The Widow’s Children

“I just told you that the doctors said he was in very bad shape, and that if he didn’t stop drinking, he wouldn’t live long,” Clara said loudly. “I don’t know anything about Adelaide,” she added.

“You don’t, do you?” her mother said, staring at Clara, her eyes widening. “Well, how is he, apart from dying? When did you see him last, Clara?”

“Oh, it was months ago. But I spoke to him on the phone,” Clara replied, then added hastily. “I phoned, to see how he was. And that last time I saw him, he wasn’t sober. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing … he gave me an old pocket watch of his, then the next morning, he called me and asked for it back.”

“He was staying with me,” Carlos said with a touch of defiance. “He was ashamed about the watch, Clarita.”

“God! Isn’t that typical!” said Laura. “And Clara, of course, gave it back. But tell me, how is Adelaide, the Queen of Pathos? You didn’t know her well, Carlos. Or did you? My God! You never saw a woman so hell-bent on finding people to torment her. And when she does, how she bears up! And then, a brave tear, a simple statement to her admirers – ’It’s all my fault’ – isn’t that so, Clara? Clara knows her, don’t you, Missy?”

But Clara was spared the discomfort of replying by Desmond’s emergence from the bathroom. Ed Hansen was not to be mentioned in Desmond’s presence. Laura had reported to her brother and daughter that he was subject to terrible attacks of jealousy; he was demented, really, on the subject of Ed, so much so, Laura claimed, that he refused to speak to anyone named Edwin or Edmund or Edward.

“Golly, I wonder where Peter is?” her mother said.

Clara went into the bathroom, thinking, gosh, golly, gee, and why did Carlos and Laura use comic strip words? Who were they condescending to? The United States? Who were the Maldonadas? Immigrants, irate dependents permanently displaced by their own ceaseless effort to maintain a fiction of their distance from, their superiority over the natives.

The bathroom was overheated. Among the rumpled towels, lurking yet in the crumpled paper of a soap wrapper, was the powerful smell of Desmond’s urine. My God! A drop of it might change the world! She visualized his black mustache, beneath it, lips like old rubber bands. In there, sheltered from Laura’s scrutiny, she felt the strain of her factitious animation drain away; she allowed herself to long for the hours of this evening to pass, to disappear. On these rare occasions when she saw Laura, or even her uncles, Carlos and Eugenio, she suffered such confusion, such a dislocation of self; wrenched out of her own life for even a few hours, it seemed not to count, to be a dream she could barely recall.

How had Desmond blundered into that coven? She thought suddenly of her grandmother, Alma, who had hatched the shocking brood. And Clara was stricken with shame, for what excuses could she offer anyone to extenuate her neglect of the old woman? But the shame was only a pinch, a momentary sting. Already, inertia was separating her from resolution. Perhaps an impulse would rescue her. Perhaps, one afternoon after work, she would find herself approaching the home. For an instant, thinking of Alma’s pleasure when she arrived, Clara smiled. Almost at once, the smile faded. Nothing, she realized, would make her go, no mysterious, still unplumbed resource in her.

“I know many t’ings,” her grandmother often avowed in her heavily accented English. Her accent was phenomenal. For forty-five years, she had resisted learning English, she, who had submitted to the brutal changes in her life without contest, had defended the language she had been born to, perhaps because it was the last connection with that Iberian coast she had left at sixteen on a ship bound for Cuba. She might know many things, but God knows what they were! Her children never asked her what she knew, but her phrase was repeated among them with mocking amusement. Ed Hansen had asked her, and he’d had no luck. “Ah Ed … many t’ings …” she’d sigh. Ed had made her laugh, evoked in her a flirtatious gaiety. Perhaps it had continued to astonish him that that dreamy, forlorn woman had produced Laura and Carlos and Eugenio.

Ed had charmed Alma from that first occasion Carlos had brought him home on leave from the army training depot where they’d been stationed during the First World War. They had both been nineteen years old, and trying to imagine what they’d been like – as she often did – Clara recalled a blurred snapshot she’d found in a shoebox in Alma’s Brooklyn apartment. In it, Carlos stood languidly near a desk. Her father was smiling, his hand resting on Carlos’s shoulder. How handsome they had been! How unimaginable that time would erode their grace! That Alma would, one day, wait for nothing in an old people’s home.

She wet her hands in the sink, and dried them roughly. Of course, Laura knew she hadn’t been to see Alma for five months. And if she didn’t go for a year? What then? She felt a thrill of terror, but of what? What could Laura do?

She flushed the toilet several times. It would excuse her absence if anyone had noticed it. She had wanted a moment away from them, from the painful tension that Laura seemed to both produce and feed upon.

Clara opened the door. There was much cigarette smoke; the room felt smaller. Laura was lying on one of the twin beds, her head propped up on one hand, her hip curving up. Her body was not youthful but it wasn’t matronly either. Laura was fifty-five.

She had just slipped her hand beneath the cover of a box which she was about to open. “Oh, Clara. I was just telling Carlos that Desmond bought me six dresses yesterday, all by himself. Can you imagine such a chap? Desmond … you’re so good! But he’s so bad! So extravagant!”

Carlos went to Clara and put his arm around her. “And I don’t even have one,” he whispered in her ear. She hugged him. He pressed his chin into her hair. They stretched out their hands. Laura said, “Look at those two, Desmond!”

Clara’s and Carlos’s hands were extraordinarily alike – it was a joke between them. At least, it was something between them. They moved apart, Carlos laughing softly. She felt uneasy. She cared about him, and these jokes, these caresses, these eloquent but wordless signals, had the effect of chilling her affection for him. He’d almost always been kind to her. She loved his splendid walk – like a tiger’s, Ed had said, you would never have known he was a pederast. Ed hadn’t, he’d claimed, for years, and had let her in on the secret when she’d been thirteen. She’d nodded calmly, concealing her ignorance of what he was talking about, knowing it was awful, terrified Carlos would learn that she knew. That had been when she was convinced the Maldonadas could read people’s minds, especially her own. But if Carlos had read her mind, it had not affected his behavior toward her. In time, she had a revelation. It was not his embarrassment she’d feared but her own. Until a few years ago, Alma often said, “Ah, Carlos … Someday I hope he’ll marry.” She doted only on Carlos. About Eugenio she said nothing. And during all the years of Clara’s growing up, while Laura and Ed had moved from Provence to Devon to Ibiza to Mexico, Alma had rarely spoken of that spectral couple to whose existence foreign stamps gave witness (by the time one letter arrived, they had often moved on to another place; Laura never wrote, sending messages through Ed), saying only, “Laurita es una viajera, eh?” with a kind of relentless leniency, or saying something else as insubstantial, so that the child, Clara, kept her questions to herself where, in the fecund, lonely dark of adolescence, they grew monstrous.

But once in the world, she learned everyone’s lesson – families were not as they seemed; she grew artful in spotting the cracks in domestic facades. Wasn’t everyone damaged? she asked herself, and read the ancient Greeks during the one year she’d gone to college, and concluded that the house of Atreus was, and always had been, full of boarders like herself. Then, a year ago, she had awakened one morning in a sweat of fear. Her life was a walk next to an electrified fence. The path was narrowing.

“You need a drink, beautiful kiddo,” Desmond was saying to her thickly. “Here.”

“You know, I’m so morbid,” Laura said. “I had a thought. What if cancer were normal, and human life was the anomaly? Isn’t that grisly?”

“For God’s sake, Laura,” Desmond said crossly. Carlos stood up and stretched. “My dear, you’re too damned perverse,” he said. “I’m perverse,” Laura said, laughing. “Clara, do you hear that old bum! The thought came to me in a movie theater yesterday. In the dark with all those bodies … I could smell someone’s dirty feet– ”

“That must have been me,” Carlos said, and Desmond roared with laughter, calling out, “Carlos! Oh Carlos!” tossing a drink into his open mouth, gulping it down, as everyone joined in until the room rang with the sound. Desmond’s lapels were wet with spilled bourbon. His suit, Clara judged, was expensive. By a hair’s breadth, Desmond had inherited a family business. That had been Laura’s doing. Old Mrs. Clapper had wanted to leave it to Desmond’s ex-wife and his daughter. She had been enraged by his marriage to Laura.

“But I won her over,” Laura had told Clara once. “I took care of that wicked old woman when she was dying,” she’d said. “Oh, I know, Clara, what you’re thinking. That I couldn’t take care of a flea,” and Clara had shaken her head vigorously. “No, no, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” because Laura had been very drunk, and God knows what she might have said if Clara had agreed with her. “I used to carry those rich bones into the bathroom and lift up her skirt and put her on the toilet,” Laura had gone on. “And do you know – in the end – she told me I’d made a man out of her son! And she changed her will. I couldn’t stand not having money anymore, for the rest of my life, the way it’d been with Ed, depending only on windfalls from his work. We were so broke in so many places, like gypsies …”

Laura’s stories. She related them with a strange shallowness, an air of wry disbelief. “But you were good to her,” Clara had said, despising herself. “You took care of her.” And Laura, with such a knowing look, had replied, “No, no. I knew what I was doing,” meeting Clara’s effort to excuse her opportunism with no interest. Why, Clara had wondered, did she try? Why did she try to offer absolution to her intransigent mother? Laura recounted her frightful tales as if she were describing a typhoon, and Clara, insistently trying to provide her with the bolt-holes through which people escaped from the moral responsibility for what they did, felt like a fool.

“Damn!” exclaimed Laura, “I forgot to dilute that batch of sleeping pills I brought for Peter.”

“How do you do that?” asked Clara.

“The weakest prescription is too strong for him,” explained her mother. “I open the capsules, spill out half the contents and fit them back together. Desmond says I look like a witch over a cauldron. Poor old Peter.”

At that moment there was a knock at the door and Laura got vigorously to her feet. Desmond said, “I’ll go.” Then, from the other side of the door came a sustained cry that grew louder every second until it fragmented into shrill, birdlike shrieks. Laura fell back on the bed, laughing wildly and rubbing her face with her hands, this fierce scouring of flesh a habit she shared with Carlos. “He has perfected his seagull cry,” Laura gasped. “My God!” exclaimed Carlos. Desmond opened the door and Peter Rice stepped into the room.

He was a few years younger than Laura, although he didn’t look it. His thin hair was gray, his features narrow, and from behind his glasses, his pale blue eyes gazed out mildly. He gave an impression of being clean and dry as though he’d been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices.

He went directly to Laura and she stood up and put her arms around him and for a moment he rested his head on her shoulder. Carlos held up his liquor glass and stared at it thoughtfully. Clara’s and Desmond’s glances met, then each turned away as though embarrassed. Peter Rice and Laura broke apart gracefully.

“Isn’t it marvelous!” said Peter in a gentle, cultivated voice. “It’s taken me three years. My masterpiece. I think I’ve caught it exactly. It’s flying from one piling to another. My gull announces the advent of twilight … on the cruisers in the marina, people are preparing their suppers of stale carrot sticks and peanuts and hamburgers. They are still wearing their boat gear. Some are drinking from bottles of prepared Manhattans. Some are walking along the pier looking for a small, jolly party they can join. There is the smell of bilge tanks, of roasting meat, of the salt water …” And once again, eyes closed, he did his seagull.

Laura laughed until tears came to her eyes. “Charming,” murmured Carlos several times. He had, indeed, caught that note of wild complaint in a seagull’s cry, thought Clara, and was suddenly miserable. She resolved to make no comment, to remain calm. The main thing was to get through this evening. The Clappers would be gone for months. She would not be compelled to think about Laura, especially if she made a few visits to her grandmother. Her own life was far distant from this hotel room. She must, as she had done as a child, take in good faith what was given. She had not been placed in the wrong crib. Everyone had trouble. She presented the room with a brave face.

“Darling Peter!” Laura said, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief Desmond had handed her. “What will you have?”

“Oh, anything,” replied Peter. “Why, this is Clara, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you for years. What a lovely dress!”

“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed Laura. “Look, Peter, what Desmond did. He bought me all these clothes … on his own.”

“Splendid,” said Peter.

“Clara, isn’t that a French dress?” Laura asked her suddenly.

“No,” replied Clara at once. But it was. In another month, she would have paid for it. “I got it on sale,” she said.

Desmond said, “You look fine in anything.”

“Oh, did you make that reservation for us at Le Canard Privé?” Laura asked him.

Peter sipped at his drink. “I’ve been longing for this,” he said. Then he handed Laura a package. “A few things to keep you from being seasick – or to make you seasick.”

Laura made a joke of unwrapping the package, uttering greedy cries, and tearing at the paper until she extracted a half dozen books.

“Oh, Peter, aren’t you a dear,” she said. “Scandal and mystery stories! My meat!”

“My girl, I even included two we didn’t publish,” said Peter.

“I did make the reservation this morning, Laura,” Desmond declared. “You were standing next to me.”

Clara heard Carlos sigh. He was looking at her. “Let’s go have another drink by ourselves,” he whispered, bending over her. She held his hand and they walked to the table near the windows where the liquor was.

“My dear puppy, I wasn’t listening,” Laura was saying. “You mustn’t be belligerent. I don’t listen to your phone conversations. I only wanted to be sure you’d made the reservations.”

She should have brought a gift, too, Clara thought. But Carlos hadn’t brought anything either, not that he ever did. She could have bought some flowers in the lobby.

“Stop tormenting your poor husband and pay attention to me,” demanded Peter. Clara glanced back at them. Laura was rolling her eyes upward with comic exaggeration. Desmond, swaying ever so slightly, stood next to her. Laura touched Peter’s cheek lightly with a finger, and Clara saw him blench. But Laura appeared not to notice. “Vel? So vat’s new?” she asked, smiling.

Carlos squeezed Clara’s arm and nodded at the window. They stood close to it, breathing the rusty-smelling heat from the radiator nearby, not speaking at once, both staring out at the rain, the black sky with its pale underbelly of reflected light, until, persuaded perhaps by the continuing chatter of the other three that he and Clara would not be overheard, Carlos began to speak about Ed Hansen. Ed was their serious subject, delivering them from further displays of affection, allowing their facial muscles, exhausted by nugatory smiles, to relax into sobriety.

“Ed was in town Saturday. God. God. I don’t know what to do. He wants me to go to Norway with him. He was so damned drunk – after two or three glasses of beer – I didn’t know what to do with him. He says Adelaide hates him – Norway! Last year it was the Canary Islands. He’s sick. He says Adelaide finds him repulsive … he only speaks of the past now … always comes to me– ”

“Is he really so sick, medically, I mean?” Clara asked. “He told me it was angina, but I don’t know when to believe him – I thought you told Laura you hadn’t seen him for months?”

“My dear Clarita, your mother – it’s a matter of tact – if I told her I’d seen him only a few days ago, she’d become avid, want to know everything. She’s rather primitive about time. If it’s months ago, you see, it’s something that may not even have happened.”

A faint smile had accompanied his words. Now it faded, leaving behind it his usual expression, one of sad pensiveness. She saw her father lost. He would get nothing from Carlos, not rescue, not even a moment’s comfort. “I tried to make him eat something …” Carlos said in melancholy accents.

But he wouldn’t, Clara guessed, have tried to stop Ed from drinking. She had spent a few afternoons with the two men in Carlos’s dark, foul apartment, drinking more than she could tolerate as her father’s moods shifted from hilarity to despair and the air grew acrid with smoke, the atmosphere charged with Carlos’s helpless irritation. She’d gone because she could not resist a chance to see Ed, even though she knew the hours would be mutilated, debauched. Once, he had sprawled on the dirty couch, nearly insensible, crooning, coughing, retching. “I will catch a great fish, a red salmon, icy its dying flesh,” he had cried thickly. “I will take it to my lair in the hills and will place around my neck the chain she has left for me, and eat my fish– ”

“For Christ’s sake!” Carlos had erupted.

“Ah – you’re both against me,” Ed had muttered. “I can’t help that, my dears, my kittens, my babes. I know you both, your tricks …” and then he had begun to bark like a dog.

Staggering beneath his drunken weight, they’d managed to get him into the bedroom. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he had yipped, his eyes clamped shut, his thin hands clenched against the gray pillowcase.

But there had been other times when she had given in to the thrall of the long friendship between the two men, the charm of their special language with each other, its mysterious allusions, the sense she had, although it bewildered her, of some surviving unimpaired worth each held for the other. Ed did not always drink until he lost consciousness. She had come upon them once in the unchanging dusk of Carlos’s living room speaking in low voices. “You must be patient, Ed,” Carlos had said gently, again and again. “Husband your strength … work at your painting with modesty, no? Isn’t that the way, old friend?” as her father – for once – in unemphatic, despairing recital, spoke of his inability to take hold of his life, of this shapeless drift toward annihilation from which he saw no turning. It was too late for everything. Why did women hate him so? Why couldn’t he work anymore, even at photography? He had been a better than competent photographer in his time. He had provided for Laura and himself, not well but with some style. Why were his nights so tormented by the past that he lay awake grinding his teeth, groaning with regret, with shame?

They had barely acknowledged her presence, as though she’d been one of Carlos’s young men whom she sometimes found there with them, who smoked idly while he looked over some of Carlos’s old music reviews, or, if he was musical, allowed his fingers to drift over the keys of the piano. She had felt as though the two of them were disappearing before her eyes, fragment of flesh by fragment of bone, replaced by the deepening dark of the evening outside. Days later, recalling that afternoon, she had known they’d been frightened, the two aging men, unable to turn on a light.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Clara said now to her uncle. “The last time I saw him – he took me to lunch that time, which never happened before – and I thought he was sober, almost. But he wasn’t.”

Ed had walked with her to her bus stop. He’d been voluble, even brisk, but as the bus drew away from the corner, she’d looked back at him. He had sagged against the soot-blackened wall of an old public school, his hat pulled forward over his forehead, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides.

There was a shout of laughter from behind them. Clara turned to see Peter Rice bent over, her mother glittering with triumphant amusement, Desmond grinning. Laura must have told a joke.

Clara walked toward them. There was nothing more to say to Carlos. They had had such conversations before about Ed. On a bedside table, she noticed a cartoon clipped from some magazine. She picked it up, then held it toward Laura. “Did grandma send this?” she asked, knowing Alma’s habit of sending cartoons to her children; she’d been doing it ever since Clara could remember. When Laura had still been married to Ed and lived in foreign places, during the months Carlos spent abroad, or when Eugenio’s tourist agency required him to go to California or New Mexico, their mother would send them, by airmail, a drawing from a magazine or newspaper, laughing to herself as she clipped out these cartoons, sent them winging to her scattered children, smiling, perhaps at the thought of their answering laughter which would anneal the distance, remind them of her existence, appease their irritation at her for reminding them.

“Put that down!”

There was such ferocity in Laura’s voice that Clara dropped the piece of paper. It floated just beneath the bed, and Carlos, arrested by Laura’s cry, let a match burn down to his fingers. In the silence – everyone was silent – Clara saw that a stem was missing from the eyeglasses Carlos was wearing.

“I’m sorry,” Clara said lamely. Peter Rice retrieved the cartoon and put it back carefully on the table. Then Laura shook her head as though confused. “Oh – I don’t know what’s the matter with me … Of course, look at it, Clara. Here, take it!” And then she grabbed her brother’s arm. “Carlos!” all mock severity now, “Get those damned specs fixed! Shame on you!”

“They’re fine,” he said mildly.

“Why, Carlos, they aren’t yours! Look, Laura, they don’t even fit him,” said Desmond.

“Someone left them at my apartment,” Carlos said ruefully, reminding them all of his reputation as the laziest man in the world. He smiled winsomely.

There was a story Ed Hansen told, of how when he and Carlos had gone on a brief trip to Mexico, Carlos had said, on their first evening in Taxco, that he didn’t feel like arranging for rooms with the hotel manager. Would Ed mind getting a translator? And during the subsequent dealing with the manager, while a young Mexican boy grabbed off the street translated for Ed, Carlos had sat in a chair, nodding, Ed reported, in voluptuous weariness, as though a young pupil was reciting an often repeated lesson for an old master.

Waking at a late hour of a Sunday morning, knowing he ought to visit his mother at the home, knowing that he would not, aware of the noxious stink of his apartment, of stale food and dust and unwashed sheets, Carlos would fold his hands behind his head and lie there, tears running down his cheeks, thinking of his used-up life, of lovers dead or gone, of investments made unwisely, of his violent sister who might telephone him at any minute and, with her elaborate killer’s manners, in her beautiful deep voice, make some outrageous demand upon him, making clear she knew not only the open secrets of his life but the hidden ones, knew about his real shiftlessness, his increasing boredom with sexual pursuit, his unappeased sexual longing, his terror of age. “I’m becoming an old sow,” he would whisper to himself, trying to keep at bay the thought of his mother waiting in the disinfectant, linoleum-smelling stillness of the old people’s home for him to come and see her.