Paula Fox – The Widow’s Children (страница 2)

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.”