The Cost of Living (18 page)

“We'll be all right,” I echoed to Walt, and I repeated it to myself, over and over, “I'll be all right; we'll be all right.”

But we're not safe yet, I thought, looking at my husband—this stranger, mute, helpless, fumbling, enclosed. Oh, we're not safe. Not by a long shot. But we'll be all right. Take my word for it. We'll be all right.

1955

W
HEN THE
telephone on the desk rang just before lunch, Charles Kimber picked up the receiver and laid it down softly. The voice of the long-distance operator came through, thin and fitful, in conversation with his secretary. He crossed the room and, opening the door of his office, told his secretary that she could put the phone down, that he would take the call himself. She obeyed, close to tears. She had been upset ever since the morning of the previous day, when she had brought him a letter with the envelope slit down the side.

“I'm awfully sorry,” she had said. “It wasn't marked personal or anything, and when I saw it was from Saint Hilda's, I just thought it was the term bill for your little girl.”

“Don't worry about it,” Charles had replied, surprised at her distress. Then he had read the letter. It was from the headmistress of St. Hilda's School, writing, with evident unease, that Charles's sixteen-year-old daughter, Joyce, had violated the rules of the school and of normal propriety by vanishing for a weekend. Miss Mercer had cause to believe—all the more since Joyce herself had admitted this—that she had spent the weekend in Albany, in a hotel, with a young man. “A young man of good family, and from a good school,” she noted, as if this altered or improved the misdemeanor.

He walked back to his desk and picked up the telephone. The voice of Miss Mercer followed that of the operator, a surprisingly young and healthy voice.

“Of course, the responsibility is ours,” said Miss Mercer. “We often let some of the senior girls go to Albany on Saturdays, always in pairs. They usually shop or go to an approved movie or something like that, and they always come back together, in our own station wagons, in time for dinner. Nothing like this has ever happened, until now. And Joyce is so…well, reliable. She's the last girl one wouldn't expect to trust. She's so…”

She's so plain, Charles supplied mentally. He had a quick image of Joyce, too big for her age and, by his standards, much too fat. Her hair was straight and of an indeterminate brown. At sixteen she still stood in a babyish manner, the toe of one moccasin over the other. She called her parents “Daddy” and “Mummy,” and she had never in her life expressed a willful or unsuitable thought.

“I'm putting her on the train tomorrow,” said Miss Mercer. “One of the junior teachers will be with her, although she's not likely to run away or anything like that. She's sensible. It sounds strange to say that now, but she
is
sensible. That's why…it's so hard to understand…”

“I know,” said Charles. “I suppose we'll all have to meet.”

“Yes,” said Miss Mercer. “I, of course, have to meet the board. Well, it's all rather unfortunate. In any case, Joyce gets in at four tomorrow.”

“Grand Central?” said Charles, although he knew very well that it was.

“Yes,” said Miss Mercer. Her voice for the first time became indistinct.

“I can't hear you,” said Charles.

“I said,” she repeated, as if she had taken a breath, “that you mustn't be alarmed when you see her. She's cut her hair off.”

“Oh, yes?” said Charles.

“Yes, the night she came back,” said Miss Mercer. “With her manicure scissors, in front of the mirror, in her room. She...well, it's the only really odd thing in her behavior since she came back to school. She seemed to expect that she could go to classes, as usual.”

“Yes, as usual,” Charles repeated, until Miss Mercer cut off the embarrassed exchange, saying she could arrange a meeting between Charles and his wife, and herself, and someone whose name sounded official.

He put back the telephone. I'll have to tell Marian, he thought. Charles had not yet mentioned the letter to his wife. Marian was a fashion model, and her strenuous hours and her need to diet kept her tense and edgy. The morning this letter arrived, Charles had left his office and gone for a walk, although he found that walking helped him think of nothing in particular. He did not feel a sense of outrage that his daughter had been dishonored. He had no desire to shoot the young man, nor even to meet him, except, perhaps, out of curiosity. His mind could not construct the image of stolid Joyce, in the moccasins, the tweed skirt, the innocent sweaters, registering (as she surely had) in a shabby hotel on a side street in Albany. He wondered not so much how it had happened, but that it had happened at all. Joyce, as far as he knew, didn't know any young men, except, perhaps, the brothers of her classmates. And why, he wondered, would any young man, even the most callow and inexperienced, pick Joyce? There are so many girls her age who are graceful, pretty, knowing, and who have weekends here and there written all over them. Yes, even girls—and here his mind mimicked Miss Mercer—of good family and from good schools. Charles was a lawyer and knew the difficulties young girls of good family could cause themselves and their parents.

Thinking this as he walked, turning it over and over, he had noticed a small crowd outside the Museum of Modern Art and, advancing, he saw that they were looking at his wife who stood, posed, against the glass doors. She was wearing a thin black dress and a small hat. She must be frozen, Charles thought, for it was a cold day and many of the women in the crowd held their collars close to their faces. But there was not a shiver, not a movement, as she stood, looking through her black-gloved fingers in the curious way the photographer had caused her to remain. The photographer said something, and she dropped one arm. She paid no attention to the crowd, and although she stared, one would have said, straight into her husband's face, she appeared not to see him. She looked, he thought, gaunt and tired. The shadow under her cheekbone, which photographed as a clean curve, seemed, under the hard winter sun, the concavity of illness. The eye framed by her fingers looked vampish and absurd, the over-darkened eye of silent films.

He thought all this without criticism, for he greatly admired his wife, and he was proud of her impersonal beauty when he saw it on the pages of
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. She was the most physically disciplined human being he had ever known. She rose each morning at half-past six and went off to work, her thin body supplied with nothing more than coffee. At noon she ate cottage cheese and a raw tomato. For dinner she allowed herself a steak and ate it scrupulously to the last bite, without any visible enjoyment. Her consumption of this slice of meat had something about it that was ritualistic and cannibalistic, and it had, for a while, interfered with Charles's enjoyment of his own food.

Her moral discipline was just as pronounced. There was not an appetite of mind or spirit she could not control as she controlled the limbs of her body before a camera. Once, when she had been interviewed for a magazine that described the home lives of fashion models, she had said, in Charles's hearing: “I'm always too cold in winter and too hot in summer. I always have a slight headache. I'm always just a little bit hungry.” He had been surprised to hear her say this. She had never volunteered anything to him that would suggest she found her métier disagreeable. Her edginess, usually, was caused by other agents: the telephone, servants, people who drank too much, parties that went on too long, and noise of any kind. She groomed herself with the absorbed concentration of a cat; and she often sat before a mirror, chin on hand, contemplating, quite objectively, her own image. She was self-contained, and she had few friends and almost no enemies. She never gossiped, and it was doubtful if she had, even in fancy, been unfaithful to her husband. Charles, indeed, had long ceased even to wonder about this.

So, thought Charles, summing up this picture as he walked back to his office, it was not from her mother that Joyce had inherited this unexpected streak of waywardness. Of course, one could not compare the two: Joyce was still a child, in a sense. She was gauche and untidy. She talked, it seemed to Charles, about nothing; and she ate far too many sweets, although Marian was surprisingly indulgent about this.

“It's up to you. You're old enough to know what you want to look like,” she would say, not unkindly, picking up from the floor the empty wrapper of a bar of chocolate. Joyce ate candy in her room at night, after the light was put out. She had done this from the time she was old enough to have her own allowance. It was difficult for Charles to picture her before her adolescence. When he thought of her as a small child, it was in terms of photographs. There was a photograph of her at four, in a sun suit, blinking into the sun from a sandbox. It was an enlarged snapshot which Marian had had framed and kept on her dressing table. There were baby pictures, of course, the face shadowed by the hood of a pram, or looking up blankly from a tasseled cushion. There was the far-fetched photograph from the mother-and-daughter series that had appeared in a fashion magazine, and which Charles kept on his desk, although the child in the picture was not remotely like his daughter.

He tried to remember Joyce as a baby, Marian pushing a pram. But either this had never happened, or his mind had refused to retain so unlikely an image. In Charles's memory, Joyce appeared quite suddenly at twelve, the age at which she had been permitted to dine with her parents. Her untidy table manners had greatly annoyed him, and he had often complained to Marian about the expensive Swiss governess who, all these years, should have been grooming a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch, ready to take her place at her parents' table.

Well, Marian would have to be told. It was, in any case, a problem for a woman, he thought, although he could not blame Joyce's delinquency on his wife. She had always been conscientious about spending time with Joyce. She seemed always to be meeting her at trains, or putting her on them. He recalled his wife's voice, from her bedroom, in conversation with Joyce's governess, saying eagerly, pleadingly almost: “But she has something, don't you think? Something pretty? Something about the eyes?” The governess, Miss Roefrich, had murmured something that was somehow flattering to Miss
and
Mrs. Kimber, which Charles considered a master stroke of tact. He, himself, could not have placed his wife and his daughter in the same breath.

He would not be seeing Marian until late that evening. Charles was dining with a Miss Lawrence, who lived near Columbia University, and at whose small apartment he spent two evenings a week. Miss Lawrence usually assembled the meal, since Charles felt they should not be seen too often in restaurants. Miss Lawrence, whose name was Bernice, but who called herself Bambi, was the secretary of a radio producer, but she had no opinions about radio, present or future, nor, for that matter, about anything else, and Charles found her conversation restful. In four years, she had complained only once or twice about their secluded relationship. The most difficult argument had taken place after she bought and read
Vogue's Book of Etiquette
. She had shown Charles the section on Dining with Married Men. “It says it's all right, if you don't do it too often with the same married man,” she had explained.

“How many married men do you know, for God's sake?” Charles had demanded, and the evening had ended in tears and terms of reproach.

This evening, dinner began with a mushroom soup and ended with chocolate éclairs. Charles told Bernice about a case, and she related a tale of outrageous gossip about a program director and film star.

“I'm going on a diet, starting Monday,” said Bernice, as she rose from the table. “Don't laugh. This time I mean it.”

He watched her, thoughtfully, as she cleared the table. “What were you like at sixteen?” he said. “I mean, what were you doing?”

“It's not that long ago,” said Bernice, looking at him. “I was in high school; what do you think?”

“Were you interested in men?”

“I don't know what you're getting at, exactly. I went to a good high school, all girls. Lauren Bacall was in my class. They were all nice girls. We never talked about men. We were interested in clothes, and world events. We had a very superior World Events teacher.” She turned on the radio, moving away from him.

“What I mean is,” said Charles, “would it have occurred to you…no, I'll put it this way: what would your family have done if you'd gone away for the weekend with some man, say a young boy from…from another good high school?”

“Killed me,” said Bernice, simply. “My mother would have cried, but my father would have killed me.” She looked at him. “Why?” she said.

“I just wondered,” said Charles. “I was wondering about that kind of situation,”

“Well, I don't like it,” said Bernice. “You're positively morbid. I'd rather talk to the cat.”

“Come on, kitty-kitty-puss,” Charles heard her say in the kitchen. “Come to your own mother, who loves you.”

At eleven o'clock Charles let himself into his own apartment. His wife was sitting up in bed, reading.

“Tough client?” she said. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf. The room smelled of perfume, of cream, of toning lotion.

“Kind of,” said Charles.

“Anything I'd be interested in?” said Marian.

“I don't
think
so,” said Charles. “Something about airlines. Look, I think I'll get myself a drink. I don't suppose you want one,” he said.

“No,” said Marian. She closed her book as he came back into the room, glass in hand. “You look tired,” she said. She pushed her pillows on the floor and slid down in bed. “Good night,” she said, closing her eyes.