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

After that, the days went on as before. I walked and washed and heard the singer and saw the trays going up to her room. I never saw her. I never seemed to be around at the right time. She went to Vienna for a week, and the house was so empty I could have cried. Then she came back, and there was a great hustle on the staircase, maids running up and down carrying things to be pressed. Herr Enrich said that she was going home to America soon.

“Couldn’t I just meet her before she goes?” I asked him. “Would you even just take her a note from me? Just a note?”

He explained all over again, as if I were a dim-witted child, that Miss West came to the farm in order to rest, and had given strict orders about intruders. “If I begin carrying messages,” he said, “she will never come again.”

“Maybe I could just leave a note in her door,” I said. “Then it wouldn’t be your fault.”

“I cannot prevent you,” Herr Enrich said.

I went up to my room and began writing notes. The final note said:

Dear Miss West, I am an American girl, the wife of an Occupation Forces sergeant. We live one floor down from you. I would like to tell you how much I have loved your singing and how much I have specially enjoyed “Herbsttag,” the most beautiful song I have ever heard in my life, with sincere best wishes, Cecilia Rowe, Mrs. Walter T. Rowe.

I copied it out on the monogrammed paper my married sister had given me, and I went quietly up the stairs and pushed the note under Miss West’s door. I waited around all day, but nothing happened. Walt came home, and then we went out to the movies with Laura and Marv. Laura told me in detail how to make a custard with brown-sugar sauce, even though she knew I never did any cooking at the farm. Marv and Laura seemed normal together — at least, they weren’t fighting — and later on, when we were back at the farm, Walt reminded me of the story I’d tried to tell him about the nurse. “Laura’s talk doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “Girls always talk about their husbands.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Not yet,” said Walt. He meant it for a joke, but I was hurt. When he came over to my bed that night, I pretended to be asleep. I felt wicked and deceitful. At the same time, I couldn’t help being surprised at how easily it worked, and I was annoyed that he didn’t try harder to wake me up. I was so confused about how I felt that I didn’t know how to behave anymore. In the morning, I sulked and didn’t speak, but Walt didn’t even notice. As soon as he had gone off to Salzburg, there was a telephone call from Laura. She asked me to come over right away. She said that she and Marv had had a terrible fight after the movies, and that she had tried to kill herself twice. I went in at once, and found her looking about the same as always. She had been drinking, and seemed restless and depressed. I stayed with her all day, and by midafternoon she had talked herself out and seemed calmer. She sat in a chair with her feet tucked up and sipped a glass of brandy. She had done talking about herself, and suddenly seemed ready to start in on me. She looked at me over the glass and said, “You don’t look too well either, Cissy. Anything wrong?”

“No.” I didn’t want to tell her about Walt and the deceitful thing I had done. Besides, the whole story behind it — our marriage and Salzburg and my wanting a friend — was too complicated to explain.

But Laura kept on looking, and she laughed and said, “I’ll bet you’ve started a baby.”

I cried, “Oh, no, no, no! Don’t say that.”

Laura said, “Well, you will someday, you know. If you haven’t already. You needn’t be so upset.”

“Oh,” I cried, “I never will! Don’t say that. I don’t want to.”

“Christ, you don’t have to want it,” Laura said. “Look at me. And look at the mess I’m in. If I hadn’t had the baby, we wouldn’t have needed a nurse. If we hadn’t needed a nurse, Marv wouldn’t have dared…”

She was off again, and, for once, I was glad, because it kept her from talking about me. A baby! My heart beat as if I had been running. How could I take care of a tiny baby when I wasn’t ready to take care of myself, when I couldn’t even wear high heels and dress like a grownup? All the way home, late that afternoon, I thought about it, and I realized what Walt’s visits to my bed might mean. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before. I’d taken it for granted that I was too young and unready, and that my real married life hadn’t started, and that nothing would happen on that account. I knew better, of course. It was just that I hadn’t given it much thought.

It was late November, and the days were short. When I arrived at the farm, it was already quite dark. I stood in the doorway, wiping my shoes on the mat, and looked through the hall into the dining room. There was Miss West’s piano. There were the rabbity people and Mrs. de Kende, sitting by the stove. The lights were on. The clocks ticked. I could smell the Sauerbraten cooking for supper. It was the atmosphere of late evening, and I felt as if here, in this part of the world, one night ran into the next with no day in between. As I shut the door, Herr Enrich came toward me, smiling, holding out a pale blue envelope. I knew at once that it was from Miss West. I snatched it, and my hands shook so much that I tore into the note as well. It was a nice note, inviting me to have lunch with her the next day in her room. I folded the torn note carefully and put it back. I felt happy and curiously delivered. I thought: Here is someone whose room won’t be dirty, who doesn’t drink all day, who won’t frighten me, who hasn’t got a husband . The note had been friendly. I thought, I have a friend.

Herr Enrich stood there, waiting, curious. “I’m having lunch with Miss West,” I told him. “Tomorrow, in her room.” I wanted him to realize I had been right all along, that she had wanted to meet me.

“Tomorrow?” he said in his polite, smiling way. “That scarcely seems possible. Miss West has gone.”

“Gone where?”

“To America,” he said. “She took the afternoon train to Zurich. She flies from there.”

“But she left me this note,” I said. I can still see myself, somehow, as if I had been a spectator all along, standing in the hall with my camel’s-hair coat and my cold bare legs and my childish bobby socks, looking at Herr Enrich, holding on to the pale blue note.

“The tomorrow was today,” Herr Enrich said, as if the triumph were his after all. “She left the note for you yesterday. But you went out in the evening, and then again this morning.” He spread his hands in mock despair, as if to say that I was always out.

I muttered stupidly, “But I never go out—” and then flew past him, up the stairs, up to her room. I flung open the door without knocking and turned on the light. A strong current from the window slammed the door behind me. The bed was stripped, the room was being aired. I opened the heavy wardrobe: a few hangers swayed on the crossbar. She had left nothing in the wardrobe, nothing in the chest of drawers. I went slowly down to my room and, in the darkened hall, saw Mrs. de Kende. She had come up from the dining room and was sitting quietly on a chair. Still sitting, she grabbed my arm and squeezed it.

“You told,” she said.

“What?”

“About my husband. About his being — you know.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Leave me alone.” I pulled away.

“He has just come in,” she said in a low voice. “He has lost two clients in Salzburg, both the same day. There could only be one reason. They found out. You told.”

“I didn’t,” I said again. “Leave me alone.”

She didn’t get hysterical but said quietly, “It is my fault. I wanted to trust someone. God is punishing me.” She got up and went into her room.