Free The Music School by John Updike

truth, the even greater expense of the divorce to which it was the alternative was, among the decisive factors, not the least decisive.
    The baby-sitter—their English-French dictionary gave no equivalent, and
bébé-sitter
, as a joke, was funnier than
une qui s’assied avec les bébés
—was named, easily enough, Marie, and was a short, healthy widow of about forty who each noon when she arrived would call “
Bonjour
,
monsieur!
” to Kenneth with a gay, hopeful ring that seemed to promise ripe new worlds of communication between them. She spoke patiently and distinctly, and in a few days had received from Janet an adequate image of their expectations and had communicated in turn such intricate pieces of information as that her husband had died suddenly of a heart attack (“
Cœur—bom!
”—her arm quickly striking from the horizontal into the vertical) and that the owners and summer residents of their villa were a pair of homosexuals (hands fluttering at her shoulders—“
Pas de femmes. Jamais de femmes!
”) who hired boys from Nice and Cannes for “
dix mille pour une nuit
.” “
Nouveaux francs?
” Kenneth asked, and she laughed delightedly, saying, “
Oui, oui
,” though this couldn’t be right; no boy was worth two thousand dollars a night. Marie was tantalizing, for he felt within her, as in a locked chest, inaccessible wealth, and he didn’t feel that Janet, who was stiffly fearful, in conversing with her, of making a grammatical mistake, was gaining access either. As a result, the children remained hostile and frightened. They were accustomed, in Boston, to two types of baby-sitters: teen-age girls, upon whom his elder daughter, aged seven, inflicted a succession of giggling crushes, and elderly limping women, of whom the grandest was Mrs. Shea. She had a bosom like a bolster and a wispy saintly voice in which, apparently, as soon as the Harrises were gone, she would tell the children wonderful stories of disease, calamity, and anatomical malfunction. Marie was neither young nor old, and, hermetically sealed inside her language, she must have seemed to the children as grotesque as a fish mouthing behind glass. They clustered defiantly around their parents, routing Janet out of her nap, pursuing Kenneth into the field where he had gone to sketch, leaving Marie alone in the kitchen, whose floor she repeatedly mopped in an embarrassed effort to make herself useful. And whenever their parents left together, the children, led by the oldest, wailed shamelessly while poor Marie tried to rally them with energetic “
ooh
”s and “
ah
”s. It was a humiliating situation for everyone, and Kenneth was vexed by the belief that his wife, in an hour of undivided attention, could easily have built betweenthe baby-sitter and the children a few word bridges that would have adequately carried all this stalled emotional traffic. But she, with the stubborn shyness that was alternately her most frustrating and most appealing trait, refused, or was unable, to do this. She was exhausted. One afternoon, after they had done a little shopping for the Christmas that in this country and climate seemed so wan a holiday, Kenneth had dropped her off at the Musée d’Antibes and drove back in their rented Renault to the villa alone.
    Smoke filled the living room. The children and Marie were gathered in silence around a fire she had built in the fireplace. Her eyes looked inquisitively past him when he entered. “
Madame
,” he explained, “
est
, uh,
visitée?—la musée
.”
    Comprehension dawned in her quick face. “
Ah, le Musée d’Antibes! Très joli
.”
    “
Oui
. Uh”—he thought he should explain this, so she would not expect him to leave in the car again
—
“
madame est marchée
.” In case this was the wrong word, he made walking motions with his fingers, and, unable to locate any equivalent for “back,” added, “
ici
.”
    Marie nodded eagerly. “
À pied
.”
    “I guess. Yes.
Oui
.”
    Then