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

My mother remarks on my hair, my height, my teeth, my French, and what I like to eat, as if she had never seen me before. Together, we wash our hair in the stream. The stones at the bottom are the color of trout. There is a smell of fish and wildness as I kneel on a rock, as she does, and plunge my head in the water. Bubbles of soap dance in place, as if rooted, then the roots stretch and break. In a delirium of happiness I memorize ferns, moss, grass, seedpods. We sunbathe on camp cots dragged out in the long grass. The strands of wet hair on my neck are like melting icicles. Her “Never look straight at the sun” seems extravagantly concerned with my welfare. Through eyelashes I peep at the milky-blue sky. The sounds of this blissful moment are the radio from the house; my cousin opening a ginger-ale bottle; the stream, persistent as machinery. My mother, still taking extraordinary notice of me, says that while the sun bleaches her hair and makes it light and fine, dark hair (mine) turns ugly—“like a rusty old stove lid”—and should be covered up. I dart into the cottage and find a hat: a wide straw hat, belonging to an unknown summer. It is so large I have to hold it with a hand flat upon the crown. I may look funny with this hat on, but at least I shall never be like a rusty old stove lid. The cots are empty; my mother has gone. By mistake, she is walking away through the goldenrod with the guest, turned up from God knows where. They are walking as if they wish they were invisible, of course, but to me it is only a mistake, and I call and run and push my way between them. He would like to take my hand, or pretends he would like to, but I need my hand for the hat.

My mother is developing one of her favorite themes — her lack of roots. To give the story greater power, or because she really believes what she is saying at that moment, she gets rid of an extra parent: “I never felt I had any stake anywhere until my parents died and I had their graves. The graves were my only property. I felt I belonged somewhere.”

Graves ? What does she mean? My grandmother is still alive.

“That’s so sad,” he says.

“Don’t you ever feel that way?”

He tries to match her tone. “Oh, I wouldn’t care. I think everything was meant to be given away. Even a grave would be a tie. I’d pretend not to know where it was.”

“My father and mother didn’t get along, and that prevented me feeling close to any country,” says my mother. This may be new to him, but, like my cousin at a musical comedy, I know it by heart, or something near it. “I was divorced from the landscape, as they were from each other. I was too taken up wondering what was going to happen next. The first country I loved was somewhere in the north of Germany. I went there with my mother. My father was dead and my mother was less tense and I was free of their troubles. That is the truth,” she says, with some astonishment.

The sun drops, the surface of the leaves turns deep blue. My father lets a parcel fall on the kitchen table, for at the end of one of her long, shattering, analytical letters she has put “P.S. Please bring a four-pound roast and some sausages.” Did the guest depart? He must have dissolved; he is no longer visible. To show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said. But my father, now endlessly insomniac and vigilant, looks as if it were he who had secrets, who is keeping something back.

The children — hostages released — are no longer required. In any case, their beds are needed for Labor Day weekend. I am to spend six days with my cousin in Boston — a stay that will, in fact, be prolonged many months. My mother stands at the door of the cottage in nightgown and sweater, brown-faced, smiling. The tall field grass is gray with cold dew. The windows of the car are frosted with it. My father will put us on a train, in care of a conductor. Both my cousin and I are used to this.

“He and Jane are like sister and brother,” she says — this of my cousin and me, who do not care for each other.

Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it, but I am told I did not

— I was already in Boston. The weekend party, her chosen audience, watched her rise, without warning, from the wicker chair on the porch. An admirer of Russian novels, she would love to make an immediate, Russian gesture, but cannot. The porch is screened, so, to throw her wedding ring away, she must have walked a few steps to the door and then made her speech, and flung the ring into the twilight, in a great spinning arc. The others looked for it next day, discreetly, but it had disappeared. First it slipped under one of those sharp bluish stones, then a beetle moved it. It left its print on a cushion of moss after the first winter. No one else could have worn it. My mother’s hands were small, like mine.

1969

I

WHY DID the Girards let Lucie’s cousin Gilles drive them to Burgundy? Lucie and Jérôme could so easily have rented a car or asked someone in their hotel about trains. The offer was not even a kindness: Gilles had to be in Dijon that weekend and he wanted company on the road.

In youth Gilles had looked like Julius Caesar, but now that he had grown thickly into his forties, he reminded people of Mussolini. Sometimes a relation from Quebec ran into Gilles — the cousin who had chosen the States, educated his daughters in Paris, had never come back to Canada except for funerals. “Gilles is like Mussolini now,” Lucie had heard, but it was said with admiration.

As Mussolini might have been cavalier with lesser visitors, so Gilles kept Jérôme and Lucie waiting for seven hours, in Paris, on a Saturday in June. First he called at breakfast time (the Girards were already sitting in the hotel parlor with a packed suitcase between them), and then he called just before lunch, and again at three. It was Lucie who took the calls. She could not quite hear what Gilles’ delays were about. The telephone at the hotel desk was greasy and certainly microbe-laden; she held it an inch away from her ear. The line was also being used by strangers frying bacon and popping corn. They lived under a tin roof on which hail was falling. A woman cried, “I told you he was a fool!” This thin, hysterical ghost voice was the tone for that weekend, a choir leader setting the pitch. Through the hail and the bacon frying came the Canadian voice of cousin Gilles making excuses.

After each of these calls, Lucie sent a telegram to a village in Burgundy, to a woman who was an old friend of Jérôme’s, and who had been expecting the Girards in time for lunch. The telegrams were variations on a single mournful apology: “Desolated to inform you the unexpected retards our arrival.” She signed Jérôme’s name and trusted the choice of words to be suitable for Madame Henriette Arrieu, so important in…what? In recent French history? In the kind of history that was turned into films? Jérôme had never described her. Lucie, obliged to invent, composed someone slender and aged, not frighteningly clever, above all kind. She gave her creation a cloud of white hair, put five or six gold rings on her fingers, dressed her in pale chiffon. Henriette Arrieu, suddenly alive, approached Lucie across an acre of flawless grass, with her hands outstretched and her rings on fire and her weightless sleeves pushed back by the slightest, warmest movement of June — as if wind were the day.

I see pictures because I don’t know as many words as Jérôme, said Lucie to herself, pleading inadequacy the way Gilles gave grounds for lateness.

Jérôme did not seem at all disturbed by the long wait. He stood looking over a window box of plastic geraniums at the traffic on quai Voltaire. Perhaps he was seeing only the pinpoint concentration of his thoughts, which Lucie imagined to be a minute ray of light in a dark curtain.