“Yes, it is nice. I pay more rent that I can really afford. But when I saw this big room—I thought, if I have such a room, I won’t mind anything else. There’s a joke kitchen over there. The bedroom is only large enough for a bed. And this street isn’t bad. Did you notice the little house next door? It’s supposed to be a Stanford White house. Was the doorman unpleasant to you? He was a star reporter on a newspaper, then it folded, and he was too old to get what he calls decent work. He was quite mean when I moved in, sneering at how little furniture I brought. But it was just to get me interested in him so he could tell me he wasn’t an ordinary doorman, that he’d been important once. I couldn’t think who it was when the buzzer rang. Let me take your coat. Is it still raining hard?”
“I’ve been out for a while,” Peter said, handing her the coat. There was only one small closet in the place, she told him, so she would hang it in the bathroom.
The room was plain, clean, and spacious. It was sparsely furnished, a studio bed covered with sailcloth, three cane chairs, two small tables, one long table covered with a brilliant green oilcloth. He picked up a small volume that lay on the couch. The Spirit of the Age by William Hazlitt. There were no other books, no magazines. On one wall hung two drawings side by side. One was signed, Edward Hansen. It showed a cluster of flat-roofed houses on a curve of beach. The other was an unsigned sketch of a leafless tree, thickly branched, with a twisted trunk like that of an olive tree.
“That’s a place where they lived a while,” Clara said when she returned to the living room and found him looking at the drawings. “I think it was Italy.”
“The tree is very nice.”
“I did that.”
“You didn’t sign it.”
“No.”
“Do you draw a lot?”
“Not at all. I did that one night from memory. It was the only tree that looked like that on the plantation in Cuba where I lived with my grandmother. All the other trees looked like giraffes or hedgehogs. Actually, it had leaves, but I couldn’t remember how they were shaped.”
“You ought to do more. I always wanted to draw.”
“No. I don’t really care about drawing,” she said, sitting down in one of the chairs. “It was just a personal thing.”
She had changed from her dress into gray slacks and a gray sweater and she was wearing summer sandals on her bare feet. He noticed they were narrow and bony and, like the room, extremely clean. She was watching him intently, but he felt she was not aware of her own intentness, only that she was determined to show no surprise at his being there at such an hour.
“Do you like Hazlitt?” he asked, sitting down on the couch, wondering how long he was going to postpone an explanation of his presence. It was not only politeness, he thought, that was preventing her from questioning him. She looked braced, her calmness the result of will. Without makeup now, she seemed older than she had looked in the hotel room and the restaurant. He was abashed. Had all the anguished resolution which had brought him here been uncalled-for, self-serving? In her living presence, he realized he had been thinking of her as a child. She was regarding him gravely, sitting straight in the chair. She was pale, unadorned like her room. Her voice was different from what he remembered. How odd to think Laura could affect one’s vocal chords. She had spoken hastily, softly, during dinner, as though on the run. He listened to her voice now; it was cool and somewhat hollow.
“Hazlitt is all right,” she said. “I don’t keep books. As long as there’s a library nearby, I can get what I want. All my friends are weighted down with books, and when they have to move, they just curse them. But they keep on buying them.”
“You don’t read novels?”
She looked suddenly restive. He said, quickly, “I’m awfully glad I didn’t wake you. I was afraid I would have to and it was a relief—”
“Listen, I got hungry and made myself some toast just before you came. Would you like a piece?” She was smiling uneasily. He felt he was tormenting her. Yet he couldn’t say what he had to.
“No, no. But you go ahead. Don’t let me—”
The smile disappeared. She merely looked at him, waiting.
“I don’t know how to go about this,” he said. Why didn’t she help him? Couldn’t she ask him why he’d come?
“You’re scaring me a little.”
“It’s about your grandmother.”
She glanced at Hansen’s drawing, then back to Peter. Her hands flattened out on her thighs.
“Something happened,” she said suddenly, her voice rising.
“She died this afternoon.”
She stood up at once and walked to the long table where she stood with her back turned to him. She was thin, he thought, much too thin. She turned slowly until he could see her face. She was not crying. Her face seemed frozen. He thought, I mustn’t show surprise if she laughs. Sometimes people do laugh when they learn of a death—I mustn’t—
“My mother sent you to tell me?”
It was the question he had feared, pushing it back all along, claiming to himself he only needed to deliver the news of death. He heard her repeat it as she began to walk toward him, her hands clasped in front of her. He was terrified that she might kneel and beg him to answer. Now she stood directly in front of him. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he began to turn the pages of the Hazlitt. A folded piece of paper dropped from the book to his knee. Clara bent forward and picked it up delicately with two fingers and slipped it into the pocket of her slacks. Only a few seconds had passed.
“No,” he said.
She fell into a chair.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice quavering.
“I mean—she said you were not to be told.”
She flushed violently; redness streaked her pale skin like a rash. Her lips parted. He could see the gleam of a tooth. Then she glanced at various objects in the room, her head turning rapidly, her glance resting only a second on this thing or that. But she didn’t look at him. She looked awkward, helpless, as though something heavy had fallen on her and was pinning her down. He didn’t know what to do, how to explain, how to help her.
“I know how shocked you are,” he said, just above a whisper, not wanting to recall her harshly to his presence there, to his witnessing what he realized was humiliation, not grief.
“I’m not shocked,” she said. “She was so old and sad. What else was there for her to do in that awful place? And I would have expected Laura—” But she stopped speaking.
It was far more painful than he had imagined. Constrained to say something, he repeated her “expected” weakly as if offering her her own word so she could go on.
“I’m lying,” she said. She drew up her legs and folded her arms across her breasts. “It’s not what I expected at all. How could anyone—how could I have expected that Laura would not tell me? It’s my way—not to show surprise.”
She looked at him with an angry, nettled expression. “I don’t give a damn either,” she said, “but I suppose if Laura came here with a pistol and aimed it at my head, I’d ask her if she wanted a drink before she fired.”
He said, “I don’t know what Laura could have been thinking. It’s certainly possible that she was too upset to know what she was saying.”
“Laura always knows what she’s doing and saying,” Clara said vehemently. “She is not, as many people are, constrained by self-consciousness. She doesn’t care why she does things. Have you ever known anyone else for whom cause and effect are the same thing? She has always been charmed by my efforts to justify her own actions to her.”
She had spoken without emphasis, but ruthlessly, and he heard how much at this minute her voice did sound like her mother’s.
“But she must have been distraught—the death of a parent—” he began.
“Never mind that!” she said harshly. “I know all that! But can’t you tell me anything?”
“About Laura—” he began, but she was shaking her head from side to side, and he fell silent, watching her worriedly. He had thought he only wanted to do the right thing, that he was doing the right thing. But he hadn’t taken her into account.
She leaned toward him. “Is it because I hardly ever went to see Alma? Is she getting even with me? Laura believes in revenge—if belief is the word for it. What I’m asking you is—explain, tell me!” she implored him. “Why am I not to know? Please. I don’t want universal truths. That’s no trouble. My grandmother died all alone. Would you have whispered in her ear that everyone dies? Listen to me!” She paused and looked down at her clenched hands. “It’s the difference that’s so hard—your own life is the difference.”
“I know that,” he said.
“How would you feel? If it were you? If you were shut out?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“No, you don’t,” she agreed.
“I can imagine,” he said quickly.
“Why do I feel so ashamed?” she cried at him. “Why this awful shame?…”
“I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I hate Laura for this.”
“Do you?” she asked. “Can you hate her?”
The room was cold. He shivered a little, then glanced at his watch. He hadn’t gone without sleep like this for years. Clara was lighting a cigarette.
“I said I could imagine how you felt,” he said. “Isn’t there any comfort in that?”
“Is there?” she asked.
“She was jealous of you, maybe,” he said. “Her mother took care of you. I got the impression you were the only person anyone ever took care of in that family.”
“Jealousy? Is that it?”
“I don’t know.”
Clara looked calmer all at once, settled into trouble.
“Even if it is jealousy, what difference does it make?” she asked without interest. “Laura is a terrorist. She realizes herself only when the bomb she throws explodes. It’s a self-realization I don’t understand.”
“Why do you see her?”
“I don’t know how not to see her.”
“But she doesn’t try to see you, does she?”
“She has an impulse now and then.”
“Don’t go. You don’t have to.”
“If it were a question of will…”
“Can you make it that?”
“I haven’t been able to yet. But after this, it might be easier.”
“I’ve known your mother a long time,” he said. “I know in my bones she was wretched tonight.”
“I don’t pretend that she didn’t feel anything. But, Jesus! She’s dead cold inside, half born. She doesn’t really know that anyone else is alive. The world—it’s only an expanded bubble of herself—what she hates is part of herself. The Jews, you know how she is about Jews? Yet those Hebrew ancestors aren’t one of Ed’s fancies. She never gets outside anything. Didn’t you feel it tonight, in the restaurant, when she was teasing you about your work? And talking about Carlos’s piggishness? How she sees everything as designed for her or against her?”
“I can see why you would feel that way,” he said.
“How I’d feel that way!” she exclaimed. “I’m talking about you! Can’t you say anything—something to me about what she’s done? Don’t you see? I don’t even know if she’s not right! But, goddamn her! It was me that lived with her mother. Oh, Christ! I’m sick with thinking about her. I was born thinking about her.”
“And your grandmother?” he asked. “What about her?”
She didn’t answer for a long time. She sat there, smoking, her eyes closed. Then she stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the table next to the chair.
“I don’t know about that either,” she said at last. “I’m scared. But grief?” She looked at him steadily for a minute. “I hated her when I was a child,” she went on. “I don’t know why. She was never brutal to me. We were like two castaways in a lifeboat. The supplies were always on the point of giving out. I felt that. I never took daily life for granted. She was so subservient, yet she managed to force those two, my uncles, to come Sunday after Sunday for those horrible dinners. It was like a slaughter, one of those dinners, Carlos with his eyes rolled up like a martyr whose feet are on fire, Eugenio exuding poisonous rage while she pretended to laugh, pretended there was an actual living conversation going on. My grandmother ruled them, through the tyranny of her pathos. No one seemed able to stop anything, to change the way it was.”
“You must have been pretty confused.”
“No,” she said emphatically. “The life with her was all I knew. It simply penetrated me. I didn’t think about it.”
“But she was very fond of you. I’ve always heard that.”
“I bet you heard that,” she said with a certain hardness.
“But wasn’t she?” he insisted.
“Well, I suppose. But I hated the way she made me feel. She surrounded me like a fog. She would ask me to kiss her. I would brush my face against hers, my lips flattened, holding my breath. Once, I told her she smelled bad. She laughed a little wistful laugh. I knew how cruel I was being—and I felt a kind of pleasure in it, that cruelty. If she had slapped me—but I never saw her in a rage. At that point where I would expect her to be angry, her tears would start. And yet, we only had each other in that place where we lived. She came to parents’ day once at the public school I went to. She walked like a cripple—her feet gave her such trouble and the pain must have thrown her off balance—but she was dressed so differently from the other parents, in her flowing rags, and her hair was coming undone all through the class period. I kept turning in my seat to see if it had come all the way undone. There was her accent, but you met her, didn’t you? She had such a willful accent—like a comic stage-Latin. She kept smiling at me from the back of the classroom as though there was nothing strange about her being there, or about the two of us. I was embarrassed. In the center of my life, there was an awful embarrassment.”
“Always?” he asked.
“You spoke of will,” Clara said sadly. “When I grew up, I willed it away, my mortification. Oh—I knew it was wrong, humanly unjust. And I used to go to see her when she was still living in the apartment. I brought her presents. But I always felt dislike, a distance from her, and she wanted everything from me, not just presents. It was a weak little stream of obligation that took me there, and when she went to the home, it dried up altogether. She was like a locked room I had escaped from. And all the time, I felt ugly with ingratitude, knowing how I should have felt.”
“What on earth did those two, Ed and Laura, do with you in the beginning?” he asked. But he was speaking in his “story” voice; he had drawled out the question the way he sometimes did in an editorial meeting with a writer whose inflamed self-esteem forced him into ludicrous circumspection.
She caught the tone and looked at him ironically.
“Why—I was born and instantly pressed into Alma’s arms,” she said.
“So, she took care of you. You can’t get away from that,” he said, willing her silently to say what he wanted her to say, that she would go to the funeral and justify his interference, release him from this obligation to listen any further to her.
“I know!” she burst out. “Oh, God! I know she took care of me. Who else was there?”
“You could have been sent away—to strangers.”
“I found them less strange,” she said.
“And she took you to Cuba—that couldn’t have been easy for her from what I’ve heard. That was something, wasn’t it?”
“What are you up to? What are you after?” she demanded.
“You’re awfully easy on yourself. You don’t know what could have happened—with strangers.”
“I’m not claiming I know. I only know what did happen.”
“I don’t know so much about it, but I have the sense her life was a long disappointment. I saw Eugenio tonight. I had to stop by to tell him—”
“Eugenio!” she interrupted. “That lunatic!”
“He told me how your grandmother had tried to sell embroidery during the depression. It was always hard times for her. She was alone with those three. He told me some things about himself—that he’d lived like a beggar, a sponge….”
“Don’t you see?” she importuned him. “I’ve heard it all. I lived it.”
Angrily, he said, “You didn’t live her life. You can’t seem to acknowledge that she was there, sheltering you.”
She ignored what he’d said and began to talk about Cuba. “I hardly ever saw her there, once or twice a month maybe. She was at the beck and call of that old witch, Gonzaga, who went absolutely out of her head the last year of her life. All for $200 a month. Everything came from Gonzaga—she’d even arranged my grandmother’s marriage to Maldonada. Oh—how it comes back to me! When we left that squalid apartment, and got on the Myrtle Avenue line with our baggage, and an hour or so later, we boarded Gonzaga’s private train that was hopping with servants like fleas. A private train! And the plantation like an industrialized feudal village, people bowing to the old woman. They put me in a room next to the servants’ wing. Night and day I could hear the bells that summoned them. The smell of cane, such a dark, sulky smell, and miles of it growing twenty feet high all around the village with its shacks built on stilts, and underneath them pigs and chickens cackling and grunting. There was such a smell of tropical rot over everything but the servants scoured it away from the great house, kept it at bay. But still, stray dogs would run among the grapefruit trees, their ears full of swollen ticks, like white grapes, even into Gonzaga’s private garden where a valet wheeled her on the afternoons she was not hallucinating…. The servants gave me liquor-soaked rags to give to Gonzaga’s monkeys—to get them drunk. She had cages of monkeys and tropical birds in the garden. And the servants let me visit them in their little rooms. But they wouldn’t touch me. And I had another life no one in the great house knew about.” She smiled reminiscently. “I found my way out of the gardens. I found the village schoolteacher, Maria Garçia was her name…in the afternoons, she used to bathe me, along with her own children, in a metal tub in her kitchen, then put up my straight hair in brown paper twists so it would curl, and afterwards, she would take us all for the paseo, the afternoon walk. When I got back to the big house, no one asked me where I’d been. I don’t think they knew I’d been anywhere.”
“But there were good times then?” he asked.
She ignored the question. She said, “Gonzaga was rich in the old way. The Gonzaga family had been very smart—so many of those old families lost their estates after the war with this country, but Gonzaga had dealt and compromised and held on and paid. One night a flock of guinea fowl began to cry outside my window and I was scared and ran into the corridor, toward the central part of the house. I wasn’t ever supposed to go there, but I didn’t dare wake any of the servants. And I ran straight into a group of musicians, taking a break, I guess, outside the main salon. Their backs were turned to me, and each one was holding in his fingers a dark cheroot, the smoke rising up like a screen. Gonzaga had summoned them from Havana. And she had her own personal doctor who lived with her, and her priest, and that private train, and a yacht that was always kept ready for her though she was too feeble to ever use it. You see? It was that kind of wealth.”
“Your grandmother had no choice,” he said. “She did what she could.”
“I’m not blaming anyone.”
“Did you think everyone else had it better?”
“Once. I thought that once,” she said caustically.
“It’s done damage, this idea of happiness, what it is, what one is owed.”
“I suppose so,” she said. “But I wish—” and she stopped and seemed to wait for him to tell her what she wished.
“Perhaps you cared about your grandmother more than you think,” he said.
She laughed at him. “I wouldn’t have thought you were so simple-minded,” she said.
“You are!” he retorted, stung.
“Now I’ve made you mad,” she said. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe that is what I wished, that I could have cared about her. But I didn’t. It was Carlos I loved. He’s sweet, you know, really sweet. I think I used to dream he’d take me away with him. I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he never could do much for anyone. But he was never bitter—like the others. I suppose my grandmother was sweet, too, when she was a girl, before it all began, that long voyage to Cuba, to the man she’d never met and had to marry. She was only sixteen, you know. He was thirty-eight. But, yes…I remember times when she was not servile and plaintive, when she was amused, when something made her laugh. She was a good mimic. She used to imitate Eugenio perfectly. It takes a certain hardheartedness to be a good mimic. When she was like that, I felt a weight had been lifted from our life together. But there was another side to her, a morbid side. She used to tell me ghastly stories, people depositing severed hands in someone’s bed, stories of curses that brought disease and death. Cuban voodoo.”
Peter felt drained of strength, without conviction that he should be where he was. He said, “I haven’t been up this late for a decade.”
“I’ll ring downstairs and get the old star reporter to find you a taxi,” she said. “I’ve kept you too long.”
“You didn’t keep me,” he said. “But wait—wait just a minute.”
She watched him guardedly. He thought, I can go now, but he said, “I think you must go to her funeral.”
“No!” she cried. “Not a chance!”
“You’re going to let Laura have her way?”
“I don’t care about Laura’s way. I won’t go. And don’t tell me what funerals are for. I know all about that. This is different.”
“It’s not different,” he said. “It’s a death, your grandmother’s. You have no right to stay away.”
“Rights have nothing to do with it. I don’t believe in such rights. And who gave you the right to tell me what to do?”
“No one. And I’m asking you, not telling you.”
“I have something to do tomorrow—today. It is almost day. And it’s important to me.”
She looked composed, cold. She’d walked away from the trouble. He disliked her suddenly; he was chilled by her callousness. Let her play dead then! There was nothing for him to do—it wasn’t his affair. Laura would telephone him in a few days. It would be as it always had been. He had pressed up against enough Maldonada thorns. Eugenio alone would have been enough!
Clara was silent. He had a sudden vision of himself raising his foot and bringing it down on her bare feet. She had a hard nature. She was arranging her face to show indifference.
“What’s so important to you?” he asked, his voice cracking with anger.
She wrenched herself upright. She looked astonished.
“And don’t tell me it’s none of my business,” he said. “Are you going to let it go on forever, this thing with Laura. Are you going to let her be the one who decides forever? End it! Go for yourself!”
“I wouldn’t go to her funeral either,” she said stupidly. She looked down at her lap, her eyes half closed.
He slumped against the wall behind the couch. He wanted to go home, to sleep, to rejoin his silent life, to know where everything was.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” she said hesitantly.
“I don’t care.”
“There is a day planned—with a man. We haven’t ever had a chance for a whole day together until now. It might not come again.”
“Whose man?”
She laughed scornfully. “For God’s sake! Not that! Are you going to tell me—”
“I’m not going to tell you anything,” he replied. “It was a conclusion, an observation, whatever you like. It’s not much of a reason anyhow.”
“I guess not,” she admitted. She looked at him candidly. “I liked the idea, that he had to plan for it, be quick to see a chance, fix it all up, just to spend a few hours with me.”
“And you?”
“I feel his pleasure.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“I don’t know.”
“But how can I go if she doesn’t want me there?”
“By finding out where the burial is to take place—by finding out how to get there—by dressing yourself and going.”
“I can’t do it,” she said and stood up and began walking around the room. “It’s chilly, isn’t it? They stop sending up enough heat at this time of the year. It’s nearly spring, isn’t it?” She paused near a window and peered through it. “There’s nobody on the street. It isn’t often empty.”
“I’ll take you,” he said. His heart sank, yet he’d known all along he’d make the offer. “I have a car. I can find out in the morning where she’s to be buried, and get the car out of the garage, and drive you.”
“I don’t give a damn that she’s dead!” she said, turning to him. “I simply don’t give one damn!”
“Neither do I,” he said. “But if I take you, will you go?”
“Go yourself!” she snapped. Then, smiling maliciously, she said, “Think how that would please Laura! That’s what you like to do, isn’t it? Bird calls and nasty stories, anything to please her?”
He was chagrined, yet he wanted to laugh. The impulse to laugh was powerful, like an incipient sneeze. Carlos, and now Clara, sniggering about his servitude. They were simply rattling their own chains. He started laughing. For no reason he could think of, he had suddenly recalled how his sister, Kitty—almost nineteen she must have been then—had picked up a tray holding his mother’s prize tea set and hurled it to the floor, breaking every single piece.
“What’s so funny?” he heard Clara ask through his laughter, then, her voice concerned, “Listen, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he gasped. “Something I remembered…. I didn’t laugh when it happened, but—it was something my sister once did. She smashed up a load of Spode one morning. It was the only time I remember Kitty going out of control like that. My mother kept a tea set on a tray in the dining room. For people to admire. We never used the stuff. The sideboard was wobbly and we always had to tiptoe in the dining room. ‘Watch out for my Spode!’ my mother would shout if she heard one of us in there. But she wouldn’t move it to another place. She used to stare at it a good deal—” He broke off and began to laugh again. Clara’s uncomprehending face provoked him to louder laughter. “I mean,” he said, coughing, “I mean, my mother looked at it so stubbornly.” He cleared his throat, snickered faintly. “I must have thought then that we’d been hit by an earthquake—everything would have to change. Nothing changed. And now, it seems funny.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that…about your pleasing Laura.”
Another wave of laughter seized him. They both tried to ignore it as though he were belching uncontrollably. Then he said, “It’s true, what you said. Say it. Say anything you like. But it doesn’t matter how Alma took care of you. She did.”
“You can’t know what it was like for me,” she said.
“I can guess,” he said. “There’s no end of trouble. My mother was a good manager. She saw to us. But she was a well-poisoner. She worked an awful magic between the three of us children. Even when we were small, she would report to us what the other two were saying. It was a kind of careless whispering; it filled the house; she seemed to feed on the gossip of her children. At night, when she’d come to tuck me in, she’d say, ‘Martha says you’re being very silly in your civics class—your little farm friend, Robert, told her so. Don’t you think you’d better stop all that?’ and when I was older, ‘Kitty tells me you had some friends in when I was in Trenton yesterday and that you all sat around being oh so important, talking about poetry! Well—so you waited till your old peasant mother was out!’ And she always understood why a boy had cracked me over the head, or a teacher found me unresponsive. She understood everyone except herself. And even then, I knew there was no intelligence at work, and no feeling except vindictiveness toward me because I was hers. Not that she didn’t do the same thing to my sisters. But there was some solidarity between them, an element that kept me out. When I walked into a room where the three of them had been talking together, they went quiet, and I would feel awkward and large, too large to retreat back through the door. Yet she couldn’t even criticize me without covering up. ‘You and I are so self-destructive, Petey,’ she’d say. Of course, I knew she only meant me. When Kitty married, the year before Mother died, I used to hear her—‘You can’t expect anything of men—don’t be surprised if he’s not there when you really need him—men never are.’ The marriage didn’t last long—although that wasn’t entirely my mother’s fault. And sometimes, not often, when I rebelled, got mad because of some tangled thing she’d said, she’d run to the girls, in front of me, crying, ‘Oh, look! I’ve hurt his feelings. He’s so abnormally sensitive! I feel so guilty!’ When she died—” He hesitated. Clara was leaning forward in her chair, staring at him intently. “When she did die, I was glad, the way you are when a pain stops. But I was crazed too, for a while.”
“You didn’t love her?”
“Love!” he exclaimed. “There’s more to love than love.”
“What else is there?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s thought.”
“And your father?”
“David Clarey Rice,” he said as though calling out his own name. “My father. ‘Our depressed paterfamilias,’ my mother called him. That uncle I was telling you about, the one I made the pie with, he was my father’s brother, rather plain like him, a plain person, not dull, but unadorned by temperament. My father never said much about himself. In time, I think I’ve slowly comprehended them both, from my own life. I see now how frantic she must have been. And he was disappointed. He didn’t have the language for his disappointment, didn’t know how to tell it. He was kindly but toneless, as though he’d been swept clean of even ordinary things—like irritability. He was like a shelter where you could get in out of a storm. A silent place.”
“You were angry a lot?”
“No. I wasn’t. There was affection…something like it anyhow.”
“But you got out of it alive!” she said, evidently thinking her own thoughts about herself. “It isn’t much in your life anymore.”
“You never get out of it.”
“I have this trouble,” she said with a certain humbleness. “I don’t see things in a plain way. I can’t be plain.”
He laughed. “You have this trouble….”
“I don’t know what you’re really up to,” she said indignantly. “It’s not just a matter of this—this mess not being your business. You stumble in here in the middle of the night sweating righteousness from every pore—and you don’t seem to have the faintest thought of what you’re stamping on and bruising. Do you think I’m going to do what you tell me to do? What anyone tells me to do?”
“Except Laura…”
“Not Laura!” she exclaimed furiously. “I arrived when everything was over—a consequence of Ed Hansen’s momentary insistence. The Maldonadas should have died out—without issue. The three of them are like dinosaurs sinking into the tar pits, flailing about themselves—”
“When they were young—” he tried to interrupt.
“Ah, yes! And they were so different then? They weren’t! They were merely young—”
“You’re so stupid!” he cried. “You won’t have to break your neck the way I did—you won’t have to find out, too late, that nothing’s been arranged for you!”
She smiled as though she’d caught him out.
“What about you?” she asked triumphantly. “What’s between you and Laura? Why are you pushing me? What is it you want me to do for you? You could have left them to their own dead. If it was such an affront to your sense of propriety, you could have refused when she told you not to tell me. You coward!” Her voice had risen; she was hurling words at him like stones.
“I want you—” he began, holding up his hands as though to shield his face—“I want you to break it, break the fatality, stand at that grave!”
“For me?” she cried. “For my good? For yours! Isn’t that it?”
“Yes. For all that!”
“You idiot!”
“All right!”
“It’s all between you and that outlaw! It has nothing to do with me!”
“Yes,” he said, defeated. “Maybe it is between Laura and me. She is outside the law. It’s why I’ve loved her, hung on to her all these years.”
“Then you go! Leave me out of it!” she demanded.
“No. I can’t,” he said. “It’s because of you I’m here.” He felt stupefied. His jaws ached. He said, barely audibly, “You must go and jump past her.”
“Lay your own spooks,” she said.
He pushed the Hazlitt essays to the floor and lay down full length on the couch and closed his eyes. He said, “Don’t go. Wait for somebody to convince you of something, anything. That’s what you expect to happen, don’t you? After all, you’re an American girl…. Don’t go. I don’t give a damn, just like you. I’m too exhausted to look at you, to look at your blank face. You can shove it!” He opened his eyes. The room was empty.
He felt fatigue as a blessing. He knew he couldn’t stand up, and he was grateful to know it. He needed only to turn his head, away from the light to the wall, and he would fall asleep. Then he heard the chink of china.
“Here,” Clara said. She was holding a tray in one hand. On it was a cup of tea, a slice of lemon, some sugar cubes, toast. She drew a small table close to the couch. “It’s ice-cold, like English toast,” she said.
She left the room and soon returned carrying a blanket and a pillow.
“It’s a good couch for sleeping,” she said.
“Do you really like to read Hazlitt?” he asked.
“Not very much. But it makes me feel calm; boredom makes me calm.”
“The tea is a comfort, just as they say.”
“I’ve set the alarm for eight o’clock,” she said. “We’ll get a few hours sleep, if we’re lucky. You can call them then, at the hotel. Will you tell her then? That you’ve told me?”
“No,” he said. “There’s no point…you’ll just be there.”
She spread the blanket over him, then waited till he had put the cup down to slip the pillow beneath his head.
“Shall I take your glasses off?” she asked.
He loved the weight of the blanket. “I think I’ll kiss this blanket,” he said. She removed his glasses gently and put them on the table.
“You will go with me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes closing.