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

He said we were going to be together a lot and it would help if we girls were friends. Laura was twenty-six. She had long hair and big eyes and always looked as if someone had just hurt her feelings. She had no girlfriends in Salzburg, other than me. She hated foreigners and couldn’t stand Army wives. Three times a week, or more, Walt and I went out with the McColls. We went to the movies or drank beer in their apartment. Marv hardly spoke to me, except when he’d been drinking. Then he would get tears in his eyes and tell me I was the first and only girl Walt had ever taken seriously, and how they’d never thought Walt would ever marry. He said I was lucky to get Walt, and he hoped I’d make him happy.

“Dry your tears, Marv,” Laura would say, rather sarcastically. She would leave Walt and Marv together and take me to another part of the room, so that we could talk. Our conversations were always the same. I would talk about home, and Laura would tell me how much she hated Salzburg and how Marv didn’t understand her and her problems. Meanwhile, Marv and Walt drank beer and talked about people I didn’t know and places I’d never been. On the way home, Walt would always ask me if I’d had a good time, and before I could answer he’d tell me again that Marv was his best friend and what a lot of fun the four of us were going to have together in Salzburg. I didn’t mind the evenings so much, but I didn’t care one bit for the afternoons I had to spend alone with Laura, because then she would curl up with a drink, girls together, and tell me the most awful things about her private life with Marv — the sort of thing my married sister would never have said. As for me, they could have cut my tongue out before I’d have talked about Walt. Naturally, I never repeated any of this to Walt. The truth was that he and I never talked much about anything. I didn’t know him well enough, and I kept feeling that our real married life hadn’t started, that there was nothing to say and wouldn’t be for years.

I don’t know if I was unhappy or happy in those days. It wasn’t what I’d expected, none of it, being married, or being an Army wife, or living in Europe. Everything — even conversation — seemed so much in the future that I couldn’t get my feet on the ground and start living. It seemed to me it had been that way all my life, and that being married hadn’t settled anything at all. My mother died when I was little, and my father married again, and then I went to live with my married sister. Whenever I seemed low or moody, my sister would say, “Wait till you grow up. Wait till you have a home. Everything will seem different.” Now I was married, and I still didn’t have a home, and there was Walt saying, “We’ll have our own place soon. You’ll be all right then.” I never told him I was unhappy — I wasn’t sure myself if that was exactly the trouble — but often I could see that he was trying to think of the right thing to say to me, hesitating as if he was baffled or just didn’t know me well enough to speak out. I was lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night. Walt was silent a lot, and often I simply burst into tears for no reason at all. Tears didn’t seem to bother him. He expected girls to be nervous and difficult at times; he didn’t like it, but he thought it was part of married life. I think he and Marv talked it over, and Marv told him how it was with Laura. Maybe Laura had been worse before they’d got the apartment. I know they had waited seven months, living in one room. Laura wouldn’t be easy in one room. Anyway, I don’t know where the notion came from, but Walt truly believed, if I was silent, or pale, or forlorn, that an apartment would make everything right.

I never thought about the apartment, except when Walt mentioned it. I wanted to be away from the farm, but I didn’t know where I wanted to be. Our room at the farm was small, cold, and coldly clean. We slept in twin beds. At night, after Walt left me and went back to his own bed and went straight off to sleep, I lay close to the wall, trying to imagine it was a wall somewhere else — but where? At my married sister’s, I had slept on a couch in the dining room. I didn’t want to be there again. The daytime was worse, in a way, because I had to be up and around, and didn’t know what to do with myself. I did a lot of laundering; I washed my sweaters until the wool matted. I’d always been clean, but now, being married, I felt I couldn’t get things clean enough anymore. Walt had told me to go for walks. Once every day, at least, I set out for a walk, a scarf over my hair, my head bent into the wind. I never went far — I was afraid of getting lost — and I felt that I looked like a miserable cat as I skirted the muddy tracks on the road outside the farm. I had never lived in the country before, and it seemed crazy to just walk around with nothing special to look at. The sky was always gray and low, as if you could touch it. It seemed made of felt. The sky at home was never like that; at least, it didn’t press down on you. Herr Enrich said this was the Salzburg autumn sky, and that the clouds were low because they were holding snow. It was frightening, in a way, to think that behind all that felt there were tireless whirlpools of snow, moving and silent.

One afternoon when I was tramping aimlessly around the yard, I heard somebody singing. I couldn’t tell if the singer was a man or a woman, and I couldn’t make out the words of the song. But the voice was the nicest I had ever heard. I stood still with my hands pulled up into my sleeves, because of the cold, and I looked up to the top of the house, where the voice was coming from. I wondered if it was the radio in someone’s room, but then the singer stopped and sang the same phrase four or five times. The kitchenmaids were sitting on a bench in the yard, plucking chickens for supper in front of an open brazier. They stopped talking and listened, too, very still, and the yard was like one of those fairy tales where everyone is suddenly frozen for a thousand years. But then the voice stopped completely, and we became ourselves again, the girls working and giggling, and me trudging about on my eternal walks.

That night, Herr Enrich mentioned the singer. It was an American, a woman. Her name was Dorothy West. She had finished a concert tour in three countries and was here to rest. She was tired and didn’t want to meet people and was having all her meals in her room.

“She used to come to us before the war,” Herr Enrich said, looking conceited. “We are so pleased that she has remembered us and come back.”

I said, timidly, “I’m American, too. Maybe she’d like to just meet me.”

Herr Enrich said, “No, no one,” like a dragon, so, of course, I didn’t say more.

Every day, then, I heard Miss West. Her voice, deep and sure, filled the sky, and I heard her even in the woods far behind the house, where I dragged my feet on my dull walks. The people at the table told me she sang in French and Italian as well as English and German, but I didn’t recognize a thing. Having her there had made them somewhat friendlier with me; also, I was beginning to understand a little German. It made a nicer atmosphere, but not one you would call home. Some days, Miss West’s accompanist came out from Salzburg, where he stayed in a hotel. He was a small man in a shabby raincoat; it was a surprise to me that she should have anyone so poor. When he came, everyone was locked out of the dining room (the only really warm room of the house, because it contained the stove), and they worked together at a piano there. The accompanist had written a new song for her; that is, he had set a poem to music. The Enrichs stood out in the hall, where they could listen. Afterward, Herr Enrich told me it was a famous poem called “Herbsttag,” which meant “Autumn Day,” and he translated it for me. The translation was slow and clumsy, and didn’t rhyme the way a real poem should. But when he came to the part about it being autumn and not having a house to live in, I suddenly felt that this poem had something to do with me. It was autumn here, and Walt and I hadn’t a house, either. It was the first time I had ever had this feeling about a poem — that it had something to do with me. I got Herr Enrich to write it down in German, and I memorized the line, “ Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr .” The rest was all about writing letters and going for lonely walks — exactly the life I was leading. I wished more than ever that I might meet Miss West and tell her how much I liked her singing, and even how much this poet had understood me. I wanted to know someone outside my marriage. I felt that I would never get to know Walt, partly because he was ten years older, but more simply because he was a man. It seemed to me that a girlfriend was the only real friend you could have. I don’t know why I attached so much to the idea of Miss West: I thought that because I had liked her voice this gave me some sort of claim on her. I realize now what a crazy idea this was, but I was only nineteen and in a foreign country.