The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  With delicate nibbles, eyes down, Lily ate her cheese. Glancing sidewise, she noticed that Mrs. Garnett had closed the book. She wanted to annoy; she had planned the whole business of the Italian meal, had thought it out beforehand. Their manners were still strange to Lily, although she was a quick pupil. Why not clear the air, have it out? Once again she wondered what the two friends meant to each other. “Like” and “hate” were possibilities she had nearly forgotten when she stopped being Mrs. Cliff and became this curious, two-faced Lily Littel.

  Mrs. Freeport’s pebbly stare was focussed on her friend’s jar of yogurt. “Sugar?” she cried, giving the cracked basin a shove along the table. Mrs. Garnett pulled it toward her, defiantly. She spoke in a soft, martyred voice, as though Lily weren’t there. She said that it was her last evening and it no longer mattered. Mrs. Freeport had made a charge for extra sugar—yes, she had seen it on her bill. Mrs. Garnett asked only to pay and go. She was never coming again.

  “I look upon you as essentially greedy.” Mrs. Freeport leaned forward, enunciating with care. “You pretend to eat nothing, but I cannot look at a dish after you have served yourself. The wreck of the lettuce. The destruction of the pudding.”

  A bottle of wine, adrift and forgotten, stood by Lily’s plate. She had not seen it until now. Mrs. Garnett, who was fearless, covered her yogurt thickly with sugar.

  “Like most people who pretend to eat like birds, you manage to keep your strength up,” Mrs. Freeport said. “That sugar is the equivalent of a banquet, and you also eat between meals. Your drawers are stuffed with biscuits, and cheese, and chocolate, and heaven knows what.”

  “Dear Vanessa,” Mrs. Garnett said.

  “People who make a pretense of eating nothing always stuff furtively,” said Mrs. Freeport smoothly. “Secret eating is exactly the same thing as secret drinking.”

  Lily’s years abroad had immunized her to the conversation of gentlewomen, their absorption with money, their deliberate over- or underfeeding, their sudden animal quarrels. She wondered if there remained a great deal more to learn before she could wear their castoff manners as her own. At the reference to secret drinking she looked calm and melancholy. Mrs. Garnett said, “That is most unkind.” The yogurt remained uneaten. Lily sighed, and wondered what would happen if she picked her teeth.

  “My change man stopped by today,” said Mrs. Garnett, all at once smiling and widening her eyes. How Lily admired that shift of territory—that carrying of banners to another field. She had not learned everything yet. “I wish you could have seen his face when he heard I was leaving! There really was no need for his coming, because I’d been in to his office only the week before, and changed all the money I need, and we’d had a lovely chat.”

  “The odious little money merchant in the bright-yellow automobile?” said Mrs. Freeport.

  Mrs. Garnett, who often took up farfetched and untenable arguments, said, “William Henry wanted me to be happy.”

  “Edith!”

  Lily hooked her middle finger around the bottle of wine and pulled it gently toward her. The day after tomorrow was years away. But she did not take her eyes from Mrs. Freeport, whose blazing eyes perfectly matched the small sapphires hanging from her ears. Lily could have matched the expression if she had cared to, but she hadn’t arrived at the sapphires yet. Addressing herself, Lily said, “Thanks,” softly, and upended the bottle.

  “I meant it in a general way,” said Mrs. Garnett. “William Henry wanted me to be happy. It was nearly the last thing he said.”

  “At the time of William Henry’s death, he was unable to say anything,” said Mrs. Freeport. “William Henry was my first cousin. Don’t use him as a platform for your escapades.”

  Lily took a sip from her glass. Shock! It hadn’t been watered—probably in honor of Mrs. Garnett’s last meal. But it was sour, thick, and full of silt. “I have always thought a little sugar would improve it,” said Lily chattily, but nobody heard.

  Mrs. Freeport suddenly conceded that William Henry might have wanted his future widow to be happy. “It was because he spoiled you,” she said. “You were vain and silly when he married you, and he made you conceited and foolish. I don’t wonder poor William Henry went off his head.”

  “Off his head?” Mrs. Garnett looked at Lily; calm, courteous Miss Littel was giving herself wine. “We might have general conversation,” said Mrs. Garnett, with a significant twitch of face. “Miss Littel has hardly said a word.”

  “Why?” shouted Mrs. Freeport, throwing her table napkin down. “The meal is over. You refused it. There is no need for conversation of any kind.”

  She was marvelous, blazing, with that water lily on her head.

  Ah, Lily thought, but you should have seen me, in the old days. How I could let fly…poor old Cliff.

  They moved in single file down the passage and into the sitting room, where, for reasons of economy, the hanging lustre contained one bulb. Lily and Mrs. Freeport settled down directly under it, on a sofa; each had her own newspaper to read, tucked down the side of the cushions. Mrs. Garnett walked about the room. “To think that I shall never see this room again,” she said.

  “I should hope not,” said Mrs. Freeport. She held the paper before her face, but as far as Lily could tell she was not reading it.

  “The trouble is”—for Mrs. Garnett could never help giving herself away—“I don’t know where to go in the autumn.”

  “Ask your change man.”

  “Egypt,” said Mrs. Garnett, still walking about. “I had friends who went to Egypt every winter for years and years, and now they have nowhere to go, either.”

  “Let them stay home,” said Mrs. Freeport. “I am trying to read.”

  “If Egypt continues to carry on, I’m sure I don’t know where we shall all be,” said Lily. Neither lady took the slightest notice.

  “They were perfectly charming people,” said Mrs. Garnett, in a complaining way.

  “Why don’t you do the Times crossword, Edith?” said Mrs. Freeport.

  From behind them, Mrs. Garnett said, “You know that I can’t, and you said that only to make me feel small. But William Henry did it until the very end, which proves, I think, that he was not o.h.h. By o.h.h. I mean off his head.”

  The break in her voice was scarcely more than a quaver, but to the two women on the sofa it was a signal, and they got to their feet. By the time they reached her, Mrs. Garnett was sitting on the floor in hysterics. They helped her up, as they had often done before. She tried to scratch their faces and said they would be sorry when she had died.

  Between them, they got her to bed. “Where is her hot-water bottle?” said Mrs. Freeport. “No, not that one. She must have her own—the bottle with the bunny head.”

  “My yogurt,” said Mrs. Garnett, sobbing. Without her make-up she looked shrunken, as though padding had been removed from her skin.

  “Fetch the yogurt,” Mrs. Freeport commanded. She stood over the old friend while she ate the yogurt, one tiny spoonful at a time. “Now go to sleep,” she said.

  In the morning, Mrs. Garnett was taken by taxi to the early train. She seemed entirely composed and carried her book. Mrs. Freeport hoped that her journey would be comfortable. She and Lily watched the taxi until it was out of sight on the road, and then, in the bare wintry garden, Mrs. Freeport wept into her hands.

  “I’ve said goodbye to her,” she said at last, blowing her nose. “It is the last goodbye. I shall never see her again. I was so horrid to her. And she is so tiny and frail. She might die. I’m convinced of it. She won’t survive the summer.”

  “She has survived every other,” said Lily reasonably.

  “Next year, she must have the large room with the balcony. I don’t know what I was thinking, not to have given it to her. We must begin planning now for next year. She will want a good reading light. Her eyes are so bad. And, you know, we should have chopped her vegetables. She doesn’t chew. I’m sure that’s at the bottom of the yogurt affair.”

/>   “I’m off to Nice tomorrow,” said Lily, the stray. “My sister is expecting me.”

  “You are so devoted,” said Mrs. Freeport, looking wildly for her handkerchief, which had fallen on the gravel path. Her hat was askew. The house was empty. “So devoted…I suppose that one day you will want to live in Nice, to be near her. I suppose that day will come.”

  Instead of answering, Lily set Mrs. Freeport’s water lily straight, which was familiar of her; but they were both in such a state, for different reasons, that neither of them thought it strange.

  1960

  ROSE

  CHILDHOOD recollected is often hallucination; who is to blame?

  One of my father’s brothers, Hans-Thomas, was a bigamist. He had a wife and sons in Europe, and a wife and a little girl in the United States. The mother of the little girl was a Catholic and would not have married him if she had known he had been married once before. She was doubly injured; his divorce from the European wife, too late to be of any good to anyone, was not recognized in Boston, where she had made her home, and in the eyes of her church, she had never married at all.

  My uncle was supremely careless, but heaven knows that he hadn’t been brought up that way. My grandparents were German. My grandfather died young, and the children were brought up by their mother. My uncle had been knocked about, physically and spiritually, as much as any disciplinarian could ask for. The education of my grandmother’s five children was based on humiliation; when they grew up, they stitched together their torn personalities as best they could. Hans-Thomas had spent whole days in a room, deprived of food and light and air and voices. Regularly, his head was shaved. Since this was not a common punishment in America, it was much remarked and ought to have taught him grace and obedience once and for all. But he grew up to be just as willful and heedless as he had been as a boy, hurt his wives, neglected his children, and escaped to Mexico, where he failed in one thing after the other. His mother sent him money until she died.

  I met Hans-Thomas once, in our house in Montreal. He gave me two America five-dollar bills, which seemed to me more valuable than Canadian money—not that I had been given ten dollars to spend before. Lest the money go to my head, my mother made me buy presents for Germaine, the half-witted bonne d’enfants, and for her sisters and brothers and cousins. I had never been told about my uncle’s scandal, or why he lived in Mexico. I had never been told that the Boston cousin existed; but I knew. I knew about it, although no one had told me a thing. Perhaps that intuitive knowledge, the piecing together of facts overhead, overcharges the mind. In any case, the prelude to the hallucination is this: Simple Germaine takes me by train to my grandmother’s house, in northern Vermont, for the holidays. The towns, the snow, the shabby farms are all familiar; we cross the border, where there is a different way of speaking, different money, a different flag. We have made this trip a dozen times.

  Christmas is a special season for us. My parents are atheists. My grandmother is a European of her time and her class—Socialist, bluestocking, agnostic, and a snob. Like my parents, she objects to Christmas, but on different grounds. My parents complain about the sentimentality, and the commercialization of a myth. My grandmother patiently explains her aversion to the pagan tree, and why she will not have one in her house. We seem to me entirely apart. In my Catholic pensionnat in Montreal, where I am a day student, instructed by my family to learn French and keep out of the chapel, Christmas is marked by four weeks of fever. On the last day, I receive a present—a pen-wiper—from a skimpy tree. There is a crèche; Bethlehem seems to be a town in Quebec. The holy family and the attending animals, angels, and kings are knee-deep in cotton snow. In my classroom, the board is decorated by the most artistic of the nuns. We watch her drawing with colored chalk: green holly, red berries, angels with yellow hair. The blackboard, no longer available for sums, holds all the excitement of a pagan season my parents despise.

  We do, however, exchange presents. I am bearing gifts to Grandmother—three drawings on parchment, and a heavy book. We arrive at Grandmother’s without adventure. And here the hallucination begins.

  Her name is Rose. She is about thirteen, with long hair that lies in ribbons on a velvet coat. The coat has braid trimming and gilt buttons. She wears a fur beret. She carries a muff. Her fur-and-velvet overshoes are in the hall closet, where my navy reefer has been hung. The overshoes are the first excitement; who is here? My cousins are boys. No girl comes to Grandmother’s but me. Now someone has come—Rose.

  I wear a Ferris waist, two pairs of bloomers because of the cold, a middy blouse with a whistle on a cord, a blue skirt, white stockings, black patent-leather shoes. I have left my coat and my gloves in the hall, but kept my hat: H.M.S. Halifax. From either side of the hat sprout braids and powder-blue grosgrain bows. I am much younger than Rose, and considerably smaller. She bends down to me; she smells of cold and of snow. The room is oddly dark. She cries, “Oh, this is Irmgard. Oh, isn’t she cute!”

  I wait for Grandmother to gather her thunderbolts, balance them, and let fly. I might conceivably be allowed to swear, but I would be husbanded from human society if I said “cute.” “Cute” is an abomination, like Wagner, canaries, the radio, motorcycles, small dogs, chintz. There are no thunderbolts. My grandmother —our grandmother—smiles at Rose out of her cold hazel eyes. She smirks at her, doting. Rose responds with a positive simper. They would eat each other, like spun sugar, if they could.

  Obviously, Germaine and I have come too early. We have broken into their tea. I have known of only one cake at Grandmother’s—a lemon-scented yellow loaf my mother derisively calls “Lutheran folly.” But Rose has a layer cake decorated with cherries. She has large, thick cookies, saucer-sized, iced with pink and white, sprinkled with colored sugar. She has ginger biscuits, crescents, stars, delicately iced. She has snowmen with cherry noses and currant eyes. They disappear, wrapped in spangled paper, into Rose’s muff.

  In the dark, warm, scented parlor Germaine winds the gramophone, and we hear bells from a foreign cathedral and shrill little voices crying “Süsser die Glocken nie klingen….” Doors fly open, Rose has a tree. Beyond the doors is a sweet-smelling pagan cave; the sitting room is a blaze of candles, stars, moons, planets; a tree. Rose sits on Grandmother’s lap; Grandmother smooths her hair. Rose is crying. Then, laden with presents, weeping, Rose departs.

  It has the true quality of a hallucination, because I take no part. I can see them, but they cannot see me. And then (this is the very thing my grandmother had taught us—her own children, then me—to suspect and scorn) singing infants, little biscuits, shed tears, slops. For she worked on my education—hard; not as she had with her own children, for she knew it had failed, but with endless instructions, and kneadings and pummelings of the mind. Her Germany was hard and thin, shadeless and plain, thin and cold, a landscape illuminated with a cold lemon sun, without warmth or regular clouds. She read to me in German. I was expected to understand. I was expected to sit and listen and form my understanding of people and the way they behaved, on the things she read. But there was a heavy brown veil between us—the German tongue. I knew two words for everything, one in English and one in French. I could not admit three. My grandmother read; I sat on a chair, so high and steep that my legs stuck out before me and went to sleep. She read and read, and one day the veil melted. I began to see a woman in long skirts, walking to and fro, talking, explaining. Suddenly she stops and throws a glance into a mirror. She peeps into a mirror, and what she sees—her own face—will always be as important to her as anything she has to say. I knew instantly what grown women were like and how I would be one day. Voilà les grandes. The veil must have reappeared; I remember nothing else.

  Now, was this grandmother mine, or Rose’s? Was her Germany the dark, spruce-scented cave, of which I was given a glimpse, or the shadeless landscape, the clear lemon sun? Did Rose carry hers all her life as I did mine—hers mournful, mine sad; hers tearful, mine grim; her rich, mine thin? But here is the pro
blem, and why it can never be answered: I never saw Rose at all. But if I never saw Rose, then everything fades with her: the tree, the bells, the dark parlor, the candles, the hanging suns.

  The next day, the sitting room doors were closed, the rooms had been aired. My present—a book, of course—was by my plate at breakfast. My grandmother and I exchanged a diffident kiss. I saw that she had written on the flyleaf “für Irmgard.”

  On the journey home, Germain and I do not discuss Rose. I suspect Germaine of being an accomplice. She wound the gramophone. But I tell my parents, I say that we saw Rose, that there were biscuits and a tree.

  “Oh, she wouldn’t.”

  But they exchange a look, which I catch. They say I am making it up. “We shall ask Grandmother,” they warn.

  Instinct now says that Grandmother is old and tired, and will lie. She has failed, and will now say anything for the sake of peace and to bind the family to her.

  They turn to Germaine. “What was she like, Germaine? What was she wearing?”

  Germaine racks her brain, which means she is set down in an unknown country and stumbles over tree roots and rocks. “She had on a navy-blue coat, a sailor hat, a sailor blouse, a...”

  But no! I am the one with the middy, the whistle, the stockings, the H.M.S Halifax hat. I see that they know perfectly well Rose exists and are curious, for they would love to know more. They would love to know how she looked and how she was dressed, but they have no more belief in my velvet coat and fur beret than in Germaine’s navy-blue reefer and sailor hat. My mother is excited. She lights a cigarette, puts it out, lights another. She admires her brother-in-law for having “brought it off.” He brought it off—kept out of prison, where he belongs, and there he is, in Mexico, in the sun. Her brother-in-law’s wickedness, his escape, excites something ruthless in her own nature. He is in Mexico; she is in Canada, which she hates. My mother would like to hear about Rose. Rose’s circumstances are more interesting than mine. Her legitimacy is in doubt, she is a Catholic, her father has “brought it off” and lives in a warm climate.