The Cost of Living Read online

  “You should worry,” Mike said. “You’ll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?”

  The effect of this was to strike her into silence.

  She drew her knees up and examined her dusty sandals; she pulled at her skirt so that it covered her legs, and drew her sweater close. Does he mean to him, she wondered. It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession. Her own mother did nothing all day, but she was excused by having once been married. It was the image of her aunt that Barbara found distressing—her aunt filling her day with scurrying errands, writing letters of complaint (Bus conductors were ruder than before the war. Why did young girls shrink from domestic service? The streets of Paris were increasingly dirtier) to the “Letters” column of the Continental Daily Mail. But who would marry me, Barbara had thought. From her reading she knew that she would never meet men or be of interest to them until she could, suddenly and brilliantly, perform on the violin, become a member of Macy’s Junior Executive Squad, or, at the very least, take shorthand at a hundred and twenty words a minute.

  She peered up at Mike now, but he was looking only at his canvas, daubing in another patch of perfectly red geraniums. “For a while, they thought I could act,” she said, offering him this semiprecious treasure. “I had a radio audition last year, when I was still fifteen. Really,” she said quickly, as if he were about to round on her with complete disbelief. “My speech-class teacher was nice. When my mother came to school to see why I wasn’t doing so well, she met all my teachers. This teacher, Mr. Peppner, told her—something. He’s the only man teacher in the whole school.” She frowned, wondering once again what Mr. Peppner in his polished dark blue suit had found to say to Mrs. Ainslie; probably she, moist-eyed and smelling expensive, had been so warm, so interested, that Mr. Peppner had had no idea he was being treated like a meritorious cook and had said something extravagant. A few days later, Barbara’s mother had asked to dinner a bald young man in spectacles, who had stared hard at Barbara and said, gracefully, that her coloring was much too delicate for television but that he would make an appointment for her with someone else.

  “It’s not that my mother wanted me to work, or anything,” Barbara explained to Mike, “but a friend of hers said it would give me poise and confidence. So I went to be tested. I had to read lines in a play. There was someone else being tested, a man, and then there was a girl, a real actress. She was only helping. My name in the play was Gillian. It was called ‘The Faltering Years.’”

  Mike had never heard of it.

  “Well, neither did I, but they all seemed to know it,” Barbara said. “I don’t think it was one of the great plays of our time, or anything like that. Of our time,” she repeated thoughtfully, having frequently read this phrase on the jackets of books. “Anyway, I had to be this Mayfair debutante. I was the girlfriend of this man, but I was leaving him.”

  “For a rich lord?” Mike said, smiling.

  “No,” she said, seriously. “He was the lord, only poor. I was leaving him for a rich industrialist. I had to say, ‘Peter, won’t you try to understand?’ Then he said something. I forget what. Then I had to say, ‘It isn’t you, Peter, and it isn’t me. It’s just.’ The line ended that way, but like a question. That was my main part, or most of it. Then I went away, but I was sorry. They skipped all that. Then the man being tested had this big scene with the actress. She was the nurse to his sick mother, who wins his heart. I forget what they said.”

  “It sounds to me like she had the best part,” said Mike.

  “She was around thirty,” Barbara said. “I think she was the director’s girlfriend. He took her to lunch afterwards. I saw them going out. Anyway, at the end I had to say to her, ‘You love Peter very much, don’t you?’ And she had to say, ‘Terribly.’ Just the way she said that, the director told me, showed she was an actress. I guess he meant I wasn’t. Anyway, they said I’d hear from them, but I never did.”

  “It’s the craziest audition I ever heard of,” Mike said. He stopped working and turned to look at her. “You a Mayfair debutante, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a fair audition.”

  She looked up at him, troubled. “But they must know what they’re doing, don’t you think?” At this reminder of knowledge and authority, Mike agreed that they probably did. “Are you hungry?” she asked. She was tired of the conversation, of exposing her failures.

  The sun was nearly overhead, and they moved under a parasol pine. “There’s nothing to drink,” Barbara said apologetically, “but she put in some oranges.”

  They ate their lunch in silence, like tired Alpinists resting on a ledge. Barbara screwed her eyes tight and tried to read the lettering on the monument; it was too hot to walk across the grass, out of their round island of shade. “It’s to some queen,” she said at last, and read out: “‘Elizabeth, impératrice d’Autriche et reine de la Hongrie.’ Well, I never heard of her, did you? Maybe she stayed at this hotel.” Mike seemed to be falling asleep. “About Hungary, you know,” she said, speaking rapidly. “One time, I went to a funny revue in Paris with my aunt. It was supposed to be in the war, and this lady was going to entertain the Russian ambassador. She wanted to dress up her little dog in the Russian costume, in his honor, but she had only a Hungarian one. So she called all the embassies and said, ‘Which side of the war is Hungary on?’ and nobody knew. So then she finally called the Russian ambassador and she said, ‘I want to dress my little dog in your honor but I have only a Hungarian costume. Do you know which side the Hungarians are on?’ And the ambassador said, ‘Yes, I do know, but I can’t tell you until I’ve talked to Moscow.’” Barbara looked anxiously at Mike. “Do you think that’s funny?”

  “Sure.”

  Neither of them had laughed.

  “Do you remember the war?” he asked.

  “A little.” She got up as if she were suddenly uncomfortable, and walked to the edge of the grass, where the Cap fell away sharply to the sea.

  “I remember quite a lot,” said Mike. “My father was in Denver the whole time—I don’t know why. We stayed home because they couldn’t find us a place to live there. When he came home for leaves, we—my brother and I—wouldn’t mind him, we were so used to our mother. When he’d tell us to do something, we’d ask her if it was all right.” He smiled, remembering. “Was yours away?”

  “Well, mine was killed,” she said diffidently, as if by telling him this she made an unfair claim on his attention. “I was only five when he went away, so I don’t remember much. He was killed later, when I was seven. It was right before my birthday, so I couldn’t have a party.” She presented, like griefs of equal value, these two facts. “People are always asking me—friends of my mother, I mean—do I remember him and what a wonderful sense of humor he had and all that. When I say no, I don’t remember, they look at me and say –” Her voice went up to an incredulous screech: “‘But it can’t be that long ago!’”

  “Well, it is,” Mike said, as if he were settling a quarrel. He stood up and moved beside her. Together, they looked down to the curving beach, where the sea broke lightly against the warm rocks, and the edge of the crumbling continent they had never seen whole. From above, they could see that beside each of the tumbled hotels a locked garden, secure against God knew what marauders, had gone wild; they could distinguish the film of weeds that brushed the top of the wall, the climbing roses that choked the palms. Above, out of their vision, was the fortification that had offended Barbara’s aunt, and down on the beach was the aunt herself, a dot with a sunshade, knitting forever.

  Say we might get married later, Barbara willed, closing her eyes against the quiet sea and the moldering life beside it. But Mike said nothing, thinking only of how dull a town Menton was, and wondering if it had been worth two weeks. He had been taught that time must be reckoned in value—and fiscal value, at that. At home, he would be required to account both for
his allowance and for his days and weeks. “Did you get anything out of Menton?” his father would ask. “Was it worth it?”

  “Oh, yes,” he might tell them. “I worked a lot, and I met a rich girl.”

  His parents would be pleased. Not that they were vulgar or mercenary, but they considered it expedient for young artists to meet the well-born; they would accept, Mike was certain, the fact of his friendship with Barbara as a useful acquirement, justifying a fortnight of lounging about in the sun. When he thought of Barbara as a patroness, commissioning him, perhaps, for a portrait, he wanted to laugh: yet the seed of the thought—that the rich were of utility—remained, and to rid himself of it he asked her sharply if she had brought her bathing suit.

  Stricken, looking about as if it might be lying on the grass, she said, “I didn’t think—But we can go home and get it.”

  They gathered up their scattered belongings and walked back the way they had come. Barbara, in her misery, further chastened herself by holding a geranium leaf on her nose—she had visions of peeling and blisters—and she trotted beside Mike in silence.

  “Do you write letters?” he said at last, for he had remembered that they both lived in New York, and he felt that if he could maintain the tenuous human claim of correspondence, possibly his acquaintance with Barbara might turn out to be of value; he could not have said how or in terms of what. And although he laughed at his parents, he was reluctant to loosen his hold on something that might justify him in their sight until he had at least sorted out his thoughts.

  She stood stock-still in the path, the foolish green leaf on her nose, and said solemnly, “I will write to you every day as long as I live.”

  He glanced at her with the beginning of alarm, but he was spared from his thoughts by the sight of the autobus on the highway below. Clasping hands, they ran slipping and falling down the steep embankment, and arrived flushed, bewildered, exhausted, as if their romp had been youthful enough to satisfy even Barbara’s aunt.

  1952

  THE PICNIC

  THE THREE Marshall children were dressed and ready for the picnic before their father was awake. Their mother had been up since dawn, for the coming day of pleasure weighed heavily on her mind. She had laid out the children’s clothes, so that they could dress without asking questions—clean blue denims for John and dresses sprigged with flowers for the girls. Their shoes, chalky with whitening, stood in a row on the bathroom windowsill.

  John, stubbornly, dressed himself, but the girls helped each other, standing and preening before the long looking glass. Margaret fastened the chain of Ellen’s heart-shaped locket while Ellen held up her hair with both hands. Margaret never wore her own locket. Old Madame Pégurin, in whose house in France the Marshalls were living, had given her something she liked better—a brooch containing a miniature portrait of a poodle called Youckie, who had died of influenza shortly before the war. The brooch was edged with seed pearls, and Margaret had worn it all summer, pinned to her navy-blue shorts.

  “How very pretty it is!” the children’s mother had said when the brooch was shown to her. “How nice of Madame Pégurin to think of a little girl. It will look much nicer later on, when you’re a little older.” She had been trained in the school of indirect suggestion, and so skillful had she become that her children sometimes had no idea what she was driving at.

  “I guess so,” Margaret had replied on this occasion, firmly fastening the brooch to her shorts.

  She now attached it to the front of the picnic frock, where, too heavy for the thin material, it hung like a stone. “It looks lovely,” Ellen said with serious admiration. She peered through their bedroom window across the garden, and over the tiled roofs of the small town of Virolun, to the blooming summer fields that rose and fell toward Grenoble and the Alps. Across the town, partly hidden by somebody’s orchard, were the neat rows of gray-painted barracks that housed American troops. Into this tidy settlement their father disappeared each day, driven in a jeep. On a morning as clear as this, the girls could see the first shining peaks of the mountains and the thin blue smoke from the neighboring village, some miles away. They were too young to care about the view, but their mother appreciated it for them, often reminding them that nothing in her own childhood had been half as agreeable. “You youngsters are very lucky,” she would say. “Your father might just as easily as not have been stationed in the middle of Arkansas.” The children would listen without comment, although it depressed them inordinately to be told of their good fortune. If they liked this house better than any other they had lived in, it was because it contained Madame Pégurin, her cat, Olivette, and her cook, Louise.

  Olivette now entered the girls’ bedroom soundlessly, pushing the door with one paw. “Look at her. She’s priceless,” Margaret said, trying out the word.

  Ellen nodded. “I wish one of us could go to the picnic with her,” she said. Margaret knew that she meant not the cat but Madame Pégurin, who was driving to the picnic grounds with General Wirtworth, commander of the post.

  “One of us might,” Margaret said. “Sitting on the General’s lap.”

  Ellen’s shriek at the thought woke their father, Major Marshall, who, remembering that this was the day of the picnic, said, “Oh, God!”

  The picnic, which had somehow become an Army responsibility, had been suggested by an American magazine of such grandeur that the Major was staggered to learn that Madame Pégurin had never heard of it. Two research workers, vestal maidens in dirndl skirts, had spent weeks combing France to find the most typically French town. They had found no more than half a dozen; and since it was essential to the story that the town be near an American Army post, they had finally, like a pair of exhausted doves, fluttered to rest in Virolun. The picnic, they had explained to General Wirtworth, would be a symbol of unity between two nations—between the troops at the post and the residents of the town. The General had repeated this to Colonel Baring, who had passed it on to Major Marshall, who had brought it to rest with his wife. “Oh, really?” Paula Marshall had said, and if there was any reserve—any bitterness—in her voice, the Major had failed to notice. The mammoth job of organizing the picnic had fallen just where he knew it would—on his own shoulders.

  The Major was the post’s recreation officer, and he was beset by many difficulties. His status was not clear; sometimes he had to act as public relations officer—there being none, through an extraordinary oversight on the part of the General. The Major’s staff was inadequate. It was composed of but two men: a lieutenant, who had developed measles a week before the picnic, and a glowering young sergeant who, the Major feared, would someday write a novel depicting him in an unfavorable manner. The Major had sent Colonel Baring a long memo on the subject of his status, and the Colonel had replied in person, saying, with a comic, rueful smile, “Just see us through the picnic, old man!”

  The Major had said he would try. But it was far from easy. The research workers from the American magazine had been joined by a photographer who wore openwork sandals and had so far not emerged from the Hotel Bristol. Messages in his languid handwriting had been carried to Major Marshall’s office by the research workers, and answers returned by the Major’s sergeant. The messages were grossly interfering and never helpful. Only yesterday, the day before the picnic, the sergeant had placed before the Major a note on Hotel Bristol stationery: “Suggest folk dances as further symbol of unity. French wives teaching American wives, and so on. Object: Color shot.” Annoyed, the Major had sent a message pointing out that baseball had already been agreed on as an easily recognized symbol, and the afternoon brought a reply: “Feel that French should make contribution. Anything colorful or indigenous will do.”

  “Baseball is as far as I’ll go,” the Major had said in his reply to this.

  On their straggling promenade to breakfast, the children halted outside Madame Pégurin’s door. Sometimes from behind the white-and-gold painted panels came the sound of breakfast—china on china, glass against silve
r. Then Louise would emerge with the tray, and Madame Pégurin, seeing the children, would tell them to come in. She would be sitting up, propped with a pillow and bolster. Her hair, which changed color after every visit to Paris, would be wrapped in a scarf and Madame herself enveloped in a trailing dressing gown streaked with the ash of her cigarette. When the children came in, she would feed them sugared almonds and pistachio creams and sponge cakes soaked in rum, which she kept in a tin box by her bedside, and as they stood lined up rather comically, she would tell them about little dead Youckie, and about her own children, all of whom had married worthless, ordinary, social-climbing men and women. “In the end,” she would say, sighing, “there is nothing to replace the love one can bear a cat or a poodle.”

  The children’s mother did not approve of these morning visits, and the children were frequently told not to bother poor Madame Pégurin, who needed her rest. This morning, they could hear the rustle of paper as Madame Pégurin turned the pages of Le Figaro, which came to Virolun every day from Paris. Madame Pégurin looked at only one section of it, the Carnet du Jour—the daily account of marriages, births, and deaths—even though, as she told the children, one found in it nowadays names that no one had heard of, families who sounded foreign or commonplace. The children admired this single-minded reading, and they thought it “commonplace” of their mother to read books.