“You girls look absolutely windblown,” she said, pulling out one of the wrought-iron chairs and returning to her place. “You must have some tea.”
She leaned down to give the dogs a few pieces of buttered toast, telling us all the while that they hadn’t played golf this morning because of the wind but had instead had a good lie-in, which was why we found them still lounging about so late in the day. The dogs sat attentively beside her, looking up, waiting for more bread, and when it didn’t come, they both turned and waddled back to me, stationing themselves, with a thump of their stubby tails, right at my feet.
“Ah,” Mrs. Richardson exclaimed just as the maid brought me and Daisy our tea. “Will you look at that?” And the poor maid straightened up quickly, prepared, it seemed, to take offense. But Mrs. Richardson was talking about the dogs. “You’ll break my heart, you boys,” she said, leaning to see them under the table. She looked up at me from beneath her short graying bangs. “You’ve got something magical about you,” she said. “You must have.”
“They’ve just got good taste,” her husband said, and then immediately seemed to suck his lips into his mustache, as if he wished he hadn’t spoken at all. Still leaning, she turned her gaze on him, her big face thrust forward. She seemed to assess him in a second, fondly but thoroughly, and then she said, “Oh, you old fogey,” and turned back to me. “Now you’ve got the poor girl blushing.”
I hadn’t blushed, until that moment, because it was only at that moment that it occurred to me that Mr. Richardson was probably somewhat younger than Flora’s father. And only a little while ago this plump and comical couple had been “lying in” until 7 a.m.
Now Mrs. Richardson moved her hand across the table and said, more businesslike, “I want to talk to your father about his dahlias. They’re exquisite. We’ve taken to going by your house nearly every afternoon—they do take my breath away.” To her husband, “Don’t they?” And he said, “Oh yes,” and offered Daisy a blueberry scone, which she accepted shyly. “I’ve even knocked on your door once or twice, but there’s been no one home. When would I find him in?”
I told her he and my mother both worked in Riverhead and weren’t usually back until after seven. Of course, I said, he was there on weekends. She sat back, as if the information displeased her. “We’re so busy with guests on weekends,” she said. “We usually pass your house around four-thirty or five, when we walk the dogs, could he manage to be home then?”
I wondered, briefly, if I hadn’t made myself clear (“The girl should really be taught to speak up”). I said again that he worked in Riverhead. He and my mother both. They usually didn’t get home till after seven.
She straightened up, the information still didn’t please her, and sipped her tea. Thinking it over, she said, “Well, I don’t want to disrupt the dogs too much, perhaps we’ll just drive over some evening. Would that be all right?”
I said I would mention it to my parents, I was sure it would be fine.
Her eyes narrowed a bit and I saw her glance again at the dogs, who were still at my feet. Some thought crossed her face, something that made her mouth tight. “Perhaps I should call first,” she said. “To make sure I’m not disturbing anyone.”
I sipped my own tea. “Please do,” I said. And I heard her husband laugh, a low chuckle. He offered me the plate. “Have a scone,” he said.
When we had finished our tea, Mrs. Richardson stood and asked if we would like to see the house. I was about to decline when Daisy said, “Oh yes,” and then added, when we all looked at her, somewhat startled (it was, I believe, the loudest reply she had ever made), “please.”
It was a large and lovely house, very masculine, very British, with lots of leather and plaid, heavy mahogany furniture with formidable curves much like Mrs. Richardson’s, darkly framed pictures of fox hunts and Cotswold villages on the walls. There was, too, under the smell of the roses—and there was a bowl of pretty roses in every room—the unmistakable odor of old people. A fustiness that had nothing to do with how immaculately clean the house was (a woman was dusting, another was washing the kitchen floor), a close, sad, human smell, the odor of breath, and flesh and hair, of worn clothes, of objects held too long in your hands. Daisy walked through the rooms—and Mrs. Richardson showed us only the library and the den, the dining room and living room—with her mouth open and her chin raised, gazing skyward, as if we were at the planetarium. Her unmitigated awe had its effect on Mrs. Richardson, however, and she began to watch Daisy with some amusement as we passed through each room, and then to linger with her. In the library she paused to show Daisy a faded copy of The Wizard of Oz, and another of The Wind in the Willows. In the den, it was her husband’s ship in a bottle that they lingered over, and a pair of cast-iron Scottie doorstops that, of course, bore a remarkable resemblance to Angus and Rupert. In the living room she lifted a small round silver frame from the mantel and said, “And this is my little boy.” Politely, Daisy peered into the frame that Mrs. Richardson lowered for her: the old-fashioned face of a boy in what appeared to be a sailor collar, looking pleasantly, if solemnly, into the camera with Mrs. Richardson’s own steel-gray eyes. Instinctively (surprisingly, to me, at least) Daisy put her hand on Mrs. Richardson’s wrist. “What’s his name?” she whispered.
“Andrew,” Mrs. Richardson said in her sure voice. “Andrew Thomas.”
“He’s very nice,” Daisy said, as she had said of the doorstops and the model ship.
Mrs. Richardson chuckled. “Yes, he was,” she said. “Thank you.”
And then Daisy added, looking straight up at her, “I think I met him before I was born.”
Mrs. Richardson moved the photo aside, as if it blocked her view, and gave Daisy another one of her steady, assessing gazes. And then she said, more kindly than I would have guessed from the frown on her face, “What a peculiar thing to say.”
Daisy took her hand from Mrs. Richardson’s wrist and shrugged, unfazed. “I remember him,” she said. For a second the only sound in the room was of Rupert, or Angus, scratching at himself, shaking his collar.
I put my hand on Daisy’s head. “We should go,” I said, while Mrs. Richardson said, turning to place the photo back on the mantel, “Oh my dear. He would have been much older than you.”
I thanked her for the tea and, sorry for my earlier rudeness, assured her that my father would welcome her visit. He was a wealth of information, I added, about his dahlias.
She smiled, leading us to the front door. Something of her mettle, her iron, had softened somehow. She said, “I’m happy just walking by and admiring them.”
She scooped up Rupert, or Angus, as we walked out the door (his white belly, his scrambling feet) and held the other back with her foot, to keep him from following. “Lovely to see you,” she said, dismissing us, but then, as we went down the steps, she called to Daisy, “And I do love your shoes.” She pointed to the sky. “Such a pretty blue.”
Since I was responsible, fully, for Daisy’s proclamation, I said nothing about it as we walked to Flora’s. I was not about to begin to dismantle whatever it was I had taught her in these past few days. Once she got back to Queens Village, Bernadette and her brothers would be doing enough of that. But I took her hand as we walked, to keep her, I said, from blowing away. She skipped beside me, her hair sailing out over her shoulders. Her shoes blue, perhaps reflecting the bright sky. “You’re feeling better today,” I said cautiously, and she said, Yes. She said she had loved Mrs. Richardson’s house, and the scones (which had tasted rather bland, a little stale, to me), and the room with all the windows where we’d had our tea. She couldn’t make up her mind, she said, if she wanted to raise Scotties or Irish setters when she grew up, and I said, Not to mention English setters and Welsh corgis—which she didn’t get until I explained it. No matter, I said. The point was, they were all from just on the other side of the ocean, from that equal and opposite invisible shore.
We took the caretaker’s gate, and once we were in the woo
ds, the wind seemed to hush a bit, seemed only to skim the treetops, to occasionally part the leaves in order to allow in new shafts of sunlight. Among the trees, it was possible to distinguish once again the sound of the wind from the sound of the ocean. We plotted out the day as we walked: we would go into the village and buy Flora a kite, and maybe—I had to check my wallet—enough candy to decorate one of the cherry trees. We’d give Flora her lunch and her nap, and then take the kite down to the beach to see if we could fly it. We’d ask Ana, I said, or maybe Flora’s father (making plans of my own), for some rags to tie together to make a tail.
Daisy said, straight-faced, “Rags wouldn’t like us using his tail.”
I looked down at her, and watched her wonderful grin blossom. Her little teeth and her wild hair and her narrow shoulders in the oversized plaid shirt and shorts her mother had bought for her. I squeezed her hand. “What am I going to do without you, Daisy Mae?” I asked. “What am I going to do when you go home?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but I picked her up and put her over my shoulder so her words fell off into a delighted squeal. She was so much lighter than she’d been last night, although a good bit squirmier. I jogged with her over my shoulder, along the path through the trees, and she exaggerated the way the bouncing disrupted her words. “You’ll just have to remember me,” she said.
When we came out, I was relieved to see that Macduff’s car was gone. The lights were on in his studio and the side door open. Although I could smell the paint, I didn’t glance inside, just put Daisy down and let her walk along the gravel, her shoes crunching, letting him know we were here. Flora was not on the porch, I was relieved to see, but inside, in the kitchen with Ana, eating a bowl of cereal. Ana was sitting beside her, leaning close, both elbows up on the table, and speaking French to Flora in what seemed to me an overly sweet and childish way. She pretended not to notice us at first, and only sat up after she laughed delightedly, as if over something Flora had said—although Flora had said nothing, only turned to Daisy with her spoon held out—and kissed the child on the forehead. Then she looked straight at me, smiling, as if to say she was prepared to beat me at my own game, to out-babysit the babysitter. “Good morning,” she said. She pushed herself out of the chair—she was in her blue uniform, but she had opened it at the collar, enough to show cleavage—and then went to the counter, where she’d already filled a baby bottle with Hawaiian Punch. She waved it in the air. “Are you thirsty, Flora?” she said, in English, and Flora held out both hands. “Red juice,” she said. “Give me.” Ana walked across the floor and handed it to her. Flora grabbed it, stuck it in her mouth. Smiling, Ana put her hands on her broad hips and turned to me as if to say, Want to make something of it?
I shrugged, refusing to meet her eye. But Daisy spoke up and said, “Her mother doesn’t want her to drink bottles.”
Ana frowned. She was good-looking, I suppose, that olive skin and those brown eyes, but there were two lines like dark gashes on either side of her mouth. Not laugh lines, it seemed clear, but lines of anger or trouble or grief. They were drawn clearly on her face now. “Her mother is not here,” she said to Daisy, her voice going up the scale. She turned to me, her hands on her hips, that coquettish tilt to her head. “When she gets here, you can tell her I give Flora bottles.” The lines grew deeper as she pretended to smile. “And I will tell her you have stolen her hat.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then I threw back my head and laughed. I can’t say it was a conscious imitation of the way he laughed, his true laugh, but I heard an echo of it in my own voice, and I think maybe Ana did, too. An echo of our complicity, a complicity even I didn’t understand, but one that I saw now left Ana, left any number of things, well behind. I was nobody’s rival. Daisy, her eyes full of concern, smiled, watching me, and Flora pulled the bottle out of her mouth to laugh, too.
I moved to the table to lift Flora out of her chair. “We’re going to take a walk into the village,” I said, and then carried Flora, still attached to her bottle, out to the porch. Daisy followed. “Why’s she so mad at you?” she asked as I put Flora into the stroller. I shrugged. “That’s what I get,” I said, “for driving Ana crazy.”
Daisy thought for a moment, looking toward the canvas chairs. Then she said, as if recalling his words, “Oh yeah.”
I pushed the stroller down the steps on its back wheels, and then over the gravel drive the same way, Flora’s little feet straight up in the air and her voice, from deep within the stroller, from behind the scarlet juice, humming and bouncing. It was a good walk to the village, and whether it was from the wind or the walk, halfway there, I heard the breathlessness come into Daisy’s voice. I took Flora out of the stroller and told Daisy to get in, and then put Flora on her lap and pushed them both. Looking down at the two pairs of little-girl legs, I saw that Daisy’s, in contrast to Flora’s plump and browned knees and calves, were not only thin but colorless, despite the time we had spent in the sun, as if the Noxzema had bleached not only her sunburn but any trace of natural color as well. I stopped to ask Flora if she wanted to walk, and so for a while she scurried ahead of us while I continued to push Daisy in the stroller. At one point, I reached down to feel her forehead, but she pushed my hand away. She said she was just tired.
At the five-and-dime we bought a kite and some string and enough lollipops and licorice shoelaces to decorate one of the weeping cherries. As we left, I saw Dr. Kaufman just coming out of the A&P across the street. He had a brown grocery sack in his arms and a woman beside him. She was holding on to his free arm with both hands and she was laughing, they both were. She had dark red hair, something like Red Rover’s, teased into a high crown at the top of her head. She was short and a little heavy, dressed in gold pedal pushers and a gold top, a black sweater thrown over her shoulders—about as different as he could get, I guessed, from his wife and their mother. Erase it and start over again. I suddenly recalled seeing the web of white stretch marks on Mrs. Kaufman’s chest that summer I had been their babysitter, like the lines left on a piece of paper that had been crumpled up and then unfolded. It was skin, of course, that resisted, refused to relent: Daisy’s bruise, Flora’s growing, her father’s arms turning to dust. You could reimagine, rename, things all you wanted, but it was flesh, somehow, that would not relent.
I paused to put our purchases in the basket beneath the stroller, waiting for them to round the corner into the parking lot, hoping they wouldn’t see us, but we were barely out of the village, had just paused to let Daisy sit in the stroller a while longer, when he pulled up in his car. She was in the passenger seat, smiling at us, and he leaned across her lap to call my name. He began to say something, but the wind was still gusting and he held up his hand to say, Wait a minute, and turned off the engine and got out. He ran around the back of the car and then opened the door for her. She got out slowly, as if she were at the end of a long ride. She wore black high-heeled sandals and her toes were painted bright red, and she was smiling at us all the while, the black sweater over her shoulders and her gold clothes nearly iridescent in the sun.
“This is Jill,” Dr. Kaufman said, his chest puffy in his pride over her. “She just got in on the train. This,” he said, introducing her to me, “is the girl I was telling you about, Theresa. She’ll be taking care of the twins that week.”
Jill held out a well-manicured hand, her wrist full of bangles. She asked me a sudden series of questions—pointless, most of them: what grade are you in and what’s your favorite subject and what singers do you like—as if she felt obliged to interview me there on the spot. She was perfumed and overly made up, but pretty, already tanned, a general impression of red and gold and auburn. As she grilled me, Dr. Kaufman crouched down on the sidewalk to talk to Flora, who was showing him the candy bracelet I had bought her, and then, still squatting, he turned his attention to Daisy, and I saw her hold out her candy bracelet, too. He took her hand to look at it, and then he reached up and put his fingers to her throat
, just briefly, as if he were taking her pulse. He straightened up and interrupted Jill’s conversation to introduce her to the two girls. “What grade are you in?” Jill asked Daisy. “What’s your favorite subject?”
Dr. Kaufman turned to me. I found myself not wanting to meet his eye.
“Do you girls want a ride?” he asked softly, as if this were something just between the two of us. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Thanks, though.” I told him this was our morning excursion, meant to get Flora ready for a nap.
He nodded, his hands on his hips, as if he understood. “She okay?” he asked. I knew he meant Daisy.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. The wind was blowing my hair across my face. “She may be getting a little head cold.”
He frowned. “You mention what I said? To her parents?”
I let the wind obscure a yes or a no. “As soon as she gets home,” I said.
This seemed to satisfy him, because he looked at Jill, who had run out of things to say to the two girls, questions to ask. “Shall we go?” she said. And then to me, “I’m glad we got a chance to meet.”
We waved to them as they pulled away, and then Flora and I pushed Daisy for a while, and then Daisy helped me push Flora. When we reached the driveway, I felt the wind fall away, much as it had this morning, when we took the caretaker’s gate and the path through the woods, and the feeling was so much like coming into harbor that I said to Daisy and Flora, as my father always said when he docked his boat, “All ashore that’s going ashore.”
He had the sawhorses set up in the driveway, the old door stretched over them, but there was no other sign of him.
Child of My Heart Page 19