Desmond was nearly sober. His body was an affliction now; he would not be all right until after he had slept. But he couldn’t fall on his bed and bury himself beneath the blankets. He must wait for Laura. He had to suffer what sleep would have spared him. A chambermaid had turned down the covers of the beds and carried off the empty bottles and glasses. The room still smelled of tobacco. Desmond drank several glasses of water. Once, he retched violently and heard himself moan, “Don’t!”
He was unable to open the window more than a crack. He opened the door to the corridor and leaned against it until he had aired out the room.
He went to the desk and spread out the paraphernalia of the trip, passports, tickets, vouchers of various kinds. He read the fine print on train schedules, then spread out the plan of the ship, his mind blank. On the honeycomb plan of the ship, he had already marked their cabin. He put his finger on the cross he had made, felt a sudden flutter of his heart, and felt cowardly and weak and confused.
Half an hour or so passed. The air in the room was chilled without being fresh. He had forgotten to close the window. On the inside cover of his passport, there was a space to write down next of kin. He supposed he’d better put Carlos down for that. His own parents were dead; he had no sisters, no brothers. No one. There was Ellie. But Laura would not care for his putting his daughter’s name down. And he had no real interest in her—it might be a dismal fact, but it was true.
At 10:30, he changed into a bathrobe. Where was his flask? He rummaged around in a handcase, remembering he had filled the flask two days ago when Laura had gone to say goodbye to her mother. It was a silver flask engraved with his initials, given to him years ago by a girl whose name and face he could not recall. He found it, unscrewed the top, and took a large swallow. God! What renewal! What relief! His sense of his own substance returned to him. But he mustn’t have anymore. Oh—he knew all the subtle trickery of alcohol!
The room was really cold. He took Laura’s robe from the closet and lay it across her bed. He packed away all the books Peter Rice had brought except for the one he thought she might like to start reading, even tonight. He knew her so well—she could read through anything, a cataclysm, even one of her own making. He had selected a detective story. He opened it to the first page: “Inspector Guthorn was savoring his second cup of China tea when the telephone—” He put the book down on her night table.
Laura would not telephone. Until she was over it, whatever it was, she would not remember what telephones were for. Through the open bathroom door, he caught sight of her fur coat which he had hung up on the shower curtain rod. It had enraged him to carry the coat through the streets from the restaurant. He would like to have dropped it in a gutter. But still, it was worth a bit. He went and shook it. The fur was still damp from the rain. He caught a discreet animal smell. Expensive. When he’d slapped the check for the coat down on the counter, he’d forgotten to tip the coatroom girl. But he couldn’t go back into the restaurant. He walked along in the rain, clutching that goddamned coat, hating his life.
The matter of the coat, where she had gotten it, was a closed question. She had told him it had been given to her by an elderly relative whose wife had died. He hadn’t quite believed her. But he didn’t know what else to believe. Even years ago, when she’d gotten the coat, she’d been too old to receive that kind of gift from a lover.
He noticed the newspaper folded on a chair. He looked up the shipping news and found the name of their ship and its sailing time.
There was a sound at the door. He went toward it quickly. It was a fumbling, rustling sound like that of someone pressing along the wall in a dark room. He started to open the door, then leaned against it.
“Laura?”
He heard a low cry. “Is it you?” he asked. It might be a drunken woman, or two people, accomplices come to rob him.
“Let me in!”
He opened the door. Laura stood there shuddering, her head bowed. He threw his arm around her hunched shoulders and instantly his arm was wet. She was soaked through. Clots of her wet hair touched his neck.
He took her to the bathroom and undressed her, then took a towel and rubbed her down as though he were currying a horse. He was happy, saved. He removed her shoes, pressed her gently to the toilet seat and rubbed her feet. Then he left her for a moment and went to get the flask. But when he held it to her lips, her eyes flashed open and she seized the flask and flung it on the tiled bathroom floor. She began to moan. He heard words. But they were Spanish words! Oh, Christ! Not that!
He lifted up her head. Her eyes were closed, her jaws rigid beneath his fingers.
“What is it?” he cried.
“My mother is dead,” she whispered. “She’s dead….”
Her head fell against his belly; her moans were like a rumbling in his stomach. He stared at the wall. He didn’t understand what she’d said. The word dead had clacked like colliding billiard balls, a word of wood, the two hard consonants clapped against each other.
He half lifted her and led her into the bedroom, to the bed, then got her into her bathrobe. She sat there, on the edge of the bed, caved in, her damp hair in spikes, moaning. For a second, he loathed her.
He found her slippers and pushed her feet into them. He noticed her toes were red and swollen. It was the city shoes. In the country, she went around in soft canvas shoes. He tried to press her down; sitting up she was peculiarly threatening, like a statue about to topple over and crush him. But she fought him off and remained precariously upright.
“We have to tell Eugenio and Carlos,” she said. She looked up at him, and then repeated what she had said very slowly.
“But—how do you know?”
“The home called, this afternoon just when we got back.”
“But, Laura! You didn’t tell them, Carlos, Clara…”
She was silent.
“You didn’t tell me.”
She covered her eyes with her hands.
“Don’t do that!”
Now she fell back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling.
“Why?” His voice faltered on that word. He remembered that when they’d come back that afternoon, Laura had gone to the elevator, saying, “Darling…come on, come on…” and so he had merely glanced at the message the desk clerk had handed him, seen it was only the home which had telephoned, old Alma, probably, wanting to say adios another hundred times, thinking to tell her later, she could always call her mother in the morning and say goodbye then….
“Why?” he asked again, thinking he would have to go through his pockets, find that message and throw it away.
“It was mine,” she whispered. He couldn’t stand the senselessness of what she had said.
“Your what?” he asked brusquely.
“Mine!” she said again. “They don’t deserve—I wouldn’t give Carlos the pleasure…”
Desmond started. Pleasure! She must have meant relief. He did not intend to pursue it. He wasn’t obliged to understand everything Laura said. Sometimes he felt he lived the life of a waiter. In this instance—it wasn’t a tragedy, after all, the death of an old woman—he was the one who had long ago taken care of the business end of death, buying the plot, giving the deed to the home, signing papers. It was he who freed Laura from official life. A year or two ago she had said, after he had returned from the home, “Don’t tell me what you did. Don’t say a word.”
Something his ex-wife had said to him years before occurred to him now. His own parents had died in the same year. They had both been buried in a cemetery near the Boston suburb in which they had lived the last years of their lives. Each time he had returned to New York, he had found himself unable to explain to his friends why he had been away. It was the former Mrs. Clapper who had announced their deaths. “You seem to feel you’ve been abased by your parents passing away,” she had said to him. How he had hated that “passing away!” But perhaps there had been something in what she’d said. The word pleasure rang on softly in his mind. Relief, pleasure, abasement. But loss and grief? He quailed inwardly at the thought of those regions of feeling; for a moment, he sensed his own stubborn narrowness. He sensed it without introspection, in the same way someone might observe to himself that he has lied, but then, like a provincial angered by a fleeting vision of a larger world, he began to belittle that world. People were only concerned with themselves. He felt a bitter disappointment.
“Well—there goes the trip,” he said.
“The trip?” she asked. She began to weep again.
“Well—postponed, then,” he said appeasingly.
“I told them the funeral is to be tomorrow,” she said. “In the end, she’s to be buried overnight, like a Jew.”
“Don’t you want to tell Carlos and Clara and Eugenio?”
She groaned. “Help me!” she cried out. “Help me…I don’t know what I’m to do.”
He was frantic suddenly. She looked so heavy lying there. What if he had to lift her, to dress her, to make her walk?
“You don’t have to do anything!” he exclaimed.
“I hated it,” she gasped out. “The going on and on—she’s always been there, waiting for me to do something about her, about her life. What could I have done? Oh, God! Do you remember what I told you? How she used to go off and just leave us? Disappear for days, and the neighbors would feed us?”
He couldn’t bear the dazed look on her face, but her eyes gleamed at him—he felt the way she was straining toward something, straining as though she would burst.
“When she came back, we could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen. Didn’t she know she’d been away? Clucking to herself, singing, saying we were out of olive oil, kissing us, kissing us while we shrank from her face, her hands, not one of us able to ask her where she’d been, not knowing till years later she’d gone to stay with that old bitch, Gonzaga, in her suite at the Plaza…oh, we always knew when she’d gone when we came home from school, we could feel the emptiness of the house and the three of us would sit in the living room, trying to decide where we could go for supper, and we all spoke Spanish then, when we were alone, never in front of the neighbors who might give us a meal, who shook their heads over us and pitied us, and we were thinking about what they’d give us to eat, and whether this time she’d never come back….”
“Don’t, Laura. Stop. You’ll make yourself ill. But I don’t understand how you went through this evening without saying anything. I mean, if you’d told me!”
She was sitting up, clutching the blanket to her chin, sniffling and looking around wildly. He felt trapped himself among the relentlessly stingy amenities of the hotel room.
“I couldn’t,” she said despairingly. “I couldn’t have borne it, seeing their dismay that they’d have to do something. And I wanted, this once, to be the only one, the only one who knew….”
“I guess it doesn’t matter…” he said, his voice trailing off.
“But she didn’t leave Clara,” Laura said. “She never left Clara.” She suddenly grabbed his hand, then dropped it as though repelled, as though it were useless. “My mother was so innocent. All her life, she refused to know what life is.”
“I’ll phone Carlos,” he said.
“No!” she cried. “Not on the phone. I don’t want to hear it on the phone. And he won’t answer if he’s got someone there. Someone has to go to both of them, to him and Eugenio.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“You can’t leave me!”
“Shall I call Clara? Ask her to go to them?”
“No!” her voice rang out. “Not her! She’s not to know!”
He started to protest, but she looked at him with such animus that he drew away from her. He stood up and went to the windows, thinking, she’s gone over the edge.
“Call Peter Rice,” she said. “He’ll go and find them, tell them.”
“Yes,” he said gratefully.
Peter answered after the fifth ring. Desmond told him shortly why he was calling. Then, although he had meant to say that they had just heard the news of Alma’s death, he heard himself tell the truth. But there was no reason to lie; it wasn’t anyone’s business to inquire why Laura had suppressed the news all that evening. He heard Peter’s sharp intake of breath, his disbelieving “You mean, she knew in the afternoon?” and Desmond said quickly, “That isn’t the point. The point is, I can’t very well leave her alone right now. So if you could go to them, you know Eugenio lives behind his office? And then to Carlos—”
“What about Clara?” interrupted Peter.
“Clara is not—,” Desmond began, but Laura grabbed the phone from his hand and held it to her ear. She seemed to listen for a minute, then she said tonelessly, “Clara is not to be told. She wouldn’t be interested.”
She handed the telephone back to Desmond instantly. He heard nothing. “Are you there?” he asked.
“I’m here,” Peter said faintly.
Desmond gave him Eugenio’s address. Peter knew where Carlos lived.
“We’re awfully grateful to you,” he said. “You can imagine—” But Peter had hung up. It was done.
“We’ll have to collect her things. I don’t know what we’ll do with them. Do you think the home would take care of that? She didn’t have much.”
He took her hand again, and this time she let it rest between his hands. They were quiet, looking at each other. At last she said, “I’m sorry about the trip.”
“It’s only a postponement.”
“I’m sorry about everything, the way I ran out tonight. I don’t know what happened. I don’t even remember now what it was.”
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.
“Mamá had an awful life.”
He nodded, the sense of her words barely touching him. He was moved by the softening of her features, the quietness in her face that belonged only to him, to the privacy between them.
“Desmond. She was such a beautiful young girl.”
“I know.”
“She never knew it. She never knew what she was at any time in her life. She had an idea about submission, you see. She submitted to everyone—it was being good. Listen…I’m glad she died. I’m glad it is over for her.”
Of course, he understood now what she meant. Everyone is glad when the old die. Glad is entirely different from pleasure. She hadn’t meant that. Laura told the truth—whatever it was at the moment. He could be glad with her. It was better for the old, all of them straggling and straying down the halls of the home like old, old dogs, stunned with age and infirmity, waiting for nothing.
“I understand what you mean,” he said eagerly.
She gave him an exceedingly somber look.
“I don’t think you do,” she said.