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

“Do you?” said the Major. His eyes hung on her face, trusting. “But then suppose I have to give it in French? How the hell do you say ‘gathered together’ in French?”

“You won’t have to give it in French,” Paula said, in just such a voice as she used to her children when they had a fever or nightmares. “Because, you see, the mayor will speak in French, and that’s quite enough.”

“That’s right,” said the Major. “I can say, in French, ‘Our good French friends will excuse this little talk in English.’”

“That’s right,” Paula said.

Reassured, the Major thrust his notes in his pocket and strode from the kitchen to the garden, where, squaring his shoulders, he rallied his forces for the coming battle.

1952

JANE AND Ernestine were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted. It had clung to the windows for weeks, ever since the start of the autumn rains, reducing a promised view of mountains to a watery blur. Now, unexpectedly, the fog rose; it went up all in one piece, like a curtain, and when it had cleared away, the children saw that the mountains outside were covered with snow. Because of their father’s health, they had always, until this year, wintered in warm climates. They abandoned their slopped glasses of milk and stared at slopes that were rough with trees, black and white like the glossy postcards their mother bought to send to aunts in America. Down below, on a flat green plain, were villages no bigger than the children’s cereal plates. Some of the villages were in Germany and some were over in France — their governess, Frau Stengel, had explained about the frontier, with many a glum allusion — but from here the toy houses and steeples looked all alike; there was no hedge, no fence, no mysterious cleft in the earth to set them apart, although, staring hard, one could see something, a winding line, as thin as a hair. That was the Rhine.

“Look,” said Jane, to the back of her mother’s newspaper. She said it encouragingly, preparing Mrs. Kennedy for shock. It did not enter her head that her mother knew what snow was like. To the two little girls winter meant walks in parks where every pebble had a correct place underfoot and geraniums grew in rows, like soldiers marching. The sea was always there, but too cold to bathe in. Overhead, and outside their window at night, palms rustled bleakly, like unswept leaves.

“Look,” Jane repeated, but Mrs. Kennedy, who read the local paper every day in order to improve her German, didn’t hear. “You can see everything,” said Jane, giving her mother up. “Mountains.”

“Hitler’s mountains,” said Ernestine, repeating a phrase that Frau Stengel had used. The girls had no idea who Hitler was, but they had seen his photograph — Frau Stengel kept it pressed between two film magazines on her bookshelf — and she frequently spoke of his death, which she appeared to have felt keenly. The children, because of this, assumed that Hitler and Frau Stengel must have been related. “Poor Hitler, Frau Stengel’s dead cousin,” Ernestine sang, inventing a tune, making whirlpools in her porridge with a spoon. Some of the people at nearby tables in the dining room turned to smile mistily at the children. What angels the Kennedy girls were, the hotel guests often remarked — so pretty and polite, and always saying the most intelligent things! “Frau Stengel says there wouldn’t have been a war that time, only all these other people were so greedy,” and “Only one little, little piece of Africa, Frau Stengel says. Frau Stengel says…” Someone had started the rumor that Jane and Ernestine were not Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters at all but had been adopted here in Germany. How else was one to account for their blond hair? Mrs. Kennedy was quite dark, and old enough to be, if not their grandmother (although some of the women in the hotel were willing to push it that far), at least a sort of elderly adoptive aunt. Mrs. Kennedy, looking up in time to catch the looks of tender good will beamed toward her daughters, would think, How fond they are of children! But then Jane and Ernestine are particularly attractive. She had no notion of the hotel gossip concerning their origins and would have been deeply offended if she had been told about it, for Jane and Ernestine were not German and not adopted. They had come along quite naturally, if disconcertingly, less than a year apart, just at a time when Mrs. Kennedy had begun to regard all children as a remote, alarming race. The second surprise had come when they had turned out to be more than commonly pretty. “Like little dolls,” Frau Stengel had said on first seeing them. “Just like dolls.”

“I have been told that they resemble little Renoirs,” Mrs. Kennedy had replied, with just a trace of correction.

Their charm, after all, was not entirely the work of nature; one’s character was just as important as one’s face, and the girls, thanks to their mother’s vigilance on their behalf, were as unblemished, as removed from the world and its coarsening effects, as their guileless faces suggested. Unlike their little compatriots, whom they sometimes met on their travels, and from whom they were quickly led away, they had never, Mrs. Kennedy was able to assure herself, heard a thought expressed that was cheapening or less than kind. They wore, in all seasons, clothing that matched the atmosphere created for their own special world — ribboned straw hats, fluffy little sweaters, starched frocks trimmed with rows and rows of broderie anglaise , made to order wherever a favorable exchange prevailed — and the result was that, with their long, brushed tresses, they did indeed resemble dolls, or even, in a rosy light, little Renoirs.

What marriages they would make! Mrs. Kennedy, without complaining of her own, nevertheless hoped her girls would accomplish something with just a little more glitter — a double wedding in a cathedral, for instance. Chartres would be nice, though damp. Observing the children now, over the breakfast table, she saw the picture again — perfumed, cloudy, with a pair of faceless but utterly suitable bridegrooms hovering in the background. Mr. Kennedy, who did not believe in churches and thought they should all be turned into lending libraries, would simply have to put aside his scruples for the occasion. Mrs. Kennedy, mentally, had it out with him. “Very well,” he replied, vanquished. “I certainly owe you this much consideration after the splendid way you’ve brought them up.” He led them into the cathedral, one on each arm. After a tuneful but, to spare Mr. Kennedy, nondenominational ceremony, the two couples emerged under the crossed swords of a guard of honor. “The girls are charming, and they owe it all to their mother,” someone was heard to remark in the crowd. Returning to the breakfast table, Mrs. Kennedy heard Jane saying, “Just this one movie, and I’ll never ask again.”

“One what !”

“This movie,” said Jane. “The one I was just telling about, Das Herz Einer Mutti . Frau Stengel could take us this afternoon, she says. She already went twice. She cried like anything.”

“Frau Stengel should know better than to suggest such a thing,” said Mrs. Kennedy, looking crossly at her brides. “There’s milk all over your mouth, and Ernestine’s hands are filthy. Do you want to make my life a trial?”

“No,” said Jane. She opened a picture book she had brought to the table and began to read aloud in German, in a high, stumbling recitative. One silky tress of hair lay on the buttered side of a piece of bread. She wiped her mouth on the fluffy sleeve of her pale blue sweater.

“Well, really, sometimes I just—” Mrs. Kennedy began, but Jane was reading, and Ernestine singing, and she said, annoyed, “What is that book, if you please?”