Child of My Heart (27 page)

He looked down at her and then up, and for a moment he lost his footing. But then he steadied himself and slowly crouched down, and then sat, a little awkwardly, and then stretched himself out on the grass beside me, on his back. He raised one leg, in that familiar pose of his, and cupped his hands over his eyes.

As if she understood the effort this had cost him, Flora said, “Good, Daddy,” and then lay flat herself.

“I see a boat,” he said, and Daisy said, “Yeah, us too,” delightedly, as if the sighting had been confirmed.

“I see the outlines of a great city.”

“A castle,” Flora said, but he didn’t understand her and I had to interpret the word for him. I turned my head and raised my chin to see him.

“A castle,” I repeated. His white hair was against the grass. His arm was right beside mine, the other still covered his eyes as he looked at the changing sky. He said, “Yes, you may be right.”

And then, as if he had only located me by the sound of my voice, he moved his hand to rest his fingers against my hip. We were all silent for a moment and there came the hollow sound of the ocean, the waves too rough for swimming today.

“A shoe,” he said, and raised his hand from his brow to point at the sky.

Flora’s arm went up, too.

“A shoe,” she said.

“Daisy’s shoes,” I said.

“With jewels,” Flora said.

The wind rose again and shook the bright lollipops on the tree; one fell to the grass as if it were ripened fruit. He had just the edge of his palm on my hipbone, his fingertips lightly touching my leg.

“A castle,” he said again, still pointing.

“A turret, a spire, a lookout tower.”

“A widow’s watch,” Daisy said.

And I heard him laugh, softly, lying in the grass.

“Yes,” he said.

“A widow’s walk.” He moved his hand down my hip and over my bare thigh and held it there, only the slightest pressure in his fingertips. I felt the wind run over the grass. I placed my hand on my belly, not sure if I meant to hold down the hem of my shirt or to raise it. I lifted my knee to match his.

“A widow’s walk,” he said again, chuckling. Lying beside me in the grass, he stretched out his artist’s fingers and brushed the inside of my thigh.

“Watching and waiting,” he said, or seemed to.

“Longing,” he said. And then took his hand away and raised himself up on his elbow to say, leaning over me, “You’re something else, Daisy Mae.”

And to his daughter, “You as well, little girl.” He reached his arm across me to smooth her hair and then drew his hand back and placed it over mine. He leaned forward, pressing both our hands into my flesh, and bent his white head gently, in what at first seemed a kind of obeisance.

“And you,” he whispered, the branches of the weeping cherry moving in the wind, the earth beneath Flora’s mother’s blue quilt seeming to press itself against the small of my back.

He moved away. I kept my hand over my eyes, but I could tell by his shadow across me and on the grass that it was difficult for him to stand. From under my palm I saw him press his knuckles against the grass, leaning first on his arms—strained and sinewy, scrubbed clean, marked with the red paint he had added to the canvas just this morning—then drawing his knees under him. Then he raised one knee, sat back on his heel. Touched his hand once more to the grass. I sat up and the two girls sat up, and without a word we all stood and went to him, Daisy and Flora laughing, to take his elbows, I to stand above him as he knelt and to hold out my hand. As he took it, I was surprised to see blades of grass falling from his fingers, as if he had been torn away from the lawn where we’d been lying, had tried to hold on, as if he had struggled not to raise himself but to stay. Letting the blades of grass fall from his fingers, he leaned heavily against my hand, and then placed his fingertips on my shoulders as he straightened himself, stepping backward once to regain his footing, and then stepping forward again, his hands on my shoulders, his chin brushing my scalp. With the wind at my back, obscured by my blowing hair, I put my lips to the papery skin of his throat and felt his pulse against my mouth. I felt his laughter. I turned to see that Daisy and his daughter were offering him the lollipops that had fallen to the ground, Flora saying, “Here, Daddy, here.”

“First fruits of the harvest,” he said. He had his arm around me, his shoulder against the back of my head, his hand on my hip. He took a lollipop from each of them, and then they offered the rest to me.

Leaning, he said into my hair, “Come out to the studio when you get a chance.”

I turned to look over my shoulder as he walked back to his painting. An old man, shuffling a bit in his soft shoes, his white hair rising off his head, his white shirt moving in and out as if with his breath, with the beating of his heart; moving, in truth, with the buffeting wind.

We went into the house for lunch. Both girls looked windblown and weary, and Daisy’s cheeks were still brighter than Flora’s. We ate our sandwiches at the kitchen table, and Ana came in twice to ignore us and once to fix her brown eyes on mine as she roughly wiped some chocolate milk from Flora’s mouth with a dish towel.

“No beach today?” she asked, and I said there was a black flag, no swimming.

She clicked her tongue and rubbed Flora’s mouth again as if she were washing a window.

“I think you can still sit on the beach,” she said, as Flora began to cry. Stepping away from the child, Ana held out both hands, as if to say, Voila!

“You see, you wait too long to give her a nap.”

I picked up Flora, still crying, and, with Daisy trailing, carried her into her room. I changed her, still crying, and rocked her a bit in my arms, Daisy sitting at our feet and rubbing her legs. Still, Flora cried and squirmed and arched her back, slapping away the book Daisy brought her, and the stuffed animals, angrily putting her little hand over my mouth when I tried to sing. She said she wanted her mother. She wanted her mother, and once the chant had started, there was no stopping it. I held her in the rocking chair, said, Hush, hush, but the crisis was full-blown. She wanted her mother. Daisy looked at me and shook her head, tears coming into her own eyes.

“Your mommy will be back soon,” she told Flora, stroking her arm.

“Mommy’s coming,” although her words were lost against the sound of Flora’s wailing. When Ana stood in the doorway, waving a bottle of punch, Flora held out her hands, and Ana entered the room and smugly handed it to her. Flora took it greedily and then let her head fall back against my arm. In a minute her eyes began to close.

Ana left the room with her hands on her hips, her backside wagging. A minute later I heard her shoes against the gravel, and then a faint conversation between the two of them, in French. I heard the front door open and close again, Ana’s footsteps in the kitchen. I pulled the bottle from Flora’s mouth, her lips moving with the memory of it for a few seconds before she settled further into sleep. I lifted her, placed her in the crib. Daisy was curled up on the floor, her hands under her cheeks but her eyes wide open. I leaned down to touch her face and knew for certain that the color in her cheeks was not from the wind alone. I went to Flora’s closet, but the aspirin had not been returned to the shoebox. I told her to wait just a minute and went down the hallway and through the bright living room and out the front door. I was aware of Ana’s face at the kitchen window.

The painting was now streaked with yellow as well. There was another paint-stained diaper tucked into his back pocket, and for the first time I saw him holding a palette as well as the putty knife. Smoothly, intently, he was applying a careful line of yellow to the canvas, following some precise design, some dictate, whose source, of course, and intention, I couldn’t begin to tell. He had one of the lollipops in his mouth, his glasses on top of his head, and he was squinting at his work as if the little white stick were a cigarette giving off smoke. There was something sure in his movements as he applied the paint, something in his manner that reminded me of the change in Dr.

Kaufman when he stopped thinking about me and asked about Daisy. The certainty of his profession, the habits of his profession, making all his gestures definite, as if there were no other course, as if it were not all arbitrary, conjured up out of his head. I wondered how often he had done this, how many pictures he had made like this, over his long lifetime. And if Macduff had been right to say that they might come to nothing at all. Not work at all, but play, pretending.

Backing away from the canvas, he placed the palette on the sawhorse table, threw the putty knife on top of it, then took the diaper from his back pocket, wiped his hands, and threw that down as well. He took the lollipop out of his mouth and threw it on the ground, then walked toward the door of his studio. He only turned when he was about to step inside, turned and gestured that I should precede him. It was the first I knew that he realized I was there. As I walked past him, he put his hand to the small of my back, following me into the studio, which was full of the filtered sunshine of the skylight.

He didn’t close the door behind him, but then, I had never seen that door closed. He went to the cluttered shelves and took another clean cloth and wiped his hands again; he took the glasses off his head and wiped them as well.

“The babes are asleep, then?” he said. And I said, “No.”

He looked up at me, and there was that uncertainty once more.

“No?” he said.

“Daisy’s awake,” I said.

“She’s not feeling well, I think. I was wondering if you had the aspirin.”

He bowed his head, wagged it, laughed softly to himself.

He walked across the room to the stool beside the bed and lifted the aspirin bottle from it. He tossed it to me and I caught it.

“Good old
St. Joseph
,” he said.

“Poor schmuck.”

He sat down on the high, jumbled bed.

“Is she really sick,” he said, smiling faintly, “or are you just being an indulgent mother?”

I was standing right under the skylight, but the room still felt cool, as if it were in shadow, a cool, bright shadow. I was aware of the smell of the paint and, for the first time, of the number of other canvases, some empty, some barely painted on, stacked up along the walls. False starts, I supposed, futile efforts, unfinished masterpieces. I wondered what distinguished them from the ones he pursued.

“I think she’s really sick,” I told him. I was aware of the windburn on my own cheeks and lips, and the weight of my hair on the back of my neck.

“She’s been feverish since she got here, I think.” I paused. He had crossed his legs and put his chin in his hand, his fingers covering his mouth. His eyes were the darkest thing about him, steady and deep behind his glasses. All else was pale, fading.

“She has bruises that don’t heal,” I said.

“On her feet, and her back. One on her shoulder that she got from a little boy last week, which actually seems to be getting worse.” He didn’t take his eyes from me or turn his head.

“I haven’t told anybody,” I said.

“All they’ll do is take her back home. Her summer will be over.”

I said, “I want to keep her here a little longer.”

He took his hand from his chin and laid his arm across his leg, as if he were about to respond. But he said nothing. We were a good ten feet apart, but in the odd, cool, opaque light of his studio we might as well have been as close as we’d been earlier, on the lawn, when I put my lips to the pulse at his throat, felt the vibration of his laughter in my mouth. The door was open and there was no need to pull it closed. I could hear the wind outside and perhaps, faintly, the sound of the ocean, the waves too dangerous for swimming. But in here, in this pale light, our complicity closed out everything else.

Finally, he said softly, his voice hoarse, as if he had indeed just spoken, and at some length, “Go bring her the aspirin.

Make her drink something, too, juice or something. Or water.”

I nodded.

“And come back,” he said.

“If you can.” He paused.

“If you’re so inclined.” And then he laughed, hesitant, and I saw by his hesitation that I was, still, better at this than he was.

“Or not,” he said.

Daisy was asleep on the floor when I returned, but I woke her up and gave her the aspirin and had her drink a glass of water. Then she rested her head on my thigh, and I stroked her cheek and her hair while we planned in whispers the rest of the afternoon, and the evening, and the days to come.

When she drifted off again, I moved her head to the stuffed animal she used as a pillow and covered her with one of Flora’s light blankets. I walked back through the hallway and the living room, where his paintings were. Ana was at the kitchen table with a sandwich and a magazine and she looked up as I went out the door but did not go to the window. I walked down the path. The painting was still outside, against the wall, the red paint looking wet in the sunlight.

I stepped inside, into what was our own light. He was standing over another small table, sketching in long strokes, as he had done the first night I was here. As he had done the first night I was here, he continued for a while, as if he were alone in the room, and then, idly, put the charcoal down and pulled off his glasses and turned to me.