Child of My Heart (13 page)
Daisy took my hand, as if to say, Let’s go, but Dr. Kaufman seemed to want to keep us there.
“You having a nice summer?” he said, leaning against the patio table, as if we would have a long chat.
“Yes, thank you,” I told him.
“Busy.” Although we had spoken on the phone a number of times to make our arrangement, this was the first time I’d seen him this year. He was broad-shouldered but about my height, a little stooped, maybe a little heavier than I’d remembered. He always had a kind, unhappy face.
“You look good,” he said.
“You’re taller,” and because he looked at me for what seemed just a second or two too long—his dark brown eyes sad and assessing at the same time—he turned to Daisy and asked, “Where in the city are you from, sweetheart?”
Without missing a beat Daisy said, “
I laughed out loud, I couldn’t help it, and Dr. Kaufman turned to me, smiling and puzzled—the first he had smiled since we arrived—and said, “What? What’s funny?” His eyes kept slipping from my face to my legs. Daisy was smiling, too.
I grabbed the bun on Daisy’s head and shook it.
“Well,
“And some nice shoes,” he said.
Red Rover was whining with more vigor now, punctuating each whine with a mournful bark, so I said we’d just go down to the pen and then be on our way. Still leaning against the table, Dr. Kaufman waved his coffee mug.
“Go right ahead,” he said.
“He’ll love you for it.”
We fed the dog some of the biscuits I carried in my beach bag and scratched him behind his ears. We were just getting ready to lock the gate again when Dr. Kaufman joined us. He had pulled on a pair of shorts over his boxers and was wearing boat shoes. He looked as if he had just, hastily, shaved. He had Red Rover’s leash in his hand and he said he and Red would just walk us to our next “assignment.” I glanced at Daisy. I knew she would be happy to have the dog’s company but perhaps a little disappointed to have to share the morning with a grown-up. But her face was expressionless. Disappointment of one sort or another was nothing new. He walked next to me, his arm brushing mine as Red Rover pulled ahead. I asked about the twins and when they would be down here, noticing as he answered, that Mrs. Kaufman had now become “their mother,” whereas two years ago, when I’d worked for them, I’d never heard him refer to her in any way other than “my wife.”
He asked me if I’d thought about colleges yet. I told him I hadn’t.
Their mother, he said, had gone to Smith.
“Don’t go to Smith.”
“You might want to think about modeling,” he said, and when I told him I didn’t think so, he said, “Oh no, you could.
You really could.” He asked Daisy, “Don’t you think your cousin could be in magazines?” Daisy looked at me to see what it was I wanted her to say—perhaps sensing my distaste for such talk.
“If she wanted to,” she said softly.
“You could,” he insisted, warming up to his own idea. His voice, his whole manner seemed to be changing, some kind of transformation I didn’t quite understand yet but knew to be somehow akin to the transformation that had made “my wife” into “their mother.”
“I know some people in the business,” he said.
“Some of my patients. I could introduce you. Point you in the right direction. I’m telling you, you could be in magazines.
Like Seventeen. You read Seventeen, don’t you? Even my daughter reads Seventeen, and she’s only six.” He laughed. It occurred to me to remind him that I knew his daughter, I was her babysitter.
“I know some of these models,” he said. He laughed again.
“I’m a bachelor now, you know,” by way of explanation.
“They all started very young, and what are you now, almost eighteen?”
“Fifteen,” I said, although I was tempted to say twelve.
He looked at me over his shoulder, Red pulling at the leash.
There was still the smell of sleep on his polo shirt, the faint odor of perspiration.
“Is that all?” he said.
“I thought you were older.” Then he said, “You were a real baby then, when you worked for us. Boy, I didn’t realize it.” He seemed, slowly, to remember something.
“Wow,” he said.
“You were thirteen. Did their mother know you were thirteen?”
I shrugged.
“I suppose so,” I said. He continued to shake his head.
“Wow,” he said again. After we had walked awhile in silence, only the sounds of the birds and Red Rover’s rapid panting, Daisy’s hard shoes against the street, he said, “I’m not going to tell you what went through that woman’s head.”
I might have thanked him for that, but instead I said, “This is where the Scotties live.”
We had finally reached the
Richardsons
’ driveway, and when we paused there, he looked so bereft, I thought for a minute he would burst into tears. Whoever he was trying to be just a few minutes ago, with all his energetic talk about modeling, and how gorgeous I was, and how old I was, seemed to have vanished, and he was once again as soft-spoken and disoriented as he had seemed when we came upon him this morning.
Still holding Red on the leash, he suddenly cupped his free hand over the back of my neck, over my hair and the collar of my father’s old white shirt, and gently leaned to kiss me on the cheek. Then he ran his hand over the shirt to grip my shoulder softly before he let go and stepped away. He turned to Daisy.
“Can I give you a little kiss, too?” he said.
“I’ve got a daughter just about your age who’s way up in
“A little boy,” Daisy said, with no further explanation required, as if she had said a wasp or a mosquito.
“An angry little boy,” I added.
He pursed his lips and nodded.
“Watch out for those,” he said, and then added, “us.” But he also ran his fingers from her shoulder down behind her arm, lifting her hand when he got to it, her palm in his fingertips. I saw him study, for just a second or two, her fingernails. It occurred to me that I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of doctor Dr. Kaufman was.
“You girls come take a swim sometime,” he said as he left us, walking backward as Red pulled him along, calling out, “That pool’s just going to sit there till the kids come down in August. It breaks my heart. You girls come use it. Really. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
After we had walked the Scotties and fed Moe, Larry, and
Curly—finding a note on the kitchen table that said the Swansons would be down tomorrow—we double-timed it to Flora’s, walking quickly for the first half and then, when Daisy became too breathless with walking and swinging her arms and laughing, I lifted her onto my shoulder and carried her—“Tiny Tim—style,” I said—the rest of the way.
Flora was already strapped into her stroller, and the stroller was on the front porch with the beach quilt folded into its basket and the lunch bag hung from the handle. She had been given a baby bottle full of Hawaiian Punch, although her mother had prohibited all bottles just last month, and although she was sucking at it contentedly when we climbed the steps, I could tell immediately that she had shed some tears this morning, too. The vacuum cleaner was running inside the house. I gathered I was to take the child and disappear for the day, and although this was pretty much what I had always done, I suddenly felt a bolt of black anger cross my eyes and my chest. I turned around and bent down to help Daisy slip off my shoulders, trying not to grip her ankles or her wrists with too much pressure. I thought at first that I would pull open the screen door and find Ana and pull the plug on the vacuum cleaner and tell her in no uncertain terms (my mother’s phrase again) that Flora was not supposed to have any more bottles and should never be left alone on the porch like a sack of potatoes, but I knew, too, that Ana would just pretend she didn’t understand and speak a stream of French until I went away, which was pretty much what she did to the cook every time they had an encounter.
I looked at Daisy.
“I wonder how long this poor kid’s been sitting out here,” I said. She shrugged. Her red ribbon had come undone, and so I retied it, slowly, and then brushed back some of the wisps of hair that had fallen around her face. She was warm, sweating a little, although, with the clouds gathering, the morning was cooler than it had been. She was paler than she should have been, too. I looked over my shoulder to Flora.
“How long have you been out here, Flora Dora?” And Flora pulled the nipple from her mouth and said, “I have a bottle,” pointing to the three fingers of bright red juice still left in it.
“That’s right,” I said.
“And your mother doesn’t want you to, does she?”
“Ana gave it to me,” she said, and then quickly stuck the thing back into her mouth in case anyone entertained any notions of trying to get it away from her.
Daisy laughed, leaning against me.
“Is it good, Flora?” she asked, and Flora nodded and then pulled out the bottle again, with a smack.
“It’s good,” she said, and plugged it in again.
Swinging her baby shoes and her fat, dimpled legs, content with the world.
“Take a rest for a minute,” I told Daisy, and I moved one of the canvas chairs next to Flora’s stroller. I went into the house.
The vacuum was back in the master bedroom now. I walked down the hall to Flora’s room, checked the shoebox in her closet, and, seeing that the bottle of aspirin had not been returned, walked into the kitchen.
The can of punch, just opened, was on the counter, and I poured a glass for Daisy, to cool her off. There was a dimpled bottle of Scotch on the counter as well, also opened. I put some ice into another juice glass and poured some Scotch into it, and then carried both outside. I gave Daisy the punch. Flora assessed the situation with her unremarkable brown eyes, and then was moved to take the bottle out of her mouth once again.
“Red juice,” she said to Daisy. She had already dribbled some of her own onto the front of her white baby dress.
“It’s good,” she added, as if urging Daisy to drink. She might have said, Skoal.
I told the girls I’d be back in a minute. The clouds had grown a bit darker, a bit thicker, and it occurred to me that if I delayed our start just a few minutes longer we might end up spending the day in the house. Poor Ana. The painting was no longer leaning against the outside wall of his studio, although there was a line in the grass that marked where it had been.
Seeing for an instant Flora’s mother with her little white sweater marching through this door, and then Ana, with her lunch tray and her wide blue hips, I almost said forget it and turned around, but I didn’t, and stepped over the threshold, onto the concrete floor. The place was much more stark than I’d imagined, really just a converted garage or storage shed with a skylight carved into its roof, something I had never seen from the outside. The light it cast into the room was milky gray. There were a few piles of canvases leaning against the walls, and a couple of sawhorses and old door tables, a single tall shelf with a jumble of paints and cloths and papers and brushes, the two bare light bulbs on long wires, neither one of them turned on. There was paint spattered on the floor, as I might have expected, and in the far corner a single bed (something I never expected) draped with what looked like heavy silk. He was lying on it, posed, it seemed—and if he’d been a different kind of painter, I would have said it was a bed meant exactly for that purpose—one arm hanging off the edge (I saw where he had dropped his glasses on the floor), the other thrown across his face, a knee raised, the other leg stretched out. There was a small stool beside the bed, a glass already on it, and another, larger, bottle of
St. Joseph
’s aspirin. I wondered if he had spent the night out here or if this was just an early morning nap. I said, Excuse me, twice, until he moved his head just a little and asked, “Who’s there?” An old man brought back from sleep.
“Theresa,” I said.
An old man brought back with some reluctance and confusion.
He lay there for a moment, not moving, and then turned his head more fully and raised his arm from his face.
“Theresa,” he said, moving his mouth, tasting the word.
“Theresa,” as if to himself.
“The babysitter,” I said.