The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox

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СКАЧАТЬ as though a sober ventriloquist had taken charge of his voice.

      “I haven’t either,” said Carlos.

      A minor impasse, a trivial lapse in someone’s memory – it happened in conversation often enough. But not to be followed by such a stony silence as this. They had all been stopped cold. On Peter Rice’s face, Clara saw a reflection of her own malaise. Carlos had gone blank. Desmond swayed as though his balance was giving way.

      Yet Laura could be contradicted. Clara had seen her charmed by disputation, bend upon it the playful intensity she gave to riddles and puzzles. Why was she staring at the wall with such a tragic look? Her limbs stiff as though convulsed? What had happened now?

      The guests had gathered to bid the travelers farewell. They had managed to keep things going – the trip, Carlos’s laziness, bird imitations, Clara’s looks – prodding and pulling words out of themselves as though urging a sluggish beast into its cage, and now it was out, this beast, menacing them with a suddenly awakened appetite. What meat would satisfy it? Clara imagined herself uttering a groan, a loud exclamation. But not at family gatherings any more than on ordinary social occasions did people burst forth into the mad, disconnected fragments of speech that might hold some tenuous consonance with what they were really thinking, feeling.

      Desmond, in slow motion, stumbled toward the bathroom. Then Peter, with an uneasy smile, spoke. “Well, dearie, if you’ve heard it all before, what haven’t you heard before? We all repeat stories about what we’ve loved or hated– ”

      Laura suddenly turned to them. She was smiling. Carlos began, very meditatively, to unwrap the cellophane from a cigar. Clara heard her own sigh and hoped no one else had.

      “I was going to say,” Peter went on, “that I saw the wickedest dance anyone ever dreamed up done by a little, thin girl of fourteen. On her knees, mind you, using her arms and shoulders– ”

      “Some poor child whore!” Clara interrupted shrilly, “forced to her knees by disgusting, primitive– ” and then startled by her own outburst, she fell silent.

      “Now, Clara,” said her mother tolerantly, “none of that talk. Nobody forces people to their knees except themselves …”

      Peter was looking at Clara with surprise. He had thought her a muted, oppressed young woman. As Laura’s daughter, what else could she have been? But the indignation he had heard in her voice, the faint glitter of hysteria – still, these reserved, brooding people were prone to take unconsidered swings at anything. They were like recluses who mistake a footfall for an invading army.

      “Were you in Rabat?” Carlos asked politely.

      “You must have been in your nappies!” exclaimed Laura. “It was just before the war, wasn’t it, Peter?”

      “Yes. I was in Rabat. And I was twenty, Laura, old enough. But primitive, Clara … I went to Quito last year during my vacation. An Indian girl used to come to do my laundry. That Jivaro profile of hers … I used to watch her iron my shirts. I loved her face. She would turn suddenly, and smile at me. The most radiant smile I ever saw! The men of her tribe had probably smiled at the missionaries like that before they hacked them up with machetes. And in Haiti, in Morocco, I’ve seen that sacred smile, ineffable, the way we must all have smiled once– ”

      “For God’s sake! What crap!” erupted Desmond crossly. He was standing next to the bathroom door, staring at the bottle of bourbon on the table. Had he already finished off half of it? But no one paid him any attention. They were watching Clara, who had risen to her feet. She was struggling to control a profound agitation; her lips trembled, she blinked, she gripped one hand with the other. Carlos hid himself in a great puff of cigar smoke.

      “Sacred, ineffable, tum-te-tum-te-tum,” mocked Laura loudly. “Do you like my smile, Peter? I’m a primitive.”

      Clara spoke, her voice tremulous. “What about the creatures that slink around this city, who kill without a flicker of pity? They smile too. Is that what you mean?”

      “How would you know, kiddo?” asked Desmond.

      Peter took hold of Clara’s hand. It was damp. Gradually, the fingers he was holding closed around his own. “I didn’t mean not human,” he said. “Really, I had something else in mind. Innocence … before the fall, all that …”

      He was very faintly repelled by the closeness, the intertwining of their fingers, their palms lightly sweating one against the other. Yet how unconsciously, how touchingly her hand had curled around his! But that was enough. He let go of her and stepped away. What had he roused up in her with his “primitive smile” routine? He was so used to his own set pieces that he didn’t even bother to listen to himself anymore. But this time, he’d done it. The girl looked on the verge of tears. He had simply been keeping the conversation moving along. He glanced quickly at Laura. And all at once it was borne in upon him powerfully that she was really the girl’s mother, that there was something here he had not known about before, had never speculated about, something singular.

      “You’re so passionate,” murmured Laura to Clara. She swung her legs off the bed, and the box of dresses tumbled to the floor. Clara went to pick them up, and as she replaced them on the foot of the bed, her mother gave her a broad, rather lewd, wink. Clara laughed and said impulsively, gratefully, “What pretty dresses they are!”

      Grinning, her mother fiddled with her sapphire ring then, suddenly, her hand shot out and she grasped the hem of Clara’s dress and turned it up. Sewn to the seam was a small white silk tag on which was printed the name, Christian Dior. Clara stood frozen as Laura’s fingers gradually released the cloth of her dress. What reasons would ever prevail against the implacable judgment she saw on Laura’s face, which was slowly, slowly turning from her to Peter Rice?

      “More drinks, all? Anyone?” Desmond was holding up a bottle. “Out of ice, darling. Shall I phone for more?” But no one answered him, and he was not surprised. He smiled to himself. He didn’t give a good goddamn for ice, for bored old Carlos sulking near the window like a moth-eaten bear, clutching his cigar – that sack of Spanish guts … dirty, lazy old queen. Christ! Didn’t he know there was a glob of chewing gum stuck to one of his shoes? If they were his shoes. You’d think he sold pencils in Times Square. Desmond didn’t give a goddamn, either, for all that frenzied jabbering going on between Laura and Peter Rice.

      He laughed aloud to think of what Laura would say about them all once they were gone, once she was alone with him, when he wouldn’t have to worry about what she was thinking, of how she was being reminded of the years before. As if he didn’t know that they talked about Ed Hansen the second he, Desmond, was out of sight! What else was there for them to talk about?

      Desmond had met Laura and Ed in Paris years ago, and he’d been dazzled by Ed at first, just like any other fool. Ed had just punched a Frenchman because Laura had said the man looked at her salaciously while the three of them were slowly rising in one of those hotel cage elevators, and he’d thought he would go out of his mind with laughter at Ed’s description of what had happened. “Hit him!” Laura had demanded, and Ed had! And then had picked the poor dazed son of a bitch up from the floor, and dragged him out into a corridor and covered him with some soiled sheets a chambermaid had left in a cart – so he wouldn’t catch his death of cold, Ed had said. That was when Laura was in her late thirties, and Desmond had thought she looked like a slightly bruised dahlia. And Marjorie, his own wife, hadn’t had the slightest idea of how stirred he’d been by Laura, wild to take her to bed, to have her all for himself, to watch her forever, to track down and discover what it was in her nature that led her to such thrilling displays СКАЧАТЬ