Child of My Heart (7 page)

But, my parents said, the offer was a fluke, a stroke of tremendous luck for the Clarkes, a purely emotional gesture by the Swansons. Never mind that in another decade the Clarkes’ house would be worth more than ten times what the Swansons had paid them, for a while it seemed that the electrician and the housekeeper from Woodside had trumped the Wall Street guy from Westchester, who, the joke went, had more dollars than sense.

In the kitchen, Daisy and I changed the water and the litter box and put out the three bowls of fresh food for Moe, Larry, and Curly—who circled our legs and purred with their yours for-the-asking love and allegiance. She sat on the floor with them and laughed when they stepped across the skirt of her dress, which she had stretched taut between her two knees, or when Curly rubbed his face on the hard sides of her pink shoes.

“They’re so friendly,” she said, and I told her, “That’s how they get fed.”

As I went around opening the windows for a few minutes (an extra service Mrs. Clarke had asked me to provide), I gave Daisy a tour of the place, which even that early in the season was more Swanson than Clarke, what with the grass-cloth mats on the floors, and the elaborate vases of fading wildflowers on each table, and the children’s rooms. The Swansons had two kids, a boy and a girl (millionaire’s choice, my mother called it), Debbie and Donald, and because of them, the two guest rooms that during the Clarkes’ reign were as plain and serviceable as convent cells—unadorned beige walls, white chenille spreads, single mahogany dressers—were now colorful and chaotic, with construction-paper artwork and garish stuffed animals and painted seashells and bedspreads and curtains in bright blue and hot pink. The cats—named by Mr.

Clarke, of course, who was a short-armed man with a round, pugnacious face, a hybrid of all three of the Stooges himself-followed us in and out of every room with their tails and noses in the air, evidence of their feline assurance that no matter the decor, the place was theirs alone. I wondered if it was because of them that Daisy, peeking into one room and then the next, felt obliged to whisper.

On the third floor, which was part guest room, part unfinished attic, I showed her the short door to the widow’s watch.

In the old days, I explained, with no telephones or even telegraph, the only way a wife would know if her husband was coming home from the sea was by looking at the horizon—the straight, uninterrupted blue by day, and at night, when there was a moon, the nearly indecipherable line of inky black. She would have to look and look until his ship appeared, and at first it would be just the slightest dot, or the tiniest light, at the edge of the world, nothing more. Being able to see the ocean, I explained, was as important to the wives of sailors and ships’ captains as having a telephone or a radio, or even a mailbox, was to us, because otherwise, if you couldn’t look out and check the horizon for his boat, you’d be forced just to wait in your living room until he came through the front door. You wouldn’t know if your husband, or your son, or your father, was coming back till he walked in the front door.

Listening politely, Daisy nodded and pushed her wild hair behind her goofy ears—the obedient child who knows she’s supposed to be learning something.

“Sometimes,” Daisy said, “I sit up with my mother when my father works late.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But, see, he can always call. If he’s going to be late. He can call and say he’s on his way home. But sailors, in those days, couldn’t call.”

“She gets really worried,” Daisy said, indicating with a roll of her eyes that this was a “really” to be reckoned with.

“Whenever he’s late.”

“Well, sure,” I said.

“She gets nervous.” As if Aunt Peg ever stopped being nervous.

“Imagine what it would be like if you had to go up on the roof every night to look for his car—if there was no other way to know he was coming. Imagine what that would be like.”

She shuddered, laughing.

“That’d be funny,” she said. But still, I couldn’t convince her to step outside for a glimpse of the ocean.

Going through the rooms again to pull the windows closed, I started to sing a song my father sang—one of a hundred mournful tunes he knew—about a ship that never (ne’er) returned, and I wasn’t halfway through the refrain when Daisy joined in: “No, they ne’er returned, they ne’er returned, and their fate is still unlearned. / And from that day to this, fond hearts are watching for the ship that ne’er returned.” Hearing the words in her thin little voice, as opposed to my father’s baritone, it suddenly struck me that they weren’t delightfully melancholy and noble, as I had always thought, but wrenchingly, even cruelly sentimental. (“Said the feeble lad to his aged mother, as he kissed his weeping wife / Just one more trip, let me cross the ocean, and I’ll settle down for life .. . But he ne’er returned.”)

“How do you know that song?” I asked her, interrupting, and she said her mother sang it—which revealed it to me, for the first time, as something my father must have learned in childhood. It struck me, too, for the first time, and on Daisy’s behalf, not my own, that it was a terrible song to sing to a child, and even though I was the one who had begun to sing it—and who had broached the whole idea with my social studies lesson in sailors’ wives—it was Aunt Peg I blamed for teaching it to poor Daisy.

“I’ve never heard your mother sing,” I said, and Daisy nodded.

“She does. Mostly at night, to get us to sleep.”

I had an instant vision of Aunt Peg standing in the upstairs hallway (the Sacred Heart peering over her shoulder)--hands on her hips, her toe impatiently tapping—getting through the song as if it were yet another task to complete: “Ne’er returned, still at sea, fond hearts, still watching, life is short, life is cruel (don’t I know it) there you go, off to bed, done”—and I began to do an imitation of her as Daisy and I marched down the stairs to shut the remaining windows. Daisy joined in, and by the time we’d locked the kitchen door again and returned the key to the flowerpot under the porch step, we were singing at the top of our lungs, fast and furious, clipping off the words—“that-day-to-this”—until, on about the twelfth repetition, I shouted, instead of “fond hearts,” “hard farts,” and Daisy, face red, her hands flying to her mouth (check off another of Uncle Jack’s no-no’s), doubled over in shame and delight. Shame and delight being, it seemed to me, a fine antidote for the song’s dreary message about the cruelty of time and fate, and the useless longings of all of us who get left behind.

On to Flora’s.

The side gate for Flora’s house was easy to miss, which made it a better alternative to the more obvious driveway entrance another quarter mile down the road.

“Here we are,” I said to Daisy, suddenly pausing in the middle of the street, and the lovely thing was that she looked up first, into the trees, before her eyes fell on the narrow wrought-iron gate that had been placed across what was essentially a child-sized hole in the thick and brambly hedge.

“Here?” she said, and I said, “Here.”

The hedge was so high and overgrown that there was, of course, no evidence of anything that lay beyond it, which no doubt made her hesitate after we crossed the little berm of grass and I began to pull against the stubborn hinges.

“Go ahead,” I said, holding the gate, but she paused.

“It’s okay?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I told her.

“Just a back door.” Still, she looked at me warily until I put my hand on her shoulder and scooted her along.

“They put this gate here just for us,” I said.

“They call it the caretaker’s gate. It’s just for us.” Still cautious, she went ahead, passing rather elegantly under the low and tangled bower that I had to stoop (brush of leaf and branch against my hair) in order to clear.

Inside, the path was mostly grown over—only a sprinkling of tiny rocks and sand here and there among the weeds and the fallen branches. The path ran through a pretty substantial wood, this whole side of the property was heavily wooded, and because the sunlight came in stripes—thick shafts of it, ahead of us and to either side—the undergrowth still felt damp and the air a little musty. Suddenly the sun, which had been growing progressively, appropriately, warmer on our heads throughout the morning, seemed to have lost its pace, or its rhythm ---its certainty, anyway—and for a moment I felt we could have been passing through any time of day at all, early morning, late afternoon, and nearly any season. I mentioned this to Daisy and she said, “It’s nice.” There was the scurry of salamanders or field mice near our feet, and the crossing shadows of birds high up in the leaves. I stopped to break a stalk of milkweed for Daisy, and she nodded earnestly, as she did at everything I had to show her. I took her hand. Cathedral light, to be sure, and the smell of damp earth and wet wood and, as I began to see the shape of Flora’s house through the trees, the faint whiff of paint or turpentine, or whatever it was that Flora’s father was using—something to do with art, anyway.

He was out on the driveway, standing behind an old door set across two sawhorses and stirring a small can of paint.

There was a canvas placed upright against the garage wall. It was about the width and the length of a man’s arms, and there were already a few dribbles of black and gray paint scattered across it. There were four more cans on the makeshift table, each with its collar of spilled color—white, gray, black, and even, I was happy to see, bright red. He had some sketches on the table as well, and he was studying these as he stirred, staring at them in that same vaguely disinterested way he had looked at his work the first night I came here—assessing it by some criteria I couldn’t begin to imagine or understand. There was a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and when Daisy’s hard shoes hit the gravel drive, he looked up for a moment, squinting through the smoke just long enough to determine what it was that had emerged into the sunshine from the path through the woods, and then—he may have laughed a little-going back to his work. I waved, just to be polite, and edged Daisy back onto the grass to quiet her footsteps.

“Is that the artist?” she whispered. I told her it was, and then I told her not to stare.

“He’s very old,” she said, turning back.

“He’s Flora’s father,” I answered, as if to contradict her.

The housekeeper met us at the front door and said in her agitated and accented English that the lady went into the village for a few minutes with the baby but would be back right away, we should wait. I put our beach bag down beside the door and then crossed the porch and sat on the step, Daisy beside me. The front porch was long and low, with a few white canvas chairs scattered across it and a pair of ashtrays on tall white pedestals placed in between them. The front lawn was wide and planted with three small weeping-cherry trees, which I told Daisy we would someday hang with lollipops and maybe candy necklaces or strings of liquorice, to give Flora a treat. We leaned over our knees. The tips of her pink shoes were darkened with dew and I touched the little jewels to see if the dampness had loosened them. It hadn’t. I drew a tic-tac toe in the sandy dirt at our feet and was just letting her win the second game when we heard him say, “Excuse me, ladies.”

And then he was stepping between us, his canvas shoes and khaki pants speckled with paint, his ankles bare, an unearthly shade of yellowish white and deep pink. There was a whiff of cigarette smoke and turpentine in his clothes. As soon as he went into the house, Daisy stood and walked to the end of the path, leaning out so she could see the canvas against the garage wall. She turned and looked at me.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“It’s a painting,” I said.

“What’s it of?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know. Something in his head.”

Impressed, she looked at it again.

“But what?” I heard her say. Behind me, the door opened, and I moved my knees aside to let him pass. Pant legs and strange, soft shoes (I’d never seen a man wear such shoes) and in his hand, held low by his thigh, a short glass with ice and some brownish alcohol in it—the sudden scent of Uncle Tommy in the air. His fingers and the back of his wrist were sinewy and old and flecked with dark paint. Daisy turned to look at him, her mouth open and her eyes wide—he might have been a dragon passing by—and as he passed her, he lightly touched his hand to her head, the way you would just idly touch a fence post or a garden statue.

Quickly Daisy came back to the steps to sit beside me, her pink shoes drawn up under the floral skirt. He did not return to the table with the paints, or to his sketches, but went instead through the side door of the garage—we saw the bare light bulb come on in the far window—and was still there when his wife’s car pulled into the drive.

Flora was in the back seat, crying. Her mother got out immediately, her face severe, and said to me, without pause or greeting, “Would you get her out, please?” And then walked into the house, her sandals flapping against her bare heels, spitting up bits of gravel as she went. In the car, Flora was pinned to the upholstery by an elaborate harness made of her mother’s silk scarves, one across her waist, two tied bandolier style across her chest, and each secured to the black cloth seat by huge diaper pins. I said, “Hi, there, Flora Dora,” and she kicked her feet and pulled at the scarves across her chest and whined, but in a half-hearted way that made it clear her tears were subsiding.

“You look like you’ve been kidnapped by Gypsies,” I said. She had been crying for quite some time. Her little face was swollen with it, her already unremarkable features further diminished by the crying she had done. I knelt beside her on the car seat, brushed some thin hair from her wet forehead, and, as I unpinned the scarves one at a time, began to tell her about Daisy, who was just behind me on the driveway. Still sniffling, Flora leaned forward to see her. Daisy came all the way from New York on the train, I told her, all by herself, and Daisy has six brothers, three big ones and three little ones, a matching set, and a sister named Bernadette, named after another little girl who once saw the Blessed Virgin Mary, the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen, while she was out playing with her friends, in a grotto by a stream in another country far away, the same country where Paris is, and the Eiffel Tower. And now when sick people go to France and drink the water from that stream, they get better, and when old people drink it, they get young again, and when crying babies drink it in their bottles, they begin to smile, and all their tears turn into lovely jewels that their mothers pluck from their cheeks and put into rings and necklaces and bracelets, some even glue them to their shoes, the way Daisy’s mother did.