Czytaj książkę: «The Widow’s Children»

CHAPTER ONE Drinks

Clara Hansen, poised upright in her underwear on the edge of a chair, was motionless. Soon she must turn on a light. Soon she must finish dressing. She would permit herself three more minutes in her darkening apartment in that state that was so nearly sleep. She turned to face a table on which sat a small alarm clock. At once, a painful agitation brought her to her feet. She would be late; buses were not reliable. She could not afford a taxi to take her to the hotel where her mother, Laura, and Laura’s husband, Desmond Clapper, were expecting her for drinks and dinner. In the morning, the Clappers were sailing away on a ship – this time, to Africa. They would be gone for months. Clara had managed to get away from the office where she worked a half hour early so she would have time enough. But it had been time enough to fall into a dream of nothingness.

Clara went quickly to her small bedroom where her dress lay across the bed. It was the best thing she owned. She was aware that as a rule she dressed defensively. But she had made a perverse choice for this evening. Laura would know the dress was expensive. The hell with it, she told herself, but felt only irresoluteness as the silk settled against her skin.

A few drops of rain slid down the windows as she passed through the living room. She turned on a light to come home to, and for a brief moment, it seemed the evening was already over, that she had returned, consoled by the knowledge that once Laura was gone, she hardly need think of her. After all, the occasions of their meetings were so rare.

It was early April and still cold, but Clara put on a light raincoat. It was shabby and soiled, but it suited some intention – a repudiation of the dress – of which Clara was only remotely aware.

Clara’s uncle, Carlos, would be there. And Laura had said on the phone that an editor friend was coming along for this farewell evening. Clara had met him once long ago; she did not think anything about him. As she walked along the street, she saw a bus coming and she hastened toward the stop. She felt at once, as though her hurrying feet had brought it on, a distressed excitement, the mood in which she always entered her mother’s territory.

A dozen blocks south from Clara’s apartment house, in an old brownstone off Lexington Avenue, Carlos Maldonada, Laura’s brother, stood next to his sink holding a wizened lemon in his hand. He didn’t especially want the vodka he had poured out for himself. He dropped the lemon which fell into the sink and lodged among the dirty dishes, then wandered off to his closet. Without bothering to look, he took a jacket from out of the musty dark and put it on.

He started toward the telephone. He could tell Laura he had tripped on a curb and hurt his ankle. It would have to be a detailed story – what he had slipped on, the passerby who had helped him, the degree of swelling, how he’d managed to get back to his apartment, the hours soaking the ankle in a basin – he didn’t have a basin – the pain-killers he’d taken.

“You damned wicked old liar!” he said, imitating Laura’s voice exactly, and laughed to hear his words in the dusty, cluttered room. He found his beret and a coat, swallowed the vodka on his way past the kitchen counter, and hurried down the stairs to the sidewalk where a taxi drew up just as he raised his arm. But once he was slumped on the cracked vinyl seat, his feet among wet cigarette butts, Carlos’s energy faltered. He gave the address of the Clappers’ hotel in a dispirited voice and did not respond to the cab-driver’s remarks, even though he was a young cabdriver and very good-looking.

The Clappers’ third guest, Peter Rice, was still in his office. With a red pencil, he checked his name in a list of editors on a memo attached to an English magazine. He had not looked at it; he didn’t read magazines of any kind anymore. His secretary, her coat draped around her shoulders, brought him the package of books he had requested. He signed a slip, smiled, thanked her, wished her a pleasant weekend, saw from his window a tugboat on the East River far below, and regretted, as he noticed the rain beginning to fall, that he had not brought his umbrella with him in the morning. It was only a formal regret; he didn’t pay attention to weather in the city.

He hadn’t seen Laura for a year. They spoke on the phone from time to time. It was Laura who called him from the Clapper farm in Pennsylvania. No one else telephoned him late in the evening, so when the phone rang, he always picked it up with a start of pleasure, knowing it would be she. This last year all her conversations had begun in despair and drama – lurid tales of Desmond’s drinking. But after a while she would grow calm, and they would speak together as they always had.

He reached for his hat. In the corridor a woman laughed. He heard footsteps going toward the elevators. The tugboat had disappeared from view. He turned off his desk lamp. The watery half-light of dusk flooded into his office but did not dim the shining jackets of the books lined up on the shelves. A worrying sense that a day had passed without leaving a mark kept him standing there, feeling lifeless. Then he thought of Laura. He picked up the package of books and left.

In the hotel bathroom, Desmond Clapper was staring at his reddening fingers as the tap water poured over them. The rush of water did not quite drown out Laura’s voice. In a moment, he would have to go into the bedroom to her. He turned the taps off, then on again.

“Tell me about the dignity of leopards! Of cockroaches! But don’t tell me about the dignity of man! How dare anybody stop anybody from going anyplace in the goddamned world? I was nearly in the restaurant when I saw you on the other side of that picket line, looking foolish, while those waiters scuttled back and forth between us mumbling about their grievances …”

Desmond ground his teeth. She was still sore about lunch. He couldn’t help what had happened. The strikers had cursed him every time he took a step toward Laura. He listened. Then she started up again. But her voice seemed nearer. Could she be standing on the other side of the door?

“Desmond? Desmond! How could you have cared about crossing that picket line? Don’t you know what waiters earn in a place like that? And – my God! Who has dignity in this life? It’s only money they want … treat me like a man … throw me another dime! Do you remember those beggars in Madrid wheeled to the churches in carts by their children? And they shook their stumps at us and laughed? That was dignity! Desmond? We’d been looking forward so long to that lunch, and you grabbed me and forced me away. One of them had a sign that spelled support with one p. Did you notice that? Christ! I would have brought out a plate and eaten in front of them! The insolence! The stupidity! And the bookshop, that awful female clerk with her dirty fingernails, the wire of her brassiere sticking out through her shirt … and she corrected me. You must have known, all these years, that I mispronounced cupola. Why didn’t you ever tell me? You know what a horror I have of mispronouncing English words. And she didn’t exert herself to help us, pretending they had no new English detective stories in stock. You ought to call the manager of that place … letting people like that bully customers … letting them take out their frustrations on others. I asked her if she needed to use a toilet. Did you hear me ask her? I spoke quietly, which maddens such people. To think I’ve been saying cupulow all these years and no one said a word until that woman. I’m so jumpy! I think this drink will help. Desmond. I know I’m on a little rampage. Did you hear that? I know it. I’m not excusing myself. That’s not the Spanish way. It’s you Anglos who specialize in piety. I never justify myself. Do I, Desmond? I’m not a Jew, after all. How I loathe self-pity! That brother of mine, that Carlos, has such a sentimental regard for his troubles – and oh, how he abandons us all, even my poor mother who prefers him to me and Eugenio. Desmond? If we could only leave without a word to a soul. When I called Clara, she told me she’d had a cold, with such a dying fall in her voice, and then showed how brave she was, saying, of course she wanted to see us before we sailed. If we could only just leave! Now! Cross the gang-plank in the dark, slip into our cabin. The steward would bring us tea and biscuits, the ship would sail at midnight, no bands, no waving. God! Those awful waiters … I suppose they have dank lives, going home in the early morning hours on subways, too exhausted to add up their tips, carrying trays into their dreams … and that wretched clerk, no one bothering to tell her about her brassiere, no one to care about her breasts, after all. Look at the time! They’ll all be here soon. I won’t mind Peter. He understands an occasion, poor bastard. He and I, we’ve had over thirty years of occasions. My oldest friend … my only friend. Thank heaven I couldn’t reach Eugenio. I can just imagine where he is, in the lair of some old woman secretly counting the real pearls around her throat, inflaming himself with the knowledge of how our family has fallen … fallen …”

Now the rain began all at once as though flung at the hotel windows and on the black avenue eight stories below. Laura, looking down, could see wipers whipping across the windshields of the cars that filled the street, and the color of the traffic lights which ran in the rain, and the gleaming surface of the macadam awash with the violence of the downpour. She lit a cigarette, then swallowed some of her drink to moisten her dry mouth. She shuddered so that even her legs trembled with the force of the spasm. Almost at once, she pretended to wonder if there had been an earthquake, if New York City was tumbling down, the hotel crumbling beneath her, pretending that her convulsion had been visited upon her by an outside force and was not what it must be, evidence of a prodigious fact she had concealed throughout her harangue, during which, she knew, Desmond had been turning the faucets on and off to drown out her voice.

This fact was the news she had received when the Clappers had returned to the hotel from their final shopping for the trip. The news was that her mother, Alma, had died in midafternoon in a home for the elderly where she had been living for the past two years. Laura had turned to Desmond, even smiling when he asked her who was on the telephone, replying it was Clara asking directions to the hotel, would he unwrap the liquor bottles now? Then, returning to the official gravity of the voice at the other end of the wire, certification of death, it was saying, given by the chief doctor on the staff – heart failed … quiet death – asking about burial arrangements, and Laura had called to Desmond, “Get me some aspirin, darling,” and had said hurriedly into the phone, “Tomorrow? Can it be tomorrow? Whatever funeral people you use … yes … but we have a plot, my husband arranged that with you two years ago … on Long Island,” and Desmond had come back and handed her two aspirin, and she had said into the phone, “Goodbye, I’ll call you in the morning,” and Desmond had said, “Call Clara? But she’s coming here tonight, isn’t she?”

She hadn’t been able to answer but he didn’t press her; she could always count on Desmond’s short interest span. Her mind had been empty of thought; she had known only that something implacable had taken hold of her. And she had felt a half-crazed pleasure and an impulse to shout that she knew and possessed this thing that no one else knew, this consequential fact, hard and real among the soft accumulations of meaningless events of which their planned trip to Africa was one other, to be experienced only through its arrangements, itinerary, packing, acquisition of medicines for intestinal upsets, books to read, clock, soap, passports, this husk of action surrounding the motionless center of their existence together.

Was Desmond drinking by himself in the bathroom? Getting in a few surreptitious swallows before the matron caught up with him? In a surge of fury at his cheating, his cowardice in appointing her the matron, she dropped her glass on the radiator against which it broke into several large pieces and fell to the carpet. Desmond appeared at once in the bathroom door, drying his hands with exaggerated care. She smiled, feeling a faint sweat on her upper lip. “Did you give the waiter a tip when he brought the ice? Oh, I dropped my glass.”

“Darling, yes,” he said. “Dropped your glass? I’ll clean it up.” He noticed a large smudge on her forehead and brushed at it with the edge of the towel, glancing past her at the window where, he guessed, she’d been leaning. “It’s raining,” he said. She laughed. “You couldn’t have heard the rain over all that racket you were making in there,” she said.

He smiled back, relieved at the composure of her voice. And he had listened to the part about going to the ship tonight. He would certainly have liked that instead of the wearisome and dangerous evening ahead. There was already broken glass – even if it was the result of an accident. Leopards, waiters, Jews, she wouldn’t have gone on so if her damned relatives weren’t coming. He watched her fold the towel she’d taken from him and then look into the mirror on the wall above the chest of drawers. She’d had her hair done that morning; it was piled on top of her head. It was so gray! It continued to surprise him, that middle-aged woman’s hair. “What disgusting ringlets,” she said, her mirror eyes staring into his. He didn’t care for that stare, and he thought, I’ll have a drink now. But as he started toward the table where the bottles and glasses were, he heard a tentative knock on the door, and he went to it and opened it.

“I’m the first?” asked Clara Hansen, looking straight past Desmond at her mother. His wasted smile lingered around his lips.

“Hello,” said Laura, bringing up the greeting from the deepest reach of her voice, a plangent, thrilling annunciation to which, Clara knew, no response would measure up, felt with a sinking heart that her own “hello” would weigh less than dust on such a scale of tonal drama, and so only held out her hand. Her mother gripped her fingers strongly for an instant, then withdrew her hand to a cigarette.

“Doesn’t she look marvelous!” exclaimed Laura. “Don’t men attack you on the street?”

“Clara, what will you have?” Desmond asked.

“Oh, Scotch,” she said. “If you have it, and soda,” and kept her gaze on Desmond. Once they began to talk, she and Laura, it would be all right. It would do. These first moments were always harrowing, and she could not explain to herself the fright she felt, the conviction of peril.

She had not lived with Laura, or her father, Ed Hansen, not been under the same roof with her mother since that first parting twenty-nine years ago in a hospital delivery room. It was that, she told herself, it is because we never began and so must always start in the middle, a void forming just behind us. But this account of her relations with her mother, so exhilarating for a day, or an hour, did not hold. Between her and Laura there was no void but a presence, raw and bloodied. Laura had had four abortions before a fifth pregnancy which had gone undetected a month too long and had produced Clara. She had, she told herself, thieved her way into life.

“How are you, Miss?” Laura asked, perched now on the windowsill. “I wish you were coming with us. Don’t you wish she was, Desmond? What a good time we’d have! Desmond, she wanted water, not soda.”

“Did you say soda or water?” asked Desmond.

“Oh … either is fine,” Clara said, “whatever comes to hand.”

“But I thought you said water,” Laura said intently.

“Actually, I think I said soda, but it doesn’t matter. Really.”

“Gosh, are you sure, Clara? Oh Christ! That must be Peter. I had hoped the three of us could have some time alone together, but– ” and she went to open the door.

It was not Peter Rice but Carlos Maldonada.

“Carlos!”

“Hello, darling,” said Carlos.

“Look who’s here! Clara! Now, don’t start up, you two,” cried Laura gaily.

Carlos went directly to his niece and put his hand on her head and pressed his fingers upon her skull. She laughed immoderately.

“Any new jokes?” Carlos asked Clara.

“Oh, Carlos. My memory’s getting so bad for jokes– ”

“Her memory is getting bad!” exclaimed Laura, laughing. “At her age– ”

“The goddamned waiter forgot the vermouth …” muttered Desmond.

“My dizzy Desmond,” Laura murmured, “none of these gypsies would touch vermouth.”

“I’ll forgive you,” said Carlos to Clara. “That last one! I’d forgive you anything for that!” That was an obscene joke she must have told him over a year ago, the last time she’d seen him, while they were walking up Lexington Avenue. He had laughed until he had cried. She hadn’t thought the joke especially funny. But the laughter she’d brought up out of him – and not for the first time – had thrilled her; in the moment’s blaze of his response, she’d been warmed. Yet what jokes took the place of, with their abject mangling of the ways of carnal life, their special language more stumps than words, she could not fathom. She tried now to remember something about a woman and a doorknob, something sufficiently coarse to evoke those cries and roars from them that would let her off the hook of their expectation for a few minutes. But her mother began to speak. Clara sighed with relief and swallowed too much liquor.

Laura was saying, “Gibraltar only for a day … then, Malaga for a week, then to Morocco, and we’re actually ready to sail. We were ready– ” and she paused suddenly and looked around the room as though utterly bewildered, as though searching for what she had been about to say written on a wall or a lampshade or a box on a table. The other three, pausing, too, in their consumption of liquor and smoke, heard the sound of the rain. It beat against the hotel windows. Clara held her breath. Then Desmond said, “I won’t pay for that goddamned vermouth, of course …” And Laura, who’d given them all the impression of someone twisting and turning in a dream, resumed speaking.

“We were ready. Then Desmond got a letter from his daughter, little Ellen, Ellie Bellie – you must see that letter, Clara! What a little sham she is! She wants to see her Daddy, she said, wants to talk about her career in publishing – which hasn’t begun. Isn’t she a little old to be beginning, darling? But Desmond, you must have told her that Peter Rice might help her get a job. You did, didn’t you? You shouldn’t encourage her hopes, you know. She writes like a twelve-year-old, and she must be thirty now. Isn’t she? She’s certainly older than Clara.”

“Excuse me,” said Desmond, and went into the bathroom.

“He is the champion wee-wee maker of seven continents,” Laura remarked.

“I believe it’s six continents,” said Carlos.

“Thank God for your geographical lore, Carlos,” Laura laughed. She was sitting on one of the twin beds. Carlos stood just behind her. The two Spaniards looked at Clara. Beneath their scrutiny the pain she had felt at the mention of that other girl, whom she’d never met, who, like herself, was no longer a girl, began to fade as though exposed to an obliterating light. She had the impression of two eagles swooping toward her. Oh – let them turn away! Yet, they were neither beaked nor birdlike, not with those massive northern Spanish heads. But she was pinioned by their gaze, its force doubled by their physical similarity, the same deep-set eyes beneath massive lid folds, the same large noses. Although Laura was gray-haired and Carlos nearly bald, they had about them something black, “Spanish,” not quite human in the eyes above their smiling lips.

“You’re not sailing?” Clara asked uncertainly, “because of Ellen …?”

Laura laughed and shook her head as though in wonder at such a conclusion.

“Lovely legs,” Carlos murmured with a charming smile, looking down at his niece’s legs.

“And those hands,” said Laura, “like a Renaissance page boy’s. Oh! Look! She’s blushing!” She rose from the bed and went over to Clara and chucked her under the chin. Clara smiled helplessly at Carlos and silently cursed her blood-reddened face. But it was not modesty that made her blush; it was anger at the injustice of a compliment that could only wound her.

During her adolescent years, she had been taken by her grandmother, Alma, to meet a ship, a train, to sit an hour or two in a hotel room or a restaurant with that fierce-looking foreign woman, her mother. In those days, she had tripped over her own feet, broken glasses of ginger ale and babbled hopelessly, waiting for Laura to say she had grown tall, had filled out, might someday even be pretty. Instead Laura told her her legs were exactly like Josephine Baker’s, her round face like that of the boy in a Reynolds painting Laura had seen in London, that she had the look of a bacchante, and gathering up the fragments of glass she had broken – but the waiter always came so quickly, so grimly – hiding her gnawed fingernails beneath the napkin or the menu, trying, trying to shut her own damned mouth, she had gathered up, too, these descriptions of herself, this praise that left behind it a sense of insult and injury.

Now, she had Renaissance hands. She looked down at them covertly. One held a glass with a grip of stone. For an instant, and her heart leapt, she imagined herself standing, hurling the glass against the hotel windows. But the impulse vanished so quickly, she was hardly aware she had had it – only that her attention had wandered.

Laura was speaking of Ed Hansen, Clara’s father, but with somewhat less contempt than she affected when Desmond was around. He was still in the bathroom. “But Clara told me – didn’t you? – that Ed was awfully sick, not faking it this time, was it angina, Clara? And that Adelaide is trying to kick him out again. Is she tired of being the wonderful new wife? Or can’t she stand his art? My God, Carlos! Did I tell you that time a few years ago when Ed called me – drunk as a lord – and said he was throwing out his cameras and going back to painting. Of course, he hasn’t had to earn a living since he’s been married to an heiress. Well … he was telling me about this painting thing, and suddenly on the phone, long distance, too, he began to cry, he said his heart was so full, you see, about being so old and finding painting all over again after all those lousy years of keeping us fed, keeping the rain off, he said, with the photography, and he was actually sobbing. But you know – old men, you can give them a cracker or tell them about a volcano erupting in a place they’ve never been and they’ll cry just the way Ed was crying. He’s not serious, that is the truth about him. He never was. That’s why he was a good photographer.”

“But he’s not really an old man,” Clara said.

“I suppose not,” Laura replied, and looked at Carlos. “When did you see him last?” she asked.

“He – a few months ago, but he was drinking. I tried to make him eat something– ”

Laura burst into laughter. “Oh, Carlos, you trying to make someone eat something – in that dunghill of a kitchen … Darling! What did you give him? Coffee grounds and mouse droppings?”

“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!”