The Widow’s Children

“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– ”