Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“I suppose things are done differently in Vienna,” Clara said. “As to bringing strangers into the house…”

“No. But then you’re personally friendly with the colored lady who works here.”

“Mrs. Peralta is no stranger.”

“She brings her children here at Thanksgiving, and they eat with the girls at the same table.”

“And why not? But yes,” said Clara, “I can see that this is a mixture that might puzzle somebody just over from Europe for the first time. My husband and I are not rashists….” (This was a pronunciation Clara could not alter.) “However, Mrs. Peralta is a trusted member of this household.”

“But Frederic’s friends might steal…?”

“I haven’t accused anyone. You couldn’t vouch for anybody, though. You’ve just met these guests yourself. And haven’t you noticed the security arrangements—the doors, the buzzer system, everybody inspected?”

Gina said, speaking quietly and low, “I noticed, I didn’t apply it to myself.”

Not herself. Gina hadn’t considered Frederic in this light. And she couldn’t al-low him to be viewed with suspicion. Clara gave her a good mark for loyalty. Ten on a scale of ten, she thought, and warmed toward Gina. “It’s not a color question. The corporation I’m in has even divested itself in South Africa.” This was not a strong statement. To Clara, South Africa was about as close as Xanadu. But she said to herself that they were being diverted into absurdities, and what she and Gina were telling each other was only so much fluff. The girl had come to New York to learn about such guys as Frederic, and there wasn’t all that much to learn. This was simply an incident, and not even a good incident. Just a lot of exciting trouble. Then she made a mental note to take all this up with Ithiel and also get his opinion on divestiture.

“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to set a limit on the size of the group you can entertain.”

The girl nodded. That made sense. She couldn’t deny it.

No more scolding. And a blend of firmness and concern for the girl. If she were to send her away, the kids would cry. And I’d miss her myself, Clara admitted. So she stood up (mistress terminating a painful interview was how Clara perceived it; she saw that she really had come to depend on certain lady-of-the-house postures). When Gina had gone to her room, Clara ran a check: the Jensen ashtray, the silver letter opener, mantelpiece 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.