He smiled. There was something odd about the way his small teeth met his gums on one side. Dentures, I supposed. A partial plate, as my parents might say. Nothing better to remind you of your mortality, he had said. His own mortality in his mouth.
He kept his one hand in my hair and took off his glasses with the other, a gesture so swift and so casual he might have done it only to see something better, maybe to read some fine print, and bending into what was his natural stoop, he leaned down and kissed me on the lips, softly, but long enough to make me have to take a breath through my nose before he was finished. And when he was finished—the taste of the alcohol on my own lips—he simply slipped his hand from my hair to my waist, brushing the backs of his fingers past my shoulder and my breast, slipped his glasses on again, and guided me to the door. We stepped over the threshold together, into the sunshine, onto the gravel path. Walking toward the house, he said, casually, “So Daisy is the eighth child of an exhausted mother,” and I said—imitating his tone as well as I could, aware of the pulse in my throat—no, the fifth child. Smack in the middle of them all, I said. Three boys older and three boys younger and one older sister, Bernadette.
It was like reciting lines on a stage, pretending to be calm despite the throbbing of your own blood in your ears.
He asked what Bernadette was like.
Very smart and chubby, I said. Homely enough, I said, to keep her parents constantly apologizing.
Reaching for the screen door, he threw his head back and laughed. He put his hand to the small of my back. “In here first,” he said, pointing toward the kitchen. And we both turned right, into the messy kitchen, where the Scotch was already on the table and Flora’s mother’s scarves were now on a high shelf by the window. He took his hand from my back in order to pour himself a drink, and as he did I stepped away, leaning against the doorframe. He looked at me from over the rim of his glass, just the slightest trace of worry, or doubt, coming briefly into his eyes.
“And you’ve rescued poor Daisy from Queens Village and her harried parents,” he said. “To give her a few summer days out here in the country.”
I nodded.
“And to teach her Shakespeare.”
I shrugged.
“And let her feast on St. Joseph’s aspirin.”
Behind me I could hear Flora calling softly from her crib.
“You gave her the aspirin,” I said.
He drank again. Now he heard her, too, his daughter; I saw his eyes register the sound. I heard Daisy sleepily responding. I thought of the surprised look she always wore when she first woke up, her features not yet fully her own.
He looked me up and down again, his head once more drawn back. Up and down from my ankles to my waist to my chest and neck and hair, the corners of his mouth drawn a little and that little bit of fear crossing his face. “You’re some kid,” he said finally. And then he raised his chin toward the hallway and his daughter’s bedroom. “Your charges are calling,” he said.
To my surprise, he went with me, walking just behind me down the narrow hallway to the bedrooms, following me right up to Flora’s crib, where Daisy was standing, stroking Flora’s plump wrist and saying, “Here she is. And here’s your daddy.”
Flora held her arms out to me, of course, and I lifted her onto the changing table. Behind me, he said to Daisy, “Come with me, won’t you?” And when I looked over my shoulder, he was walking hand in hand with her down the hallway. I heard the screen door close and followed with Flora as soon as I had changed her. They were both standing at the bottom of the steps when we got outside, both of them chewing aspirin between their back teeth. He was pointing out something to her in one of the high branches of the far trees—a jay’s nest, he said—and she was looking up, following his arm, still holding his hand.
I put Flora in her stroller, and she began to cry, asking for a bottle of red juice. I said, “No more bottles, Flora. You don’t want a bottle.” But she was cranky, still not fully awake, and her voice began to get shrill. I leaned over her. “Mommy doesn’t want you to have a bottle, Flora,” I said softly. “You’re such a big girl now, you don’t need a bottle.” She kicked her feet against the bars of the stroller, crying in earnest now. I put my hand on her arm. “Oh, Flora,” I whispered.
That’s when he turned to us, still holding Daisy’s hand, and said, “Go ahead and give her one.”
I stood up straight, tossing my hair over my shoulder. Looking down at the two of them from the shade of the porch, I saw that they were both sun-washed and faded, Daisy still blurred from her nap, he, perhaps, blurred from the need for one. I was about to say either “your wife” or “her mother,” had probably hesitated simply to decide which was best, when he held up a hand. “We’ve vanished,” he said.
He said it softly, under Flora’s crying, and so it was the word itself that made me start.
“We’re gone,” he said. He glanced down at Daisy for a moment, pleasantly, including her in the conversation. “All my life I’ve known women who could do this. Turn their backs and make things disappear. It’s a wonderful talent.” He smiled up at me. His white hair stood straight up over his head, and while Uncle Tommy’s focus went awry when he drank, fell slightly to the left or right of whatever he seemed to be seeing, his was direct and thorough. “Although a bit much for a man my age. A bit too much irony.” Daisy was looking up at him in her polite, attentive way. Mournfully, Flora said, “Red juice, please. Please.” He looked at me. “Don’t worry about my wife. Let the poor kid have a bottle.”
I shrugged. “All right,” I said to him, and to his daughter, “Hold on, Flora Dora.” As I pulled open the screen door to go back into the kitchen, he said, “And pour something for her old man while you’re at it.”
I filled Flora’s bottle with punch and refilled his glass as well. When I came out, he had pulled the stroller to the edge of the steps and was sitting beside it, with Daisy at his feet. Flora took the bottle with both hands, eagerly, and even smiled around the nipple when her father said, “Ah, the pleasures of the flesh.” He winked at me. “What a teenager she’s going to make.”
He raised the glass to the three of us. “Three beauties,” he said, and drank, and winced when the cold hit his bad tooth. He rubbed his jaw. “How many years would it earn me,” he said, “if I swallowed each one of you whole?” Daisy, with her pink shoes tucked up under her knees and the hem of my old white tennis dress, said simply, “I don’t know.”
He laughed, one of his deep shouts of real laughter, and leaning forward, reached down to pat her head. “Neither do I,” he said. “But it would be worth finding out.”
With his drink in his hand, he stood cautiously, the other hand gripping the wood banister, pulling himself up with it. He turned from us, walking down the gravel path a little stiffly, perhaps a little more stooped, and went into his studio, where Ana, as far as I could tell, was still waiting for him.
I convinced the girls to spend the rest of the afternoon at home, in the house and on the lawn, playing blindman’s bluff and paper dolls and perfecting our cartwheels and somersaults on the grass. About mid-afternoon, Ana came out of his studio and went into the house, looking much as she always did, acting much the same as well—ignoring us in her Frenchified way. I heard the vacuum go on inside, and a few minutes later saw her come to the door to shake out a small rug. She was in her blue uniform again, although she had one of Flora’s mother’s scarves tied around her hair. She no longer seemed particularly unhappy, and although she was the only one who had witnessed what had happened in his studio this morning, I wasn’t particularly embarrassed by her glance. It was as if I had somehow taken to heart his startling phrase, as if we had vanished, the girls and I, and this house and lawn, the studio, the gravel path, the woods up to the caretaker’s gate, was the last place we lingered. Like little ghosts.
It wasn’t until just before dinner that we finally walked down to the beach, and that was only so Daisy could take her therapy at the edge of the ocean. Her skin
did not seem to be improving, nor was it getting any worse, although the seriousness with which she watched her feet sink into the sand as the foamy water spread around them made me think that she, too, could erase the bruises, and whatever it was the bruises indicated—perhaps anemia (I had looked it up, and had asked my mother to make liver and onions)—by an act of will.
Walking back, we ran into the Richardsons again, with Rupert and Angus and another couple, a thinner and authentically British version of themselves, a Mr. and Mrs. Hyphenated Name, down for the weekend. Mrs. Richardson introduced Flora as the daughter of “one of our better known artists”—the thin couple gave a satisfying exclamation at his name—and Daisy as a “little visitor” who lived on Sutton Place, and me as the girl who had stolen her puppies’ hearts (poor Rupert and Angus beating their stumpy tails and panting as if to say, It’s true, it’s true), who lived in that charming cottage with the dahlias. “The village beauty,” she said, as if this were merrie olde England and I were Eustacia Vye herself.
The thin couple—gaunt, really, and dressed for fall—shook hands with us all and smiled broadly, and actually said, Enchanting, enchanting, as they looked at us in the dusk. The tall trees were full now of birdsong and setting sunlight. We chatted for a while, although the conversation quickly ran its course and we needed to get Flora home. We spoke about the weather and the weekend and the fireworks at the Main Beach, and Mrs. Richardson’s preference for June over July, September over August. (“Of course you schoolchildren dread it,” she said, taking us all in with a warm Beatrix Potter kind of glance, “but September is really the best month of the summer. The crowds are gone. We have those warm days and those glorious cool nights.” “Sleeping weather,” her husband said, taking the pipe from his mouth, and the British woman exclaimed, “Oh, indeed, sleeping weather,” as if it were something out of King Arthur.) With Angus and Rupert panting contentedly at my feet, absorbing into their bellies the warmth of my sneakers and whatever heat was left in the road, we lingered. We lingered although it was growing late and Flora was nodding off in her stroller and Daisy was sighing quietly, shifting from foot to foot. We discussed the fragrant air, the stars at night, the soothing sound of the ocean. Mrs. Richardson was beaming, at us, and at her thin and shadowy friends, as if we were all her own creation, and I paused longer than I should have to let her enjoy it, this fairy tale she had made of us, her own England, under the thick trees, on the quiet road that ran between a deep green lawn lit by fireflies and the brown potato field where just yesterday afternoon baby June had tumbled up out of the ground.
There was still no cook that night. When we finally got Flora into bed, it was later than usual, almost dark, and the light from his studio cast shapes on the gravel drive. As we passed the open door I could see him stretched out on the bed, in that same fallen-warrior pose, one leg up and his arm over his eyes, the painting still on the floor. At home, my mother turned from the stove as we walked in and said over her shoulder, “I was beginning to worry.”
As usual, the Clarkes came over for dinner on Sunday. They liked to drive down from their summer apartment on the North Shore during the day, have dinner with us, and then stop off at the house later in the evening, once they could be sure the Swansons had left for Westchester, just to check on things, on the cats in particular, before heading back to their temporary quarters on the lesser shore.
My parents enjoyed their company. Although they had not known one another in childhood, had only met since they’d all moved out here, they had grown up in close proximity and knew many of the same people and places, and these reminiscences made up the bulk of their conversation. It was odd, I suppose, that even though they had both ended up here in this beautiful place—my parents through conscious effort to put me in the way of good fortune, the Clarkes through the good fortune delivered to them by his fairy uncle—all their interest and enthusiasm were reserved for the places they had left. Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they had abandoned. Even after twelve years of friendship, they were still discovering, weekly it seemed, places where their paths had crossed or their histories had merged—a familiar candy store in Brooklyn, a friend of a friend’s sister whom one of them used to date, another GI who also was on the Queen Mary, an office mate who’d once held a job that was also once held by a friend from high school. Circuitous, circumstantial lineages that seemed to encompass all the years of their youth and the breadth of the five boroughs, and were always linked—even then I thought there was something medieval about it—to the names of Catholic parishes, as if no identity of friend or cousin or co-worker could be truly established without first determining where he or she had been baptized or schooled or married or (their phrase again) buried from—no landmark of their histories truly confirmed without the name of the nearest church to authenticate it.
Daisy’s presence, of course, proved great fodder for this, their favorite kind of conversation, and over dinner in our corner dining room, under the slanting ceiling that accommodated the attic stairs, the pursuit began when Mr. Clarke pointed his fork toward Daisy and said to my father, “I wonder if my brother Bill might have known her mother. She’s your younger sister, right? And she graduated from St. Xavier’s, right?” There followed the usual testing of names and dates and parish dances and high school teams—the names of saints and of all the familiar hopeful, holy phrases (Incarnation, Redemption, Perpetual Help)—passing over the white tablecloth and the liver and onions and mashed potatoes and fresh peas, over Daisy’s head and mine, until they struck pay dirt with a link, tentative at first, between Daisy’s father’s older brother (St. Peter’s parish), who had briefly distinguished himself as a bandleader at a series of Knights of Columbus dances, and Mrs. Clarke’s sister (Holy Name), whose best friend, for a good year or so, had been his girl.
Isn’t that something? they all said in amazement and quiet satisfaction. Small world—forgetting, it seemed, the tremendous effort they had just gone through to establish this link. They all ate quietly for a while, shaking their heads at the pleasure of it—lives connected and bound, the world made small, parish-sized, and logical. Inevitable, somehow. Mrs. Clarke said to Daisy, “My goodness, we’re nearly related, I might have been your aunt’s best friend’s little sister, if they hadn’t parted ways. I certainly would have known your father, and your mother, too.”
Daisy made a polite attempt at looking impressed and surprised (I noticed she was more interested in hiding her liver under her mashed potatoes), until the conversation took off again in pursuit of further connections.
Now Peg, my father went on, graduated from St. Xavier’s, and Jack, as far as he knew, was the only boy she had ever dated. He played basketball at St. Peter’s and lived with his brother, the bandleader, and another, younger sister who was now a Dominican nun on Long Island, having lost both his parents fairly early. Jack’s father had been a beat cop in Harlem, you see, until some no-goods toppled a chimney on him, killing him in an instant, right there on the street, and as far as anyone could tell, just for the fun of it. The mother, Jack’s mother, had a kind of nervous breakdown—she was expecting what would have been her fourth child, and neither one of them made it through the birth. The three kids were split up for a while, and then Jack’s brother, Frank, got out of high school and got this orchestra started, and with his day job was doing well enough to bring the three of them together again, just when Jack was starting high school himself.
“I guess Jack,” my father said, “was a pretty sad case in those days—he tells some stories” (glancing at Daisy and me, indicating by his look the stories were not for our ears). A real little hoodlum himself—but then the good Fathers knocked him around a bit and got him playing basketball every spare minute of the day, and then Peggy showed up at one of the games. And the rest is history. Eight kids—little Daisy here our particular favorite—a nice house in Queens Village. Jack didn’t m
ake it into the police academy, but the transit authority took him. He needed to be a cop, he said. Because of his father, no doubt. He sometimes says he got into so much trouble as a kid just so he could spend time in police stations. You know, around men in his father’s uniform. He needed that.
I thought of Petey and Tony and the cop on the beach.
Not wanting to lose her connection, Mrs. Clarke said, “That was some nice orchestra his brother had.” She turned to Daisy. “This would be your uncle.”
Daisy smiled politely, her hand in her lap.
“Wasn’t it, though?” my mother said.
“I guess Frank was some musician,” my father went on. “Jack says his brother could play anything—piano, drums, clarinet. He said he could walk into a room and pick up an instrument he’d never seen before—trombone, flute, you name it—and play it for all it was worth. And he never had a lesson.”
“No kidding,” Mrs. Clarke said.
“Never,” my father said, equally astonished. “According to Jack, it just came to him naturally.”
“That’s a gift,” Mrs. Clarke said.
“That’s what got him through his troubles, Jack said.” My father seemed to withdraw a little, picturing it. “Jack said all Frank would have to do is close his eyes and play something, and it would be like everything else that was happening to him—his mother, his father, even the stomach cancer that eventually killed him at, what was he—”
And my mother said sadly, “Forty-three.”
“—at forty-three,” my father went on, “everything that was happening to him just vanished and he was without a care in the world. Just his music.”
“That’s a gift,” Mrs. Clarke said again, but my father had begun to chuckle.
“At Frank’s wake,” he said, glancing at my mother, who had lowered her head and was chuckling, too, knowing, of course, what he was recalling, knowing as always what he would say, “which was at Fagin’s, we walk in and here the room is completely filled with colored people. Packed with them. And we’re both thinking that we’re in the wrong place and we’re just starting to back out—and we’re saying, Sorry for your trouble, sorry for your trouble, to all these colored people squeezed in there—when along comes Jack, from the lobby, and he’s mad as anything and he whispers to me from between his teeth, ‘Doesn’t this look like the’ “—pause, glance at us minors—“ ‘the GD darktown strutters’ ball?’ ” My parents both laughed, recalling it, in complete synchronization. “Turns out Frank had been playing in clubs up in Harlem for years, years. And never told Jack about it. Harlem, where his father had been killed. And a whole contingent of them, there must have been eighty of them, I guess they were other musicians and fans and club owners, you know, hep cats and zoot suits, the whole scene, had come out to Brooklyn together to pay their respects. And here’s Jack, all red-faced and furious, and surrounded by his cop friends, in this Irish Catholic funeral parlor, having to shake hands and get hugged by every one of them.”
Child of My Heart Page 13