The Widow’s Children

“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!”