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

Lucie tried to think of something courteous, something that would make Nadine proud of her country’s school system. “It is interesting, but a pity about his eye,” she said. “He must find it a handicap.”

“Handicaps are an academic tradition,” said Jérôme, and smiled. It was for that rare, unexpected, deeply personal smile that anyone, even musicians stranded at Rimouski, could forgive Jérôme.

Nadine looked as if she had seen nothing except Jérôme smiling from the very beginning.

I don’t know what that remark means, thought Lucie. What if it doesn’t mean anything? Very often when I haven’t understood a remark, it had turned out not to mean anything.

She memorized the dinner they were eating for cousin Gilles, who was as interested in what other people fed on as he was in his own food. His first question when the Girards arrived in Paris had been, “What did they give you on the plane?” Some sort of soup, said Lucie to herself now. Green soup. Some sort of fish in a green sauce. Perhaps the whole meal will be green.

“There is my grandmother,” said Nadine.

“Where?” cried Lucie, craning forward. “Where is she?” She could not see any women at all — nothing but old men.

To Jérôme they looked like elderly teachers at a seminary, controlled and withdrawn. Solemn music and torchlight. A priest with a country accent. They seem so quiet now. Old. Spent. They don’t wear the striped pajama suits in public anymore.

He remembered a protest march in Paris. It must have been the first time Adenauer came to visit. Or when the French voted to rearm Western Germany after the war. Jérôme had been puzzled then by the men in pajama suits. They were one generation ahead of him: in a way, they had always been old. That day he had seen for the first time in his life how the police destroyed a crowd. They carved the whole into fragments and ground the fragments to crumbs. In those days the police carried capes with lumps of lead sewn in the hems. They rolled up the capes as if they were carpets and swung out. The men wearing the striped costumes tripped and fell and folded their arms for shelter. A head hitting a curb made one sound, a stick on a head made another. In those days you still remembered the brain beneath the bone: no one ever thought of that now. There were no crash helmets for protection, only hands and arms. Even Jérôme ran, though he still believed then that you could not have police running after you unless you deserved it.

In those days Jérôme was still a daily communicant and if he missed Mass he went to Vespers. He was scrupulous about giving Heaven as much as he wanted in return. He was thin at twenty, with a white frozen forehead and candid dark eyes. His eyes ran with the cold. Never in Canada had he been as miserable in winter as here in Paris. He pulled his neck down in the collar of his overcoat and walked with his hands in his pockets. He wore a gray scarf wound two or three times over his chin. His thoughts were like an invalid’s, sparse and pale. Girls were drawn to him, but he failed them, they drifted off. Paris in those days was gritty and black. Even the streets looked diseased. The student restaurants smelled of steam and foul meat. He ate once a day, and he owed people money. People laughed at his accent. Then his grandfather died; he came into an inheritance; and he lost his pallor because he ate better food. He began to meet French persons of another sort.

Nadine’s grandmother was one. She opened her house in Burgundy to a weekend seminar on Socialism and the French-Speaking Union. Even the name was bold, for everyone still thought “Empire” then. They talked about reforms in Morocco and about an army convoy of jeeps that had been shot at in Algeria. Morocco and Algeria were one in his mind, wave upon wave of vaguely biblical hills dotted with shepherds. Madame Arrieu predicted that one day France would lose her colonies. She made a gentle, visionary declaration. She was fair, blue-eyed, as quick as a bird. Jérôme got to his feet and suggested a strong French-speaking union in an old tradition, with an elected king at its head. Madame Arrieu countered with a proposal that seemed breathtakingly courageous: Why not a Negro king? The idea was so far-fetched, yet so forward-looking, that the seminar program was abandoned and the Negro king remained under consideration for much of the night. Jérôme and Madame Arrieu were still talking after everyone else had gone to bed. Their conversation slackened. They talked about regicide, fathers, men, men and women. She led him across a grassy courtyard to an open summer kitchen paved with black-and-white stones. Her thick yellow hair was pulled up on her head any way; her light shoes were wet with dew. He heard the first tentative sparrows. She made coffee, not very well — she explained that she had never done anything for herself. The canister of coffee beans slipped out of her grasp as she was saying it. It was all she could do not to sweep up the coffee, dust and all, and put everything back in the tin. She hated waste because of the war.

Jérôme had brought a girl with him from Paris for the weekend. She was the girl who had looked down over a stone wall to a motor road and said, “Do you think they rent those towers?” She had made a quick shift of roommates in order to have Jérôme, but she had given up waiting now and gone to sleep. She would remember that weekend and never forgive him. He would forget her for almost twenty years and then not remember her name. A girl from Paris was nothing now, because Henriette Arrieu was new. She had spent the war in England. She was a strict Anglophile.

“Your hereditary enemy,” Jérôme reminded her. How can you define yourself without your enemies? he said. How can you know what you are? His face was radiant. She was the fine, pinpointed center of his attention. He had never looked at anyone but Henriette. That was how Jérôme seemed when he became passionate about an idea. She could have told him why women were attracted to him, and why they drifted off.

But all she said was that she had been in London with de Gaulle. (Poor de Gaulle — a forgotten figure now; a country gentleman writing his memoirs; but she had known him ten years ago, at his prime.)

Jérôme remembered de Gaulle. De Gaulle came to Quebec in nineteen forty-three. Jérôme’s grandfather leaned one hand on the little boy’s shoulder. He leaned with all his weight. “Vive Pétain!” the old man shouted when de Gaulle went by. Jérôme looked up, then back at the General. The General did not turn his head. Did not even blink. He was as straight as a capital I. That was de Gaulle, in Quebec, in nineteen forty-three. Lackey of the English. Puppet of the British Empire. Anti-Christ. Sold out to International Jewry and the Freemasons. Straw man. Terrorist. Playing Stalin’s game. On Sundays Jérôme heard it in church. De Gaulle would never be honored in Quebec. He had come because he wanted cannon fodder for the English. Had been paid by Churchill, by the Rothschilds. The money was in Zurich. In the Argentine. Jérôme’s grandfather wept tears of real happiness because he had said, “Vive Pétain!”

And as he was calling “Vive Pétain”—at that very moment, perhaps — Edouard Arrieu, sold out by his most trusted friend, went into the convulsion of cyanide poisoning. A week later Arrieu’s brother was arrested and deported; he did not know why he had been arrested, or that Edouard was dead.

Jérôme listened to Henriette telling him about this and he tried to fuse “resistant” with “atheist terrorist,” which was what he had been told, once, Resistant really meant. She let him finish drinking his bitter coffee out of a crockery bowl and then led him back to the drawing room. This time they went by way of the house, where one white room opened to another. She showed him the picture of a fair-haired man and told him the photograph was nearly all she remembered. She had two repeated nightmares. In one he came back from the dead, but so maimed and disfigured that his character had altered too. The change of person was the frightening part of the dream. In the second nightmare he was young, perfect, and said, “I see that you have started taking yourself seriously now.” She did not know which fear was the more destructive, but she sometimes thought that one of the two was bound to kill her.