The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox
his foot covered with blood. Alma had pasted over the hole a picture of an ape she had found in a copy of Life magazine.
“For God’s sake! The dresses are falling again! Put them away, will you, Laura?” Desmond said irritably. Laura made a comic face and grinned. Her good humor was holding, Clara assured herself as Laura hung the dresses in a closet. Each passing moment was bringing them all closer to the safety of the restaurant. As Laura had remarked about herself, she didn’t misbehave in public the way she used to in the old days.
“What are you doing, Clara? Did I hear you mention public relations?” Peter inquired.
“That shit!” exploded Desmond. Then, his eyes on his wife, he said, as though in apology, “Well, everybody knows it’s– ”
Laura covered her eyes with the palms of her hands. “What everybody knows,” she intoned dramatically, “is that my husband is tipsy, having provided himself with a few little extras over there in his corner.” Her hands flew away; her eyes sparkled; her amiability distracted them from the steaming expletive, the intrusive pure ugliness of it. Saved – although from what, Clara couldn’t think – they looked at her expectantly. “Tell us about it, Clara,” Laura said.
She told them what she thought would amuse them, but kept herself out of it. She feared, without knowing why, that the weight of one word of personal feeling would sink them all. And her throat tightened at Carlos’s faint sigh, when she saw her mother gazing fixedly at her own hands and Peter Rice staring blankly at a telephone directory. She described the agency code system for client meetings where account executives alerted each other to unconscious personal habits by one or two or three discreet raps on the conference table. “We have a scratcher in the office,” she said. “But when he hears three raps, he jumps like a stung rabbit and folds his hands.”
They did laugh then, all except Desmond. He didn’t care what they were going on about now. Had he made that reservation at the restaurant? It was one thing he prided himself on, his efficiency in making arrangements. He looked at Laura; she was very handsome, sitting there on the bed. Handsome, heavy, wanton, he thought half-dreaming – like some large animal bogged down in its own heat and weight.
“‘Time is ever fleeting,’” sang Peter Rice. “What on earth? Where did that come from? Clara, you’ve described your agency perfectly. Appalling. Are you interested in publishing? It’s not much better but its style is somewhat more– ” and he shrugged and lit a cigarette.
Like a large animal, crooned Desmond to himself, in a fen, its hide muddied, matted, beshitted, the rank smell of dead leaves –
“Desmond?” his name, so softly spoken, nearly a whisper. He felt a sharp pain in his bowels. Laura could not possibly know what he’d been thinking, yet it came to him that she knew something about him, this minute, which, if she chose to reveal it, would mortify him. He knew that flat-eyed look of hers, that whisper! He poured a large drink into his glass and held it up so she could damn well see it. He deserved better after Marjorie, after those years with her and that child, Ellen, Ellen Clapper, writing him stupid letters – Laura saw how stupid. Then he understood! All that Laura knew was that he had, perhaps, taken a bit too much to drink.
“Desmond. What time is the reservation for?”
“Seven-thirty,” he said. How small everyone’s head looked! He shook his own head to clear his vision. But it wouldn’t come right.
“You didn’t!”
“Well – what’s wrong, for God’s sake …”
“But, my dear! Dan is calling then, about Lucy, to tell us how she is!”
“Why don’t you call Dan, then?”
“It would insult him. He’d think I didn’t trust him.”
“Who’s Lucy?” asked Carlos with a look of distaste; it would be disagreeable if his sister and her husband started quarreling now, with so many hours still to be endured.
“Their dog,” whispered Clara. “That old terrier.”
“I thought Dan was the dog,” Carlos said.
“Listen, if he calls on time – it’ll only take a second. And we don’t have to be in the restaurant on the dot,” protested Desmond.
Laura looked at him affectionately. “Old muddled brains,” she said, smiling.
“The thing about being in publishing,” began Peter, “is that you must seem to be interested in art but imprisoned in a system that only values money. The superior chic, of course, is to appear interested only in money.”
“How disgusting,” said Carlos languidly.
“The dog is all right!” Desmond suddenly shouted. “I don’t see what’s wrong with the reservation.” He fell silent, then looked truculently at Peter. “What are you carrying on about?” he asked gruffly. “So what else is new about American publishing? About artistes and their old nannies?”
Laura jumped off the bed and walked over to her husband. “What dog, darling? That was hours ago … Have you been drinking a little?” She pinched his chin and turned to wink at the others as though to invite them to share the joke. Everyone was aware that Desmond had called Peter Rice an old nanny. Clara, ashamed of the relief she felt at not being the cause of the somber, thorny silence which followed Laura’s words, watched Peter covertly. His eyes were cast down, his hands clasped. He glanced up at her. “Culture makes one bitter,” he said in such a low voice she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
Now Laura was speaking rapidly but inaudibly to Desmond, in whose expression petulance warred with a peculiar gratification. “I won’t. I’ll stop,” he suddenly said clearly. Laura turned to the others. “Are you all starving?”
Clara asserted quickly that she was not. “I’m going to be starving any minute,” said Carlos. But Peter was silent. He lifted up a plastic-covered card from the table. “The hotel has its own jeweler,” he said.
“An vy not?” asked Laura with what she apparently imagined was a Jewish accent. Clara started guiltily as though she’d been caught out by all the Jews she knew consorting with this anti-Semite.
“I have to order up my diamonts,” Laura cried. “After all, I trow avay my old vones!”
“That old joke …” said Peter. “I’m ashamed of you, Laura.”
“Well, my dear, my daughter doesn’t bring me any new ones anymore.”
Clara winced. She and Alma, dropping their jokes and cartoons over the rim of the volcano, seemed alike in their similar persuasion that this woman, this link between them, must be propitiated, that she was not a point in a continuing line of human descent but the apex of a triangle. Her heart beat painfully – it was not that she had ever given much thought to having children, but she felt as though she’d suddenly gotten news that she couldn’t have any, that the geometric fancy which had taken hold of her imagination – she could see the iron triangle as clearly as she could see the hotel telephone – was the shape of her fate.
But how did Laura behave with Alma? She couldn’t recall much from the few times she had seen them together. They spoke Spanish. Clara, who had always addressed her mother as Laura, had been oddly thrilled to hear Laura say, “Mamá.” She had observed how, in those scattered encounters among the years of absence, Laura had shown toward her mother an almost commanding protectiveness, and when Alma’s sighs and exclamations of pleasure began gradually to subside, and after a brief interlude during which the old woman gave her daughter news of her life, extracting from her money-troubled days the little sidelights she thought would appeal to Laura’s sense of irony, might even evoke her admiration for Alma’s high spirits in dreary circumstances, the pretend life would suddenly collapse. Tears streaming down her face, she would cry out that she had been “abandonada” by everyone, resisting all effort to comfort her until that point when Laura seized her hands and said, “Now, Mamá. We’ll