Child of My Heart

by Alice McDermott

  Red Rover was whining with more vigor now, punctuating each whine with a mournful bark, so I said we’d just go down to the pen and then be on our way. Still leaning against the table, Dr. Kaufman waved his coffee mug. “Go right ahead,” he said. “He’ll love you for it.”

  We fed the dog some of the biscuits I carried in my beach bag and scratched him behind his ears. We were just getting ready to lock the gate again when Dr. Kaufman joined us. He had pulled on a pair of shorts over his boxers and was wearing boat shoes. He looked as if he had just, hastily, shaved. He had Red Rover’s leash in his hand and he said he and Red would just walk us to our next “assignment.” I glanced at Daisy. I knew she would be happy to have the dog’s company but perhaps a little disappointed to have to share the morning with a grown-up. But her face was expressionless. Disappointment of one sort or another was nothing new. He walked next to me, his arm brushing mine as Red Rover pulled ahead. I asked about the twins and when they would be down here, noticing as he answered, that Mrs. Kaufman had now become “their mother,” whereas two years ago, when I’d worked for them, I’d never heard him refer to her in any way other than “my wife.” He asked me if I’d thought about colleges yet. I told him I hadn’t. Their mother, he said, had gone to Smith. “Don’t go to Smith.”

  “You might want to think about modeling,” he said, and when I told him I didn’t think so, he said, “Oh no, you could. You really could.” He asked Daisy, “Don’t you think your cousin could be in magazines?” Daisy looked at me to see what it was I wanted her to say—perhaps sensing my distaste for such talk. “If she wanted to,” she said softly.

  “You could,” he insisted, warming up to his own idea. His voice, his whole manner seemed to be changing, some kind of transformation I didn’t quite understand yet but knew to be somehow akin to the transformation that had made “my wife” into “their mother.” “I know some people in the business,” he said. “Some of my patients. I could introduce you. Point you in the right direction. I’m telling you, you could be in magazines. Like Seventeen. You read Seventeen, don’t you? Even my daughter reads Seventeen, and she’s only six.” He laughed. It occurred to me to remind him that I knew his daughter, I was her babysitter. “I know some of these models,” he said. He laughed again. “I’m a bachelor now, you know,” by way of explanation. “They all started very young, and what are you now, almost eighteen?”

  “Fifteen,” I said, although I was tempted to say twelve.

  He looked at me over his shoulder, Red pulling at the leash. There was still the smell of sleep on his polo shirt, the faint odor of perspiration. “Is that all?” he said. “I thought you were older.” Then he said, “You were a real baby then, when you worked for us. Boy, I didn’t realize it.” He seemed, slowly, to remember something. “Wow,” he said. “You were thirteen. Did their mother know you were thirteen?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose so,” I said. He continued to shake his head. “Wow,” he said again. After we had walked awhile in silence, only the sounds of the birds and Red Rover’s rapid panting, Daisy’s hard shoes against the street, he said, “I’m not going to tell you what went through that woman’s head.”

  I might have thanked him for that, but instead I said, “This is where the Scotties live.”

  We had finally reached the Richardsons’ driveway, and when we paused there, he looked so bereft, I thought for a minute he would burst into tears. Whoever he was trying to be just a few minutes ago, with all his energetic talk about modeling, and how gorgeous I was, and how old I was, seemed to have vanished, and he was once again as soft-spoken and disoriented as he had seemed when we came upon him this morning. Still holding Red on the leash, he suddenly cupped his free hand over the back of my neck, over my hair and the collar of my father’s old white shirt, and gently leaned to kiss me on the cheek. Then he ran his hand over the shirt to grip my shoulder softly before he let go and stepped away. He turned to Daisy. “Can I give you a little kiss, too?” he said. “I’ve got a daughter just about your age who’s way up in Maine this morning.” Daisy simply said, “Yes,” and I suppose I saw a mirror image of myself in the way she leaned forward, her cheek proffered, demurely accepting his sad affection. He touched her shoulder, too, and, seeing the bruise Petey had left there, put a finger to it for a moment and said, “How’d you get this?”

  “A little boy,” Daisy said, with no further explanation required, as if she had said a wasp or a mosquito.

  “An angry little boy,” I added.

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “Watch out for those,” he said, and then added, “us.” But he also ran his fingers from her shoulder down behind her arm, lifting her hand when he got to it, her palm in his fingertips. I saw him study, for just a second or two, her fingernails. It occurred to me that I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of doctor Dr. Kaufman was. A Park Avenue doctor was all I could recall. Something that required him to be in the city only three days a week. Someone my mother was quite pleased to have me work for.

  “You girls come take a swim sometime,” he said as he left us, walking backward as Red pulled him along, calling out, “That pool’s just going to sit there till the kids come down in August. It breaks my heart. You girls come use it. Really. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  After we had walked the Scotties and fed Moe, Larry, and Curly—finding a note on the kitchen table that said the Swansons would be down tomorrow—we double-timed it to Flora’s, walking quickly for the first half and then, when Daisy became too breathless with walking and swinging her arms and laughing, I lifted her onto my shoulder and carried her—“Tiny Tim—style,” I said—the rest of the way.

  Flora was already strapped into her stroller, and the stroller was on the front porch with the beach quilt folded into its basket and the lunch bag hung from the handle. She had been given a baby bottle full of Hawaiian Punch, although her mother had prohibited all bottles just last month, and although she was sucking at it contentedly when we climbed the steps, I could tell immediately that she had shed some tears this morning, too. The vacuum cleaner was running inside the house. I gathered I was to take the child and disappear for the day, and although this was pretty much what I had always done, I suddenly felt a bolt of black anger cross my eyes and my chest. I turned around and bent down to help Daisy slip off my shoulders, trying not to grip her ankles or her wrists with too much pressure. I thought at first that I would pull open the screen door and find Ana and pull the plug on the vacuum cleaner and tell her in no uncertain terms (my mother’s phrase again) that Flora was not supposed to have any more bottles and should never be left alone on the porch like a sack of potatoes, but I knew, too, that Ana would just pretend she didn’t understand and speak a stream of French until I went away, which was pretty much what she did to the cook every time they had an encounter.

  I looked at Daisy. “I wonder how long this poor kid’s been sitting out here,” I said. She shrugged. Her red ribbon had come undone, and so I retied it, slowly, and then brushed back some of the wisps of hair that had fallen around her face. She was warm, sweating a little, although, with the clouds gathering, the morning was cooler than it had been. She was paler than she should have been, too. I looked over my shoulder to Flora. “How long have you been out here, Flora Dora?” And Flora pulled the nipple from her mouth and said, “I have a bottle,” pointing to the three fingers of bright red juice still left in it.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And your mother doesn’t want you to, does she?”

  “Ana gave it to me,” she said, and then quickly stuck the thing back into her mouth in case anyone entertained any notions of trying to get it away from her.

  Daisy laughed, leaning against me. “Is it good, Flora?” she asked, and Flora nodded and then pulled out the bottle again, with a smack. “It’s good,” she said, and plugged it in again. Swinging her baby shoes and her fat, dimpled legs, content with the world.

  “Take a rest for a minute,” I told Daisy, and I moved one of the canvas ch
airs next to Flora’s stroller. I went into the house. The vacuum was back in the master bedroom now. I walked down the hall to Flora’s room, checked the shoebox in her closet, and, seeing that the bottle of aspirin had not been returned, walked into the kitchen. The can of punch, just opened, was on the counter, and I poured a glass for Daisy, to cool her off. There was a dimpled bottle of Scotch on the counter as well, also opened. I put some ice into another juice glass and poured some Scotch into it, and then carried both outside. I gave Daisy the punch. Flora assessed the situation with her unremarkable brown eyes, and then was moved to take the bottle out of her mouth once again. “Red juice,” she said to Daisy. She had already dribbled some of her own onto the front of her white baby dress. “It’s good,” she added, as if urging Daisy to drink. She might have said, Skoal.

  I told the girls I’d be back in a minute. The clouds had grown a bit darker, a bit thicker, and it occurred to me that if I delayed our start just a few minutes longer we might end up spending the day in the house. Poor Ana. The painting was no longer leaning against the outside wall of his studio, although there was a line in the grass that marked where it had been. Seeing for an instant Flora’s mother with her little white sweater marching through this door, and then Ana, with her lunch tray and her wide blue hips, I almost said forget it and turned around, but I didn’t, and stepped over the threshold, onto the concrete floor. The place was much more stark than I’d imagined, really just a converted garage or storage shed with a skylight carved into its roof, something I had never seen from the outside. The light it cast into the room was milky gray. There were a few piles of canvases leaning against the walls, and a couple of sawhorses and old door tables, a single tall shelf with a jumble of paints and cloths and papers and brushes, the two bare lightbulbs on long wires, neither one of them turned on. There was paint spattered on the floor, as I might have expected, and in the far corner a single bed (something I never expected) draped with what looked like heavy silk. He was lying on it, posed, it seemed—and if he’d been a different kind of painter, I would have said it was a bed meant exactly for that purpose—one arm hanging off the edge (I saw where he had dropped his glasses on the floor), the other thrown across his face, a knee raised, the other leg stretched out. There was a small stool beside the bed, a glass already on it, and another, larger, bottle of St. Joseph’s aspirin. I wondered if he had spent the night out here or if this was just an early-morning nap. I said, Excuse me, twice, until he moved his head just a little and asked, “Who’s there?” An old man brought back from sleep.

  “Theresa,” I said.

  An old man brought back with some reluctance and confusion. He lay there for a moment, not moving, and then turned his head more fully and raised his arm from his face. “Theresa,” he said, moving his mouth, tasting the word. “Theresa,” as if to himself.

  “The babysitter,” I said.

  He sat up slowly, with some effort, but smiling, too. “I know who you are,” he said as he swung his feet over the side. “I’m not that senile.”

  He reached between his knees to retrieve his glasses from the concrete floor, and then slowly put them on. He ran his hand over his head, but the white hair simply rose up again. “Was I snoring?” he asked. I said I didn’t know, I just got here.

  I crossed the room to hand him the glass of Scotch. “Ana told me to bring this to you,” I said. Now he looked up at me, his eyebrows raised and his forehead wrinkled, and said, with a laugh, “I doubt that.”

  But he reached out and took the glass from me anyway. He raised it before he took a sip. I imagined that if the light were better he’d be able to see me blushing. This was not my kind of lying.

  “Your wife,” I went on, “doesn’t want Flora to have any more bottles. She’s trying to train her. But Ana gave her one this morning when she set her out on the porch. I know she did it to keep her quiet, so she could vacuum, but she really shouldn’t.”

  He had turned his head and was looking toward the window, his elbows on his knees, the glass I had handed him between his legs. It was, I understood, another pose, a real one this time, one that was meant to convey to me that he had no interest at all in anything I was saying. So I stopped. It was not silk that was draped on the hard bed but some kind of heavy damask. For a different kind of artist it might have served as background for a pale nude. A painted one. But he didn’t paint such things.

  “My cousin’s with me again today,” I said softly. “Daisy.”

  Now he turned back to look at me. “The little redhead?”

  I nodded. “She loved it,” I said. “Yesterday, when you let her have an aspirin.”

  He was looking up at me from the bed, or the bier, or whatever it was, his eyes, through his glasses, seeming bemused, as if I were telling him something he was surprised to hear. “She’s in awe of you,” I said. “You’ve captured her imagination.”

  He was still looking at me, both surprised and skeptical, when he reached out his hand and ran the back of his thumb down the side of my leg, a single stroke from just above my knee to just below it. Then he turned his palm and simply held the back of my knee in his hand. His fingertips were cold and wet from the glass. His sleeves were rolled back and the hair on his arms was white. His skin was pink, a little raw-looking, as if it had recently been scrubbed. Still, the thought crossed my mind that in not too many more years, it would be dust. It was a thought that let me look right at him as he touched me. With his eyebrows raised, questioning something, he looked right back. The light in the place was just a shade grayer than it had been, which was better still, because now I knew there was color in my cheeks, and I wondered for a minute if he could feel the tremor in my knee. But I said anyway, “I appreciated your being so nice to her, she’s had kind of a rough time.”

  He placed the slightest pressure against my leg, as if to draw me closer, but when I stepped back, away from him, he simply let go. He pursed his lips a bit, only one corner of his mouth smiling. “I’ll say something to Ana,” he said softly. “About baby bottles.” He raised the glass. “And about sending out drinks with the babysitter.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” Walking out, I pulled my hair back and twisted it behind me, making wings of my father’s white shirt.

  When I got outside, the clouds seemed ready to do something, but I pushed the stroller down the three steps and across the gravel anyway, Daisy helping and Flora too tightly attached to her empty bottle to hum. We had just reached the road when big drops of rain began to fall, and we went scurrying back to the porch, past the studio, where both lights were now on. I put the beach quilt on the floor of the porch and went inside for Flora’s box of crayons and glue and construction paper. We were going to make a city, I said. Just like the one Flora’s mother had gone to. The Empire State Building would be red, I told them, and St. Patrick’s blue and Saks Fifth Avenue would be bright green. We’d make Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we’d put Flora’s father’s paintings inside. And then Flora’s mother would ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, where she’d stand out on the Observation Deck and wave her turquoise scarf until, standing on my shoulders, on the beach, Flora saw just a glimpse of it flashing up and down on the western horizon. (And Flora stood up, went to the edge of the porch— Daisy following, hovering, worried that she might fall—and called out into the rain, “Hello, Mommy”) And then, I said, Flora’s mother would walk up to Saks (following with our fingers the seams of the beach quilt) to find another white dress for Flora. (No, red, Flora said, eyeing Daisy.) A red dress for Flora, with red ribbons at the shoulders and red ribbons for her hair. She’d stop at St. Patrick’s, Our Lady’s Chapel, and say a prayer that Flora Dora doesn’t miss her too much, and then she’d walk up Fifth Avenue to visit the old polar bear at the zoo. (“Hello, Polar Bear,” Flora said into the pale blue quilt, “Hello there,” her hands on her plump knees, her little rear in the air, and Daisy, leaning into my lap, her head on my shoulder, said, only
a little self-consciously, “Hello, Polar Bear,” too.)

  And then Flora’s mother would walk up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and through the hushed marble rooms until she came to the special place where Flora’s father’s painting was. And a guard would unhook the thick velvet rope, and she would walk into the beautiful room, all marble and gold and as quiet as a church, and there would be Flora, in painting as long and as wide as her father’s arms. Flora in a white dress, framed in gold. And Flora’s mother would stand there looking at it for so long that when she finally walked back down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sky would be black and the stars would be out and all the buildings would be lit, and she would hold up her hand—like this—(Flora and Daisy followed) and say, Taxi! (Flora said, Taxi!). And as soon she got into the taxi, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what in the world am I doing here? Take me home to my little girl.”

  The rain lasted only a short time that morning, and the sun came out again while the cherry trees were still dripping water onto the grass. We were on the quilt, amid the squashed and battered and scribbled-on remnants of our construction-paper city when Flora’s father came up the path. He said, “Ladies,” as he crossed the porch, and then, just before he went inside, he bent down to Daisy and without a word opened his palm. Furtively, she took the two aspirins and slipped them into her mouth. He only glanced at me, but he winked as he did, and over Flora’s fair head I smiled at him. By the time we were ready for the beach, whatever bit of fever Daisy might have had seemed to be gone.

  At the beach I changed Flora into her bathing suit under the fragrant towel, and then Flora and I made our envelope for Daisy to slip into. I caught another glimpse of the bruise on her back and thought it seemed lighter today, the yellowish green of something on its way to healing. She took off her shoes and socks without much prompting. In the beach light the discoloration on her insteps seemed far more severe, and even Flora leaned down and looked at them with a short and sympathetic intake of breath. Daisy immediately buried her feet in the warm sand, but I distracted them both by saying it was now my turn to change. Usually, when I had just Flora with me, I would slip under a beach towel and pull off my clothes and pull on my suit in an instant, but since I had the two of them to help, I gave them each a towel and asked if they would make an envelope for me as well. I sat on the blanket and the two girls stood on either side of me, the towels outstretched in their little arms and the sun warm on my head and my shoulders. I slipped out of my father’s shirt and then pulled the T-shirt over my head, my arms rising above the curtain of the beach blankets, and then pulled off my shorts and my underwear. I leaned down to work my suit up over my feet and my legs, calling out, “Stay with me now, girls,” as I shifted my weight and rose up onto my knees, to pull the suit over my waist. I could see Flora’s side beginning to fold and I said, “One more minute, Flora Dora,” as I slipped my right arm into the suit. But I fumbled with the twisted strap on the left side and Flora fell plop backward as I did, beach towel and all, and whoever might have been watching us among the half dozen or so groups scattered on the beach would have had a good bright white glimpse of whatever little bit I had. Daisy’s mouth dropped open and she raised her beach towel to her face, as if to shield her eyes. Flora simply began to cry. I covered myself with the edge of the suit, but my arm was bare and there was no modest way to get it into the strap short of wrapping myself in a towel again, which suddenly struck me as excessive. I realized I had hunched my shoulders, too, instinctively, I supposed, and cupped my hands over my chest. This also struck me as excessive. So I raised myself up fully on my knees and then stood, straightening my spine. “No one’s looking,” I said to Daisy as she took the beach towel from her own eyes. And I said, “Don’t cry, Flora Dora,” to Flora on the quilt. Making myself as tall as I could, I pulled my right arm out of the suit, pulled the suit to my waist, straightened the fabric at my hips and over my stomach and then, leisurely, drew the suit up again, one strap over my left arm and one over my right.