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

She smiles like a monkey. We did see her then. At any rate, we saw someone.

But let us begin with common sense. The scene, as I saw it, was impossible. My grandmother would not have had that tree and those candles. As for the record of “Süsser die Glocken,” sung by mosquito voices, why, she could never have heard it for one minute without intense intellectual suffering. As though an eraser were coming down on the decorated blackboard, the memory must be rubbed out, or life, and the possibilities of behavior, like my grandmother’s heart, will split in two. The holly, the berries, the angels, the candles, the snow, white, red, green, blur together and dissolve in an odor of dust and slate. Rose, reduced, is a plain girl with a monkey’s smile. The eraser crosses her face. Rose is not my cousin. I never saw her. She had no legal reason to exist.

Chalk and dust hang suspended in the air; the air clears, and we are in a world of black and white again, black and white of nun’s habits, of leafless trees and snow, of white chalk on the practical board. Germaine says she saw someone; she remembers it well. But Germaine was simple-minded, and notorious for making legends last.

1960

LOUISE, my sister, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon. At five o’clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the landings were pitch dark — dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities. The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar. My sister had been in Paris six months, but she still could say, “What a funny French word that is, Puss—‘ snack .’” Louise’s progress down the steps was halting and slow. At the best of times she never hurried, and now she was guiding her bicycle and carrying a trench coat, a plaid scarf, Herriot’s Life of Beethoven , Cassell’s English-French, a bottle of cough medicine she intended to exchange for another brand, and a notebook, in which she had listed facts about nineteenth-century music under so many headings, in so many divisions of divisions, that she had lost sight of the whole.

The dictionary, the Herriot, the cough medicine, and the scarf were mine. I was the music mistress, out in all weathers, subject to chills, with plenty of woolen garments to lend. I had not come to Paris in order to teach solfège to stiff-fingered children. It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can’t always be choosers. At first I gave lessons so as to get by, and then I did it for a living, which is not the same thing. My older sister followed me — wisely, calmly, with plenty of money for travel — six years later, when both our parents had died. She was accustomed to a busy life at home in Australia, with a large house to look after and our invalid mother to nurse. In Paris, she found time on her hands. Once she had visited all the museums, and cycled around the famous squares, and read what was written on the monuments, she felt she was wasting her opportunities. She decided that music might be useful, since she had once been taught to play the piano; also, it was bound to give us something in common. She was making a serious effort to know me. There was a difference of five years between us, and I had been away from home for six. She enrolled in a course of lectures, took notes, and went to concerts on a cut-rate student’s card.

I’d better explain about that bicycle. It was heavy and old — a boy’s bike, left by a cousin killed in the war. She had brought it with her from Australia, thinking that Paris would be an easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time. The promises that led her, that have been made to us all at least once in our lives, had sworn faithfully there would be angelic children sailing boats in the fountains, and calm summer streets. But the parks were full of brats and quarreling mothers, and the bicycle was a nuisance everywhere. Still, she rode it; she would have thought it wicked to spend money on bus fares when there was a perfectly good bike to use instead.

We lived on the south side of the Luxembourg Gardens, where streets must have been charming before the motorcars came. Louise was hounded by buses and small, pitiless automobiles. Often, as I watched her from a window of our hotel, I thought of how she must seem to Parisian drivers — the very replica of the governessy figure the French, with their passion for categories and their disregard of real evidence, instantly label “the English Miss.” It was a verdict that would have astonished her, if she had known, for Louise believed that “Australian,” like “Protestant,” was written upon her, plain as could be. She had no idea of the effect she gave, with her slow gestures, her straight yellow hair, her long face, her hand-stitched mannish gloves and shoes. The inclination of her head and the quarter-profile of cheek, ear, and throat could seem, at times, immeasurably tender. Full-face, the head snapped to, and you saw the lines of duty from nose to mouth, and the too pale eyes. The Prussian ancestry on our mother’s side had given us something bleached and cold. Our faces were variations on a theme of fair hair, light brows. The mixture was weak in me. I had inherited the vanity, the stubbornness, without the will; I was too proud to follow and too lame to command. But physically we were nearly alike. The characteristic fold of skin at the outer corner of the eye, slanting down — we both had that. And I could have used a word about us, once, if I dared: “dainty.” A preposterous word; yet, looking at the sepia studio portrait of us, taken twenty-five years ago, when I was eight and Louise thirteen, you could imagine it. Here is Louise, calm and straight, with her hair brushed on her shoulders, and her pretty hands; there am I, with organdy frock, white shoes, ribbon, and fringe. Two little Anglo-German girls, accomplished at piano, Old Melbourne on the father’s side, Church of England to the bone: Louise and Patricia — Lulu and Puss. We hated each other then.

Once, before Louise left Paris forever, I showed her a description of her that had been written by Sylvie Laval. It was part of a cast of characters around whom Sylvie evidently meant to construct a film. I may say that Sylvie never wrote a scenario, or anything like one; but she belonged to a Paris where one was “writer” or “artist” or “actor” without needing to prove the point. “The Australian,” wrote Sylvie, in a hand that showed an emotional age of nine, “is not elegant. All her skirts are too long, and she should not knit her own sweaters and hats. She likes Berlioz and the Romantics, which means corrupt taste. She lives in a small hotel on the left bank because [erased] She has an income she tries to pass off as moderate, which she probably got from a poor old mother, who died at last. Her character is innocent and romantic, but she is a mythomaniac and certainly cold. This [here Sylvie tried to spell a word unknown to me] makes it hard to guess her age. Her innocence is phenomenal, but she knows more than she says. She resembles the Miss Bronty [crossed out] Bronthee [crossed out] Brounte, the English lady who wore her hair parted in front and lived to a great old age after writing many moral novels and also Wuthering Heights.”

I found the notes for the film in a diary after Sylvie had left the hotel. Going by her old room, I stopped at the open door. I could see Monsieur Rablis, who owned the hotel and who had been Sylvie’s lover, standing inside. He stood, the heart of a temper storm, the core of a tiny hurricane, and he flung her abandoned effects onto a pile of ragged books and empty bottles. I think he meant to keep everything, even the bottles, until Sylvie came back to settle her bill and return the money he said she had stolen from his desk. There were Javel bottles and whiskey bottles and yogurt bottles and milk bottles and bottles for olive oil and tonic water and medicine and wine. Onto the pile went her torn stockings, her worn-out shoes. I recognized the ribbons and the broderie anglaise of a petticoat my sister had once given her as a present. The petticoat suited Sylvie — the tight waist, and the wide skirt — and it suited her even more after the embroidery became unstitched and flounces began to hang. Think of draggled laces, sagging hems, ribbons undone; that was what Sylvie was like. Hair in the eyes, sluttish little Paris face — she was a curious friend for immaculate Louise. When Monsieur Rablis saw me at the door, he calmed down and said, “Ah, Mademoiselle. Come in and see if any of this belongs to you. She stole from everyone — miserable little thief.” But “little thief” sounded harmless, in French, in the feminine. It was a woman’s phrase, a joyous term, including us all in a capacity for frivolous mischief. I stepped inside the room and picked up the diary, and a Japanese cigarette box, and the petticoat, and one or two other things.