The Cost of Living Read Online Free

widowed mother and daughter literally adrift, on a cruise, seeking new horizons after the mother’s latest romance has soured. The mother, Mrs. Ellenger, is distraught to be without male companionship. She is at once a defensive and delinquent parent, drinking brandy and reading old issues of
Vogue
instead of entertaining her daughter, Emma. At the end of the story, in a desperate plea, Mrs. Ellenger warns Emma never to marry. “Don’t have anything to do with men,” she says, lying with her daughter in bed. “We should always stick together, you and I. Promise me we’ll always stay together.” For Mrs. Ellenger, Emma becomes a substitute spouse; the child she resents is the only person who will not abandon her—at least, for as long as Emma has no choice in the matter. Perhaps due to the very lack of attention, Gallant’s children are a flinty, self-sufficient breed. Madeline is perfectly content on her own in Manhattan, living off liverwurst sandwiches and going to the movies every day. And twelve-year-old Emma, whose mother retreats to her cabin, spends much of the cruise befriending the bartender and conversing with other adults. The children, in other words, learn to fend for themselves; throughout these stories, it’s the adults who need taking care of.
    â€œThe Burgundy Weekend,” the last, novella-like piece in this collection, was published in 1971, a year after Gallant’s second novel,
A Fairly Good Time
. The story, which has not been reprinted since it appeared in
The Tamarack Review
, is written in five chapter-like sections, with the amplitude of a writer now accustomed to greater distance and range. Lucie and Jérôme Girard, a Canadian couple, are visiting France, and travel one weekend to see Madame Arrieu, a former acquaintance of Jérôme’s. Madame Arrieu’s granddaughter, Nadine, is a French version of Madeline, a solitary and disaffected teenager whose parents are cruising around the coast of Yugoslavia. Lucie is unlike many women in the preceding stories. She waits until her late twenties to marry Jérôme, who is an unemployed, neurotic intellectual dwelling in a self-concocted world. Because Jérôme has squandered his money, she continues working after marriage, as a nurse. It is Lucie who is the breadwinner, and the caretaker. In spite of the challenges of being married to Jérôme, she takes pride in being the only one able to understand and manage him: “She had a special ear for him, as a person conscious of mice can detect the faintest rustling.” Though made to feel unwelcome by Nadine, who proceeds to flirt with Jérôme, Lucie holds her own during the weekend. Capable and grounded, she is not only a woman of her times but an indication that times have changed.
    The story’s central subject, in fact, is the passage of time, and it straddles the chronological sweep of this collection—looking back at the Fifties, taking place at the start of the Seventies, with the Sixties sandwiched in between. It encompasses three generations and numerous layers of history—layers at once living and dying. Members of the Resistance are literally dying off; Madame Arrieu, a survivor of World War Two, is at a televised memorial service for war deportees when the Girards arrive in Burgundy. Jérôme, who was a student in Paris in the Fifties and for whom this journey marks a return in midlife to the same house he visited twenty years ago, is assaulted by a changed, modern France. He seeks shelter in memories, in a numbing hybrid of present and past: seeing de Gaulle in Quebec in 1943; his first winter in Paris; falling in with left-wing activists concerned with reform in Morocco and Algeria. He recalls police brutality at a protest: “A head hitting a curb made one sound, a stick on a head made another. In those days you still remembered the brain beneath the bone: no one ever thought of that now.”