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

She said, “Robbie, can I talk to you?” Reluctant, he looked away from his book. She said, “I just wanted to tell you about a dream. Last night I dreamed you died. I dreamed that there was nothing I could do to bring you back, and that I had to adjust all my thoughts to the idea of going on without you. It was a terrible, shattering feeling.” She intended this to be devastating, a prelude to the end. Unfortunately, she had had this dream before, and Robbie was bored with it. They had already discussed what it might mean, and he had no desire to go into it now.

“I wish to God you wouldn’t keep on dreaming I died,” he said.

She waited. There was nothing more. She blinked back her tears and said, “Well, listen to this, then. I want to talk about Bernadette. What do you know, exactly, about Bernadette’s difficulties?”

“Has Bernadette got difficulties?” The floor under his feet heaved and settled. He had never been so frightened in his life. Part of his mind told him that nothing had happened. He had been ill, a young girl had brought warmth and comfort into his room, and he wanted to touch her. What was wrong with that? Why should it frighten him so much that Nora knew? He closed his eyes. It was hopeless; Nora was not going to let him get on with the book. Nora looked without any sentiment at all at the twin points where his hairline was moving back. “Does she seem sort of unsettled?” he asked.

“That’s a way of putting it. Sometimes you have a genuine talent for irony.”

“Oh, hell,” said Robbie, suddenly fed up with Nora’s cat-and-mouse. “I don’t feel like talking about anything. Let’s skip it for now. It’s not important.”

“Perhaps you’d better tell me what you consider important,” Nora said. “Then we’ll see what we can skip.” She wondered how he could sit there, concerned with his mild grippe, or his hangover, when the whole structure of their marriage was falling apart. Already, she saw the bare bones of the room they sat in, the rugs rolled, the cracks that would show in the walls when they took the pictures down.

He sighed, giving in. He closed his book and put it beside his drink. “It was just that yesterday when I was feeling so lousy she brought me — she brought me a book. One of those books we keep lending her. She hadn’t even cut the pages. The whole thing’s a farce. She doesn’t even look at them.”

“Probably not,” said Nora. “Or else she does and that’s the whole trouble. To get straight to the point, which I can see you don’t want to do, Bernadette has told me she’s having a baby. She takes it for granted that you already know. She’s about four months under way, which makes yesterday seem rather pointless.”

Robbie said impatiently, “We’re not talking about the same thing.” He had not really absorbed what Nora was saying; she spoke so quickly, and got so many things in all at once. His first reaction was astonishment, and a curious feeling that Bernadette had deceived him. Then the whole import of Nora’s speech entered his mind and became clear. He said, “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? Are you completely crazy?” Anger paralyzed him. He was unable to think of words or form them on his tongue. At last he said, “It’s too bad that when I’m angry I can’t do anything except feel sick. Or maybe it’s just as well. You’re crazy, Nora. You get these — I don’t know — You get these ideas.” He said, “If I’d hit you then, I might have killed you.”

It had so seldom occurred in their life together that Robbie was in the right morally that Nora had no resources. She had always triumphed. Robbie’s position had always been indefensible. His last remark was so completely out of character that she scarcely heard it. He had spoken in an ordinary tone of voice. She was frightened, but only because she had made an insane mistake and it was too late to take it back. Bravely, because there was nothing else to do, she went on about Bernadette. “She doesn’t seem to know what to do. She’s a minor, so I’m afraid it rather falls on us. There is a place in Vermont, a private place, where they take these girls and treat them well, rather like a boarding school. I can get her in, I think. Having her admitted to the States could be your end of it.”

“I suppose you think that’s going to be easy,” Robbie said bitterly. “I suppose you think they admit pregnant unmarried minors every day of the year.”

“None of it is easy!” Nora cried, losing control. “Whose fault is it?”

“It’s got nothing to do with me!” said Robbie, shouting at her. “Christ Almighty, get that through your head!”

They let silence settle again. Robbie found that he was trembling. As he had said, it was physically difficult for him to be angry.

Nora said, “Yes, Vermont,” as if she were making notes. She was determined to behave as if everything were normal. She knew that unless she established the tone quickly, nothing would ever be normal again.

“What will she do with it? Give it out for adoption?” said Robbie, in spite of himself diverted by details.

“She’ll send it north, to her family,” said Nora. “There’s always room on a farm. It will make up for the babies that died. They look on those things, on birth and on death, as acts of nature, like the changing of the seasons. They don’t think of them as catastrophes.”

Robbie wanted to say, You’re talking about something you’ve read, now. They’ll be too ashamed to have Bernadette or the baby around; this is Quebec. But he was too tired to offer a new field of discussion. He was as tired as if they had been talking for hours. He said, “I suppose this Vermont place, this school or whatever it is, has got to be paid for.”

“It certainly does.” Nora looked tight and cold at this hint of stinginess. It was unnatural for her to be in the wrong, still less to remain on the defensive. She had taken the position now that even if Robbie were not responsible, he had somehow upset Bernadette. In some manner, he could be found guilty and made to admit it. She would find out about it later. Meanwhile, she felt morally bound to make him pay.

“Will it be expensive, do you think?”

She gave him a look, and he said nothing more.

Bernadette sat in the comforting dark of the cinema. It was her favorite kind of film, a musical comedy in full color. They had reached the final scene. The hero and heroine, separated because of a stupid quarrel for more than thirty years, suddenly found themselves in the same nightclub, singing the same song. They had gray hair but youthful faces. All the people around them were happy to see them together. They clapped and smiled. Bernadette smiled, too. She did not identify herself with the heroine, but with the people looking on. She would have liked to have gone to a nightclub in a low-cut dress and applauded such a scene. She believed in love and in uncomplicated stories of love, even though it was something she had never experienced or seen around her. She did not really expect it to happen to her, or to anyone she knew.

For the first time, her child moved. She was so astonished that she looked at the people sitting on either side of her, wondering if they had noticed. They were looking at the screen. For the first time, then, she thought of it as a child, here, alive — not a state of terror but something to be given a name, clothed, fed, and baptized. Where and how and when it would be born she did not question. Mrs. Knight would do something. Somebody would. It would be born, and it would die. That it would die she never doubted. She was uncertain of so much else; her own body was a mystery, nothing had ever been explained. At home, in spite of her mother’s pregnancies, the birth of the infants was shrouded in secrecy and, like their conception, suspicion of sin. This baby was Bernadette’s own; when it died, it would pray for her, and her alone, for all of eternity. No matter what she did with the rest of her life, she would have an angel of her own, praying for her. Oddly secure in the dark, the dark of the cinema, the dark of her personal fear, she felt protected. She thought: Il prie pour moi . She saw, as plainly as if it had been laid in her arms, her child, her personal angel, white and swaddled, baptized, innocent, ready for death.