The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox

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СКАЧАТЬ – 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 have no more of this!” Alma, the old child of her own daughter, would smile again, somewhat piteously … Sometimes, Laura had left a few dollars in her hands. She had “swiped” them from Ed, she would say. When she left – no one knew when she would reappear – there would be between the grandmother and her granddaughter a shocked, bereaved silence as though someone had died.

      Both Alma and Clara, like foreigners who practice a new language, especially its idioms, had adopted Laura’s characterization of the Hansens’ nearly unchanging financial state. It was called being “broke.” The child Clara sensed in that word its inherent promise: Being broke was a condition subject to sudden dramatic reversal. That the reversal never came, that year after year, coming home from school and hanging up her threadbare winter coat in the closet, she could see her grandmother’s one pair of “good” shoes grow shabbier and shabbier, could not dislodge from her mind the thrilling expectation that money would come, that there would be a great festival of money. But, in the midst of her life, Clara knew they were poor, among the poorest in their corner of Brooklyn. Yet she was haunted by that contrary possibility, that they were only “broke,” that rescue was on the way – always on the way.

      Alma had had an income, although very small, from relatives in Cuba, and Carlos contributed a few dollars now and then. Otherwise, how would they have lived?

      “I don’t hear jokes anymore,” she said to Laura, but her voice cracked suddenly with an effort to conceal a spurt of anger. “Broke!” she wanted to shout, “you sons of bitches, what do you know?”

      She was frightened. She got up and walked over to the window. What was the matter with her? What would be the use of breaking off her tenuous connection with Laura now? Nothing to be gained; nothing, even, to be lost. She was no longer at the mercy of adults. She was one herself, buying her own clothes, paying her own rent. It was Alma who was still dependent on Laura’s mercy – whatever that was! She wondered if her grandmother knew that Laura had tried to get city aid to pay for the cost of the home for the elderly? She knew because Laura had told her, describing how the investigators had discovered that Desmond and Carlos and even Eugenio had “resources” which canceled out any claims they might imagine they had on public money. The woman investigator who had interviewed her had been scandalized, outraged, Laura reported without embarrassment or comment. Laura had merely observed that Carlos and Eugenio were “bums,” and that she couldn’t see how she could ask Desmond to carry their responsibility. But in the end, she had asked Desmond and he had agreed to provide the larger share of the money, and so, she had told Clara, each month they spent a fortune on telephone calls trying to hound the two brothers to pay something, anything, toward Alma’s expenses.

      Oh God! Why wouldn’t she go and visit her grandmother? Had she inherited that profound spiritual indolence of the Maldonadas?

      “Clara must make a new reservation for us, Desmond. Won’t you, Clara?”

      Her mother was looking at her archly. Clara nodded.

      “Ask СКАЧАТЬ