expectations of motherhood will also deflate quickly when the realities of motherhood sink in. I’m with you on Arnaud though; I think he might be more practical and less romantic about the entire situation, so I feel as though his even-handed determination means there’s a fair chance that they’ll find a middle ground and muddle along. You’re right, it does seem to be a common theme in literature, so I’m guessing it’s common IRL too.
Yup, it’s streaming there, in 3 or 4 parts, and there’s a “Making of” video too, which is really interesting because the women who worked on the production are very passionate and clear about their commitment to this story (based on an autobiography). I think you’d find it fascinating, maybe even more than I did, partly because music and musicians are also really key to the story. But I don’t want to say exactly why I think it feels so relevant to this MG story because it has to do with part of the two female main characters’ realizing that something is more important to them than they’d thought it was, and that would risk a spoiler.
Well, now I’m really curious!
Your weekend viewing buddy would enjoy this one too–make a date for next weekend!
It’s hard to know whether to be happy about the way it ended, or disappointed (for Sylvie). But I’m going to take an optimist’s view of it – after all, he did say that “strange” thing about the children!
I loved this story – the characters just popped off the page. And my favourite quotes are included in your review… the one about mothers, and the one about Protestant churches.
Can you imagine spending an entire day listening to 6 records (12 sides) while someone else translates every word for you?
I like this passage: “The music seemed as worm and shabby as the room. I imagined the musicians in those great orchestras of the past to be covered with dust, playing on instruments cracked, split, daubed with fingerprints, held together with glue and string. My children in Lille had spotless instruments, perfectly tuned. Their music floated into a dark garden drenched with silent rain.” Expectations versus reality?
There are so many fun spots on this story, it would take too long to mention them all!
I can’t avoid the realist’s view of it – but I do like that brief moment in which we can enjoy Sylvie’s sense of having “gotten one over” (over on whom? her future husband? her mother? the institution of marriage? I’m not sure) on someone or something. She’s already been so disillusioned, with the previous situation, so it doesn’t seem possible that she’s going to find anything like happiness in this situation, does it?
But, by the same token, her future husband does seem to be rather matter-of-fact and not malicious, not unkind, not cold– only aloof? Or maybe it’s more than that. But, as you say, he’s looking ahead, making plans. He’s got ideas about their future together, and I’m sure lots of couples in that sort of situation only fell into things and moved along as others wished them to.
How tiresome, right? What patience!
That is a lovely passage too. I’d forgotten to note the music angle. I should have anticipated that you’d highlight that! Which reminds me, speaking of Europe and musicians, have you watched “Unorthodox”? There are some interesting connections between it and this story (but many differences too).