Читать книгу The Widow’s Children - Paula Fox - Страница 5

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!”

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.

“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!”

“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