Child of My Heart (28 page)
“What those drawings might be worth, I knew, remained to be seen. His art would come to nothing because it had been done out of desperation, or it would change everything, because it could.
“She’s asleep?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Poor kid,” he said, as if he fully understood what was coming for Daisy. And then he added, “Both of them. My poor kid, too.” As if he saw Flora’s troubled life as well.
He moved toward me. He pushed the hair off my shoulder, gently, and as he did, I put my fingertips to his wrists in what was Daisy’s gesture of affection and sympathy. I thought I could feel how thin his skin was, textured only by some drops of paint.
“And what about you?” he said, looking down at me.
“I’m fine,” I told him.
I kept my fingertips against his wrists as he undid each button of my blouse, then I reached back to sweep the shirt over my arms and onto the floor. Only a little hesitant, and with the softest intake of breath, he bent to kiss my throat, his hand in my hair. He kissed my shoulders, and as I leaned my head back into his palm, he kissed my mouth again, the taste of alcohol not nearly as strong as it had been the last time, mixed as it was now with the sweet flavor of the lollipop. He moved me toward the bed with his hand at the small of my back. He moved his hands down my hips and then slowly knelt in front of me while I put my hands on his wild white hair. I leaned back on the bed, onto the jumbled bolts and blankets of damask and silk, and shaded my eyes as he slipped out of his clothes and then stretched himself beside me, his flesh surprisingly cool, his long, pale limbs light, nearly weightless against mine. But all his movements were sure, and I trusted whatever design he followed, out of his own head, relieved, for just a few minutes, of the need to follow any design of my own. At one point there was some disruption of the sunlight that came through the open doorway, but it was momentary, a shadow passing as it will in a dream, unable to get in.
When it was gone, I got up and slipped back into my clothes, standing for just one moment under the opaque light with my shirt in my hands. He was still stretched out on the bed, the damask draped over his shoulder and his thigh. He turned to me, the back of his hand on his forehead, and watched, and I watched back. Finally, he said, “Although I can hardly see you, from here, without my glasses, I suspect you’re beautiful, standing there.”
I pulled on my shirt, lifted my hair up over my collar, and slowly closed each button.
“Back to my work,” I said.
Daisy and Flora were still sleeping. Only twenty minutes had elapsed since I’d left the room. I put the back of my hand to Daisy’s cheek, she seemed cooler, and drew the blanket up over Flora’s shoulder. I glanced at the three sketches in their gold frames and considered what their worth might be, when they had been claimed by the future and all that was pretty and charming about them was transformed by all that had intervened—the infant grown into a troubled woman, the mother never returned, the father and all his efforts turned to dust. But then, I supposed, with more time, all that would be forgotten as well, and they would once again be charming and pretty portraits of a mother and a child—not a biography, as Macduff might have said, but a novel.
I found I preferred modern art, pictures of nothing, after all.
I went out to the porch with my book. I moved one of the canvas chairs under Flora’s window. I realized that every bit of my body, every inch of my skin, felt windblown, weatherworn, pleasantly weary, except for some pain at my center, a dark, sharp jewel of it. I turned the book over, thought I heard Ana’s voice coming from the studio, perhaps crying again, or crying out. Then it was silent, only the distant breeze, the distant ocean, the birds on the lawn and in the high hedge. And then, softly, I heard Flora and Daisy. They were talking to each other, something about the tree, and the liquorice, and Mommy in New York City, something sweet and calm in the rhythm of their voices, in the gentle exchange of their words, that reminded me of my parents’ muted conversations, the perpetual sound of their voices coming through our bedroom wall as I woke or drifted to sleep. I felt a sweet, deep, sorrowful nostalgia for them, and for the days I had been in their care.
Then I heard Flora say my name, and Daisy repeat it. I called over my shoulder, toward the window, “I’m out here, girls,” and got up and went to them.
We had a snack in the kitchen, glasses of Hawaiian Punch (telling Flora, “Doesn’t it taste better in a glass?”) and some crackers, and then I went to the broom closet and found some of the old pillowcases Ana used to clean with. We carried them out to the quilt under the trees, and after we had each picked a lollipop and a liquorice string, I used the scissors to cut them into long strips that the girls knotted together to make a tail for our kite. We put the kite together on the porch, to be out of the wind, and then Flora got into the stroller and we headed for the beach, Daisy carrying the gaudy kite on her back to keep the wind from bending it. A modern-art version, it seemed to me, of angel wings.
We had used a good deal more kite string on the lollipops than I had figured, and so while the kite took off immediately, it seemed to end its ascent rather abruptly, and while with plenty of tugging and running I was able to keep it aloft pretty well, it never lost the impression, as kites sometimes will, of being tethered to the earth. This bothered me more than it bothered the girls, who chased after the kite and tried to grab its tail each time it dove toward the sand. The waves were high, coming close upon one another’s backs and crashing with that hollow, angry sound that I usually associate with bad weather. But the sky remained bright. The clouds had grown higher but they were still pure white and lit by the sun. As we stood at the edge of the water, letting the foam spill around Daisy’s feet, we spotted a ship out on the horizon, just the grayish silhouette of what seemed like a tanker heading east. We watched it moving, imperceptibly, it seemed, and then Daisy said, “I think it will be safe out there. I think the water’s pretty calm. It’s just dangerous here, where we swim.”
I looked down at her, Flora on my hip.
“You think?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” she said. And then did a gentle little two-step, just as I had instructed her, moving her feet out of the wet sand that covered them to a new spot where they could be covered again. She looked up once more.
“Yeah,” she said, as if to reassure us, “those sailors will be fine.”
Up in the parking lot, as was our routine, I had them both lean against the railing while I bent to wipe the sand off their feet. I slipped Flora’s white sandals on, then brushed off Daisy’s feet. With her clean, bruised foot resting on my thigh, I held up one of the shoes, and it caught the sun, iridescent and, I insisted, still pale blue, the very color of the sky. I held it out to Flora.
“Haven’t these turned blue?” I asked, and Flora shook her head solemnly and then told us, “The babies were crying.”
Daisy and I looked at each other and frowned. Then Daisy smiled her “Let’s indulge Flora” smile and said, “What babies, Flora Dora?”
“The babies,” Flora said, and reached out and put her fingernail to one of the little fake jewels. In an instant it was off and fallen into the sand. I leaned over to pick it up and then held it out to Daisy in the palm of my hand. It was turquoise and diamond-shaped, and the glue that had held it had left its shape on the shoe.
“We can just glue this back on, Daisy Mae,” I said.
“I’m sure we can.”
She seemed stricken, and if she had been another child-Bernadette, for instance, or one of the Morans—she might have slapped Flora’s hand. But she only shrugged, used to this kind of disappointment.
“I know,” she said.
I slipped the jewel into the pocket of my shirt, slipped the sock and the shoe over Daisy’s foot. Gently ran my hand over the bruise on the back of her calf. We walked home quietly, the sky becoming a pale orange in the west, although above us it was still bright blue. On one of the great lawns, just our side of a long split-rail fence entwined with roses, we came upon a tiny rabbit, close enough to the road that we could see its mouth moving, the reflected light in its round black eye. With a finger to my lips, I told the girls to be quiet as we crouched down to watch him, getting as close as any wild rabbit will let you get, a very young rabbit, it seemed to me, not wise enough yet to be startled.
When he’d finally hopped away, we began walking again, and I said to Daisy, “You must have told Petey you liked rabbits.”
She said, “Yeah. Remember my first day. That morning when we saw all the rabbits, when Red Rover ate my muffin?”
I said I did remember. It wasn’t so very long ago.
“We were sitting with the Scotties,” Daisy said.
“Petey told me he wasn’t allowed to have a dog and I said we weren’t either. But I was thinking of asking my father if I could have a rabbit. Because you could keep them in your room and they wouldn’t run away. And they’re so cute. I said I’d just like to pet one.”
I laughed.
“You may have started something,” I said.
At Flora’s house the car was gone and the painting was still propped up against the studio wall. There was green in it now, the color of grass, flecked here and there into the black and the gray. The cook was in the kitchen, shaking a torrent of tenderizer onto a thick steak, picking it up with her bare fingers and slapping it down again, her forearms jiggling. The overhead light was on although it was only
For a moment I found myself trying to recall that little bit of pain, somewhere at my center, fearful, for a moment, that I had lost it.
“Hello, my dears,” the cook said over her shoulder. Daisy and Flora went to the table, looking at the rolled-out dough as if it would form itself into biscuits or cookies or pie right before their eyes.
“Frenchy’s gone,” she said to me.
“He took her to the station.” She rolled her eyes, breathing heavily with her efforts in the kitchen.
“All of a sudden she remembers she hasn’t seen her husband in three weeks.” She chuckled, flipped the steak over.
“Thank God I’m a Christian,” she said.
Daisy and I got Flora into her pajamas and then delivered her to the cook, who had already set out a dinner of applesauce and warm biscuits and carrots and peas. She told us we might as well go on home. She’d get Flora to sleep. She’d brought her overnight bag, she said. Not that she didn’t think it would do him good to take care of his daughter by himself, but at his age, and with the way he liked his drink, it probably wasn’t the safest thing to leave the two of them alone.
She chuckled again to herself, and whispered to me, “I don’t suppose I’ll have to bar the door.”
Flora cried when we said goodbye, and as Daisy leaned over to kiss her good night, I noticed the brightness had returned to her cheek.
“One minute,” I said to Daisy at the door, and then went back to Flora’s room to retrieve the aspirin I’d left there this afternoon. I shook a dozen of them into my palm and then slipped them into my shirt pocket. Flora’s mother’s scarves had been taken out of the kitchen and placed neatly on Flora’s dresser. I lifted one, and saw beneath it a folded piece of heavy beige cloth, the painter’s backdrop damask that covered the studio bed. It was no more than a twelve-inch square, rough edged, cut rather quickly and unevenly by a dull scissors. In the center there was a stain, a smear of dark color.
I folded the cloth carefully, and returned it to the pile of scarves.
We walked home together in the fading summer light, holding hands, mostly quiet. At one point Daisy said suddenly, “I know what Flora meant—about the babies.” I looked down at her. The windburn, the fever had painted her cheeks, and her eyes were bright against them.
“That was the story you told, about the babies at
Lourdes
who drink the water in their bottles and then their tears turn to jewels. Remember? You told Flora. And their mothers put them on their shoes. That’s what she was thinking about when she picked the jewel off my shoe. The babies crying.”
I stood still for a moment, then dropped my head back and closed my eyes.
“You’re right,” I said.
“You’re absolutely right.”
Daisy nodded, proud of herself.
“Gosh,” I said.
“I can’t tell you kids anything. You remember everything.”
We began walking again, and softly Daisy said, “I remember Andrew Thomas.”
I put my hand to the back of her neck, lifted her thick red hair. Another gust of wind picked up the rest of it and Daisy squinted, walking into it.
“Margaret Mary Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer true,” I said.