Collected Stories

much that he can even take a friendly interest in the men I’ve been involved with. They’re like failed competitors to the guy who won the silver trophy. He’s proud to claim a connection with the famous ones, and when I went to visit poor Mike in Venice, he flew with me.”

“So he isn’t jealous,” said Laura Wong.

“The opposite. The people I’ve been intimate with, to him are like the folks in a history book. And suppose Richard III or Metternich had gotten into your wife’s pants when she was a girl? Wilder is a name-dropper, and the names he most enjoys dropping are the ones he came into by becoming my husband. Especially the headliners…”

Laura Wong was of course aware that it was not for her to mention the most significant name of all, the name that haunted all of Clara’s confidences. That was for Clara herself to bring up. Whether it was appropriate, whether she could summon the strength to deal with the most persistent of her preoccupations, whether she would call on Laura to bear with her one more time… these were choices you had to trust her to make tactfully.

“…whom he sometimes tapes when they’re being interviewed on CBS or the MacNeil/Lehrer programs. Teddy Regler always the foremost.”

Yes, there was the name. Mike Spontini mattered greatly, but you had to see him still in the husband category. Ithiel Regler stood much higher with Clara than any of the husbands. “On a scale often,” she liked to say to Laura, “he was ten.”

“Is ten?” Laura had suggested.

“I’d not only be irrational but psycho to keep Teddy in the active present tense,” Clara had said. This was a clouded denial. Wilder Velde continued to be judged by a standard from which Ithiel Regler could never be removed. It did not make, it never could make, good sense to speak of irrationality and recklessness. Clara never would be safe or prudent, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of expelling Ithiel’s influence—not even if God’s angel had offered her the option. She might have answered: You might as well try to replace my own sense of touch with somebody else’s. And the matter would have had to stop there.

So Velde, by taping Ithiel’s programs for her, proved how unassailable he was in his position as the final husband, the one who couldn’t in the scheme of things be bettered. “And I’m glad the man thinks that,” said Clara. “It’s best for all of us. He wouldn’t believe that I might be unfaithful. You’ve got to admire that. So here’s a double-mystery couple. Which is the more mysterious one? Wilder actually enjoys watching Ithiel being so expert and smart from Washington. And meantime, Laura, I have no sinful ideas of being unfaithful. I don’t even think about such things, they don’t figure in my conscious mind. Wilder and I have a sex life no marriage counselor in the world could fault. We have three children, and I’m a loving mother, I bring them up conscientiously. But when Ithiel comes to town and I see him at lunch, I start to flow for him. He used to make me come by stroking my cheek. It can happen when he talks to me. Or even when I see him on TV or just hear his voice. He doesn’t know it—I think not—and anyway Ithiel wouldn’t want to do harm, interfere, dominate or exploit—that’s not the way he is. We have this total, delicious connection, which is also a disaster. But even to a woman raised on the Bible, which in the city of New York in this day and age is a pretty remote influence, you couldn’t call my attachment an evil that rates punishment after death. It’s not the sex offenses that will trip you up, because by now nobody can draw the line between natural and unnatural in sex. Anyway, it couldn’t be a woman’s hysteria that would send her to hell. It would be something else….”

What else?” Laura asked. But Clara was silent, and Laura wondered whether it wasn’t Teddy Regler who should be asked what Clara considered a mortal sin. He had known Clara so well, over so many years, that perhaps he could explain what she meant.

This Austrian au pair girl, Miss Wegman—Clara gave herself the pleasure of sizing her up. She checked off the points: dressed appropriately for an interview, hair freshly washed, no long nails, no conspicuous polish. Clara herself was gotten up as a tailored matron, in a tortoiseshell-motif suit and a white blouse with a ruff under the chin. From her teaching days she commanded a taskmistress’s way of putting questions (“Now, Willie, pick up the Catiline and give me the tense of abutere in Cicero’s opening sentence”): it was the disciplinarian’s armor worn by a softy. This Austrian chick made a pleasing impression. The father was a Viennese bank official and the kid was correct, civil and sweet. You had to put it out of your head that Vienna was a hatchery of psychopaths and Hitlerites. Think instead of that dear beauty in the double suicide with the crown prince. This child, who had an Italian mother, was called Gina. She spoke English fluently and probably wasn’t faking when she said she could assume responsibility for three little girls. Not laying secret plans to con everybody, not actually full of dislike for defiant, obstinate, mutely resistant kids like Clara’s eldest, Lucy, a stout little girl needing help. A secretly vicious young woman could do terrible damage to a kid like Lucy, give her wounds that would never heal. The two little skinny girls laughed at their sister. They scooped up their snickers in their hands while Lucy held herself like a Roman soldier. Her face was heated with boredom and grievances.

The foreign young lady made all the right moves, came up with the correct answers—why not? since the questions made them obvious. Clara realized how remote from present-day “facts of life” and current history her “responsible” assumptions were—those were based on her small-town Republican churchgoing upbringing, the nickel-and-dime discipline of her mother, who clicked out your allowance from the bus conductor’s changemaker hanging from her neck. Life in that Indiana town was already as out of date as ancient Egypt. The “decent people” there were the natives from whom television evangelists raised big money to pay for their stretch limos and Miami- style vices. Those were Claras preposterous dear folks, by whom she had felt stifled in childhood and for whom she now felt a boundless love. In Lucy she saw her own people, rawboned, stubborn, silent—she saw herself. Much could be made of such beginnings. But how did you coach a kid like this, what could you do for her in New York City?

“Now—is it all right to call you Gina?—what was your purpose, Gina, in coming to New York?”

“To perfect my English. I’m registered in a music course at Columbia. And to learn about the U.S.A.”

A well-brought-up and vulnerable European girl would have done better to go to Bemidji, Minnesota. Any idea of the explosive dangers girls faced here? They could be blown up from within. When she was young (and not only then), Clara had made reckless experiments—all those chancy relationships; anything might have happened; much did; and all for the honor of running risks. This led her to resurvey Miss Wegman, to estimate what might be done to a face like hers, its hair, her figure, the bust—to the Arabian Nights treasure that nubile girls (innocent up to a point) were sitting on. So many dangerous attractions—and such ignorance! Naturally Clara felt that she herself would do everything (up to a point) to protect a young woman in her household, and everything possible meant using all the resources of an experienced person. At the same time it was a fixed belief with Clara that no /лexperienced woman of mature years could be taken seriously. So could it be a serious Mrs. Wegman back in Vienna, the mother, who had given this Gina permission to spend a year in Gogmagogsville? In the alternative, a rebellious Gina was chancing it on her own. Again, for the honor of running risks.

Clara, playing matron, lady of the house, nodded to agree with her own thoughts, and this nod may have been interpreted by the girl to mean that it was okay, she was as good as hired. She’d have her own decent room in this vast Park Avenue co-op apartment, a fair wage, house privileges, two free evenings, two afternoons for the music-history classes, parts of the morning while the children were at school. Austrian acquaintances, eligible young people, were encouraged to visit, and American friends vetted by Clara. By special arrangement, Gina could even give a small party. You can be democratic and still have discipline.

The first months, Clara watched her new au pair girl closely, and then she was able to tell friends at lunch, people in the office, and even her psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone, how lucky she had been to find this Viennese Miss Wegman with darling manners. What a desirable role model she was, and also such a calming influence on the hyperexcitable tots. “As you have said, Doctor, they set off hysterical tendencies in one another.”

You didn’t expect replies from these doctors. You paid them to lend you their ears. Clara said as much to Ithiel Regler, with whom she remained very much in touch—frequent phone calls, occasional letters, and when Ithiel came up from Washington they had drinks, even dinner from time to time.

“If you think this Gladstone is really helping… I suppose some of those guys can be okay,” said Ithiel, neutral in tone. With him there was no trivial meddling. He never tried to tell you what to do, never advised on family matters.

“It’s mostly to relieve my heart,” said Clara. “If you and I had become husband and wife that wouldn’t have been necessary. I might not be so overcharged. But even so, we have open lines of communication to this day. In fact, you went through a shrink period yourself.”

“I sure did. But my doctor had even more frailties than me.”