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

“If Ruth ever asks me anything like that, I’ll belt her one,” says Bea. “It’s none of her damned business.”

“It will have to be her business at some point,” says Verna.

“Well, her business is none of mine. I don’t want my own daughter coming round telling me it’s too much or not enough.”

“Your reactions are so aggressive, Bea,” says Verna. “I wish you’d have someone take a look at Roy. I’m glad Mac’s here, because I want him to hear this. Mac, Leonard is very worried about Roy. He’s a very sick child. He’s an autistic child. You know that, don’t you?”

“Autistic my foot,” says Bea. “He’s bone lazy, that’s all. He talks when he wants to.”

Malcolm, standing with his back to the sink, half sitting on the edge of it, slides along to where he has a better view of Bea. Verna has a red sherry flush right up to the edge of her eyes. “Mac never looks at Ruthie,” she says. “You wouldn’t know she had a father. If intelligent parents like you two can’t do the right things, what can you expect from people like the Congolese? I don’t mean that racially. They make mistakes over weaning and that, but they have every excuse. Even our parents had an excuse. They didn’t know anything.”

“Mine did,” says Bea. “My mother was a saint and my father worshipped her. We were very, very happy. Three girls. When I was thirteen my mother said to me, ‘All men are filth.’” Bea laughs.

Verna swings round to Malcolm as if to say, “Now do you see what’s wrong with Bea as a mother?”

Bea, glancing at Malcolm, says, “I can’t talk openly if somebody thinks I’m telling lies.”

“Oh, Bea, I don’t!” This is Verna, but who cares what Verna says? The play is back to Malcolm and Bea.

Purified, exalted, because she has just realized what a good mother she is; sensing that Malcolm at this moment either wants to leave her or know something more about her, so that the marriage is at extremes of tension again, Bea calls happily, “Roy, there’s a whole box of pictures for you in the hall.”

She cuts the crusts off Roy’s sandwiches and carries the plate to the living room. A puppet show is adjusted for him on the hired television and he is told to turn the sound off the instant it ends. Bea comes back and sits on a kitchen stool with her skirt at the top of her thighs. She grows excited, delaying Verna, keeping her because Malcolm wants her to go.

To say she had not wanted her children, as Verna sometimes hints, is a lie, Bea argues. She wanted a boy, then a girl — just what she was given. You have to take into account how Roy was conceived. She hardly knew the man. She never tried to hide Roy, or pretend he wasn’t hers, though under the circumstances she might have been pardoned. She read Spock and gave Roy calcium and Vitamin D. “Mystery” had been her word for Roy unborn. But why hadn’t anyone warned her the Mystery was so very ugly? Birth was ugly. Death was another ugly mystery. Her mother, dying…“Now, Bea, that’s just brooding over the past.” Verna again.

But most of everything is just dirt and pain, says Bea. When she was pregnant with Ruth, she knew there was no mystery, she knew what to expect. She knew Malcolm wanted a child just to satisfy his ego, and because he felt guilty over something, and she woke him up in the night to say, “Look at how ugly you’ve made me.”

Their lives are spread out for Verna like the wet tea leaves in the sink; like debris after a crash. No secret, dreaded destination could be worse than this. He leaves the room, walking between the two women, who seem too rapt to notice him. In the living room Roy is playing with Kodachromes, squinting, holding them up to the light. Malcolm bends down, as if helping the child. He sees the Baums’ holiday in Spain, the Baums around a Christmas tree. Roy does not seem to notice Malcolm, but then he seldom does.

Neither Malcolm nor Roy heard the music rise and become poignant.

“Oh, damn !” Bea darts into the room. Roy kneels, staring at the screen. A woman lies on a large old-fashioned bed, surrounded by weeping children. Bea says, “The goddam mother’s died. Roy shouldn’t be looking at that.”

Roy will speak now that Bea is here: “It’s sad.”

She raises her hand. “You know you’re only supposed to watch the kids’ programs.” Her hand changes direction. She snaps off the sound.

Verna, looking as unhappy as Malcolm has ever seen any woman in his life, trails after Bea. In snatches, sometimes drowned in Ruth’s bath water, he hears from sad Verna that it is depressing to live in rooms where half the furniture is gone. It reduces the feeling of stability. Tomorrow we’ll be gone from here. No one will miss us. There will be homes for twelve hundred people now on a waiting list. As if a rich country could not house its people any other way. They will pay half the rents we are paying now. The landlords will paint and clean as they never had to for us. I’m not sad to be leaving.

A door is slammed. Behind the door, Verna whispers. Leonard’s story is being retold.

Malcolm stood up as Bea came into the room. He said, “Don’t come to Belgium.” A blind movement of Roy at his feet drew his attention. “All right,” he said. “I know you’re there. Where do you want to go? Who do you want to go with, I mean?”

The child formed “Her” with his lips.

“You’re sure? It beats me, but we won’t discuss it now.”

As if looking for help, Bea turned to the screen. Silently, washed by a driving rain (a defect of transmission), the President of the Republic’s long bald head floated up the steps of a war memorial. The frames shot up wildly, spinning, like a window shade. Bea stood staring at the mute news, which seemed to be about stalled cars and middle-aged faces. Roy looked at his mother. His brow was furrowed, like an old man’s.

I should have told Leonard, Malcolm thought: The real meaning of Pichipoi is being alone. It means each of us flung separately — Roy, Ruth, Bea — into a room without windows. It can’t be done. It can’t be permitted, I mean. No jumping off the train. I nearly made it, he said to himself. And then what?

“No,” he said aloud.

A sigh escaped the child, as if he knew the denial was an affirmation, that it meant “Yes, I am still here, we are all of us together.”

Breathing again, the child began his mindless sorting of old pictures and Christmas cards.

“Well, Roy,” said Malcolm, as if answering some comment, “half the people in the world don’t even get as far as I did just now.”

That was the end of it — the end of the incident. It turned into a happy evening, one of their last in France.

1968

HE SUPPOSED he had always been something of a sermonizer, but it was not really a failing; he had a mountain of information on many subjects, and silence worried him over and above the fear of being a bore. He had enjoyed, in particular, the education of his little girl. Even when she seemed blank and inattentive he went on with what he was saying. He thought it wrong of her to show so plainly she was sick to death of his voice; she ought to have learned a few of the social dishonesties by now.

They were in a warm climate, driving down to the sea. He must have been talking for hours. He said, “If indefinite time can be explained at all, it means there is another world somewhere, exactly like ours in every way.”

“No, you’re wrong,” she said, finally answering him — high and irritable and clear. “To make it another world you’d have to change something. The ashtray in the dashboard could be red instead of silver. That would be enough to make another world. Otherwise it’s just the same place.”