The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant Page A

your mother wouldn’t like.” This was to be another of her new cheerful days; disappointed, the children settled down to lessons. Ernestine colored the pictures in a movie magazine with crayons, and Jane made a bracelet of some coral rosebuds from an old necklace her mother had given her.
    â€œIt’s nice here today,” said Jane. “We like it here.”
    â€œThe sun is shining. You should go out,” said Frau Stengel, yawning, quite as if she had not heard. “Don’t forget the little rubbers.”
    â€œWill you come?”
    â€œOh, no,” Frau Stengel said in a tantalizing, mysterious way. “It is important for me to rest.”
    â€œFor us, too,” said Ernestine jealously. “We have to rest. Everybody rests. Our father rests all the time. He has to, too.”
    â€œBecause he’s so sick,” said Jane.
    â€œHe’s dead,” said Ernestine. She gave Gregory Peck round blue eyes.
    Frau Stengel looked up sharply. “Who is dead?” she said. “You must not use such a word in here, now.”
    The children stared, surprised. Death had been spoken of so frequently in this room, on the same level as chocolate biscuits and coral rosebud bracelets.
    â€œ
He’s dead
,” said Ernestine. “He died this morning.”
    Frau Stengel stopped rocking. “Your father is
dead
?”
    â€œYes, he is,” said Ernestine. “He died, and we’re supposed to stay here with you, and that’s all.”
    Their governess looked, bewildered, from one to the other; they sat, the image of innocence, side by side at her table, their hair caught up with blue ribbons.
    â€œWhy don’t we go out now?” said Jane. The room was warm. She put her head down on the table and chewed the ends of her hair. “Come on,” she said, bored, and gave Ernestine a prod with her foot.
    â€œIn a minute,” her sister said indistinctly. She bent over the portrait she was coloring, pressing on the end of the crayon until it was flat. Waxy colored streaks were glued to the palm of her hand. She wiped her hand on the skirt of her starched blue frock. “All right, now,” she said, and got down from her chair.
    â€œWhere are you going, please?” said Frau Stengel, breathing at them through tense, widened nostrils. “Didn’t your mother send a message for me? When did it happen?”
    â€œWhat?” said Jane. “Can’t we go out? You said we could, before.”
    â€œIt isn’t true, about your father,” said Frau Stengel. “You made it up. Your father is not dead.”
    â€œOh, no,” said Jane, anxious to make the morning ordinary again. “She only said it, like, for a joke.”
    â€œA joke? You come here and frighten me in my condition for a
joke
?” Frau Stengel could not deliver sitting down the rest of the terrible things she had to say. She pulled herself out of the rocking chair and looked down at the perplexed little girls. She seemed to them enormously fat and tall, like the statues in Italian parks. Fascinated, they stared back. “What you have done is very wicked,” said Frau Stengel. “Very wicked. I won’t tell your mother, but I shall never forget it. In any case, God heard you, and God will punish you. If your father should die now, it would certainly be your fault.”
    This was not the first time the children had heard of God. Mrs. Kennedy might plan to defer her explanations to a later date, in line with Mr. Kennedy’s eventual decision, but the simple women she employed to keep an eye on Jane and Ernestine (Frau Stengel was the sixth to be elevated to the title of governess) had no such moral obstacles. For them, God was the catch-all answer to most of life’s perplexities. “Who makes this rain?” Jane had once asked Frau Stengel.
    â€œGod,” she had replied cozily.
    â€œSo that we can’t play outside?”
    â€œHe