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

“When you meet our Dad, just say you’ve always known us,” said Pattie.

“No, say we went to see you for a summer job,” said Claire. “Anyway, he won’t ask.”

They lived in a dark-green painted house behind a dried-up garden. Nearly blocking the entrance was a pram with a sleeping baby in it. His lips were slightly parted, his face flushed and mosquito-bitten. The baby’s rasped thighs, his dark damp curls, the curdled-milk stain on the pillow had the print of that moment, as if I had already left Canada (I was, already, trying to do just that) and was getting ready to remember Bea, whom I hadn’t met. I memorized the bright hot summer night, the stunning season that was new to me, a kind of endless afternoon, the street that seemed neither town nor country, the curtain at the window perfectly still behind a screen. The pram, the baby, and, once we were indoors, even the Seven Dwarfs on the fake chimneypiece, displayed like offerings in a museum, seemed reality, something important, from which my upbringing had protected me. I understood I had met the right people too late, for Canada had been a mistake, and it was already part of the past in my mind. The living room was spotless and cool; the linoleum on the floor gleamed pink and green. Upon it two dark-red carpets lay at pointless but evidently carefully chosen angles. Plants — dark furry begonias and a number of climbers — grew on the windowsill. A cat lay curled before the logs of the fire, exactly as if there were a real blaze. We did not stop here; the girls led me down a passage and into the kitchen. I remember a television set with the sound turned off. On the screen a man wearing a Stetson leaned against a fence, telling us to fly, fly, because the skies were falling — if the sound had been on, he would merely have been singing a song. On one wall was a row of cages with canaries, and there were still more green plants. We had walked into a quarrel. When two people are at right angles to each other they can only be quarrelling. I saw for the first time Bea’s profile, and then heard her voice. The voices of most Canadian girls grated on me; they talked from a space between the teeth and the lips, as if breath had no part in speech. But the voices of all three Griffith girls were low-pitched and warm. The girls’ father sat at the table drinking beer, leaning on a spread-out newspaper. Behind him was the photograph of a good-looking young man in Army uniform. At first I thought it must be his son.

“All Cath’lic girls are called Pat and Claire” was one of the first things Bea ever said to me. “I got my mother’s name. Beetriss .” She mocked me, looking at me, gently exaggerating the way she and her sisters sounded, so as to make slight fun of me.

What did I fall in love with? A taciturn man who was anchored in the last war; two silly girls; quiet Bea. We ate quantities of toast and pickles and drank beer. “Come back any time,” said Mr. Griffith, without smiling. Bea saw me out.

“I like it here,” I said carefully, for I had learned something about the touchiness of Canadians, “but I may be going over to NATO. Somebody’s pulling strings for me.” I was diffident, in case she thought I thought I was being clever.

“That’s like the Army, isn’t it?”

“Not for me. I’m a civilian.”

“I hope we’ll see something of you before you go,” she said. “But we’re not very interesting for you.”

“I love your family,” I think I said. I said something else about “kitchen warmth.”

“You like that, do you? I’d like to get out of it. But I’m stuck, and no one can help me. Well, I’ve got used to it. I mean, I guess I’ve got used to kitchens.”

I wasn’t the first person in her life. There was the father of Roy. What about him? “Oh, he was scared,” she said. “Scared of what he’d done.” She seemed curiously innocent — did not understand her sisters’ jokes, or the words that sounded like other words and made them laugh. When I knew I was leaving, a few months after that, I felt I had no right to leave her behind. Even so, there was no beginning. Talking about her mother one day, we came close to talking about a common future.

“She died,” Bea said, “but not at home. After the twins were born she thought everyone had it in for her, that Dad was getting secret messages over the radio, all that. She thought the cushions on the back of the sofa were watching her. She tried to drown the twins. Dad thinks we’ll be like her. He thinks we already are.”

“He’s wrong,” I said. “No one knows much about that kind of illness, but it isn’t inherited.” I went on — cautiously now, “Was your mother Indian? Indians are often paranoid, for some reason.”

“No. Would you mind if she was?”

Nothing would have let her believe how interesting, how exotic I would have found it. “I’d mind other things more,” I said. “Hemophilia, for instance.”

It was exactly as if I were asking her to marry me. She looked at me, and decided not to trust me. “My mother was French-Canadian,” she said. “Dad’s Irish and Welsh.”

I may have gone on talking then; I may have compressed my feelings about leaving her into a question. We were in a restaurant. She was a slow eater, never ate much, left half of everything on her plate. Now she stopped altogether and said quietly, “All right. I mean, yes, I want to. More than anything. But do something for me. Write it down.”

“What do you want me to write? A proposal?”

“Yes. Say it in writing.”

“Why?” I said. “Do you think I’m going to take it back?”

“No. I want it for Dad. Date it from three months back, so he won’t be able to say I held a gun at your head.”

“What is this?” I said. “What’s it about?”

“Well, I’m pregnant,” said Bea. “I was afraid if I told you you’d say it wasn’t yours. Anyway there’s nothing I could force you to do. There’s no way of forcing a man to do anything. I could only wait for you to make up your mind about me. Dad thinks we’re already engaged. I told him that to keep him quiet. I didn’t want him to go down to your office and that.”

The thought of what had been going on made my blood stop. I had never seen a change in him; there were always the same meals in the kitchen, the early supper, the noiseless television, the twins’ laughter. Then Bea said, “I’ll get rid of this one if you want, because of your new job and all. I suppose I can’t keep my cat?”

I had expected “Can I keep Roy?”

“You can have another,” I said. We seemed to be talking about the same thing.

Mr. Griffith asked me a few questions. One was “Been married before?” and another “What about the boy?”

“I’m adopting Roy,” I said. This had not come up, except in my mind. Bea must have been waiting, once again, for me to decide. I remember that she looked completely astonished as I said it; not grateful, not even relieved. When she gave my written proposal to her father, her remark was “Don’t say I never gave you anything for your old age.”

It was nearly our farewell evening. We were around the kitchen table drinking wine I had brought. He read the proposal, made a ball of it, and threw it in the sink. Bea’s face went dark, as if a curtain had been blown across the light. It was a dark look I saw later on Roy when he was learning to stand up to her. Mr. Griffith said, “Let’s get back to something serious,” and hoisted the bottle before him. His hand shook, and that made Bea smile. When she saw she had made him tremble, she smiled. That is all I know about her father and Bea.

Before we left she took her cat away to be destroyed. She had already stopped watering the plants, and the birdcages were empty. By the time we were married and she went away to start a new life with me, the household, the life in it, had been killed, or had committed suicide; anyway, it was dead.