The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox
“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.”
“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!