“You don’t, do you?” her mother said, staring at Clara, her eyes widening. “Well, how is he, apart from dying? When did you see him last, Clara?”
“Oh, it was months ago. But I spoke to him on the phone,” Clara replied, then added hastily. “I phoned, to see how he was. And that last time I saw him, he wasn’t sober. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing … he gave me an old pocket watch of his, then the next morning, he called me and asked for it back.”
“He was staying with me,” Carlos said with a touch of defiance. “He was ashamed about the watch, Clarita.”
“God! Isn’t that typical!” said Laura. “And Clara, of course, gave it back. But tell me, how is Adelaide, the Queen of Pathos? You didn’t know her well, Carlos. Or did you? My God! You never saw a woman so hell-bent on finding people to torment her. And when she does, how she bears up! And then, a brave tear, a simple statement to her admirers – ’It’s all my fault’ – isn’t that so, Clara? Clara knows her, don’t you, Missy?”
But Clara was spared the discomfort of replying by Desmond’s emergence from the bathroom. Ed Hansen was not to be mentioned in Desmond’s presence. Laura had reported to her brother and daughter that he was subject to terrible attacks of jealousy; he was demented, really, on the subject of Ed, so much so, Laura claimed, that he refused to speak to anyone named Edwin or Edmund or Edward.
“Golly, I wonder where Peter is?” her mother said.
Clara went into the bathroom, thinking, gosh, golly, gee, and why did Carlos and Laura use comic strip words? Who were they condescending to? The United States? Who were the Maldonadas? Immigrants, irate dependents permanently displaced by their own ceaseless effort to maintain a fiction of their distance from, their superiority over the natives.
The bathroom was overheated. Among the rumpled towels, lurking yet in the crumpled paper of a soap wrapper, was the powerful smell of Desmond’s urine. My God! A drop of it might change the world! She visualized his black mustache, beneath it, lips like old rubber bands. In there, sheltered from Laura’s scrutiny, she felt the strain of her factitious animation drain away; she allowed herself to long for the hours of this evening to pass, to disappear. On these rare occasions when she saw Laura, or even her uncles, Carlos and Eugenio, she suffered such confusion, such a dislocation of self; wrenched out of her own life for even a few hours, it seemed not to count, to be a dream she could barely recall.
How had Desmond blundered into that coven? She thought suddenly of her grandmother, Alma, who had hatched the shocking brood. And Clara was stricken with shame, for what excuses could she offer anyone to extenuate her neglect of the old woman? But the shame was only a pinch, a momentary sting. Already, inertia was separating her from resolution. Perhaps an impulse would rescue her. Perhaps, one afternoon after work, she would find herself approaching the home. For an instant, thinking of Alma’s pleasure when she arrived, Clara smiled. Almost at once, the smile faded. Nothing, she realized, would make her go, no mysterious, still unplumbed resource in her.
“I know many t’ings,” her grandmother often avowed in her heavily accented English. Her accent was phenomenal. For forty-five years, she had resisted learning English, she, who had submitted to the brutal changes in her life without contest, had defended the language she had been born to, perhaps because it was the last connection with that Iberian coast she had left at sixteen on a ship bound for Cuba. She might know many things, but God knows what they were! Her children never asked her what she knew, but her phrase was repeated among them with mocking amusement. Ed Hansen had asked her, and he’d had no luck. “Ah Ed … many t’ings …” she’d sigh. Ed had made her laugh, evoked in her a flirtatious gaiety. Perhaps it had continued to astonish him that that dreamy, forlorn woman had produced Laura and Carlos and Eugenio.
Ed had charmed Alma from that first occasion Carlos had brought him home on leave from the army training depot where they’d been stationed during the First World War. They had both been nineteen years old, and trying to imagine what they’d been like – as she often did – Clara recalled a blurred snapshot she’d found in a shoebox in Alma’s Brooklyn apartment. In it, Carlos stood languidly near a desk. Her father was smiling, his hand resting on Carlos’s shoulder. How handsome they had been! How unimaginable that time would erode their grace! That Alma would, one day, wait for nothing in an old people’s home.
She wet her hands in the sink, and dried them roughly. Of course, Laura knew she hadn’t been to see Alma for five months. And if she didn’t go for a year? What then? She felt a thrill of terror, but of what? What could Laura do?
She flushed the toilet several times. It would excuse her absence if anyone had noticed it. She had wanted a moment away from them, from the painful tension that Laura seemed to both produce and feed upon.
Clara opened the door. There was much cigarette smoke; the room felt smaller. Laura was lying on one of the twin beds, her head propped up on one hand, her hip curving up. Her body was not youthful but it wasn’t matronly either. Laura was fifty-five.
She had just slipped her hand beneath the cover of a box which she was about to open. “Oh, Clara. I was just telling Carlos that Desmond bought me six dresses yesterday, all by himself. Can you imagine such a chap? Desmond … you’re so good! But he’s so bad! So extravagant!”
Carlos went to Clara and put his arm around her. “And I don’t even have one,” he whispered in her ear. She hugged him. He pressed his chin into her hair. They stretched out their hands. Laura said, “Look at those two, Desmond!”
Clara’s and Carlos’s hands were extraordinarily alike – it was a joke between them. At least, it was something between them. They moved apart, Carlos laughing softly. She felt uneasy. She cared about him, and these jokes, these caresses, these eloquent but wordless signals, had the effect of chilling her affection for him. He’d almost always been kind to her. She loved his splendid walk – like a tiger’s, Ed had said, you would never have known he was a pederast. Ed hadn’t, he’d claimed, for years, and had let her in on the secret when she’d been thirteen. She’d nodded calmly, concealing her ignorance of what he was talking about, knowing it was awful, terrified Carlos would learn that she knew. That had been when she was convinced the Maldonadas could read people’s minds, especially her own. But if Carlos had read her mind, it had not affected his behavior toward her. In time, she had a revelation. It was not his embarrassment she’d feared but her own. Until a few years ago, Alma often said, “Ah, Carlos … Someday I hope he’ll marry.” She doted only on Carlos. About Eugenio she said nothing. And during all the years of Clara’s growing up, while Laura and Ed had moved from Provence to Devon to Ibiza to Mexico, Alma had rarely spoken of that spectral couple to whose existence foreign stamps gave witness (by the time one letter arrived, they had often moved on to another place; Laura never wrote, sending messages through Ed), saying only, “Laurita es una viajera, eh?” with a kind of relentless leniency, or saying something else as insubstantial, so that the child, Clara, kept her questions to herself where, in the fecund, lonely dark of adolescence, they grew monstrous.
But once in the world, she learned everyone’s lesson – families were not as they seemed; she grew artful in spotting the cracks in domestic facades. Wasn’t everyone damaged? she asked herself, and read the ancient Greeks during the one year she’d gone to college, and concluded that the house of Atreus was, and always had been, full of boarders like herself. Then, a year ago, she had awakened one morning in a sweat of fear. Her life was a walk next to an electrified fence. The path was narrowing.
“You need a drink, beautiful kiddo,” Desmond was saying to her thickly. “Here.”
“You know, I’m so morbid,” Laura said. “I had a thought. What if cancer were normal, and human life was the anomaly? Isn’t that grisly?”
“For God’s sake, Laura,” Desmond said crossly. Carlos stood up and stretched. “My dear, you’re too damned perverse,” he said. “I’m perverse,” Laura said, laughing. “Clara, do you hear that old bum! The thought came to me in a movie theater yesterday.