The Cost of Living Page 7

  Paula closed the picnic hamper and looked at her husband with compassion. She suddenly felt terribly sorry for him, because of all that was in store for him this day, and because the picnic was not likely to clarify his status, as he so earnestly hoped. There would be fresh misunderstandings and further scandals. She laid her hand over his. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have been listening more carefully. Read me your speech, and start with ‘We are gathered together.’ I think it’s quite appropriate and very lovely.”

  “Do you?” said the Major. His eyes hung on her face, trusting. “But then suppose I have to give it in French? How the hell do you say ‘gathered together’ in French?”

  “You won’t have to give it in French,” Paula said, in just such a voice as she used to her children when they had a fever or nightmares. “Because, you see, the mayor will speak in French, and that’s quite enough.”

  “That’s right,” said the Major. “I can say, in French, ‘Our good French friends will excuse this little talk in English.’”

  “That’s right,” Paula said.

  Reassured, the Major thrust his notes in his pocket and strode from the kitchen to the garden, where, squaring his shoulders, he rallied his forces for the coming battle.

  1952

  A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

  JANE AND Ernestine were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted. It had clung to the windows for weeks, ever since the start of the autumn rains, reducing a promised view of mountains to a watery blur. Now, unexpectedly, the fog rose; it went up all in one piece, like a curtain, and when it had cleared away, the children saw that the mountains outside were covered with snow. Because of their father’s health, they had always, until this year, wintered in warm climates. They abandoned their slopped glasses of milk and stared at slopes that were rough with trees, black and white like the glossy postcards their mother bought to send to aunts in America. Down below, on a flat green plain, were villages no bigger than the children’s cereal plates. Some of the villages were in Germany and some were over in France—their governess, Frau Stengel, had explained about the frontier, with many a glum allusion—but from here the toy houses and steeples looked all alike; there was no hedge, no fence, no mysterious cleft in the earth to set them apart, although, staring hard, one could see something, a winding line, as thin as a hair. That was the Rhine.

  “Look,” said Jane, to the back of her mother’s newspaper. She said it encouragingly, preparing Mrs. Kennedy for shock. It did not enter her head that her mother knew what snow was like. To the two little girls winter meant walks in parks where every pebble had a correct place underfoot and geraniums grew in rows, like soldiers marching. The sea was always there, but too cold to bathe in. Overhead, and outside their window at night, palms rustled bleakly, like unswept leaves.

  “Look,” Jane repeated, but Mrs. Kennedy, who read the local paper every day in order to improve her German, didn’t hear. “You can see everything,” said Jane, giving her mother up. “Mountains.”

  “Hitler’s mountains,” said Ernestine, repeating a phrase that Frau Stengel had used. The girls had no idea who Hitler was, but they had seen his photograph—Frau Stengel kept it pressed between two film magazines on her bookshelf—and she frequently spoke of his death, which she appeared to have felt keenly. The children, because of this, assumed that Hitler and Frau Stengel must have been related. “Poor Hitler, Frau Stengel’s dead cousin,” Ernestine sang, inventing a tune, making whirlpools in her porridge with a spoon. Some of the people at nearby tables in the dining room turned to smile mistily at the children. What angels the Kennedy girls were, the hotel guests often remarked—so pretty and polite, and always saying the most intelligent things! “Frau Stengel says there wouldn’t have been a war that time, only all these other people were so greedy,” and “Only one little, little piece of Africa, Frau Stengel says. Frau Stengel says...” Someone had started the rumor that Jane and Ernestine were not Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters at all but had been adopted here in Germany. How else was one to account for their blond hair? Mrs. Kennedy was quite dark, and old enough to be, if not their grandmother (although some of the women in the hotel were willing to push it that far), at least a sort of elderly adoptive aunt. Mrs. Kennedy, looking up in time to catch the looks of tender good will beamed toward her daughters, would think, How fond they are of children! But then Jane and Ernestine are particularly attractive. She had no notion of the hotel gossip concerning their origins and would have been deeply offended if she had been told about it, for Jane and Ernestine were not German and not adopted. They had come along quite naturally, if disconcertingly, less than a year apart, just at a time when Mrs. Kennedy had begun to regard all children as a remote, alarming race. The second surprise had come when they had turned out to be more than commonly pretty. “Like little dolls,” Frau Stengel had said on first seeing them. “Just like dolls.”

  “I have been told that they resemble little Renoirs,” Mrs. Kennedy had replied, with just a trace of correction.

  Their charm, after all, was not entirely the work of nature; one’s character was just as important as one’s face, and the girls, thanks to their mother’s vigilance on their behalf, were as unblemished, as removed from the world and its coarsening effects, as their guileless faces suggested. Unlike their little compatriots, whom they sometimes met on their travels, and from whom they were quickly led away, they had never, Mrs. Kennedy was able to assure herself, heard a thought expressed that was cheapening or less than kind. They wore, in all seasons, clothing that matched the atmosphere created for their own special world—ribboned straw hats, fluffy little sweaters, starched frocks trimmed with rows and rows of broderie anglaise, made to order wherever a favorable exchange prevailed—and the result was that, with their long, brushed tresses, they did indeed resemble dolls, or even, in a rosy light, little Renoirs.

  What marriages they would make! Mrs. Kennedy, without complaining of her own, nevertheless hoped her girls would accomplish something with just a little more glitter—a double wedding in a cathedral, for instance. Chartres would be nice, though damp. Observing the children now, over the breakfast table, she saw the picture again—perfumed, cloudy, with a pair of faceless but utterly suitable bridegrooms hovering in the background. Mr. Kennedy, who did not believe in churches and thought they should all be turned into lending libraries, would simply have to put aside his scruples for the occasion. Mrs. Kennedy, mentally, had it out with him. “Very well,” he replied, vanquished. “I certainly owe you this much consideration after the splendid way you’ve brought them up.” He led them into the cathedral, one on each arm. After a tuneful but, to spare Mr. Kennedy, nondenominational ceremony, the two couples emerged under the crossed swords of a guard of honor. “The girls are charming, and they owe it all to their mother,” someone was heard to remark in the crowd. Returning to the breakfast table, Mrs. Kennedy heard Jane saying, “Just this one movie, and I’ll never ask again.”

  “One what!”

  “This movie,” said Jane. “The one I was just telling about, Das Herz Einer Mutti. Frau Stengel could take us this afternoon, she says. She already went twice. She cried like anything.”

  “Frau Stengel should know better than to suggest such a thing,” said Mrs. Kennedy, looking crossly at her brides. “There’s milk all over your mouth, and Ernestine’s hands are filthy. Do you want to make my life a trial?”

  “No,” said Jane. She opened a picture book she had brought to the table and began to read aloud in German, in a high, stumbling recitative. One silky tress of hair lay on the buttered side of a piece of bread. She wiped her mouth on the fluffy sleeve of her pale blue sweater.

  “Well, really, sometimes I just—” Mrs. Kennedy began, but Jane was reading, and Ernestine singing, and she said, annoyed, “What is that book, if you please?”

  “Nothing,” said Jane. It was a book Frau Stengel had given them, the comic adventures of Hansi, a baboon. Hansi was always in mischief, bursting
in where grown-up people were taking baths, and that kind of thing, but the most enchanting thing about him, from the children’s point of view, was his heart-shaped scarlet behind, on which the artist had dwelt with loving exactitude.

  Mrs. Kennedy drew the book toward her. She glanced quickly through the pages, then put it down by her coffee cup. She said nothing.

  “Is it cruel?” said Jane nervously. She tried again: “Is it too cruel, or something?”

  “It is worse than cruel,” said Mrs. Kennedy, when at last she could speak. “It is vulgar. I forbid you to read it.”

  “We already have.”

  “Then don’t read it again. If Frau Stengel gave it to you, give it back this morning.”

  “It has our names written in it,” said Jane.

  Momentarily halted, Mrs. Kennedy looked out at the view. Absorbed with her own problem—the children, the book, whether or not she had handled it well—she failed to notice that the fog had lifted, and felt just as hemmed in and baffled as usual. If only one could consult one’s husband, she thought. But Mr. Kennedy, who lay at this very moment in a nursing home half a mile distant, waiting for his wife to come and read to him, could not be counted on for advice. He cherished an obscure stomach complaint and a touchy liver that had withstood, triumphantly, the best attention of twenty doctors. It was because of Mr. Kennedy’s stomach that the family moved about so much, guided by a new treatment in London, an excellent liver man on the Riviera, or the bracing climate of the Italian lakes. A weaker man, Mrs. Kennedy sometimes thought, might have given up and pretended he was better, but her husband, besides having an uncommon lot of patience, had been ailing just long enough to be faddish; this year it was a nursing home on the rim of the Black Forest that had taken his fancy, and here they all were, shivering in the unaccustomed damp, dosed with a bracing vitamin tonic sent over from America and guaranteed to replace the southern sun.

  Mr. Kennedy seldom saw his daughters. The rules of the private clinics he frequented were all in his favor. In any case, he seldom asked to see the girls, for he felt that they were not at an interesting age. Wistfully, his wife sometimes wondered when their interesting age would begin—when they were old enough to be sent away to school, perhaps, or, better still, safely disposed of in the handsome marriages that gave her so much concern.

  Reminded now of Mr. Kennedy and the day ahead, she looked around the dining room, wondering if anyone would like to come along to the nursing home for a little visit. She stared coldly past the young American couple who sat before the next window; they were the only other foreigners in the hotel, and Mrs. Kennedy had swept them off to the hospital one morning before they knew what was happening. The visit had not been a success. Cheered by a new audience, Mr. Kennedy had talked about his views—views so bold that they still left his wife quite breathless after fourteen years of marriage. Were people fit to govern themselves, for instance? Mr. Kennedy could not be sure. Look at France. And what of the ants? Was not their civilization, with its emphasis on industry and thrift, superior to ours? Mr. Kennedy thought that it was. And then there was God—or was there? Mr. Kennedy had talked about God at some length that morning, and the young couple had listened, looking puzzled, until, at last, the young woman said, “Yes, well, I see. Agnostic. How sweet.”

  “Sweet!” said Mr. Kennedy, outraged.

  Sweet? thought his wife. Why, they were treating Mr. Kennedy as if he were funny and old-fashioned, somebody to be humored. If they could have heard some of the things he had said to the bishop that time, they might have more respect! She had given the young man a terrible look, and he had begun to speak valiantly of books, but it was too late. Mr. Kennedy was offended, and he interrupted sulkily to snap, “Well, no one had to revive Kipling for me,” and the visit broke up right after that.

  Really, no one would do for Mr. Kennedy, thought his wife—but she thought it without a jot of censure, for she greatly admired her husband and was ready to show it in a number of practical ways; not only did she ungrudgingly provide the income that permitted his medical excursions but she sat by his bedside nearly every day of the year discussing his digestion and reading aloud the novels of Upton Sinclair, of which he was exceedingly fond.

  Sighing, now, she brought her gaze back from the window and the unsuitable hotel guests. “You might as well go to lessons,” she said to the girls. “But remember, no movies.”

  They got down from their chairs. Each of them implanted on Mrs. Kennedy’s cheek a kiss that smelled damply of milk. How grubby they looked, their mother thought, even though the day had scarcely begun. Who would believe, seeing them now, that they had been dressed not an hour before in frocks still warm from the iron? Ernestine had caught her dress on something, so that the hem drooped to one side. Their hair…But Mrs. Kennedy, exhausted, decided not to think about their hair.

  “You look so odd sometimes,” she said. “You look all untidy and forlorn, like children without mothers to care for them, like little refugees. Although,” she added, conscientious, “there is nothing the matter with being a refugee.”

  “Like Frau Stengel,” said Jane, straining to be away.

  “Frau Stengel? What on earth has she been telling you about refugees?”

  “That you should never trust a Czech,” said Jane.

  Mrs. Kennedy could not follow this and did not try. “Haven’t you a message for your father?” she said, holding Jane by the wrist. “It would be nice if you showed just a little concern.” They stood, fidgeting. “Shall I tell him you hope he feels much better?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you hope to see him soon?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “He will be pleased,” their mother said, but, released, they were already across the room.

  Frau Stengel was, on the whole, an unsatisfactory substitute for a mother’s watchful care, and it was only because Mrs. Kennedy had been unable to make a better arrangement that Frau Stengel had become the governess of Jane and Ernestine. A mournful Volksdeutsch refugee from Prague, she looked well over her age, which was thirty-nine. She lived—with her husband—in the same hotel as the Kennedy family, and she had once been a schoolteacher, both distinct advantages. The girls were too young for boarding school, and the German day school nearby, while picturesque, had a crucifix over the door, which meant, Mrs. Kennedy was certain, that someone would try to convert her daughters. Of course, a good firm note to the principal might help: “The children’s father would be most distressed…” But no, the risk was too great, and in any case it had been agreed that the children’s religious instruction would be put off until Mr. Kennedy had made up his mind about God. Frau Stengel, if fat, and rather commonplace, and given to tearful lapses that showed a want of inner discipline, was not likely to interfere with Mr. Kennedy’s convictions. She admired the children just as they were, applauding with each murmur of praise their mother’s painstaking efforts to see that they kept their bloom. “So sweet,” she would say. “So herzig, the little sweaters.”

  The children were much too pretty to be taxed with lessons; Frau Stengel gave them film magazines to look at and supervised them contentedly, rocking and filing her nails. She lived a cozy, molelike existence in her room on the attic floor of the hotel, surrounded by crocheted mats, stony satin cushions, and pictures of kittens cut from magazines. Her radio, which was never still, filled the room with soupy operetta melodies, many of which reminded Frau Stengel of happier days and made her cry.

  Everyone had been so cruel, so unkind, she would tell the children, drying her eyes. Frau Stengel and her husband had lived in Prague, where Herr Stengel, who now worked at some inferior job in a nearby town, had been splendidly situated until the end of the war, and then the Czechs sent them packing. They had left everything behind—all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!

  Although the children were bored by the rain and not being allowed to go out, they enjoyed their days with Frau Stengel. Every day was just like the one before, which
was a comfort; the mist and the rain hung on the windows, Frau Stengel’s favorite music curled around the room like a warm bit of the fog itself, they ate chocolate biscuits purchased from the glass case in the dining room, and Frau Stengel, always good-tempered, always the same, told them stories. She told about Hitler, and the war, and about little children she knew who had been killed in bombardments or separated forever from their parents. The two little girls would listen, stolidly going on with their coloring or cutting out. They liked her stories, mostly because, like the room and the atmosphere, the stories never varied; they could have repeated many of them by heart, and they knew exactly at what point in each Frau Stengel would begin to cry. The girls had never seen anyone weep so much and so often.

  “We like you, Frau Stengel,” Jane had said once, meaning that they would rather be shut up here in Frau Stengel’s pleasantly overheated room than be downstairs alone in their bedroom or in the bleak, empty dining room. Frau Stengel had looked at them and after a warm, delicious moment had wiped her eyes. After that, Jane had tried it again, and with the same incredulity with which she and Ernestine had learned that if you pushed the button the elevator would arrive, every time, they had discovered that either one of them could bring on the great, sad tears that were, almost, the most entertaining part of their lessons. “We like you,” and off Frau Stengel would go while the two children watched, enchanted. Later, they learned that any mention of their father had nearly the same effect. They had no clear idea of the nature of their father’s illness, or why it was sad; once they had been told that, because of his liver, he sometimes turned yellow, but this interesting evolution they had never witnessed.