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

“Our age?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kennedy vaguely. Would this be a good occasion, she wondered, to begin telling them about…about…But no, not in a hotel dining room, not over a plate of alphabet soup. “I suppose I could stay home for a few days, until we find someone, and we could do lessons together. Would you like that?” They looked at her without replying. “We could do educational things, like nature walks,” she said. “Why, what ever is the matter? Are you so unhappy about Frau Stengel?”

“Is he dead?” said Jane.

“Who?”

“Our father,” said Jane in a quavering voice that carried to every table and on to the kitchen.

“Good heavens!” Mrs. Kennedy glanced quickly around the dining room; everyone had heard. Damp clouds of sympathy were forming around the table. “As a matter of fact, he is much better,” she said loudly and briskly. “Perhaps, to be reassured, you ought to see him. Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes.”

She was perplexed but gratified. “Father didn’t want you to see him when he was so ill,” she explained. “He wanted you to remember him as he was.”

“In case he died?”

“I think we’ll go upstairs,” said Mrs. Kennedy, pushing back her chair. They followed her across the room and up the staircase without protest. She had never seen them looking so odd. “You seem all pinched,” she said, examining them by the light between their beds. “And a few minutes ago you seemed so rosy! Where are my little Renoir faces? I’m getting you liver tablets tomorrow. You’d better go to bed.”

It was early, but they made no objection. “Are you really going to be home tomorrow?” said Jane.

“Well, yes. I can’t think of anything else to do, for the moment.”

“He’s dead,” said Jane positively.

“Really,” said their mother, exasperated. “If you don’t stop this at once, I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s morbid.”

“Will you read to us?” said Ernestine, shoeless and in her petticoat.

“Read?” Mrs. Kennedy said. “No, I couldn’t.” With quick, tugging motions, she began to braid their hair for the night. “I don’t even want to speak. I want to rest my voice.”

“Then could you just sit here?” said Jane. “Could we have the light?”

“Why?” said Mrs. Kennedy, snapping elastic on the end of a braid. “Have you been having bad dreams?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane, standing uncertainly by her bed.

“Healthy children don’t dream,” her mother said, confident that this was so. “You have no reason whatever to dream.” She rose and put the hairbrush away. “Into bed, now, both of you.”

They crept wretchedly into their separate beds. Mrs. Kennedy kissed each of them and opened the window. She was at the door, her hand on the light switch, when Jane said, “Can God punish you for something?”

Mrs. Kennedy dropped her hand. She had been, she found with annoyance, about to say vaguely, “Well, that all depends.” She said instead, “I don’t know.”

It was worse than anything the children had bargained for. “If she doesn’t know—” said Ernestine. It was not clear whom she was addressing. “—then who does?”

“Nobody, really,” said Mrs. Kennedy. They had certainly chosen a singular approach to the subject, and an odd time to speak of it, she thought, but curiosity of this sort should always be dealt with as it came up. “Many people think they know, one way or the other, but it is impossible for a thinking person — Father will tell you about it,” she finished. “We’ll arrange a visit very soon.”

“If you don’t know ,” said Jane from her pillow, “then we don’t know what can happen.” She lay back and pulled the bedsheet up to her eyes. Mrs. Kennedy put out the light, promising again an interesting talk with their father, who would explain all over again how he didn’t know, either, and why.

Just before going to bed, shortly after ten o’clock, Mrs. Kennedy softly re-entered the children’s room. She carried a large dish of applesauce, two spoons, and two buttered rolls for the girls to discover in the morning. The room was totally dark, and stuffy; someone — one of the children — had closed the window and drawn the heavy double curtains straight across. Groping in the dark to their bedside table, she put down her burden of food, and then, as quietly as she could, pulled the draperies to one side. Moonlight filled the squares of the window. The breeze that came in when she unlatched the window smelled of snow. In the bright, cold, clear night, the lights from the villages down below blinked and wavered like stars. It was not often that Mrs. Kennedy had time to enjoy or contemplate something not directly dependent on herself or fated by one of her or her husband’s decisions. For nearly a full minute, she stood perfectly still and admired the night. Then she remembered one of the reasons she had come into the room, and bent over to draw the covers up over her daughters.

Ernestine had got into bed with Jane, which was odd; they lay facing the same direction, like two question marks. With one hand Ernestine limply clutched at her sister’s braids. Both children had wormed down into the middle of the bed, well below the pillow, under a tent of blankets; it was a wonder they hadn’t smothered.

Mrs. Kennedy drew back the blankets and gently pulled Ernestine away. Without waking, but muttering something, Ernestine got up and walked to her own bed. The hair at her temples was wet, and she generated the nearly feverish warmth of sleeping children. Sleeping, she put her thumb in her mouth. Mrs. Kennedy turned to Jane and pulled her carefully up to the pillow. “I left my book outside,” said Jane urgently and distinctly. Straightening up, Mrs. Kennedy gave the covers a final pat. She looked down at her little girls, frowning; they seemed at this moment not like little Renoirs, not like little dolls, but like rather ordinary children who for some reason of their own had shut and muffled the window and then crept into one bed, the better to hide. She was tempted to wake Jane, or Ernestine, and ask what it was all about, this solicitude for Mr. Kennedy, this irrelevant talk of God. Perhaps Frau Stengel, in some blundering way, had mentioned her pregnancy. Despairing, Mrs. Kennedy wished she could gather her children up, one under each arm, and carry them off to a higher mountain, an emptier hotel, where nothing and no one could interfere, or fill their minds with the kind of thought she feared and detested. Their minds . Was she really, all alone, without Mr. Kennedy to help her, expected to cope with their minds as well as everything else?

But I am exaggerating, she thought, looking out at the peaceful night. They haven’t so much as begun to think, about anything. Without innocence, after all, there was no beauty, and no one could deny the beauty of Jane and Ernestine. She did not look at them again as they lay, damp and vulnerable, in their beds, but, instantly solaced with the future and what it contained for them, she saw them once again drifting away on a sea of admiration, the surface unmarred, the interior uncorrupted by thought or any one of the hundred indecisions that were the lot of less favored human beings. Meanwhile, of course, they had still to grow up — but after all what was there between this night and the magic time to come but a link of days, the limpid days of children? For, she thought, smiling in the dark, pleased at the image, were not their days like the lights one saw in the valley at night, starry, indistinguishable one from the other? She must tell that to Mr. Kennedy, she thought, drawing away from the window. He would be sure to agree.

1953