Overhead in a Balloon by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online Page B

M. Chassepoule seemed safe, at ease, tucked away in a warm setting of lights and friends and royal blue, and yet he made an odd little gesture of helplessness, as if to tell Speck, “Here I am, like you, overtaxed, hounded, running an honest business against dreadful odds.” Speck made a wry face of sympathy, as if to answer that he knew, he knew. His neighbour seemed to belong to an old and desperate breed, its back to the wall, its birthright gnawed away by foreigners, by the heathen, by the blithe continuity of art, by Speck himself. He dropped his gaze, genuinely troubled, examining the wares M. Chassepoule had collected, dusted, sorted, and priced for a new and ardent generation. The work he had just put back in the window was
La France Juive
, by Édouard Drumont. A handwritten notice described it as a classic study, out of print, hard to find, and in good condition.
    Speck thought, A few years ago, no one would have dared put it on display. It has been considered rubbish for fifty years. Édouard Drumont died poor, alone, cast off even by his old friends, completely discredited. Perhaps his work was always being sold, quietly, somewhere, and I didn’t know. Had he been Walter and superstitious, he might have crossed his fingers; being Speck and rational, he merely shuddered.
    W alter had a friend – Félicité Blum-Weiler-Bloch, the owner of the Afghan hound. When Walter complained to her about the temperature of the gallery, she gave him a scarf, a sweater, an old flannel bed-sheet, and a Turkey carpet. Walter decided to make a present of the carpet to Speck.
    “Get that thing out of my gallery,” said Speck.
    “It’s really from Félicité.”
    “I don’t want her here, either,” said Speck. “Or the dog.”
    Walter proposed spreading the carpet on the floor in the basement. “I spend a lot of time there,” he said. “My feet get cold.”
    “I want it out,” said Speck.
    Later that day Speck discovered Walter down in the framing room, holding a vacuum cleaner. The Turkey carpet was spread on the floor. A stripe of neutral colour ran through the pattern of mottled reds and blues. Looking closer, Speck saw it was warp and weft. “Watch,” said Walter. He switched on the vacuum; another strip of colour vanished. “The wool lifts right out,” said Walter.
    “I told you to get rid of it,” said Speck, trembling.
    “Why? I can still use it.”
    “I won’t have my gallery stuffed with filth.”
    “You’ll never have to see it. You hardly ever come down here.” He ran the vacuum, drowning Speck’s reply. Over the noise Walter yelled, “It will look better when it’s all one colour.”
    Speck raised his voice to the Right Wing pitch heard during street fights: “Get it out! Get it out of my gallery!”
    Like a telephone breaking into a nightmare, delivering the sleeper, someone was calling, “Dr. Speck.” There on the stairs stood Lydia Cruche, wearing an ankle-length fur coat and a brown velvet turban. “I thought I’d better have a look at the place,” she said. “Just to see how much space you have, how much of Cruche you can hold.”
    Still trembling, Speck took her hand, which smelled as if she had been peeling oranges, and pressed it to his lips.
    T hat evening, Speck called the Senator: Would he be interested in writing the catalogue introduction? No one was better fitted, said Speck, over senatorial modesty. The Senator had kept faith with Cruche. During his years of disappointment and eclipse Cruche had been heartened, knowing that guests at the Senator’s table could lift their eyes from quail in aspic to feast on “Nude in the Afternoon.”
    Perhaps his lodge brother exaggerated just a trifle, the Senator replied, though it was true that he had hung on to his Cruches even when their value had been wiped out of the market. The only trouble was that his recent prose had been about the capital-gains-tax project, the Common Market sugar-beet subsidy, and the uninformed ecological