At night in the city, things were never invisible, always somewhat visible, as though lurking. There was no utter black night in the city. Day drained away; darkness came diluted by a pale but ruthless artificial light. Should a sleeper wake suddenly, there would be no surcease from seeing. Peter Rice, his hand still resting on the telephone whose ringing had snatched him out of his brief sleep, stood in his living room, his pajama bottoms twisted around his waist, his bare feet chilled on the floor. Light from the street revealed the shadowed clumps of his possessions. Reluctantly, he went to turn on his own lights, one next to a bookcase, one near an easy chair, and one hanging from the ceiling over a small round table where he ate his meals.
As the room revealed itself, one, two, three, it had a certain novelty; it was his yet for a moment he was not of it. Of personal things, there were only two. One was a sketch by Ed Hansen hanging on the wall near the door that led to Peter’s study. It was a drawing Ed had made of Peter and Barbara a few months after their marriage. They had been sitting on the ground, leaning against the trunk of an apple tree. Barbara’s hand was resting on his knee. He was looking away from her, out of the picture. Near one of the living room windows was a child’s white wicker rocking chair that had belonged to Peter’s grandmother. It was the only thing he had taken for himself from the Rice house when he and his sisters had emptied it out before putting it up for sale. On his grandmother’s eighty-third birthday, she had shown him she could still sit in the chair. Often, when his glance fell upon it, he remembered the old woman crowing victoriously as she rocked, her arthritic fingers resting upon the wicker arms, cake crumbs from her birthday cake clinging to her upper lip. He had had to help her up out of it and she had fallen against him. He never forgot the feel of her aged body, so breakable, like an armful of dry twigs. Beside the chair, on the floor, was a pot holding a large, straggling plant. It had been given to Peter by his neighbor downstairs, Violet Darcy. The Darcys lived in the duplex of the town house on 11th Street of which Peter occupied the top floor. Violet had said he needed something green and growing in his life, something to take care of. When the soil in the pot got dry and crusty, he felt like a torturer. He wished it would die. But it continued to send out shoots and new leaves which turned yellow in a short time and dropped off to the floor. It was an ugly, shapeless plant and he wondered why he didn’t kill it. When he opened the door to his apartment, it was always the first thing he saw.
It was just past midnight. He had been asleep little more than an hour. He drank a glass of water in his small kitchen, then went to get dressed. When the phone had rung, he had thought it was Violet calling. Abject, and apologetic, she had called him once or twice quite late when her older child, Gina, who had just turned eighteen, had not come home. “Her love life is her own business,” Violet would avow with a strained but insistent leniency, “but I don’t want her murdered in the streets.” It was to Peter, the last few years, that she turned for reassurance. He never said much; if he listened long enough, Violet always talked herself out of her apprehensions. Peter knew that Mr. Darcy, an advertising executive, had no patience with Violet’s worries about their children. He was a tall, muscular man who entered into and departed from rooms quickly, athletically, as though following a secret program of body building. Peter had known them for ten years. He and Violet were friends of a sort; he and Mr. Darcy were polite to each other. Violet frequently spoke of the goodness of her husband’s heart but he seemed to Peter glacially cold, animated by the hostile conviction that he was a sensible man in a world of fools. He had many opinions, and he delivered them like short, hard blows. There was no hue of personal feeling in what he said; he never conversed. Their younger child, Roger, a boy of fourteen, had a cowed, hopeless look. When Mr. Darcy was darting about their home with his intense physical irritability like a wasp’s, Peter had overheard Roger whispering to himself the names of various car makes. A magic incantation? But Peter had long given up speculating about the inner life of the Darcys. He and Violet were fond of each other; she diverted him from his own fretfulness. Sometimes he was ashamed—it was hardly friendship, this mindless feeding on someone else’s personality, yet he was truly grateful to her; she asked very little of him.
He often stopped by for a drink or coffee. She played baroque organ music on her phonograph for him, thinking he liked it. They spoke of the end of the world—perhaps the Chinese were better off, after all. “The Chinese are Oriental idiots,” Mr. Darcy had remarked. Violet had no time to read fiction, she said. She read philosophy. She watered herself with philosophy as she watered the plants with which her living room was webbed and leafed and made bosky. She would crook a finger at Peter. Smiling, she would place her hand beneath the limp petal of a flower—“Bloomed just this morning,” she would say, “a miracle!” But for all her care, her greenery was scraggly. Among the plain red pots out of which they sent their tendrils and leaves, Violet lingered with her long-spouted watering can as in a lunatic forest dream.
When Peter had moved into his apartment, ten years ago, Violet’s kitchen had been covered with posters. First there had been Black Power posters, then leafy cartoons which proclaimed that war was not good for children, then a large photograph of a hirsute poet carrying a placard which read, “Pot is a reality kick,” then handsome, lifeless photographs of meadows and woods whose captions asked, “Is our priceless heritage to be destroyed? Our green to go?”
These depthless, transient seizures of sociological or political fashion reflected on Violet’s pale brow like the reflections of automobile lights on Peter’s bedroom wall as the cars paused at traffic lights, then passed on. The time of posters was gone. Just as the time for introducing Peter to marriageable women had gone. But, he supposed, Violet still wondered what he had in the way of carnal delight. There had been a brief period when she had clearly reached a conclusion about him. It was then she had spoken about homosexuality as though it were a special grace. In her efforts to reassure him of the infinite range of what consenting adults could consent to as far as she was concerned, she spoke in the now conventional language—inane, brutal and mawkish—of sexual matters. He could tell she thought she was being outrageous; he could only guess how she was violating her private sensibilities. What could they be? What were his? He had been celibate a long time. Celibacy was the condition of his whole life. Something had simply stopped in him. It wasn’t there anymore. Like his grandmother, he too had become an armful of dry, cold twigs. But he suffered dreadfully sometimes and thought he would prefer outright revulsion against the flesh than this intensifying chill, this spreading pallor of feeling.
Violet loved, and constantly used, certain words—impalpable, nebulous, indescribable. It thrilled her to use them; they set the echoes flying; she was rapt as she gave each syllable intense emphasis. Peter was no longer irritated by her fondness for enigmatic language. He had come to believe that Violet was lost in her life—that she was, to herself, nebulous, indescribable, and that Darcy’s success in his field, the increasing materiality of their life, the tokens of which she constantly derided, aggravated to the point of terror her sense of her human vulnerability, of the perilous world into which she would be compelled to release her children.
She and Peter did not speak of such things, yet he recognized those spots of fear that broke out in her like the buboes of a hidden plague. It was a kind of payment to her for her interest in him, her concern for him, this recognition and acceptance of what she would not accept in herself.
As he turned out the lights in his living room, he wondered if Violet could hear him moving about above her at such a late hour. Once, wearied by her obsessive cultural affectations, he had thought to introduce her to Laura. What a thought! What malice!
He passed Violet’s door, and fought down an impulse to ring her bell, wake her, tell her about the message of death he had to carry, tell her that the dead woman’s grandchild was not to be told. It would only have frightened Violet. But, he thought, it frightens me, too.
He continued down the stairs, walking softly, his front door key already in his hand. Sitting on the last step, her legs stretched out beneath the hall table, was Gina Darcy. She was very still, hunched over. Her long brown hair hung lank across the shoulders of her denim jacket. She didn’t turn as he neared her and she made no effort to make room for him to pass. He held the banister to prevent himself from falling.
“Gina?”
“Yuh.”
She was holding the brown butt of what looked like a hand-rolled cigarette.
“Are you okay?” he asked lightly. He supposed she’d been sitting there some time, smoking marijuana by herself. She slowly turned her thin face up toward him.
“Okay? Yuh. I’m okay.”
“On your way home?” he asked foolishly.
She smiled mirthlessly. “Where I am, it’s home,” she said. “And oddly enough, I am home. This is home, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“How about you? You going home?”
“Out,” he said shortly.
“Out. In. We’re all going home,” she said.
He unlocked the door, then hesitated. “Well—ultimately,” he said.
“Shit,” she said bleakly.
“Good-night,” he said, and went out.
Eugenio’s office was on Fifth Avenue, around 15th Street, Peter guessed. He turned up his collar and began to walk uptown. Even though it was still raining heavily, there were people about. But there always were people about. A police car passed him. In its window, he glimpsed a long black sideburn on a dead white cheek. Suddenly, the spiraling wail of the siren started up. The car made a U-turn and sped away. Three young black men were walking toward him. They seemed suspended from their enormous spheres of hair. One carried a portable radio out of which issued a hermaphroditic shriek of lament and fury. To this sound, the young man moved his feet several steps back, then forward. Each time his dance separated him from his companions, they waited patiently, silently, until he again closed ranks with them.
He saw by the numbers on the stores and apartment houses that he was close to Eugenio’s office, and in a few steps he came to a halt in front of a plate glass window behind which were displayed travel folders and one large airline poster. A faint light emanated from somewhere in the rear of the narrow room. The door was bolted and a shade was half drawn over the glass window. He knocked, softly at first, then more insistently. The light from the back broadened. Nothing happened for a minute, then, very slowly, the shade was raised. Eugenio looked out at him. In one hand, he was holding a threaded needle, in the other a jacket against which his thumb was pressing a button. Eugenio looked puzzled, then recollection came. He stuck the needle into the jacket, retreated for an instant, dropped the jacket on a desk, then returned to unbolt the door.
“Eugenio, it’s Peter Rice.”
“Yes, Oh, yes. I recognized you. It’s been some time. Yes. Quite a while.”
“I have to speak with you. May I come in?”
“Of course, of course,” Eugenio said with a smile and an accent Peter remembered at once though he had not seen him for some years. The smile had something embarrassed, wary about it. His accent was almost imperceptible, yet it was there, in the curious emphasis he gave to certain words as though he were striking them off like medals.
“I suppose you’ve heard that I live—I have space back there, you see, behind this office,” he said, leading the way. He seemed uneasy about keeping his back to Peter and half turned as he moved along. Peter saw there was only one desk in the office, a few racks of travel folders, one large poster of a castle taped to the wall.
“Rents are so atrocious,” Eugenio continued as he stood back to let Peter precede him into a small room. “These landlords are so avaricious, so predacious. So I make the best of things, you see. But it’s not grand.”
Suddenly, he dashed back into the office section, returning with the jacket in his hands.
“A little sewing—I had lost a button earlier today, you see. In the subway. And had great good luck in the five-and-ten-cent-store, finding an almost identical button. One can’t hope to find the same one of course, not in the five-and-ten. Won’t you sit down?”
The room’s small window was barred. A basin, supported by discolored pipes, jutted out from the wall. Near it was a couch, a brown blanket folded at one end. A straight-backed chair stood next to a wrought iron standing lamp. A two-burner hot plate took up most of the surface of a small table. Next to it was a box of salt and a glass holding several pieces of flatware. A suitcase in a corner served as another table. A few books were piled on top of it along with a manila legal folder tied with several lengths of string. A metal contrivance of the sort Peter had seen used to hold coats at parties held Eugenio’s sparse wardrobe, a coat, a jacket of some dark material, a blue suit, the gray pants of the suit jacket on which he was at present sewing a button. Peter took the other chair, a kind of folding stool. Behind it was a narrow door which, he assumed, led to a toilet.
“Not very grand,” murmured Eugenio once more. “But then, beggars can’t be choosers.” He laughed, a grinding metallic chuckle.
“How are you?” asked Peter, his voice thickened with the withheld news, knowing there was no way to say what he had to say except plainly, wishing it would burst out of him like a shout.
“How am I? Let me see…but—your coat. Do let me hang it up for you. No? Are you sure? Well—I am pleased, of course, to have company. Although I was alarmed when I heard your knock.”
He began to stitch on his button. “You will excuse me if I go ahead with my work, won’t you? Appearance is everything. If one of my customers saw me with a loose button, she might cancel her flight to Cairo—a lucrative fare for the airline company, and a few pennies to me. These rich old women! Alarmed, I was saying. You know, I suppose, that the streets are filled with roaming hyenas these days. Hyenas…By the time the police come, one is a corpse. So I am rather nervous that one of these hyenas will break down my door. I was tempted to put a sign in the window saying I have nothing. But, of course, that would only incite them. They aren’t really interested in robbery, you see. They are interested in murdering. Imagine having a cannon on one’s premises—one that could be moved into place at night. Then, when they attack the door—Boom! Quite a surprise, don’t you think?” He ground out another short laugh. “But tell me, you’re great friends with my sister, aren’t you? Have you seen her lately?”
“Eugenio. I have serious news. Laura sent me to tell you that your mother died this afternoon in the home.”
The jacket fell from Eugenio’s hands, the needle sticking up out of the button. He was still, his eyes half closed. Then he picked up the jacket and pulled the needle through. He bent his head over his work and said nothing. Outside, the traffic seemed to have stopped. There was no noise except the infinitesimal click of needle against button.
“I’m sorry,” said Peter.
Eugenio raised his head. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “I can offer you a cup of that dreadful instant coffee or tea. I have no liquor. I don’t drink liquor.”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Of what?”
Peter looked at him bewildered.
“Of what did she die?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“Where is my sister?”
“They’re staying at a hotel. They were going to take a ship tomorrow, a tour to Africa.”
“Oh? And when are they embarking?”
“They’ve postponed their trip, or will be postponing it. I’m certain. Because the funeral—”
“I see. I wonder if they used a travel agent? I could have taken care of it for them, the arrangements. I could have made it cheaper. Of course, my sister’s husband doesn’t have to worry about money. Do you know what time this afternoon?”
“What time she died?” Peter asked, detesting him. “No. I don’t know. When you call in the morning about the funeral, you can find out the particulars.”
“Yes, the particulars. Do you know my sister never mentioned this trip of theirs to me? I didn’t even know they were leaving the country.” He drew his thread through the fabric, then bit it off with his teeth.
“My mother always warned me not to bite thread,” he said. “She thought it was very bad for teeth. Did you know my mother?”
“I met her years ago when Laura and Ed Hansen were still married.”
“Edward Hansen. A remarkable man. What a charming man! He could charm anyone.” Eugenio squeezed his eyes shut, his forehead wrinkled, the strange, wary smile appeared on his lips, he shook his head. “No one who had not met him could imagine such charm,” he said. He looked so wolfish, so oddly triumphant in his appreciation of Hansen.
“I remember,” Peter said without emphasis. He was confounded by Eugenio’s reception of the news. He didn’t know what to do with Eugenio’s digressions. After so many years, the Maldonada perversity still took him by surprise, forced him to admit the precariousness of custom. These people had not signed any social contract. But where Laura’s unpredictability still had the power to quicken him, Eugenio’s discordant drifting was making him frantic to escape from the room. But he had begun to speak of his mother.
“You should have seen her when she was still a young woman. She let herself go so. Because there was a terrible weakness, you see, such a terrible weakness…. Of course, she was not hard. No…her temperament was soft. Romantic. That ghastly romanticism! And my brother, Carlos, encouraged her in it—both of them so unrealistic. She had that money, all that was left after my father died. After that war, the carpetbaggers came. And they took advantage of her. Everything had been burned to the ground except the great house, and she sold it for a mere nothing. And she came here when she could have gone back to Spain. Her parents offered her money to go home, to take us all back there.” He looked up at Peter. “My God!” he cried out. Then he held up his jacket, tweaked the button he had sewed, then went to hang it next to the gray trousers.
“It was Carlos who persuaded her to buy the house on Long Island. He was only a boy—but he had such influence over her. The house was an evil sponge…it took all our money. There wasn’t any more. And if it hadn’t been for La Señora Gonzaga—” He went back to his chair and sat down stiffly.
“—if it hadn’t been for that woman, we would have starved to death, in our house. My mother would not admit the hardness of the world. Do you know what she did? In the depression? She tried to sell fine embroidery. It was the only thing she knew how to do!” and he emitted a kind of piercing cry as though he could find no word for what he felt about his mother’s folly.
“So she became Señora Gonzaga’s companion. And received a recompense—a monthly amount, small but it kept us. But these last years, after La Señora died, after her son sold the plantation to some Americans, there was nothing. She was very shrewd, not at all like my mother. She kept her holdings until the second of her death, you see, through the war, after…. And now, there is Fidel Castro. And nothing of any of us left there in Cuba. You see, we made a terrible mistake. We thought it was ignoble to be shrewd, cunning….”
“Well—it is, isn’t it?”
“Oh—if you could have seen her when she was still herself. How fastidious she was, such a lady. I wonder if you understand what I mean? She still remembered the past then. When one forgets the past, there is nothing, is there?”
“I’m afraid I must go. I have to let Carlos know. It’s quite late. I had better—”
“Do you know I was actually thrown out of people’s homes? Led to the very door and asked to leave? You see, we weren’t trained to do anything. When we began to go to school in this country, my mother was amused, as though it were all a whim. Mamá did not understand that one must be trained in something to survive. When I was eighteen or nineteen, I would go to stay with friends so I would get fed, have shelter. And I would stay and stay until they were forced to ask me to leave. And at home, Mamá and Carlos would talk endlessly of some new scheme—both of them sitting there, planning. About what? About nothing!”
“But Eugenio—Carlos was quite a good music critic. Not so long ago, I used to see his name everywhere. He must have learned—”
“No, no…you don’t understand. Carlos made it all up! He read a few books. We had learned to read. And he was a very good mimic, you see, and his friends were musicians. We have all learned by imitation.”
“That is how everyone learns at first,” Peter said.
“Oh, yes, at first. But then they change. Somehow, they no longer imitate. They begin to know. But in my family, we could never do anything but imitate. We never knew.”
He fell silent, so silent, so still that Peter leaned forward and strained to catch the sound of breathing as though Eugenio might be dying there in front of him. The dark, deep-set eyes were staring at him but he saw no recognition. Then, slowly, a saturnine smile touched Eugenio’s lips.
“I don’t think you understood me when I said I’d been thrown out of houses, did you?”
He could not answer; he had not understood. But he had heard the horror in Eugenio’s voice, the horror of an unexpungeable memory.
“Perhaps you can imagine—not knowing what to do next. I mean, with one’s entire life. I don’t believe I ever had the pleasant experience of thinking small decisions were unimportant. What I mean is, living as though one were suspended over a pit, that if one looked too eagerly in the direction of the dining room, one could be dropped instantly into that pit. So every second of life falls into peril—or safety. Peril or safety—has one picked up the correct fork? Should one ask for another serving? Is one’s coat hanging in the place reserved for the master of the house? Is the argument in the bedroom between one’s friend and his mother about one’s continuing, exasperating, unbearable presence? I didn’t know how to look for work. Can you imagine that? Why, once I walked into a Brooklyn clothing store looking for a clerk’s job. I was struck dumb! I could not speak: Do you know that now, for the first time in my life, I have a savings account? Would you like to see my little book?” He stood up and walked over to the suitcase where he picked up the manila folder and began to untie the string that bound it.
“Please,” Peter said. “I do see how awful it has all been. But I must go, let the others—” and stopped, hearing others. But there was only Carlos.
“Tell me, Eugenio,” he said, trying to speak neutrally. “Your sister insisted that Clara not be told of your mother’s death. I don’t understand what to—”
“Here it is,” Eugenio said, holding the blue passbook in his hand. “It is grotesque, isn’t it? That a person of my age—but it isn’t a large amount. Still, I’ve not had any amount until recently. Do you think the banks are safe?”
“About Clara—”
“Clara? She’s rather flighty, isn’t she? I haven’t seen her in some time. I suppose you know that my mother took care of her? Señora Gonzaga permitted my mother to take Clara with her to Cuba when she accompanied the Señora there. As you must have gathered, my mother was never insistent, but there was an exception. Clara. She did insist on taking Clara.”
“I thought that Laura was simply distraught tonight—that she hadn’t meant it, about Clara,” Peter said.
“Meant it?”
“Clara is not to be told, she is not to come to the funeral.”
“I know nothing about these things between Clara and my sister,” Eugenio said impassively. He replaced his passbook in the envelope. “All these women in the family have some trouble, Laura, Mamá, Clara, with men.”
“I wasn’t speaking of men.”
“When my mother came to this country, a very respectable, very rich man wanted to marry her, even with the children—but Carlos wouldn’t permit it. He had frightful tantrums. I suppose you wouldn’t suspect that about my brother. And, of course, my mother always gave in. She gave in to everything. I realized she was losing her hold on things when she began to neglect her hair. Her dresses were often so soiled. But when she was still in command of herself—”
Peter stood up. “I must go,” he said. He had determined to take a taxi to Carlos. His bones ached. He was exhausted.
“She even sold her jewelry for nothing. There was quite a bit of it. She might as well have given it away. She gave everything away. I tried to introduce her to certain people—well-bred, very refined people who would have appreciated her, understood what she came from. But it was impossible. She was too far gone. She had no discipline.” Then, he cried out in an anguished voice. “And she grew so old!”
Peter began to walk toward the office.
“Oh, I must thank you,” Eugenio said with a strange truckling bow. “I do appreciate your coming here at such a late hour.”
On a leaf from his note pad, Peter wrote down the telephone of the Clappers’ hotel. “Here is Laura’s number,” he said, holding it out to Eugenio. “If you’ll call in the morning…”
“Yes. Do you think it’s too late to call now? I suppose it is. But—is there anything else? Anything more you know about my mother’s death? Do you think she was alone when she died?”
“I wish I could tell you more. But I’ve told you all I know.”
“If you could have seen her in the time before…” He stood, several feet away from Peter, staring at the room he lived in, his glance falling on the couch, the lamp, his clothes, the barred window. Peter sensed he must often stand like that, looking at the emblems of his survival, measuring the scant space he had scraped out for himself.
“I’m sorry to have brought you such news,” Peter said, walking quickly to the door that led to the street. He was full of a nervous apprehension that Eugenio might not let him out, but Eugenio slipped past him and unbolted the door.
“Well,” he said, “if you ever plan a trip, I’m quite good at all that. You might be surprised at how good I am.”
He promises surprises, he still waits to be thrown out, thought Peter as he stood shivering on the curb, looking up the avenue for a taxi. When, shortly, one came, it swerved recklessly toward him, its wheels sending up a spray of water from the gutter that soaked his trousers and socks. Inside the car, a becapped and neckless driver began at once to emit a demented croak of “Where to? Where to? Where to?” Peter gave Carlos’s address in an icy voice and folded himself damply against the back seat. The driver shouted. “I just heard on the news about them dragging this woman out of the East River where she jumped. Let them die, I say. They want to kill themselves, let them!”
“I would rather not talk,” Peter declared. He saw a patch of livid skin, a large wart, a gray patch of hair as the driver glanced back at him. In Peter’s inner vision, the squad formed, raised its guns, fired. The cabdriver became an ash, blew away. These executions in his mind were taking place with increasing regularity; could one stink, spiritually, of a slaughterhouse, Peter wondered? Then, as they neared the east 60’s, the driver erupted, “You know how to take care of this colored crime? You line them up, a dozen every day, then you shoot them. That’s how.” He drew to the curb and shut off his meter. “Know what I mean?”
“Why only a dozen?” Peter said as he handed him the fare. “Why not thousands?” and slammed the door.
In the entrance of the old apartment house where Carlos lived, he pressed Carlos’s bell. When there was no response, he held his thumb on the button in a rage of shot nerves, his flesh chilled, his nostrils filled with the stale smell of dust and old metal polish. A sepulchral voice spoke through a grid at the side of the mailboxes.
“Who is it?”
“Peter Rice,” he shouted into the grid, and grabbed the doorknob as an electric buzzer sounded. There was no doorman here, only a dirty mirror near the elevator in which he caught a glimpse of his bedraggled self as he went to the stairs. Above him, from the second-floor landing, Carlos looked down.
“Peter! For God’s sake! What brings you here at such an hour?” He was smiling, holding out his hand. Peter shook it, dropped it.
“I have to see you—”
“Come in, come in…listen, I’ve got a young friend here—a young chap…”
The doorway led directly into a kitchenette. A fluorescent light coated a sinkful of dirty dishes yellow. On the counter was half of a squeezed lemon.
Carlos was trying to take his coat but Peter wrapped himself in it stubbornly. For a moment there was savage confusion, hands flying, hands gripping, and suddenly Peter tore himself away into the living room and stood with his back against the wall as though at bay. A tall thin figure moved idly away from the windows which looked out on the street.
“This is Lance,” Carlos said in a bewildered voice as a handsome, young dark-brown man sauntered to a couch and fell softly among its cushions. “Lance, this is an old friend, Peter Rice.” The young man nodded, unsmiling, indifferent.
On the floor, near a fireplace, was a still life—two pillows, an empty glass, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts—from which Peter averted his eyes quickly.
“I’m just staying for a minute,” he said, vaguely aware he owed some explanation for holding onto his wet raincoat which Carlos was still looking at curiously. Peter looked directly at Carlos, then at the young man, who now appeared to be dozing. A heavy chain circled his throat; suspended from it, visible upon his chest revealed by his open shirt, was a stone-encrusted pendant, vaguely Oriental.
“Well, yes, by all means, Peter. Would you like a drink. Do sit down. Won’t you let me take the coat? You look like a rain forest. Don’t worry about Lance. Just go ahead,” Carlos nodded reassuringly.
“Laura sent me. They didn’t want to telephone you about…”
Carlos’s mouth tightened. He looked frightened.
“What is it,” he said in a low voice.
“Your mother died.”
Carlos looked straight up at the ceiling, then burst into clamorous violent sobs. His mouth fell open, enormous tears flowed down his chin, his hands thrashed the air. Lance flew to him and threw his arms around Carlos’s massive shoulders. “Poor old thing…” he murmured. “Poor old thing has lost its Mama….” He stroked Carlos’s bald head, his neck, his wet face, and Carlos bent his head until it rested on Lance’s narrow shoulder.
“Oh, God! Oh God!” he cried out.
“I’m sorry. I’m so—”
Carlos gasped, one of his hands reached out and seemed to clutch at the air. “Oh, tell me—” he began, then fell into another fit of weeping.
“Hush, hush, darling man,” said Lance, and led him to the couch where he lowered him, his long back straining with the effort to support Carlos’s weight. He fell beside him, endlessly stroked him. “Oh, what tears!” he said softly.
Peter retreated into the kitchenette where he leaned back against the sink. He didn’t think that, at this moment, he could stand upright without support. He was being persecuted by the sounds of lamentation in the other room; those explosive heated sobs seemed operatic and profligate, as though Carlos was desperately simulating grief in order to ward it off. But what had he expected? Indifference? Irony? Ritual gravity? He had not foreseen his own helplessness, this sudden, shocking intimacy, even though purely circumstantial, with the Maldonada brothers, his entrapment in the toils of a real, infinitely complex history which had been, up until tonight, all story, Laura’s narration, to which he had wanted to be no more than a listener.
What a foul, neglected stench there was in this place! He plucked the lemon from the counter and held it to his nostrils. There was silence from the living room. At any moment now, he would be able to leave. Then he thought of Clara. His heart sank; something held off for so long had stepped up to him and was breathing on his cheek. Laura’s narration had come to an abrupt stop in a tangle of raveled ends, in a heap of collapsed scenery. He felt he had been stripped naked, and he was strange to himself. As he stood away from the sink, a faint shudder passed through him.
“Please, Peter. Come in and sit down,” Carlos called humbly from the other room.
He looked dazed, but his tears had stopped. Lance held one of his hands tightly. Peter sat down in a chair across from the couch.
“When did she die?”
“I think—I know it was this afternoon.”
Carlos started. “But they only just found out about it?”
“Laura knew. She had heard this afternoon.”
“I can’t stand it!” cried Carlos, snatching his hand away from Lance and clapping it to his forehead. “How could she—but I thought she was crazier than usual tonight. God! How could she be such an unholy bitch!”
“After you left, she got up and ran out. I don’t know why. Clara was telling her about some animals. I suppose she was very upset all along,” Peter said wearily.
“So, she knew all the time. She sat there, knowing. I’m finished with her. Finished!”
“You’ll have to call them in the morning at the hotel. I don’t know about the arrangements for the burial.”
“What about my brother, Eugenio?”
“I’ve just come from him.”
Carlos threw him a look of wry comprehension. “He was—as usual?”
“I don’t know him that well.”
“There is nothing to know. Lance, will you fix me some vodka and tonic? And if there’s a lemon…”
“I think we used your last lemon,” Lance replied in a light, drawling voice. “Can I fix you something?” he asked politely of Peter.
“Thanks, no. Nothing.”
“I don’t suppose you know how—”
“Only what I’ve told you.”
“But can you imagine her knowing all the time?” He shook his head. “Do you understand such a thing? Of course, she’s incapable of explaining herself, ever. I suppose you know that about Laura. You’ve known her long enough. But have you ever heard—”
“Carlos. She told me Clara is not to be told of your mother’s death. She said she wouldn’t be interested.”
“Is that what she said? Interested?”
“Just that.”
Lance returned and handed Carlos a glass of vodka and tonic. “You’re out of ice cubes,” he said.
“Thank you, darling,” Carlos said gently.
Lance smiled faintly and sat down beside him on the couch again.
“Carlos. Don’t you think Clara should be told?”
Carlos looked worried. He took a swallow from his glass.
“I don’t know,” he said. “My mother was very fond of Clara. I wouldn’t think—would you?—that Laura would try to protect Clara, spare her the funeral. I suppose she’s angry at her, angry because Clara wouldn’t go to the home to visit my mother. But Laura! For God’s sake! They were away for years—she and Ed drifting around the world. She never even sent a postcard! Do you think Laura meant it? She says a good deal she doesn’t mean.”
“I think she meant it.”
“Then—I don’t know what to say.”
“But what about you? Don’t you want her to be there? At the funeral?”
“Well—you know, Desmond did take care of a good deal. I have to admit that. I suppose they have a right—it hardly makes any difference to my mother, after all, whether Clara is there or not.”
“Don’t be obtuse,” Peter said sharply. “You know funerals aren’t for the dead!”
“We are born again,” Lance said reverently. “Death is only a door.”
“I don’t think that’s quite fair,” Carlos said. “I don’t think I’m obtuse at all—but these ceremonies—”
“Carlos!” Peter said urgently. “I’ve asked you what you thought. If you think she should be there.”
“I don’t think much of should,” Carlos said evasively.
“Then, I’m not to tell her? You won’t tell her?”
“But, that’s what I meant—about Desmond and my sister. They’ve taken care of things to a large extent. I suppose it’s up to them, isn’t it? How things are to be done?”
“You have no opinion?”
“No one wants to go to funerals, surely!”
“Is it a matter of desire?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at. Really.”
“But Clara is her only grandchild!”
“I know that! God knows, she could get none from Eugenio or me!”
“I think I’d better go.”
“It was immensely good of you to come and tell me. I imagine they woke you up? I don’t see why they couldn’t have telephoned me in the morning.” He paused, then went on. “I’ll tell Ed. He’d want to know. They got along, you know. It was strange to see them together. She thought him a marvel. He was at his best with her. His best was very, very good. He really paid attention to her. He could imitate her wonderfully.” He looked broodingly at Peter. “But you know all that, don’t you? You know all about us.”
“I don’t know about Clara,” Peter said. “I really don’t know what to do. I think she ought to be there tomorrow, Carlos, won’t you call her?”
Carlos stood up and began to pace about the room. Lance watched him, leaning forward as though ready to rush to him if he showed signs of collapse.
“Don’t you think you’re making a great deal out of little, Peter?” asked Carlos. He stood next to a large old upright piano, raising and lowering the keyboard lid. “Anyway, if Clara knew Laura didn’t want her there, she certainly wouldn’t go. She’s afraid of her, which isn’t surprising. Aren’t we all?” Carlos smiled faintly. Then he said, “I can’t tell her at any rate. It’s not my decision. It won’t be a real funeral. We have to put my poor mother in the ground, that’s all.
“Wasn’t she a Catholic?” asked Peter.
Carlos laughed aloud. “Mamá? Of course she was Catholic. All Spaniards are Catholics.” He banged down the piano lid suddenly. “Did Laura ever tell you about my grandfather? He was a philosopher of sorts. He wrote a book, an anticlerical tract, and had a hell of a time back then with the church. He hated priests the way only Latin Catholics can hate them. Mamá never went to mass. That went, too, like the rest of it. The priests and nuns made her laugh, she made fun of them. I don’t remember, naturally, but I’m sure we were baptized. Although not confirmed, I think. There was a chapel on the plantation, I’ve been told. But my father died, and that was the end. Although, now that I think about it, she went to a synagogue once, and to several Protestant services. She used to say she liked to know about everything.” There was a touch of mockery in his voice. “Me gusta saber de todo,” he repeated in Spanish. “I teased her about the synagogue. I told her she was returning to the bosom of Abraham. Perhaps, she said.”
“I love it when you speak Spanish,” said Lance.
Carlos suddenly covered his eyes with his hand. “What a terrible life,” he said wretchedly.
“Listen!” begged Peter. “I’ve known you most of my life. I don’t know what happened to Clara, really. I’ve not thought about it. She was born, then she was someone I hardly ever heard about. I haven’t asked. But your mother was made to be responsible for her. It seems utterly wrong to me that Clara should not know she’s dead. How will she find out? In three months, if she happens to drop by to see you? When she meets up with Laura again? What will Laura say? ‘By the way, my mother is dead’? One should learn of a death in a family. How will she learn of it, then? Carlos! For God’s sake, don’t hide out in your own character—don’t exploit your vices to get out from under! I know all about that! I do it, I do it myself. Answer me! Tell me what to do! Don’t leave me with this—this weight!”
“Laura told you what to do,” Carlos shouted, stalking across the floor toward Peter, then turning abruptly into a shadowed corner of the room. “You like to do what Laura wants, don’t you?” He grunted something to himself, then shook his head roughly like a bull tossing its horns. “You always have,” he went on rancorously. “How well I remember that first day, years ago, that you met them—in that house they had out on the island. But, do you remember? She had no love-sick suitor as faithful as you. All these years, you’ve been that, haven’t you!”
“It’s not important what I’ve been!” cried Peter.
“The bride of your heart,” Carlos jeered. “Even Ed gave her up years ago, years ago! But you! I’ve seen you cringe when she raised her hand, and when she held it out, I’ve seen you lick it. And you ask me what to do about Clara? I don’t know what to do about myself, about my brother, about Laura—and my mother. I’ve turned and turned away and always they were there, waiting, Laura crouched to spring out at me, my mother always waiting for me, that God-awful brave smile, waiting for me as though I was the hope of everything, of change, of possibility. What possibility? What could I have done for Eugenio? For any of them? We were wrecked from the beginning!”
“It’s Karma,” Lance remarked.
“Poor Clara,” Carlos said in an exhausted voice. “She was the last one I could have done something for. But she has her life before her—she’s well out of it. Tell her not to look back, not to join us wives of Lot. After all,” he said with a sad smile, “she’s an American girl. An enviable creature to be. Do you understand? I don’t care whether she goes to my mother’s funeral or not. It makes no difference at all.”
Peter stood up. In the silence, Carlos stared at him without expression, his arms hanging loose at his side. Peter waited. Carlos walked forward out of the shadows. “As I said, I’m grateful to you. It’s a thankless task you’ve had. But I thank you.”
“I’ll go then.”
“I’ll phone them in the morning. Perhaps we can have lunch one of these days? Perhaps you’d like to see Ed? He’s not always entirely drunk. If you could come up here from your office—Ed is frightened by that midtown crowd. There’s a quiet Italian restaurant not far from here. I’m sure Ed would like to see you.”
Peter nodded. At the door, as he opened it, Carlos said, “Be sure to remember me to your sisters when you see them.”
At the foot of the stairs, Peter sat down. He heard the door click closed. It was nearly 3:00 A.M. He thought of Gina sitting on those other stairs. He felt singularly alone. His sisters were close as a married couple, smiling at him from the fastness of their devotion to each other, excluding him as they always had excluded him. But if he died, now, here on the stairs, this pain in his left arm the first tremor of a collapsing heart, his sisters would see that he had a proper funeral. And for a second, recalling their voices from another room, their feet pounding through the old house as they went out to play, leaving him behind, he thought, how could I be so old? How could they have lived so long? Is that all there is? This withering and softening and exhaustion in time?
It was dangerously late to be out on the streets. He had often boasted of his fears. Like everyone he knew, he was inclined to brag about fear. Another dodge. Perhaps Laura had said nothing about the death, had kept silent in order to postpone the news to herself. Wasn’t that it? Ed Hansen had told him a story once of a man who, after he had been hit by a train at a crossing, had walked a mile before he fell, every bone in his body broken.
All these years Carlos and he had floated along the currents set into motion by a youthful and unquestioning friendship. Yet all the time, Carlos had been judging him, observing him, drawing up accounts. But how wrong he was! Peter had never suffered the sickness of love for Laura. It was something else.
On Lexington Avenue, he found a telephone booth, but there was no directory. After two phone calls to information, he was able to elicit Clara’s address by giving the operator one he made up. It was twelve blocks away. He began to walk uptown on Lexington. He was not thinking of what he would do. He was recalling how exposed he had been in the telephone booth, and how he had not been frightened. Let them kill him! But no sooner had he given permission to unknown assailants, then he was engulfed by horrible apprehensions. It was as though, all at once, his nerves had been hooked up to some galvanic pulse of malign energy. He trembled; in the pockets of his raincoat, his clenched hands sweated; his eyelids twitched. He was shambling toward disintegration, in a state of fear so elemental that his mind, streaming always with words, became a screen over which light and dark had ceased to play.
Some purely physical reflex brought him to a halt against a shop window against whose cold glass he leaned his forehead. He was panting like a dog. Gradually, his vision returned. He saw, in the window, bathed in the glow of a small spotlight, a model ship. It was a schooner in full sail. On the deck, tiny figures of sailors bent at their tasks. One was on the aft rigging; the rigging itself was of flax-colored rope, intricate, taut, perfect, a thing he could have examined forever, this work of skill and patience, an imitation of reality that was in itself a realization. His breathing grew normal. The blurred symbols in his head took shape, became orders. He would tell Clara that her grandmother had died that day. He did not know what else he would tell her. He’d see. He went on. A couple in evening clothes approached, then passed him. He saw pinned to the woman’s fur coat a large white button upon which black letters read: “Fuck Housework.”
He thought of other proclamations, other times. He lived in a period of disgust, of self-disgust, of disgust with all others, of a sickly, puerile, sentimental detestation of thought which led without divagation to the cabdriver’s solution of crime and to his own silent firing squad.
He was very cold. The drizzle of rain continued. He had had what Violet would have called, and instantly dismissed as, an attack of anxiety. But that supernal dread which had caught him up with such violence could not be encompassed by the propitiating lingo of psychology. Naming had scant magic when magic itself was at work. Yet as he sloshed, exhausted, toward Clara’s apartment, he felt a touch of felicity, as though the resolution that was leading him toward her was about something other than death.