The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant Page B

makes the sun,” Frau Stengel said, anxious to give credit.
    â€œWell, then—” Jane began, but Frau Stengel, sensing a paradox, went on to something else.
    Until now, however, God had not been suggested as a threat. The children stayed where they were, at the table, and looked wide-eyed at their governess.
    Frau Stengel began to feel foolish; it is one thing to begin a scene, she was discovering, and another to sustain it. “Go to your room downstairs,” she said. “You had better stay there, and not come out. I can’t teach girls who tell lies.”
    This, clearly, was a dismissal, not only from her room but from her company, possibly forever. Never before had they been abandoned in the middle of the day. Was this the end of winter?
    â€œIs he dead?” cried Ernestine, in terror at what had become of the day.
    â€œGoodbye, Frau Stengel,” said Jane, with a ritual curtsy; this was how she had been trained to take her leave, and although she often forgot it, the formula now returned to sustain her. She gathered up the coral beads—after all, they belonged to her—but Ernestine rushed out, pushing in her hurry to be away. “Busy little feet,” said an old gentleman a moment later, laboriously pulling himself up with the aid of the banisters, as first Ernestine and then Jane clattered by.
    They burst into their room, and Jane closed the door. “Anyway, it was you that said it,” she said at once.
    Ernestine did not reply. She climbed up on her high bed and sat with her fat legs dangling over the edge. She stared at the opposite wall, her mouth slightly open. She could think of no way to avert the punishment about to descend on their heads, nor could she grasp the idea of a punishment more serious than being deprived of dessert.
    â€œIt was you, anyway,” Jane repeated. “If anything happens, I’ll tell. I think I could tell anyway.”
    â€œI’ll tell, too,” said Ernestine.
    â€œYou haven’t anything to tell.”
    â€œI’ll tell everything,” said Ernestine in a sudden fury. “I’ll tell you chewed gum. I’ll tell you wet the bed and we had to put the sheets out the window. I’ll tell everything.”
    The room was silent. Jane leaned over to the window between their beds, where the unaccustomed sun had roused a fat, slumbering fly. It shook its wings and buzzed loudly. Jane put her finger on its back; it vibrated and felt funny. “Look, Ern,” she said.
    Ernestine squirmed over on the bed; their heads touched, their breath misted the window. The fly moved and left staggering tracks.
    â€œWe could go out,” said Jane. “Frau Stengel even said it.” They went, forgetting their rubbers.
    Mrs. Kennedy came home at half past six, no less and no more exhausted than usual. It had not been a lively day or a memorably pleasant one but a day like any other, in the pattern she was now accustomed to and might even have missed. She had read aloud until lunch, which the clinic kitchen sent up on a tray—veal, potatoes, shredded lettuce, and sago pudding with jelly—and she had noted with dismay that Mr. Kennedy’s meal included a bottle of hock, fetched in under the apron of a guilty-looking nurse. How silly to tempt him in this way when he wanted so much to get well, she thought. After lunch, the reading went on, Mrs. Kennedy stopping now and then to sustain her voice with a sip of Vichy water. They were rereading an old Lanny Budd novel, but Mrs. Kennedy could not have said what it was about. She had acquired the knack of thinking of other things while she read aloud. She read in a high, uninflected voice, planning the debut of Jane and Ernestine with a famous ballet company. Mr. Kennedy listened, contentedly polishing off his bottle of wine. Sometimes he interrupted. “Juan-les-Pins,” he remarked as the name came up in the text.
    â€œWe were there.” This was the