Which one had presented them with this vacuum cleaner? It didn’t matter much now, they’d be long dead. Still. Some things you looked at brought back the hurt of years ago as if it were yesterday. There was no birthright baby grand for Stanley, as he’d expected. Not even an upright. It was, instead, a vacuum cleaner. Oh, yes, she remembered now. It was the aunt with the three thins. She’d brought her own music stand with her violin when she’d come to stay. Mary still remembered the look of bewildered hurt on Stan’s face when he’d unwrapped the vacuum cleaner. She would love him all his life for the hurried phony flash of delight he’d bestowed upon her then, so she wouldn’t see his shame for her sake.
Claire sighed and Mary sighed about their different things.
“What’s with the little girl? The Medicino girl?” Mary asked finally, suddenly.
“Dharma? Her father came for her very late last night. I almost hated letting her go. It’s funny. She’s more like the Tree I remember than Tree was.”
“Time marches on, me darlin’.”
Claire squinted into her bowl of milk coffee. “Mmm, I mean something else. Only I don’t know what. You want breakfast?”
“I’ll take my breakfast with my grandson, if you don’t mind.”
Mary looked down at the nutty old wood of the table. Her old table from when she and Stan had started out. It wasn’t pretty, but it was sturdy and Johnny had sanded it down to Claire’s “country French” specifications. Carmela had had it first, but she’d given it back. Or, rather, Stan had retrieved it before Carmela’s first husband Arnold had sold it at his yard sale. His horrifying, vindictive, divorce yard sale. It had never been grand enough for Carmela anyway, Mary thought with the mixture of pride and shame she so often felt when it came to Carmela.
“So, what about this play Carmela’s got going?” Claire asked pleasantly, instantly reading Mary’s mind with troubled, albeit recovered, familial telepathy.
Mary shrugged, pretending not to care too much. She knew that Carmela suffered every time she saw her old rejected table so successfully renovated. Claire had always taken Carmela’s rejects and turned them around and made them beautiful. This infuriated Carmela, but then, so many things infuriated Carmela. One couldn’t keep up. Had Carmela married Stefan because Claire had toyed with the idea herself? It was hard to know who or what Stefan Stefanovitch really was. So wrapped up he was in himself and others in his image: sophisticated connoisseur of wines and women, cars and countries, ideas as commodities.
Carmela had the mansion on the hill, all right. And all the atrocities that went along with it.
“Ma!” Anthony cried from just outside, “the dog threw up!” Claire landed in the real world with a thud.
“Is she all right?”
“Well, now she’s trying to eat my flip-flop.”
“So we’ll interpret that as she’s all right, okay?”
A laugh hooted through the screen.
“Get the hose and wash it away, oh, the heck, I’ll be right out.” Claire stood reluctantly.
“Let him be,” said Mary. “Now that he thinks you want to do it, he’ll be all insistence to do it himself. Sit down now and tell me what you think of Carmela’s play.”
“I don’t think anything at all. The first I heard of it was yesterday. I think. Nobody tells me anything.”
“Ooo. I hope that’s not the verge of recrimination in your voice. For it’s you who’s in your own little world, isn’t it?”
“I am?” Claire was delighted to hear anything at all about what people thought of her, that was how often it ran directly opposite to what she expected them to think. “And here I was thinking of me as a regular busybody.”
“Huh! I’m sure I don’t know which is worse.”
“Neither do I,” said Claire with sincerity.
“Well. It’s a play about people at least. Not your angels and symbols.”
“I can’t imagine Carmela writing about the supernatural.”
Mary gave her a funny look.
“I mean, Carmela’s so down to earth. So you’re pretty safe there.”
“Don’t be too sure. Just when you think you know someone, they’ll turn around and be somebody else, won’t they?”
“They will?”
“Sure. Just look at the play she wanted to put on!”
“Which play?”
“Oh glory be, now don’t go back and tell her I told you or she’ll say I’m tellin’ tales out of school, like. She wouldn’t want me to tell you about what didn’t work out. Carmela is so—”
“—touchy,” Claire supplied.
“Well, see, it was to be a story about the Virgin Mary falling in love with a visitor from outer space.”
“Ha! She did, sort of.”
“Carmela had her secretly meeting him for mint tea over in Nazareth, against her parents’ wishes and all. Then before you know it, they were having it off in the desert.” Here Mary’s face went red. “There was no question of marriage,” she continued, tight-lipped, the scandal an appalling concern to her now. “He had to go back to wherever it was that he had come from. In the end, the family found a nice fella from the town, the carpenter’s son, a simple, good fellow, and they married them off.”
“The mint tea is good.”
“Oh! Don’t go telling her that! She’ll think she ought to go back to it!”
“Mom. Carmela would certainly never take up something because I thought it was good. On the contrary.”
“Still and all—the worst of it was, it was a musical. I mean, a musical!”
“Yes, well, she is her father’s daughter. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll never even mention it, all right?” Mary lived in a world of don’t mention this’s and don’t mention that’s.
“Aunt Claire?”
“Ah, it’s Michaelaen, is it?!” Mary sprang from her chair and gave the big eight-year-old boy a bear hug. He let himself be smothered, wiped his mouth with one arm, and grabbed a doughnut from the counter with the other. A powdered sugar doughnut it was, still soft and squishy with freshness. Michaelaen, Zinnie’s son, was always dropping over; even when Claire and Johnny had the house in South Ozone Park, he would come over sometimes after school. He would take the bus, all by himself, arriving blase and carrying big-boy geography books and looseleaf binders. He sported his shirt purposely out of his uniform trousers, his skateboard an integral part of his being. Zinnie was often stuck in court and Claire felt better if he came to her for supper. Johnny could always drop him off at home later, when he was working nights, and when he wasn’t, Zinnie would pick him up sometime, today or tomorrow, it didn’t matter to Claire. Claire loved that kid. And Anthony was as good as he could be when his big cousin was around, following him all over the place. “Race ya,” he’d say, hopefully, as they leapt from room to room. And Michaelaen, good natured as Zinnie, so often complied.
He stood there now, self-important, self-assured. Not shy before his aunt and grandmother, Claire noticed, congratulating herself and her mother. Not all children could be themselves with adults, but Michaelaen was. They had both contributed a lot of time to making this so. A lot of hours reading this kid stories and playing Mr. Potato Head went into making this fellow look into your eyes without guile or mistrust. This, Claire knew, was a success to be counted, shared by them all, especially her mom and dad, while Zinnie had had to work. Her dad had walked him through the woods with stories and silences and plain old being there—there had been a time when Michaelaen hadn’t been so trusting—the divorce, of course, and other things. Horrible things. The important thing was that now he was. He was opening, he announced, a detective agency. Five dollars a case. Only twenty-five cents, he rushed to assure them, deposit. Five bucks if he solved the case. Mary made a great show of looking for a quarter.
Really it was only Carmela who wasn’t that close with Michaelaen. She wasn’t that into kids, really. Not yet, anyway. One day, Claire hoped, she would get pregnant and that all would change. It would soften h
er, loosen those brittle bones, she wouldn’t look at herself so much as a failure. It didn’t matter that to the world Carmela looked like the undefeated champ; Claire understood her better. True, she had the house at the top of the hill, mansion really, but Claire understood from having known Stefan first what price Carmela must be having to pay to live there. It would always be Stefan’s deal. Cool, flaxen-haired, fast-driving Stefan, who, every time you crooked your little finger to pick up his fragile champagne crystal, watched you with sardonic, superior eyes. He enjoyed making you feel the fool. Expecting, waiting, even, for you to break that glass. And Carmela, knowing, deeply, herself to be the fool, fit snugly in.
Carmela didn’t have to work as a fashion columnist anymore (it wouldn’t become the wife of a diplomat like Stefan) and so she was a playwright. Not successful as yet, but then most playwrights were unsuccessful so that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Carmela’s title be pronounceable at cocktail parties. “My wife, Carmela Stefanovitch, the playwright.” The way he had of saying things would make the listener feel inferior and out of touch for not knowing who she was. Oh, well. That all didn’t matter.
Johnny staggered into the kitchen and lurched into the bathroom.
“What was that?” Mary’s voice rose shrilly.
“It’s all right, Mom, it’s just Johnny.”
“Why doesn’t he use the bathroom up the stairs?”
“Beats me. He says it’s too small and if he closes the door he feels all boxed in. This is an awfully big bathroom.”
Mary looked doubtful.
“I think he likes to see what’s going on,” Claire whispered. “You know. Johnny Dick.” She walked over to the big kitchen window and poked her head out.
There was Tree Dover’s house across the street. A moaning in the glaring sunshine, right now, empty of a woman rushing up stairs and down to the dryer, silent and quiet in her kitchen with her coffee cup, nervous and balanced by the moon, the months, the years. Claire blinked at the closed kitchen windows, no friend inside them now, the way there might have been, to catch sight of, run out and go gossip with. Floozie looked up through the screen at her with perky, smart little eyes that summed you up. Funny how she seemed to zoom in on Claire’s thoughts. Always looking up at her quickly and shrewdly when she felt anything palpable. There was, of course, no single reason for Claire to think this, it was just a feeling, odd and true.
Claire did a double take.
“What’s the matter now?” said Mary. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No. It’s just that I—it’s Dharma Dover in the yard.”
“Well, that’s good. Do her good to play with the boys.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I’m glad to see her. I just can’t figure her father letting her come and go as she pleases just now.” She turned to look at Mary sitting there. “Wouldn’t you think he’d want her with him all the time? Every minute?”
Mary made a wry face and shrugged heavily. “Everyone carries grief in a different way, Claire. He might not be able to bear the sight of the child just now. Not be able to handle her grief as well as his own.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Ma. How does he—I mean, what does he do? What kind of job—always home?”
“He’s in real estate, Claire. He makes his own hours.” She stopped and looked at her daughter. “You must have heard of ‘Dover Estates’?”
“‘Estates,’ is it? Thinks well of himself, eh?”
“Well of the neighborhood. And the only one who does,” she sniffed. “Those big real estate conglomerates don’t give a hoot or a holler who they sell to. Andrew Dover sees to it the neighborhood doesn’t go to—” She looked at Claire’s Greenpeace-liberal shoulders at the window. “Gypsies.”
“Hey!” Claire shouted out at the kids. “Anyone want orange juice ice pops?”
“Ma,” Anthony waved her away, annoyed. Any chance he could get with children was gold for him. He didn’t want her intruding upon that.
“Right,” she said and shut the window. She stood there, then opened it again. “Dharma,” she said, “would you come over here for a moment?”
Dharma came. She held the dog. They looked up at Claire with bold, unshrinking eyes, the two of them, little orphans. Not any more, thought Claire, in a surge of effusive emotion. Not any more. I’ll take these two on as my own. She sucked a great gust of air up through her nostrils in ferocious promise. It would be a karmic debt paid off.
In high school, some principal or other had had the bright idea of rounding up the sophomore class and leading them on four trains into Brooklyn to some orphanage. These private-school girls—and that’s all they were was girls, skirts rolled up above their knees in case Prince Charming rode the A train too—went down to Brooklyn and everyone was assigned a kid. Claire’s kid was Anthony. She thought. Yes, now that she thought about it, his name had been Anthony as well, remembered Claire, and he had looked at her with big Diana Ross eyes and had said, “You gonna come see me?”
“Yes,” Claire had said firmly, hoping she meant it.
She guessed she had, at the time.
“Really?” asked the little boy, not believing her.
“Yes, really,” she’d said, and smiled her charming smile, her eyes misting over at the goodness innate of her.
That smile had fooled a lot of people, had made an awful lot of false promises in its time, had done a lot of damage, hadn’t it? It wasn’t the teary-eyed promises that meant anything, that got anywhere, that anyone lived up to; it was the ones people kept, annoyed, maybe, but kept.
“I just wanted to say,” Claire started to say then stopped as she thought of that little boy on line in the schoolyard, watching while the other girls came and no one came for him until it was clearer and clearer as the time went on, that nobody would come for him; nobody ever did. They must have assigned him another girl. And still, Claire saw him every morning in the papers, every evening on the news, a gangly kid, arrested, then a bigger guy, a man, been up in prison and released, coming uptown to see his parole officer. On the F train when she went to the city she saw him all the time, sitting there half-looking at her with mistrustful reproach in his eyes. She’d never come. The glitzy immediacy of debate club and hitch-hiking down to Greenwich Village to hang out with musicians had knocked that great goodness right out of her. He had been lonesome and she could have made a difference. It was not arrogance this time. She really had let that soul completely down. She knew it then, she knew it now.
“Dharma,” Claire said easily, “would you help me with Anthony this year? It’s just that I’m having such a hard time with him and if I had someone young, someone who could get through to him, like …”
And Dharma, slowly becoming aware that she was again being called upon for help and it wasn’t some pitying grown-up funeral-parlor soppy stuff here where Claire would fall into her arms sobbing, decided, for now, she might give it a go.
Floozie looked up and caught Claire with suddenly impressed bright eyes.
“I hear you’re running Cascade now,” they seemed to say. This family was always using some old Bette Davis film as their point of reference.
“Yes, Doctor Jackowitz,” Claire agreed, kneeling down to tousle the dog’s fluffy, nifty head. “I’m running Cascade now.”
Claire returned to the funeral parlor in the afternoon. Not having found the courage to walk up to the body at the wake, she knew she’d have to go back or regret it. She returned before hours, when no one was around. Mahegganey’s was a family funeral parlor. They all used Mahegganey’s.
Claire walked in without hesitation. Tree was all alone. She knelt down on the padded velvet stool and said her Our Father out loud. The hearing is the last to go in the dead, she knew. “Oh, Tree,” she said, tears already running down her cheeks, “I’d forgotten I knew you so well. I’d forgotten how much you mean to me. You meant to me. How much you’ve influenced my life. I wish I’d told you before. Before this—”
When Claire did finally finish, she stood up and saw Andrew Dover pass in the hallway. Embarrassed, she dried her eyes, then wondered why the hell she should feel embarrassed. Outside, she heard Andrew talking in hushed important tones on the office phone. He had, she supposed, the makings of a bigshot. Claire wondered just how big? And how far was he prepared to go to get there? Murder? She held her purse in both her hands and went quietly back home.
In the playground on the Overlook, the highest spot atop the neighborhood, above the cloying magnificence of everybody’s fabric softener, where Forest Park ends, or begins, birds from everywhere stop, leave, and stop again, stunned into circling confusion by furious global warming, overcrowding the woods, bunking into each other, sending birdwatchers berserk with good fortune.
From her spot on a bench by the sprinkler, Claire watched Dharma douse her angry Anthony with one more round of a blue pailful of water. Floozie the dog sat majestically on Claire’s soft lap. The leaves were in the trees, on the ground, in the air.
All at once, it was fall. After the nerve-wracking white light of summer, it was the most wonderful thing to sit still in the round rusty yellow of it. Tomorrow was Carmela’s grand party. Claire pulled her legs up underneath herself on the park bench and savored her position. She had settled on what she would wear. It wasn’t a dress, really, but a ready-made, one of those Punjabi dresses over pants that you could suddenly find in shops all over Jamaica Avenue. It was apricot with threads of green and vague cream-colored stencils, trimmed and dotted in tiny almost indiscernible gold stars. The whole effect was shimmering and light and when she had put it up against her face in the store the proprietress’s face had burst with happiness. There was no question, she had had to buy it. Such solicitous, forthright approval must be respected. And it had come with a silk peach scarf so deliriously soft it resembled the underbelly of a leaf to the touch.
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