Collected Stories

herself to decide who comes in. I made it explicit what the household rules were. I would have vouched for you, and you must vouch for your friend.”

Gina was shaken. Both women trembled. After all, thought Clara, a human being can be sketched in three or four lines, but then when the sockets are empty, no amount of ingenuity can refill them. Not her brown, not my blue.

“I understand you,” said Gina with an air of being humiliated by a woman whose kindness she counted on. “Are you sure the ring isn’t misplaced again?”

“Are you sure…?” Clara answered. “And try to think of my side of it. That was an engagement ring from a man who loved me. It’s not just an object worth x dollars. It’s also a life support, my dear.” She was about to say that it was involved with her very grip on existence, but she didn’t want any kind of cry to come out or to betray a fear of total slippage. She said instead, “The ring was here yesterday. And a person I don’t know wandering around the house and—why not?—coming into my room…”

“Why don’t you say it?” said Gina.

“I’d have to be a fool not to. To be too nice for such things, I’d have to be a moron. Frederic was here all afternoon. Has he got a job somewhere?”

The girl had no answer to this.

“You can’t say. But you don’t believe he’s a thief. You don’t think he’d put you in this position. And don’t try to tell me he’s being accused because of his color.”

“I didn’t try. People are nasty about the Haitians.”

“You’d better go and talk to him. If he’s got the ring, tell him he has to return it. I want you to produce it tomorrow. Marta Elvia can sit with the girls if you have to go out tonight. Where does he live?”

“One hundred twenty-eighth Street.”

“And a telephone? You can’t go up there alone after dark. Not even by day. Not alone. And where does he hang out? I can ask Antonia’s husband to take you by cab…. Now Wilder’s coming down the corridor, and I’ve got to go.”

“I’ll wait here for the concierge.”

“For Marta Elvia. I’ll talk to her on the way out. You wouldn’t steal, Gina. And Mrs. Peralta has been here eight years without a coffee spoon missing.”

Later Clara took it out on herself: What did I do to that girl, like ordering her to go to Harlem, where she could be raped or killed, because of my goddamn ring, the rottenest part of town in the rotten middle of the night, frantic mad and (what it comes down to) over Ithiel, who balked at marrying me twenty years ago! A real person understands how to cut losses, not let her whole life be wound around to the end by a single desire, because under it all is the uglitude of this one hang-up. Four husbands and three kids haven’t cured me of Ithiel. And finally this love-toy emerald, personal sentimentality, makes me turn like a maniac on this Austrian kid. She may think I grudge her the excitement of her romance with that disgusting girl-fucker who used her as his cover to get into the house and now sticks her with this theft.

Nevertheless Clara had fixed convictions about domestic and maternal responsibilities. She had already gone too far in letting Gina bring Frederic into the apartment and infect the whole place, spraying it with sexual excitement. And, as it now turned out, even become involved in crime. A fling in the U. S. A. was all very well for a young lady from bourgeois Vienna—like the poor Russian hippie, that diplomat’s son who fell in love with Mick Jagger. “Tell Mick Jagger good-bye,” he said, boarding the plane. This city had become the center, the symbol of worldwide adolescent revolt.

In the middle of the corporate evening Clara was attacked by one of her fierce migraines, and a head as conspicuous as hers, dominating a dinner table, affected everybody when it began to ache, so that the whole party stood up when she rose and hurried out. The Veldes went straight home. Swallowing a handful of white pills from the medicine chest, Clara went immediately to Gina’s room. To her relief, the girl was there, in bed. The reading lamp was on, but she wasn’t reading, only sitting up, her hands thoughtfully folded.

“I’m glad you didn’t go to Harlem!” I reached Frederic on the phone. He was with some of our UN friends.”

“And you’ll see him tomorrow…?”

“I didn’t mention the ring. But I am prepared to move out. You told me I had to bring it back or leave.”

“Going where…!” Clara was taken by surprise. Next she was aware of the girl’s brown gaze, the exceptional fixity of it. Unshed tears were killing her. “But if Frederic gives back the ring, you’ll stay.” While she was speaking, Clara with some shame recognized how dumb she sounded. It was the hereditary peasant in her saying this. The guy would deny the theft, and if eventually he admitted it, he still would not return the ring. This very moment he might be taking a thousand bucks for it. These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it.

Left standing were only property rights. With murder in second place. A stolen ring. A corpse to account for. Such were the only universals recognized, and very few others could be acknowledged. So where did love fit in? Love was down in the catacombs, those catacombs being the personal neuroses of women like herself.

She said to Gina, as one crypto lover to another, “What will you do?”

Gina said, but without resentment, not a hint of accusation in her voice, “That I can’t say. I’ve only had a couple of hours to think. There are places.”

She’d move in with her Haitian, Clara guessed, plausibly enough. But this was not sayable. Clara was learning to refrain. You didn’t say everything. “Discover silence,” she instructed herself.

Next day she rushed home from work in a cab and found Marta Elvia babysitting. Clara had already been in touch with an agency, and there was a new girl coming tomorrow. Best she could do on short notice. Lucy was upset, predictably, and Clara had to take her aside for special explanations. She said, “Gina suddenly had to go. It was an emergency. She didn’t want to. When she can, she’ll come back. It’s not your fault.” There was no guessing just how rattled Lucy was. She was silent, stoical.

Clara had rehearsed this on the telephone with the psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone.

“With working parents,” she said to Lucy, “such problems do come up.”

“But Daddy isn’t working now.”

You’re telling me! thought Clara. He was doping out the upcoming primaries in New Hampshire.

As soon as possible, she went to see Dr. Gladstone. He was about to take one of his holidays and would be away three weeks. They had discussed this absence in the last session. In the waiting room, she studied the notes she had prepared: Where is Gina? How can I find out, keep track? Protect?

She acknowledged to Dr. Gladstone that she was in a near-hysterical state over the second disappearance, the theft. She was discovering that she had come to base her stability entirely on the ring. Such dependency was fearful. He asked how she saw this, and how Ithiel figured in it. She said, “The men I meet don’t seem to be real persons. Nobody really is anybody. There may be more somebodies than I’ve been able to see. I don’t want to write off about one half of our species. And concentrated desire for so many years may have affected my judgment. Anyway, for me, what a man is seems to be defined by Ithiel. Also, I am his truest friend, and he understands that and responds emotionally.”

Involuntarily Clara fell into Dr. Gladstone’s way of talking. To herself, she would never say “responds emotionally.” As the sessions were short, she adopted his lingo to save time, notwithstanding the danger of false statements. Hope brought her here, every effort must be made, but when she looked, looked with all her might at Dr. Gladstone, she could not justify the trust she was asked to place in that samurai beard, the bared teeth it framed, the big fashionable specs, his often baseless confidence in his science. However, it would take the better part of a year to acquaint a new doctor with the fundamentals of her case. She was stuck with this one.

“And I’m very worried about Gina. How do I find out what’s happening to her? Should I hire a private investigator? A girl like that survive in Spanish Harlem? No way.”

“An expensive proposition,” said Dr. Gladstone. “Any alternatives in mind?”

“Wilder does nothing. He could get on the case. Like shadow her, make practical use of the thrillers he’s read. But he’s negotiating with some hopeless wimp who wants to go for the White House.”