Mavis Gallant - The Cost of Living - Early and Uncollected Stories

“Well, mine was killed,” she said diffidently, as if by telling him this she made an unfair claim on his attention. “I was only five when he went away, so I don’t remember much. He was killed later, when I was seven. It was right before my birthday, so I couldn’t have a party.” She presented, like griefs of equal value, these two facts. “People are always asking me — friends of my mother, I mean — do I remember him and what a wonderful sense of humor he had and all that. When I say no, I don’t remember, they look at me and say —” Her voice went up to an incredulous screech: “‘But it can’t be that long ago!’”

“Well, it is,” Mike said, as if he were settling a quarrel. He stood up and moved beside her. Together, they looked down to the curving beach, where the sea broke lightly against the warm rocks, and the edge of the crumbling continent they had never seen whole. From above, they could see that beside each of the tumbled hotels a locked garden, secure against God knew what marauders, had gone wild; they could distinguish the film of weeds that brushed the top of the wall, the climbing roses that choked the palms. Above, out of their vision, was the fortification that had offended Barbara’s aunt, and down on the beach was the aunt herself, a dot with a sunshade, knitting forever.

Say we might get married later, Barbara willed, closing her eyes against the quiet sea and the moldering life beside it. But Mike said nothing, thinking only of how dull a town Menton was, and wondering if it had been worth two weeks. He had been taught that time must be reckoned in value — and fiscal value, at that. At home, he would be required to account both for his allowance and for his days and weeks. “Did you get anything out of Menton?” his father would ask. “Was it worth it?”

“Oh, yes,” he might tell them. “I worked a lot, and I met a rich girl.”

His parents would be pleased. Not that they were vulgar or mercenary, but they considered it expedient for young artists to meet the well-born; they would accept, Mike was certain, the fact of his friendship with Barbara as a useful acquirement, justifying a fortnight of lounging about in the sun. When he thought of Barbara as a patroness, commissioning him, perhaps, for a portrait, he wanted to laugh: yet the seed of the thought — that the rich were of utility — remained, and to rid himself of it he asked her sharply if she had brought her bathing suit.

Stricken, looking about as if it might be lying on the grass, she said, “I didn’t think — But we can go home and get it.”

They gathered up their scattered belongings and walked back the way they had come. Barbara, in her misery, further chastened herself by holding a geranium leaf on her nose — she had visions of peeling and blisters — and she trotted beside Mike in silence.

“Do you write letters?” he said at last, for he had remembered that they both lived in New York, and he felt that if he could maintain the tenuous human claim of correspondence, possibly his acquaintance with Barbara might turn out to be of value; he could not have said how or in terms of what. And although he laughed at his parents, he was reluctant to loosen his hold on something that might justify him in their sight until he had at least sorted out his thoughts.

She stood stock-still in the path, the foolish green leaf on her nose, and said solemnly, “I will write to you every day as long as I live.”

He glanced at her with the beginning of alarm, but he was spared from his thoughts by the sight of the autobus on the highway below. Clasping hands, they ran slipping and falling down the steep embankment, and arrived flushed, bewildered, exhausted, as if their romp had been youthful enough to satisfy even Barbara’s aunt.

1952

THE THREE Marshall children were dressed and ready for the picnic before their father was awake. Their mother had been up since dawn, for the coming day of pleasure weighed heavily on her mind. She had laid out the children’s clothes, so that they could dress without asking questions — clean blue denims for John and dresses sprigged with flowers for the girls. Their shoes, chalky with whitening, stood in a row on the bathroom windowsill.

John, stubbornly, dressed himself, but the girls helped each other, standing and preening before the long looking glass. Margaret fastened the chain of Ellen’s heart-shaped locket while Ellen held up her hair with both hands. Margaret never wore her own locket. Old Madame Pégurin, in whose house in France the Marshalls were living, had given her something she liked better — a brooch containing a miniature portrait of a poodle called Youckie, who had died of influenza shortly before the war. The brooch was edged with seed pearls, and Margaret had worn it all summer, pinned to her navy-blue shorts.

“How very pretty it is!” the children’s mother had said when the brooch was shown to her. “How nice of Madame Pégurin to think of a little girl. It will look much nicer later on, when you’re a little older.” She had been trained in the school of indirect suggestion, and so skillful had she become that her children sometimes had no idea what she was driving at.

“I guess so,” Margaret had replied on this occasion, firmly fastening the brooch to her shorts.

She now attached it to the front of the picnic frock, where, too heavy for the thin material, it hung like a stone. “It looks lovely,” Ellen said with serious admiration. She peered through their bedroom window across the garden, and over the tiled roofs of the small town of Virolun, to the blooming summer fields that rose and fell toward Grenoble and the Alps. Across the town, partly hidden by somebody’s orchard, were the neat rows of gray-painted barracks that housed American troops. Into this tidy settlement their father disappeared each day, driven in a jeep. On a morning as clear as this, the girls could see the first shining peaks of the mountains and the thin blue smoke from the neighboring village, some miles away. They were too young to care about the view, but their mother appreciated it for them, often reminding them that nothing in her own childhood had been half as agreeable. “You youngsters are very lucky,” she would say. “Your father might just as easily as not have been stationed in the middle of Arkansas.” The children would listen without comment, although it depressed them inordinately to be told of their good fortune. If they liked this house better than any other they had lived in, it was because it contained Madame Pégurin, her cat, Olivette, and her cook, Louise.

Olivette now entered the girls’ bedroom soundlessly, pushing the door with one paw. “Look at her. She’s priceless,” Margaret said, trying out the word.

Ellen nodded. “I wish one of us could go to the picnic with her ,” she said. Margaret knew that she meant not the cat but Madame Pégurin, who was driving to the picnic grounds with General Wirtworth, commander of the post.

“One of us might,” Margaret said. “Sitting on the General’s lap.”

Ellen’s shriek at the thought woke their father, Major Marshall, who, remembering that this was the day of the picnic, said, “Oh, God!”

The picnic, which had somehow become an Army responsibility, had been suggested by an American magazine of such grandeur that the Major was staggered to learn that Madame Pégurin had never heard of it. Two research workers, vestal maidens in dirndl skirts, had spent weeks combing France to find the most typically French town. They had found no more than half a dozen; and since it was essential to the story that the town be near an American Army post, they had finally, like a pair of exhausted doves, fluttered to rest in Virolun. The picnic, they had explained to General Wirtworth, would be a symbol of unity between two nations — between the troops at the post and the residents of the town. The General had repeated this to Colonel Baring, who had passed it on to Major Marshall, who had brought it to rest with his wife. “Oh, really?” Paula Marshall had said, and if there was any reserve — any bitterness — in her voice, the Major had failed to notice. The mammoth job of organizing the picnic had fallen just where he knew it would — on his own shoulders.