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

“What’s simper?” Ellen asked.

“It’s what you do all day,” said her sister. To their mother she remarked, “Madame is reading the Figaro in her bed.” There was, in her voice, a reproach that Paula Marshall did not spend her mornings in so elegant a manner, but Paula, her mind on the picnic, the eggs to be hard-boiled, scarcely took it in.

“You might, just this once, have come straight to breakfast,” she said, “when you know I have this picnic to think of, and it means so much to your father to have it go well.” She looked, as if for sympathy, at the portrait of Madame Pégurin’s dead husband, who each day surveyed with a melancholy face these strangers around his table.

“It means a lot to Madame, too,” Margaret said. “Riding there with the General! Perhaps one of us might go in the same car?”

There was no reply.

Undisturbed, Margaret said, “She told me what she is wearing. A lovely gray thing, and a big lovely hat, and diamonds.” She looked thoughtfully at her mother, who, in her sensible cotton dress, seemed this morning more than ever composed of starch and soap and Apple Blossom cologne. She wore only the rings that marked her engagement and her wedding. At her throat, holding her collar, was the fraternity pin Major Marshall had given her fifteen years before. “Diamonds,” Margaret repeated, as if their mother might take the hint.

“Ellen, dear ,” said Paula Marshall. “There is, really, a way to eat prunes. Do you children see me spitting?” The children loudly applauded this witticism, and Paula went on, “Do be careful of the table. Try to remember it isn’t ours.” But this the Army children had heard so often it scarcely had a meaning. “It isn’t ours,” they were told. “It doesn’t belong to us.” They had lived so much in hotels and sublet apartments and all-alike semi-detached houses that Madame Pégurin’s table, at which minor nobility had once been entertained, meant no more to them than the cross-legged picnic tables at that moment being erected in the Virolun community soccer field.

“You’re so fond of poor Madame,” said Paula, “and all her little diamonds and trinkets. I should think you would have more respect for her furniture. Jewels are only a commodity, like tins of soup. Remember that. They’re bought to be sold.” She wondered why Madame Pégurin did not sell them — why she kept her little trinkets but had to rent three bedrooms and a drawing room to a strange American family.

“Baseball is as far as I’ll go,” said the Major to himself as he was dressing, and he noted with satisfaction that it was a fine day. Outside in the garden sat the children’s friends Henry and Joey Gould. The sight of these fair-haired little boys, waiting patiently on a pair of swings, caused a cloud to drift across the Major’s day, obscuring the garden, the picnic, the morning’s fine beginning, for the Gould children, all unwittingly, were the cause of a prolonged disagreement between the Major and his wife.

“It’s not that I’m a snob,” the Major had explained. “God knows, no one could call me that!” But was it the fault of the Major that the Goulds had parted with Madame Pégurin on bad terms? Could the Major be blamed for the fact that the father of Henry and Joey was a sergeant? The Major personally thought that Sergeant Gould was a fine fellow, but the children of officers and the children of sergeants were not often invited to the same parties, and the children might, painfully, discover this for themselves. To the Major, it was clear and indisputable that the friendship should be stopped, or at least tapered. But Paula, unwisely, encouraged the children to play together. She had even asked Mrs. Gould to lunch on the lawn, which was considered by the other officers’ wives in Virolun an act of great indelicacy.

Having the Gould children underfoot in the garden was particularly trying for Madame Pégurin, whose window overlooked their antics in her lily pond. She had borne with much; from her own lips the Major had heard about the final quarrel of the previous winter. It had been over a head of cauliflower — only slightly bad, said Madame Pégurin — that Mrs. Gould had dropped, unwrapped, into the garbage can. It had been retrieved by Louise, Madame Pégurin’s cook, who had suggested to Mrs. Gould that it be used in soup. “I don’t give my children rotten food,” Mrs. Gould had replied, on which Louise, greatly distressed, had carried the slimy cauliflower in a clean towel up to Madame Pégurin’s bedroom. Madame Pégurin, considering both sides, had then composed a message to be read aloud, in English, by Louise: “Is Mrs. Gould aware that many people in France have not enough to eat? Does she know that wasted food is saved for the poor by the garbage collector? Will she please in future wrap the things she wastes so that they will not spoil?” The message seemed to Madame Pégurin so fair, so unanswerable, that she could not understand why Mrs. Gould, after a moment of horrified silence, burst into tears and quite irrationally called Louise a Communist. This political quarrel had reached the ears of the General, who, insisting he could not have that sort of thing, asked Colonel Baring to straighten the difficulty out, since it was the Colonel’s fault the Goulds had been sent there in the first place.

All this had given Virolun a winter of gossip, much of which was still repeated. One of the research workers had, quite recently, asked Major Marshall whether it was true that when young Mrs. Gould asked Madame Pégurin if she had a vacuum cleaner, she had been told, “No, I have a servant.” Was this attitude widespread, the research worker had wanted to know. Or was the Army helping break down the feudal social barriers of the little town. Oh, yes, the Major had replied. Oh, yes, indeed.

Passing Louise on the staircase with Madame Pégurin’s breakfast tray, the Major smiled, thinking of Madame Pégurin and of how fond she was of his children. Often, on his way to breakfast, he saw the children through the half-open door, watching her as she skimmed from her coffee a web of warm milk; Madame Pégurin’s levees, his wife called them. Paula said that Madame Pégurin was so feminine it made her teeth ache, and that her influence on the children was deplorable. But the Major could not take this remark seriously. He admired Madame Pégurin, confusing her, because she was old and French and had once been rich, with courts and courtesans and the eighteenth century. In her presence, his mind took a literary turn, and he thought of vanished glories, something fine that would never return, gallant fluttering banners, and the rest of it.

He found his wife in the dining room, staring moodily at the disorder left by the children. “They’ve vanished,” she said at once. “I sent them to wait in the garden with Joey and Henry, but they’re not out there now. They must have crept in again by the front door. I think they were simply waiting for you to come down so that they could go up to her room.” She was flushed with annoyance and the unexpected heat of the morning. “These red walls,” she said, looking around the room. “They’ve made me so uncomfortable all summer I haven’t enjoyed a single meal.” She longed to furnish a house of her own once more, full of chintz and robin’s-egg blue, and pictures of the children in frames.

In the red dining room, Madame Pégurin had hung yellow curtains. On a side table was a vase of yellow late summer flowers. The Major looked around the room, but with an almost guilty enjoyment, for, just as the Methodist child is seduced by the Roman service, the Major had succumbed in Madame Pégurin’s house to something warm and rich, composed of red and yellow, and branching candelabra.