Child of My Heart

by Alice McDermott

  Now all four adults were laughing and shaking their heads, and my parents said together, somewhat wistfully, “Only in New York, right?” as if New York were long lost to them all.

  “But see,” my father said. “It was just the way Jack had always told it. When Frank played music, everything else, for him, just vanished. He probably didn’t know what color anybody was.”

  Mr. Clarke reached his short arm across the table to lift his water glass, shaking his head, laughing. And then he asked, one eyebrow cocked a bit in a way that would indicate, if he were indeed one of the Three Stooges, something up a sleeve. “You folks ever know Jimmy Fagin? Not the old man, the younger one. From St. Cyril’s?”

  “Oh sure,” my mother said. “He and my brother Tommy worked together right after the war. At Brooklyn Union. They were great pals for a while there.”

  Mr. Clarke chuckled, rolled his tongue into his cheek. “Well, he was my cousin Marty’s best man!”

  “No kidding,” my parents said together, and took up anew the pursuit of these vague connections.

  Since our television was in a corner of the living room, and since the adults were still lingering over their coffee at the dining-room table, Daisy and I went up to the attic together after dinner. I had a deck of cards with me, and my book, and the jar of Noxzema for Daisy’s feet. The light was low up there, one of the ceiling lights had burned out and I had only the bedside lamp turned on. We could hear a gentle rain falling overhead. We sat on one of the beds and played rummy for a while, and when we grew bored with that, we went to my old clothes and picked out another outfit for tomorrow—a seersucker shorts set in yellow and white stripes. I told Daisy that it seemed I could recall the entire summer I had worn it just by touching the cloth. The summer I was Daisy’s size, if not her age. Not so very long ago, and yet a time as lost as my parents’ days of basketball games and the service and first jobs, when the world was divided into parishes named for saints who had lived and died, or for the intricate stories that made up our faith—Incarnation, Holy Redeemer, Queen of Heaven, Most Holy Innocents.

  I laid the shorts set out on the bed and then took the jar from the nightstand and smoothed some of the cold cream over Daisy’s thin arms. I asked her if she had known that story about her father’s father, the policeman, and she said yes. She said she knew he had fallen off a roof and died, and although that wasn’t quite the way I’d heard it, I didn’t contradict her. I asked if that was why she always worried about falling, but she shook her head and shrugged. She said she didn’t think that was why—she said she didn’t remember meeting her father’s father in heaven before she was born. She suddenly brightened. But maybe she had, she said, an idea dawning, and maybe he had told her to be careful.

  I laughed and she grinned up at me, and then I said, “Give me your leg,” and smoothed some Noxzema onto her calf. I slipped her sock off and examined her instep in the dim light. “See, it’s going away,” I said. And it was, or it appeared to be. “Those shoes are doing the trick.” I looked at the other one. It, too, seemed to have faded. “I wonder what could have caused it,” I said, as if whatever it was had already passed—vanished. “You should have eaten more of that liver,” I said, and she made a face. “Seriously,” I said. “And we have to get some spinach into you, too. Anything with iron.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I only eat creamed spinach,” she said haughtily. And I said, “All right, Miss Sutton Place, creamed spinach. Spinach souffle. Spinach with caviar, for all I care.” I rubbed the cold cream carefully into her instep, holding her foot in my hands. The light that obscured the odd bruises also brought out the pale blue hollows beneath her eyes. “I don’t want you to have to go back home too soon, Daisy Mae,” I said. “I want to keep you with me.”

  When my mother called up the attic stairs, I saw Daisy start and I quickly reached for her socks. But my mother climbed only halfway up to ask if we wanted to take a walk with my father and Mr. Clarke over to the house, to check on the cats. Daisy considered this for a minute, I knew she loved the cats, but then shook her head. “Too tired,” she whispered.

  I called back that we would probably just stay here. We went downstairs to get ready for bed. My mother and Mrs. Clarke were doing the dishes in the kitchen, talking and smoking. Daisy and I brushed our teeth together and got into our nightgowns, and then she lay down beside me on my bed and went instantly to sleep while I read, looking back first to find the part where it said that ghosts only visit people who sleep alone, going ahead to find out what would become of lovely Eustacia, who wanted so much. I was half asleep myself when I heard a car pull up outside and a car door slam and I thought vaguely that it had something to do with the Morans. And then I heard my father’s voice in the kitchen, and then my mother and father both were standing in the doorway.

  My mother whispered, “Get dressed,” and they both turned away. I pulled on my shorts and a T-shirt and went out into the living room, where my mother was standing, holding my raincoat. “You need to go over to the house,” she said, her face calm and severe, maybe annoyed, the look she wore in adversity. “One of the cats got hit by a car and the little girl won’t let it go. The Swansons want you to talk to her. Where are your shoes?”

  My father was standing in the kitchen, holding a black umbrella and my grass-stained sneakers. Mrs. Clarke had her wrists in her hands and was saying, “Poor Curly,” tears in her voice, and my father simply turned to me and said, “Let’s go.” I slipped into my sneakers. The smell of the exhaust from the car outside had filled the kitchen.

  It was Mr. Swanson’s car, a big Cadillac, and he was at the wheel. Oddly enough, my father opened the front door for me and then got into the back himself, as if Mr. Swanson and I were peers, or as if I were more of Mr. Swanson’s world than his own. The car smelled of its new leather and of Mr. Swanson’s cigars. “Sorry to get you out of bed,” he said. He wore a windbreaker and corduroy pants, a crew cut going gray at his temples. He had the kind of looks that made you believe he was powerful. “But you were the only person we could think of. She won’t listen to us.”

  Apparently, just as the Swansons were packing their car this evening, getting ready for the drive home, Curly had run out the door, and they had spent the better part of the past two hours searching for him. They had even called Mr. and Mrs. Clarke’s apartment on the North Shore to solicit their help, but of course they weren’t home. Not half an hour ago they were all in the house, debating whether they should spend the night or go on home, with the hope that Curly would simply come back on his own (they were going to stop by our house on the way out, he said, just so I would know to look for the cat in the morning), when they heard the screech of tires on the road outside the house, and sure enough—their worst fears—there was the poor cat in a heap by the side of the road.

  Debbie, their daughter, was the first to reach it, and she scooped it up and cried out that it was still breathing. Mr. Swanson had put his hand on the bloodied thing and felt a bit of a pulse, but he told her to take it under the porch light so they could see how badly it was hurt. “Badly,” Mr. Swanson said, but nothing he could say or do would make his daughter let go of the thing. She just held it and rocked it and insisted it was still breathing and would probably be all right soon. It was clearly dead by the time Mr. Clarke and my father came along, but still she couldn’t be convinced to let go. It was Mrs. Swanson who had suggested they come and get me.

  Mr. Swanson swung the big car into the drive. The house was all lit up on the inside, looking more than ever like something conjured by fairies, although the group gathered on the porch steps was stooped and mostly in shadow. I could hear Debbie wailing. She had a deep, guttural voice for a child, even when she was laughing, and behind her wailing I could hear her mother and her brother and even Mr. Clarke offering soothing, ineffectual bits of comfort. Her mother looked up when we approached and said, “Thank God,” and then turned to place her hands on her son’s shoulders and steer him bac
k into the house. Mr. Clarke stepped away, to a far corner of the porch. Mr. Swanson and my father stayed at the bottom of the steps, well behind me.

  Debbie was sitting pigeon-toed on the steps, her sneakers and her socks and a bit of her bare knee touched with shadows that may have been blood. She had poor Curly in her lap, her arms clutching him to her chest, his head just under her chin, and she was moving back and forth with him, keening, crying, “He’s fine, he’s fine.”

  I climbed two of the steps and then sat down beside her. The floorboards were wet and slick from the rain. In the porch light I could see her shoulder, smeared with blood, and what was left of Curly’s face—an ear, an eye, the awful bit of sharp cat teeth, as many as might have been revealed by a snarl. It was not only a lifeless thing, but, sodden with rain and with blood, it was not even close to something that had ever had life in it. And yet Debbie, as I sat beside her, buried her face in its fur.

  I touched her arm. The blood was sticky on her skin. “Hey, little swan,” I said.

  She raised her head to look at me. The blood was smeared on her cheek and her chin, she may even have had some of it in her mouth, and I wondered for a moment if she might have bitten her own tongue with her crying. “It’s Curly,” she said, in her hoarse voice, her body shaking with her tears. “A car hit him.”

  I nodded. “Poor little guy,” I said. I could smell the blood, something like the metallic smell of the rain, rising from the darkness in her arms.

  She lowered her face into his fur again. And then looked up. “I think he’s still breathing,” she said. “I felt his heart. Before.”

  I reached out and stroked him, feeling the blood stiffening on his fur. Debbie watched as I did, growing still, or at least stopping her keening for a moment, though her shoulders still shook. “I think he’ll be okay,” she said, looking at me to confirm this.

  I continued to pet him, not sure just what I was running my hand through. I said, “It was nice of you to hold him.”

  Another car pulled into the driveway, a police car, and I heard Mr. Swanson and my father move toward it. I saw an officer get out, but I didn’t look long enough to see if he was the new Mr. Moran. I heard Mr. Swanson say, “Didn’t even stop … had to be speeding … thought we should tell the police.”

  I moved my hand off the cat and placed it on Debbie’s knee. “Little swan,” I said, leaning toward her but trying to keep my eyes off the terrible skull, “Curly might like it if you let Mr. Clarke hold him awhile, too. Don’t you think?”

  I looked over my shoulder toward the house. Mr. Clarke was standing by the bay window, in the multipaned light cast from the living room onto the porch, looking small and wet and bereft himself here on the prow of his magical inheritance. “Mr. Clarke,” I said, “do you think you could hold Curly for a while?”

  I felt Debbie flex beside me, every little-girl muscle in her body ready to protest, but as I slid my arms into her lap, under the limp and heavy body of the cat, I felt her fall back, too. She let go, and I lifted the heavy thing, handing it to Mr. Clarke, who cradled it in his arms like his own lost child, turning away.

  Now Debbie began to cry in earnest, but it was that helpless, pliable brokenhearted crying of a less determined child. I touched her elbow and she got up slowly, her bloodied arms outstretched, her wrists limp, and I led her as she cried up the steps and to the front door, which I tried not to mark with blood, into the light of the hallway and up the ornate Victorian stair. From the living room I heard her brother say, “Eeewww!” and we were only halfway up the stairs when her mother called softly, from behind us, “Try not to touch anything.”

  I took her into the hall bathroom, a small pink-and-black linoleum bathroom with a thick, shaggy bath rug and the cloying scent of rose-shaped decorative soaps mixed with Mrs. Swanson’s decaying wildflowers. First I unbuttoned her shirt as she cried, the material so soaked with blood that I could barely work the slick buttons through the sodden holes, and then I unbuttoned her shorts and pulled them down to her ankles and asked her to step out of them, pulling off her bloodied socks and sneakers as she did. The blood had pooled in her lap, the shorts were no doubt ruined, but I put them in the pink sink anyway and ran cold water over them. “Always use cold water on bloodstains,” I told her, washing my own hands in the cold stream. I smiled at her, pushed back her thin hair, which also had blood in it. “Future reference,” I said.

  I took her hand and helped her into the tub. She began to bend her knees, but I said, Not yet, and instead ran the water, getting it warm enough. I found a washcloth and soaked it and first ran it across her face, over her mouth and her cheeks and her still falling tears, rinsing it again and again, and then I ran it over her arms and her shoulders and between her fingers, until most of the blood, the sad, wet smell of it, had gone down the drain. I told her to sit down. Then I filled up the tub and swished the warm water around her body, which was tanned and beautifully healthy and showed the perfect outline of her bathing suit. I let her hold on to my wet arm, her mouth against my skin, and cry some more. “Poor little swan,” I said. Her mother peeked in twice while I bathed her, the second time to deposit a pile of thick pink towels, and then went away. I shampooed her hair, rinsing it with the pink plastic cup on the sink, and then helped her out, wrapping her body in one towel, her hair in another. We walked together down the hall to her bedroom.

  Her small valise lay open on the bright pink bedspread, just a few pieces of clothing folded into it, her damp bathing suit still on the floor. Seeing it all, she began to cry again, and I realized that this, of course, was what she had been doing when the benign day shifted on her and someone called up from downstairs that Curly had run out the door. I hugged her and tried to see the room with her eyes—the colorful drawings and the bright-eyed stuffed pets, the new seashells scattered across the dresser in a little pool of sand, the old ones painted yellow and blue and bright green on the shelves. I thought it must seem to her a very long time ago that she was here, simply getting ready to go home, busy and naïve and sun-tired, vaguely contented. A Sunday afternoon in summer a very long time ago.

  I found a nightgown in her dresser and slipped it over her head. And then sat her on the bed and combed out her hair. “Moe and Larry are going to be so sad,” Debbie said softly, and I said, “Gosh, I know. We’ll have to be extra nice to them.”

  Debbie said, “If only he hadn’t run out the door like that.”

  “That wasn’t really like him, was it?” I said. “Sleepy old Curly.”

  She was pulling at her fingers, one after the other. “I should have locked him in up here,” she said.

  I laughed. “He wouldn’t have liked that.”

  “I should have, though.” She turned to look at me, tears coming back into her eyes. “He was right on my bed when we got back from the beach. I should have locked him in.”

  “You didn’t know,” I said. “No one could have known.”

  I lowered the valise to the floor and pulled back the bedspread. Wearily, she climbed under the covers. I put her stuffed animals around her, every one I could find, although she usually slept with just a bear and a worn-out calico cat. She didn’t seem to mind. Looking out from among them, she moved her eyes all over the room. I leaned down to kiss her. “You couldn’t have known,” I said again. “You couldn’t have known what you know now.”

  The Swanson kids didn’t say prayers at night. They didn’t, as far as I could tell, have any kind of religion at all. So I said nothing about Curly among the angels, or Curly as a kitten again, rolled up against his mother’s fur. I simply said that Curly was probably very grateful to her for the way she had held him all night. Curly always liked being held. It seemed a rather insubstantial consolation, and as I offered it I had a funny recollection of Petey’s rabbit trap in the yard—of the thin twig he’d used to prop up the cardboard box, of something slight and fragile holding back a weighty darkness. But Debbie nodded, and then threw her arms around my neck. “Can you babysit for
us next weekend?” she whispered into my hair. “Can you come over and babysit?”

  “Sure,” I said, and kissed her again.

  As I went toward the door, she said, “Do you think my mother will come up?” and I said I was sure she would.

  In the living room, Mr. and Mrs. Swanson seemed to be arguing, but when I got all the way down the stairs I realized they were actually agreeing with each other, albeit angrily.

  “This is why I never wanted them,” Mrs. Swanson was saying. And he was saying, “I never thought she’d get so attached.”

  They both turned to look at me when I stood in the doorway, and Mrs. Swanson said, in that same angry tone, “Jesus, look at your nice coat. You leave it with us and we’ll get it cleaned for you.” I looked down and saw that my raincoat was smeared with Curly’s blood.

  As Mrs. Swanson advanced toward me, determined to get my coat, Mr. Swanson said, “George and your dad went on home. I said I’d give you a ride. You were a godsend, really.”