Child of My Heart (14 page)
He sat up slowly, with some effort, but smiling, too.
“I know who you are,” he said as he swung his feet over the side.
“I’m not that senile.”
He reached between his knees to retrieve his glasses from the concrete floor, and then slowly put them on. He ran his hand over his head, but the white hair simply rose up again.
“Was I snoring?” he asked. I said I didn’t know, I just got here.
I crossed the room to hand him the glass of Scotch.
“Ana told me to bring this to you,” I said. Now he looked up at me, his eyebrows raised and his forehead wrinkled, and said, with a laugh, “I doubt that.”
But he reached out and took the glass from me anyway. He raised it before he took a sip. I imagined that if the light were better he’d be able to see me blushing. This was not my kind of lying.
“Your wife,” I went on, “doesn’t want Flora to have any more bottles. She’s trying to train her. But Ana gave her one this morning when she set her out on the porch. I know she did it to keep her quiet, so she could vacuum, but she really shouldn’t.”
He had turned his head and was looking toward the window, his elbows on his knees, the glass I had handed him between his legs. It was, I understood, another pose, a real one this time, one that was meant to convey to me that he had no interest at all in anything I was saying. So I stopped. It was not silk that was draped on the hard bed but some kind of heavy damask. For a different kind of artist it might have served as background for a pale nude. A painted one. But he didn’t paint such things.
“My cousin’s with me again today,” I said softly.
“Daisy.”
Now he turned back to look at me.
“The little redhead?”
I nodded.
“She loved it,” I said.
“Yesterday, when you let her have an aspirin.”
He was looking up at me from the bed, or the bier, or whatever it was, his eyes, through his glasses, seeming bemused, as if I were telling him something he was surprised to hear.
“She’s in awe of you,” I said.
“You’ve captured her imagination.”
He was still looking at me, both surprised and skeptical, when he reached out his hand and ran the back of his thumb down the side of my leg, a single stroke from just above my knee to just below it. Then he turned his palm and simply held the back of my knee in his hand. His fingertips were cold and wet from the glass. His sleeves were rolled back and the hair on his arms was white. His skin was pink, a little raw-looking, as if it had recently been scrubbed. Still, the thought crossed my mind that in not too many more years, it would be dust. It was a thought that let me look right at him as he touched me.
With his eyebrows raised, questioning something, he looked right back. The light in the place was just a shade grayer than it had been, which was better still, because now I knew there was color in my cheeks, and I wondered for a minute if he could feel the tremor in my knee. But I said anyway, “I appreciated your being so nice to her, she’s had kind of a rough time.”
He placed the slightest pressure against my leg, as if to draw me closer, but when I stepped back, away from him, he simply let go. He pursed his lips a bit, only one corner of his mouth smiling.
“I’ll say something to Ana,” he said softly.
“About baby bottles.” He raised the glass.
“And about sending out drinks with the babysitter.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Thanks.” Walking out, I pulled my hair back and twisted it behind me, making wings of my father’s white shirt.
When I got outside, the clouds seemed ready to do something, but I pushed the stroller down the three steps and across the gravel anyway, Daisy helping and Flora too tightly attached to her empty bottle to hum. We had just reached the road when big drops of rain began to fall, and we went scurrying back to the porch, past the studio, where both lights were now on. I put the beach quilt on the floor of the porch and went inside for Flora’s box of crayons and glue and construction paper. We were going to make a city, I said. Just like the one Flora’s mother had gone to. The
Central Park
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we’d put Flora’s father’s paintings inside. And then Flora’s mother would ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, where she’d stand out on the Observation Deck and wave her turquoise scarf until, standing on my shoulders, on the beach, Flora saw just a glimpse of it flashing up and down on the western horizon.
(And Flora stood up, went to the edge of the porch-Daisy following, hovering, worried that she might fall—and called out into the rain, “Hello, Mommy.”) And then, I said, Flora’s mother would walk up to Saks (following with our fingers the seams of the beach quilt) to find another white dress for Flora. (No, red, Flora said, eyeing Daisy.) A red dress for Flora, with red ribbons at the shoulders and red ribbons for her hair. She’d stop at St. Patrick’s, Our Lady’s Chapel, and say a prayer that Flora Dora doesn’t miss her too much, and then she’d walk up Fifth Avenue to visit the old polar bear at the zoo. (“Hello, Polar Bear,” Flora said into the pale blue quilt, “Hello there,” her hands on her plump knees, her little rear in the air, and Daisy, leaning into my lap, her head on my shoulder, said, only a little self-consciously, “Hello, Polar Bear,” too.) And then Flora’s mother would walk up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and through the hushed marble rooms until she came to the special place where Flora’s father’s painting was. And a guard would unhook the thick velvet rope, and she would walk into the beautiful room, all marble and gold and as quiet as a church, and there would be Flora, in a painting as long and as wide as her father’s arms. Flora in a white dress, framed in gold. And Flora’s mother would stand there looking at it for so long that when she finally walked back down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sky would be black and the stars would be out and all the buildings would be lit, and she would hold up her hand—like this--(Flora and Daisy followed) and say, Taxi! (Flora said, Taxi!). And as soon she got into the taxi, she’d say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what in the world am I doing here? Take me home to my little girl.”
The rain lasted only a short time that morning, and the sun came out again while the cherry trees were still dripping water onto the grass. We were on the quilt, amid the squashed and battered and scribbled-on remnants of our construction-paper city when Flora’s father came up the path. He said, “Ladies,” as he crossed the porch, and then, just before he went inside, he bent down to Daisy and without a word opened his palm.
Furtively, she took the two aspirins and slipped them into her mouth. He only glanced at me, but he winked as he did, and over Flora’s fair head I smiled at him. By the time we were ready for the beach, whatever bit of fever Daisy might have had seemed to be gone.
At the beach I changed Flora into her bathing suit under the fragrant towel, and then Flora and I made our envelope for Daisy to slip into. I caught another glimpse of the bruise on her back and thought it seemed lighter today, the yellowish green of something on its way to healing.
She took off her shoes and socks without much prompting. In the beach light the discoloration on her insteps seemed far more severe, and even Flora leaned down and looked at them with a short and sympathetic intake of breath. Daisy immediately buried her feet in the warm sand, but I distracted them both by saying it was now my turn to change. Usually, when I had just Flora with me, I would slip under a beach towel and pull off my clothes and pull on my suit in an instant, but since I had the two of them to help, I gave them each a towel and asked if they would make an envelope for me as well. I sat on the blanket and the two girls stood on either side of me, the towels outstretched in their little arms and the sun warm on my head and my shoulders. I slipped out of my father’s shirt and then pulled the T-shirt over my head, my arms rising above the curtain of the beach blankets, and then pulled off my shorts and my underwear. I leaned down to work my suit up over my feet and my legs, calling out, “Stay with me now, girls,” as I shifted my weight and rose up onto my knees, to pull the suit over my waist. I could see Flora’s side beginning to fold and I said, “One more minute, Flora Dora,” as I slipped my right arm into the suit. But I fumbled with the twisted strap on the left side and Flora fell plop backward as I did, beach towel and all, and whoever might have been watching us among the half dozen or so groups scattered on the beach would have had a good bright white glimpse of whatever little bit I had. Daisy’s mouth dropped open and she raised her beach towel to her face, as if to shield her eyes. Flora simply began to cry. I covered myself with the edge of the suit, but my arm was bare and there was no modest way to get it into the strap short of wrapping myself in a towel again, which suddenly struck me as excessive. I realized I had hunched my shoulders, too,
ini
stinctively
, I supposed, and cupped my hands over my chest.
This also struck me as excessive. So I raised myself up fully on my knees and then stood, straightening my spine.
“No one’s looking,” I said to Daisy as she took the beach towel from her own eyes. And I said, “Don’t cry, Flora Dora,” to Flora on the quilt. Making myself as tall as I could, I pulled my right arm out of the suit, pulled the suit to my waist, straightened the fabric at my hips and over my stomach and then, leisurely, drew the suit up again, one strap over my left arm and one over my right.
Daisy’s mouth was wide open, the beach towel bunched in her hands. Flora was still whining on the quilt. I bent down and scooped her up and, holding her on my hip, turned to Daisy. I could see I’d become something else in her eyes, as if I had indeed made everyone on the beach disappear.
“Come on, Daisy Mae,” I said, holding my hand out to her.
“Now let’s take care of you.”
We began that afternoon a peculiar therapy. I had Daisy stand at the shoreline, where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again.
It was nothing more than the usual game I had played all my life, that every child standing at the shoreline must surely play, but the precision of my instructions gave it a new meaning, or purpose, and although I said nothing about the water or the sand or the movement of the waves as a cure for whatever it was that had discolored her skin, Daisy obeyed with absolute seriousness and stood there, watching her feet sink into the wet sand, stepping to the left and to the right, while I took Flora out into the ocean in my arms.
She was fearless in the ocean, as long as she had her arms around my neck. I had already taught her how to hold her breath and shut her eyes when we went under together, and how to raise her chin and shut her eyes against the spray when we bobbed over a wave. Once, in a trough between waves, I pointed toward the city and said, “There’s your Mommy, Flora,” and she raised her hand and waved at the sun (gold sun in a white-and-turquoise sky, I told her, Mommy’s scarf, after all). Once, diving under with her, in the rush of bubbles and green water and the sudden underwater silence, I looked at her to see that she was looking at me, eyes wide open, face serene, pale hair floating, looking for all the world like something not yet born but fully formed, something plump and otherworldly, angelic and human, iridescent, milky white, the unlikely miraculous flesh conjured out of a stooped old man and his hard and narrow young wife. In the sun again, sound again (of ocean and seagulls and children calling), and with her wet arms around my neck and her heart beating rapidly against my chest, I planted a kiss on her salty cheek and said, Let’s go help Daisy.
We stood with her at the shoreline, all three of us watching our feet sink into the swirling water and sand. And then, suddenly, there was a fourth presence at my elbow and I turned to see Petey panting beside me. He was soaking wet and looked as if he had been rolled in sand.
His too large bathing suit was down around his bony hips and his concave stomach, and three or four of his mosquito bites were running with blood as well as seawater. Even in a place as elemental as the shore, Petey could manage to look both besieged and neglected. He said a shy “Hi” to Daisy and then pulled me by the elbow, whispering something. I had to ask him twice what he was trying to say, and finally had to lean over to put my ear to his mouth. As I did, he took a handful of my wet and matted hair and held it over his lips.
“I’ve got Daisy’s present,” he whispered.
“When are you coming back?”
I told him we’d be back around dinnertime. I looked over his head. The beach was more crowded by now, the beginning of an extended summer weekend.
“Are you by yourself?” I asked him.
“Where’s baby June?” He did not let go of my hair.
He kept it still entangled in his fingers and against his lips.
