The Cost of Living (5 page)

“Maybe he doesn't like this house, either,” Mrs. Tracy said. “I can't understand any of this. Everyone I know has always been happy. My summers have always been so perfect, ever since I was a child.” And, bursting into tears, she ran out to the garden, past the astonished postman, who had walked up from the road with a package too large for the mailbox. It contained a present for Madeline, an unsuitable evening dress chosen by her stepmother, whom she had never met.

From the window of his room, Paul saw Mrs. Tracy run across the lawn. She stopped and bent down to pull three or four bits of wild grass from a flower bed. Then she wiped her eyes with her hands and walked calmly back to the house.

He turned to his books and wondered how soon it would be safe to approach Madeline again. A moment later, he heard the postman drive away and knew that he had missed the deadline for his term paper.

Mrs. Tracy put in a call to Mr. Tracy, and Paul began composing a letter to the head of the extension course, asking if he might submit his paper a few days late. He would show the letter to Madeline, he thought.

In the next room, Madeline had stopped crying and fallen asleep. She dreamed that someone had given her a dollhouse. When a bell rang downstairs, it merged into her dream as something to do with school. Actually, the ringing was caused by the long-distance operator, who had at first reported that the circuits to New York were busy and was now ready to complete the call. Mrs. Tracy entered the house in time to take the receiver from Allie's hand and assure her husband that nothing was the matter, that she had called only to say good morning.

“It's a lovely morning here,” she said. “Couldn't you come up in time for dinner tonight? It's for Madeline's sake—you know what a birthday means to a young girl.”

“I don't know,” Edward said. “I suppose I could.” His office would be unbearably hot, and he was beginning to feel foolish about his quarrel with Madeline. “She's only a kid,” he said aloud.

“That's just the point. We mustn't take her too seriously. And it's her birthday,” Mrs. Tracy said, as if this fact were a talisman, something that would cause the day to fall into place.

When she had hung up, Allie, who had been listening, looked at her accusingly. “I heard Madeline say she didn't like him,” she said.

“People often say things,” Mrs. Tracy said. “You must never pay attention to what people say if you know the opposite to be true.”

“Like what?” said Allie.

“Well, for instance,” Mrs. Tracy said seriously, “I could believe I was the only person who had enjoyed being here this summer. But I know it isn't reasonable.”

She had, in fact, put the idea out of her head while pulling grass from the garden.

“Now,” she said, “will you please, for the last time, call Paul and Madeline, so that we can get breakfast over with and get this day under way?”

1951

B
Y HALF
past ten, a vaporish heat had gathered on the road above the Mediterranean, and the two picnickers, Barbara Ainslie and Mike Cahill, walked as slowly as they could. Scuffing their shoes, they held themselves deliberately apart. It was the first time they had been alone. Barbara's aunt, with whom she was staying in Menton, had begun speaking to Mike on the beach—she thought him a nice young boy—and it was she who had planned the picnic, packing them off for what she termed a good romp, quite unaware that her words had paralyzed at once the tremulous movement of friendship between them.

So far, they had scarcely spoken at all, passing in silence—in the autobus—between the shining arc of the beach and the vacant hotels that faced it. The hotels, white and pillared like Grecian ruins, were named for Albert and Victoria and the Empire. Shelled from the sea during the war, they exposed, to the rain and the road, cube-shaped rooms and depressing papered walls that had held the sleep of a thousand English spinsters when the pound was still a thing of moment. At sixteen, Barbara was neutral to decay but far too shy in the presence of Mike to stare at anything that so much as suggested a bedroom. She had looked instead at the lunch basket on her lap, at her bitten nails, at the shadow of her canvas hat, as if they held the seed of conversation. When they were delivered from the bus at last and had watched it reeling, in its own white dust, on to Monte Carlo, they turned together and climbed the scrambling path to Cap Martin.

“What will we talk about?” Barbara had asked her aunt, earlier that morning. “What will I say?”

Barbara's aunt could see no problem here, and she was as startled as if a puppy tumbling in a cushioned box had posed the same question.

“Why, what do young people have to say anywhere?” she had asked. “Tell him about your school, if you like, or your winter in Paris.” Having provided that winter, she did not see why its value should be diminished in May, or, indeed, why it should not remain a conversational jewel for the rest of Barbara's life.

“I suppose so,” Barbara had said, determined not to mention it at all. She was in France not as a coming-out present or because she had not smoked until she was eighteen but ignominiously, because she had failed her end-of-term examinations for the second year running. She had been enrolled in one of the best day schools in New York, a fact that she was frequently reminded of and that somehow doubled her imperfection. Her mother had consulted a number of people—an analyst she met at a party, two intimate women friends, the doctor who had delivered Barbara but had noticed nothing unusual about her at the time—and finally, when the subject was beginning to bore her, she had dispatched Barbara to Paris, to the distressed but dutiful sister of Barbara's late father. Barbara was conscious, every moment of the day, that she was to get something from her year in France, and return to America brilliant, poised, and educated. Accordingly, she visited all the museums and copied on slips of paper the legends of monuments. Her diary held glimpses of flint tools, angular modern tapestries, cave drawings, the
Gioconda
(“quite small”), and the
Venus de Milo
(“quite big”); of a monument “that came by ship from Africa and was erected to the cheers of a throng”; and of a hotel where Napoleon had stayed as a young man, “but which we did not really see because it had been pulled down.” These mementos of Paris she buttressed with snapshots in which ghostly buildings floated on the surface of the Seine, and the steps of the Sacré-Coeur, transparent, encumbered the grass at Versailles. The snapshots she mounted and shielded with tissue in an album called “Souvenirs de France.”

She was proud of the year, and of the fact that she had shivered in unheated picture galleries and not spent her time drinking milk shakes in the American Embassy restaurant; still, she felt her year no match for Mike's. When her aunt, testing, asked him where he lived in Paris, he had replied, “Oh, St. Germain,” and Barbara had been ill with envy, unaware that he stayed at a recommended
pension
, the owner of which sent fortnightly reports to his mother.

Glancing now at Mike shyly, as they walked along the upper road, Barbara caught from the corner of her eye the movement of her own earrings, Moroccan hoops she had bought, in the merciful absence of her aunt, from an Arab on the beach. With his sweaty fez and his impertinent speech, the Arab had seemed to Barbara the breathing incarnation of oil, greed, and problems. She had read a great deal in the winter, and she could have told anyone that Africa seethed, Asia teemed, and that something must be done at once about the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Spanish or Heaven only knew what would happen. She had also been cautioned that these difficulties were the heritage of youth, and this she acknowledged, picturing the youth as athletic, open-shirted, vaguely foreign in appearance, and marching in columns of eight.

“Straight over there is the Middle East,” she said to Mike, placing him without question in those purposeful ranks. She pointed in the direction of Corsica, and went on, “All the Arabs! What are we going to do about the Arabs?”

Mike shrugged.

“And the Indians,” Barbara said. “There are too many of them for the food in the world. And the Russians. What are we going to do about the Russians?”

“I don't know,” Mike said. “Actually, I never think about it.”

“I suppose you don't,” she said. “You have your work to do.”

He glanced at her sharply, but there was no need to look twice. He had already observed her to be without guile, a fact that confused and upset him. Her good manners, as well, made him self-conscious. Once, when she mentioned her school, he had not mentioned his own New York high school and then, annoyed with himself, had introduced it with belligerence. He might have saved himself the trouble; she had never heard of it and did not know that it was a public school. He blamed his uneasiness, unfairly, on the fact that she had money and he had not. It had not occurred to him, inexperienced as he was, placing her with the thinnest of clues, that she might not be rich.

Mike was older than Barbara, although not by a great deal. He had come to France because the words “art” and “Paris” were unbreakably joined in his family's imagination, the legend of Trilby's Bohemia persisting long after the truth of it had died. When his high school art teacher, a young woman whose mobiles had been praised, pronounced that his was a talent not to be buried under the study of medicine or law, his family had decided that a year in Paris would show whether or not his natural bent was toward painting. It was rather like exposing someone to a case of measles and watching for spots to break out.

In Paris, Mike had spent the first three weeks standing in the wrong queue at the Beaux-Arts, and when no one seemed able to direct him to the right one, he had given up the Beaux-Arts entirely and joined a class instructed by an English painter called Chitterley, whose poster advertisement he had seen in a café. It was Mr. Chitterley's custom to turn his young charges loose on the city and then, once a week or so, comment on their work in a borrowed studio on the quai d'Anjou. Mike painted with sober patience the bridges of the Seine, the rain-soaked lawns of the Tuileries, and a head-on view of Notre Dame. His paintings were large (Mr. Chitterley was nearsighted), askew (as he had been taught in the public schools of New York), and empty of people (he had never been taught to draw, and it was not his nature to take chances).

“Very
interesting
,” said Mr. Chitterley of Mike's work. Squinting a little, he would add, “Ah! I
see
what you were trying to do here!”

“You do?” Mike wished he would be more specific, for he sometimes recognized that his pictures were flat, empty, and the color of cement. At first, he had blamed the season, for the Paris winter had been sunless; later on, he saw that its gray contained every shade in a beam of light, but this effect he was unable to reproduce. Unnerved by the pressure of time, he watched his work all winter, searching for the clue that would set him on a course. Prodded in the direction of art, he now believed in it, enjoying, above all, the solitude, the sense of separateness, the assembling of parts into something reasonable. He might have been equally happy at a quiet table, gathering into something ticking and ordered the scattered wheels of a watch, but this had not been suggested, and he had most certainly never given it a thought. At last, when the season had rained itself to an end (and his family innocently were prepared to have him exhibit his winter's harvest in some garret of the Left Bank and send home the critics' clippings), he approached Mr. Chitterley and asked what he ought to do next.

“Why, go to the country,” said Mr. Chitterley, who was packing for a holiday with the owner of the quai d'Anjou studio. “Go south. Don't stop in a hotel but live on the land, in a tent, and paint, paint, paint, paint, paint!”

“I can't afford it,” Mike said. “I mean I can't afford to buy the tent and stuff. But I can stay over here until August, if you think there's any point. I mean is it wasting time for me to paint, paint, paint?”

Mr. Chitterley shot him an offended look and then a scornful one, which said, How like an American! The only measuring rods, time and money. Aloud, he suggested Menton. He had stayed there as a child, and he remembered it as a paradise of lemon ice and sunshine. Mike, for want of a better thought, or even a contrastive one, took the train there a day later.

Menton was considerably less than paradise. Shelled, battered, and shabby, it was a town gone to seed, in which old English ladies, propelling themselves with difficulty along the Promenade George V, nodded warmly to each other (they had become comrades during the hard years of war, when they were interned together in the best hotels, farther up the coast) and ignored the new influx of their countrymen—embarrassed members of the lower middle classes, who refused to undress in the face of heat and nakedness and who huddled miserably on the beach in hot city clothing, knotted handkerchiefs on their heads to shield them from the sun.

“
Not
the sort of English one likes,” Barbara's aunt had said sadly to Mike, who was painting beside her on the beach. “If you had seen Menton before the war! I had a little villa, up behind that hotel. It was shelled by the Americans. Not that it wasn't necessary,” she added, recalling her origins. “Still—And they built a fortification not far away. I went up to look at it. It was full of rusted wire, and nothing in it but a dead cat.”

“The French built it,” Barbara said. “The
pension
man told me.”

“It doesn't matter, dear,” her aunt said. “Before the war, and even when it started, there was nothing there at all. It was so different.” She dropped her knitting and looked about, as if just the three of them were fit to remember what Menton had been. It was the young people's first bond of sympathy, and Barbara tried not to giggle; before the war was a time she didn't remember at all. “In those days, you knew where you were
at
,” her aunt said, summing up the thirties. She picked up her knitting, and Mike went on with his painting of sea, sky, and tilted sailboat. Away from Mr. Chitterley and the teacher who had excelled in mobiles, he found that he worked with the speed and method of Barbara's aunt producing a pair of Argyle socks. Menton, for all its drawbacks, was considerably easier to paint than Paris, and he rendered with fidelity the blue of the sea, the pink and white of the crumbling villas, and the red of the geraniums. One of his recent pictures, flushed and accurate as a Technicolor still, he had given to Barbara, who had written a touched and eager letter of thanks, and then had torn the letter up.