Child of My Heart (18 page)

“I guess Jack,” my father said, “was a pretty sad case in those days—he tells some stories” (glancing at Daisy and me, indicating by his look the stories were not for our ears). A real little hoodlum himself—but then the good Fathers knocked him around a bit and got him playing basketball every spare minute of the day, and then Peggy showed up at one of the games. And the rest is history. Eight kids—little Daisy here our particular favorite—a nice house in
Queens
Village
. Jack didn’t make it into the police academy, but the transit authority took him. He needed to be a cop, he said. Because of his father, no doubt. He sometimes says he got into so much trouble as a kid just so he could spend time in police stations. You know, around men in his father’s uniform. He needed that.

I thought of Petey and Tony and the cop on the beach.

Not wanting to lose her connection, Mrs. Clarke said, “That was some nice orchestra his brother had.” She turned to Daisy.

“This would be your uncle.”

Daisy smiled politely, her hand in her lap.

“Wasn’t it, though?” my mother said.

“I guess Frank was some musician,” my father went on.

“Jack says his brother could play anything—piano, drums, clarinet. He said he could walk into a room and pick up an instrument he’d never seen before—trombone, flute, you name it—and play it for all it was worth. And he never had a lesson.”

“No kidding,” Mrs. Clarke said.

“Never,” my father said, equally astonished.

“According to Jack, it just came to him naturally.”

“That’s a gift,” Mrs. Clarke said.

“That’s what got him through his troubles, Jack said.” My father seemed to withdraw a little, picturing it.

“Jack said all Frank would have to do is close his eyes and play something, and it would be like everything else that was happening to him—his mother, his father, even the stomach cancer that eventually killed him at, what was he_” And my mother said sadly, “Forty-three.”

“—at forty-three,” my father went on, “everything that was happening to him just vanished and he was without a care in the world. Just his music.”

“That’s a gift,” Mrs. Clarke said again, but my father had begun to chuckle.

“At Frank’s wake,” he said, glancing at my mother, who had lowered her head and was chuckling, too, knowing, of course, what he was recalling, knowing as always what he would say, “which was at Fagin’s, we walk in and here the room is completely filled with colored people. Packed with them. And we’re both thinking that we’re in the wrong place and we’re just starting to back out—and we’re saying, Sorry for your trouble, sorry for your trouble, to all these colored people squeezed in there—when along comes Jack, from the lobby, and he’s mad as anything and he whispers to me from between his teeth, “Doesn’t this look like the’ “—pause, glance at us minors—“ ‘the GD dark town strutters’ ball?”” My parents both laughed, recalling it, in complete synchronization.

“Turns out Frank had been playing in clubs up in
Harlem
for years, years. And never told Jack about it.
Harlem
, where his father had been killed. And a whole contingent of them, there must have been eighty of them, I guess they were other musicians and fans and club owners, you know, hep cats and zoot suits, the whole scene, had come out to
Brooklyn
together to pay their respects. And here’s Jack, all red-faced and furious, and surrounded by his cop friends, in this Irish Catholic funeral parlor, having to shake hands and get hugged by every one of them.”

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 soufflé. 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 back 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.