Child of My Heart (17 page)
An eye, a jaw, the curve of a breast, all of it disproportionate and ugly, somehow, all of it laid on with thick paint. As if he wanted there to be no doubt that he knew what he was doing.
As if he wanted there to be no doubt that he could transform what might otherwise be arbitrary and unskilled into something intentional, something of value. His alone. His work.
I turned to look at the other painting, which had no images at all, a blur of paint. Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.
I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. I wondered if Ana had left, since there were still cups and dishes in the sink and the floor needed sweeping. I went through the screen door and sat on the steps of the porch. The car was still there.
The lights were still on in his studio. I stood up and walked, as Daisy had done, toward the path, leaning a bit to see if the canvas was against the wall. It wasn’t. I walked a little farther.
I could smell the paint, but I heard no voices. Keeping my footsteps light, I passed by the side door and saw he was in there, standing over the same canvas, which was now lying on the concrete floor. His legs spread, his hands on his hips, staring down at his work in his white shirt and his khaki pants like some old colossus. I couldn’t see the bed in the far corner, but I had the impression that someone else was in there with him, and I walked on by, toward the caretaker’s path, as if that had been my destination all along. But then I thought I heard my name called and I stopped. I listened for a minute, sure I was mistaken, and then I heard him say, “You can come in.”
I walked back toward the door, uncertain but curious. He was still standing in the same place, in the same pose, a large cloth in one of the hands he held against his hip, what looked like a putty knife in the other. The light from the skylight was clearer today, a lovely bleached light that seemed to make his hair and his skin and his clothes and the cloth he held—it was a diaper, actually, stained with paint—all seem the same shade.
He said, “We thought the three of you were napping,” and standing on the threshold, I saw that Ana was indeed in there with him, sitting on the hard bed. She was wearing a sleeveless sweater and a black skirt, and her plump, bare legs were crossed. Her chin was lowered and thus had multiplied itself by three. She looked unhappy and her expression did not change as she watched me.
“Come on in,” he said again. And I crossed the threshold, into the bleached light. I stood on the other side of his painting, which, I supposed, was progressing. There was more paint on it, anyway. He turned to look at Ana over his shoulder, said something to her in French, and then turned back to me.
“The wood nymph,” he said, translating, I assumed, what he had told her. I realized I still had the clover chains in my hair, too. I touched one of them.
“A Thomas Hardy-reading, Shakespeare-quoting, drink-pouring wood nymph.” He walked around the painting toward me, but then veered off to the shelves of paints and clutter, throwing the diaper and the knife onto one of them. I smiled politely.
“Flora,” I said, “told me her mother is coming home tomorrow, so I wondered if you needed me to come so early—or at all.”
He turned, laughing, as if he had caught me in another lie.
He rested an elbow on a shelf above him, put his other hand on his hip. Only my experience with Uncle Tommy led me to know he had been, or still was, drinking. There was no lack of steadiness about him, no weaving or slurring, but an odd deliberateness in each gesture, a determination in his focus.
“No,” he said.
“No. Flora’s mother won’t be here tomorrow. Or the next day, I imagine.” He pulled off his glasses and pinched the space between his eyes.
“Flora’s mother is in the city,” he said.
“And Flora’s mother is an ardent practitioner of out of sight, out of mind. There’s really no telling when she’ll return.” He put his glasses on again, moving away from the shelves.
“So your services will continue to be needed.”
He walked toward me again. He reached out and touched my hair, lifting it from my shoulder with one hand and plucking out of it one of the clover flowers with the other. He spun the flower in his fingers.
“And the little redhead, too,” he said, looking at me from over his glasses.
“What was her name?”
“Daisy,” I said. There was the scent of Uncle Tommy as well, tinged, it seemed to me, with the orange aspirins. He raised his chin, getting a better look.
“Daisy,” he said.
“Who’s having a rough time?”
I nodded, but then added, “At home. Not now.”
He nodded, too.
“I see,” he said.
“You’ve rescued her.” He was placing my hair behind my shoulder now, gently, as if to put it back where it belonged. He took another clover flower from the back of my head. His neck was sinewy, full of hollows, that pale, papery skin.
“And home is ...” he asked, his eyes searching my hair.
“
Brooklyn
?”
“
He nodded, as if he should have known.
“Father a fireman?”
He smoothed some of my hair behind my ear, his fingertips brushing the side of my face and my scalp. And then he lifted it again, as if measuring its weight. I could smell the paint on his palm.
“Policeman,” I said.
He nodded in the same way.
“Ten kids?” he said.
“Eight,” I answered.
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
“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 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
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 band leader 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 band leader 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.
