The Cost of Living Read online

  Ernestine had got into bed with Jane, which was odd; they lay facing the same direction, like two question marks. With one hand Ernestine limply clutched at her sister’s braids. Both children had wormed down into the middle of the bed, well below the pillow, under a tent of blankets; it was a wonder they hadn’t smothered.

  Mrs. Kennedy drew back the blankets and gently pulled Ernestine away. Without waking, but muttering something, Ernestine got up and walked to her own bed. The hair at her temples was wet, and she generated the nearly feverish warmth of sleeping children. Sleeping, she put her thumb in her mouth. Mrs. Kennedy turned to Jane and pulled her carefully up to the pillow. “I left my book outside,” said Jane urgently and distinctly. Straightening up, Mrs. Kennedy gave the covers a final pat. She looked down at her little girls, frowning; they seemed at this moment not like little Renoirs, not like little dolls, but like rather ordinary children who for some reason of their own had shut and muffled the window and then crept into one bed, the better to hide. She was tempted to wake Jane, or Ernestine, and ask what it was all about, this solicitude for Mr. Kennedy, this irrelevant talk of God. Perhaps Frau Stengel, in some blundering way, had mentioned her pregnancy. Despairing, Mrs. Kennedy wished she could gather her children up, one under each arm, and carry them off to a higher mountain, an emptier hotel, where nothing and no one could interfere, or fill their minds with the kind of thought she feared and detested. Their minds. Was she really, all alone, without Mr. Kennedy to help her, expected to cope with their minds as well as everything else?

  But I am exaggerating, she thought, looking out at the peaceful night. They haven’t so much as begun to think, about anything. Without innocence, after all, there was no beauty, and no one could deny the beauty of Jane and Ernestine. She did not look at them again as they lay, damp and vulnerable, in their beds, but, instantly solaced with the future and what it contained for them, she saw them once again drifting away on a sea of admiration, the surface unmarred, the interior uncorrupted by thought or any one of the hundred indecisions that were the lot of less favored human beings. Meanwhile, of course, they had still to grow up—but after all what was there between this night and the magic time to come but a link of days, the limpid days of children? For, she thought, smiling in the dark, pleased at the image, were not their days like the lights one saw in the valley at night, starry, indistinguishable one from the other? She must tell that to Mr. Kennedy, she thought, drawing away from the window. He would be sure to agree.

  1953

  GOING ASHORE

  AT TANGIER it was surprisingly cold, even for December. The sea was lead, the sky cloudy and low. Most of the passengers going ashore for the day came to breakfast wrapped in scarves and sweaters. They were, most of them, thin-skinned, elderly people, less concerned with the prospect of travel than with getting through another winter in relative comfort; on bad days, during the long crossing from the West Indies, they had lain in deck chairs, muffled as mummies, looking stricken and deceived. When Emma Ellenger came into the breakfast lounge barelegged, in sandals, wearing a light summer frock, there was a low flurry of protest. Really, Emma’s mother should take more care! The child would catch her death.

  Feeling the disapproval almost as an emanation, like the salt one breathed in the air, Emma looked around for someone who liked her—Mr. Cowan, or the Munns. There were the Munns, sitting in a corner, frowning over their toast, coffee, and guidebooks. She waved, although they had not yet seen her, threaded her way between the closely spaced tables, and, without waiting to be asked, sat down.

  Miss and Mrs. Munn looked up with a single movement. They were daughter and mother, but so identically frizzy, tweedy, and elderly that they might have been twins. Mrs. Munn, the kindly twin, gazed at Emma with benevolent, rather popping brown eyes, and said, “Child, you’ll freeze in that little dress. Do tell your mother—now, don’t forget to tell her—that the North African winter can be treacherous, very treacherous indeed.” She tapped one of the brown paper-covered guidebooks that lay beside her coffee tray. The Munns always went ashore provided with books, maps, and folders telling them what to expect at every port of call. They differed in every imaginable manner from Emma and her mother, who seldom fully understood where they were and who were often daunted and upset (particularly Mrs. Ellenger) if the people they encountered ashore were the wrong color or spoke an unfamiliar language.

  “You should wear a thick scarf,” Mrs. Munn went on, “and warm stockings.” Thinking of the Ellengers’ usual wardrobe, she paused, discouraged. “The most important parts of the—” But she stopped again, unable to say “body” before a girl of twelve. “One should keep the throat and the ankles warm,” she said, lowering her gaze to her book.

  “We can’t,” Emma said respectfully. “We didn’t bring anything for the cruise except summer dresses. My mother thought it would be warm all the time.”

  “She should have inquired,” Miss Munn said. Miss Munn was crisper, taut; often the roles seemed reversed, and it appeared that she, of the two, should have been the mother.

  “I guess she didn’t think,” Emma said, cast down by all the things her mother failed to do. Emma loved the Munns. It was distressing when, as now, they failed to approve of her. They were totally unlike the people she was accustomed to, with their tweeds, their pearls, their strings of fur that bore the claws and muzzles of some small, flattened beast. She had fallen in love with them the first night aboard, during the first dinner out. The Munns and the Ellengers had been seated together, the dining-room steward having thought it a good plan to group, at a table for four, two solitary women and their solitary daughters.

  The Munns had been so kind, so interested, asking any number of friendly questions. They wondered how old Emma was, and where Mr. Ellenger might be (“In Heaven,” said Emma, casual), and where the Ellengers lived in New York.

  “We live all over the place.” Emma spoke up proudly. It was evident to her that her mother wasn’t planning to say a word. Somebody had to be polite. “Most of the time we live in hotels. But last summer we didn’t. We lived in an apartment. A big apartment. It wasn’t our place. It belongs to this friend of my mother’s, Mr. Jimmy Salter, but he was going to be away, and the rent was paid anyway, and we were living there already, so he said—he said—” She saw her mother’s face and stopped, bewildered.

  “That was nice,” said Mrs. Munn, coloring. Her daughter looked down, smiling mysteriously.

  Emma’s mother said nothing. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke over the table. She wore a ring, a wedding band, a Mexican necklace, and a number of clashing bracelets. Her hair, which was long and lighter even than Emma’s, had been carefully arranged, drawn into a tight chignon and circled with flowers. Clearly it was not for Miss or Mrs. Munn that she had taken such pains; she had expected a different table arrangement, one that included a man. Infinitely obliging, Mrs. Munn wished that one of them were a man. She bit her lip, trying to find a way out of this unexpected social thicket. Turning to Emma, she said, a little wildly, “Do you like school? I mean I see you are not in school. Have you been ill?”

  Emma ill? The idea was so outrageous, so clearly a criticism of Mrs. Ellenger’s care, that she was forced, at last, to take notice of this pair of frumps. “There’s nothing the matter with my daughter’s health,” she said a little too loudly. “Emma’s never been sick a day. From the time she was born, she’s had the best of everything—the best food, the best clothes, the best that money can buy. Emma, isn’t that right?”

  Emma said yes, hanging her head and wishing her mother would stop.

  “Emma was born during the war,” Mrs. Ellenger said, dropping her voice. The Munns looked instantly sympathetic. They waited to hear the rest of the story, some romantic misadventure doomed by death or the fevered nature of the epoch itself. Mrs. Munn puckered her forehead, as if already she were prepared to cry. But evidently that part of the story had ceased to be of interest to Emma’s mother. “I had a nervous breakdo
wn when she was born,” Mrs. Ellenger said. “I had plenty of troubles. My God, troubles!” Brooding, she suddenly dropped her cigarette into the dregs of her coffee cup. At the sound it made, the two ladies winced. Their glances crossed. Noticing, Emma wondered what her mother had done now. “I never took my troubles out on Emma,” Mrs. Ellenger said. “No, Emma had the best, always the best. I brought her up like a little lady. I kept her all in white—white shoes, white blankets, white bunny coats, white hand-knitted angora bonnets. When she started to walk, she had little white rubbers for the rain. I got her a white buggy with white rubber tires. During the war, this was. Emma, isn’t it true? Didn’t you see your pictures, all in white?”

  Emma moved her lips.

  “It was the very best butter,” Miss Munn murmured.

  “She shows your care,” Mrs. Munn said gently. “She’s a lovely girl.”

  Emma wanted to die. She looked imploringly at her mother, but Mrs. Ellenger rushed on. It was important, deeply important, that everyone understand what a good mother she had been. “Nobody has to worry about Emma’s school, either,” she said. “I teach her, so nobody has to worry at all. Emma loves to study. She reads all the time. Just before dinner tonight, she was reading. She was reading Shakespeare. Emma, weren’t you reading Shakespeare?”

  “I had this book,” Emma said, so low that her answer was lost. The Munns began to speak about something else, and Emma’s mother relaxed, triumphant.

  In truth, Emma had been reading Shakespeare. While they were still unpacking and settling in, she had discovered among their things a battered high school edition of The Merchant of Venice. Neither she nor her mother had ever seen it before. It was in the suitcase that contained Mrs. Ellenger’s silver evening slippers and Emma’s emergency supply of comic books. Emma opened the book and read, “You may do so; but let it be so hasted that supper be ready at the farthest by five of the clock.” She closed the book and dropped it. “It must have come from Uncle Jimmy Salter’s place,” she said. “The maid must have put it in when she helped us pack.” “I didn’t know he could read,” Mrs. Ellenger said. She and Mr. Salter had stopped being friends. “We’ll mail it back sometime. It’ll be a nice surprise.”

  Of course, they had never mailed the book. Now, at Tangier, it was still with them, wedged between the comic books and the silver slippers. It had never occurred to Emma’s mother to give the book to a steward, or the purser, still less take it ashore during an excursion; the mechanics of wrapping and posting a parcel from a strange port were quite beyond her. The cruise, as far as she was concerned, had become a series of hazards; attempting to dispatch a volume of Shakespeare would have been the last straw. She was happy, or at least not always unhappy, in a limited area of the ship—the bar, the beauty salon, and her own cabin. As long as she kept to this familiar, hotel-like circuit, there was almost no reason to panic. She had never before been at sea, and although she was not sickened by the motion of the ship, the idea of space, of endless leagues of water, perplexed, then frightened, then, finally, made her ill. It had come to her, during the first, dismal dinner out, that her life as a pretty young woman was finished. There were no men on board—none, at least, that would do—and even if there had been, it was not at all certain that any of them would have desired her. She saw herself flung into an existence that included the Munns, censorious, respectable, prying into one’s affairs. At that moment, she had realized what the cruise would mean: She was at sea. She was adrift on an ocean whose immenseness she could not begin to grasp. She was alone, she had no real idea of their route, and it was too late to turn back. Embarking on the cruise had been a gesture, directed against the person Emma called Uncle Jimmy Salter. Like any such gesture, it had to be carried through, particularly since it had been received with total indifference, even relief.

  Often, even now, with twenty-four days of the cruise behind and only twenty more to be lived through, the fears she had experienced the first evening would recur: She was at sea, alone. There was no one around to tip stewards, order drinks, plan the nights, make love to her, pay the bills, tell her where she was and what it was all about. How had this happened? However had she mismanaged her life to such a degree? She was still young. She looked at herself in the glass and, covering the dry, darkening skin below her eyes, decided she was still pretty. Perplexed, she went to the beauty salon and had her hair washed by a sympathetic girl, a good listener. Then, drugged with heat, sated with shared confidences, she wandered out to the first-class bar and sat at her own special stool. Here the sympathetic girl was replaced by Eddy, the Eurasian bartender from Hong Kong. Picking up the thread of her life, Mrs. Ellenger talked to Eddy, describing her childhood and her stepmother. She told him about Emma’s father, and about the time she and Emma went to California. Talking, she tried to pretend she was in New York and that the environment of the ship was perfectly normal and real. She played with her drink, smiling anxiously at herself in the mirror behind the bar.

  Eddy wasn’t much of an audience, because he had other things to do, but after a time Mrs. Ellenger became so engrossed in her own recital, repeating and recounting the errors that had brought her to this impasse, that she scarcely noticed at all.

  “I was a mere child, Eddy,” she said. “A child. What did I know about life?”

  “You can learn a lot about life in a job like mine,” Eddy said. Because he was half Chinese, Eddy’s customers expected him to deliver remarks tinged with Oriental wisdom. As a result, he had got into the habit of saying anything at all as if it were important.

  “Well, I got Emma out of it all.” Mrs. Ellenger never seemed to hear Eddy’s remarks. “I’ve got my Emma. That’s something. She’s a big girl, isn’t she, Eddy? Would you take her for only twelve? Some people take her for fourteen. They take us for sisters.”

  “The Dolly Sisters,” Eddy said, ensconced on a reputation that had him not only a sage but a scream.

  “Well, I never try to pass Emma off as my sister,” Mrs. Ellenger went on. “Oh, it’s not that I couldn’t. I mean enough people have told me. And I was a mere child myself when she was born. But I don’t care if they know she’s my daughter. I’m proud of my Emma. She was born during the war. I kept her all in white…”

  Her glass slid away, reminding her that she was not in New York but at sea. It was no use. She thought of the sea, of travel, of being alone; the idea grew so enormous and frightening that, at last, there was nothing to do but go straight to her cabin and get into bed, even if it was the middle of the day. Her head ached and so did her wrists. She took off her heavy jewelry and unpinned her hair. The cabin was gray, chintzed, consolingly neutral; it resembled all or any of the hotel rooms she and Emma had shared in the past. She was surrounded by her own disorder, her own scent. There were yesterday’s clothes on a chair, trailing, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke. There, on the dressing table, was an abandoned glass of brandy, an unstoppered bottle of cologne.

  She rang the service bell and sent someone to look for Emma.

  “Oh, Emma, darling,” she said when Emma, troubled and apprehensive, came in. “Emma, why did we come on this crazy cruise? I’m so unhappy, Emma.”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “I don’t know why we came at all.” Sitting on her own bed, she picked up her doll and played with its hair or its little black shoes. She had outgrown dolls as toys years before, but this doll, which had no name, had moved about with her as long as she could remember. She knew that her mother expected something from this winter voyage, some miracle, but the nature of the miracle was beyond her. They had shopped for the cruise all summer—Emma remembered that—but when she thought of those summer weeks, with Uncle Jimmy Salter away, and her mother sulking and upset, she had an impression of heat and vacancy, as if no one had been contained in the summer season but Mrs. Ellenger and herself. Left to themselves, she and her mother had shopped; they had bought dresses and scarves and blouses and bathing suits and shoes of every possible color. They bought hats
to match the dresses and bags to match the shoes. The boxes the new clothes had come in piled up in the living room, spilling tissue.

  “Is he coming back?” Emma had asked once.

  “I’m not waiting for him to make up his mind,” her mother had said, which was, to Emma, scarcely an answer at all. “I’ve got my life, too. I mean,” she amended, “we have, Emma. We’ve got a life, too. We’ll go away. We’ll go on a cruise or something.”

  “Maybe he’d like that,” Emma had said, with such innocent accuracy that her mother, presented with the thought, stared at her, alarmed. “Then he could have the place all to himself.”

  In November, they joined the cruise. They had come aboard wearing summer dresses, confident in the climate promised by travel posters—the beaches, the blue-painted seas, the painted-yellow suns. Their cabin was full of luggage and flowers. Everything was new—their white bags, the clothes inside them, neatly folded, smelling of shops.

  “It’s a new life, Emma,” said Mrs. Ellenger.

  Emma had caught some of the feeling, for at last they were doing something together, alone, with no man, no Uncle Anyone, to interfere. She felt intensely allied to her mother, then and for several days after. But then, when it became certain that the miracle, the new life, had still to emerge, the feeling disappeared. Sometimes she felt it again just before they reached land—some strange and unexplored bit of coast, where anything might happen. The new life was always there, just before them, like a note indefinitely suspended or a wave about to break. It was there, but nothing happened.