Collected Stories

knickknacks; and for the лth time she wished that there were someone to share her burdens. Wilder was no good to her that way. If he got fifty speech commissions he couldn’t make up the money he had sunk in mining stocks— Homestake and Sunshine. Supposedly, precious metals were a hedge, but there was less and less principal for the shrinking hedge to hedge.

The inspection over, Clara talked to Antonia Peralta before Antonia turned on the noisy vacuum cleaner. How often had Gina’s young man been in the apartment? Antonia jabbed at her cheek with a rigid finger, meaning that a sharp lookout was necessary. Her message was: “Count on me, Mrs. Velde.” Well, she was part of a pretty smart subculture. Between them, she and Marta Elvia would police the joint. On Gina Wegman herself Antonia Peralta did not comment. But then she wasn’t always around, she had her days off. And remember, Antonia hadn’t cleaned under the bed. And if she had been thorough she would have round the missing ring. In that case, would she have handed it over? She was an honest lady, according to her lights, but there probably were certain corners into which those lights never were turned. The insurance company had paid up, and Clara would have been none the wiser if Antonia had silently pocketed a lost object. No, the Spanish ladies were honest enough. Marta Elvia was bonded, triple certified, and Antonia Peralta had never taken so much as a handkerchief.

In my own house,” Clara was to explain later, “I object to locking up valuables. A house where there is no basic trust is not what I call a house. I just can’t live with a bunch or keys, like a French or Italian person. Women have told me that they couldn’t sleep nights if their jewelry weren’t locked up. /couldn’t sleep if it were.”

She said to Gina, “I’m taking your word for it that nothing bad will happen.” She was bound to make this clear, while recognizing that there was no way to avoid giving offense.

Gina had no high looks, no sharp manner. She simply said, “Are you telling me not to have Frederic here?”

Clara’s reaction was, Better here than there. She tried to imagine what Frederic’s pad must be like. That was not too difficult. She had, after all, herself been a young woman in New York. Gina was giving her a foretaste of what she would have to face when her own girls grew up. Unless heaven itself were to decree that Gogmagogsville had gone far enough, and checked the decline—time to lower the boom, send in the Atlantic to wash it away. Not a possibility you could count on.

“By no means,” said Clara. “I will ask you, though, to take full charge when Antonia is off.”

“You don’t want Frederic here when the children are with me?”

“Right.”

“He wouldn’t harm them.” Clara did not see fit to say more.

She spoke to Ms. Wong about it, stopping at her place after work for a brief drink, a breather on the way home. Ms. Wong had an unsuitably furnished Madison Avenue apartment, Scandinavian design, not an Oriental touch about it except some Chinese prints framed in blond wood. Holding her iced Scotch in a dampening paper napkin, Clara said, “I hate to be the one enforcing the rules on that girl. I feel for her a lot more than I care to.”

“You identify all that much with her?”

“She’s got to learn, of course,” said Clara. “Just as I did. And I don’t think much of mature women who have evaded it. But sometimes the schooling we have to undergo is too rough.”

“Seems to you now…”

“No, it takes far too much out of a young girl.”

“You’re thinking of three daughters,” said Ms. Wong, accurate enough. “I’m thinking how it is that you have to go on for twenty years before you understand—maybe understand—what there was to preserve.”

Somewhat dissatisfied with her visit to Laura (it was so New York!), she walked home, there to be told by Mrs. Peralta that she had found Gina and Frederic stretched out on the living room sofa. Doing what? Oh, only petting, but the young man with the silk pillows under his combat boots. Clara could see why Antonia should be offended. The young man was putting down the Veldes and their fine upholstery, spreading himself about and being arrogant.

And perhaps it wasn’t even that. He may not have reached that level of intentional offensiveness.

“You talk to the girl?”

“I don’t believe I will. No,” said Clara, and risked being a contemptible American in Mrs. Peralta’s eyes, one of those people who let themselves be run over in their own homes. Largely to herself, Clara explained, “I’d rather put up with him here than have the girl do it in his pad.” No sooner had she said this than she was dead certain that there was nothing to keep Gina from doing whatever they did in both places. She would have said to Gina, “Making the most of New York—this not-for-Vienna behavior. No boys lying on top of you in your mother’s drawing room.”

“Land of opportunity,” she might have said, but she said this only to herself after thinking matters through, considering deeply in a trancelike private stillness and moistening the center of her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Why did it go so dry right at the center? Imagining sexual things sometimes did that to her. She didn’t envy Gina; the woman who had made such personal sexual disclosures to Ms. Wong didn’t have to envy anyone. No, she was curious about this pretty, plump girl. She sensed that she was a deep one. How deep was what Clara was trying to guess when she went so still.

And so she closed her eyes briefly, nodding, when Marta Elvia, who sometimes waited for her in the lobby, pressed close with her pregnant belly to say that Frederic had come in at one o’clock and left just before Mrs. Velde was expected.

(There were anomalies in Clara’s face when you saw it frontally. Viewing it in profile, you would find yourself trying to decide which of the Flemish masters would have painted her best.)

“Thanks, Marta Elvia,” she said. “I’ve got the situation under control.”

She shouldn’t have been so sure about it, for that very evening when she was dressing for dinner—a formal corporate once-a-year affair—she was standing before the long mirror in her room, when suddenly she knew that her ring had been stolen. She kept it in the top drawer of her dresser—unlocked, of course. Its place was a dish Jean-Claude had given her years ago. The young Frenchman, Ithiel’s temporary replacement recklessly chosen in anger, had called this gift a vide-poches. At bedtime you emptied your pockets into it. It was meant for men; women didn’t use that kind of object; but it was one of those mementos Clara couldn’t part with—she kept schoolday valentines in a box, too. She looked, of course, into the dish. The ring wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected it to be. She expected nothing. She said that the sudden knowledge that it was gone came over her like death and she felt as if the life had been vacuumed out of her.

Wilder, already in evening clothes, was reading one of his thrillers in a corner where the back end of the grand piano hid him. With her rapid, dry decision-maker’s look, Clara went to the kitchen, where the kids were at dinner. Under Gina’s influence they behaved so well at table. “May I see you for a moment?” said Clara, and Gina immediately got up and followed her to the master bedroom. There Clara shut both doors, and lowering her head so that she seemed to be examining Gina’s eyes, “Well, Gina, something has happened,” she said. “My ring is gone.”

“You mean the emerald that was lost and found again? Oh, Mrs. Velde, I am sorry. Is it gone? I’m sure you have looked. Did Mr. Velde help you?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“Then let’s look together.”

“Yes, let’s. But it’s always in the same place, in this room. In that top drawer under my stockings. Since I found it again, I’ve been extra careful. And of course I want to examine the shag rug. I want to crawl and hunt for it. But I’d have to take off this tight dress to get on my knees. And my hair is fixed for going out.”

Gina, stooping, combed through the carpet near the dresser. Clara, silent, let her look, staring down, her eyes superdilated, her mouth stern. She said, at last, “It’s no use.” She had let Gina go through the motions.

“Should you call the police to report it?”

“I’m not going to do that,” said Clara. She was not so foolish as to tell the young woman about the insurance. “Perhaps that makes you feel better, not having the police.”

“I think, Mrs. Velde, you should have locked up your valuable objects.”

“In my own home, I shouldn’t have to.”

“Yes, but there are other people also to consider.”

“I consider, Gina, that a woman has a right in her own bedroom… it’s for a woman