The Cost of Living Read Free Page B

parents, to accept their children as they are. In “Thieves and Rascals,” the father is annoyed that his daughter is “gauche and untidy,” and that her Swiss governess has not groomed “a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch.” Between mothers and daughters, there is often competition—mothers wanting to be mistaken for their daughters’ sisters, for example—and there is also some meanness. In “The Wedding Ring,” the mother tells her brunette daughter to cover her head with a hat lest the sun turn her hair into a “rusty old stove lid.”
    Perhaps these parents are feckless, perhaps they too young or self-centered to care for offspring, perhaps they are simply undeserving of them. Whatever the reason, parents maintain a distance from their children, physical as well as emotional, relinquishing their responsibilities, or regarding them as an afterthought. Even when aware of their shortcomings, parents have little motivation to change. “We can’t lie here and discuss her character and all her little ways,” the mother in “Thieves and Rascals” says to her husband, after their daughter has been expelled from boarding school for spending a weekend in a hotel with a young man. “Evidently neither of us knows anything about them. We can talk about what lousy parents we are. That won’t help either. We might as well sleep, if we can.”
    While this was not an era when mothers chose to raise children without partners, as they are free to do today, there is a significant number of single mothers in these pages. Two are women of lesser economic means, and both happen to be Canadian. Bea, in “Malcolm and Bea,” who lives with her father and sisters in a house “behind a dried-up garden” with “seven Dwarfs on the fake chimneypiece,” bears a child out of wedlock, having slept with its father “only the once.” Bernadette, who does not even know the name of the man who impregnates her, is a maid. The rest are single because they are widows, or divorced, or because their husbands are fundamentally absent. “The Rejection” turns the tables on the single-mother theme; here we see a divorced father and his daughter, utterly estranged. For the most part, though, the spouseless parents are women, both young and middle-aged. Mrs. Tracy in “Madeline’s Birthday,” who only sees her husband on weekends, presents a relatively quotidian version, while Laure, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” mother to two daughters in Paris, only sees her husband, who lives in New Haven, two months out of the year. In “Travelers Must Be Content,” Bonnie is divorced and living in Europe with her teenaged daughter, Flor. In “A Day Like Any Other,” Mrs. Kennedy’s husband is convalescent, indulging “an obscure stomach complaint and a touchy liver” (and meanwhile smuggling wine to his bedside). He forces his family into a peripatetic lifestyle, retreating from one nursing home to the next, and hardly interacting with his daughters:
    The rules of the private clinics he frequented were all in his favor. In any case, he seldom asked to see the girls, for he felt that they were not at an interesting age. Wistfully, his wife sometimes wondered when their interesting age would begin—when they were old enough to be sent away to school, perhaps, or better still, safely disposed of in the handsome marriages that gave her so much concern.
    Both Bonnie and Mrs. Kennedy, stranded by the men in their own lives, are nevertheless obsessed with their daughters’ matrimonial destinies. Mrs. Kennedy repeatedly and grandiosely envisions the wedding ceremony of her daughters (“Chartres would be nice, though damp”); it is only hypothetically, and also at the ritual moment when they are no longer in her charge, that she feels closest to them.
    â€œGoing Ashore” is about a