Child of My Heart (25 page)
I smiled at him, and at the cop behind him.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I said.
I found Daisy on the grass at the foot of the driveway where I’d left her. Garbage, the tabby stray, was circling her, rubbing himself against her back and her knee, purring as Daisy ran her hand down the length of his back and to the tip of his tail. He paused at her shoe, as Curly had, and rubbed his jowls against it. I crouched down beside her to scratch him behind the ear.
“What would you do if you got to heaven,” Daisy asked, “and you found out there were no pets there, no dogs or cats or anything?”
I stood up, put out my hand to pull her up too.
“I’d raise a fuss,” I said.
“I’d go to the head guy and tell him if he didn’t let dogs in, I’d march down to the other place and see what they had to offer.” She laughed, pulling the big shorts up at the waist, adjusting her blouse, uncomfortable in her new clothes.
“But they do have pets,” I said.
“St. Francis made sure of that a long time ago.”
It was a glorious morning, windy and bright, with clouds moving along so swiftly you might have been viewing them from a train. We skipped Red Rover that morning because Dr. Kaufman was back from the city, and took the Scotties for a longer walk than usual, all the way to the Main Beach, where the black flag was already flying, and then back down to the Coast Guard beach, where they could run, although by the time we got there, they were so tired they simply sat at our feet, panting, their pink tongues nearly luminous in their black faces. We leaned against the steel rail at the top of the parking lot. The waves were huge, and clearly dangerous, coming one after the other, booming emphatically, slamming down their spray. Daisy edged closer to me and took my hand as we watched. We talked about the edge of the world, as we could see it this morning, what it would be like to be in a ship and to watch the receding horizon, to watch it for as long as it took for another shore to come into view, another shore where the waves were also crashing, the foaming water running up onto the beach, a shoreline equal and opposite to the one on which we stood, invisible but not imaginary, where someone might well be on the lookout for us (or at least for the Scotties, I said, since that was where they were born), waving a scarf from a widow’s watch or a distant tower, Hello, hello.
I waved, and Daisy raised her hand and waved, too. Leaning against the parking lot railing, I looked down at Daisy’s shoes and, pointing, told her, “Now they’re totally blue.” She looked at them, too.
“Like they fell out of the sky,” I said.
She laughed.
“Not really.”
I could see the passing clouds reflected in their jewels.
“Really,” I said.
“It’s true. They’re perfectly blue. Maybe it means you’re about to fly.”
At the Richardsons’, where the gardens were full of dew and lush with summer flowers, we handed the Scotties over to the maid at the back door and then heard Mrs. Richardson’s voice calling, “Tell them to come in.” The maid held the door wider, motioning for us to obey, the two leashes still in her hands, and Rupert and Angus both jumped up as we entered, as if to celebrate (although somewhat wearily) our return. We were in a small room just off a kitchen, and we saw Mrs. Richardson in a long white robe, a teacup in her hand, at the far end of it, just sweeping out. We followed. The kitchen was long and narrow, the biggest I—and certainly Daisy—had ever seen. To our right as we left it was a small conservatory, all glass and potted plants, and Mr. and Mrs. Richardson were having breakfast there at a glass-topped table with a lovely bowl of roses in the center. He wore a satin-collared jacket and she was in the white robe—decorated, I saw now, with embroidered sprigs of spring flowers, and tied up right under her substantial bosom with what appeared to be a double knot that she had, no doubt, secured with a hardy tug.
“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
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 door stops 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 door stops 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
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 woods, 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.