We sat in silence for a minute, stubborn silence on my part, casual, amused silence for him. It was this watching that disturbed me, because in it I saw his belief that he could penetrate with his amused eyes the person I thought I was and find something more to his liking at the core. Erase me and start over again, out of his own design. His own head. It made me feel buffeted, somehow, as if, from moment to moment, I had to catch my breath, plant myself more firmly, as you do between waves. I had years left, I had beauty, I had the capacity to make uncertainty cross his face. And yet I had also entered into some agreement with him. There was some complicity between us, in the way we had left his studio together and headed for the house. In here first, he had said, as we went into the kitchen, as if we both understood what was to follow. Some unspoken complicity in the way I had drawn him into Daisy’s care, in what I was doing now, driving Ana crazy. An uneasy alliance, as Sister Irene would have said in World History class.
I raised my eyes and looked back at him. I wondered for a moment why he didn’t have a drink, if his toothache had been cured, and then I saw there was an empty glass on the floor beside his chair.
“So what made you choose Macbeth?” he said finally. “Out of all the fairy tales you might recite for my daughter?”
I shrugged. “We did it in school freshman year,” I said.
His glasses seemed to flash with the setting light. “I thought it might have had something to do with her mother,” he said. He leaned forward a bit. “Don’t tell me you were one of the witches.”
I shook my head. “I was Macduff. It’s an all-girl school.”
He gave his true laugh. “Of course,” he said. He reached down for the empty glass and turned to Daisy. “Would you run inside, Daisy Mae, and ask the lady of the house to fill this for me?”
Daisy took the glass and slipped off her chair. “Okay,” she said. I might have resented him for appropriating my nickname, except that it so clearly pleased her. We both watched her go through the door, the pink shoes clicking on the floorboards.
He turned back to me. “Lots of room for histrionics,” he said. “Playing Macduff. Great sorrow, bloody revenge. Are you that kind of actress?”
I let the silence come back for a second and then I said, “I didn’t play it that way. That was how the nun who directed wanted me to do it. She kept yelling at me to wring my hands. She wanted me to get all pop-eyed when he hears about his family. But I didn’t.” His head was to one side, against his artist’s hand. I was aware of him watching me, his own world whirling inside his head. “Well, I did in rehearsals,” I said, planting myself more firmly, “but not when we put it on, when she couldn’t do anything about it. I just said it like it was something he always knew was going to happen. I just said”—I gave a kind of nod, as I had done that night on the stage—“ ‘All my pretty ones.’ I said, ‘Heaven looked on, and would not take their part’—not a question, like he always knew.”
His chin was in his palm, his elbow on the armrest beside me, his long legs spread out before him, crossed at the bare ankles. Something regal in his slouch, his white shirt rolled at the sleeves and open at the collar, the white flame of his hair. “Always knew his children would be slaughtered?” he said softly.
I straightened my spine, aiming for something regal myself. “In a way,” I said.
Daisy came out again with the drink in her hand, gave it to him, and slipped back into the canvas chair. He touched her shoulder as he accepted it, said, “Thank you, dear.” He placed it in the tall ashtray and turned back to me, as if he were not yet ready to drink. As if first something had to be settled between us.
I was silent again. There was another star and a sliver of moon in the deep blue sky, a few torn shreds of clouds, red and gold. For a moment, I only looked out across the darkening lawn. There was the sound of Flora’s voice from inside, Ana’s musical if terse replies. The drill of summer locusts in the trees. I felt him studying me, fingers along his cheek, although I still kept my head turned toward the lawn and the weeping cherries.
“I didn’t have him scream at Macbeth at the end, either,” I said finally. “I didn’t make it a triumph. I made it look like he was crying. Like he was sick of all this blood.” I had a momentary recollection of that wet and tinny smell. “I had him drop Macbeth’s head, at the end. This papier-mâché thing. I had him look like he was sick of the whole thing. Everybody dying.”
I turned to him and he lifted his chin out of his palm. I couldn’t tell if he was bored. “How’d that go over?” he asked.
“She didn’t like it,” I said. “She gave me a C.”
He chuckled. “Understatement is a hard sell,” he said.
I took my arms from the armrest and folded them across my lap. “Some of the other girls said I made Macduff seem like a fairy.” I recalled the slow dawning; Mr. Clarke’s house suddenly sunk back onto solid, sordid earth. I looked at him to see if he knew what I meant.
He wasn’t smiling. “Nice girls,” he whispered.
Daisy, just beside him, was gently swinging her feet, utterly patient. “We should go,” I said, although I didn’t want to, somehow. I stood, and she stood. He raised his glass to us both, still slouched in his chair. “Bonsoir,” he said, and nothing more, although I knew he watched us as we walked across the lawn to the drive.
Petey was on the back steps when we got home, the light in the kitchen behind him already on and my mother inside making dinner, our folded beach umbrella leaning up against the house.
Petey stood as soon as we approached, something behind his back. I looked quickly to see if his rabbit trap was still there. It was gone.
He said to Daisy, “This isn’t what I told you about. The thing I really want to get you, but”—and he thrust out his hand. It was a bracelet made of caramel-colored stones, looped in rings of something that even in the dim light I could tell was not real gold. Daisy seemed to have no idea what to do, and so he shoved the bracelet toward her and said, “It’s for you.”
Hesitantly, she took it from him. I wouldn’t ask him, in front of her, where it had come from, but I suspected the worst. And then Petey said, looking up at me, as if he well understood an explanation was needed.
“The cop gave it to my mom, but she didn’t like it at all. She said I could have it.” He scratched at an already-broken mosquito bite on his arm. “I don’t know if you like it,” he said to Daisy.
Daisy looked at it and then looked at me. “It’s pretty,” she said.
I asked, “Are you sure it’s okay with your mom?”
“Oh yeah.” He was absentmindedly picking at the scab, a string of blood running down his arm. “She was going to throw it away. Honest.”
If this was true, it could not bode well for the policeman.
I reached out and gently moved his hand from his arm. “Well, that’s nice of you, Petey,” I said. And Daisy said, “Thank you,” and Petey explained once again that it was not the thing he intended to give her, the thing he was still working on.
I asked him if he wanted to come into the house and put a Band-Aid on that and he looked at the place he had been scratching as if no part of it were his own. “No,” he said. “It’s all right.” And wiped off the blood with his shirt. He motioned toward the bracelet again. “Put it on,” he said.
I put the beach bag on the ground and took the bracelet from Daisy. “Hold out your hand,” I said, and then turned her wrist over to fasten it. We were in shadow from the porch light and the kitchen light but I knew what I saw along the inside of her arm was another spreading bruise. I fastened the bracelet and turned her arm over, and the thing immediately slipped over her hand and onto the grass. We all bent to pick it up, Petey beating us to it.
He held it, looking pained and disappointed. “It’s too big,” he said. And I said, no, it could be fixed. I slipped it back over Daisy’s tiny hand and then pinched it to show how it could be made tighter. “I can have my dad take out a few links,” I said.
Petey seemed skeptical, and his shoulders sank into that disintegrating slouch. But Daisy held her wrist up so that the bracelet slipped nearly to her elbow and shyly said, “Thank you very much,” once more, and Petey walked off with his hands deep in his pockets but his step light, somehow, as if not quite convinced of the success of his offering but neither resigned to its failure. He was barefoot and his shorts came nearly to his knees and his white T-shirt might well have been left behind by one of the fathers. “Sometimes,” I told Daisy as we walked into the house, “I think Petey’s the loneliest kid on earth.”
I thought she would object, given his brother and his sisters and all the various temporary residents, animal and human, of his house, but she only nodded and said, “I know what you mean.”
Larry and Moe followed us into my room, where I took off the bracelet, and I held her arm under the lamplight. The bruise was there, but it had been exaggerated by the shadows and might only have been something caused by Red Rover’s pulling when I let her walk him. Daisy watched me quietly as I examined her, said, “Both,” solemnly when I asked her which hand she used to take the leash, and then, when I assured her it was nothing, she grinned her goofy grin. “Out, damned spot,” she said. And I put my finger to her lips. “Darn,” I said. “Out darn spot.”
While she was in the shower I sat with my father at the dining-room table, the cats about our feet, counting the links on the bracelet and trying to figure out the best way to remove them. There was another rattle at the screen door, and then Janey came in through the kitchen, a small paper bag in her hand and her chiseled face dirty and streaked with tears. Her blond hair was still braided, probably the braid I put in it last week, although the ribbon was gone. Moe and Larry came out from under the table to greet her, but she had nothing for them today. “Rags tore up your hat,” she said simply, and handed me the paper bag. Inside were the remnants of Flora’s mother’s hat, only a bit of the crown, and the chewed-up leather hatband, the remains of a bright red ribbon. Janey glanced at my father as if he were somehow inanimate. He had his miniature leather-bound tool set on the table in front of him, his glasses well down on his nose.
“I don’t know if you can fix it,” she said, her eyes on the air between us, as if she were uncertain of just whom she was appealing to. And then her eyes fell on the bracelet. Her pale brows narrowed. She raised her hand, pointing. “I wanted that bracelet,” she said, and as she did I saw—I had glanced at the paler inside of her arm, making a comparison with Daisy’s—a cuff of red skin around her wrist. I took the finger she was pointing and turned her arm over. “What happened here?” I said.
“Petey did it,” she said, raising her chin and her bottom lip, a look that promised, simultaneously, defiance and tears. “Mommy threw the bracelet on the floor and I got it first,” she said. And to my father, “I got it.” Back to me, “But Petey took it away.” She held out her wrist. “He gave me an Indian sunburn.” To my father, “He twisted my skin.” To me, “Until I had to let it go. Then he pushed me.” Now her voice rose into another, tearful register. “I came over to see if you were home yet but you weren’t, and that’s when I found the hat on the grass, all chewed up.” A tear welled and fell. “Nothing’s gone right for me today.”
I held out my arms and she immediately came to me, and although she held her body a little stiffly, she put her forehead on my shoulder. My mother, a spatula in her hand, came to the kitchen door to see what the trouble was. A few minutes later Daisy, her hair still draped with a towel, came out of the bedroom. I explained to them both what had happened, and then Daisy stepped forward and lifted the bracelet from the table and handed it to Janey.
“You can have it,” she said. “It’s okay.”
Janey looked at her through her tears and shook her head. “Petey will kill me if I take it.”
I assured her he wouldn’t. “I’ll explain it to Petey,” I said. “I’ll make it okay.”
Sympathetically, Daisy put her fingertips on Janey’s sore wrist. She said, “Petey has something else he wants to give me. I’ll tell him I’d just rather wait for the other thing.”
I glanced at my father to see if he’d made the connection between this other thing and Petey’s futile rabbit trap. But he didn’t. My mother was saying, “That’s very nice of you, Daisy,” and Janey was tentatively reaching out to take the bracelet.
“I can shorten that for you,” my father said as she tried it on. He leaned toward her, counting with one finger the pale brown stones, and then suggested he remove three of them for a perfect fit. “And I’ll tell you what,” he said to her over his bifocals. “We’ll save the three of them for you so they don’t get lost, and as you get bigger, you just come over here and one by one we’ll put them back. That way, you can wear the bracelet now and the whole time you’re growing up.”
Janey sniffled and nodded and further streaked her dirty face with the back of her hand. “Okay,” she said softly. My mother returned to the kitchen, and we all watched my father as he bent over the bracelet like a watchmaker. (Later he would declare that the thing was hardly worth five bucks, which no doubt is why Sondra threw it to her children.) I put my arm around Daisy to pull her closer and whisper “Thank you” in her ear. She seemed to be shivering, and I reached up and moved the towel over her head to dry her hair.
I suggested that the bracelet should probably stay here until I had a chance to talk to Petey about it and Janey happily agreed, and happily agreed to stay for dinner as well, tasting creamed spinach for the first time (first by a tentative touch of a forkful to the tip of her pink tongue) and declaring it really good.
That night in bed as I curled around her, Moe and Larry two warm weights at our feet, I told Daisy again how nice she had been to poor Janey. And once again I felt that shiver in her spine. “Janey’s lucky,” Daisy whispered. “She can come to your house anytime she wants, for years, all the way until she’s grown up.”
Faintly, I could hear my parents’ voices on the other side of the wall, their quiet and unending exchange. “Well, you can, too, Daisy Mae,” I told her, whispering into her hair. “Just hop on the train.”
I felt her shake her head against the pillow. For a second, when she didn’t speak, I thought she might have been crying, homesick again. But then she whispered, “I don’t think I’ll ever be back here.”
I laughed, just a puff of air against her scalp. “Why?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just have that feeling.”
I tightened my arm around her. “Of course you will,” I said. “Every summer. You could come at Easter, too, if you want, even Christmas. You can come back anytime, all the way until you’re grown up.” I said it fondly, assuredly, with all the authority I knew she gave me, all the authority I knew I had, here in my own kingdom, but I also said it against a flash of black anger that suddenly made me want to kick those damn cats off the bed and banish every parable, every song, every story ever told, even by me, about children who never returned. The newborn children named for Irish patriots. The children who said, I want to show it to the angels. Children who kissed their toys at night and said, Wait for me, who dreamed lollipop trees, who bid farewell to their parents from the evening star, children who crawled ghostly into their grieving father’s lap, who took to heart an old man’s advice that they never grow old, and never did. All my pretty ones? All? I wanted them banished, the stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children’s tragic premonitions. I wanted them scribbled over, torn up. Start over again. Draw a world where it simply doesn’t happen, a world of only color, no form. Out of my head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the sea, eternal summer, a brush of fairy wings and all dark things banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead cats, harried parents, lonely children, all the coming griefs, all the sentimental, maudlin tales fashioned out of the death of children.
“And when you grow up,” I said, “you can move out here, with me. And we’ll bring our babies to the beach together and
teach them to swim in the ocean and we’ll have a hundred puppies in the yard and we’ll hire Petey to come over every day and clean up the poop.”
She laughed.
“And Mrs. Richardson will have us over for tea, and Mrs. Clarke will give you her house because you were almost her older sister’s best friend’s boyfriend’s niece.”
“I didn’t get that,” Daisy murmured, and I murmured back, “Me neither. But I think it makes you her closest relative. And I’ll tell you a secret about that house,” I said. “If you promise not to tell anybody. This is absolutely true: Nobody ever saw that house get built. One day there was just grass and trees and that little pond with the dragonflies, and then one night there was a house, lit up like a lightning bug. And although nobody saw anyone go in, in the morning the front door opened and out came a man, kind of short and bald, with a round, happy-looking face and a round stomach and wearing a beautiful gold shirt and brown pants and a black jacket so he kind of looked like a lightning bug himself. And that was Mr. Clarke’s uncle, and that’s how Mr. Clarke came to own the house. And when it’s time to leave it to someone, since they haven’t got any children of their own, Mr. and Mrs. Clarke will have to leave it to you, so when you grow up, you’ll live in a house built by fairies.”
Child of My Heart Page 16