Zinnie was off tonight and was to stay home with Michaelaen and Anthony. And Dharma, too, of course. This arrangement was working out quite well. Dharma was allowed to stay the night. This and any other night. Claire rocked back and forth, disturbed. Both Anthony and Michaelaen were better behaved with Dharma in the house. Each child was awed and if not silenced, certainly quieter, from Dharma’s enormous loss. If nothing else, it was a great learning experience, reverence for life and all that, but Claire was growing increasingly unnerved by Andrew Dover’s behavior towards Dharma. If it was none of her business then she wouldn’t feel so involved, now would she? She was just waiting to say something to him, to Andrew, about it, and she was just waiting for him to say to her it was none of her business. “I lived too many years in Germany to feel like that, to let that kind of an attitude just go by,” she would say to him. She had her arguments ready, like packages in her arms to drop into his, just in case he ever dismissed his formal, grieving, polite attitude and showed his proper self. Big phony. Claire was furious at him. The gall of him, to be alive and happy while Tree was dead. She knew he was happy. She wasn’t fooled by that morose puss he would put on for the outside world when he walked out the door and down to the church. Claire, home all day with the children, out beating a rug in the rain, had heard him whistling, heard him clear as a bell when he’d thought no one could hear him. What was it he’d been whistling? It didn’t matter. You don’t whistle when you’re in grief. You don’t want to do anything but think about, talk about, and cry about the one who’s gone.
Claire looked at Dharma. They were all in a cluster. Someone had brought their new Play-Doh up to the playground and they were all around it, greedy to be in on its lovely smell, its untouched newness. Only Dharma looked off into space. Inconsolable. Claire made another silent prayer that her Anthony wouldn’t lose her until she was old enough to want to be lost. It wasn’t right. So just let Andrew say one word to her about whose business it was. Just let him try. “Long Way to Tipperary.” That was it. That’s what he’d whistled. Twit.
So Mary was coming over for the first part of the evening, while Zinnie wrote up her bills, and she would keep them occupied with making jelly tarts. Mary was very good at all that. All three daughters had fond memories of jelly tarts in times of crisis. It wouldn’t be bad. Playing with the dog would keep the kids occupied for a while. She’d let them take Floozie on a good long walk with Aunt Zinnie. You never had to worry about them when Zinnie was with them, she would protect them and hold their interest. And if she didn’t, they’d get the old one-two right into the grubby corner—so they knew just like magic, she would shrug, what was expected.
“Kids!” she shouted, gathering the scattered entrails of her bag about her. They came, slowly at first, then became revved up by the novelty of their spontaneous idea of racing down the great hill all together. Excitedly they left the park, the thought of a race gaining momentum. Unfortunately, fatigue won out, and before they even reached Metropolitan Avenue screams of ownership over some staff-like stick one of them had picked up (“It’s mine!” “No mine!”) were obliterated by “I saw it first,” and “No, I did! Gimme back!”
Claire noticed that her son was the crankiest in the bunch. This was nothing new. He always was. You’d think she’d beat him when he was an infant, the way he carried on. Dharma had lost her mother, Michaelaen had been through a divorce and a terrible trauma known only to himself, and who behaved atrociously? Her tyranical, whiney son. So what was she supposed to do? Smack him silly? Yes. She was going to have to start to whack him if he didn’t shape up. A good bop on the butt, that’s what he needed. Maybe it was the move. Maybe not.
Yesterday, she could have killed him. They’d been up here at the Overlook; she’d specifically taken them up here to be out of the vicinity because Andrew didn’t think Dharma should be at the funeral and had asked Claire to keep her. Claire had been only too happy to oblige, agreeing that putting one’s mother into the earth was hard enough at middle age, and probably insufferably traumatic at seven. So she’d taken them up here and they had been getting along fine, playing kickball, when Anthony had spotted the hearse and funeral party winding up Park Lane South. Claire had signalled to him with her eyes not to say a word, but he had. “Look,” he’d shouted, and Dharma had looked, along with everyone else in the playground. Claire could have died for her, that little girl, standing there by the sandbox in her chartreuse dress, her fingernails still chipped pink in polish her mother had let her put on. Claire hadn’t known what to do. She had sat there, frozen, and Dharma had stood very still and not bothered with Anthony or any of the others. There she’d stood and looked down the great hill and held on to the tall, chain-link fence.
That had been yesterday. Well, there was nothing to be done.
Dharma came running back to her. Claire noticed her clothes were all wet. Normally, she wouldn’t take notice, but the weather was changing and you couldn’t leave her like that for too long.
“We’ll stop off at your house and you can run in and get some dry clothes. All right?”
Dharma looked down at herself. “Good Lord,” she said, the way a woman would. She must have spent most of her time with her mother, Claire thought, her adult behavior was so pronounced.
“Dharma, is there anyone from school, some little girl in your class, someone you’d like to invite over? I wouldn’t mind. One more or less.”
Dharma shook her head.
“Then you don’t mind hanging out with us? Helping me with Anthony? At least for a while?”
“No, Mrs. Benedetto. I told you already three times I wouldn’t. Really.”
“That’s fine. Look, Dharma, I’m all for form and proper behavior, but if you’d like to call me something else—I don’t know. Mrs. Benedetto seems too formal for the way I feel towards you. I don’t suppose you’d like to call me ‘Aunt Claire’ or something like that …”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, no, of course not. So. Fine.”
Claire watched her run off, back to the children. They had grabbed sticks and were using them as staffs, great herders they were, now. Dharma had to run to catch up. The hill was steep and it warmed up. Claire blew on her upper lip. To the right were the woods and they followed the path that rimmed it. To the left was Park Lane South and across that Stefan’s house. Carmela’s house. Claire still thought of it as Stefan’s. Actually, she didn’t think of it as either of theirs. Years ago, when she’d gone to high school on the bus, she would pull the buzzer here to notify the driver to let her off at this stop. So everyone, those all-important other passengers, would think she lived specifically in this villa. She was quite sure they would know it would be that particular villa, to which she belonged, no other. She fit so well to it, with her sweater nestled onto her shoulders just so well bred, with the pearls, the single strand, and her so-well-scrubbed fingernails buffed, not polished. They were not just passengers on a bus, these passengers, they were her public, the audience hushed in a Lincoln Center theater. They were savvy. They watched, on other nights, Fritz Lang in black-and-white. They certainly were not simply people on their way home. They were her audience. When, years later, as if by magic, she had literally run into Stefan jogging through the woods and he had invited her home, home being the very villa of her adolescent dreams, she had taken it as a sign. The fact that Stefan was handsome and interested in her had not been as meaningful as the mystical incredibility of what was going on.
Yes. So long ago. Even what had happened later had been so long ago. Four years. The fact that she had met Johnny at the same time had been rich with meaning as well. It had allowed her free will over destiny. Or so it had seemed at the time.
Claire felt the opulence jiggle in the rear of her thighs as she marched down the hill. She let it jiggle, jiggling it more for the good it would do them. She looked, no doubt, like a wooden soldier, but what she looked like now had not the same significance it had once had. I’ve changed, Claire told h
erself, astonished, relieved, appreciative. I’m another person looking back on someone else.
She caught up with the children at the crossing, as the cars whizzed by on Park Lane South. You had to be careful here. After that it was as if you descended into the tops of the trees. The villas changed here to stately rundown elderly Queen Anne Victorians and Colonials. The neighborhood wasn’t as fancy, but it also wasn’t irritated by the interjection of rude apartment houses. Here it was quiet, you could park anywhere you liked. As a matter of fact, in this part of town, the homeowners considered the street in front of their own homes their private domain, and if you parked once too often in front of someone else’s house you’d find your tires flat. “And rightly so,” you’d hear them say.
Claire’s heart still leapt at first sight of her house. She felt herself hurry toward it, so much still to do to make it really perfect.
Johnny had already started pulling down the walls around the chimney. It was an awful job, and every room was littered on the first floor, but when it was done, when the fireplace flues were open and the stones and tiles restored to their original grandeur, Johnny said a fireplace like this would really heat the house, not rob from it, the way the modern ones did. To have four open fireplaces in one house was a wonderful thing for the both of them. It meant so much. Especially to him, who’d only known fireplaces in films. They would whisper about it in their bed when Anthony was asleep, how wonderful it would be when it was finished. They would invite Red Torneo, Johnny’s old friend from Brooklyn, and sit him in front of the fire and make him drink hot toddies. “He’d go for that,” Johnny would say, and she could tell, by the unconscious wiggle of his bare toes against hers, how the idea genuinely delighted him. His eyes would be wide open in the darkness and he would be dreaming out loud. “And then,” he would say, drawing it out for her so she could savor it too, “then, we’ll invite your friends from overseas and they’ll take up the whole top floor.” Johnny liked to be fair.
Claire smiled. She wondered who on earth he thought she would invite. There was no one there who was interested in her life any more.
Johnny would hold her softly in his warm protective arms. She was important here, she knew. Her life meant more now than it ever had. She would hear his breathing change and feel his grip go slack and peaceful. She was important here. Still, she stayed awake and overheard the mindless chatter of the world she’d left behind. It glittered and disdained and chirped until it turned into the odd, occasional late-night squirrel on the roof, hurrying before the raccoon came down at last from the oozy wood.
Dharma stood and looked across the street.
“Michaelaen,” Claire said, “would you take Anthony on in and turn on the Disney Channel and let him have a Snickers from the tin drum? One Snickers, remember. Just one. I’ll take Dharma over and help her get some dry clothes. And give Floozie fresh water, if you think of it.”
“I can go by myself,” Dharma said.
“Never mind,” Claire dismissed her. She was very good at this when she meant it. She would narrow her eyes and look a certain way, the way she’d seen Sister Saint Stephen do so many years ago. Sister Saint Stephen had done a fine job of terrifying the entire class of sixty-four children. “You’ll not go anywhere alone while I’ve got charge of you. Got that?”
Dharma pursed her lips but waited for Claire while she opened the door to let the boys in. They walked across the road together, and Claire remembered the time she’d first come to this place and sat there in the car with Anthony asleep and Tree had come upon her. How astonished they’d both been. And Claire remembered still the way Tree looked forward to her meeting her daughter.
Claire didn’t want to go canonizing Tree in her mind, now. She remembered, even then, a light but deliberate sense of reserve, not wanting Tree to enter entirely into her world, not inviting her directly to her house. She’d known, even in that short meeting, a feeling of caution, of not surrendering everything at once. She hadn’t given Tree her number straight away. One holds on to painful memories, even broken ones that seem so pointed. When they were children, Claire had lured Tree into her garage with the promise of a ride on the silver painted scooter bike. It was an unusual bike; it had no chain, just a smooth rubber loop thing. It was great fun. Claire, though she only measuredly liked the thing, recognized it immediately for what it could bring her, and that was a chance at the notorious Tree Medicino’s friendship. And it had done.
And then, one day, Michael, Claire’s brother, had hot-rodded the thing down to Jamaica Avenue and the rubber loop had slipped off and broken. Claire still remembered the moment when she’d told Tree she couldn’t have the bike today, it was broken, sorry. She remembered still the unhesitating look turn from impatient waiting joy to raging fury. Not disappointment, fury. She had not even waited to play out the day but had gone, just like that, and had not come back. Not that day nor any other that winter.
When Mary had unconsciously bullied her with an unthinking “Where’s that friend of yours, the one you just can’t live without,” Claire had answered with an unconcerned, “Oh, her. She’s boring.” “Like a lightswitch, that Claire,” Mary had dismissed her, had shaken her head and gone on smearing apple butter onto toast.
And Claire could remember arranging her face to appear nonchalant, involved all at once in the setup, the pretense, the job of convincing the viewer she was fine and dandy, busy, like all of us, pretending not to feel, until, who knows, maybe we don’t. Or at least we don’t know that we don’t.
“I have to go in the back way,” Dharma said.
“You haven’t got your key?” Claire asked. They crunched uneasily along the white pebbles in the drive with their feet, neither looking forward to this.
“My father said I didn’t need it today. Because I would be at your house and all.”
“Oh, yes, of course. The back door’s open?”
“No. I climb inside the bathroom window.”
“Do you really?”
Before anything else, Dharma had hoisted herself up onto the sturdy Rubbermaid garbage pail. In the small window she went. She appeared, some moments later, at the back door, not smiling.
Claire hesitated. She had overstepped so many bounds already, today. “Shall I come with you?”
“Yes,” Dharma said quickly.
Claire went in. A morbid thrill of curious expectation went right through her. The kitchen was brown, all brown. There was a brown shiny refrigerator as well. Orange and yellow silk flowers were on the round Formica table. It was not Claire’s style, but it was cozy. There were plenty of cabinets. Dharma waited while she took in the room. “So come on,” she said.
They walked along a corridor that reminded Claire of her Polish great-aunt’s place over in Ridgewood. It was a narrow house, full of beams, wallpaper trim and excessive dollies and runners. It was dark, the shades were drawn, and if that wasn’t dark enough the furniture was mahogany. The only touch of something else was Tree’s great collection of hats. They lined the walls on pegs. It gave the gloomy Victorian interior a touch of the theatric, backstage at the Valencia vaudeville theater. There were big hats, little hats, plumed hats, pill boxes, and bonnets. Claire loved Victorian exteriors, but she wasn’t too crazy about these heavy interiors. Now that she was in, she couldn’t wait to get out. “What’s that smell?” She sniffed the air.
“It’s myrrh. Mommy always burned it in the egg. The brass egg.”
“Ah. Which room is yours?”
“In the front.” She touched Claire’s arm. “I’ll be right out.”
Claire didn’t like to intrude upon a little girl’s messy room and rumpled bed. She remembered her own hurricane of chaos as a child. Dharma’s ringlets hardly bounced as she made her way down the hallway. The walls were also dotted with Tree’s extravagant and picturesque hats. Claire followed her with a craned long neck and was astonished to see a spotless room, a made-up canopy bed and a dainty white shag rug. It was the room of a television child, hard
ly anyone Claire would know. Dharma walked directly to her low white dresser and opened a pink and golden jewelry box. A ballerina pirouetted around an oval mirror. “Somewhere, My Love,” the music box warbled. Dharma relieved her fingers of her rings and shut the box. She opened a drawer of folded little-girl tops, pulled one out, opened the drawer beneath it, inspected the row of folded little-girl bottoms, chose the corresponding pair of pedal pushers and shut that drawer as well. She turned to see if Claire was watching, but Claire had apprehended this and turned her back on Dharma so she’d have some privacy without shutting her door. She sensed that Dharma was too polite to shut it in her face. She hummed the little ballerina’s song so Dharma would know she was fine, not a care in the world, and she was out here, planted firmly, not leaving, not coming a bit closer. “La-la-la,” she sang, then saw them and almost missed a beat, but didn’t: a pair of butter-soft beige moccasins in hurried discard atop the landing on the stairs.
Claire kept on humming, singing, singing, humming. Jesus, let’s get out of here, she whispered silently to herself, and turned back to see if Dharma was almost ready. Come on, come on. She couldn’t bear the thought of the two of them coming down the stairs and Dharma seeing them together. Portia and Andrew. It wasn’t possible. But it also wasn’t possible that Tree would have had the same shoes she’d so admired, and that they would be lying about. It was too much to imagine. Claire was petrified, afraid to speak and at the same time afraid not to. She held her right hand with her left, her shoulders squinched up with indecision. “La-la-la-la-la,” she continued her piece. She held her elbows now; she was quite cold.
Dharma stood before her and they turned in silence and left the house. The light swallowed them up totally like darkness and hid them from each other. Dharma trotted hurriedly along, relieved in her sly way that Claire hadn’t noticed who it was in the house. Claire walked briskly alongside her, ashamed for the both of them. She didn’t like it. And then again, suppose this Portia person had been up the stairs on her own, furrowing through bureau drawers—or even worse, alone on Tree’s dark, tumbled, anguished bed?
Foxglove Page 8