“That’s what you_ think, baby” was Clara’s response, although it was not made to Gina Wegman, it was made to Ms. Wong. “And let’s hope she never finds out what this town can do to a young person. But when you think about such a pretty child and the Italian charm of her looks, so innocent—although innocence is a tricky thing to prove. You can’t expect her to forget about being a girl just because the surroundings are so dangerous.”
“Do you let her ride the subway?”
“Let_ her!” said Clara. “When the young things go into the street, where’s your control over them? All I can do is pray she’ll be safe. I told her if she was going to wear a short skirt she should also put on a coat. But what good is advice without a slum background? What a woman needs today is some slum experience. However, it’s up to me to keep an eye on the child, and I must assume she’s innocent and doesn’t want_ to be rubbed up against in the rush hours by dirty-sex delinquents.”
“It’s hard to be in the responsible-adult position,” said Laura.
“It’s the old-time religion in me. Stewardship.” Clara said this partly in fun. Yet when she invoked her background, her formative years, she became for a moment the girl with the wide forehead, the large eyes, the smallish nose, who had been forced by her parents to memorize long passages from Galatians and Corinthians.
“She suits the children,” said Ms. Wong.
“They’re very comfortable with her, and there’s no strain with Lucy.” For Clara, Lucy was the main thing. At this stage she was so sullen—overweight, shy of making friends, jealous, resistant, troubled. Hard to move. Clara had often suggested that Lucy’s hair be cut, the heavy curls that bounded her face. “The child has hair like Jupiter,” said Clara in one of her sessions with Laura. “Sometimes I think she must be as strong—potentially—as a hod carrier.”
“Wouldn’t she like it short and trim, like yours?”
“I don’t want a storm over it,” said Clara.
The child was clumsy certainly (although her legs were going to be good—you could already see that). But there was a lot of power under this clumsiness. Lucy complained that her little sisters united against her. It looked that way, Clara agreed. Patsy and Selma were graceful children, and they made Lucy seem burly, awkward before the awkward age. She would be awkward after it too, just as her mother had been, and eruptive, defiant and prickly. When Clara got through to her (the superlarge eyes of her slender face had to bear down on the kid till she opened up—“You can always talk to Mother about what goes on, what’s cooking inside”), then Lucy sobbed that all the girls in her class snubbed and made fun of her.
“Little bitches,” said Clara to Ms. Wong. “Amazing how early it all starts. Even Selma and Patsy, affectionate kids, are developing at Lucy’s expense. Her ‘grossness’—you know what a word ‘gross’ is with children—makes ladies of them. And the little sisters are far from dumb, but I believe Lucy is the one with the brains. There’s something major_ in Lucy. Gina Wegman agrees with me. Lucy acts like a small she-brute. It’s not just that Roman hairdo. She’s greedy and bears grudges. God, she does! That’s where Gina comes in, because Gina has so much class, and Gina likes_ her. As much as I can, with executive responsibilities and bearing the brunt of the household, I mother those girls. Also, I have sessions with the school psychologists—I was once married to one of those characters—and discussions with other mothers. Maybe putting them in the ‘best’ schools is a big mistake. The influence of the top stockbrokers and lawyers in town has to be overcome there. I’m saying it as I see it….”
What Clara couldn’t say, because Laura Wong’s upbringing was so different from her own (and it was her own that seemed the more alien), had to do with Matthew 16:18: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”—it_ being love, against which no door can be closed. This was more of the primitive stuff that Clara had brought from the backcountry and was part of her confused inner life. Explaining it to her confidante would be more trouble than it was worth, if you considered that in the end Ms. Wong would still be in the dark—the second dark being darker than the first. Here Clara couldn’t say it as she saw it.
There’s a lot of woman in that child. A handsome, powerful woman. Gina Wegman intuits the same about her,” said Clara.
She was much drawn to Gina, only it wouldn’t be wise to make a younger mend of her; that would lie too close to adoption and perhaps cause rivalry with the children. You had to keep your distance—avoid intimacies, avoid confidences especially. Yet there was nothing wrong with an occasional treat, as long as the treat was educational. For instance, you asked the au pair girl to bring some papers to your office, and then you could show her around the suite, give her a nice tea. She let Gina attend a trade briefing on shoulder pads and hear arguments for this or that type of padding, the degree of the lift, the desirability of a straighter line in the hang of one’s clothes; the new trends in size in the designs of Armani, Christian Lacroix, Sonia Rykiel. She took the girl to a show of the latest spring fashions from Italy, where she heard lots of discussion about the desirability of over-the-knee boots, and of the layering of the skirts of Gianni Versace over puffy knickers. Agitprop spokesmen putting across short garments of puckered silk, or jackets of cunningly imitated ocelot, or simulated beaver capes—all this the ingenious work of millionaire artisans, billionaire designer commissars. Gina came suitably dressed, a pretty girl, very young. Clara couldn’t say how this fashion display impressed her. It was best, Clara thought, to underplay the whole show: the luxurious setting, the star cast of Italians, and the pomp of the experts—somewhat subdued by the presence of the impassive czarina.
“Well, what should I say about these things?” said Clara, again confiding to Laura Wong. “This glitter is our living, and nice women grow old and glum, cynical too, in all this glitz of fur, silk, leather, cosmetics, et cetera, of the glamour trades. Meanwhile my family responsibilities are what count. How to protect my children.”
“And you wanted to give your Gina a treat,” said Ms. Wong. “And I’m glad about the playfulness,” said Clara. “We have to have that. But the sums it costs! And who gets what! Besides, Laura, if it has to be slathered onto women… If a woman is beautiful and you add beautiful dress, that’s one thing: you’re adding beauty to beauty. But if the operation comes from the outside only, it has curious effects. And that’s the way it generally happens. Of course there will be barefaced schemers or people in despair looking glorious. But in most cases of decoration, the effect is hell. It’s a variation on that Auden line I love so much about ‘the will of the insane to suffer.’ ” When she had said this she looked blankly violent. She had gone further than she had intended, further than Ms. Wong was prepared to follow. Here Clara might well have added the words from Matthew 16.
Her Chinese American confidante was used to such sudden zooming. Clara was not being stagy when she expressed such ideas about clothing; she was brooding audibly, and very often she had Ithiel Regler in mind, the women he had gone off with, the women he had married. Among them were several “fancy women”—she meant that they were overdressed sexpots, gaudy and dizzy, “ground-dragging titzers,” on whom a man like Ithiel should never have squandered his substance. And he had been married three times and had two children. What a waste! Why should there have been seven marriages, five children! Even Mike Spontini, for all his powers and attractions, had been a waste—a Mediterranean, an Italian husband who came back to his wife when he saw fit, that is, when he was tired of business and of playing around. All_ the others had been dummy husbands, humanly unserious—you could get no real masculine resonance out of any of them.
What a pity! thought Laura Wong. Teddy Regler should have married Clara. Apply any measure—need, sympathy, feeling, you name it—and the two profiles (that was Laura’s way of putting it) were just about identical. And Ithiel was doing very badly now. Just after Gina became her au pair girl, Clara learned from the Wolfenstein woman, Teddy’s first wife, who had her sc
outs in Washington, that the third Mrs. Regler had hired a moving van and emptied the house one morning as soon as Teddy left for the office. Coming home in the evening, he found nothing but the bed they had shared the night before (stripped of bedding) and a few insignificant kitchen items. Francine, the third wife, had had no child to take care of. She had spent her days wandering around department stores. That much was true. He didn’t let her feel that she was sharing his life. Yet the man was stunned, wiped out—depressed, then ill. He had been mourning his mother. Francine had made her move a week after his mother’s funeral. One week to the day.
Clara and Laura together had decided that Francine couldn’t bear his grieving. She had no such emotions herself, and she disliked them. “Some people just can’t grasp grief,” was what Clara said. Possibly, too, there was another man in the picture, and it would have been awkward, after an afternoon with this man, to come home to a husband absorbed in dark thoughts or needing consolation. “I can easily picture this from the wife’s side,” said Laura. Her own divorce had been a disagreeable one. Her husband, a man named Odo Fenger, a dermatologist, had been one of those ruddy, blond, fleshy baby-men who have to engross you in their emotions (eyes changing from baby blue to whiskey blue) and so centuple the agonies of breaking away. So why not_ send a van to the house and move straight into the future—future being interpreted as never (never in this life) meeting the other party again. “That Francine didn’t have it in her to see him through, after the feeling had been killed out of her._ Each age has its own way of dealing with these things. As you said before, in the Renaissance you used poison. When the feeling is killed, the other party becomes physically unbearable.”
Clara didn’t entirely attend to what Laura was saying. Her only comment was, “I suppose there has_ been progress. Better moving than murdering. At least both parties go on living.”
By now Ms. Wong wanted no husbands, no children. She had withdrawn from all that. But she respected Clara Velde. Perhaps her curiosity was even deeper than her respect, and she was most curious about Clara and Ithiel Regler. She collected newspaper clippings about Regler and like Wilder Velde didn’t miss his TV interviews, if she could help it.
When Clara heard about Francine and her moving van, she flew down to Washington as soon as she could get to the shuttle. Gina was there to take charge of the children. Clara never felt so secure as when dependable Gina was looking after them. As a backup Clara had Mrs. Peralta, the cleaning woman, who had also become a family friend.
Clara found Ithiel in a state of sick dignity. He was affectionate with her but reserved about his troubles, thanked her somewhat formally for her visit, and told her that he would rather not go into the history of his relations with Francine.
“Just as you like,” said Clara. “But you haven’t got anybody here; there’s just me in New York. I’ll look after you if you should need it.”
“I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve been despondent. What I’ve learned, though, is that when people get to talking about their private troubles, they go into a winding spiral about relationships, and they absolutely stupefy everybody with boredom. I’m sure that I can turn myself around.”
“Of course. You’re resilient,” said Clara, proud of him. “So we won’t say too much about it. Only, that woman didn’t have to wait until your mother was dead. She might have done it earlier. You don’t wait until a man is down, then dump on him.”
“Shall we have a good dinner? Middle Eastern, Chinese, Italian, or French? I see you’re wearing the emerald.”
“I hoped you’d notice. Now tell me, Ithiel, are you giving up your place? Did she leave it very bare?”
“I can camp there until some money comes in and then refit the living room.”
“There ought to be somebody taking care of you.”
“If there’s one thing I can do without, it’s this picture of poor me, deep in the dumps, and some faithful female who makes my heart swell with gratitude.” Being rigorous with his heart gave him satisfaction.
“He likes to look at the human family as it is,” Clara was to explain.
“You wouldn’t marry a woman who did value you,” said Clara at dinner. “Like Groucho Marx saying he wouldn’t join a club that accepted him for membership.”
“Let me tell you,” said Ithiel, and she understood that he had drawn back to the periphery in order to return to the center from one of his strange angles. “When the president has to go to Walter Reed Hospital for surgery and the papers are full of sketches of his bladder and his prostate—I can remember the horrible drawings of Eisenhower’s ileitis—then I’m glad there are no diagrams of my vitals in the press and the great public isn’t staring at my anus. For the same reason, I’ve always discouraged small talk about my psyche. It’s only fair that Francine shouldn’t have valued me. I would have lived out the rest of my life with her. I was patient….”
“You mean you gave up, you resigned yourself.”
“I was affectionate,” Ithiel insisted.
“You had to fake it. You saw your mistake and were ready to pay for it. She didn’t give a squat for your affection.”
“I was faithful.”
“No, you were licked,” said Clara. “You went to your office hideaway and did your thing about Russia or Iran. Those crazy characters from Libya or Lebanon are some_ fun to follow. What did she do for fun?”
“I suppose that every morning she had to decide where to go with her credit cards. She liked auctions and furniture shows. She bought an ostrich-skin outfit, complete with boots and purse.”
“What else did she do for fun?”
Ithiel was silent and reserved, moving crumbs back and forth with the blade of his knife. Clara thought, She cheated on him. Precious Francine had no idea what a husband she had. And what did it matter what a woman like that did with her gross organs. Clara didn’t get a rise out of Ithiel with her suggestive question. She might just as well have been talking to one of those Minoans dug up by Evans or Schliemann or whoever, characters like those in the silent films, painted with eye-lengthening makeup. If Clara was from the Middle Ages, Ithiel was from antiquity. Imagine a low-down woman who felt that he_ didn’t appreciate her! Why,_ Ithiel could be the Gibbon or the Tacitus of the American Empire. He_ wouldn’t have thought it, but she remembered to this day how he would speak about Keynes’s sketches of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson. If he wanted, he could do with Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, or Kissinger, with the shah or de Gaulle, what Keynes had done with the Allies at Versailles. World figures had found Ithiel worth their while. Sometimes he let slip a comment or a judgment: “Neither the Russians nor the Americans can manage the world. Not capable of organizing the future.” When she came into her own, Clara thought, she’d set up a fund for him so he could write his views.
She said, “If you’d like me to stay over, Wilder has gone to Minnesota to see some peewee politician who needs a set of speeches. Gina is entertaining a few friends at the house.”
Do I look as if I needed friendly first aid?” You are down._ What’s the disgrace in that?”
Ithiel drove her to the airport. For the moment the parkways were empty. Ahead were airport lights, and in the slanting planes seated travelers by the thousands came in, went up.
Clara asked what job he was doing. “Not who you’re doing it for, but the subject.”
He said he was making a survey of the opinions of щmigrщs on the new Soviet regime—he seemed glad to change the subject, although he had always been a bit reluctant to talk politics to her. Politics were not her thing, he didn’t like to waste words on uncomprehending idle questioners, but he seemed to have his emotional reasons tonight for saying just what it was that he was up to. “Some of the smartest emigres are saying that the Russians didn’t announce liberalization until they had crushed the dissidents. Then they co-opted the dissidents’ ideas. After you’ve gotten rid of your enemies, you’re ready to abolish capital punishment—that’s how Alexander Zinoviev puts
it. And it wasn’t only the KGB that destroyed the dissident movement but the whole party organization, and the party was supported by the Soviet people. They strangled the opposition, and now they’re pretending to be it._ You have the Soviet leaders themselves criticizing Soviet society. When it has to be done, they take over. And the West is thrilled by all the reforms.”
“So we’re going to be bamboozled again,” said Clara.
But there were other matters, more pressing, to discuss on the way to the airport. Plenty of time. Ithiel drove very slowly. The next shuttle flight wouldn’t be taking off until nine o’clock. Clara was glad they didn’t have to rush.
“You don’t mind my wearing this ring tonight?” said Clara.
“Because this is a bad time to remind me of the way it might have gone with us? No. You came down to see how I was and what you could do for me.”
“Next time, Ithiel, if there is a next time, you’ll let me check the woman out. You may be big in political analysis… No need to finish that_ sentence. Besides, my own judgment hasn’t been one hundred percent.”
“If anybody were to ask me, Clara, I’d say that you were a strange case—a woman who hasn’t been corrupted, who has developed a moral logic of her own, worked it out independently by her own solar power and from her own feminine premises. You hear I’ve had a calamity and you come down on the next shuttle. And how few people take this Washington flight for a human purpose. Most everybody comes on business. Some to see the sights, a few because of the pictures at the National Gallery, a good percentage to get laid. How many come because they’re deep?”
He parked his car so that he could walk with her to the gate.
“You’re a dear man,” she said. “We have to look out for each other.”
On the plane, she pulled her seat belt tight in order to control her feelings, and she opened a copy of Vogue,_ but only to keep her face in it. No magazine now had anything to tell her.
When she got back to Park Avenue, the superintendent’s wife, a Latino lady, was waiting. Mrs. Peralta was there too. Clara had asked the cleaning lady to help Gina entertain (to keep an eye on) her friends. The elevator operator-doorman was with the ladies, a small group under the marquee. The sidewalks of Park Avenue are twice as broad as any others, and the median strip was nicely planted with flowers of the season. When the doorman helped Clara from the yellow cab, the women immediately began to tell her about the huge bash Gina had given. “A real mix of people,” said Mrs. Peralta.