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

Turning to the window, she looked with distaste at the top of a pear tree. Someone, Paul or Allie, was scratching at her door.

“Paul, if that’s you, then come in. Please don’t lurk in the hall.”

He slid around the door, spectacles gleaming, with an armful of books. Too wary to speak until he had judged her temper, he sat down on one of the blue-and-white striped chairs, balancing his books.

“Have you come to wish me happy birthday?” Madeline asked. She sat up in bed, tugging halfheartedly at a strap of her nightgown that had broken in the night. With everybody but Paul, she was almost nunlike in her decorum, but she had decided early in the summer that he would put up with anything, and immodesty was only one of the ways she showed her contempt for his unmanliness.

He smiled, or gave way to a nervous tic — Madeline could never be sure which it was. “No,” he said, fidgeting. “I did not come for your birthday but to ask you to read this paper and correct the English.” He seemed to Madeline doomed for life to ask for help and speak with a slight accent.

“Say ‘this,’” she said. “Not ‘ziss.’”

“Ziss,” he repeated after her.

Mrs. Tracy had hoped that Paul and Madeline would become friends, but, as it happened, they were without interest in each other. Their only common ground was the help Madeline could give him with his studies, and this she did with an ill grace.

“They’re nearly of an age — only three years or so apart,” Mrs. Tracy had told her husband in the spring, before she opened the house in the country. “They’re both adrift, in a way — Paul on account of the war, and Madeline from her family. A summer there might do wonders.”

Edward Tracy had said nothing. Technically, the Connecticut house belonged to his wife, who had inherited it. Loving it and remembering her own childhood there, she looked upon her summers as a kind of therapy to be shared with the world. Edward, therefore, merely added this summer of Paul and Madeline to his list of impossible summers. These included the summer of the Polish war orphans, the summer of the tennis court, the summer of Mrs. Tracy’s cousins, the summer of the unmarried mother, the summer of the Friends of France, and the summer of Bundles for Britain.

Paul and Madeline were less destructive than the Poles and less expensive than the tennis court. Unlike the unmarried mother, they did not leave suicide notes in the car. They were, on the face of it, quiet and undemanding. But there was an unhappiness about them, a lack of ease, that trailed through the house, affecting the general atmosphere. Sometimes Edward felt that having them there was bad for Allie, but he wasn’t certain why or how. He said nothing about it, since, as he told himself, he saw them only weekends and couldn’t judge.

The morning of Madeline’s birthday, searching for an excuse to leave the city a day early and so have a long weekend, Edward remembered that he and Madeline had had a quarrel of a sort, and he thought, aggrieved, She is keeping me out of my own house. Edward had been drinking the evening before and felt, if not ill, at least indecisive. He sat at the dining-room table unable to drink his coffee or leave it alone, uncomfortable in the empty apartment but reluctant to go out into the heat of the street. Feeling sorry for himself, half wishing himself out of town, he thought of his last conversation with Madeline.

He had found her before one of his wife’s white-painted bookcases. Madeline had been sunbathing and smelled of scented oil. Her hair, too long and thick for the season, had been pinned up and was beginning to straggle. Through the window, Edward could see the lawn sloping away to one of Anna’s gardens. Anna, with Allie at her heels, moved along the flower border, doing something. They were fair-haired and unhurried. Edward looked at them and approved. He turned to Madeline and frowned. She, ignoring him, knelt on the floor to examine the bottom shelf.

“Looking for something special?” he asked.

Without turning, she said, “I found one book I liked and I thought you might have another.”

“What was that?”

“You probably haven’t read it,” Madeline said, intending the insult. “It was about a girl who worked in a travel agency and fell in love with a lawyer. It was more than that, really, but that was the main thing.”

“It sounds like a woman’s book,” Edward said. “What happened to the girl and the lawyer?” It seemed to him impossible to stop talking.

“He deceived the girl, so she ran a car into something and killed them both.”

“Are you sure it belongs to us?” Edward asked.

“Yes. And it was good. I think someone gave it to you.” She looked at him for the first time. “I can always tell your books by the funny little plate at the front.”

Edward looked back at her with loathing and said, “It doesn’t sound like terribly healthy reading for a young girl. I think you should spend more time at other things.”

“Do you?” Madeline said. “Excuse me, I have to get by you to get out.”

She left the room and ran upstairs, her heart pounding with fright and anger.

“Do you know what I hate more than anything?” Madeline said to Paul on the morning of her birthday. “I hate older men who look at girls and insult them.” It was an unusually chatty remark for Madeline, but Paul was not listening.

“That little pear tree is dying,” he said.

“Let it.” Madeline was a city child. The country, with its hills and stretches and unexplained silences, bored and depressed her. Paul considered her.

“Where would you rather be?”

“I don’t know,” Madeline said indifferently. “Camp was worse.”

“But Mrs. Tracy found you alone in an apartment,” he said, as if he were telling her about someone else.

Madeline made a face. She was accustomed to being discussed, and she could imagine Mrs. Tracy’s version of the story. It was true; she had been found alone in her mother’s apartment. Madeline was to have slept there overnight in the interval between the end of school and the start of her holidays, but her mother had forgotten to write and tell her that she was spending the summer with the Tracys, or had neglected to post the letter, and Madeline had remained in the apartment three weeks.

Her mother had been away since Christmas. The apartment was shrouded in white dust covers, the telephone disconnected. No one knew that Madeline was there except the janitor, who had given her the key. Her allowance for the summer, a lump sum from her father, had arrived before the closing of school. She lived on chocolates and liverwurst sandwiches, went to the movies every day, and was ideally happy. All around her in the building was a pleasant bustle of latchkeys, footsteps, voices in the kitchen air shaft, sometimes a radio. Then Anna Tracy had arrived and carried her off like a scoop of ice cream.

“I think I like cities,” Madeline said. She lay back with her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. “Are you never going?” she said, not intending it as a question. “If you want to use the bathroom, please go now. I’m going to wash my hair.”

The birthday must have put her in an excellent temper, Paul thought. Otherwise, she would never have suggested that he use the bathroom first, for it was a constant grievance between them. It adjoined both their rooms, but Madeline treated it entirely as her own. She left powder on the bathmat, towels on the floor. Every morning, Paul found his towels pushed aside and Madeline’s underthings hanging to dry. Ashamed for her, Paul would mop the tub and cap the toothpaste. Madeline would admit no part of Paul into her life. They did not even have a cake of soap in common. He might be one of Anna Tracy’s casualties; she was not. Without finding words for it, Paul knew that her untidiness had something to do with her attitude toward him and the entire household. He wished she would employ a less troublesome method of showing it.