The Widow’s Children

CHAPTER ONE

Drinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clara, what will you have? Desmond asked.

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

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

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

Did you say soda or water? asked Desmond.

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

But I thought you said water, Laura said intently.

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

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

It was not Peter Rice but Carlos Maldonada.

Carlos!

Hello, darling, said Carlos.

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

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

Any new jokes? Carlos asked Clara.

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

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

The goddamned waiter forgot the vermouth … muttered Desmond.

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

I’ll forgive you, said Carlos to Clara. That last one! I’d forgive you anything for that! That was an obscene joke she must have told him over a year ago, the last time she’d seen him, while they were walking up Lexington Avenue. He had laughed until he had cried. She hadn’t thought the joke especially funny. But the laughter she’d brought up out of him – and not for the first time – had thrilled her; in the moment’s blaze of