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

I could feel my heart in my breast, as hard and cool as a pebble. I sat down where she had been, in the dark, until I heard Walt come in. He spoke to Herr Enrich and then came up the stairs. “Walt,” I said. He stopped, looking around, and I flung myself at him and cried, “She’s gone, the singer has gone home, it’s all over and I’ll never meet her, I’ll never have a friend!”

Faces appeared on the stairs — white, astonished faces. I had always been so quiet. Walt said to them, “It’s all right,” and he led me into our room. “Who’s gone?” he said, shutting the door.

“The singer,” I said. I leaned against him and wept and wept. “I wanted to meet her. I wanted terribly much to meet her. I’m sick of this house. I’m sick of the woman next door. I’m sick of Laura. I don’t want a baby.”

“Are you having a baby?” said Walt.

“I don’t know.” I pulled away and went over to the chest of drawers to find a handkerchief. I dried my eyes and blew my nose. Walt stood by the door, watching me. His arms hung at his sides. He looked helpless.

“Are you having a baby?” he said again.

“I told you, I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was just something Laura said.”

“It might be a good thing for you,” said Walt.

“You mean a good thing like having an apartment?” I combed my hair, tugging at it. I think I hated him at that moment. Then I caught sight of him in the mirror; he looked helpless, and unhappy, and I remembered what Marv had said — that I was the first girl Walt had taken seriously, and how his friends had never thought he’d get married. I wondered if he was sorry he’d got married, and, for the first time, I wondered if being married was as hard for him as for me.

In the next room, Mrs. de Kende was muttering — praying, I supposed. I felt guilty about her, in a vague way, as if I had let her down; as if I were really the one who had told about her husband. But that was just a momentary feeling. Mrs. de Kende was old and crazy, not a young girl like me. I began to dress to go out. Walt and I were having supper with Marv and Laura, and then we were going to the movies. I didn’t want to spend my evening that way, but I felt there was no stopping things now that I was married and had better take things as they came. The singer had gone. I’d have to manage without help, without a friend more important than Walt. I wondered if all of this — my crying, Walt being bewildered — was married life, not just the preliminary.

Walt moved away from the door and sat down on his bed. “What about this singer?” he said. “Was she going to give you lessons, or something?”

“It was just crazy,” I said.

“You’ll be all right, Cissy,” he said. “Living out here has got you down.”

“I know,” I said. “When we get our own place.” We looked briefly, almost timidly, at each other in the mirror, and I knew we were thinking the same thing: the apartment will make the difference; something’s got to.

Your girlhood doesn’t vanish overnight. I know, now, what a lot of wavering goes on, how you step forward and back again. The frontier is invisible; sometimes you’re over without knowing it. I do know that some change began then, at that moment, and I felt an almost unbearable nostalgia for the figure I was leaving behind, the shell of the girl who had got down from the train in September, the pretty girl with all the blue plaid luggage. I could never be that girl again, not entirely. Too much had happened in between.

“We’ll be all right,” I echoed to Walt, and I repeated it to myself, over and over, “I’ll be all right; we’ll be all right.”

But we’re not safe yet, I thought, looking at my husband — this stranger, mute, helpless, fumbling, enclosed. Oh, we’re not safe. Not by a long shot. But we’ll be all right. Take my word for it. We’ll be all right.

1955

WHEN THE telephone on the desk rang just before lunch, Charles Kimber picked up the receiver and laid it down softly. The voice of the long-distance operator came through, thin and fitful, in conversation with his secretary. He crossed the room and, opening the door of his office, told his secretary that she could put the phone down, that he would take the call himself. She obeyed, close to tears. She had been upset ever since the morning of the previous day, when she had brought him a letter with the envelope slit down the side.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she had said. “It wasn’t marked personal or anything, and when I saw it was from Saint Hilda’s, I just thought it was the term bill for your little girl.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Charles had replied, surprised at her distress. Then he had read the letter. It was from the headmistress of St. Hilda’s School, writing, with evident unease, that Charles’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Joyce, had violated the rules of the school and of normal propriety by vanishing for a weekend. Miss Mercer had cause to believe — all the more since Joyce herself had admitted this — that she had spent the weekend in Albany, in a hotel, with a young man. “A young man of good family, and from a good school,” she noted, as if this altered or improved the misdemeanor.

He walked back to his desk and picked up the telephone. The voice of Miss Mercer followed that of the operator, a surprisingly young and healthy voice.

“Of course, the responsibility is ours,” said Miss Mercer. “We often let some of the senior girls go to Albany on Saturdays, always in pairs. They usually shop or go to an approved movie or something like that, and they always come back together, in our own station wagons, in time for dinner. Nothing like this has ever happened, until now. And Joyce is so…well, reliable. She’s the last girl one wouldn’t expect to trust. She’s so…”

She’s so plain, Charles supplied mentally. He had a quick image of Joyce, too big for her age and, by his standards, much too fat. Her hair was straight and of an indeterminate brown. At sixteen she still stood in a babyish manner, the toe of one moccasin over the other. She called her parents “Daddy” and “Mummy,” and she had never in her life expressed a willful or unsuitable thought.

“I’m putting her on the train tomorrow,” said Miss Mercer. “One of the junior teachers will be with her, although she’s not likely to run away or anything like that. She’s sensible. It sounds strange to say that now, but she is sensible. That’s why…it’s so hard to understand…”

“I know,” said Charles. “I suppose we’ll all have to meet.”

“Yes,” said Miss Mercer. “I, of course, have to meet the board. Well, it’s all rather unfortunate. In any case, Joyce gets in at four tomorrow.”

“Grand Central?” said Charles, although he knew very well that it was.

“Yes,” said Miss Mercer. Her voice for the first time became indistinct.

“I can’t hear you,” said Charles.

“I said,” she repeated, as if she had taken a breath, “that you mustn’t be alarmed when you see her. She’s cut her hair off.”

“Oh, yes?” said Charles.

“Yes, the night she came back,” said Miss Mercer. “With her manicure scissors, in front of the mirror, in her room. She…well, it’s the only really odd thing in her behavior since she came back to school. She seemed to expect that she could go to classes, as usual.”

“Yes, as usual,” Charles repeated, until Miss Mercer cut off the embarrassed exchange, saying she could arrange a meeting between Charles and his wife, and herself, and someone whose name sounded official.

He put back the telephone. I’ll have to tell Marian, he thought. Charles had not yet mentioned the letter to his wife. Marian was a fashion model, and her strenuous hours and her need to diet kept her tense and edgy. The morning this letter arrived, Charles had left his office and gone for a walk, although he found that walking helped him think of nothing in particular. He did not feel a sense of outrage that his daughter had been dishonored. He had no desire to shoot the young man, nor even to meet him, except, perhaps, out of curiosity. His mind could not construct the image of stolid Joyce, in the moccasins, the tweed skirt, the innocent sweaters, registering (as she surely had) in a shabby hotel on a side street in Albany. He wondered not so much how it had happened, but that it had happened at all. Joyce, as far as he knew, didn’t know any young men, except, perhaps, the brothers of her classmates. And why, he wondered, would any young man, even the most callow and inexperienced, pick Joyce? There are so many girls her age who are graceful, pretty, knowing, and who have weekends here and there written all over them. Yes, even girls — and here his mind mimicked Miss Mercer — of good family and from good schools. Charles was a lawyer and knew the difficulties young girls of good family could cause themselves and their parents.