The Widow’s Children

“I’m really going to have my prescription filled one of these days,” he said to Laura.

“Oh, Carlos …” Laura shook her head with mock despair.

“You might get a seeing eye dog,” suggested Peter.

“Oh, Peter, then he’d have to feed it, and take it out– ”

“Not necessarily,” Carlos said, and laughed, as did everyone, and new drinks were made. Laura raised hers to the group. “Gosh, it’s so damned nice to have you all here! Carlos! Clarita! You’re really here. Isn’t it, Desmond? Doesn’t it feel delicious?”

“Oh yes … it’s wonderful,” Desmond replied. His face was inflamed, his eyes were dulled.

“The restaurant Desmond found has the most marvelous eggs à la Russe,” Laura said animatedly. “Isn’t that your favorite, Clara? Aren’t you the great mayonnaise and eggs lover?”

“Oh, God! I’m smoking a cigarette and now I’ve lit another one,” exclaimed Peter.

“No seagull would do such a dreadful thing,” Laura smiled. Peter looked like a bashful youth unexpectedly caressed. “I know some very low-class seagulls,” he said. “Now, let’s see your dresses, darling, or, as my mother used to call them, frocks.”

Desmond, after glancing quickly at his wife, touched Clara’s arm. “How’s tricks? Really, I mean,” he said.

“I think I’ll get another ice cube,” she said, thinking, it’s his turn with me now. At the drinks table, Desmond grabbed up an ice cube in his large hand which was, Clara thought, unusually hairy – as though he was wearing a mitt. “Laura said you’d found a pretty good job.”

“Well, it’s an awful good job – but, there are nice people there,” she didn’t want to be caught complaining. “When I turned in my first expense account sheet, the executives all came to see me. I have a tiny office, and the six of them crowded in. It was quite funny. I’d turned in this expense sheet for $6.75, and they asked me, was I trying to make them look like crooks?”

Desmond snorted and rocked toward her on his heels; did he imagine he looked shrewd, pursing up his lips and scowling importantly?

“I’m sure they explained,” he said.

“Well, I had just put down bus and subway fares, you see– ” but Desmond was gone; with three unsteady steps he had moved to the bed where Laura was reclining. “Darling? Do you want more ice?”

Clara was used to not finishing sentences. Her thoughts returned at once to a nettled, uneasy speculation about the cartoon her mother had at first charged her not to touch, but it was a futile exercise. In no other company more than among these Spaniards was Clara so conscious of a discrepancy between surface talk and inner preoccupation. They sped from one posture to another, eliciting with amused cries each other’s biases, pretending to discover anew the odd notions each harbored, amusing themselves nearly to death! Until Laura, with a hard question, thrust a real sword through the paper props, and there would be for a second, a minute, the startled mortified silence of people caught out in a duplicity for which they could find no explanation. Then, with what indulgence, what tenderness, Laura rescued them, sometimes.

I will simply pick up that cartoon from the table, Clara told herself, looking at a small pool of water that had leaked through the window. She turned toward the bedside table. Between her and it was a matched luggage set. It was new and looked expensive. She would have to get around the other side of the bed where Peter Rice and Carlos were standing with their drinks. But what the hell did she care about the cartoon?

“Come over here … don’t be so exclusive, Miss,” her mother called.

“Beautiful suitcases,” said Clara.

“Our new line,” boasted Desmond.

The luggage had cost the Clappers nothing. The inheritance which Laura had secured them was a fine leather business. The sales were handled by representatives in all the major cities of the country. “Very refeened,” Laura would say, grinning. One profitable year, they had bought a farm in Pennsylvania, and there they lived, making an occasional trip to New York or, more infrequently, a journey abroad.

As Clara carefully avoided the luggage in her passage from window to chair, where she sat down, she thought Laura’s smile was touched with melancholy. She seemed, for the moment, to be at rest, a kind of sated rest, Clara reflected. The room was so close; perhaps we are slowly suffocating – the air seemed composed of the very stuff of the beige carpeting. Suddenly the radiator emitted a noisy sustained hiss of steam. A new Vesuvius, Clara thought – we’ll be found, later, as we are at this moment, stiffened in our chains like the dog of Pompeii.

“This hotel has gone downhill,” Desmond said querulously.

“Not to spite you, Desmond,” remarked Laura.

“I didn’t say– ”

“Clara! Look out! He’s going to spill his drink on you!”

Clara reared up in her chair. But Desmond was standing several feet away from her. He looked dumfounded, held his drink up to eye level, mumbled, “Christ! It’s nearly empty.” Peter Rice spoke hurriedly. “Laura, listen. You must see the Blue People.”

“Peter Rice!” Laura exclaimed, her eyes enormous, glittering. “You are, to put it mildly, somewhat forgetful. Do you know how many times you’ve told us about those Blue People of yours! Good God! What happened to you in those Berber tents?”

“I’ve never told you about the Blue People.”

“But you did!”

“I never heard about them,” claimed Desmond with eerie clarity, a falsetto sharpness of enunciation, as though a sober ventriloquist had taken charge of his voice.

“I haven’t either,” said Carlos.

A minor impasse, a trivial lapse in someone’s memory – it happened in conversation often enough. But not to be followed by such a stony silence as this. They had all been stopped cold. On Peter Rice’s face, Clara saw a reflection of her own malaise. Carlos had gone blank. Desmond swayed as though his balance was giving way.

Yet Laura could be contradicted. Clara had seen her charmed by disputation, bend upon it the playful intensity she gave to riddles and puzzles. Why was she staring at the wall with such a tragic look? Her limbs stiff as though convulsed? What had happened now?

The guests had gathered to bid the travelers farewell. They had managed to keep things going – the trip, Carlos’s laziness, bird imitations, Clara’s looks – prodding and pulling words out of themselves as though urging a sluggish beast into its cage, and now it was out, this beast, menacing them with a suddenly awakened appetite. What meat would satisfy it? Clara imagined herself uttering a groan, a loud exclamation. But not at family gatherings any more than on ordinary social occasions did people burst forth into the mad, disconnected fragments of speech that might hold some tenuous consonance with what they were really thinking, feeling.

Desmond, in slow motion, stumbled toward the bathroom. Then Peter, with an uneasy smile, spoke. “Well, dearie, if you’ve heard it all before, what haven’t you heard before? We all repeat stories about what we’ve loved or hated– ”

Laura suddenly turned to them. She was smiling. Carlos began, very meditatively, to unwrap the cellophane from a cigar. Clara heard her own sigh and hoped no one else had.

“I was going to say,” Peter went on, “that I saw the wickedest dance anyone ever dreamed up done by a little, thin girl of fourteen. On her knees, mind you, using her arms and shoulders– ”

“Some poor child whore!” Clara interrupted shrilly, “forced to her knees by disgusting, primitive– ” and then startled by her own outburst, she fell silent.

“Now, Clara,” said her mother tolerantly, “none of that talk. Nobody forces people to their knees except themselves …”

Peter was looking at Clara with surprise. He had thought her a muted, oppressed young woman. As Laura’s daughter, what else could she have been? But the indignation he had heard in her voice, the faint glitter of hysteria – still, these reserved, brooding people were prone to take unconsidered swings at anything. They were like recluses who mistake a footfall for an invading army.

“Were you in Rabat?” Carlos asked politely.

“You must have been in your nappies!” exclaimed Laura. “It was just before the war, wasn’t it, Peter?”

“Yes. I was in Rabat. And I was twenty, Laura, old enough. But primitive, Clara … I went to Quito last year during my vacation. An Indian girl used to come to do my laundry. That Jivaro profile of hers … I used to watch her iron my shirts. I loved her face. She would turn suddenly, and smile at me. The most radiant smile I ever saw! The men of her tribe had probably smiled at the missionaries like that before they hacked them up with machetes. And in Haiti, in Morocco, I’ve seen that sacred smile, ineffable, the way we must all have smiled once– ”

“For God’s sake! What crap!” erupted Desmond crossly. He was standing next to the bathroom door, staring at the bottle of bourbon on the table. Had he already finished off half of it? But no one paid him any attention. They were watching Clara, who had risen to her feet. She was struggling to control a profound agitation; her lips trembled, she blinked, she gripped one hand with the other. Carlos hid himself in a great puff of cigar smoke.

“Sacred, ineffable, tum-te-tum-te-tum,” mocked Laura loudly. “Do you like my smile, Peter? I’m a primitive.”

Clara spoke, her voice tremulous. “What about the creatures that slink around this city, who kill without a flicker of pity? They smile too. Is that what you mean?”

“How would you know, kiddo?” asked Desmond.

Peter took hold of Clara’s hand. It was damp. Gradually, the fingers he was holding closed around his own. “I didn’t mean not human,” he said. “Really, I had something else in mind. Innocence … before the fall, all that …”

He was very faintly repelled by the closeness, the intertwining of their fingers, their palms lightly sweating one against the other. Yet how unconsciously, how touchingly her hand had curled around his! But that was enough. He let go of her and stepped away. What had he roused up in her with his “primitive smile” routine? He was so used to his own set pieces that he didn’t even bother to listen to himself anymore. But this time, he’d done it. The girl looked on the verge of tears. He had simply been keeping the conversation moving along. He glanced quickly at Laura. And all at once it was borne in upon him powerfully that she was really the girl’s mother, that there was something here he had not known about before, had never speculated about, something singular.

“You’re so passionate,” murmured Laura to Clara. She swung her legs off the bed, and the box of dresses tumbled to the floor. Clara went to pick them up, and as she replaced them on the foot of the bed, her mother gave her a broad, rather lewd, wink. Clara laughed and said impulsively, gratefully, “What pretty dresses they are!”

Grinning, her mother fiddled with her sapphire ring then, suddenly, her hand shot out and she grasped the hem of Clara’s dress and turned it up. Sewn to the seam was a small white silk tag on which was printed the name, Christian Dior. Clara stood frozen as Laura’s fingers gradually released the cloth of her dress. What reasons would ever prevail against the implacable judgment she saw on Laura’s face, which was slowly, slowly turning from her to Peter Rice?

“More drinks, all? Anyone?” Desmond was holding up a bottle. “Out of ice, darling. Shall I phone for more?” But no one answered him, and he was not surprised. He smiled to himself. He didn’t give a good goddamn for ice, for bored old Carlos sulking near the window like a moth-eaten bear, clutching his cigar – that sack of Spanish guts … dirty, lazy old queen. Christ! Didn’t he know there was a glob of chewing gum stuck to one of his shoes? If they were his shoes. You’d think he sold pencils in Times Square. Desmond didn’t give a goddamn, either, for all that frenzied jabbering going on between Laura and Peter Rice.

He laughed aloud to think of what Laura would say about them all once they were gone, once she was alone with him, when he wouldn’t have to worry about what she was thinking, of how she was being reminded of the years before. As if he didn’t know that they talked about Ed Hansen the second he, Desmond, was out of sight! What else was there for them to talk about?

Desmond had met Laura and Ed in Paris years ago, and he’d been dazzled by Ed at first, just like any other fool. Ed had just punched a Frenchman because Laura had said the man looked at her salaciously while the three of them were slowly rising in one of those hotel cage elevators, and he’d thought he would go out of his mind with laughter at Ed’s description of what had happened. “Hit him!” Laura had demanded, and Ed had! And then had picked the poor dazed son of a bitch up from the floor, and dragged him out into a corridor and covered him with some soiled sheets a chambermaid had left in a cart – so he wouldn’t catch his death of cold, Ed had said. That was when Laura was in her late thirties, and Desmond had thought she looked like a slightly bruised dahlia. And Marjorie, his own wife, hadn’t had the slightest idea of how stirred he’d been by Laura, wild to take her to bed, to have her all for himself, to watch her forever, to track down and discover what it was in her nature that led her to such thrilling displays of temperament, those scenes that had so disgusted Marjorie, that had so exhilarated him. Later, Laura had told him that Ed had known all along that Desmond was mad to get her, and how he’d laughed at Desmond. Desmond knew they’d both laughed. He’d never forgive them that.

He’d known, too, they had a child somewhere, living with the grandmother in Cuba, known the child wouldn’t be a problem for him. Laura wasn’t anybody’s mother. Not like Marjorie, clamping her jaw shut, buttoning up Ellen’s jacket, saying, “I don’t want my child within a thousand miles of that Spanish bitch!” And that hadn’t been much of a problem either. He felt in his pocket suddenly. Where the hell had he put Ellen’s letter? He always answered her letters. Laura didn’t know that. He usually managed to get to the mail before she did, but he’d slipped up this time. He’d send the girl a postcard from Rabat. He might even speak to Peter privately about helping her get a job in publishing. He supposed she had ambitions – silly illusions about literature – an ordinary lawyer’s office not being up to Marjorie’s expectations for “my child!” Desmond said aloud, “Damned right!”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Clara had come over to him and was looking distractedly at the ice bucket, the bottles.

“Oh, you know …” Desmond said thickly, “the ice … they never bring enough of it … damned hotels.”

Clara poured some scotch into her glass. “I don’t care about ice.”

“That’s right.”

“Your ship must be getting all wet in this rain – the decks, the portholes blurred. When it rains like this, I get the feeling that travel is an illusion. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, now …”

“It’s hard to imagine there’s a place where it isn’t raining, do you see?”

I am the only sensible person in this place, he thought, and frowned at her, as though to bring her to her senses. What was she looking so apologetic about? Then, abruptly, Clara left him. Had he told her to shut up? He’d thought it, but God! had he said it?

The cartoon Clara had gone to look for had disappeared from the bedside table. Had Laura chewed it up and swallowed it? If it had been there, she could have remarked upon it and so begun a new conversation with her mother, one that would release her, for the moment, from the mortification of her lie about the dress. Her squalid lie; the peculiar look of prophecy on her mother’s face, what was she to make of it?

Her dress was hot against her skin. Peter Rice glanced at her; an impersonal smile touched his lips. She felt she was about to faint, to fall, not from drink or from the warmth of the room, but from a powerful recollection that swept over her so that she seemed to feel the flesh, the limbs, of her lover, Harry Dana, pressing her down, holding her down, the hateful dress abandoned in the corner where she’d dropped it.

She was suddenly aware of a curious odor. It was, she recalled, that hair treatment her mother used, a kind of tar to rid herself of some minor scalp trouble. She had not realized until that instant that she must have been moving closer and closer to Laura. What an awful haircut she’d gotten herself! Clara sniffed discreetly. There it was again, a black, marshy smell, a touch of petroleum, an ancient ooze, the true elements of that Spanish blood, sangre pura, not a scalp treatment at all! Pure blood! The Spaniards had consumed whole populations of Indians, of Arabs, of black Moors, of Jews. God, how she would like to have been present when her father had said to Laura, “You know, of course, that you’re Sephardic, my queen, don’t you?” At least, so he had told Clara, swearing he’d said it. And he’d shown Clara a little tintype he had stolen from Laura, a photograph of Laura’s father, her own grandfather long dead before she’d been born, a handsome, swarthy, small man dressed in gypsy costume for the sitting, a swaggering, sporty little cock in a rakish caballero hat. “From Cadiz,” Ed had said, “never to be mentioned in front of your Uncle Eugenio!”

As if she would have mentioned anything to Uncle Eugenio, his own father or his own shoelaces! For there was a man whom “pure blood” had driven crazy, who carried, rolled up in his pocket, photocopies of pages of coats of arms he’d found in genealogical encyclopedias in the library. It was said that Eugenio never touched anyone’s hand – fear of contamination, perhaps. Once, when he’d stayed at Alma’s old apartment, sleeping on the studio couch among the rattletrap furnishings of the living room, Clara had heard him scream in the middle of the night like a horse pitched onto barbed wire. And once he had kicked a hole in the plaster of the wall, waking to find his foot covered with blood. Alma had pasted over the hole a picture of an ape she had found in a copy of Life magazine.

“For God’s sake! The dresses are falling again! Put them away, will you, Laura?” Desmond said irritably. Laura made a comic face and grinned. Her good humor was holding, Clara assured herself as Laura hung the dresses in a closet. Each passing moment was bringing them all closer to the safety of the restaurant. As Laura had remarked about herself, she didn’t misbehave in public the way she used to in the old days.

“What are you doing, Clara? Did I hear you mention public relations?” Peter inquired.

“That shit!” exploded Desmond. Then, his eyes on his wife, he said, as though in apology, “Well, everybody knows it’s– ”

Laura covered her eyes with the palms of her hands. “What everybody knows,” she intoned dramatically, “is that my husband is tipsy, having provided himself with a few little extras over there in his corner.” Her hands flew away; her eyes sparkled; her amiability distracted them from the steaming expletive, the intrusive pure ugliness of it. Saved – although from what, Clara couldn’t think – they looked at her expectantly. “Tell us about it, Clara,” Laura said.

She told them what she thought would amuse them, but kept herself out of it. She feared, without knowing why, that the weight of one word of personal feeling would sink them all. And her throat tightened at Carlos’s faint sigh, when she saw her mother gazing fixedly at her own hands and Peter Rice staring blankly at a telephone directory. She described the agency code system for client meetings where account executives alerted each other to unconscious personal habits by one or two or three discreet raps on the conference table. “We have a scratcher in the office,” she said. “But when he hears three raps, he jumps like a stung rabbit and folds his hands.”

They did laugh then, all except Desmond. He didn’t care what they were going on about now. Had he made that reservation at the restaurant? It was one thing he prided himself on, his efficiency in making arrangements. He looked at Laura; she was very handsome, sitting there on the bed. Handsome, heavy, wanton, he thought half-dreaming – like some large animal bogged down in its own heat and weight.

“‘Time is ever fleeting,’” sang Peter Rice. “What on earth? Where did that come from? Clara, you’ve described your agency perfectly. Appalling. Are you interested in publishing? It’s not much better but its style is somewhat more– ” and he shrugged and lit a cigarette.

Like a large animal, crooned Desmond to himself, in a fen, its hide muddied, matted, beshitted, the rank smell of dead leaves –

“Desmond?” his name, so softly spoken, nearly a whisper. He felt a sharp pain in his bowels. Laura could not possibly know what he’d been thinking, yet it came to him that she knew something about him, this minute, which, if she chose to reveal it, would mortify him. He knew that flat-eyed look of hers, that whisper! He poured a large drink into his glass and held it up so she could damn well see it. He deserved better after Marjorie, after those years with her and that child, Ellen, Ellen Clapper, writing him stupid letters – Laura saw how stupid. Then he understood! All that Laura knew was that he had, perhaps, taken a bit too much to drink.

“Desmond. What time is the reservation for?”

“Seven-thirty,” he said. How small everyone’s head looked! He shook his own head to clear his vision. But it wouldn’t come right.

“You didn’t!”

“Well – what’s wrong, for God’s sake …”

“But, my dear! Dan is calling then, about Lucy, to tell us how she is!”

“Why don’t you call Dan, then?”

“It would insult him. He’d think I didn’t trust him.”

“Who’s Lucy?” asked Carlos with a look of distaste; it would be disagreeable if his sister and her husband started quarreling now, with so many hours still to be endured.

“Their dog,” whispered Clara. “That old terrier.”

“I thought Dan was the dog,” Carlos said.

“Listen, if he calls on time – it’ll only take a second. And we don’t have to be in the restaurant on the dot,” protested Desmond.

Laura looked at him affectionately. “Old muddled brains,” she said, smiling.

“The thing about being in publishing,” began Peter, “is that you must seem to be interested in art but imprisoned in a system that only values money. The superior chic, of course, is to appear interested only in money.”

“How disgusting,” said Carlos languidly.

“The dog is all right!” Desmond suddenly shouted. “I don’t see what’s wrong with the reservation.” He fell silent, then looked truculently at Peter. “What are you carrying on about?” he asked gruffly. “So what else is new about American publishing? About artistes and their old nannies?”

Laura jumped off the bed and walked over to her husband. “What dog, darling? That was hours ago … Have you been drinking a little?” She pinched his chin and turned to wink at the others as though to invite them to share the joke. Everyone was aware that Desmond had called Peter Rice an old nanny. Clara, ashamed of the relief she felt at not being the cause of the somber, thorny silence which followed Laura’s words, watched Peter covertly. His eyes were cast down, his hands clasped. He glanced up at her. “Culture makes one bitter,” he said in such a low voice she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

Now Laura was speaking rapidly but inaudibly to Desmond, in whose expression petulance warred with a peculiar gratification. “I won’t. I’ll stop,” he suddenly said clearly. Laura turned to the others. “Are you all starving?”

Clara asserted quickly that she was not. “I’m going to be starving any minute,” said Carlos. But Peter was silent. He lifted up a plastic-covered card from the table. “The hotel has its own jeweler,” he said.

“An vy not?” asked Laura with what she apparently imagined was a Jewish accent. Clara started guiltily as though she’d been caught out by all the Jews she knew consorting with this anti-Semite.

“I have to order up my diamonts,” Laura cried. “After all, I trow avay my old vones!”