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

Robbie decided to apologize to Bernadette. He had frightened her, which he had no right to do. He no longer liked the classic role he had set for himself, the kindly educator of young servant girls. It had taken only a glimpse of his thin, busy wife to put the picture into perspective. He allowed himself one last, uncharitable thought, savoring it: Compared with Bernadette, Nora looked exactly like a furled umbrella.

Bernadette was sitting at the kitchen table. The ham had been put away, the room aired. She was polishing silver for the party, using a smelly antiseptic pink paste. He no longer felt the atmosphere of warmth and food and comfort Bernadette had brought up to his room. She did not look up. She regarded her own upside-down image in the bowl of a spoon. Her hands moved slowly, then stopped. What did he want now?

Before coming to Montreal, Bernadette had been warned about the licentious English — reserved on the surface, hypocritical, infinitely wicked underneath — and she had, in a sense, accepted it as inevitable that Mr. Knight would try to seduce her. When it was over, she would have another sin to account for. Mr. Knight, a Protestant, would not have sinned at all. Unique in her sin, she felt already lonely. His apology sent her off into the strange swamp world again, a world in which there was no footing; she had the same feeling as when they tried to make her read books. What was he sorry about? She looked dumbly around the kitchen. She could hear Nora upstairs, talking on the telephone.

Robbie also heard her and thought: Bernadette is afraid of Nora. The idea that the girl might say something to his wife crossed his mind, and he was annoyed to realize that Nora’s first concern would be for Bernadette’s feelings. His motives and his behavior they would discuss later, over a drink. He no longer knew what he wanted to say to Bernadette. He made a great show of drinking a glass of water and went out.

By evening, Robbie’s temperature was over ninety-nine. Nora did not consider it serious. She felt that he was deliberately trying to ruin the party, and said so. “Take one good stiff drink,” she said. “That’s all you need.”

He saw the party through a feverish haze. Nora was on top of the world, controlling the room, clergy-baiting, but in the most charming manner. No priest could possibly have taken offense, particularly a nice young priest from Belgium, interested in modern art and preceded by a liberal reputation. He could not reply; his English was limited. Besides, as Nora kept pointing out, he didn’t know the situation in Quebec. He could only make little grimaces, acknowledging her thrusts, comically chewing the stem of a cold pipe.

“Until you know this part of the world, you don’t know your own Church,” Nora told him, smiling, not aggressive.

The English-Canadians in the room agreed, glancing nervously at the French. French Canada was represented by three journalists huddled on a couch. (Nora had promised the priest, as if offering hors d’oeuvres, representatives of what she called “our chief ethnic groups.”) The three journalists supported Nora, once it was made plain that clergy-baiting and French-baiting were not going to be combined. Had their wives been there, they might not have concurred so brightly; but Nora could seldom persuade her French-Canadian finds to bring their wives along. The drinking of Anglo-Saxon women rather alarmed them, and they felt that their wives, genteel, fluffy-haired, in good little dresses and strings of pearls, would disappoint and be disappointed. Nora never insisted. She believed in emancipation, but no one was more vocal in deploring the French-Canadian who spoke hard, flat English and had become Anglicized out of all recognition. Robbie, feverish and disloyal, almost expected her to sweep the room with her hand and, pointing to the trio of journalists, announce, “I found them in an old barn and bought them for five dollars each. I’ve sandpapered and waxed them, and there they are.”

From the Church she went on to Bernadette. She followed the familiar pattern, explaining how environment had in a few months overcome generations of intellectual poverty.

“Bernadette reads Gide and Lawrence,” she said, choosing writers the young priest was bound to disapprove of. “She adores Colette.”

“Excellent,” he said, tepid.

Bernadette came in, walking with care, as if on a tightrope. She had had difficulty with her party uniform and she wondered if it showed.

“Bernadette,” Nora said, “how many children did your mother have?”

“Thirteen, Madame,” said the girl. Accustomed to this interrogation, she continued to move around the room, remembering Nora’s instructions during the rehearsal.

“In how many years?” Nora said.

“Fifteen.”

“And how many are living?”

“Six, Madame.”

The young priest stopped chewing his pipe and said quietly, in French, “Are you sorry that your seven brothers and sisters died, Bernadette?”

Jolted out of her routine, Bernadette replied at once, as if she had often thought about it, “Oh, no. If they had lived, they would have had to grow up and work hard, and the boys would have to go to war, when there is war, to fight—” About to say, “fight for the English,” she halted. “Now they are little angels, praying for their mother,” she said.

“Where?” said the priest.

“In Heaven.”

“What does an angel look like, Bernadette?” he said.

She gave him her hypnotized gaze and said, “They are very small. They have small golden heads and little wings. Some are tall and wear pink and blue dresses. You don’t see them because of the clouds.”

“I see. Thank you,” said Nora, cutting in, and the student of Gide and Colette moved off to the kitchen with her tray.

It ruined the evening. The party got out of hand. People stopped talking about the things Nora wanted them to talk about, and the ethnic groups got drunk and began to shout. Nora heard someone talking about the fluctuating dollar, and someone else said to her, of television, “Well, Nora, still holding out?”—when only a few months ago anyone buying a set had been sheepish and embarrassed and had said it was really for the maid.

When it was all over and Nora was running the vacuum so that there would be less for Bernadette to do the next day, she frowned and looked tired and rather old. The party had gone wrong. The guest of honor had slipped away early. Robbie had gone to bed before midnight without a word to anybody. Nora had felt outside the party, bored and disappointed, wishing to God they would all clear out. She had stood alone by the fireplace, wondering at the access of generosity that had led her to invite these ill-matched and noisy people to her home. Her parties in the past had been so different: everyone had praised her hospitality, applauded her leadership, exclaimed at her good sense. Indignant with her over some new piece of political or religious chicanery, they had been grateful for her combativeness, and had said so — more and more as the evening wore on. Tonight, they seemed to have come just as they went everywhere else, for the liquor and good food. A rot, a feeling of complacency, had set in. She had looked around the room and thought, with an odd little shock: How old they all seem! Just then one of her ethnic treasures — a recently immigrated German doctor — had come up to her and said, “That little girl is pregnant.”

“What?”

“The little servant girl. One has only to look.”

Afterward, she wondered how she could have failed to notice. Everything gave Bernadette away: her eyes, her skin, the characteristic thickening of her waist. There were the intangible signs, too, the signs that were not quite physical. In spite of her own motherhood, Nora detested, with a sort of fastidious horror, any of the common references to pregnancy. But even to herself, now, she could think of Bernadette only in terms of the most vulgar expressions, the terminology her own family (long discarded, never invited here) had employed. Owing to a “mistake,” Bernadette was probably “caught.” She was beginning to “show.” She was at least four months “gone.” It seemed to Nora that she had better go straight to the point with Bernadette. The girl was under twenty-one. It was quite possible that the Knights would be considered responsible. If the doctor had been mistaken, then Bernadette could correct her. If Bernadette were to tell Nora to mind her own business, so much the better, because it would mean that Bernadette had more character than she seemed to have. Nora had no objection to apologizing in either instance.