Collected Stories

promptly. Keeping on his good side, taking care from every standpoint to be a desirable client. As for Gottschalk, he was exactly what she had ordered from Ithiel—minimum sleaze. Not much more.

“I’d like a progress report by Friday,” she said.

That afternoon she met with Ms. Wong. Moved to talk. And with the gesture of a woman newly engaged, she held out her hand, saying, “Here’s the ring. I thought it had gone into the muck for good. It’s getting to be a fairy- tale object. With me it’s had the funny effect of those trick films they used to show kids—first a building demolished by dynamite. They show it coming down. Then they reverse it in slow motion, and it’s put together again.”

“Done by means of a magic ring?” said Ms. Wong.

It occurred to Clara that Laura was a mysterious lady too. She was exotic in externals, but in what she said she was perfectly conventional. While your heart was moved, she would still murmur along. If you came and told her you were going to kill yourself, what would she do? Probably nothing. Yet one must talk.

“I can’t say what state I’m in,” said Clara, “whether I’m pre-dynamite or post-dynamite. I don’t suppose I look demolished.

“Certainly not.”

“Yet I feel as if something had come down. There are changes. Gina, for instance, was a girl I took into the house to help with the kids. Little was ever said. I didn’t think well of her Caribbean romance, or sex experiment. Just another case of being at sea among collapsing cultures—I sound like Ithiel now, and I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing-culture bit: I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul. Essential parts of people getting mislaid or crowded out—don’t ask me for specifics; I can’t give them. They’re always flitting by me. But what I started to say was how I’ve come to love that girl. Just as she immediately understood Lucy, how needy Lucy was, in one minute she also got the whole meaning of this ring. And on the decision to get it back for me she left the house. Moving to East Harlem, yet.”

“If her Vienna family had a notion…”

“I intend to do something for her. That’s a special young woman. I certainly will do something. I have to think what it should be. Now, I don’t expect her to describe what she went through, and I don’t intend to ask her. There are things I wouldn’t want anybody to ask me,” said Clara. Clifford from Attica was on her mind. On the whole, she kept this deliberately remote, yet if pressed she could recover quite a lot from her memory.

“Have you any idea…?” said Laura Wong.

“About her, not yet, not until I’ve spoken to her. About myself, however, I do have different views as a result of this. Twice losing and recovering this ring is a sign, a message. It forces me to interpret. For instance, when Francine came in a van and emptied Ithiel’s house—that woman is about as human as a toilet plunger!—Ithiel didn’t turn to me. He didn’t come and say, ‘You’re unhappy with Wilder. And between us we’ve had seven marriages. Now, shouldn’t you and I…?’”

“Clara, you wouldn’t have done that?” said Laura. For once her voice was more real. Clara was struck by the difference.

“I might have done it. So far it’s been change and change and change. There’s pleasure change, and acquisitive change, and there’s the dynamic of… oh, I don’t know. Perhaps of power. Is there no point of rest? Won’t the dynamic ever let you go? I felt that Ithiel might be a point of rest. Or I for him. But that was simply goofy. I have an anti-rest character. I think there’s too much basic discord in me.”

“So the ring stood for hope of Teddy Regler,” said Laura Wong.

“The one exception. Teddy. A repeatedly proven exception. There must be others, but I never came across them.”

“And do you think…?”

“He’ll ever accomplish his aim? I can’t say. He can’t, either. What he says is that no trained historian will ever do it, only a singular person with a singular eye. Looking at the century with his singular inborn eye, with a genius for observing politics: That’s about the way he says it, and perhaps he’ll take hold one day and do a wrap-up of the century, the wrap-up of wrap-ups. As for me,” said Clara, “I have the kids, with perhaps Wilder thrown in as a fourth child. The last has been unacceptable. What I’d most like now is a quiet life.”

“The point of rest?”

“No, I don’t expect that. A quiet life in lieu of the point of rest. The point of rest might have been with Ithiel. I have to settle for what I can get—peaceful evenings. Let there be a convent atmosphere, when the kids have gone to bed and I can disconnect the phones and concentrate on Yeats or somebody like that. Not to be too ambitious; it would be enough to get rid of your demons—they’re like patients who drift in and out of the mental hospital. In short, come to terms with my anti-rest character.”

“So all these years you’ve never given up hope that Teddy Regler and you…”

“Might make a life together, in the end…?” said Clara. Something caused her to hesitate. As they had always done in problematic situations, her eyes turned sideways, looking for an exit, and her country-girl mouth was open but silent.

On Madison Avenue, walking uptown, Clara was thinking, saying to herself in her contralto grumble, This is totally off the wall. There’s no limit, is there? She wanted me to say that Ithiel and I were finished, so that she could put her own moves on him. Everybody feels free to picture what they like, and I talked Ithiel up until he became too desirable for her to resist, and how long has the little bitch been dreaming of having him for herself! No way! Clara was angry, but she was also laughing about this. So I choose friends, so I choose lovers, so I choose husbands and bankers and accountants and psychiatrists and ministers, all the way down the line. And just now lost my principal confidante. But I have to spin her off very slowly, for if I cut the relationship, she’s in a position to hurt me with Wilder. There’s also the insurance company, remember, the real owner of this ring. Also, she’s so gifted professionally. We still need her layouts.

Meanwhile she had in mind an exceptional, a generous action.

From her office next day, on her private line, she had a preliminary talk about it with Ithiel, just back from Central America. Naturally she couldn’t tell him what her goal was. She began by describing the return of her ring, all the strange circumstances. “This very minute, I’m looking at it. Wearing it, I don’t feel especially girlish. I’m more like contemplating it.

She could see Ithiel trying on this new development, matching the contemplative Clara against the Clara who had once sunk her long nails into his forearm and left scars that he might have shown General Haig or Henry Kissinger if he had wanted to emphasize a point about violence. He had quite a sense of humor, Ithiel did. He enjoyed telling how, in a men’s room at the White House, Mr. Armand Hammer was at the next urinal, and about the discussion on Soviet intentions they had had between the opening and the closing zips.

Or thinking back to the passionate Clara, or to the Clara who had wanted them buried side by side or even in the same grave. This had lately begun to amuse him.

From her New York office, she had continued to talk. So far he had had little to say other than to congratulate her on the recovery of this major symbol, Madison Hamilton’s emerald. “This Gina is a special young woman, Ithiel,” she told him. “You would have expected such behavior from a Sicilian or a Spanish woman, and not a contemporary, either, but a romantic Stendhal character—a Happy Few type, or a young woman of the Italian Renaissance in one of those Venetian chronicles the Elizabethans took from.”

“Not what you would expect from the Vienna of Kurt Waldheim,” he said.

“You’ve got it. And a young person of that quality shouldn’t go on tending kids in New York—Gogmagogsville. Now, what I want to suggest is that she go to Washington.”

“And you’d like me to find her a job?”

“That wouldn’t be easy. She has a student visa, not a green card. I need to get her away from here.”

“Save her from the Haitian. I see. However, she may not want to be saved.’

“I’ll have to find out how she sees it. My hunch is that the Haitian episode is over and she’s ready for some higher education….”

“And that’s where I come in, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be light with me about this. I’m asking you to take me seriously. Remember what you said to me not long ago about my moral logic, worked out on my own feminine premises under my own power…. Now, I’ve never known you to talk through your hat on any real subject.”

She had been centered, unified, concentrated, heartened, oriented by his description of her, and she couldn’t let him withdraw any part of it.

“What I saw was what I said. Years of observation to back it. Does she want to come to Washington?”