The Widow’s Children

“That old joke …” said Peter. “I’m ashamed of you, Laura.”

“Well, my dear, my daughter doesn’t bring me any new ones anymore.”

Clara winced. She and Alma, dropping their jokes and cartoons over the rim of the volcano, seemed alike in their similar persuasion that this woman, this link between them, must be propitiated, that she was not a point in a continuing line of human descent but the apex of a triangle. Her heart beat painfully – it was not that she had ever given much thought to having children, but she felt as though she’d suddenly gotten news that she couldn’t have any, that the geometric fancy which had taken hold of her imagination – she could see the iron triangle as clearly as she could see the hotel telephone – was the shape of her fate.

But how did Laura behave with Alma? She couldn’t recall much from the few times she had seen them together. They spoke Spanish. Clara, who had always addressed her mother as Laura, had been oddly thrilled to hear Laura say, “Mamá.” She had observed how, in those scattered encounters among the years of absence, Laura had shown toward her mother an almost commanding protectiveness, and when Alma’s sighs and exclamations of pleasure began gradually to subside, and after a brief interlude during which the old woman gave her daughter news of her life, extracting from her money-troubled days the little sidelights she thought would appeal to Laura’s sense of irony, might even evoke her admiration for Alma’s high spirits in dreary circumstances, the pretend life would suddenly collapse. Tears streaming down her face, she would cry out that she had been “abandonada” by everyone, resisting all effort to comfort her until that point when Laura seized her hands and said, “Now, Mamá. We’ll have no more of this!” Alma, the old child of her own daughter, would smile again, somewhat piteously … Sometimes, Laura had left a few dollars in her hands. She had “swiped” them from Ed, she would say. When she left – no one knew when she would reappear – there would be between the grandmother and her granddaughter a shocked, bereaved silence as though someone had died.

Both Alma and Clara, like foreigners who practice a new language, especially its idioms, had adopted Laura’s characterization of the Hansens’ nearly unchanging financial state. It was called being “broke.” The child Clara sensed in that word its inherent promise: Being broke was a condition subject to sudden dramatic reversal. That the reversal never came, that year after year, coming home from school and hanging up her threadbare winter coat in the closet, she could see her grandmother’s one pair of “good” shoes grow shabbier and shabbier, could not dislodge from her mind the thrilling expectation that money would come, that there would be a great festival of money. But, in the midst of her life, Clara knew they were poor, among the poorest in their corner of Brooklyn. Yet she was haunted by that contrary possibility, that they were only “broke,” that rescue was on the way – always on the way.

Alma had had an income, although very small, from relatives in Cuba, and Carlos contributed a few dollars now and then. Otherwise, how would they have lived?

“I don’t hear jokes anymore,” she said to Laura, but her voice cracked suddenly with an effort to conceal a spurt of anger. “Broke!” she wanted to shout, “you sons of bitches, what do you know?”

She was frightened. She got up and walked over to the window. What was the matter with her? What would be the use of breaking off her tenuous connection with Laura now? Nothing to be gained; nothing, even, to be lost. She was no longer at the mercy of adults. She was one herself, buying her own clothes, paying her own rent. It was Alma who was still dependent on Laura’s mercy – whatever that was! She wondered if her grandmother knew that Laura had tried to get city aid to pay for the cost of the home for the elderly? She knew because Laura had told her, describing how the investigators had discovered that Desmond and Carlos and even Eugenio had “resources” which canceled out any claims they might imagine they had on public money. The woman investigator who had interviewed her had been scandalized, outraged, Laura reported without embarrassment or comment. Laura had merely observed that Carlos and Eugenio were “bums,” and that she couldn’t see how she could ask Desmond to carry their responsibility. But in the end, she had asked Desmond and he had agreed to provide the larger share of the money, and so, she had told Clara, each month they spent a fortune on telephone calls trying to hound the two brothers to pay something, anything, toward Alma’s expenses.

Oh God! Why wouldn’t she go and visit her grandmother? Had she inherited that profound spiritual indolence of the Maldonadas?

“Clara must make a new reservation for us, Desmond. Won’t you, Clara?”

Her mother was looking at her archly. Clara nodded.

“Ask the operator to get the number for you,” Laura directed.

“She doesn’t have to call,” Desmond protested.

Laura appeared not to have heard him. She was studying her ankles, turning them this way and that. Peter Rice was preoccupied with fitting himself into a small boudoir chair. Desmond’s heavy breathing was audible in the silence – he sounded like a horse, a few stalls away, breathing evenly in the blankness of the night.

When Laura looked up, she seemed unaware of Peter’s fidgeting, of Carlos brushing cigar ashes from the coverlet of the other bed where he had spilled them. She stared at Desmond as though they were alone. Clara had the startling impression that her mother’s eye sockets were empty, were like mouths, opening to scream. The heavy lids dropped suddenly. “If Eugenio were here, that would be all of us,” she said to no one in particular.

Conversation began at once, although to Clara’s question about how long they would be in Africa, Desmond hesitated so long, she wondered if he knew what she was asking him.

“Why do they always do it?” Peter Rice asked, rubbing the fabric of the chair with one finger.

“Do what?” Laura asked.

“So pretentious, this fabric. Fake brocade, isn’t it? Why not be plain? Why not a plain, decent chair? Why is music played in elevators? And what music! And those revolting gold tassels on airline menus, and what are those designs stamped on your bedspreads? Coats of arms, no less! I mean– ”

“Peter,” Laura said. “Don’t waste your nerves on trivia. The world is wrecked, my dears. There’s no point at all in being sniffy about the corpse’s low taste in winding sheets.”

“I was only babbling,” Peter said defensively.

“Have you seen my mother recently?” Carlos asked Laura. He had been silent for some time, and now his voice was formal and chilled as though, during that time of silence, he had broken off his connections with everyone in the room. He was already turning away from his sister; his interest in her answer seemed negligible.

“My mother.” That is how each of her children referred to Alma. They shut each other out, Clara thought. She hoped the subject of Alma would not engage them for long. Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs. She felt the imminence of an attack against her. But there was no defense except the confession that she could not bring herself to visit the old woman. She cast a furtive glance at Laura.

They were all staring at Laura. She had clasped her drink to her forehead frantically as though an ache there must be pressed away. Her eyes were closed. In the tension of her raised arms, the loosened curls tumbling forward, legs lifting toward her stomach, one shoe beginning to slip from a foot, she was like the personification of calamity.

Desmond cried out incoherently, Peter stood up, Carlos backed away toward the windows, and Clara, remembering a glass of whiskey hurled at her by Laura so many years before she could not recall the place, only the arc of the glass, crouched in her chair.

The legs came down, the foot found the fallen shoe and inserted itself, the drink was held out to be appraised by the now wide-open eyes, and Laura grinned at them like a rogue.

“Your mother?” she asked lightly of Carlos. “You rascal! I drove all the way up from the farm last week to see your mother, and you, you wretch, live fifteen minutes from the home and haven’t been for a month. Isn’t he a rascal, Peter? Her very favorite, too! Even – even Eugenio went! Although I heard he stayed just long enough to taunt her with the details of some dinner party he crashed into. You know, Peter, don’t you, how Eugenio treats my mother? When he used to stay at the apartment, months sometimes when he had no money, he’d tell her about his dinner parties. He can’t bear to touch anybody – I suppose you must have noticed that, Clara – he always stands at least ten feet away from other human bodies. Isn’t it funny he should be running a travel agency and sending people away all the time? But I started to say – that he used to torment Mamá about the meals he was served in grand houses, as though it was her fault she didn’t live in a grand house with servants to take care of him properly!”

Uncle Eugenio had once said to Clara, “My mother was so beautiful when she used to take care of herself.” And when Clara was older, though no less ill at ease in Eugenio’s presence, he confided to her that it was the childishness in his mother’s character, “fatal childishness,” he had said, that had brought the family so low. Did he, Clara wondered, hold his mother responsible too for the Spanish-American War which had dislodged the Maldonadas’ grip on their Cuban holdings? But he never spoke of such things, wars, depressions, the state of the world, seeming as unaware, Clara thought, as her mother and Carlos of the existences beyond the rain-blurred windows which impinged upon their own. Those two, like their brother, were interested in what was singular, aberrant. But was there anybody, she asked herself, who thought

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