The Widow’s Children. Paula Fox

faint smile had accompanied his words. Now it faded, leaving behind it his usual expression, one of sad pensiveness. She saw her father lost. He would get nothing from Carlos, not rescue, not even a moment’s comfort. “I tried to make him eat something …” Carlos said in melancholy accents.

      But he wouldn’t, Clara guessed, have tried to stop Ed from drinking. She had spent a few afternoons with the two men in Carlos’s dark, foul apartment, drinking more than she could tolerate as her father’s moods shifted from hilarity to despair and the air grew acrid with smoke, the atmosphere charged with Carlos’s helpless irritation. She’d gone because she could not resist a chance to see Ed, even though she knew the hours would be mutilated, debauched. Once, he had sprawled on the dirty couch, nearly insensible, crooning, coughing, retching. “I will catch a great fish, a red salmon, icy its dying flesh,” he had cried thickly. “I will take it to my lair in the hills and will place around my neck the chain she has left for me, and eat my fish– ”

      “For Christ’s sake!” Carlos had erupted.

      “Ah – you’re both against me,” Ed had muttered. “I can’t help that, my dears, my kittens, my babes. I know you both, your tricks …” and then he had begun to bark like a dog.

      Staggering beneath his drunken weight, they’d managed to get him into the bedroom. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he had yipped, his eyes clamped shut, his thin hands clenched against the gray pillowcase.

      But there had been other times when she had given in to the thrall of the long friendship between the two men, the charm of their special language with each other, its mysterious allusions, the sense she had, although it bewildered her, of some surviving unimpaired worth each held for the other. Ed did not always drink until he lost consciousness. She had come upon them once in the unchanging dusk of Carlos’s living room speaking in low voices. “You must be patient, Ed,” Carlos had said gently, again and again. “Husband your strength … work at your painting with modesty, no? Isn’t that the way, old friend?” as her father – for once – in unemphatic, despairing recital, spoke of his inability to take hold of his life, of this shapeless drift toward annihilation from which he saw no turning. It was too late for everything. Why did women hate him so? Why couldn’t he work anymore, even at photography? He had been a better than competent photographer in his time. He had provided for Laura and himself, not well but with some style. Why were his nights so tormented by the past that he lay awake grinding his teeth, groaning with regret, with shame?

      They had barely acknowledged her presence, as though she’d been one of Carlos’s young men whom she sometimes found there with them, who smoked idly while he looked over some of Carlos’s old music reviews, or, if he was musical, allowed his fingers to drift over the keys of the piano. She had felt as though the two of them were disappearing before her eyes, fragment of flesh by fragment of bone, replaced by the deepening dark of the evening outside. Days later, recalling that afternoon, she had known they’d been frightened, the two aging men, unable to turn on a light.

      “I don’t know what to tell you,” Clara said now to her uncle. “The last time I saw him – he took me to lunch that time, which never happened before – and I thought he was sober, almost. But he wasn’t.”

      Ed had walked with her to her bus stop. He’d been voluble, even brisk, but as the bus drew away from the corner, she’d looked back at him. He had sagged against the soot-blackened wall of an old public school, his hat pulled forward over his forehead, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides.

      There was a shout of laughter from behind them. Clara turned to see Peter Rice bent over, her mother glittering with triumphant amusement, Desmond grinning. Laura must have told a joke.

      Clara walked toward them. There was nothing more to say to Carlos. They had had such conversations before about Ed. On a bedside table, she noticed a cartoon clipped from some magazine. She picked it up, then held it toward Laura. “Did grandma send this?” she asked, knowing Alma’s habit of sending cartoons to her children; she’d been doing it ever since Clara could remember. When Laura had still been married to Ed and lived in foreign places, during the months Carlos spent abroad, or when Eugenio’s tourist agency required him to go to California or New Mexico, their mother would send them, by airmail, a drawing from a magazine or newspaper, laughing to herself as she clipped out these cartoons, sent them winging to her scattered children, smiling, perhaps at the thought of their answering laughter which would anneal the distance, remind them of her existence, appease their irritation at her for reminding them.

      “Put that down!”

      There was such ferocity in Laura’s voice that Clara dropped the piece of paper. It floated just beneath the bed, and Carlos, arrested by Laura’s cry, let a match burn down to his fingers. In the silence – everyone was silent – Clara saw that a stem was missing from the eyeglasses Carlos was wearing.

      “I’m sorry,” Clara said lamely. Peter Rice retrieved the cartoon and put it back carefully on the table. Then Laura shook her head as though confused. “Oh – I don’t know what’s the matter with me … Of course, look at it, Clara. Here, take it!” And then she grabbed her brother’s arm. “Carlos!” all mock severity now, “Get those damned specs fixed! Shame on you!”

      “They’re fine,” he said mildly.

      “Why, Carlos, they aren’t yours! Look, Laura, they don’t even fit him,” said Desmond.

      “Someone left them at my apartment,” Carlos said ruefully, reminding them all of his reputation as the laziest man in the world. He smiled winsomely.

      There was a story Ed Hansen told, of how when he and Carlos had gone on a brief trip to Mexico, Carlos had said, on their first evening in Taxco, that he didn’t feel like arranging for rooms with the hotel manager. Would Ed mind getting a translator? And during the subsequent dealing with the manager, while a young Mexican boy grabbed off the street translated for Ed, Carlos had sat in a chair, nodding, Ed reported, in voluptuous weariness, as though a young pupil was reciting an often repeated lesson for an old master.

      Waking at a late hour of a Sunday morning, knowing he ought to visit his mother at the home, knowing that he would not, aware of the noxious stink of his apartment, of stale food and dust and unwashed sheets, Carlos would fold his hands behind his head and lie there, tears running down his cheeks, thinking of his used-up life, of lovers dead or gone, of investments made unwisely, of his violent sister who might telephone him at any minute and, with her elaborate killer’s manners, in her beautiful deep voice, make some outrageous demand upon him, making clear she knew not only the open secrets of his life but the hidden ones, knew about his real shiftlessness, his increasing boredom with sexual pursuit, his unappeased sexual longing, his terror of age. “I’m becoming an old sow,” he would whisper to himself, trying to keep at bay the thought of his mother waiting in the disinfectant, linoleum-smelling stillness of the old people’s home for him to come and see her.

      “I’m really going to have my prescription filled one of these days,” he said to Laura.

      “Oh, Carlos …” Laura shook her head with mock despair.

      “You might get a seeing eye dog,” suggested Peter.

      “Oh, Peter, then he’d have to feed it, and take it out– ”

      “Not necessarily,” Carlos said, and laughed, as did everyone, and new drinks were made. Laura raised hers to the group. “Gosh, it’s so damned nice to have you all here! Carlos! Clarita! You’re really here. Isn’t it, Desmond? Doesn’t it feel delicious?”

      “Oh yes … it’s wonderful,” Desmond replied. His face was inflamed, his eyes were dulled.

      “The restaurant Desmond found has the most marvelous eggs à la Russe,” Laura said animatedly. “Isn’t that your favorite, Clara? Aren’t you the great mayonnaise and eggs lover?”

      “Oh, God! I’m smoking a cigarette and now I’ve lit another one,” exclaimed Peter.

      “No seagull would do such a dreadful thing,” Laura smiled.