Foxglove

by Mary Anne Kelly

  At the Harvard Club, where Jupiter Dodd used to like to take Claire to lunch, in the room set aside for ladies with their well-behaved children, or simply guests unwilling to wait with the rest, there is a painting on the wall by John Singer Sargent. It’s called Chess Game and in it, on the edge of a shimmering lily pond, in oasis-dappled light, recline two players, a pantalooned young man and a veiled and slender woman. They are engrossed. He knows what he’s about. She is dark, self-possessed, and serious. The chess board, however, is suspended above ground. Such a mystic thing for such solid sport. He might not really be there, one considers, and neither, perhaps, is she, just an inspiration to his imagination. But then again, they’re always there, those two, up on the dark red, time-honored wall, playing.

  Claire often thought about that painting. And talked about it. Such an ideal spot to be. “You can’t live in a painting,” Zinnie would remind her. “No,” she would say. She was thinking of that painting now in her own house, and not mentioning it to Zinnie, who sat with her on the stairs, because she knew what she would say. And Zinnie, who had enjoyed psychology in college, always insisted that the painting reminded Claire of Michael. There was truth in everything, Claire supposed, but she knew Zinnie worried about her. Zinnie looked so happy lately. She glowed with an inner light. Everyone dismissed it as a by-product of show biz, but Claire knew there was something going on with Narayan. She could hear them whispering downstairs late into the night. The two of them were so dazed, they were banging into walls. Also, she had watched from her bedroom window as Narayan pulled Zinnie into the garage and kissed her. Not only had Zinnie let him, Claire remembered, she had watched Zinnie’s black-stockinged leg travel up and around Narayan’s waist like a lasso.

  She and Zinnie played Go Fish. The cast had all gone home, or, as Carmela said, to their respective hovels. They had started off playing cards with the kids, Claire and Zinnie, but the kids had gotten bored and petered off, Anthony first, who now played distractedly with the Jacob’s Ladder Narayan had made him from ribbons and glue and old cardboard. Johnny lay, half dozing, on the loveseat. Anthony caught Claire’s eye and led her gaze to the spot under Johnny’s arm, where his robe was washed thin. Anthony was always full of tricks and games and festivities lately. Conspiratorially, mother and son locked eyes. He pussyfooted silently across the room, grazed a finger along Johnny’s breast till he reached the pit of his arm and then wiggled the digit. Johnny’s arm flew down protectively and he lurched. Anthony howled with laughter. “Let’s do it again!” he cried and so they did. Johnny closed his eyes and Anthony went back to where he’d been originally sitting and they repeated the entire charade. Anthony enjoyed himself just as much each time as the first and he laughed with abandon.

  Swamiji, sewing up the wash-worn seams of Claire’s embroidered Chinese pillowcases, smiled dotingly.

  It was very still outside the house.

  Dharma pulled Claire’s great lot of hair behind her head and wound it into a French braid. Michaelaen and Narayan were captivated with their game of Nintendo. Stan had insisted upon his radio station and no one had bothered to change it. Even though their own lives tended them towards more current music, the Breslinsky girls all felt most at home and contented within the strains of the classical music on which Stan had raised them. These pieces were so lovely; Barber’s adagio for strings and then Haydn’s concerto for flute and oboe. No one wanted to move. It was like being under a spell. The weather wasn’t sunny, but quick, silver clouds were gathering and a woolpack of pearly light shone through Swamiji’s now spotless windows, lifting everyone’s spirits up and keeping them aloft.

  The dog slept in a rectangle of light on Freddy’s old Dhera Gaz in the middle of the room. Floozie had always liked that rug. It might have gotten her into trouble back when she lived with Fred, but it had, in the end, led her here, hadn’t it? There would be hamburgers and macaroni and cheese for supper. She sighed happily, yawned, stretched, turned over, and went back to sleep.

  “The thing is,” Claire said suddenly, “if Mrs. Dixon wasn’t the one who pulled the wire on the radio—and it wasn’t, it’s perfectly clear now that it wasn’t—then who did do it?”

  Everyone groaned. “Go fish,” said Zinnie.

  “I mean,” she continued nonetheless, “that changes everything, doesn’t it?” She looked from one face to another. No one would meet her eyes. They knew what she was getting at. She had this tic in her head that Andrew Dover had killed his wife and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, shake it.

  As far as Johnny was concerned, the case was closed. He had never wanted to hear Mrs. Dixon’s name again; that case was long closed. And Andrew Dover had been with Portia McTavish the day Theresa Dover had died. They’d been seen by sources left and right. Christ, they’d even stopped at Freddy’s. So the guy was guilty of adultery, so what? So was half the world. What were you gonna do, hang him for cheating? Anyway, the coroner had said it was open and shut; she’d died of a stroke, brought on by drugs and alcohol. Both her parents had died that way, hadn’t they? Far as he could tell, Theresa Dover was just one more slut junkie out of the way. You couldn’t say that to Claire, though. His wife was a slight bit pixillated in her brain. He looked at her over there across the room, with the little girl brushing her hair and putting it back in a fancy rope like that, all reddish and fluffy and dark. That same old ache he always got from the sudden sight of her came back with impatience. He rolled the toothpick around in his mouth. You get a house, you pay a mortgage, and you can’t even screw your wife, he grumbled to himself, standing up to get rid of the hardness.

  Claire felt his itchy look, mistook it for annoyance and she figured she’d better change the subject. This was turning into a sore topic. If only she could get Johnny alone for a couple of minutes, she knew she could blow in his ear and loosen him up enough to hear her out. He stood up and started for the door. Now where was he off to? “Now where are you off to?” She tried not to wear her interrogator’s face.

  “The barn,” he said.

  “Aw, Johnny, today? You promised you’d be here all day. The minute you have any time off lately, you’re off to the track.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Anthony piped up, backing her up.

  “I’m just going over to the barn,” Johnny stretched, filling the room with his big hulking self. “We’re getting the horse a goat, while she heals.”

  “A goat?” they all cried.

  “Yeah, why? Keep her company. They like goats.” He looked at all of them looking at him with open mouths. “Whatsa matter? You got something against goats?”

  “I wanna go!” Anthony cried.

  “Me too,” Michaelaen pleaded.

  “All right, all right,” Claire gave in, watching, spellbound, as Johnny loaded the bullets into his Colt Detective Special. Usually, she looked away, pretending to herself that life would never be that bad again. Still, she was glad he wore it. He was alive. And protected. She might feel safe enough inside her white light, but she liked her husband in a gun. “Just be back way before supper,” she warned. “I want you all in and out of here and the place cleaned up before I have to get dressed for the play.”

  “We’ll be back, don’t you worry,” they all promised. Sure. They all promised the moon when it took them to the track. She would not be annoyed, she vowed. She couldn’t stand women who were always annoyed. She would relax, smile, and enjoy their happiness. There was anyway no sense to being upset when it would get her nowhere. Somehow, the bills would get paid and the mortgage dealt with. And if they didn’t, she would deal with that, too. Isn’t that what mommies and housewives the world over did? Well, she would do it, too.

  “Dharma?” she turned around and looked into the uncanny, curious eyes, so like those of her schoolmate. “Did you want to go with them?”

  “Good Lord, no,” Dharma assured her. She wasn’t one for horses. They were so big. They smelled of, well, horse.

  Johnny came back in. He whacked the chair beside Swamiji
’s head with a bing.

  “Didn’t you tell me you had a number you wanted me to play for you?”

  “I have a number I appreciate that you might use, if you like.”

  Johnny rocked back and forth expectantly.

  “One sixty-five,” said Swamiji. “Leviticus.”

  “Whatever,” Johnny grinned at Claire.

  She shook her head. “You’re too much. Now, where’s Anthony?”

  “He’s with Michaelaen.”

  They both peered suspiciously out the window, the most precious thing in their lives out there walking around in a pair of rickety sneakers.

  “You’ll be careful.” She tried not to sound worried.

  Anthony, out on the lawn, sneezed twice. Johnny and Claire glanced, concerned, at each other.

  “I didn’t hear any ‘God bless you’s’ in there,” his grown-up, curmudgeony voice came reprimandingly through the shut window.

  “Go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  “Remind me to call Red when I get back,” he said. “He’s not feelin’ too hot.”

  Johnny went out the door and whisked Anthony into the air, depositing him beside Michaelaen in the back seat of the car.

  “Move over, fart breath,” Anthony said.

  “Get a grip, rhinoceros nostrils,” Michaelaen said.

  Claire watched Johnny strap him in. She whispered, “God bless you,” and she went back to her place. She was nervous. There was so much still to do.

  “You are veddy, veddy wise,” Swamiji bobbed his head whimsically at Claire. Floozie got up, looked around for a cozier spot, jumped up and squished herself in the space between him and the side of his chair.

  “Got no choice.” Claire shrugged, anyway pleased that he’d noticed.

  “Yes, but you’re letting him follow his bliss.”

  “He’d do it anyway,” she snorted, “whether I let him or not.”

  “Ah, people always do what they want to do,” he agreed, “but if you don’t permit him with grace, it would not be his bliss.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “There is so much power in one’s attitude,” Swamiji squinted one eye and threaded the needle he held in the air. “If only people knew.”

  “Knew what?” Dharma stopped pulling the hairs from the brush and looked up.

  “How much power they have.”

  “Oh,” they both said.

  In the garlicky, Jell-O-boxed pantry, where the mirror hung amid the cans of bright yellow creamed corn and wheat-germ jars filled with pasta and grains, Mary stood before her in her shimmering green dress. The dress was all right, Claire supposed, but the hat had to go. It had a veil, a sort of stiff go-to-meeting netting thing that stuck up into the air.

  “Something wrong?” Mary painted green eyeshadow across her crepey lids with a shaky, unpracticed hand.

  “No, nothing.” She didn’t like to tell her she looked like she was off to a wedding in Woodhaven. It didn’t matter. Mary would take it as a compliment anyhow. “You look terrific, Ma.” Now where was Johnny? He’d just come in and he’d gone off again. If she wasn’t mistaken, it was O.T.B. before they were closed.

  “I’m as nervous as a girl. My own daughter singing lead in an off-Broadway play. And another one wrote the whole thing … it’s too brilliant.”

  “Off-Broadway?”

  “All right, Off-off-Broadway.”

  “How about, ‘Only forty-five minutes from Broadway’?” Claire suggested.

  “Oh, you’re just jealous,” Mary threw her gloves at her. “I can’t get this bloody hat on!”

  “You might take that as a sign, Mother. Maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

  “Oh, you and your signs!”

  “Come on, let me help. Hmm. Hold still, will you? No, you’re right. It needs a bobby pin.”

  “Bobby pin, my foot! You’ll ruin my hat.”

  “Don’t you have a hat pin?”

  “Bugger. Why would I carry about a loose hat pin?”

  “Better than a loose hat. Oh, stop! Ma! What, are you going to cry over a silly old hat? Mom! Tch. Here, take this Kleenex. Now stop it or you’ll ruin your pretty eye makeup.”

  “Serve me right.” Mary sniffed, “trussied up like a bleedin’ harlot.”

  “Oh, you’re not. You look beautiful. Just beautiful.”

  “D’you think so?” She turned to face her and the hat slipped down to the bridge of her nose. They both laughed long and hard. Nerves. They were both nerved up with excitement.

  “Hang on.” Claire dried her own eyes. “I know where I saw some hat pins.” She grabbed her keys and threw on her coat.

  “Ah, now, don’t be goin’ out for it,” Mary moaned.

  “Be still. I’ll be right back. I have to run over Dharma’s anyway, to get her winter boots. Suppose it snows?”

  “Oh, now, don’t go there, using her things. I don’t want any dead woman’s things.”

  “You make it sound so sinister.” She pushed her out of the way with her shoulder and regarded herself in the mirror. She didn’t look so bad. “It won’t snow. It’s too early for snow.”

  “By the way,” Mary tried to sound casual, “what’s Swamiji goin’ to wear?”

  “Same old Swami winter wear. You know him.” Mary didn’t say anything. “What? What’s the matter? You’re worried what someone will say about Swamiji, aren’t you? Mom,” her voice rose shrilly, “how can you go to church every day and be a Christian when you read the papers, clicking your tongue at the devil on the very streets of Queens county, and then you turn around and question what the other parishioners will think of someone … someone …” she sputtered, “… better than all of them, just because if he’s black you think he ought to wear a suit and tie like a Pakistani urologist and not the homespun of the holy man he is.”

  “What do you think of this polish?” Mary extended her nails for inspection. Claire’s righteous heart melted. Plenty of Clorox and Spic and Span and ammonia had gone into those knuckly mitts. “Boy. Gorgeous. Where’d you find that one?”

  “Right down here in Woolworth’s. Would you believe it? Oop! Who’s that?” She flipped her eye shadow case into the air in an acrobatic frenzy. It landed somewhere in the colander full of bleeding eggplant for tomorrow’s parmigian.

  “I’ll never find it now,” she cried.

  “It’s in the pot of water pressing the eggplant down,” Claire reassured her. “I’ll get the door while you fish it out. It’s Zinnie. She just had to go to the bank.”

  “What’s this?” Zinnie stood there accusingly, having let herself in the back door, a Parcel Post package in her hand. “And there’s a letter for Swamiji.”

  “You look beautiful, dear!” Mary whispered.

  “Well, who’s it addressed to?” Claire grabbed the package from her. “Dharma? She’ll like that. I wonder who’s sending her something? It isn’t her birthday, is it? Christ, I don’t even know when her birthday is, do you believe it?”

  “Can you do up my buttons?” Zinnie turned and led them out of the pantry. She was corseted up in a black, low-cut dress. All the ladies in the cast were dressed low-cut. Carmela thought they might as well keep the men in their seats once the parish wives had gotten them there. Otherwise it would look so bad, she said, all the fellows out in the lunch room smoking and guffawing. Carmela didn’t much like men, anymore, or give them much credit, Claire noticed, for all her manufactured girlie magnets to attract their attention.

  Zinnie wriggled happily across the kitchen. She loved playing the bitchy witch, she said. She’d always felt sorry for her, could never relate to those good fairy people, with their namby-pamby pinks and blues and their magic wands and their powdered wigs. “These here,” she hoisted her chest up with no-nonsense fingers, unringed and untaloned, “are the goods.” Later they would paint her face downward to age her, but for now she looked the dandy enchantress she was.

  “Holy Jesus,” Stan exclaimed as he came up
from the cellar. “Look at you!”

  “If I don’t eat something now,” Zinnie beseeched Claire, “I won’t have anything till after the play. I can’t wait.”

  “I’ll run in and get that hatpin later, Mom,” Claire said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Tea and toast,” suggested Mary. She screwed in her best Cladagh earrings.

  “Anything! English muffins!” Zinnie drew Anthony’s Peter Pan sword from its sheath and broke lance around the kitchen. “Food!” she cried out. “My bounty, me pretty, my just deserts before the party begins! This will be my wish! Hand over, or next you’ll walk the plank!”

  “Ow. Watch it, will you? That hurts. And get off the table before Anthony sees you and thinks that’s a great idea,” said Claire.

  “I won’t!”

  “You jolly well will.” Mary smacked her on the feet.

  “Where are the children?” Claire asked.

  “I can see them from here,” Zinnie said, “they’re all three of them out in the yard.”

  “What are they up to?”

  “Doing the pony, from the look of it. Wait. Oh. They’re playing potsy.”

  “Quiet, everyone!” Stanley held up his hand. “It’s Debussy!”

  “Give me the butter, Mom,” Claire instructed.

  “It’s ‘Reflections in the Water,’” Stan insisted, not believing, still, after all these years of his inspired instruction, they wouldn’t be more delighted.

  Swamiji cleared his throat from the doorway. Only the rippling sound of music was between them but Claire knew, right then, that that was it, he’d be gone from them soon. There was an open space, like weight, in a circle between them.