The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox

       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