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

“A brute. A person. A victim. All feminine,” said Jérôme.

“Brute, victim. Your choice is revealing,” said Nadine. “All you people, you intellectuals, are still living in the nineteen sixties.” Before then life had been nothing but legends: grandfather’s death as a hero, great-uncle’s deportation, grandmother in London being brave and bombed.

Lucie tried to break in to defend Jérôme: he most certainly was not a brute, if that was what Nadine had meant. This had the effect of halting, for the moment, the double monologue. Jérôme pulled a piece of cold toast toward him, smashed it carefully, began tormenting the crumbs.

“Only Michael Haydn matters,” said Nadine suddenly. Jérôme began to laugh as if he would never stop. Her imitation of Gilles was nothing like him, but Jérôme must have repeated some of the conversation in the car. Harping on Gilles was at least a sign that he noticed other people. At the same time it worried Lucie to think that this spoiled, inexperienced child — Nadine — should mock a successful doctor. It was simply not anything Lucie was used to.

“Gilles is very intelligent,” Lucie said. “His first research grant was five hundred thousand dollars — I think. He was younger than I am now.”

If Nadine had been trained in any one thing, it was how to divert a conversation from shipwreck. “I have been meaning to ask you,” she said to Jérôme. “What do you do?”

“Jérôme hasn’t quite found what he wants to do yet,” said Lucie, out of habit. She wasn’t answering for him — it was just that sometimes he never answered at all. “He has degrees in literature and…all of that.”

“What a waste,” said Nadine. “I was hoping you had studied law, like Fidel Castro.” This must have been tied to last night’s conversation too, because it made Jérôme smile.

Lucie was not a jealous wife. At least, she did not wish to be one. As soon as she had finished her breakfast she left the two to their politics and private laughter and strolled over the courtyard to the summer kitchen. She would address herself to the servants, and learn something useful about French life.

“May I watch you preparing lunch?” she said.

Marcelle, the mustached senior servant, turned down the radio. She had been smoking a thin cigar while her assistant played Patience. The assistant gathered the cards together with two sweeping movements and put them in the pocket of her apron.

“I won’t be cooking lunch for some time, little lady,” said Marcelle. “Madame’s train from Paris does not arrive until after one.”

“I am longing to meet her,” said Lucie. “There are no photographs of her in the house. Does she look like Nadine?”

Lucie was no threat to the servants: she was nothing to worry about. The assistant took out her cards again. Sitting down, drinking reheated coffee, homesick Lucie said, “Do you mean you have never been to Canada? You could easily go on a charter flight.”

“That is true,” said Marcelle.

“We speak the true French,” said Lucie, pulling apart everything she had ever heard Jérôme say, as if unraveling a sweater. “The French of Louis xiii. Perhaps. Certainly Louis xv — no one can contradict that. Your kings talked just as I do. As for French cooking, the first settlers had to eat what they could find. They ate molasses.” Marcelle said she had eaten molasses; the other woman had not. Allowing for the interruption, Lucie went on, “Also, buckwheat pancakes. The English were rich and ate meat. But our people lived on beans. Sometimes they owned just one plate for each person and they ate the beans on one side of the plate and then turned it over and ate the molasses out of the little hollow.”

“What little hollow?” said Marcelle.

Lucie turned her saucer over; the bottom side was flat. “Those were different plates,” she said.

“In the country, when I was a child, we ate that way,” said Marcelle’s crony suddenly. “Cleaned the plate with bread, turned it upside down, ate jam.”

But Lucie did not need support. She had known she was right all along. “We suffer from the Oedipus feeling of having been abandoned,” she said, unraveling more and more carelessly now. “Abandoned by the mother, by France — by you . Who knows what this new Oedipus won’t do now that he has grown up? Nothing will ever be the same after the next elections.”

Here came a pause, as all three thought of different elections. “It is true that nothing is the same,” said the second old woman finally. “Now if it rains you have floods. In good weather the trees die. Only one person in this village was given a telephone, in spite of the last elections.”

Marcelle agreed. Elections were meaningless. She told about how her nephew had come back blinded after a war, and how his wife had deserted him. Marcelle was still working at her age because she had spent all her postal savings to support the blind nephew’s forsaken children. The other woman now began touching the playing cards, and from something hinted, Lucie understood she had overstayed. She also realized that the crony had not been playing Patience, but telling Marcelle’s fortune — divining the risks, chances, and changes in love, health, and money that lay before her still.

Nadine had dressed meantime and she and Jérôme now walked through a gray and redbrick village. Every other façade looked lost and crumbling. He read, across the wall of one blind shuttered house, “The Rural Proletariat Needs Holidays Too.”

“I painted that,” said Nadine.

The house they stopped at was low and new; it stood in the way of a much older house of brick and stone falling to ruin. They came straight into a kitchen full of women and small children dressed for church. Black currant liqueur was instantly served in heavy glasses. Jérôme, the only man in the room, sat on a narrow bench and heard a story about a last illness, a death, a will, lawyers’ fees, and state taxation. The woman telling this had on a felt hat. An unborn child was considered a legal heir if it had attained five months of its pre-natal life; but if a foetus was unlucky enough to lose its father when it was only four and three-quarter months old, then it came into the world without any inheritance whatever. It could not inherit its father’s land, his gold coins, his farm machinery, his livestock.

“What do you think of my washing machine?” said another woman, cutting off the story.

What made this room unlike a kitchen in a city? The smell, said Jérôme, though he could not have defined it. The crumbling house behind this must have been where the family had once lived — for hundreds of years, perhaps.

The owner of the new washing machine was named Pierrette. Her skin was pink, her eyes were blue, and although she spoke to Nadine, it was Jérôme’s admiration she wanted. “We used to launder in the public wash-house, in spring water, and dry the sheets on the grass,” she said. “God, that spring water was cold! We boiled the sheets with wood ash and rinsed them — it was like melted ice. Your grandmother gave all her linen to my mother to wash,” she said to Nadine. “She used to send her sheets from Paris in winter.”

“I think I remember,” said Nadine. “The fresh scent of the sheets at my grandmother’s house. Now everybody has a washing machine and the bedclothes smell of detergents.” Nadine looked at the new machine as if expecting Pierrette to say she was sorry she owned it. “You probably laughed at your work,” said Nadine severely. “A collective action is…well…collective. But the machine is lonely. Think of it, Jérôme,” she said, suddenly turning to him. “Marcelle alone with her machine. Pierrette alone here.”

“Our hands used to be chapped and covered with blood,” said the woman with the felt hat. “We had to leave off rinsing so as not to bloody the clothes. And I was allergic to wood ash, although we didn’t know the word for allergy then.”