The Cost of Living (29 page)

We do, however, exchange presents. I am bearing gifts to Grandmother—three drawings on parchment, and a heavy book. We arrive at Grandmother's without adventure. And here the hallucination begins.

Her name is Rose. She is about thirteen, with long hair that lies in ribbons on a velvet coat. The coat has braid trimming and gilt buttons. She wears a fur beret. She carries a muff. Her fur-and-velvet overshoes are in the hall closet, where my navy reefer has been hung. The overshoes are the first excitement; who is here? My cousins are boys. No girl comes to Grandmother's but me. Now someone has come—Rose.

I wear a Ferris waist, two pairs of bloomers because of the cold, a middy blouse with a whistle on a cord, a blue skirt, white stockings, black patent-leather shoes. I have left my coat and my gloves in the hall, but kept my hat:
H.M.S. Halifax
. From either side of the hat sprout braids and powder-blue grosgrain bows. I am much younger than Rose, and considerably smaller. She bends down to me; she smells of cold and of snow. The room is oddly dark. She cries, “Oh, this is Irmgard. Oh, isn't she cute!”

I wait for Grandmother to gather her thunderbolts, balance them, and let fly. I might conceivably be allowed to swear, but I would be husbanded from human society if I said “cute.” “Cute” is an abomination, like Wagner, canaries, the radio, motorcycles, small dogs, chintz. There are no thunderbolts. My grandmother —our grandmother—smiles at Rose out of her cold hazel eyes. She smirks at her,
doting
. Rose responds with a positive simper. They would eat each other, like spun sugar, if they could.

Obviously, Germaine and I have come too early. We have broken into their tea. I have known of only one cake at Grandmother's—a lemon-scented yellow loaf my mother derisively calls “Lutheran folly.” But Rose has a layer cake decorated with cherries. She has large, thick cookies, saucer-sized, iced with pink and white, sprinkled with colored sugar. She has ginger biscuits, crescents, stars, delicately iced. She has snowmen with cherry noses and currant eyes. They disappear, wrapped in spangled paper, into Rose's muff.

In the dark, warm, scented parlor Germaine winds the gramophone, and we hear bells from a foreign cathedral and shrill little voices crying “
Süsser die Glocken nie klingen
….” Doors fly open, Rose has a tree. Beyond the doors is a sweet-smelling pagan cave; the sitting room is a blaze of candles, stars, moons, planets; a tree. Rose sits on Grandmother's lap; Grandmother smooths her hair. Rose is crying. Then, laden with presents, weeping, Rose departs.

It has the true quality of a hallucination, because I take no part. I can see them, but they cannot see me. And then (this is the very thing my grandmother had taught us—her own children, then me—to suspect and scorn) singing infants, little biscuits, shed tears, slops. For she worked on my education—hard; not as she had with her own children, for she knew it had failed, but with endless instructions, and kneadings and pummelings of the mind. Her Germany was hard and thin, shadeless and plain, thin and cold, a landscape illuminated with a cold lemon sun, without warmth or regular clouds. She read to me in German. I was expected to understand. I was expected to sit and listen and form my understanding of people and the way they behaved, on the things she read. But there was a heavy brown veil between us—the German tongue. I knew two words for everything, one in English and one in French. I could not admit three. My grandmother read; I sat on a chair, so high and steep that my legs stuck out before me and went to sleep. She read and read, and one day the veil melted. I began to see a woman in long skirts, walking to and fro, talking, explaining. Suddenly she stops and throws a glance into a mirror. She peeps into a mirror, and what she sees—her own face—will always be as important to her as anything she has to say. I knew instantly what grown women were like and how I would be one day.
Voilà les grandes
. The veil must have reappeared; I remember nothing else.

Now, was this grandmother mine, or Rose's? Was her Germany the dark, spruce-scented cave, of which I was given a glimpse, or the shadeless landscape, the clear lemon sun? Did Rose carry hers all her life as I did mine—hers mournful, mine sad; hers tearful, mine grim; her rich, mine thin? But here is the problem, and why it can never be answered: I never saw Rose at all. But if I never saw Rose, then everything fades with her: the tree, the bells, the dark parlor, the candles, the hanging suns.

The next day, the sitting room doors were closed, the rooms had been aired. My present—a book, of course—was by my plate at breakfast. My grandmother and I exchanged a diffident kiss. I saw that she had written on the flyleaf “
für Irmgard
.”

On the journey home, Germain and I do not discuss Rose. I suspect Germaine of being an accomplice. She wound the gramophone. But I tell my parents, I say that we saw Rose, that there were biscuits and a tree.

“Oh, she
wouldn't
.”

But they exchange a look, which I catch. They say I am making it up. “We shall ask Grandmother,” they warn.

Instinct now says that Grandmother is old and tired, and will lie. She has failed, and will now say anything for the sake of peace and to bind the family to her.

They turn to Germaine. “What was she like, Germaine? What was she wearing?”

Germaine racks her brain, which means she is set down in an unknown country and stumbles over tree roots and rocks. “She had on a navy-blue coat, a sailor hat, a sailor blouse, a...”

But no! I am the one with the middy, the whistle, the stockings, the
H.M.S Halifax
hat. I see that they know perfectly well Rose exists and are curious, for they would love to know more. They would love to know how she looked and how she was dressed, but they have no more belief in my velvet coat and fur beret than in Germaine's navy-blue reefer and sailor hat. My mother is excited. She lights a cigarette, puts it out, lights another. She admires her brother-in-law for having “brought it off.” He brought it off—kept out of prison, where he belongs, and there he is, in Mexico, in the sun. Her brother-in-law's wickedness, his escape, excites something ruthless in her own nature. He is in Mexico; she is in Canada, which she hates. My mother would like to hear about Rose. Rose's circumstances are more interesting than mine. Her legitimacy is in doubt, she is a Catholic, her father has “brought it off” and lives in a warm climate.

My circumstances are boring. My mother knows all about my clothes. I wake, I dress, I am taken to school by Germaine, I play with dolls. They would have preferred a boy. Well, it is too late now. I am here. They should have thought of it sooner. They should have stopped bickering for a moment and come to a decision. Now I am here, and we shall just have to put up with one another. Rose needn't put up with anyone; her father is in Mexico, shedding five-dollar bills like leaves.

Since Rose is favored from the start, why is she given things I am told are abomination? It is for Rose that Grandmother's sitting room is a dark, enchanted cave. And so the questions begin again. Did it amuse our grandmother to give us different glimpses of her world? Mine was surely the noblest and best, but there was a coarse, sentimental
Lumpendeutsch
part of her nature reserved for Rose?

Did she see her often? Did she like her best?

There is a core of the whole business; and even now the child's puppy ego wakes and shows its teeth: prefer me, if you don't mind.

Catching Germaine off guard, I ask cunningly, “
Rose est jolie
?”

“
Jolie
!” cries Germaine. “She has pretty hair, but an ugly face. She smiles like a monkey.”

She smiles like a monkey. We did see her then. At any rate, we saw someone.

But let us begin with common sense. The scene, as I saw it, was impossible. My grandmother would not have had that tree and those candles. As for the record of “Süsser die Glocken,” sung by mosquito voices, why, she could never have heard it for one minute without intense intellectual suffering. As though an eraser were coming down on the decorated blackboard, the memory must be rubbed out, or life, and the possibilities of behavior, like my grandmother's heart, will split in two. The holly, the berries, the angels, the candles, the snow, white, red, green, blur together and dissolve in an odor of dust and slate. Rose, reduced, is a plain girl with a monkey's smile. The eraser crosses her face. Rose is not my cousin. I never saw her. She had no legal reason to exist.

Chalk and dust hang suspended in the air; the air clears, and we are in a world of black and white again, black and white of nun's habits, of leafless trees and snow, of white chalk on the practical board. Germaine says she saw someone; she remembers it well. But Germaine was simple-minded, and notorious for making legends last.

1960

L
OUISE
, my sister, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon. At five o'clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the landings were pitch dark—dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities. The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar. My sister had been in Paris six months, but she still could say, “What a funny French word that is, Puss—‘
snack
.'” Louise's progress down the steps was halting and slow. At the best of times she never hurried, and now she was guiding her bicycle and carrying a trench coat, a plaid scarf, Herriot's
Life of Beethoven
, Cassell's English-French, a bottle of cough medicine she intended to exchange for another brand, and a notebook, in which she had listed facts about nineteenth-century music under so many headings, in so many divisions of divisions, that she had lost sight of the whole.

The dictionary, the Herriot, the cough medicine, and the scarf were mine. I was the music mistress, out in all weathers, subject to chills, with plenty of woolen garments to lend. I had not come to Paris in order to teach
solfège
to stiff-fingered children. It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can't always be choosers. At first I gave lessons so as to get by, and then I did it for a living, which is not the same thing. My older sister followed me—wisely, calmly, with plenty of money for travel—six years later, when both our parents had died. She was accustomed to a busy life at home in Australia, with a large house to look after and our invalid mother to nurse. In Paris, she found time on her hands. Once she had visited all the museums, and cycled around the famous squares, and read what was written on the monuments, she felt she was wasting her opportunities. She decided that music might be useful, since she had once been taught to play the piano; also, it was bound to give us something in common. She was making a serious effort to know me. There was a difference of five years between us, and I had been away from home for six. She enrolled in a course of lectures, took notes, and went to concerts on a cut-rate student's card.

I'd better explain about that bicycle. It was heavy and old—a boy's bike, left by a cousin killed in the war. She had brought it with her from Australia, thinking that Paris would be an easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time. The promises that led her, that have been made to us all at least once in our lives, had sworn faithfully there would be angelic children sailing boats in the fountains, and calm summer streets. But the parks were full of brats and quarreling mothers, and the bicycle was a nuisance everywhere. Still, she rode it; she would have thought it wicked to spend money on bus fares when there was a perfectly good bike to use instead.

We lived on the south side of the Luxembourg Gardens, where streets must have been charming before the motorcars came. Louise was hounded by buses and small, pitiless automobiles. Often, as I watched her from a window of our hotel, I thought of how she must seem to Parisian drivers—the very replica of the governessy figure the French, with their passion for categories and their disregard of real evidence, instantly label “the English Miss.” It was a verdict that would have astonished her, if she had known, for Louise believed that “Australian,” like “Protestant,” was written upon her, plain as could be. She had no idea of the effect she gave, with her slow gestures, her straight yellow hair, her long face, her hand-stitched mannish gloves and shoes. The inclination of her head and the quarter-profile of cheek, ear, and throat could seem, at times, immeasurably tender. Full-face, the head snapped to, and you saw the lines of duty from nose to mouth, and the too pale eyes. The Prussian ancestry on our mother's side had given us something bleached and cold. Our faces were variations on a theme of fair hair, light brows. The mixture was weak in me. I had inherited the vanity, the stubbornness, without the will; I was too proud to follow and too lame to command. But physically we were nearly alike. The characteristic fold of skin at the outer corner of the eye, slanting down—we both had that. And I could have used a word about us, once, if I dared: “dainty.” A preposterous word; yet, looking at the sepia studio portrait of us, taken twenty-five years ago, when I was eight and Louise thirteen, you could imagine it. Here is Louise, calm and straight, with her hair brushed on her shoulders, and her pretty hands; there am I, with organdy frock, white shoes, ribbon, and fringe. Two little Anglo-German girls, accomplished at piano, Old Melbourne on the father's side, Church of England to the bone: Louise and Patricia—Lulu and Puss. We hated each other then.

Once, before Louise left Paris forever, I showed her a description of her that had been written by Sylvie Laval. It was part of a cast of characters around whom Sylvie evidently meant to construct a film. I may say that Sylvie never wrote a scenario, or anything like one; but she belonged to a Paris where one was “writer” or “artist” or “actor” without needing to prove the point. “The Australian,” wrote Sylvie, in a hand that showed an emotional age of nine, “is not elegant. All her skirts are too long, and she should not knit her own sweaters and hats. She likes Berlioz and the Romantics, which means corrupt taste. She lives in a small hotel on the left bank because [erased] She has an income she tries to pass off as moderate, which she probably got from a poor old mother, who died at last. Her character is innocent and romantic, but she is a mythomaniac and certainly cold. This [here Sylvie tried to spell a word unknown to me] makes it hard to guess her age. Her innocence is phenomenal, but she knows more than she says. She resembles the Miss Bronty [crossed out] Bronthee [crossed out] Brounte, the English lady who wore her hair parted in front and lived to a great old age after writing many moral novels and also Wuthering Heights.”