The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  “Should we knock?” Margaret said. They debated this until their mother’s low, reproachful “Children!” fetched them out of the upstairs hall and down a shallow staircase, the wall of which was papered with the repeated person of a shepherdess. Where a railing should have been were jars of trailing ivy they had been warned not to touch. The wall was stained at the level of their hands; once a week Louise went over the marks with a piece of white bread. But nothing could efface the fact that there were boarders, American Army tenants, in old Madame Pégurin’s house.

  During the winter, before the arrival of the Marshalls, the damage had been more pronounced; the tenants had been a Sergeant and Mrs. Gould, whose children, little Henry and Joey, had tracked mud up and down the stairs and shot at each other with water pistols all over the drawing room. The Goulds had departed on bad terms with Madame Pégurin, and it often worried Major Marshall that his wife permitted the Gould children to visit the Marshall children and play in the garden. Madame Pégurin never mentioned Henry’s and Joey’s presence; she simply closed her bedroom shutters at the sound of their voices, which, it seemed to the Major, was suggestion enough.

  The Gould and Marshall children were to attend the picnic together; it was perhaps for this reason that Madame Pégurin rattled the pages of Le Figaro behind her closed door. She disliked foreigners; she had told the Marshall children so. But they, fortunately, did not consider themselves foreign, and had pictured instead dark men with curling beards. Madame Pégurin had tried, as well as she could, to ignore the presence of the Americans in Virolun, just as, long ago, when she traveled, she had overlooked the natives of whichever country she happened to be in. She had ignored the Italians in Italy and the Swiss in Switzerland, and she had explained this to Margaret and Ellen, who, agreeing it was the only way to live, feared that their mother would never achieve this restraint. For she would speak French, and she carried with her, even to market, a book of useful phrases.

  Madame Pégurin had had many troubles with the Americans; she had even had troubles with the General. It had fallen to her, as the highest-ranking resident of Virolun, to entertain the highest-ranking American officer. She had asked General Wirtworth to tea, and he had finished off a bottle of whiskey she had been saving for eleven years. He had then been moved to kiss her hand, but this could not make up for her sense of loss. There had been other difficulties—the tenancy of the Goulds, and a row with Colonel Baring, whose idea it had been to board the Goulds and their hoodlum children with Madame Pégurin. Madame Pégurin had, indeed, talked of legal action, but nothing had come of it. Because of all this, no one believed she would attend the picnic, and it was considered a triumph for Major Marshall that she had consented to go, and to drive with the General, and to be photographed.

  “I hope they take her picture eating a hot dog,” Paula Marshall said when she heard of it.

  “It was essential,” the Major said reprovingly. “I made her see that. She’s a symbol of something in this town. We couldn’t do the thing properly without her.”

  “Maybe she just likes to have her picture taken, like anyone else,” Paula said. This was, for her, an uncommonly catty remark.

  The Major said nothing. He had convinced Madame Pégurin that she was a symbol only after a prolonged teatime wordplay that bordered on flirtation. This was second nature to Madame Pégurin, but the Major had bogged down quickly. He kept coming around to the point, and Madame Pégurin found the point uninteresting. She wanted to talk about little Youckie, and the difference between French and American officers, and how well Major Marshall looked in his uniform, and what a good idea it was for Mrs. Marshall not to bother about her appearance, running as she did all day after the children. But the Major talked about the picnic and by the weight of blind obduracy won.

  The little Marshalls, thinking of the sugared almonds and pistachio creams in Madame Pégurin’s room, slid into their places at the breakfast table and sulked over their prunes. Before each plate was a motto, in their mother’s up-and-down hand: “I will be good at the picnic,” said John’s. This was read aloud to him, to circumvent the happy excuse that he could not yet read writing. “I will not simper. I will help Mother and be an example. I will not ask the photographer to take my picture,” said Ellen’s. Margaret’s said, “I will mind my own business and not bother Madame Pégurin.”

  “What’s simper?” Ellen asked.

  “It’s what you do all day,” said her sister. To their mother she remarked, “Madame is reading the Figaro in her bed.” There was, in her voice, a reproach that Paula Marshall did not spend her mornings in so elegant a manner, but Paula, her mind on the picnic, the eggs to be hard-boiled, scarcely took it in.

  “You might, just this once, have come straight to breakfast,” she said, “when you know I have this picnic to think of, and it means so much to your father to have it go well.” She looked, as if for sympathy, at the portrait of Madame Pégurin’s dead husband, who each day surveyed with a melancholy face these strangers around his table.

  “It means a lot to Madame, too,” Margaret said. “Riding there with the General! Perhaps one of us might go in the same car?”

  There was no reply.

  Undisturbed, Margaret said, “She told me what she is wearing. A lovely gray thing, and a big lovely hat, and diamonds.” She looked thoughtfully at her mother, who, in her sensible cotton dress, seemed this morning more than ever composed of starch and soap and Apple Blossom cologne. She wore only the rings that marked her engagement and her wedding. At her throat, holding her collar, was the fraternity pin Major Marshall had given her fifteen years before. “Diamonds,” Margaret repeated, as if their mother might take the hint.

  “Ellen, dear,” said Paula Marshall. “There is, really, a way to eat prunes. Do you children see me spitting?” The children loudly applauded this witticism, and Paula went on, “Do be careful of the table. Try to remember it isn’t ours.” But this the Army children had heard so often it scarcely had a meaning. “It isn’t ours,” they were told. “It doesn’t belong to us.” They had lived so much in hotels and sublet apartments and all-alike semi-detached houses that Madame Pégurin’s table, at which minor nobility had once been entertained, meant no more to them than the cross-legged picnic tables at that moment being erected in the Virolun community soccer field.

  “You’re so fond of poor Madame,” said Paula, “and all her little diamonds and trinkets. I should think you would have more respect for her furniture. Jewels are only a commodity, like tins of soup. Remember that. They’re bought to be sold.” She wondered why Madame Pégurin did not sell them—why she kept her little trinkets but had to rent three bedrooms and a drawing room to a strange American family.

  “Baseball is as far as I’ll go,” said the Major to himself as he was dressing, and he noted with satisfaction that it was a fine day. Outside in the garden sat the children’s friends Henry and Joey Gould. The sight of these fair-haired little boys, waiting patiently on a pair of swings, caused a cloud to drift across the Major’s day, obscuring the garden, the picnic, the morning’s fine beginning, for the Gould children, all unwittingly, were the cause of a prolonged disagreement between the Major and his wife.

  “It’s not that I’m a snob,” the Major had explained. “God knows, no one could call me that!” But was it the fault of the Major that the Goulds had parted with Madame Pégurin on bad terms? Could the Major be blamed for the fact that the father of Henry and Joey was a sergeant? The Major personally thought that Sergeant Gould was a fine fellow, but the children of officers and the children of sergeants were not often invited to the same parties, and the children might, painfully, discover this for themselves. To the Major, it was clear and indisputable that the friendship should be stopped, or at least tapered. But Paula, unwisely, encouraged the children to play together. She had even asked Mrs. Gould to lunch on the lawn, which was considered by the other officers’ wives in Virolun an act of great indelicacy.

  Having the Gould children
underfoot in the garden was particularly trying for Madame Pégurin, whose window overlooked their antics in her lily pond. She had borne with much; from her own lips the Major had heard about the final quarrel of the previous winter. It had been over a head of cauliflower—only slightly bad, said Madame Pégurin—that Mrs. Gould had dropped, unwrapped, into the garbage can. It had been retrieved by Louise, Madame Pégurin’s cook, who had suggested to Mrs. Gould that it be used in soup. “I don’t give my children rotten food,” Mrs. Gould had replied, on which Louise, greatly distressed, had carried the slimy cauliflower in a clean towel up to Madame Pégurin’s bedroom. Madame Pégurin, considering both sides, had then composed a message to be read aloud, in English, by Louise: “Is Mrs. Gould aware that many people in France have not enough to eat? Does she know that wasted food is saved for the poor by the garbage collector? Will she please in future wrap the things she wastes so that they will not spoil?” The message seemed to Madame Pégurin so fair, so unanswerable, that she could not understand why Mrs. Gould, after a moment of horrified silence, burst into tears and quite irrationally called Louise a Communist. This political quarrel had reached the ears of the General, who, insisting he could not have that sort of thing, asked Colonel Baring to straighten the difficulty out, since it was the Colonel’s fault the Goulds had been sent there in the first place.

  All this had given Virolun a winter of gossip, much of which was still repeated. One of the research workers had, quite recently, asked Major Marshall whether it was true that when young Mrs. Gould asked Madame Pégurin if she had a vacuum cleaner, she had been told, “No, I have a servant.” Was this attitude widespread, the research worker had wanted to know. Or was the Army helping break down the feudal social barriers of the little town. Oh, yes, the Major had replied. Oh, yes, indeed.

  Passing Louise on the staircase with Madame Pégurin’s breakfast tray, the Major smiled, thinking of Madame Pégurin and of how fond she was of his children. Often, on his way to breakfast, he saw the children through the half-open door, watching her as she skimmed from her coffee a web of warm milk; Madame Pégurin’s levees, his wife called them. Paula said that Madame Pégurin was so feminine it made her teeth ache, and that her influence on the children was deplorable. But the Major could not take this remark seriously. He admired Madame Pégurin, confusing her, because she was old and French and had once been rich, with courts and courtesans and the eighteenth century. In her presence, his mind took a literary turn, and he thought of vanished glories, something fine that would never return, gallant fluttering banners, and the rest of it.

  He found his wife in the dining room, staring moodily at the disorder left by the children. “They’ve vanished,” she said at once. “I sent them to wait in the garden with Joey and Henry, but they’re not out there now. They must have crept in again by the front door. I think they were simply waiting for you to come down so that they could go up to her room.” She was flushed with annoyance and the unexpected heat of the morning. “These red walls,” she said, looking around the room. “They’ve made me so uncomfortable all summer I haven’t enjoyed a single meal.” She longed to furnish a house of her own once more, full of chintz and robin’s-egg blue, and pictures of the children in frames.

  In the red dining room, Madame Pégurin had hung yellow curtains. On a side table was a vase of yellow late summer flowers. The Major looked around the room, but with an almost guilty enjoyment, for, just as the Methodist child is seduced by the Roman service, the Major had succumbed in Madame Pégurin’s house to something warm and rich, composed of red and yellow, and branching candelabra.

  “If they would only stay in the garden,” Paula said. “I hate it, always having to call them and fetch them. The girls, at least, could help with the sandwiches.” She began to pile the plates one on another, drawing the crumbs on the tablecloth toward her with a knife. “And they’re probably eating things. Glacéed pineapple. Cherries in something—something alcoholic. Really, it’s too much. And you don’t help.”

  She seemed close to tears, and the Major, looking down at his cornflakes, wondered exactly how to compose his face so that it would be most comforting. Paula was suspicious of extravagant tastes or pleasures. She enjoyed the nursery fare she gave the children, sharing without question their peas and lamb chops, their bland and innocent desserts. Once, long ago, she had broken off an engagement only because she had detected in the young man’s eyes a look of sensuous bliss as he ate strawberries and cream. And now her own children came to the table full of rum-soaked sponge cake and looked with condescension at their lemon Jello.

  “You exaggerate,” the Major said, kindly. “Madame Pégurin takes a lot of trouble with the children. She’s giving them a taste of life they might never have had.”

  “I know,” Paula said. “And while she’s at it, she’s ruining all my good work.” She often used this expression of the children, as if they were a length of Red Cross knitting. As the Major drank his coffee, he made marks in a notebook on the table. She sighed and, rising with the plates in her hands, said, “We’ll leave it for now, because of the picnic. But tomorrow you and I must have a long talk. About everything.”

  “Of course,” the Major said. “We’ll talk about everything—the little Goulds, too. And you might try, just this once, to be nice to Mrs. Baring.”

  “I’ll try,” said Paula, “but I can’t promise.” There were tears in her eyes, of annoyance at having to be nice to Colonel Baring’s wife.

  Madame Pégurin, in the interim, descended from the shuttered gloom of her room and went out to the garden, trailing wings of gray chiffon, and followed by the children and Louise, who were bearing iced tea, a folding chair, a parasol, a hassock, and a blanket. Under the brim of her hat her hair was drawn into tangerine-colored scallops. She sat down on the chair and put her feet on the hassock. On the grass at her feet, Margaret and Ellen lay prone, propped on their elbows. John sat beside them, eating something. The little Goulds, identical in striped jerseys, stood apart, holding a ball and bat.

  “And how is your mother?” Madame Pégurin asked Joey and Henry. “Does she still have so very much trouble with the vegetables?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said innocently. “Where we live now, the maid does everything.”

  “Ah, of course,” Madame Pégurin said, settling back in her chair. Her voice was warm and reserved—royalty at a bazaar. Between her and the two girls passed a long look of feminine understanding.

  In the kitchen, attacking the sandwiches, Paula Marshall wondered what, if anything, Mrs. Baring would say to Madame Pégurin, for the Barings had been snubbed by her so severely that, thinking of it, Paula was instantly cheered. The Barings had wanted to live with Madame Pégurin. They had been impressed by the tidy garden, the house crowded with the salvage of something better, the portrait of Monsieur Pégurin, who had been, they understood, if not an ambassador, something just as nice. But they had offended Madame Pégurin, first by giving her a Christmas present, a subscription to the Reader’s Digest in French, and then by calling one afternoon without an invitation. Mrs. Baring had darted about the drawing room like a fish, remarking, in the sort of voice reserved for the whims of the elderly, “My mother collects milk glass.” And the Colonel had confided to Madame Pégurin that his wife spoke excellent French and would, if pressed, say a few words in that language—a confidence that was for Madame Pégurin the depth of the afternoon. “I wouldn’t think of taking into my house anyone but the General,” she was reported to have said. “Or someone on his immediate staff.” The Barings had exchanged paralyzed looks, and then the Colonel, rising to it, had said that he would see, and the following week he had sent Sergeant Gould, who was the General’s driver, and his wife, and the terrible children. The Barings had never mentioned the incident, but they often, with little smiles and movements of their eyebrows, implied that by remaining in a cramped room at the Hotel Bristol and avoiding Madame Pégurin’s big house they had narrowly escaped a season in Hell.


  Now they were all going to the picnic, that symbol of unity, Sergeant Gould driving the General and Madame Pégurin, the Barings following with the mayor of Virolun, and the Marshalls and the little Goulds somewhere behind.

  The Major came into the kitchen, carrying his notebook, and Paula said to him, “It will be queer, this thing today.”

  “Queer?” he said absently. “I don’t see why. Look,” he said. “I may have to make a speech. I put everyone on the agenda but myself, but I may be asked.” He frowned at his notes. “I could start with ‘We are gathered together.’ Or is that stuffy?”

  “I don’t know,” Paula said. With care, and also with a certain suggestion of martyrdom, she rolled bread around watercress. “Actually, I think it’s a quote.”

  “It could be.” The Major looked depressed. He ate an egg sandwich from Paula’s hamper. The basket lunch had been his idea; every family was bringing one. The Major had declared the basket lunch to be typically American, although he had never in his life attended such a function. “You should see them all in the garden,” he said, cheering up. “Madame Pégurin and the kids. What a picture! The photographer should have been there. He’s never around when you want him.”

  Describing this scene, which he had watched from the dining-room windows, the Major was careful to leave out any phrases that might annoy his wife, omitting with regret the filtered sunlight, the golden summer garden, and the blue shade of the parasol. It had pleased him to observe, although he did not repeat this either, that even a stranger could have detected which children were the little Goulds and which the little Marshalls. “I closed the dining-room shutters,” he added. “The sun seems to have moved around.” He had become protective of Madame Pégurin’s house, extending his care to the carpets.

  “That’s fine,” Paula said. In a few minutes, the cars would arrive to carry them all away, and she had a sudden prophetic vision of the day ahead. She saw the tiny cavalcade of motorcars creeping, within the speed limit, through the main street and stopping at the 1914 war memorial so that General Wirtworth could place a wreath. She foresaw the failure of the Coca-Cola to arrive at the picnic grounds, and the breakdown of the movie projector. On the periphery, scowling and eating nothing, would be the members of the Virolun Football Club, which had been forced to postpone a match with the St. Etienne Devils because of the picnic. The Major would be everywhere at once, driving his sergeant before him like a hen. Then the baseball, with the mothers of Virolun taking good care to keep their pinafored children away from the wayward ball and the terrible waving bat. Her imagination sought the photographer, found him on a picnic table, one sandaled foot next to a plate of doughnuts, as he recorded Mrs. Baring fetching a cushion for General Wirtworth and Madame Pégurin receiving from the little Goulds a cucumber sandwich.