Child of my Heart
by
Alice McDermott


Also by Alice McDermott

A Bigamist's Daughter

That Night

At Weddings and Wakes Charming Billy

Child of My Heart.  Alice McDermott.  Child of My Heart.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ip Union Square West, New York 1000)

Copyright 2002 by Alice McDermott

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas & Mcintyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2002

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDermott, Alice.

Child of my heart / Alice McDermott.-- ist ed.

p. cm.

ISBN o-)j4i2i2)-o

1. Teenage girls--Fiction.  2. Beauty, Personal--Fiction.  3. Long
Island (N.Y.)--Fiction.  4. Babysitters--Fiction.  J. Cousins-Fiction.
I. Title.

PStf6).C)K C4?  2002 8ij'.}4--dc2i

2002060.764

Designed by Abby Kagan www.fsgbooks.com } 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Harriet Wasserman

Child of My Heart.

I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, Moran kids, Daisy,
my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local
artist.  There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three
of them, that had been left under our back steps.  They were wet and
blind, curled up like grubs and wrapped in a kind of gray caul--so
small it was difficult to know if their bodies moved with the beating
of their hearts or the rise of their breaths.  Not meant to live, as my
parents had told me, being wild things, although I tried for nearly a
week to feed them a watery mixture of milk and torn clover.  But that
was late August.

Late in June, Daisy arrived, the middle child of my father's only
sister.  She came out by herself on the Long Island Railroad, her name
and address written on a piece of torn brown paper and attached to her
dress with a safety pin.  In my bedroom, which she was to share, I
opened her suitcase, and a dozen slick packages slid out--tennis sets
and pedal-pusher sets, Bermuda shorts and baby doll pajamas and
underwear, all brand-new and still wrapped in cellophane.  There was
a

brand-new pair of sneakers as well, the cheap, pulled-from-a bin kind,
bound together with the same plastic thread that held their price tag,
and another, even cheaper pair of brittle pale pink slip-ons studded
with blue and turquoise jewels.

Princess shoes.  Daisy was vain about them, I could tell.  She asked me
immediately--she was the shy child of strict parents so most of what
she said involved asking for permission--if she could take off the worn
saddle shoes she had traveled in and put them on.

"I won't wear them outside till Sunday," she promised.  She had the
pale blue, nearly translucent skin of true redheads, a plain wisp of a
child under the thick hair and the large head.  It made no difference
to me what kind of shoes she wore, and I told her so.  I was pretty
sure they were meant to be bedroom slippers anyway.

"Why wait for Sunday?"  I said.

Kneeling among the packages that made up her wardrobe, I asked, "Didn't
you bring any old clothes, Daisy Mae?"  She said her mother had told
her that whatever else she needed to wear she could borrow from me.  I
was fifteen that summer and already as tall as my father, but my entire
life's wardrobe was stored in the attic, so I knew what she meant.
Daisy herself had six brothers and a sister, and even at fifteen I knew
that my aunt and uncle resented what they saw as the lavish time and
money my parents spent on me, an only child.  I knew, in the way
fifteen-year-old girls know things--intuitively, in some sense; in some
sense based purely on the precise and indifferent observation of a
creature very much in the world but not yet of it--that Daisy's parents
resented any number of things, not the least of which, of course, was
Daisy.  She was only one of what must have been to them a long series
of unexpected children.  Eight over the course of ten years, when

apparently what they had been aiming for was something more like two
or three.

Just the winter before I had spent a weekend with them in their tidy
house in Queens Village.  I had come up from East Hampton precisely to
take poor Daisy (to us, she was always "poor Daisy") into Manhattan to
see the Christmas show at Radio City.  My Aunt Peg, my father's sister,
picked me up at the Jamaica station and immediately dropped the hint
that it was impolite and unfair of me not to have invited Bernadette,
her twelve-year-old, to come along, too.  Aunt Peg was a thin and wiry
woman, only, it seemed, a good night's sleep away from being pretty.
Under her freckles, her dry skin was pale, and her thick, brittle hair
was a weary, sun-faded shade of auburn.  Even as she drove, she had a
way of constantly leaning forward, as if into a wind, which of course
added to her air of determined efficiency.  (I could well imagine her
pushing a shopping cart through the Great Eastern Mills in Elmont,
pulling shorts sets and tennis sets from the crowded bins--one, two,
three, four, underwear, pajamas, shoes--dumping all of them directly
from shopping bag to suitcase, toss in a hairbrush and a toothbrush,
slam the case, done.) "Bernadette will have to find her own fun
tomorrow" was the way she put it to me, leaning into the steering wheel
as if we were all headed downhill.

Their house was at the bottom of a dead-end street: narrow, painted
brick, with a long driveway and a shingled garage and a square little
back yard big enough for only an umbrella clothesline and a
long-disused sandbox.  Upstairs there were three bedrooms, and then up
another flight of stairs, hidden behind a door, a finished attic that
served as a kind of dormitory

for the three older boys.  There was the odor of children about the
place--endemic to any house I have ever visited with more than three
kids living in it--a distillation of the domestic scents of milk and
wet socks combined with the paper and paste and industrial-strength
disinfectant of elementary school hallways.  Despite the number of
people living in the small house, there was a remarkable sense of order
about the rooms, most especially in my aunt and uncle's bedroom, which
was at the head of the stairs.  It was a small, square room with one
large window that looked out into the street.  It held a high
four-poster bed, a tall dresser (his) and a low bureau (hers) with a
mirror, two night tables, and a straight-backed chair with a tapestry
seat.  The curtains that crisscrossed the window were white lace. There
was a crucifix above the bed, a large oil painting of the Sacred Heart
on the far wall--the first thing you saw when you looked into the room
from the hallway--a mostly blood-red Oriental carpet on the floor.
There was only one photograph in the room: my aunt and uncle's wedding
picture.

No sign, in other words, of the eight children that had been conceived
on the double mattress, under the eternally smooth bedspread.
Explanation enough, it seemed to me, for the apparent forgetfulness on
their part that had yielded all those unexpected pregnancies.  With the
bedroom door pulled closed, they couldn't have found it difficult to
make themselves believe that they were perfectly free to begin again.

Uncle Jack was a transit cop.  He had a pitted, handsome face, dark
eyes, thin lips, and a thousand and one inscrutable but insurmountable
rules regarding his home and his children.

No one, for instance, was to walk on the front lawn.  Or sit on

the bumper of his car when it was parked in the driveway.  No one was
to call out from an upstairs window when someone was at the front door.
No one was to play handball against the garage, or stoop ball against
the stoop.  There was no going barefoot around the house.  No getting
up from the dinner table without a precise answer to the precise
question "May I please be excused?"  No sitting on the curb or standing
under the streetlight.  No dishes left in the dish drainer.  No phone
calls from friends after 6 p.m. No playing down in the basement after
eight.  No sleeping on the couch--day or night, in sickness or in
health--which put me in the smallest of the three bedrooms with Daisy
and Bernadette, Daisy on the rickety army cot because I was the guest
and because Bernadette was not going to have the wonderful day in the
city that Daisy was getting the next morning, so she might as well,
said Aunt Peg, at least have a good night's sleep.

I didn't much care for Bernadette--she was plain and chubby, but, more
to the point, she was also extremely smart, which made her mean.  It
was as if she had already weighed the value of her intelligence against
the value the world would assign it and knew instinctively that she
would be gypped.  Although I always attempted to feel sorry for her, I
was more successful at feeling a smug satisfaction as I placed my
overnight bag on Daisy's bed and realized that all of Bernadette's
Honor Roll certificates plastering the walls could not earn her my
affection, or my company.  Because whatever sympathy her forlorn
expression might have elicited as she watched me from her frilly,
dancing-ballerinas bedspread (a bedspread meant for another kind of
child altogether) was dissipated by her questions

about how I tolerated living "way out at the end of Long Island" after
all the interesting summer people had gone.

She refused to come along on a walk.  It was too cold for walking, she
said.  There was nothing worth walking to, anyway, not around here--as
if she alone had some experience of a better place, a place filled with
worthy destinations.  I understood even then that this cool disdain of
hers was the last refuge of the homely (generosity and sweetness--which
was what she saved for adult company--being the next to last), and was
glad enough to leave her to it.  There is no misanthrope like a chubby
misanthrope.  Daisy and I were free, then, to slip through the slight
jog of space between the tall hurricane fence that ran along my
cousins' property and the chain-link that ran along their neighbors',
into an alleyway that no doubt had some part in Uncle Jack's listed
prohibitions.  It ran behind the series of dead ends that made up the
neighborhood, and was broken here and there by even smaller paths that
led between other narrow yards and other houses and out into other
streets.  We followed these smaller passageways randomly, emerging from
between fenced winter gardens and storage sheds, or battered garbage
cans and tangles of abandoned bicycles, onto streets neither one of us
had ever seen before.  I was, of course, within half an hour, totally
lost, but Daisy held my hand with complete confidence, marveling, I
could tell, at just how I knew where to turn.

When we came out onto a broad boulevard divided by a series of lacy,
winter-bare willows, I heard her catch her breath.

All the little houses here had front sun rooms and by some wonderful
neighborhood consensus every windowpane of every one of them had been
decorated with a sprayed-on

parabola of snow.

"We're in Bavaria," I said, and Daisy whispered, "We are?"  as if this
were a surprise, and a destination, I had planned for her.  And then
real snow began to fall.  If you had seen the way she glanced up at the
sky, you'd have thought I'd planned this, too.  It accumulated first on
the grass, and then, more rapidly, on the street and sidewalk.  Our
footprints were the first to mark it.  We walked down the narrow
divide, under the thin willow branches as they gathered snow, unable to
tell if it was the yellow sky that was darkening above us or only the
thickening canopy of coated trees.  We threw back our heads and opened
our mouths and stuck out our tongues and felt the snowflakes in our
eyes and on our bare throats.  When other children started to come out
of the houses behind us, shouting, optimistically scraping sleds over
sidewalks, we ran to get away from them, up to Jamaica Avenue, where
the streetlights were already on.  It was that odd light of early
winter, afternoon turning prematurely to steel-blue night.  We went
into a candy store on a corner, its entrance already slick with wet
footprints and its smell of newsprint and candy bars and the cold
overcoats of men just up from the subway making us feel we had indeed
traveled a long way.

At the counter, I bought us each a hot chocolate with the extra money I
always put in my shoe when I took the Long Island Railroad.  It was
lovely stuff, made with hot water, not milk, and topped with whipped
cream from a cold silver can.  It was served in chipped and yellowing
cups and saucers that smelled faintly of coffee--the warm rims of the
cups delightfully dry and thick against our lips.  Drinking it, we
pretended to speak French--tossing the word chocolate back and forth
between us--and hugging the cups like Europeans, our elbows

on the counter.  (Cup-hugging and elbows on the table being, of
course, Daisy said, two more of her father's taboos.) After I paid, I
asked for directions home from the man at the register, pretending I
was only out to confirm what I already knew, although I'm not sure
Daisy would have noticed anyway.  There was a barrel of lollipops
beside the newspaper rack, a handwritten sign, TWO FOR A NICKEL.  Her
parents had made her too polite to ask for one, so I casually bought a
hundred of them, refusing a paper bag and stuffing them instead into
our pockets, pant pockets and coat pockets, and then lifting the hem of
her sweater to form another pocket and filling it as well.

When we got back to the house, we dumped all of them over her brothers
and Bernadette, who were lying on the living-room floor watching their
allotted hour of television before dinner.  The lollipops in their
wrappers were wet with snow, some were muddy from where we had dropped
them on the walk home.

"Where did you get these?"  Bernadette asked, and before Daisy could
answer, I said, "We found a lollipop tree.  You should have come."  The
boys said, "Yeah, sure," but Bernadette couldn't resist grilling us on
the particulars, her eyes narrowed, her thin mouth opened skeptically,
showing the little blowfish teeth.

A house on the boulevard, I said.  A willow tree.  A huge willow tree
filled with lollipops for the taking.  The tree belongs to an old
couple, I said, whose only child, a little boy, had dreamed of a
lollipop tree in his front yard on the night he died, fifty years ago
this very day.  Once a year and only on this day, I said, they make his
dream come true by filling their willow tree with lollipops.  (And the
odd thing is, I said, it was

snowing in his dream, too, and it snows every year on this date the
minute the old couple hangs the last lollipop on the tree.) They invite
children from miles around.  I'm surprised you guys have never heard
about it before.  The old couple serves hot chocolate out on their lawn
while the children collect the lollipops from the tree.  They hire tall
men to help lift the smaller children high into the branches.  The
single rule is that you can pick only as many lollipops as you can
carry home-no paper bags or suitcases, oh, and that the picking lasts
for just one hour, from dusk to nightfall, to the second the first star
appears.

Corresponding to their son's last hour on earth, since the evening star
in the dark blue winter sky was the first thing the old couple had
noticed when they went to the bedroom window only a minute after the
doctor had pulled a blanket up over his peaceful little face.

Although Bernadette squinted skeptically through it all, the boys had
their backs to the TV set by the time I'd finished.

"We'll have to go next year," Jack Jr.  said softly.  But Bernadette
turned on Daisy.

"Is this true?"  she demanded.  Daisy shrugged her thin shoulders.
There was a remnant of hot chocolate on her upper lip and the top of
her wiry hair was darkened by a little skullcap of melted snow.

"You should have come," she said matter-of-factly, skirting the lie. At
eight o'clock my parents called to say that in order to keep the peace,
I would have to ask Bernadette to join us tomorrow, which I did, much
to my aunt's grudging satisfaction.

Bernadette, of course, was not the walker Daisy was and found the huge,
winking tree in Rockefeller Center a meager distraction from her cold
toes.  She found no enchantment in the silver

knobs and glass pockets of the Automat.  She refused to follow a woman
in pancake makeup and fur coat, clearly a Rockette, through the crowds
in order to discover the Music Hall's secret stage door.  She
complained so vehemently about the taste of the roasted chestnuts I had
bought from a stand in the park that Daisy and I could no longer
pretend to enjoy them.  She couldn't believe Radio City Music Hall
didn't sell popcorn.  She couldn't be convinced to hop on a downtown
bus just to "see" Greenwich Village.  She complained of a stomachache
the whole train ride home and then sabotaged the day completely by
asking her mother that evening to go and tell me that sometime during
the course of the afternoon she had been visited by her "friend."  I
suppose it was an apology of sorts, for what a whiner she had been.  Or
maybe it was just an excuse.  A plea for sympathy from a being as
discouraged by herself, by the humorless personality, the unshakable
intelligence, the heavy face and limbs--none of which she would have
chosen had the choice been hers--as was everyone else.

I told my aunt that I understood, and smiled warmly at Bernadette in
her pajamas, but when I invited Daisy into my bed that night, or back
into her own bed, I curled around her little body and, while her sister
slept and bled, promised a summer visit, all by herself, a week or two,
or three or four-as many as her father would allow.  Just the two of
us, I whispered.

Would she be brave enough to take the train out by herself?  In the
darkness she nodded.  She would.

My OWn parents had moved out to Long Island when I was two years old.
They had done so because they knew by then that I

was the only child they would ever have--they were already in their
mid-forties--and that I would be good-looking.  Unusually so.  A young
Elizabeth Taylor was the immediate word.

(Later, among the East End crowd, it was a young Jackie Kennedy.) Blue
eyes and dark hair and full lips and pale skin.

A somewhat startling change from the red-haired or red-faced relatives
who leaned over my crib, speculating, as they would continue to do
until I was in my thirties, if I wasn't evidence of some French blood
in the family.  But my mother claimed that my looks were due only to
the intercession of St.  Theresa of the Little Flower, my Gallic patron
saint--which was her homely and pious way of deflecting both their
vanity provoking praise and the notion that somewhere in our Irish
heritage there had been dropped a tincture of impious blood.

Being who they were--children of immigrants, well-read but
undereducated--my parents saw my future only in terms of how I would
marry, and they saw my opportunities narrowed by the
Jewish/Irish/Polish/Italian kids who swarmed the city and the close-in
neighborhoods where they could afford to buy a home.  They moved way
out on Long Island because they knew rich people lived way out on Long
Island, even if only for the summer months, and putting me in a place
where I might be spotted by some of them was their equivalent of
offering me every opportunity.

It hardly mattered that we lived in a two-bedroom house that had once
been a fisherman's cottage, or that our neighbors, the Morans, piled
bedsprings and car parts in their front yard, or that both my parents
had to commute to Riverhead to work.  Proximity to wealth was what they
were after, and to that end, they encouraged me to answer ads for
summer

babysitter or mother's helper from the time I was ten or so, driving
me to my June interviews in order to check out the size of the house
and the pool and the number of servants before I accepted the job.
Walking into those interviews, across high ceilinged entry ways that
opened onto the sea, or around back to a pool where the lady of the
house--always slim and already tanned--would remove her sunglasses at
my approach, I must have fit right into the pretty summer dreams those
pretty young mothers had had back on Fifth Avenue in March.  I was
hired immediately, first time out, although I was only ten and Mrs.
Carew had been looking for a teenager.  By the next summer, I was in
demand--having been checked out thoroughly by the other young mothers
at the Maidstone Club and the Main Beach.  Pretty, intelligent, mature
in speech although undeveloped physically (another plus), well immersed
in my parents' old-fashioned Irish Catholic manners (inherited from
their parents, who had spent their careers in service to this very
breed of American rich), and, best of all, beloved by children and
pets.

I don't know how to account for it, my way with small creatures.

Nor did it ever occur to me to try.  Because I was a child myself when
I began to take care of other children, I saw them from the start as
only a part of my realm, and saw my ascendance as a simple matter of
hierarchy--I was the oldest (if only by a year or two) among them, and
as such, I would naturally be worshipped and glorified.  I really
thought no more of it than that.  And when they clung to me and petted
me, when the boys, lovesick, put their heads in my lap and the girls
begged to wear my rings or comb my hair, I simply took it as my due.  I
was Titania among her fairies (the summer I was

thirteen I even named the Kaufman kids Cobweb and Pease blossom, to
their unending delight); and the dogs and cats and bunnies and gerbils
that seemed to follow their young owners in their affection were only
doing what nature, in our little realm, prescribed.

Ironically, it was my way with pets that caused me more trouble with my
employers than my way with children-because while on occasion a mother
would pretend to be hurt by a child's insistence on my company if a
nightmare woke her from a nap or if a knee was scraped, fathers were
genuinely offended by their pets' changes in loyalty.  I remember in
particular one young black Lab, Joker was his name, who would not leave
my side, not even for a run on the beach with his down for-the-weekend
master, not even when I urged him to go ahead, pushed him to his feet,
whispered into his velvet ear.  He would only slowly wag his tail at
the sound of my voice and then sit down again at my feet--much laughter
from the children on the porch or the beach blanket, much consternation
from the rejected owner.  I gathered from the children the next summer
that there had been some advocacy on the father's part not to have me
back.

If there was any trick, any knack, to my success as a minder of
children, it was, I suppose, the fact that I was as delighted with my
charges as they were with me.  Although I had spent my own childhood in
what seemed to me a kind of leafy green contentment, I had been alone
much of the time, as happens with only children of older, working
parents--especially only children of older parents who live in a
village filled with summer houses and temporary residents--and the time
I spent with my charges was probably the longest stretch of time I
had

ever spent with anyone other than my parents and myself.  As a result,
I didn't have to devise games and entertainments for the children I
watched, I had only to include them in the ongoing games and
entertainments I had devised for myself long ago.

And then there were the Morans.  Except for an elderly couple I saw
only when my mother sent me to their house with a jar of beach-plum
jelly or a basket of tomatoes from our garden or the extra bluefish my
father had caught, the Morans were our only full-time neighbors.  In my
earliest memories, Mr.  Moran lived in his house alone.  I have the
impression I thought then he was a retired sea captain--maybe my father
had made some joke about it that I had misinterpreted (he often
referred to Mr.  Moran as being "three sheets to the wind"--a
nautical-enough reference for a six-year-old), or maybe my Uncle Tommy,
my mother's dissipated younger brother, told me the tale and I believed
him (because if I inherited my way with children and animals from
anyone, it must have been from Tommy).  Or maybe it was just the way
Mr.  Moran looked--bowlegged and Popeye-thin, with a constant two-day
growth of beard.  His house was behind and perpendicular to ours,
surrounded by a tall hedge that obscured all but the gravel driveway
and a bit of his overgrown lawn.  I don't recall seeing much of him
then.  I'd hear him singing sometimes on the other side of the hedge
when I played alone in our back yard--burring, Celtic folk songs that I
took to be sea chanties--and I'd sometimes see my father chatting with
him over our split-rail fence or at the dock in Three Mile Harbor,
where they both kept their boats.  On occasion, the town police would
pull into Mr.  Moran's driveway--bringing him home, my father would
explain, after a "bender"--and twice

my parents had to summon the police for him themselves:

once when he appeared at our door at dinnertime with his lip gashed
open and blood pouring from his mouth; another time when they
discovered him out cold on our side lawn, his face in the grass and his
pants down around his ankles (too late, they had tried to shield my
eyes, but not before I got a quick, bone chilling glimpse of a mound of
a pale adult backside, as gray and lonesome as a sand dune in winter).
Not long after this, Sondra, Mr.  Moran's daughter, and her family
moved into the ramshackle house.

It was the winter before I took my first mother's helper job with Mrs.
Carew.  Sondra was a bleached blonde in those Marilyn Monroe/Jayne
Mansfield days when being a bleached blonde made for instant glamour.
She wore a black lambskin jacket and had a baby in her arms and three
more toddling, towheaded children around her.  On that first day, there
was no sign of their father.  They arrived in a wood-paneled station
wagon that for the next week was left parked and unpacked by the side
of the road.  My mother had seen them all arrive from our kitchen
window, and it wasn't an hour or two later that I stepped out our back
door and found the three little ones draped over the wide wooden plank
of our tree swing.  Although it must have been January or February and
the winter chill of the ocean was in the air, only one of them, the
girl, wore a jacket and a hat.  The two boys were in sweatshirts and
pajama bottoms.  All three wore socks on their hands but none on their
feet, which became abundantly clear when one of the boys (Petey as it
turned out), not ten seconds after I'd said hello to him, leaned too
far over the seat of the swing and landed headfirst on an exposed and
frozen tree root.

Rivulets of blood running over a pink scalp, running through the
stubble of their white-blond hair, will remain for me forever the
emblem of the Moran kids.

Nobody ever paid me for minding them, but from that day forward I had
only to walk out our back door to find one or more of them suddenly in
my care.  They'd be slumped against our fence, all four, eventually all
five, of them, locked out of their own home by their raging parents, or
one or the other would be sitting bereft in our yard, tears streaking
dirty cheeks, blood, more often than not, coming from somewhere --a
scraped elbow, a scratched mosquito bite.  It got so that when I
brought one of them inside to wash the cut and the dirty hands and
face, I could pretty much name the date and place of every other scar I
found on them as well.

Sondra's husband arrived a week or so later, a vague figure coming and
going, sometimes in dark suits, sometimes in jeans, sometimes, I
suspect, in the guise of another man altogether.

She fought with him, and with her old father, exchanging curses and
throwing things and then screeching out of the driveway in her car at
any hour of the day or night, the children left in her wake seeming to
settle behind her, in the road, on our lawn, across our back steps,
like the detritus of some explosion.

Every once in a while the Moran kids would show up with a new pet,
sometimes a cat or a dog they had found, a length of clothesline tied
around its neck, sometimes a turtle or a salamander or a fledgling
bird.  These, too, of course, would eventually fall into my care, at
least until they ran away or died or were claimed by their real owners.
Two of them came and

went regularly: Rags, a mangy but sweet little mutt, and Garbage, an
orange tabby cat.

The summer Daisy came, I had limited my babysitting duties to Flora,
the artist's child, but had also supplemented my pay with a couple of
dog-walking and cat-sitting arrangements with some of the people in the
neighborhood.  Flora was easy enough.  She was two and a half and
mostly docile, and my charge was to pick her up every morning and, if
the weather was good, push her in her stroller to the beach, give her
lunch there, let her take her nap, and then bring her home again at
four or five so the housekeeper could bathe her and put her to bed.  On
rainy days, I would play with her in her room or walk her back to my
house, where I would have to keep her, like some delicate china vase,
just slightly beyond the full grasp of the Moran kids' dirty hands. She
was tiny for her age, with very little hair, and her mother dressed her
always in loose white dresses, like a baby in a painting.  Her mother
was some kind of dancer or actress.  She was thin and tall, with
something severe about her face--a sharp nose and high cheekbones and a
narrow mouth, a certain gray roughness to her otherwise flawless skin
that would put you in mind of expertly poured concrete.  She was a good
thirty or forty years younger than Flora's father, the artist--maybe
more.  He was an unremarkable old man, glasses, khaki pants, a stoop.
He had a long thatch of white hair that seemed to rise over his head
like a pure white tongue of smoky fire.  I don't think I ever figured
out just where it took root, but it seemed to me that his hair moved
constantly, like a flame--perhaps fanned by the constant stirring of
his artistic brain.  My parents said he was

supposed to be a genius.  He painted huge abstracts in a garage-sized
studio beside the house, and sometimes out on the gravel driveway
itself.  They weren't particularly colorful or interesting pictures,
but he had done some sketches of Flora and his wife that hung in
Flora's bedroom, and these were good enough to make me believe he
actually knew what he was doing.

The first time I baby sat for Flora he gave me a bit of his work.  It
was an evening in the early spring, the April before Daisy came.  They
had called me at the last minute because their housekeeper had missed
her train from the city and they had an affair to attend (or so it was
put to me by my mother, who took the phone call) in Southampton.  My
father dropped me at the door and the cook let me in.  I found him
sitting at a narrow desk in their long, low living room.  He was
waiting for his wife and he was drawing, scrawling really, two or three
charcoal lines on sketch paper.  As soon as he had done one, he threw
it on the floor and began another.  I introduced myself and he said,
still drawing, that the girls would be right out.  He sat sideways at
the little desk, his long legs crossed, drawing, tossing, drawing
again.  As I waited (sitting on the edge of what seemed a quite modern
and impractical white leather couch), he must have gone through fifty
pieces of paper, and from what I could see, the pattern of marks on
each one was exactly the same.  When Flora toddled into the room, he
barely looked up, not even when she stepped on some of his strewn
papers.  She was in a white nightgown and her thin hair rose straight
up like her father's.  A pretty child in her own, odd way.  I showed
her the magazine I'd been paging through, and without hesitation she
leaned against my knees.  She was on

my lap by the time her mother came in (dressed, as I recall, in
something elegant and vaguely Chinese), and as I received my usual
instructions about where they would be and what lights should be left
on when Flora went to sleep, I noticed that he continued drawing and
tossing his drawings on the floor.  Then suddenly, without a word to
him, his wife leaned down to kiss her daughter's head, turned her long
nose toward the front door, and followed it out.  I had a moment when I
wondered if he was going along.  I even wondered if he was the husband
at all and not some visiting grandfather I'd be expected to mind as
well.  I kept talking to Flora about the pictures in the magazine,
keeping her distracted from her mother's departure but watching him,
too, from the corner of my eye.  He drew a few more sketches and then,
answering to no call, like a man alone in a room, he slowly stood,
paused, and then, still standing, leaned over the desk to draw the
pattern once more.  Flora and I by this time had gone through the
magazine and she now had me by the hand and was pulling me toward a
basket of books beside her father's desk.  He looked up and saw her and
smiled distractedly, and then he looked at me.  He took off his
glasses.  He had that delicate, almost crinkling, thin skin you see in
old men.  The piece of charcoal was in his hand and had dirtied his
fingertips.  He gave me a different kind of smile, rolling the charcoal
between thumb and forefinger, taking me in.  His white hair moved as if
caught in a soft breeze.

"I hear you're a babysitter par excellence," he said--not the way I
would say it, but the way someone who really spoke French would say it.
I told him I just liked children.  He nodded slowly, as if this were a
sad but complex piece of information, and then, putting on his glasses,
he turned back to his sketch.  He

signed it with the charcoal and then handed it to me, over Flora's
head.

"Take this home and frame it, then," he said.

"It'll help you put all your own kids through college."  It was
unremarkable enough--a loop, a line, a thing like a chicken leg--also
vaguely Oriental.  The paper was thick and lovely, though.  After he
left (strolling toward the door as if it were an arbitrary destination,
although I could see when he opened it the headlights of the car where
she sat, I could hear the impatient idling of the engine), I placed it
between the pages of a Life magazine and put it on the table by the
front door so I wouldn't forget it.  I thought less of how it would
help me to put my kids (all my kids) through college than of what an
embarrassment it would be to him if I didn't bother to take it home. He
might well have been a genius, a famous artist, a man whose signature
and doodles were valuable, but I was fifteen and pretty and I didn't
doubt for a moment that I was the one with the advantage here.

The next morning, Flora asked for me as soon as she woke up and then
cried when she understood that I wasn't still in the house, and so her
indulgent mother called me to ask if I'd like to take Flora for a walk
in her stroller, and then asked if I would do the same every day after
school and then full time when summer came.  If summer comes, she said,
with some melodrama, because it had been cold and damp and overcast for
weeks, and she was, she said, bored, bored, bored to be out here so
early in the season.  Out here only so her husband could work.  She
turned her nose toward the gray studio, where you could see two single
lightbulbs hanging in the window, burning into the driveway's gloom. It
was a new use of the word for me: I had never before associated drawing
and painting with

"work."  I liked the idea.  And I was beginning to like their house,
which was long and low and full of plate-glass windows and smelled
delightfully of her Chanel and his pipe smoke.  I already liked
Flora.

My parents were none too pleased with the arrangement, since it didn't
seem to offer as many opportunities for mingling with wealthy potential
boyfriends that sitting for stockbrokers or lawyers or plastic surgeons
did, but I reminded them that Daisy was coming and that spending the
day with Flora would mean spending the day with Daisy, too, whereas any
of my usual mother's helper jobs would leave Daisy on her own until I
returned.  Poor Daisy, I said, deserved a good summer for a change, and
my mother--whose pity for Daisy was a marvelous vehicle for her
disapproval of my father's sister--rolled her eyes and repeated, "Poor
Daisy," and the course of my summer was determined.

The first thing we have to do for you, I told Daisy, is not so much
unpack your clothes as unwrap them.  She sat on the floor beside me,
her thin legs straight out so we both could admire the hard pink shoes.
I had tried to convince her not to wear them with socks, it was summer,
after all, I said, but she had shyly insisted that the socks made the
shoes more comfortable.

There was an iridescence to them, I saw, in the sunshine of my bedroom,
a bit of metallic blue beneath the pink, and when I pointed this out to
her she said, delightedly, that she hadn't noticed it before.

"It probably wasn't there before," I told her.  Softly, she asked me
what I meant.

"They're changing," I said bluntly.

"They're not the same shoes they were

when you found them at Great Eastern.  They're not even the same shoes
your mother put in the suitcase this morning.

They're becoming something else.  I don't know what yet.  We'll have to
wait and see.  Maybe by the time you go home, they'll be all blue, or
even silver.  Maybe these," I leaned over and tapped one of the
turquoise gems glued to the cheap leather, "will have become real."

I sorted and stacked her outfits--four shorts sets, three tennis sets,
a pedal-pusher set, underwear, pajamas--and then unwrapped them one by
one, pulling out straight pins and pieces of odd-shaped cardboard.  I
had her try each one on and was dismayed to see that not only would
each of them have to be ironed to get out the factory-sealed creases
and wrinkles but that each was at least a size or two too big.  Here
was my Aunt Peg's logic, here was evidence that her grudging sense of
life's unfairness had seeped into everything she did.  She would not
send her middle child out to the hoity-toity Hamptons for the summer
with a suitcase full of Bernadette's hand-me-downs.

Oh no.  (I could hear her say it to Uncle Jack, at their kitchen table,
over his favorite dessert of canned fruit salad sprinkled with tiny
marshmallows.) No, siree.  Daisy would go with new clothes, still in
their wrappers.  But neither would she want me or my parents to forget
that life was not easy for a transit cop with eight kids, not nearly as
easy as it was for a working couple with only a daughter, and luxuries
like one-season shorts sets bought from racks, not bins, were simply
not in the cards for this hardworking family.  The "poor Daisy" refrain
had its benefits, no doubt--a few weeks in summer with one less mouth
to feed, for instance, one less child to keep track of but even in her
harried, downhill existence, Aunt Peg would want to mark her child with
evidence of both her dignity and her practicality.

Poor Daisy stood in my bedroom in her pink shoes and hooked two thumbs
into the drooping armholes of her sleeveless tennis dress, like Mr.
Green Jeans pulling at his suspenders.

"It's a little big," she said, laughing at herself, at the way the
pleated skirt nearly touched her knees.  Beneath the white polyester
cotton of the cheap dress, I could see her skinny chest with its
shadowy hollows and pink nipples and nearly translucent glow.  Even at
eight, her skin gave off the peculiar, new-to-the-light aura of a
newborn's.

"Let's save it for Bernadette," I said, and stood.

"This way, Daisy Mae," I said.

Our house was so small that both bedrooms led directly into the living
room, and the place where the living-room ceiling dropped down to
accommodate the attic stairs delineated the extent of the dining room.
A fisherman's cottage to be sure, built in the late 1900s, we were
told, with one stone fireplace and wide-plank floors and a walk-up
attic that smelled of cedar and mothballs and dust, and, on sunny days
such as this, the warmed breath of old wood.  The stairs to it were
steep and curved a little at top and bottom, and when I reached the top
and leaned down to take Daisy's hand, I could feel she was trembling.
When she reached the last two stairs, she pulled her hand away and kind
of scrambled on all fours onto the attic floor, getting, as she did,
very little traction from the pink shoes.  When she saw that the floor
was safely beneath her, and the entrance to the attic stairs a good
enough distance away,

she turned and sat, her legs spread, as if she had arrived there after
a fall, not a climb.

"Are you all right?"  I said, laughing a bit, just to dampen her panic.
She nodded, breathing heavily, the too big dress now spread around her
like a gown.

"I'm fine," she said softly.

This attic was my favorite place in the house--and I loved every corner
of that house, even then.  It was all rafters and ancient treasures and
chinks of broken sunlight coming through the walls and the one tiny
window.  Two old iron beds that had belonged to my mother's parents
were set up under one eave, covered with two ancient quilts and two
somewhat wilted feather pillows--our guest suite, as my mother called
it (my Uncle Tommy being the only guest it had ever accommodated).

There was a faded Queen Anne chair, some old-fashioned lamps with
tasseled lampshades.  A dresser.  A full-length standing mirror.  A
steamer trunk that opened sideways.

My father's army footlocker, stenciled with his name and rank and the
yellowed cargo tag from the Queen Mary.  There were a number of
rolled-up rugs, a couple of antique pitchers and basins.  Boxes of old
photographs, of Christmas decorations, of magazines and books.  My
disassembled crib.  My black baby carriage draped with an old sheet. My
pale blue teeter totter, my rocking horse.  A stage set of an attic in
every way.

My stage.

Under the other eave there was a long metal rod that held our winter
coats in cloth wardrobes, and, for the rest of its length, my biography
in clothing.  My mother had all my dresses and tops and slacks and
skirts and shorts arranged in chronological order down the expanse of
the bar, so that behind my father's overcoat there was my Catholic
school uniform

skirt, abandoned just a week ago when vacation began, my uniform
blouses and sweaters, my Easter dress and coat, my green St.  Patrick's
Day shirtwaist, my velvet Christmas dress, my fall kilts and cardigans,
followed by everything I had outgrown from last summer, followed by my
freshman-year uniform, another Easter dress, etc.  It was all orderly
enough to merit documentation, and I only had to count off velvet dress
sleeves or the yellow, green, pink, or blue shoulders of my Easter
coats to know exactly where I needed to look to find something for
Daisy.

I pulled out the first dress I recalled, a white one with pale yellow
flowers and a green velveteen sash, puffy sleeves, a sweet collar, a
full skirt.  Daisy was still sitting on the floor, but when I held it
out to her, she rose slowly, walking carefully toward me over the warm,
worn floorboards, as if she were not yet sure she trusted them.
Kneeling in front of her, I unbuttoned the tennis dress and slipped it
over her shoulders.

"Arms up," I said, and pulled my old dress over her head.  I turned her
around and buttoned up the back and tied the sash.

"Beautiful," I said, turning her again, and she was: the yellow and
white and green and her flushed cheeks and bright red hair.

"I could wear it to church on Sunday," she said, a little breathless.
And I said, once again, "Why wait till Sunday?"

I showed her my baby clothes, at the far end of the long rack.  The
little dresses on their hangers, the boxes on the shelf beneath them
with the sweaters and the sleepers and even a handful of worn cloth
diapers, all wrapped in tissue paper, weighed down with pieces of
cedar.  I held the box to her nose and told her to breathe in.  I said,
Isn't it something, how all my baby clothes smell like that?  As if my
parents hadn't gotten me

from the hospital at all but from some old forest.  Found on a bed of
moss, perhaps, cradled in the roots of an ancient tree.  It makes you
wonder, I said mysteriously, loving her for the way she was taking me
in, her mouth opened and her eyes bright.  I put the lid on the box and
slipped it back onto its shelf.

"Do you remember anything, Daisy Mae?"  I asked.

"About the time before you were born?"

She thought for a moment and said no, she didn't think she did.

"You don't remember God?"  I said.

"Or heaven?  Or the angels?  Or the other children waiting to be
born?"

She frowned.

"I don't think so," she said.

"You don't remember meeting Kevin" (one of her younger brothers) "or
Brian or Patrick," (the others) "before you were all born?"

She shook her head.

"You should try to remember," I told her.

"You're only eight.  I remembered a lot of it up until just a few years
ago.

You should think about it more and see what you come up with."

I told her I could remember the name Robert Emmet.  I said I had once
asked my mother, probably when I was about your age, who Robert Emmet
was, and she, after a long pause, had said he was an Irish patriot her
father had been particularly fond of.  I said no, he was a little baby
boy, the one I was talking about.  A little baby boy still in a
blanket.  That's the Robert Emmet I was talking about.

Later on I found out that before me, my mother had had another baby
who'd died just as he was being born and who

was baptized Robert Emmet by the delivery room nurse because that was
the name my grandfather offered when my father was asked and had no
response to give.

Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names,
sometime between his birth and mine.  I'd had a glimpse of my
grandfather, too, I was certain, but the memory was not as clear.

I walked over to the old dresser and pulled open its bottom drawer.
There were a number of shoeboxes lined up inside, and in one of them my
mother had her father's old shaving things: a cup wrapped in tissue
paper, a brush, a long thin razor.

A brown bottle of bay rum with a cork stopper and, on its label, a
stained and yellowed drawing of a palm tree and a beach.  I took out
the bottle and showed it to Daisy.  I pulled out the cork.  The bottle
was empty, but there was a faint whiff of the stuff still inside.
Again, I told her to take a sniff.

She leaned forward and breathed deeply.

I remembered smelling this same smell, I told her, sometime before I
was born.  I think my grandfather and I must have passed each other, he
on his way in, me on my way out-he died in March, I was born in April.
I think I must have smelled it when he leaned over to pat my head as he
walked past.

I put the stopper back in and returned the bottle to its box.

"That is," I said, "I think I remember."

I looked at Daisy.  She was nodding, her eyebrows raised, her mouth
turned down, as if she were considering all this and finding it very
reasonable, very likely.  I loved the way she looked, in my old dress,
in her pink shoes and socks, so I picked

her up and turned her around a couple of times and then put her down
again.  Going back to the clothes rack, I told her how my Uncle Tommy
slept up here whenever he visited, and how he always said, before he
climbed the stairs, "If I see the ghost, I'll give him your regards."

I told her how sometimes he said the old fisherman who built this house
appeared during the night, just standing over there by the window,
looking out, smoking his pipe.  The first time Uncle Tommy said, "Can I
help you, sir?"  And the man just turned around a little bit and waved
his hand behind his back and said, "No, no.  No, thank you," in a voice
so choked with emotion that Uncle Tommy didn't ask anything else, just
watched the man staring out the window and smoking until he fell back
asleep again.

Once he asked him, "Can I get you a chair, sir?"  And the man again
waved him away, saying, "No, no."  But the next morning, Uncle Tommy
moved the chair over to the window anyway and was very happy to wake up
during the next night to see that the man was sitting in it, his legs
crossed comfortably.

And oddly enough, Uncle Tommy said, there was a little boy asleep on
his lap.

"Who was he?"  Daisy asked.

I shrugged.

"Who knows?"

I pulled out a checked sundress, red and blue, with ribbon ties at the
shoulder.

"This is cute, too," I said.  And another of white eyelet.  And a pair
of pink pedal pushers that would go with her shoes.

"Maybe some night we'll sleep up here," I said.

"You and I."

She hesitated for a moment and then said, "Okay," looking down at the
dress I held against her.

"Chances are, the only ghost we'll see is me at your age," I said.

"Looking to see who's wearing my old clothes."

Before we went back down, I told her to take off the shoes if the
stairs made her nervous.

She shook her head.

"I'm okay," she said.

I went ahead of her, the clothes on their hangers draped over my arm,
turning at each step to make sure she was all right.  There was no
banister, but she kept both hands flat against the wall and descended
so slowly, and with such cautious trepidation, you'd have thought she
was edging along some building ledge.

"Are you afraid of heights, Daisy Mae?"  I asked her, halfway down.

She shook her head.  She would not take her eyes from the stairs, or
the hem of my old dress, or the pink shoes whose wooden heels and
slippery beige soles slapped loudly against each bare step.

"I'm only afraid of falling," she said.

I awoke every morning to the sound of my parents' voices coming through
the wall behind my bed.  They slept in twin beds with quilted leather
headboards, a nightstand in between, and their voices in those first
moments of the day were subdued and conversational.  I imagined at one
point that they simply told each other their dreams, and in much the
same matter-of fact way they might relate the details of an ordinary
and unremarkable trip to the market.  I don't pretend to understand
it:

why they never slept in the same bed but began each morning talking to
each other as if they shared the same mind.  The wallpaper in my
bedroom, and in theirs, was full of yellow

roses, fist-sized yellow roses that became, as I stared and listened
and tried to make out what they said, the fist-sized yellow faces of
wrinkled babies and grinning gargoyles and startled guardian angels, of
choir boys in war paint with open, oval mouths.

My parents got up at five, bathed and had breakfast, and were usually
out of the house by six.  During the school year I went with them, to
be dropped off with the nuns at my private school twenty miles to the
west--essentially a boarding school for the daughters of wealthy Asians
and South Americans, with only a handful of us day students squeezed in
to keep the locals agreeable--but in the summer the house was mine.
This had been the case for nearly as long as I can remember, although
there was a time, before I started school, I suppose, when old Mrs.
Tuohey would be stirred into the mix before my parents left for work,
stirred like the hasty half teaspoon of sugar my mother always added to
the black tea she made for herself and my father.  Even before I was
old enough for school, Mrs.  Tuohey was a gesture only, mostly a second
thought, and quickly diluted by the vast solitude of the tiny house,
and my own preference for it.  The poor woman, a pale and frail little
widow who lived in the village, usually spent the day in the first seat
she had taken when my father brought her in, not much more than a ghost
herself.

I loved that house, as I've said, and I loved it especially on those
summer mornings when the sun lit the kitchen and the bedrooms but kept
the living room cool and damp and smelling, because of the old stone
fireplace, like a recently inhabited cave.  I'd cross it in my bare
feet and go into the kitchen, where my parents would be having their
bacon and

eggs, continuing that same back-and-forth, just-passing-the
time-of-day conversation they'd been having since they'd first regained
consciousness.  When they saw me, my father would pull out the third
chair and my mother would stand up to get an extra plate, as if I were
an unexpected guest.  She would pour me some of the tea she had made
for just the two of them, and scatter a bit of sugar across it while I
took a piece of toast or bacon from the plate between them.  They would
then continue their conversation, with only an occasional word or two
addressed to me, like a sidelong glance.  They kept their voices low,
as if I were still asleep, and their eyes, it seemed to me, were always
somewhat averted.

I believe my parents had grown a little wary of me by then.

Not merely wary of the physical changes, of the long, bare legs I
pulled up under my chin as I bit my toast into odd shapes, or the
widening shoulders under my T-shirt, the budding breasts, the way my
easy-to-admire childish beauty was quickly becoming something a little
thinner and sharper and certainly more complicated, but wary as well of
what they must have believed was the fast-approaching time of my
fulfillment of their dream for me--of my absorption into that world
they had taken so much trouble to place me on the threshold of.  I
suppose it was one of the ironies of their ambition for me, of their
upbringing and their sense of themselves, that they Would not see me as
fully a part of that brighter world of wealthy people and supposed
geniuses if I did not at some point recognize that they were not.  That
the best assurance they would have that I had indeed moved into a
better stratum of society would be my scorn for the lesser one to which
they belonged.

They were dear people, both my parents, but the vividness of their
dream of my rise, their absolute confidence in the inevitability of my
success, made them resent what they saw as its consequences even that
summer when I was fifteen and part of no other social set than my own.
Turning away from me in anticipation of my turning away from them, they
left me more alone that summer than perhaps I'd ever been.

Once they had gone to work, I took a peach from the bowl of fruit on
the counter and crossed the living room again.  Our front porch was
short and square, its floorboards painted a glossy gray, the trim and
balustrade white and wet at that hour of the morning.  I sat on the
steps with the newspaper and my summer reading book.  There were lilac
bushes on either side of the porch, my father's dahlias all along the
split-rail fence.

Across the narrow macadam road there was only a high hedge, a deep
green dropcloth the length of the street, meant to conceal the summer
house beyond it, but serving also to make our house seem the only
inhabited place--or maybe the only place (and us the only family) bold
enough to live within easy sight of strangers.  I read the paper and
ate the peach and then tossed the pit into the grass.  I walked down
the three steps to the lilac bush and shook the branches and caught the
dew that fell in my palm and rubbed the sticky juice from my hands.

Then I turned my face up and closed my eyes and shook the branches
again to get the peach juice off my lips.  The dew was cold, despite
the sunshine that had already begun to hit the leaves, and I lifted my
hair and bent under the branches to feel it on the back of my neck.  I
shook my head to make the bush shake and felt a drop of dew slide down
my shirt and along my

spine.  A branch caught my hair as I straightened up, and as I reached
for it, I felt it press into my scalp, a bony finger drawn along the
back of my head.  I moved against it, pulled away a little, and then
moved back against it again, entangling the hair even more, no doubt,
but enjoying the grip it had on me, the sweet pressure and scratch.  I
turned under it, let my head fall back, pressed my shoulders into the
green leaves, arching like a cat and feeling the dampness of my
T-shirt, the drops of dew scattered across my arms.  I ran my fingers
through my hair, from temple to crown, and met the single hard branch
that had caught me.  Gently, I freed myself from it and stepped away,
and the words I was looking for were in the paperback book on the step:
Send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.

I shook the hem of my T-shirt, lifted and twisted it not because it was
soaked but because I wanted to feel the new sun on my midriff.  I would
have taken it off altogether if I'd had the courage.  I shook out my
hair and wound it at the back of my neck.  I brushed the dew from my
arms and walked through the grass and the sun to the back of the house,
where there was a hedge under both bedroom windows.  I stepped behind
it, my bare feet in the soft, damp dirt, and at my own window leaned
down toward the sill.  I put my mouth to the screen, at the place where
the window was raised, breathed its metallic taste, and said, "Margaret
Mary Daisy Mae, will you ever get up?"

Through the shadowy mesh I could see her stir in my bed, and then,
after the briefest pause, sit bolt upright and look around.  I pressed
my lips to the screen.  The taste of the

peach was still at the back of my tongue.

"There's work to do," I told her, and she rubbed her eyes and said,
still groggy, "I'm awake."

I slipped out from behind the hedge and in through the back door. There
were English muffins in the pantry and I toasted her one and spread it
with butter and my mother's beach-plum jelly.  I poured her some juice
and was carrying both to her when she emerged from my room in the
floral dress and her white socks and the pink shoes, her hair a mess
and her skin so pale it seemed to be made of nothing more substantial
than the cotton gauze of my mother's summer curtains.

I placed the glass and the dish on the dining-room table.

"You okay, Daisy Mae?"  I asked her, and she nodded and obediently sat
down.

"Just sleepy," she said.  I watched her as she ate.  She ate demurely,
one hand and the napkin on her lap, one bite at a time and the careful
chewing with the mouth closed.

Touch of napkin to her lips after each sip of orange juice.  All the
niceties that Uncle Jack required at his own Formica topped table in
the overcrowded kitchen in the overcrowded Queens Village house, where
I had seen him preside at breakfast with the Transit Authority gun and
holster he'd worn the night before still hung around his hips.  I
picked up the second half of the English muffin and folded it over and
asked, "Don't you ever do this?"

She shook her head.  Her eyes were tired.  I pointed to the fold in the
bread.

"Bite it here," I said, and she did, and then I showed her the perfect
hole she had made in the middle.  I told her to raise her index finger
and I placed the muffin on it like an oversized ring.

"Now you can take it with you," I said.

"And nibble on it all day long."

I lifted her plate and her glass and left them both on the kitchen
counter as we headed out the back door.  I had the Kaufmans' dog to
walk first, I told her.  And then the Richardsons'.  And then we would
feed the cats at the Clarke place on the way to pick up Flora.  I took
her hand as we went through the back fence.  She continued to balance
the English muffin on the other.  The Morans' house was silent as we
passed it, the shades in the front room only partially and unevenly
closed, giving it that creepy, stupid look of a person sleeping with
one glazed eye half open.  There was the perennial rusted outboard
motor on the grass, a large and battered cardboard box beside it, an
abandoned garden hose beside a deflated plastic wading pool, scattered
bits of toys, a few bicycles, a pair of little boy's white underpants
hanging from the hedge and looking for all the world like a popped
balloon.  I was grateful to see that there was no sign yet of the Moran
kids themselves.  I wanted Daisy to be the only child this morning.

We walked down the center of the road and sang "Zip-A Dee-Doo-Dah"
together, swinging our arms back and forth until she lost her balance
in the pink shoes and I had to pull her up by the arm to keep her from
scraping her knees-which was not hard to do, of course; she was so
light I could easily have pulled her right up over my head.  A bit of
yesterday's fear crossed her face as she recovered, but I got her
laughing again when I said, "Have a nice trip?"  The sun was fully over
the trees by now, and the birds were busy in them.  There was still
some mist rising from the brown potato fields and the green lawns of
the larger estates, and the few people who passed by in cars waved
casually.  There were enough rabbits still about to keep Daisy
perpetually charmed.

I have until now kept out of this account and even, mostly, out of my
own recollection, the fall and winter that awaited poor Daisy, because
while it may well be the end point of this particular story it is not,
after all, the reason I tell it, but this is the morning she mentioned
on the phone back in Queens Village, in late February--the morning we
saw all the rabbits, she said.  The morning she wore on her finger,
like a garnet ring, the English muffin spread with beach-plum jelly.
Until Red Rover ate it.  That morning in June.

The Kaufmans' house was fairly modest, a single-story cedar shake with
a curved gravel driveway and white shutters and green flower boxes and
red trim.  I'd been a mother's helper here two summers ago, when I had
dubbed their twins, Colby and Patricia, Cobweb and Peaseblossom. They'd
spent last summer with their mother in Europe (my own mother suspected
a divorce, and rightly so), and this year they would be at sleep-away
camp until August.  But their father was out here for the summer and he
was the one who had called to ask if I could help him with the dog for
the three days a week he needed to be in the city.  He was a nice man,
short and balding and Jewish, far friendlier than his blond
Presbyterian Brooks Brothers madras (and now ex-) wife.

One afternoon when I worked there, while we were sitting around the
table beside the pool, just back from the beach, he suddenly leaned
over and placed his forearm next to mine.  I had the twins, wrapped in
beach towels, sitting sleepily in my lap, but they both struggled up to
see what their father was doing.

"Look at this," he said.  His arm was deeply tanned, covered in thick
black hair, and mine was its usual after-the-beach

pale red.

"Did we spend the day under the same sun or what?"

he said.  Then he leaned over me to pull the children's thin, golden
arms out of their towels, and in our efforts to line up all eight of
our arms, he knelt down in front of us, his bare chest just brushing my
knees, and took all of us into a kind of embrace.

There began a debate about which of the twins was tanner--I was
immediately declared the least, their father the most--and they called
to their mother to cast the deciding vote.  She had just stepped out of
the pool house.  She had already showered and was wearing a seersucker
kimono and striped slippers and had a Turkish towel around her head.
She walked over and bent down to add her own arm to the mix.  It was a
lovely shade, lighter than the children's, darker than mine.  Her skin
was slick and glistening and smelled of lemons.

She held it there for only a moment--her robe fell open for a second
and I could see the spidery white stretch marks against her tanned
breasts--and then, without declaring a winner, she stood up and said to
her husband, who was still pressed against my knees, "Can I talk to
you, please?"

Dr.  Kaufman leaned across my lap to kiss the hand of each child.

"You're both beautiful," he said, and then ran his fingers along my arm
as he stood up.  He touched my hair and said, "You, too, Irish," before
he followed his wife inside.  The twins immediately pulled the beach
towels back over their heads and snuggled against me again.  Cobweb was
still a thumb sucker and Peaseblossom had the end of her braid in her
mouth.  I hummed some Christmas hymns for them--it was what they
liked--"O Holy Night" and "What Child Is This?"  and "O Little Town of
Bethlehem"--all three of us smelling of pool

water and Coppertone, delightfully warm and sun-weary in the shade of
the umbrella, in the sweet offshore breeze.  And then I heard their
mother's voice calling through the open windows that faced the back of
the house.  My first impression was that she had dropped something or
lost something and was saying, Oh, what happened?  or Oh, where is it?
Then I wondered for a second--until I remembered who she was--if she
might be attempting to sing.

But the sound never formed itself into speaking or singing, and the
tone and timbre, the volume, of her voice was something I had never
heard before, certainly something that had never drifted through the
rose-covered wall that separated my parents' bedroom from my own.  I
tried to look down at the children: Cobweb's wet thumb had fallen into
his lap, but I sensed, although I could not see, that Patricia's eyes
were wide open.  Their mother's voice grew louder.  Oh, what
happened?

Oh, where is it?  But in a language I didn't know.  I had only heard
voices raised to such a pitch in anger--Daisy's brothers quarreling, or
the worst nuns at school demanding our respect-and although I knew this
wasn't anger, I wasn't surprised either, when she began to swear, or
what sounded like swearing, and then, finally, to cry her husband's
name--Phil, Phil, Phil.  Somewhere behind all this I thought I heard
him saying, Hush, hush, but then even that sound was wiped out by her
voice as it veered into a kind of scream.  Well before I had admitted
to myself that I understood what was going on, I had an impulse to put
my hands against the children's ears.  The scream gave way to a
recognizable moan, what seemed an endless series of them, and then--I
wasn't following the logic

here at all--a deep-throated laughter that, even after all the
commotion of the last few minutes, seemed inappropriately, falsely,
raucous--as if she were making an effort to be heard.

For me to hear.  There was silence, and then I heard him cry, Oh, oh,
oh, as if someone were bending back his thumb.

It was some time before they emerged from the house, both of them
showered and dressed now.  The children had slept soundly in my lap and
were just stirring again, and there were pins and needles in both my
legs.  She took them from me gently, led them into the house, where the
cook had already begun to fix them their dinner, and then she turned
back to ask me if I wanted to take one last swim before I went home,
her voice its usual slightly flat and nasal drawl.  I dove in, mostly
to hide my own awkwardness, and when I climbed out only he was on the
patio, fiddling with the grill.  I pulled my T-shirt over my wet
bathing suit, gathered my beach bag and my towel, and slipped into my
flip-flops.

"Good night, Dr.  Kaufman," I said, and he turned to look over his
shoulder, not really looking, only putting his face in my direction,
not his eyes.  He said, "Good night, sugar," the same endearment he
used with the kids.

They were eating toasted cheese at the table in the breakfast nook, and
I kissed them good night and then unwound Cobweb from my waist at the
front door with a hundred assurances that I would see him first thing
in the morning.  I walked home in what was fast becoming twilight,
something of the encroaching blue-black sky and the lingering scarlet
sunset now embedded like a dark jewel in my own vision of married
life-of my own, unformed future.

Last summer, when my mother guessed that the trip to

Europe meant the Kaufmans were divorcing, I thought that afternoon was
proof positive she was wrong.  I didn't realize, she argued, how easy a
thing divorce had become for non Catholics.  She didn't realize (I
failed to argue) what the Kaufmans were capable of doing in the waning
hours of a summer afternoon.

The dog kennel was in the back, behind the pool house.

The pool without the children's toys and swim rings seemed desolate,
and Red Rover threw himself against the fence when he saw us as if I
had orchestrated their return.  He was your usual jittery Irish setter,
but mostly pretty well mannered, so I wasn't prepared for the way he
rushed for Daisy as soon as I opened the gate, devouring her English
muffin in an instant and then nearly knocking her over with his
wiggling and wagging.  She was startled, but not frightened, and
although she backed away, she was closer to laughter than to tears.  I
grabbed him by the collar and snapped on his leash, while he took a
minute to lick the jelly from his chops.  And then he turned his head
toward me and seemed to say, "Oh, it's you!"  and, nearly beside
himself with joy, began to lick my face and my chin, his paws on my
chest.  I had to push him off me, and push him out the kennel door,
Daisy all the while hanging on the fence and now laughing
breathlessly.

We continued on, down toward the Coast Guard beach, where I was able to
unleash him and let him run.  Daisy was still a little overwhelmed, and
I told her to sit on a stone and take off her shoes and socks before
she walked in the sand.

"Maybe tomorrow you'll want to wear your sneakers," I said.

She sat down as I'd told her, but she made no move to take off the pink
shoes.  I had one eye on Red, who kept turning back

and going forward, more or less waiting for us, but running off a
little farther each time.  I knew he was too much of a coward to run
very far, but I didn't want to be stuck walking to Ama gansett to
retrieve him--I had to be at Flora's by nine.

I turned back to Daisy, but she had still made no move to take off the
shoes.

"The sand will ruin those, Daisy Mae," I said, and I bent down to pull
them off myself.  Abruptly she scooted her feet away from me, and when
I looked up at her, somewhat startled, she had her nose in the air, one
of those bratty, overacted poses I had seen plenty of other kids
strike, but never her.

"What's the matter?"  I said, and to complete the picture she folded
her arms across her chest, across the bodice of the sweet-collared
dress, and said, stubbornly, "I don't want to take them off."  The sun
on her wiry, uncombed hair brought out the reds and the golds and the
possibility that she did indeed, as her mother and Bernadette had
assured me, have a redhead's temper.

I stood up straight and shrugged.

"Suit yourself," I said and, without another word or look, kicked off
my own battered Keds and ran down toward Red Rover, who saw this as his
signal to take off full tilt ahead of me.  I ran after him for a while,
the leash in my hand, and then slowed down to a walk as he began to
nose and sniff at whatever he could find along the shoreline, playing
his own game of keeping me near without seeming to.  When I finally
turned to look back, Daisy was running toward me down the beach.  It
took a few minutes for me to see that she had her pink shoes in her
hands and her white socks still on her feet, and that she was crying. I
held my arms out to her as she grew nearer, and when she reached me, I
lifted her and spun her around.  When I put her down again,

she sobbed into my hip.

"Were you afraid someone was going to steal them?"  I asked, and she
waited a moment before she nodded.

"Do you want to take off your socks, too?"  I said, and she whispered,
"No."  Red came bounding toward us, and I picked up a piece of
driftwood and tossed it to make him head back toward the road.

"All right," I said.

Sitting on the same stone, Daisy brushed the sand off the thin socks
and slipped them back into her shoes.

"You still don't want to take those off?"  I asked, and she shook her
head.

"You don't have sand between your toes?"  Smiling, she shook her head
again.  I shrugged.  With kids, you never knew.  It could have been a
broken toenail.  It could have been that her brothers, or Bernadette,
had told her she had stinky feet.  It could have been that she did
indeed fear that her magic slippers would be stolen.  It could have
been a whim.

I got the leash on Red Rover and we started walking again, toward the
Richardsons'.  They had two Scotties--an obvious choice for a couple of
tweedy New Yorkers with vaguely British accents.  The Scotties got
along fine with the setter, and so to save time, we stopped to pick
them up on the way to bringing Red Rover home.  Their house was Tudor,
naturally, and pretty grand, with lovely flower gardens and what seemed
a big staff.  The Richardsons walked their dogs themselves for a good
hour or so every afternoon--which is when I had met them--coming home
from the beach with Flora at the beginning of June.  Mrs.  Richardson
was one of those blunt, loud, bangs-across-the-forehead women who
seemed to believe that everyone else must surely be as pleased with her
as she was with herself for being so no-nonsense and direct and, as she
saw it, egalitarian.  She and her husband were astonished at

the paroxysm of stumpy tail-wagging their two little dogs launched
into as we passed each other, and astonished further by the way they
lowered their bellies to the ground as I bent down to scratch their
ears.

"They're usually terribly standoffish," she said in her semi-British
way.  Leaning over the edge of her stroller, Flora was delighted by
them, too, and so a conversation began between us, and Mrs.  Richardson
learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the
dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and baby
sat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the
road.  Staring straight into my face with the divine right of a dowager
queen, she said, "You're very pretty, aren't you?"  She turned to her
husband, who carried a pipe.

"Isn't she?"  Embarrassing us both.

"I bet you're bright, too, and industrious, aren't you?"  She could
have been a black-and-white character actress in pearls, staring at me
through a monocle.

"You've certainly charmed my dogs," she said.  Just as we parted--the
Scotties digging their little gray nails into the road to express their
reluctance to move on--I mentioned that I walked dogs, too, for some of
our neighbors.

"Do you?"  she said.  She smiled smugly at her husband--didn't I say
she was industrious?--and then turned back to me.  Well, then, she
said, seeing how her dogs had taken to me, and seeing how they were
growing rather stout, she wondered if I wouldn't like to come by the
house some morning and walk them a bit while she and her husband played
golf.  I would like to, I said, as if I were correcting her (telling
Flora, after we had pushed on, that if I wouldn't like to, I wouldn't,
would I?).  And so it was arranged.

As usual, the dogs were handed over to me at the back door

by one of the maids ("A maid?"  Daisy whispered, laughing, as if I had
said a leprechaun or a centaur).  And since they were far more
predictable than Red Rover, I handed both their leashes to Daisy and
kept Red's for myself.  The road the Richardsons lived on was wider and
grander and lined with great oaks that were lush and fresh that time of
year, bordered with green grass and dark hedges, and at one point as we
walked along, I held back a bit so I could watch Daisy, with her messy
red hair (I vowed to braid it later) and in my old dress and the
cherished pink slippers and the sandy socks, walk regally behind the
plump and pampered Scotties, who, in the same year that Daisy had been
born to her baby-beleaguered parents, had been flown first-class from
Edinburgh to Idlewild, to be delivered into Mrs.  Richardson's waiting
arms.

We put Red Rover back into his pen with fresh water and some dog
biscuits and the reassurance that we would return in late afternoon,
and then walked the Scotties back to my house to pick up our beach
things before we got Flora.  Tony and Petey Moran were already sitting
on my back steps, Petey with a new quarter-moon cut under his eye that
had almost blackened it.  The two boys fell on the two dogs as soon as
we were inside the yard with them--literally fell on them, like half
wit hillbillies chasing a greased pig, going down on them chest first,
their arms spread, and then rolling in the grass as the dogs, with
surprising speed and presence of mind, and even a bit of a growl,
scooted away.  I had to raise my voice (to the boys, not the dogs) to
restore order, and then I got both boys and both dogs and Daisy to sit
in a circle on the lawn.  The poor Scotties were panting by then, and
Petey and Tony seemed to

be panting, too, with love and desire and their wild blue-eyed
affection for all creatures they could pet or caress and, often in the
same gesture, hurt.  I let Petey sit beside one (Angus, I think; I
never could tell them apart) and Tony beside the other (Rupert) and
watched them gently stroke their dogs for a few minutes, the dogs
quickly growing accustomed to the long, soothing strokes, if not to the
little-boy faces hanging beside theirs, hovering as if to plant a kiss.
At one point Tony slipped his arm around the dog and tried to pull it
into his lap, but I stopped him.  These were not really old dogs, I
explained, but they had really old owners, and if the boys were not
calm they might very well end up with a nose bitten off.  I guided
their hands over the tops of the dogs' heads and down their backs.

"Nice and calm," I said.  Then I introduced Daisy, and the two boys
gazed at her out of their trance of affection.

"My cousin.

She's here to help me for the summer."

"Hi," they said, and then Petey added, "I like your shoes," something
of both larceny and lechery in his voice, a tone aided and abetted no
doubt by the pirate patch of a black eye.  Petey was maybe nine or ten
that summer, and had only recently gotten over his habit of asking me,
at constant three-minute intervals, "Do you like me?"

"Do you like my brother?"

"Do you like my mom?"

"Do you like me?"  He was the neediest of the Moran kids, and they were
a needy lot.

Twice in the past year he had spent the night under the hedge outside
my bedroom window, and twice my parents had considered calling Child
Services about him.  But he was well fed and went to school and his
cuts and scrapes and bruises were no different from any of the cuts and
scrapes and bruises of his

siblings, all of which seemed to be the product of bad luck and ill
timing, accident and fate.  When I asked Petey what he'd done to his
eye, Tony explained for him that he had been running around with two
juice glasses on his face, pretending they were binoculars, and had
smashed right into a door jamb.

"You must have been going pretty fast," I said.

"He said he was chasing the last remaining looney bird on earth," Tony
said.

"And who was the looney bird?"  I asked Petey.

He bowed his head.

"Baby June," he said, and then, abashed, buried his face in Angus's (or
Rupert's) neck.  Surprisingly enough, the dog, still panting, tolerated
it, even thumped his tail a bit and raised one paw as if to stay
balanced.  Perhaps he realized that in all his eight years at the
Richardsons', he'd never been quite so necessary.  I leaned across the
grass and put a hand on Petey's prickly head.

"Perfectly understandable," I said, hoping it would mean, "I like you,
Petey."

When boys and dogs seemed properly subdued, I gave the ends of the
leashes to Daisy and, standing slowly, walked back into the house.  I
gathered our beach things and made our sandwiches--all the while
glancing out the window to make sure everything was all right, because
with the Moran kids, you could never be sure.  But the dogs were lying
in the grass by now, the boys still stroking their coats, and it seemed
Petey and Tony and Daisy were actually having some kind of
conversation.

Daisy was idly braiding the leashes together, nodding, and Tony was
slowly pulling at the grass as he talked.  I wondered if they were
commiserating--about too many siblings and harried parents and a family
in which you were loved, but perhaps not well enough.  About houses
that smelled

of wet wool and old socks and hastily applied industrial cleaner,
where parents sometimes stumbled on your name or slapped you without
meaning to or looked at you as if you were everything they'd ever
wanted going down the drain--and then closed a door and forgot you
completely, crying, Oh, where is it?  Oh, what happened?  Oh, oh,
oh--in misery and happiness and anger and laughter and pain.

I made two extra sandwiches for the Moran kids, but just as I brought
them outside, two of the girls showed up, Judy, who was about eleven,
and baby June, whose drooping diaper was so wet it seemed to leave a
kind of damp slug's trail on the grass.

I sent Judy back to their house for a new one and changed the baby
right there on the lawn, Tony and Petey standing over me, eating their
sandwiches and offering casual bits of guidance ("There's a piece of
grass on her tush"), like construction workers on coffee break.  I
tossed the wet diaper into my mother's empty laundry basket at the side
of the house and let the boys walk the Scotties to the corner, Judy and
the baby coming along, too, where I told them all I really had to get
to work.  They turned back readily enough, but a few minutes later Tony
and Petey came zooming by on their banana bikes, slowing beside us and
circling around us and then zooming up again.  They were waiting there
when we emerged from the Richardsons' driveway after dropping off the
dogs and followed us most of the way to the Clarkes' as well, until
they were distracted by a red convertible with a wide and startlingly
white interior that passed by on an intersecting road.

Standing straight up on their pedals, they headed off to see if they
could chase it down and find out if it belonged to a movie star.

"We'll let you know," Petey shouted back over his shoulder,

his voice deep and serious, full of comic-book urgency.  It was clear
that there were two of us now whom he wanted to impress.

"He likes you," I said to Daisy, and she smirked and shrugged and said
the requisite "Eeww," and then, when I said it again, the pro forma
"Does not."

I stopped and bent down and took hold of her skinny leg.  I lifted her
foot, and she leaned against me, hopping on the other to keep her
balance.  I pretended to inspect her shoe.  I could see how the white
socks were still peppered with grains of sand.  There was a shiny scar
on her knee and a series of black-and-blue marks down her freckled
calf.  A girl with brothers.

"Your shoes are getting pinker," I said, dropping one leg and picking
up the other one.

"You must be in love."

The Clarkes' house was vaguely Victorian, with a nice big front porch
and a back patio that looked out on a wide sloping lawn and a little
pond surrounded by cattails and dragonflies.

Mr.  and Mrs.  Clarke were friends of my parents who shared the same
city background and middle-class income, the house itself being an
inheritance from a bachelor uncle of Mr.

Clarke's who had done well in the garment industry.  In my childhood I
had been enchanted by the house, not only because of its pond and
porch, the diamond-shaped panes in its bay windows, or its turret and
widow's watch, but also because I believed for many years that it
actually had been given to Mr.

Clarke by a fairy--by his fairy uncle, as I'd heard him say, or, his
uncle the fairy.  In the wonderland that was my solitary childhood,
such a bequest--a wave of a cattail wand, a flash of sunlight on a
beveled pane of glass, a flutter of dragonfly wings--seemed both
credible and marvelous.  Had I not learned

the truth of the matter in my freshman year at the academy (it was,
I'm afraid, more of a slow, disappointed dawning than a flash of
illuminating light), I might, on this pretty June morning now full of
bee sound and birdsong and the scent of mown grass, have told Daisy the
same.

The Clarkes spent every summer in an apartment on the North Shore so
they could rent their house to a wealthy Westchester family, the
Swansons, from June to September.

The' cats belonged to the Clarkes, but the Westchester family liked the
idea of renting the cats as well, so their children could have the
experience of pets without the year-long obligation.  I was part of the
bargain, too.  I took care of the cats on weekdays when the Swansons
went home (unlike so many of the summer mothers whose husbands worked
in the city, Mrs.  Swanson would not spend five nights a week out here
alone), and I sometimes baby sat for the kids as well on Saturday
nights.  My parents wouldn't let me take any money from the Clarkes,
since they were friends and apparently struggling to keep the old house
in good repair, but the Swansons always drank too much at dinner and
paid me twice what I asked when they came home.

The Clarkes and their tenants had one of those odd, long term
relationships that seemed more like a custody deal than a summer
rental.  Although they had no children themselves (they had cats, and
the fact that they were willing to rent out their cats as well as their
house probably tells you all you need to know about them), the Clarkes
had allowed the Swansons to install a basketball hoop over the garage
and a small swing set in the side yard.  They'd also let the Swansons
put an extra refrigerator in the basement and an awning over the patio.
When

the Swansons offered to replace all the kitchen appliances and repaint
most of the rooms, the Clarkes had complied.  They'd also let them buy
the wicker furniture for the porch and tear up the fairly new
wall-to-wall carpeting and refinish the wood floors.  In another summer
or two, the Swansons would offer to install an in-ground pool, a real
coup for the Clarkes (my parents thought), who got both a boost to
their property value and further insurance that their faithful and
generous renters would indeed return for many more summers.  Later
still, long after I'd moved away and in the midst of outlandish
interest rates and a depressed real estate market, the Swansons would
offer the Clarkes a princely sum for their house--enough for them to
buy another on the North Shore as well as a condo in Florida--a cause
for much discussion among my parents and the Clarkes, who urged us to
talk to a real estate agent ourselves.

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 licorice, 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 halfhearted 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.

The scarves--black and gold and white and turquoise blue--were
beautiful and expensive and had the lovely, faded smell of perfume not
recently applied.  I folded each one as I unpinned it, and placed it on
the ledge behind the back seat with the closed-up diaper pins.  Then I
lifted Flora out and put her on the driveway next to Daisy.  Together,
both girls bent to examine the pretty shoes.  As I reached back in for
the scarves and the pins, I heard Daisy say, "Jewels."

Flora's mother was in the kitchen speaking French to the housekeeper,
and when I handed her the scarves she shrugged and said, with a laugh,
"There's no other way to keep her from rolling down the windows," and
then put the scarves on top of the refrigerator.  She asked me to give
Flora some crackers and a cup of milk--she'd eaten nothing for
breakfast, she said-and then she and the housekeeper both left the
room.  I'd had no chance to introduce Daisy, but Flora's mother had
hardly seemed to notice her.  I poured both girls some milk and put a
plate of digestive biscuits on the table between them.  Flora took only
a sip of the milk and then slipped off her chair and climbed into my
lap and wearily put her head on my chest.  She was wearing another
shapeless white dress, her white baby

shoes, and white socks trimmed with lace.  Her bare legs were dimpled
and chubby and rosy pink, and I saw that Daisy was studying them, too,
perhaps recalling, as I was, her old father's thin white skin.

"Somebody wore herself out this morning," I said, to Daisy and to Flora
as well.

"Crying's hard work, isn't it?"  And both girls agreed.

When her mother came into the kitchen again, she was wearing a beige
dress and high heels and there was a white cardigan draped over her
shoulders.  Her dark hair was pulled back smoothly, giving more
prominence, and power, to her long, determined nose.  Her lipstick was
freshly applied, more bright red.

"Listen," she said, her eyes just momentarily falling, indifferently,
on Daisy, "I need to go up to the city, I don't know how long I'll be.
You keep coming, as always.  Ana will be here.  And the cook.  Keep
Flora out for as long as you can if the weather's good.  She sleeps
better when she's been out all day."  She turned to Ana as if we had
all left the room.

"It's going to be as hot as hell in Manhattan," she said.  Despite the
curse word, she was smiling under her long nose, anticipating something
delightful--perhaps what a fine time she would have in Manhattan while
we were all back here trying to wear Flora out.  I thought of my own
summer visits to the city with my parents, the stifling streets, the
gritty air, the hot smell of the subway blowing up from those
heel-catching grates.

Women in short white gloves and sleeveless dresses, touching shoulders,
sweating, waiting in crowds at corners for the light to change.  And
that moment of disorientation and fear when we left the Music Hall or
the Museum of Natural History or the restaurant (Patricia Murphy's)
where we'd gone for dinner,

and saw that the sky above the city was now pitch dark--that the city
had become a city at night.  I was pretty certain that it was this
particular city, the city at night, that Flora's mother was bound
for--and delighted to be bound for--while we, the caretakers, stayed
behind.

"I must be out of my mind," she said, turning away from us, clearly
pleased with herself but still annoyed with Flora, because she did not
give her a kiss goodbye, although Flora, weary from weeping, didn't
seem much to mind.

From the kitchen window, I saw her cross the driveway, Ana scurrying
behind with a small valise that she stopped to put into the back seat
of the car while Flora's mother went on, through the side door of her
husband's workshop.  I didn't recall ever seeing her go in there, and
she wasn't inside for more than a few minutes when she came out again,
her face harder and tighter than before, the white sweater buttoned at
her throat and thrown over her shoulders like a little Superman cape of
resolve and indignation.  She gestured to Ana, and Ana quickly got into
the car.  Then she turned on her heels once again and came back into
the house.  I heard her shoes on the wooden floor, across the hallway,
through the living room, back into the carpeted bedrooms, and then, a
few minutes later, out again.  I looked at Daisy, who was used to the
permutations in the weather of a house with people in it.  She shrugged
and smiled.  Then Flora's mother once again appeared in the kitchen
door.

"My scarves," she said, and I pointed to the top of the refrigerator,
where she had placed them.  She reached up and took them down, sorted
through them, and then chose the turquoise-and-white one, placing the

others on the kitchen table right in front of me.  I took the moment
to introduce Daisy, and although she seemed hardly to hear, she did
say, as she shook out the scarf, pausing to examine a small hole the
diaper pin had made, "What a pretty dress.  I had one just like it."
She then folded the scarf into a triangle and placed it over her hair,
leaning her head back as she did, her eyes half closed.  She tied it
under her chin and then wrapped the ends around her neck and tied them
again.

"You might also want to come by a little earlier while I'm gone," she
said.

"Eight or eight-thirty or so, to give Ana a hand."  I said that I
would.  She leaned down to look at her reflection in the side of the
toaster.  On my lap, Flora said, "Bye-bye, Mommy," and Mommy said,
"Bye-bye, dear."

She straightened up.  In the scarf she seemed very tall and very
elegant, but homely, too, without her dark hair to soften the hard
lines of her face and that gray, precise skin.

"If my husband tries to fuck you while I'm gone," she said softly,
"don't be frightened.  He's an old man and he drinks.  Chances are it
will be brief."  She cupped her fingers to the back of Flora's head,
which put her hand right under my chin.

"You can always send him to Ana, if you want," she said, and then bent
down, the fragrant scarf right at my nose, and kissed Flora on the
head, leaving lipstick and the scent of her face powder on the child's
pale scalp.

I sat for a few minutes after she had gone, waiting for the heat to
leave my cheeks before I looked at Daisy.  I had one arm around Flora,
but my right hand was on the table and I was surprised to see that my
fingers were trembling.  I was embarrassed and angry and surprised--I
would have thought the

housekeeper was too old to be included in such talk, just as, a few
minutes ago, I might have presumed I was too young and Flora's mother
too elegant to speak such a word.  I heard the car pull out of the
driveway, and then waited a few minutes more before I slowly raised my
eyes to Daisy.  She was looking at me with more expectation than
caution, certainly with no fear.  I wondered if she'd missed the word,
or if she recognized its sound only when it was shouted in anger or
used as an adjective, as her father tended to do.  I blew some air
through my lips and Daisy did the same: even if she didn't know the
word when used in its proper context, she knew a marital spat when she
saw one, and she nodded a little, wisely, when I said, "Oh, what fools
these mortals be."

"She's falling asleep," Daisy whispered, pointing at Flora in my lap,
whose eyelids were indeed fluttering closed.  I hoisted her to my
shoulder and stood, pushing my chair back with the back of my knees.  I
told Daisy to go out to the porch to fetch the beach bag and then
carried Flora to her bedroom.

I fully expected her to revive when I placed her on the changing table,
but she only whined and cried and did not open her eyes, so when I was
finished, I lifted her into her crib and covered her with a thin
blanket.  She smiled sleepily.  She seemed grateful to be out of the
fray.  I wondered what had gone on in the village this morning, and
whether it was her daughter's tantrum or her husband's familiarity (my
parents' word) with the maid that had sent Flora's mother off to New
York.  I smoothed Flora's hair.  Either way, the door had been shut on
the child.

On the wall above the crib were the three simple pencil

sketches of Flora and her mother--sweet enough to be hung in a church.
Good drawings, I thought.  But in the living room I had just passed
through there was also a large canvas of what seemed to me to be only
smashed images, perhaps of a woman--an ear, a breast, some lips.  And
another, smaller painting that was simply color, and not even
particularly pretty color, dark paints that had merely been dropped or
spilled or smeared.  I pulled the blanket up to Flora's cheek.

It suddenly occurred to me that Ana was not too old and I was not too
young, because he was both this baby's father and an old, old man.
Because he could draw sweet Madonnas and dismembered faces and pictures
of nothing, nothing at all.  I wondered if it took an act of will or
just a long, long life to achieve this--to exceed or to outlive or
simply to escape the limits of time and age, of what could or couldn't
be done, should or shouldn't be done.  To use no other criteria but
your own, straight out of your head.

I turned away from the crib and saw Daisy coming along the narrow
hallway that led from the living room, the beach bag over her arm.  She
seemed to be favoring her right leg as she walked.  I put my finger to
my lips and touched her on the small of her back to lead her out again,
and as soon as we had passed through the front door I asked if she was
getting a blister from her shoes.  She said no, her foot was just
asleep, but not without a bit of a flush rising to her cheeks.

"If they're hurting you," I said, "you might want to take them off for
a while."  But she shook her head and handed me the beach bag and
changed the subject by asking, "Now what are we supposed to do?"

"Sit and wait," I said.

"Until she wakes up."  And seeing

that was unsatisfactory, I offered, "We can read."  I moved two of the
canvas chairs under Flora's window and then told Daisy to go inside to
pick out some books from the basket beside the desk.  I took my own
book from the beach bag and sat with it, pulling my legs up into the
sway-bottomed chair, my paperback on my raised knees.  And then I
watched him from over the top of it as he left his studio and walked to
the house.  He climbed the three steps slowly, shuffling on the balls
of his feet, his head down, not to avoid me, I think, but in a real
failure to notice I was there.  He went into the house and I
listened.

I heard the rattle of an ice tray in the kitchen, and then, a few
minutes later, he came through the door again with a new drink in his
hand and said, as if we'd already spoken, "The little redhead inside
says you'll know where the Saint Joseph's is kept."

I put my book down, and my legs.  I had some unformed and disconcerting
image of old St.  Joseph and the young Virgin Mary before I even
managed to say, "I beg your pardon?"

He was smiling, about the eyes mostly, as if it had pleased him to
discover a little redhead in his house, or to see me so puzzled.

"The children's aspirin," he said again.

"The St.  Joseph's children's aspirin.  The little girl inside said you
would know where we keep it."

"In Flora's room," I said.

"The shoebox in her closet."  And then, suddenly understanding his
expectation, I stood and told him I'd get it.  I met Daisy at the door,
a pile of picture books in her arms.  I told her I'd be back in a
minute.

When I returned, he was in the other canvas chair and Daisy was on the
porch floor, the books spread around her.  I handed him the bottle and
then had to step between her and

him, over the books and his feet, between her shoulder and his knees,
to get back to where I'd been sitting.  I could feel the heat rise in
my cheeks, and I put my book on my lap, afraid if I held it up I would
see my fingers trembling again.  I was only beginning to fully
understand the full, rotten effect of Flora's mother's last-minute
instructions for the babysitter.

I couldn't look at his face.  He placed his drink in the smoked-glass
ashtray, then opened the bottle and handed it to Daisy.

"See if your clever little fingers can get that cotton out for me," he
said.

Solemnly, she took it from him, pulled the cotton out, and handed the
bottle back.  With her mouth open, she gazed up at him, the cotton ball
still in her hand, and I reached down to relieve her of it.  He shook a
few of the aspirins into his palm and then, picking them off one by
one, put them in his mouth and began to chew.  I felt him looking at me
as he did.  I looked up.

Behind his thick glasses, his eyes still seemed to be on the verge of
laughter.  His white shock of hair might have stirred.

"Never get old," he said.  He was chewing all on one side.

"Or, better yet, never get old teeth."  He reached for his glass, took
a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed.  He returned the
glass to the ashtray and shook a few more aspirins into his palm.

"Nothing better to remind you of your mortality than your teeth rotting
in your gums."  He looked down at Daisy, lifted his brows.

"I really have no idea if these things will do any good," he said, as
if she alone would understand his dilemma.

"But they're chewable, they're orange-flavored.

They go directly to the source of the pain."  He shrugged.

"They can't hurt, right?"

"They're good," Daisy offered.

"I love them."  And he gallantly held his palm out to her.

"Would you like one?"

She looked up at me.

"You're not sick," I said.  But he moved his outstretched arm to knock
me on my knee.

"Oh come on," he said, his thumb against my skin.

"She can have one."

"My leg does hurt a little," Daisy said; and she touched the leg that
was drawn up under her skirt.

"Your foot's asleep," I told her, more harshly than I intended.

"You said so yourself."  And then I added, "They're not candy, Daisy.
They're medicine."  They looked at me, both of them, surprised and
disappointed.  There was a tightness in my stomach and in my chest, and
I felt as constricted by my own prim, close-fisted humorlessness as
Flora had been by her mother's silk scarves.  It was, I suppose, a
learned response, how one behaved in the face of potential lechery.  If
I was not the most popular girl at school, I was, perhaps, the most
attentive, especially when the talk turned, delicately, to sex.  I
could hear Sister Alphonse Marie: "Stand fast, girls."

He shrugged and closed his hand, pulling it away.  Daisy slumped at my
feet, returning quietly to her books.  Then I said, into the silence,
"Okay, just one," which made him suddenly throw his head back with
laughter, a shout of laughter that I feared for a moment would wake
Flora--although Flora waking would be the very thing that would allow
us to leave.

He leaned forward again and Daisy took one of the aspirins from his
palm and put it in her mouth.

"I can tell what kind of mother you're going to be," he said, smiling
at me--fondly, it seemed.

"A dozen kids who can get away with anything."  His

eyes went to my hair, which at that hour of a summer day was probably
as wild as Daisy's, then to somewhere around my mouth, and then my
throat.  He wore a thin white shirt, open at the collar.  I thought he
was about to tell me I was pretty--I knew the look, a gift about to be
delivered--but instead he leaned over and took the book from my lap. He
pushed his glasses to the top of his head to read the title, and
suddenly I saw in his face little Flora's features, worn out by
tears.

"Hardy," he said, turning the pages, his nose raised so his eyes could
focus.  An old, old man after all.

"Egdon Heath.

Lovely Eustacia."  I told him it was for school, and he nodded, of
course it was.

"At least it's not Jane Eyre" he said.  But I told him, "I like Jane
Eyre, too," as if I had missed his irony.  He handed the book back to
me, over Daisy's head, and I did not look away.  There was black paint
under his fingernails, splatters of gray and white on the back of his
hand.  He plucked the glasses from the top of his head, placed them on
his knee, and then ran his hands up over his face, through the tongue
of smoky white hair.

"Twelve children," he said, as if to himself.

"And a clam digger for a husband."  He reached for his drink and took a
sip and once again swished it around in his mouth.

"Pain," he said as he swallowed.

"Someone should write a history of the world according to the
toothache.  What kingdoms lost because of a toothache.  What romances
gone unconsummated.

Ships sunk.  Masterpieces left unfinished."

Daisy was looking up at him with quiet concern, and noticing this, he
reached down and touched her hair.

"Never get old," he said again.

"Sell your soul if you have to."  He looked at me, Flora's face, worn
out, receding, the skin grown yellowish and paper thin.  But the weak
eyes were his.

"What I

wouldn't give to have the time you've still got, kiddo," he said.

"Kids, clam digger, and all."

I lowered my eyes and shrugged, as I might have had he delivered the
prize of admitting I was pretty.  I'd lost my fear of him, I knew, the
knot of it in my stomach and chest, its ricochet in my fingertips.
There was a trace of Uncle Tommy's third-drink philosophy in what he
said, and it reminded me once again of my own capacity to embarrass
him, to feel sorry for him.  The advantage I had of youth and beauty
and time left.  I wasn't even startled when he slowly, maybe a little
drunkenly, leaned toward me once more and took my wrist and gently
insinuated his paint-spattered finger into my closed fist, prying it
apart.  In my palm was the bit of cotton from the aspirin bottle.  He
took it from me, dipped it quickly into his drink, and then pressed it
into his mouth, into the corner he had favored as he'd chewed the
aspirin.  He moved his tongue around a bit, tasting--his eyes let me
know--not just the whiskey but the warm salt of my skin.

I shrugged again and reached back to lift my hair off my neck, twisting
it, as I had done this morning, into a loose bun.

The day was growing warmer.

"Flora's worn out," I said, and Daisy at my feet murmured, "I'll say.
We'll never get to the beach."  She put her chin on her hand and idly
turned a page.  I could tell she was familiar with this kind of
disappointment, the disappointment brought about by the endless and
inevitable accommodation of younger children.

"Sure we will," I said.  Now he was simply watching me, sunk back in
the canvas chair, his fingers on the side of his head, watching but no
longer smiling.  Even as Ana pulled the car into the drive, his eyes
were still on me.

Ana climbed the steps and looked at the three of us, surprised and not
pleased to see us there, her hands on her hips.

"Baby asleep?"  she asked me, and I said yes.  She gestured toward the
house.

"Inside?"  I resisted saying, Where else?

"Yes," I said.

"In her crib."  She shook her head and clucked her tongue and looked at
her watch.

"No good," she said.

"Too early.  She'll be too tired for her dinner tonight."  She was a
nice-looking woman, although I had never thought to notice before.  She
had olive skin and softly per med hair and large, dark eyes, a small
gold cross on her neck.  Plump in her pale blue servant's dress, an
ample figure, I suppose it would be called.  I was under the impression
that she had a husband in the city.

"You should wake her up," she said, gesturing toward the street; she
might even have been angry at me.

"Go for your walk."

Flora's father said, "Nonsense," from his chair.  He put on his glasses
and then stood up slowly, wearily, a tall, thin man getting back to
work.  His drink was still in his hand.

"Let her sleep," he said to me, and then, as he walked past her,
something in French to Ana.  She stood there for a few minutes as he
walked down the steps and back to his studio, her head turned over her
shoulder but her eyes on the floor, her mouth pensive, her hands still
on her hips.  Even if she wasn't French, and despite her middle-aged
figure, you'd have to call the pose coquettish.

She threw a final glance at me and went into the house.  I wondered
what last-minute instructions Flora's mother had left for her before
she boarded the train.  Or what Ana herself had planned on, with the
wife safely on her way and the child and the babysitter and her
redheaded shadow off to the beach

for the day.  The French maid and the aging artist frolicking under
the weeping-cherry trees.

"Jeepers creepers," I said to Daisy after the screen door had slammed,
and Daisy rolled her eyes and said, "What's she so mad about?"

"Beats me," I said.  I sat with her on the floor of the porch.

Flora's books were mostly new, and, Daisy pointed out, many of the
pages were scratched over with crayons, an infraction Uncle Jack would
never have allowed, which seemed to take Daisy's breath away.

"She's spoiled," I explained.

"Only children like us usually are."  Daisy considered this for a
moment and then, afraid, I think, that she had given some offense,
said, "Well, her dad is an artist, after all.  Maybe she can't help
it."

I laughed and leaned forward and kissed her forehead, which was warm.
Then I scooted around behind her and drew her between my legs and began
to braid her tangled, heavy hair.  Ana appeared behind the screen door
once or twice to see what we were doing--I wondered if she was going to
go in and shake Flora awake--and then came out with a lunch tray held
high between her hands.  She crossed the porch with it and went down
the steps and the path and then into the side door of the garage.

While she was still inside, Daisy and I moved out to the lawn, where we
ate our own lunches in the scattered shade of one of the small cherry
trees.  The day had grown warm, but it was perfect June warmth, soft as
water on our skin, and with the low house and the woods and the high
green hedge, the blue sky was just a lovely canopy over us alone. Lying
on the grass together, Daisy's head on my thigh, we were quiet enough
to hear the ocean.

My advantage, I realized, was not only that I could embarrass him or
pity him, or recognize his foolishness--a supposed genius, a rich man
with a young wife--not even the years I had left while his were spent.
My advantage was that I knew what he was trying to do, here in his
kingdom by the sea, where art was what he said it was and the limits of
time and age were banished and everything was possible because
everything that mattered was inside his head.  My advantage was that I
knew what he was trying to do--and I was better at it.

When Flora finally woke, she was hot and sweaty but happy to see me,
and Daisy with her shoes, so I gave her a quick lunch and packed up her
towel and her bathing suit and plopped her into her stroller.

"Should I put my suit on?"  Daisy asked, and then looked at me warily
when I said we'd change on the beach.

"You don't want to walk all that way in a tight bathing suit," I said.
And then, by way of further explanation, "Under a towel, Daisy Mae.
It'll be fine.  You'll see."

Ana was back in the kitchen by then, more pleasant, perhaps, but mostly
because she was ignoring us.  I stuck a sun hat on Flora's head and
borrowed another one for Daisy.  And then, on a whim, because I
usually, wisely, never borrowed anything from the people I worked for,
I plucked Flora's mother's straw hat from its hook by the door and
stuck it on the back of my head.  I'd only seen her wearing it once,
when I brought Flora home one afternoon and she was having drinks out
on the lawn with another old guy (a Broadway person, the cook was
pleased to tell me) and his also-too-young wife.  It was on one of
those cool and overcast days she had been so miserable about when I
first started, and so the hat was mere costume, worn, perhaps, for the
benefit of her theatrical friends.  I saw

Ana glance at me over my shoulder as I took it.  I realized I wouldn't
mind in the least if she told; I might even want her to.  Daisy looked
up at me.

"You look nice," she said.

I laughed.

"I look like Huckleberry Finn," I told her.

She smiled wryly.

"Huckleberry Hound, you mean."

I paused.  In the shadow of her sun hat, her eyes were rimmed in pale
blue.  She was grinning with all her crooked little teeth.

"You're getting there, Daisy Mae," I said admiringly.

"You're getting there."

Flora's habit, a trick I'd taught her, when I pushed her stroller down
the gravel drive, was to hum in a monotone, open-mouthed, so her voice
would tremble and shake with the vibration of the wheels against the
stones.  Daisy thought this deliriously funny, and her laughter made
Flora more pleased with herself than ever.  Her bumpy song grew louder
and Daisy's laughter more uncontrollable as we passed the dribbled
canvas, the burning lightbulb in the window, the scent of paint, and
headed toward the road.

Daisy walked beside the stroller--Flora had reached up and taken her
hand--and although she still favored one foot, it did not seem as
prominent a limp as before.  Testing her, I paused, put my hand to the
road, and then announced that I was taking off my sneakers.  I tied
them together and put them over my shoulder.  The tar was warm, but not
too hot beneath my feet.  I elaborately wiggled my toes.

"Feels real good," I said in a fake Southern accent.

"Better than being civilized."  But Daisy did not follow suit.

There were already a few scattered bathers on the beach.  I pushed the
stroller into our regular corner of the parking lot, and Flora,
accustomed to our routine, immediately scooted out

and headed, with Daisy, into the sand.

"There go your shoes," I called, and then decided not to puzzle over it
anymore.  In my own childhood, my mother often told me, I had once worn
a flamboyant red Gypsy skirt, the remnant of my Halloween costume, from
October 31 to Thanksgiving, night and day, over church clothes and play
clothes and pajamas, with no other explanation for why I kept it on (or
why I finally took it off) than that I wanted to.  She told the story
without ever once questioning why she had indulged me in this,
questioning only what it was that had possessed me to insist that I not
be parted from the gaudy skirt, with its swirls of gold and black and
its itchy red net ruffles--the very skirt that hung at this moment in
my attic wardrobe, just to the right of a row of blue-and-green uniform
jumpers, size 7.

On the beach, I spread out the soft blue quilt Flora's mother had
provided and then pulled our towels and our suntan lotion from the
beach bag.  I opened the thermos of lemonade and gave each of them a
drink.  I told them I just remembered a story one of the nuns at my
school had told us, a story about a little girl--this was years and
years ago--who was given a beautiful white slip, hand-embroidered and
made of the softest, finest cotton in the whole world.  It was made by
some nuns who lived upstate and came out of their convents only once a
year, when they traveled around to churches to sell the things they
made after Mass--children's clothes and altar cloths and doilies.  The
slip was pure white, and the little girl was meant to save it to wear
on her First Communion, in May, but one cold night in February, just as
she was getting ready for bed, she opened up her bottom drawer and took
the slip out

of its tissue paper and put it on.  The next morning, when her mother
saw what she had slept in, she was really angry, but the little girl
said, "But, Mommy, I wanted to show it to the angels."

Her mother said, The angels will see it on your First Communion, and
took the slip and ironed out all the wrinkles and put it back in its
tissue paper.  Well, the next morning her mother went in to wake her up
and there was the little girl sleeping in the white slip again (Daisy
laughed, as if to say, I like this kid), and her mother was just about
to scold her when she realized that the little girl wasn't asleep at
all but dead.  She really had worn the slip to show it to the angels.

Daisy frowned and pulled back her chin, squinting at me in the sun.  A
wave crashed with what sounded like a clap of thunder.

I laughed.

"I don't believe it, either," I said.  Flora, impatient, began to raise
her white dress over her head, showing her plump thighs and her belly
button and her ruffled diaper cover.

"I want to swim," she said.  I reached up and pulled her into my lap to
unlace her shoes.

Carefully, thoughtfully, perhaps, Daisy sat down beside us.

"Bernadette knows another story like that," she said.

"She told me once.  Only it wasn't a slip, it was something else. White
Communion shoes, I think."

"It must be a story they teach them in nun school," I said.  I pulled
off Flora's shoes and socks and stood her up again.

"If I had been the little girl," I said, "I'd have shown up in heaven
in a red Gypsy skirt from Halloween.  Not exactly angelic."  I tapped
the toe of Daisy's pink shoe.

"And I suppose you'd be wearing these."

"Jewels," Flora said, leaning to put her finger on them, too.

"Daisy has jewels on her shoes."

I lifted one of the beach towels and draped it over Flora's head--it
was our routine--and then joined her under it to slip off her dress and
her diaper and pull her skirted bathing suit up over her chubby legs
and baby belly while her hands gripped my hair so she could keep her
balance.  When we emerged, I pulled Daisy's suit out of the bag and
told her she was next.  But she looked around shyly and shook her
head.

"Someone might see me," she whispered.  I noticed that she had taken
off the pink shoes but still had her white socks on.

There was a faint blush rising into her cheeks.

"No, they won't," I said.  I picked up another beach towel and held
both of them together.

"I'll make an envelope, see," I told her, holding out the length of the
two towels.

"You scoot under and come up inside."

This she did, laughing, her head popping up just over the towels,
between my arms.  I closed my eyes and turned my head away.

"Now no one can see you but the seagulls."  I felt her moving against
the blanket, pulling the dress up over her head, bending to step into
her suit.  Cautiously, I looked to see how she was doing.  Her bare
back was bent, I could see the sharp thin line of her spine as if it
had been picked out by the sun, but there was a place, too, low on her
back, just over her hip that because of the sun or my half-shut eyes or
the shadow of the beach towels seemed bruised or mottled.  I might have
asked her about it then, but as soon as she stepped out from behind the
towel--she did it with a flourish, like a diva taking a curtain
call--we saw Tony and Petey heading toward us, their bikes thrown into
the sand just behind them like some useless

and discarded things.

"Where've you been?"  Tony demanded as Petey said, in the same tone,
"What took you so long?"

As they squinted up at me, skeptically, it seemed, I explained that
Flora had taken an early nap and we'd had to wait for her.  I sat down
on the quilt.

"Did you find the movie star?"

I asked, and they shook their heads no, falling on their knees in the
sand beside us.

"We saw what house they went into, though," Tony offered.

"We were going to do a stakeout, but baby June wouldn't be quiet."

The two brothers exchanged a look from under their pale white brows,
and then Petey of the blackened eye said, "Rags is back.  We tied him
up to your fence so my grandpa won't see him."  He turned to Daisy.

"My grandpa shoots stray dogs," he said.

And I said, "No, he doesn't," although, given Mr.  Moran's personality,
it didn't seem unlikely.

"He said he'd shoot Rags," Tony argued.

"He said Rags tried to bite him."

"Rags doesn't bite," I said, and took away the sandy Popsicle stick
Petey had just handed Flora.

"Where's baby June now?"  I asked, because the look the two brothers
had exchanged had had a kind of snag in it.  They exchanged the same
look again.

"At home, I guess," Tony said into the sand.

"With Judy?"  I asked.

"Judy and Janey got to go horseback riding with their dad," Petey said
with some indignation.

"Is this your hat?"  He picked up Flora's mother's hat from the quilt
where I'd placed it and stuck it on the back of his head.  Then he
pulled the

brim down over his ears and said in a high voice, "Ain't I pretty."

"Is your mother home?"  I said, and with the hat still pulled down and
his two palms against his cheeks, Petey shook his head.

"So who's minding June?"  I asked them.  Hands on his knees, Tony sat
up a bit to look back over his shoulder toward the parking lot.  Petey
said, from under the shadow of the hat, "She's coming.  She was right
behind us."

I lifted Flora and the beach bag and the towel and slipped my dress
over Daisy's suit.  I asked her to pick up the quilt and her shoes.
Walking up the beach behind us, Tony and Petey promised that baby June
would probably be here any minute, she was just really, really slow.
She was right behind them the last time they looked.

I put a startled Flora into the stroller, and with Daisy scraping along
in her pink shoes, trying to keep up, and Petey and Tony protesting at
my side, I walked quickly down to the road.

No sign of baby June.

"Which way did you come?"  I asked them, and squinting up at me, they
pointed left, toward home.

"When was the last time you saw her?"

Tony pointed again.

"Just past the movie star's house," he said.

"What's the big deal?"

We came upon her a few minutes later, sitting, like a baby in a fairy
tale, at the edge of a brown potato field, her face streaked with tears
and dirt, her hands filthy, her clothes--a pilly and too tight cotton
sun suit--dirtier still.  I walked over the cool, lumpy dirt in my bare
feet and snatched her up.  She smelled like the earth, like a freshly
dug potato, as if she had

just rolled up out of the jumbled ground.

"You guys," I said, turning to the two boys, who seemed nonplussed by
the whole ordeal--she had been, after all, pretty much where they'd
expected, just behind them.

"You guys should never leave her like that.  Do you know what could
have happened to her?"

"Well, she's too slow," Petey said.

And I said, my voice growing louder, "She could have been hit by a car,
Petey.  She could have been kidnapped.  Stolen."

"No one would steal her" Tony said, and the two of them laughed at the
joke.

"She could have been run over," I said again, louder this time.

"I can't believe you guys did this--you're idiots.  Perfect idiots."

Suddenly Petey's face changed.  He stepped closer, his fists
clenched.

"Well, we kept looking for you," he said, squinting, matching his angry
voice to mine.

"Yeah," Tony said indignantly.

"Where the hell were you?"

Petey stepped forward again.

"Yeah, where were you?"  He was right under my nose and his dirty baby
sister was staring down at him from my arms.  He was all open mouth
under Flora's mother's wide straw hat, and his blackened eye was half
closed.  His voice was loud enough to hurt my ears.

"We kept going back to the beach and you weren't there."  He gestured
wildly, like an adult.  There was spit forming at the corners of his
mouth.

"You weren't where you were supposed to be."  He jabbed a finger at
me.

"You're the idiot."

Softly, staring him down, I said, "You two left your baby sister alone
in the road.  It's about the stupidest thing you've ever done."

 First I saw the tears come into his pale eyes and then I saw his
fist.  I turned to protect baby June's knee and he hit me solidly on
the forearm.

"Well, to hell with you," he cried, sounding for all the world like his
grandpa.  And then he turned, skidding down the incline of dirt that
separated the road and the field, and, as if for good measure, punched
Daisy, too, on the shoulder, hard enough to make her step back, her
face filled with surprise and pain.  Then he ran, Tony at his heels.

With June still in my arms, I went to Daisy, who was holding her
shoulder and whispering, "Ow, ow, ow," but not crying.

A girl with brothers.  I put my free arm around her.

"Go get your bikes, idiots," I called after the boys.

"And bring me back that hat."  But Tony just turned and thumbed his
nose, and stuck out his tongue, and the two of them kept running.

I held Daisy tighter, and little June reached down to pat her head.  In
her stroller Flora began to cry, but I hushed her.

"Daisy's okay," I told her.

"You're okay, aren't you, Daisy Mae?"

She nodded, being brave.

"It's okay, Flora Dora," she said.

"I'm all right."

I told them we would forget the beach for today.  I gave Daisy one more
pat on the head and then with my free hand turned Flora's stroller
around.

"Margaret Mary," I said, "do you think you can push the stroller while
I carry baby June?

Something tells me she's done enough walking."

Daisy said sure, and then had some trouble keeping the stroller
straight.  I put my hand on it briefly to guide her, and then let her
go on her own.  It took some effort, I could tell, the

smooth soles of her pink shoes slipping and sliding against the
macadam, but she put all her legs and her sore shoulder into it, all of
that tiny body, muscle and bone.

"What would I do without you, Daisy Mae?"  I said.

"One day here and already you're indispensable."

Back at my house, Rags was tied to the side fence with a short bit of
clothesline.  He barked viciously as we approached, even growled--as if
the few hours he'd spent on the property had made him responsible for
the security of the house.  I told the girls to stay where they were--I
could see them drawing back anyway, and then I approached him and said,
"What are you growling at, you silly dog?"  At the sound of my voice he
immediately cowered a bit and thumped his tail, whining an apology.  He
was a sweet but odd mutt, mostly collie, I think, by turns skittish and
friendly and shy, schizophrenic, I supposed.

And stupid.  He came and went, a stray for the most part, probably left
behind by some summer people who didn't want the year-round
responsibility of a pet; occasionally--those times when we didn't see
him for weeks--adopted by another summer family who made him theirs for
whatever time they were out here.  The Moran kids weren't allowed to
keep him, but they dragged him back to me whenever he came around.
Rags, being stupid, tolerated them for the most part, although I'd seen
him nip their fingers once or twice.  Now he rolled over in joyful
submission as I petted him and talked him into calming down.  I then
let the girls bring him some water and dog biscuits.

With Rags still tied to the fence but happily subdued, I stripped off
baby June's dirty clothes in the yard and washed her off with my
father's garden hose.  Then I wrapped her in a

beach towel and carried her into the bathroom, where I filled the tub
with water and shampoo and let June and Flora both play in the bubbles.
Daisy laughed, watching them, but didn't want to join in, not even in
her bathing suit.  Out on the lawn again, in what were now the long
shadows of the afternoon, I gave everybody cookies and fruit punch.
Judy and Janey wandered over to take Rags for a walk, but there was no
sign of the boys.  I turned baby June over to her sisters and asked
Daisy if she might possibly want to get out of her bathing suit, and
maybe even change her shoes for the afternoon walk.  To my surprise,
she nodded and went into the house, coming out a few minutes later not
in her new sneakers but in the old saddle shoes she had worn on the
train.

"They look comfortable," I said, mostly because she seemed so
disappointed to be wearing them again.

We got Flora into her stroller and walked her home, singing loudly most
of the way--"Barnacle Bill the Sailor," a song that came to me as we
passed Mr.  Moran, standing, swaying, shirtless in his driveway,
mumbling to himself.  We were trying to keep Flora from falling asleep
before she had her dinner.

The lights were still on in her father's painting place, but there was
no sign of him, or Ana either, which was just as well, since I didn't
have the straw hat.  Inside, there was the familiar smell of the place:
her perfume, his cigar, something new and complicated riding on the
scent now.  The cook was in the kitchen, just taking a single baked
potato out of the oven, and when I told her Flora had already been
bathed, back at my house, she reached up and ran her hand over my hair.
She was a lady who went to our church, a vague friend of my mother's,
fat and grandmotherly but not, I now realized, unaware.

"Thank you, dear," she said.

"That helps."  As if she knew, and I knew, that Ana's duties would fall
to her tonight.

As tired as she was, and perhaps because she was tired, Flora cried
when Daisy and I said goodbye.  She didn't cling, or even run after us,
she was too exhausted for that.  But she sat at the kitchen table in
the terrycloth bib the cook had tied around her neck and simply sobbed.
On the plate in front of her were the steaming baked potato, a few
peas, some cut-up bits of poached chicken.  She sat on a couple of
phone books, but still her chin was only just above the food.  She
cried with her mouth open, the tears streaming down her cheeks.  The
cook sat at the table with her, wiping away the tears with her thumb.
Under her fat elbow were Flora's mother's scarves, all but the
turquoise-and-white one, just where she had left them.

Daisy and I backed out of the room, waving.  The house behind us seemed
empty.  I took her hand as soon as we got outside.

The spattered canvas was still against the wall of the garage, and I
thought about what he had said, about masterpieces unfinished.  I told
Daisy, as we walked to the Kaufmans' to give Red Rover his evening
walk, that maybe tonight we could sleep in the attic, in the two old
beds.  We could push one of the chairs over to the window, and maybe, I
said, if we wake up and see the ghost Uncle Tommy always saw, we could
ask him his name, and the name of the little boy in his lap.

"What do you think their story is, Daisy Mae?"  I asked her.  She
thought awhile and then she said, "The ghost is the little boy's
father.  And he was waiting by the window for him to come back.  And
then the little boy came back and sat on his father's lap, in the
chair."

I nodded.

"Reasonable enough," I told her.

"Now we just have to figure out where the little boy had been."

"On a ship," she said without hesitation.

"That finally returned."

I laughed.  The sun was lower now, and the grackles were going crazy in
the trees, preparing for night.  Somewhere from behind one of the high
hedges we heard children's voices calling, laughter and a shout.  From
somewhere else came the sound of a tennis ball.  There was the lovely
scent of fading summer afternoon in the air--maybe a hint of the unseen
children's suntan lotion.  I began to sing, "And it finally returned,
it finally returned, it came back from the sea.  And from that day to
this"--I glanced down at her and she looked up at me, expectantly.

"Fond hearts," I said clearly, "are happy"--she seemed relieved: the
air was too lovely for more bad words--"because the ship had finally
returned."

We heard Red Rover whining and yelping even before we reached the
house.  Clearly, he'd had a miserably lonely day, and I let him lick my
face, and Daisy's, to make it up to him.

We walked him back to the beach, and sure enough, Petey's and Tony's
bicycles were still in the sand.  Daisy and I picked them up and rested
them against the garbage cans while Red Rover explored the shoreline,
then we brought him back to his pen.  A light was on in the Kaufmans'
front window, as was the side porch light, but this house, too, was
empty.  Dr.  Kaufman had not returned from the city yet.  I hoped he
would remember to visit Red when he did.

Going back to the beach to fetch the boys' bicycles, we ran into the
Richardsons with their Scotties.  Mrs.  Richardson looked Daisy up and
down as I introduced her, and I feared for

a moment that she would actually say--the word was all over her
mannish face--pitiful.  Poor Daisy did indeed look like a waif.  Her
braid was coming undone and her sash was limp and there were streaks of
dirt, baby June's handprints, Red Rover's paws, on the skirt of her
white-and-yellow (and now, suddenly, under Mrs.  Richardson's all but
monocled eye, outdated) hand me-down dress.  And then the unpolished
saddle shoes, merely two shades of gray, rather than black and white. I
had the notion that the shoes alone had transformed her from the
charming sprite she'd been this morning, walking the Scotties under the
tall green trees, that those cheap pink things had some magic in them
after all.

"And where in the city do you live?"

Mrs.  Richardson asked her, and Daisy, mumbling, shy under her
scrutiny, bowed her head and said, "Two Hundred and Seventh Place."

Mrs.  Richardson put her big face into mine.

"What did she say?"  (The implication being, of course, that the child
should really be taught to speak up.)

I smiled, pushing Daisy along.

"She lives on Sutton Place," I said.

"Shall I come by for the dogs in the morning?"

Mrs.  Richardson glanced at her husband, who had his pipe stem in his
mouth.

"Yes, of course," she said.

"Nice meeting you, Daisy," and Daisy, even in the worn-out shoes and
the dirty dress, did a splendid curtsy and said, "Nice meeting you,
too."

"Can you imagine living with that woman?"  I asked her as we went on,
and Daisy shook her head.

"Poor dogs," she said.

We rode the wobbling bicycles back to the house, leaving them both in
the Morans' battered yard.  My parents weren't home yet, so I went into
the kitchen and peeled some potatoes

and put them on to boil.  Daisy was sitting on the couch in the living
room, looking at some magazines, but when I went in to join her, I saw
that she was crying quietly, the tears just rolling out of her eyes.  I
pushed the magazines onto the floor and sat down beside her.  I put my
arm around her, drawing her close.

"What is it, Daisy Mae?"  I asked, and she sniffed and said softly, "I
miss my mother."

This surprised me a bit, and immediately I regretted having made fun of
Aunt Peg, back at the Clarkes' house this morning.  Of course, of
course, it seemed perfectly sensible now--crazed Aunt Peg was, after
all, Daisy's only mother.

"I

miss my house," she added.

I kissed the top of her head.

"You can go home whenever you want," I said softly, into her hair, the
sweet odor of her warm scalp.  Although the very notion of it made me
realize, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I would be lonely
without her, here in my own house, where I had always been alone.

"I can take you home on the train tomorrow, or whenever you want.  Just
say the word."  But she quickly shook her head, and then turned to look
at me earnestly.

"Oh, I don't want to leave," she said.

"I love it here.  I could stay forever."

Tears came into her eyes again.

"I just miss them," she said.

I told her I understood.

"It's hard when you're used to people," I said, and she nodded.

"You can miss them but not necessarily want to be with them."

She nodded again.

"You sort of wish you could be two places at once.  With them, because
you love them and you're used to them, but also away from them, so you
can be just yourself."

"That's right," Daisy said, leaning against me, her skinny elbow
pressing into my thigh.

"You wish you could appear and disappear, like a little ghost.  Be
around them, but not be stuck with them."  She nodded again.

"It's the mystery of families," I said.

She rested her head on my shoulder.  Her face was drawn and tired.  I
could hear the boiling potatoes drilling in their pot, and knew they
should probably be turned down, but I didn't want to leave Daisy to get
up and do it.  I told her to put her feet up, instead, to take a rest,
and when she did, I said, thinking more of my mother's love of the
rose-colored slipcover than of all the nonsense we'd gone through today
over the pink shoes, "You'd better take off your shoes."  Obediently,
wearily, she leaned down and untied the worn-out saddle shoes, no
argument here, of course, because the shoes, ordinary school shoes,
contained no magic.

"And those sandy socks," I said.  With only the slightest, saddest nod,
a mere remnant of her earlier hesitation, she slipped off each of the
thin white socks and placed them into her shoes.  She drew her feet up
on the couch again, her knees pulled up into the generous skirt of my
old Sunday dress, and put her head in my lap.  On the wall next to the
fireplace was the sketch Flora's father had given me back in April, now
carefully matted and framed.  Framed in what my parents had called a
museum-quality frame--"a small fortune"--they'd said.  But the man in
the frame shop had offered them one hundred dollars for the drawing,
which pleased and surprised them no end.  When they brought it home,
they hung it up with great ceremony.  Although they still thought the
drawing itself looked "like nothing," it was,

nevertheless, the first real evidence of my success by association,
the very reason they'd moved out here.  I saw Daisy looking at the
picture, her hands under her cheek, and I said, "Flora's father drew
that."

She nodded.

"I thought so."

"I don't know what it's supposed to be," I said.

"He drew about fifty of them and gave one to me."  I moved my arm down
the length of her little body, stroking her side.

"It's a picture of something broken," she said matter-of factly not as
sleepy as she had been, revived, it seemed, by her own thoughts.

"Something you sort of expected to break, but you still wish it hadn't.
You still think maybe it won't."

I moved the hem of the dress off her thin ankles.  The sun was coming
through the living-room window in that heavy red gold of near-dusk, but
it did not hit the couch and so there was no glare to blind me and no
real shadow to convince me I was mistaken in what I saw.  I leaned over
her a bit.

"Daisy," I said.

And then I touched her shoulder and asked her to sit up again.

She seemed for a moment to hold her breath.  I slipped off the couch
and knelt down among the magazines.  Gently, I took both of her feet
into my hands.  Across each instep, tracing, it seemed, the outline of
her old saddle shoes, an unmistakable bruise--I licked my finger and
rubbed it a bit, just to make sure--a black-and-blue crescent that
reached nearly to her toes.  I touched it softly, and then with some
pressure, but she did not flinch.

"Does this hurt?"  I said, and she shook her head sheepishly.

"Not really," she said.

"What is it, then?"  I whispered.

She shrugged, her two hands politely folded together in the

lap of her skirt.

"Just a black-and-blue mark," she said cautiously, raising her chin and
turning her head away from me just a little.

"How did you get it?  Your brothers?"

Now there were tears in her eyes again and her voice was very soft,
nearly inaudible.

"No," she whispered.  She met my eye and nodded as if to admit that
here, then, was the thing she had worked so hard to conceal.

"I don't know how I got it," she said.

"It was just there one day, a little while ago.  I don't know why."

I looked at it more closely.  It was a mottled bruise, yellowish in
spots, in some spots almost black.

"Did you tell anyone?"

I asked her.

"Did you show your mother?"

Daisy shook her head again, and now her mouth was trembling.

"I was afraid they wouldn't let me come," she said softly.

"I was afraid they'd make me go to the doctor and then I wouldn't be
able to come."  A tear slipped over the brim of her eye and ran down
her face and hit the pretty collar of her dirty dress.

"I really don't want to go home," she said earnestly.

"I

was just missing my mother, but I don't want to go home."  I moved back
onto the couch and again took her into my arms.

Like a baby, she put her open mouth to my shoulder.

"I thought it was because of the shoes," she said.

"My school shoes.  I thought the pink ones would make it go away.

But I wore them all day.  It's not going away."  She moved a hand up to
my face.

"I don't want to go home already," she said.

I held her for a while, stroking her arm, patting her back, hushing
her, hushing her.  I thought of the discoloration I had seen on her hip
as she changed.  The pale wash of her skin this

morning, the heat of her scalp and her forehead when I leaned to kiss
her.  All the things Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack, in their busy,
child-infested lives, could have missed, could have been missing for
quite some time.  Poor Daisy.  Poor Daisy, we all said.  Poor Daisy,
the jolly family story went, poor Daisy doesn't get much attention,
what with her noisy brothers and fat, fragile Bernadette, and the house
to keep orderly, the rules to enforce, the long, dangerous nights her
father has to work (not to mention all the busy, closed-door nights he
was at home).  Poor Daisy's a good little thing, the family story went:
obedient, polite, wonderfully independent--getting herself her own
bath, putting on her own pajamas, coming down for school in the morning
all ready to go.  She's a quiet little thing, poor Daisy, but around
here, she doesn't have much chance to be anything else, does she? (This
from Uncle Jack in his gun and holster, his dish of fruit salad with
tiny marshmallows placed on the Formica table before him, and Aunt Peg
hovering, touching his shoulder, his scarred cheek, all the children in
bed but me.  The kitchen window behind him sprayed with false snow.

"Poor Daisy," he said, and swallowed a bright spoonful.  Uncle Jack at
one in the morning, in his own kitchen, finally returned.

"She's a quiet little thing, but I guess we'll keep her.")

I don't know that I made any decision.  I don't know that I understood
what the bruises might mean, or forebode, although I think Daisy and I
both had a sense of something menacing about them, something making its
way into her life, and mine.  Something that had broken.  Something you
sort of expected to break.  But still hope it won't.

"One day isn't very long," I said to her, eventually, when

she was ready to hear me.

"You never know.  You haven't really given those pink shoes much
time."

She sat up, her arms still around my neck, our faces just inches
apart.

"You only put them on yesterday," I said.

"They only got out here yesterday.  They were perfectly ordinary shoes
until then."  I heard my parents' car pull into the driveway, the
crunch of their tires on the gravel.

"We have to give them a chance, right?  We have to wait and see."  I
wiped my thumbs over her flushed cheeks, which were still wet with
tears.  There was the screech of the old car's hand brake

Gently, I leaned across Daisy's lap to pick up her socks.

"You know what they say about magic, and ghosts, and good luck, too," I
told her.

"They say first you have to believe, right?"

I unrolled the socks.  They were warm and damp, still sandy.  I shook
them out elaborately, first one, then the other.  I slapped them
against the inside of my wrist.  Then I brushed off Daisy's discolored
feet, running my fingers between her toes, tickling her a bit.  I heard
the car doors slam, my parents talking to each other as they made their
way across the path between the garage and the porch, their voices
ordinary and gentle, the same conversation they had begun on first
waking.

"Point your toes like a ballerina, Daisy Mae," I whispered.

And I slipped the socks over her feet, and then held them both,
concealed in my hands, as my parents came through the screen door.

They might have been visitors from another, darker planet, my father in
his rumpled navy suit, my mother in her skirt and stockings and heels,
a newspaper, a briefcase, under their arms.

The smoky smell of the office and the car in their clothes.

"Well, here they are!"  my father exclaimed, as if he was indeed
surprised to see us.  And my mother asked, "How did you girls get along
today?  Did you wear poor Daisy out?  Are the potatoes on?"

I gave Daisy's two feet a single shake, as if to seal our agreement,
and then pulled her off the couch.

"Oh my gosh, the potatoes!"  I said, pretending, just to welcome them
home, that I didn't always know what I was doing.

After dinner, Daisy and I went out to catch fireflies.  She had put the
pink shoes on again, giving them time, and they did indeed make her
seem brighter.  We sat together on the tree swing, facing each other,
Daisy's legs around my waist, our hands together on the thick rope, and
when I had pumped us too high and I began to feel her tremble with each
upward swing, I scraped my bare feet along the grass to slow us down a
bit.  We were sitting like that, in the darkness, only our back porch
light and the light from the kitchen where my parents still sat,
talking and smoking, reaching into the yard, when Petey and Tony came
along, through the gate this time, although they were accustomed to
merely hopping the fence.

"Have you seen Rags?"  Petey asked softly as he approached, barely
raising his head to look at us.

"Judy and Janey took him," I said.

"Just before I walked Flora home."

"Well, he's gone again," he said into the ground.

"They haven't seen him."

"I haven't seen him, either," I said.  I continued to push the swing
back and forth, slowly, the sound of the rope creaking against the high
branch the only sound among us for a while.

In the darkness, I could really make out only the boys' bright eyes
and the white stubble of their hair.  Their bodies seemed to have
vanished.

Finally I said, "You need to tell Daisy you're sorry, Petey," and as if
he'd only been waiting for my cue, he said, "I'm sorry, Daisy."

She glanced at me, and then turned to him to say, "It's all right."

I moved the swing slowly, back and forth.

"You might want to say it to me, too," I added, and once again, without
hesitation, Petey said, "I'm sorry."

Tony stepped forward, drawing the straw hat from behind his back.

"Here," he said, handing it to me with some formality.

It was somewhat the worse for wear, and although I couldn't examine it
thoroughly in this light, I could tell it had been bent out of shape,
perhaps even chewed on here and there.

"I'm going to give Daisy something, too," Petey said shyly.

"I just don't have it yet.  But she's really going to like it when I
get it."

Daisy and I exchanged a glance at this news, and then Daisy said,
somewhat regally, "That's very nice of you."

Now added to our silence in the darkness was the hollow and faraway
sound of old Mr.  Moran yelling at someone inside their house, and then
his daughter's shouted answer.  I let Daisy slide off my lap and we all
caught fireflies for a while-- Petey and Tony more often than not
having to peel the broken, still-illuminated things from the heels of
their palms, where they had caught them just a second too late and with
just a touch too much violence and enthusiasm.  Judy wandered over

eventually.  She was carrying Garbage, the stray cat, up under her
chin, and she cursed softly when he struggled out of her arms and
disappeared into the bushes.  Then Janey followed, as the volume of the
argument inside their house ebbed and flowed and doors slammed.  I made
popcorn for us all, and then let them come in to eat it at the kitchen
table, since the mosquitoes were getting bad.  I sent them all home at
about ten o'clock, when my parents called in from the living room to
say that Daisy really should get to bed.

We slept in the attic that night, putting the old wing chair in front
of the little window just as Uncle Tommy had done.  I could tell by a
certain texture in her voice, a certain terseness in her words, by the
way she glanced now and then at the back of the chair as she pulled
down the bedspread and arranged her pillows, that Daisy was beginning
to worry a bit that the ghost would indeed appear, and so I showed her
how it said in my novel that ghosts appear only to single people who
sleep alone.  This seemed to reassure her a bit, although still she
asked me to lie down with her until she went to sleep.  I did,
whispering Hail Marys as my mother used to do for me, one after the
other, monotonously.  We said no more about the bruises, although as
she dressed I had noticed a new one, on her shoulder, small and round,
from Petey's fist.  I had showed her that I had a smaller, matching
version on my forearm.  In only a few minutes she was sound asleep.  I
got up, drew the blanket over her shoulder, and got into the other
bed.

I looked at the window, at the dark silhouette of the high backed chair
in front of it.  Of course Uncle Tommy, lying alone, would have seen
the ghost.  Ghosts, as the story said, didn't appear to married
couples.  I thought of Uncle Tommy

lying alone in this very bed, Uncle Tommy, past fifty, unmarried,
childless.  A small boyish body, a large, handsome face, also boyish in
its way, his thinning hair still fair, his cheeks baby-smooth until
they met the web of deep lines around his smiling eyes.  Uncle Tommy,
always alone, always smiling.  Always, even past fifty, going through
jobs and girlfriends.  He lived in an apartment I had never seen, on
the Upper West Side, and my entire experience of him was merely a
series of unexpected visits and unexpected departures.  Here and then
not here.  I liked him because he called my mother Sis or Sissy, and
whenever she begged him to be serious he said, winking at me,
"Nothing's serious."  He said, laughing, that he wanted no part of
marriage "and, while you're at it," no part of the Church.  He said he
didn't much like the sound of till death do us part--a shudder of his
shoulders and a shake of his head.

He didn't like the notion of deferred joy in heaven, either.

"I'd rather be joyful now."  He liked children and he liked dogs, he
said (although he had neither of his own), because they were the only
creatures who truly understood what now is.  If I'd inherited my own
talent from anyone, it must have been from him.

"Being happy," Uncle Tommy liked to say, "takes a great deal of work."
He said he had no time for anything else.

But the ghost who appeared to him here in our attic had been watching
and waiting, wanting something, a ghost so choked with emotion, Uncle
Tommy had said, that he could barely speak.  A mournful ghost, until
Uncle Tommy gave him a chair, and a little boy to hold in his arms.
Finally returned.

I stayed awake for as long as I could, lying in Uncle Tommy's bed,
listening to Daisy's soft breath and being somewhat

afraid of it, afraid of her unconsciousness, I guess, until I heard
her giggle in her sleep.  The ghost and his boy never did appear, not
that night anyway, although I learned in the morning that Petey was
there, sleeping in the dirt beneath the window of my empty room.

He Was at the kitchen table with my parents the next morning.

My mother had draped a crocheted blanket over his shoulders and there
was a milky cup of the black tea and a plate of toast on the table in
front of him.  My parents were pretending they didn't know he had slept
out there, telling me when I came into the room that Petey was up extra
early today because he had hoped to catch a rabbit in our yard.  My
father was showing him how to go about it, demonstrating with a
matchbox and a toothpick the kind of trap he could build, and my mother
was leaning into the refrigerator, getting some carrots for him to use
as bait.  Since Petey was in my seat, I stood against the counter,
watching him.  There must have been a hundred mosquito bites on his
face and arms and his bare brown legs, I could even see a few of them
on his pink scalp.  His right shoulder and arm, the right side of his
face and head were dirty, still caked with mulch from the way he had
slept under the bushes.

He didn't touch the tea, but ate the whole plate of toast and then,
with my mother's carrots in hand, stood up and said thank you and
headed out, like a rabbit himself, through the back door.

My mother returned to her chair wearily, as if Petey were her own
wayward child.  She asked me if I'd heard the police car last night, at
the Morans' house again, and when I said no,

she shook her head.

"Your father didn't hear it either," she said.

"Or all the shouting."

"I heard the shouting earlier," my father said, but my mother shook her
head.

"No," she said.

"Late into the night."

And he shrugged, sheepishly acknowledging that he had slept while she
hadn't.

When they were gone, I climbed up the attic stairs to wake Daisy,
bringing with me as I did one of the new outfits her mother had sent
along.  My own gesture of reconciliation and regret toward Aunt Peg,
whom Daisy loved.  Who loved Daisy.

It was the smallest of all the outfits she had brought--a pink
and-blue-plaid shorts set that went nicely with her pink shoes.

I had already ironed out the creases, and planned to pin the elastic
waist if it was too loose.  But Daisy pouted a bit when she saw it. She
already had her heart set on the red-and-blue checked sundress from my
own eight-year-old wardrobe.  She liked the ribbon ties at the
shoulders.  Downstairs in my own room, I held her between my knees and
brushed out her hair, tying it up on the top of her head with a rubber
band and another thick red ribbon.  Her face was suddenly narrower,
with her hair pulled off it, and her ears stood out like the handles on
a teacup.  Her skin, the bones of her bare shoulders seemed teacup
thin, pale blue and fragile.

That morning, over my own shorts and T-shirt, I had put on an old white
dress shirt of my father's, and on an impulse I lifted the tail of it
over my head and then swooped down on Daisy, pulling us both onto the
bed.  She laughed and squealed, and then, remembering, put her hand to
her hair and said, "Don't mess up my bun."

"Oh, it's your bun, is it?"  I asked, tickling her.

"I thought it was my bun."  I loved her little

crooked and missing teeth, and her tiny nose and the pale red arcs of
her brows.  Catching our breath, we lay together for a moment on my
chenille spread, the tail of the worn shirt covering both our faces,
blotting out everything but the morning light.  And then she whispered,
"You won't tell?"  I shook my head, almost imperceptibly, and only to
reassure her.

"Don't think about it anymore," I told her, and then pulled the
shirttail off our faces.  I told her we had work to do.

Last night I'd placed Flora's mother's straw hat on the hook by the
back door, and this morning I saw more clearly that it had been twisted
and broken, definitely chewed on around the brim.  I slapped it on the
back of my head anyway.  I had money enough to buy her a new one.

Petey and Tony and Janey were in our yard with a cardboard box and
Rags's clothesline leash and the limp carrots.

Petey stepped in front of the box as soon as we came out the back door,
the carrots behind his back, and Tony gave me one of those scooting
gestures that meant Daisy was not supposed to see.  Janey's eyes went
from the red ribbon in Daisy's hair to the checked sundress to the
jeweled shoes.  Like all the Moran kids that morning, she was dressed
in the same clothes she'd had on yesterday, and perhaps the day before,
the same blouse and pedal pushers she'd gone riding in with a father
Petey and Tony didn't share.  She was a striking little girl, despite
the dirty face and the stringy white-blond hair, one of those little
girls whose adult beauty was apparent even at this age, and she was
only about six, apparent in the sharpness of her features and the curve
of her spine and the hard blue of her eyes.

"Where you going?"  she asked, and then followed with, before I had
quite said where, "Can I come?"

Tony shouted, "Janey, no," his chest inflated with authority, and then
told her in the same rough and loud voice a dog trainer--or perhaps his
own father--would use, "Stay here.

Mommy said."

"I guess you're supposed to stay here," I told her, and Tony added,
"The police will pick her up if she leaves this street.  My mother
said."

Janey looked disappointed for just a moment, and then she turned to
him, her blue eyes narrowed, and what she had hoped for was suddenly
erased from her face by her scorn.  I could see a shin kick coming on,
so I took Flora's mother's battered hat from the back of my head and
placed it on Janey.

"You want this?"  I asked.

"It looks good on you."

She looked up into the shadow of the brim and her face changed once
more.  She was a six-year-old again.

"You look like a movie star," I said.

"Sandra Dee."  I shot Tony a look that said, Don't you dare contradict
me.  And Janey slowly smiled, touching the brim all around.

"Can I have it?"  she said.  I said, "Sure," as if it were mine to
give.  I told her to come by after dinner tonight and I'd find her some
colored ribbons to decorate it with.

Now Petey, still trying to block the overturned box, made the same
scooting motion with his free hand, the carrots held behind his back.

"Go," he mouthed.

"Will you guys go?"

Although Dr.  Kaufman was supposed to be home today, Daisy asked if we
could stop by Red Rover's pen just to say hello.  It wasn't much out of
the way, so I agreed.  The car was parked in front of the house when we
got there, but the window shades were all pulled down, so I told her
we'd just go quickly around the back, give Red Rover a pat and a
biscuit,

and then get going.  But when we went around the house, Dr.  Kaufman
himself was on his patio, his back to us, looking out over his empty
pool and pool house.  He was barefoot and wore only boxer shorts and a
polo shirt, and I would have turned around and disappeared if he hadn't
heard Daisy's hard footstep on the concrete and turned around himself.
His thinning, wiry hair was mussed from sleep and he needed a shave.

Everything about him, as a matter of fact, arms, legs, even the backs
of his hands, everything but the crown of his head, seemed muted by
curly dark hair.  He had a cup of coffee in his hand.

"Well, hey," he said slowly.

"You coming to walk Red?

Did I tell you today?"

I shook my head and introduced Daisy and said we were just stopping by
to say good morning to the dog.

"Oh, hey," he said again softly, as if he were searching for words.  He
might still have been half asleep.

"Isn't that nice?"

He suddenly moved to pull out one of the patio chairs.  His hairy legs
were bowed and he was not as tan as he would be by August.

"You want to sit down?"  he said, gesturing with the coffee cup.

"You want some juice?"  He looked at me, trying to gauge something.

"You don't drink coffee, do you?  I brought some rolls back from the
city.  You want a roll?"  I said no, thank you and no, thank you.  I
told him I was just on my way to my other jobs.

"Oh sure," he said, nodding, his voice soft and vague once again.
Behind him, the water in the pool was beautifully blue and still,
reflecting only the small clouds that had begun to move into the sky.
The pool house was closed up.  It seemed never to have been opened.  I
heard Red Rover whine once or twice, not much hope in it.

Daisy took my hand, as if to say, Let's go, but Dr.  Kaufman seemed to
want to keep us there.

"You having a nice summer?"

he said, leaning against the patio table, as if we would have a long
chat.

"Yes, thank you," I told him.

"Busy."  Although we had spoken on the phone a number of times to make
our arrangement, this was the first time I'd seen him this year.  He
was broad-shouldered but about my height, a little stooped, maybe a
little heavier than I'd remembered.  He always had a kind, unhappy
face.

"You look good," he said.

"You're taller," and because he looked at me for what seemed just a
second or two too long--his dark brown eyes sad and assessing at the
same time--he turned to Daisy and asked, "Where in the city are you
from, sweetheart?"

Without missing a beat Daisy said, "Sutton Place."

I laughed out loud, I couldn't help it, and Dr.  Kaufman turned to me,
smiling and puzzled--the first he had smiled since we arrived--and
said, "What?  What's funny?"  His eyes kept slipping from my face to my
legs.  Daisy was smiling, too.

I grabbed the bun on Daisy's head and shook it.

"Well, Queens Village, actually," I said, and she giggled and shrugged,
and Dr.  Kaufman, siding with her, said, "So she's got a good
imagination."  Now he looked her over, too.

"And some nice shoes," he said.

Red Rover was whining with more vigor now, punctuating each whine with
a mournful bark, so I said we'd just go down to the pen and then be on
our way.  Still leaning against the table, Dr.  Kaufman waved his
coffee mug.

"Go right ahead," he said.

"He'll love you for it."

We fed the dog some of the biscuits I carried in my beach bag and
scratched him behind his ears.  We were just getting

ready to lock the gate again when Dr.  Kaufman joined us.  He had
pulled on a pair of shorts over his boxers and was wearing boat shoes.
He looked as if he had just, hastily, shaved.  He had Red Rover's leash
in his hand and he said he and Red would just walk us to our next
"assignment."  I glanced at Daisy.  I knew she would be happy to have
the dog's company but perhaps a little disappointed to have to share
the morning with a grown-up.  But her face was expressionless.
Disappointment of one sort or another was nothing new.  He walked next
to me, his arm brushing mine as Red Rover pulled ahead.  I asked about
the twins and when they would be down here, noticing as he answered,
that Mrs.  Kaufman had now become "their mother," whereas two years
ago, when I'd worked for them, I'd never heard him refer to her in any
way other than "my wife."

He asked me if I'd thought about colleges yet.  I told him I hadn't.
Their mother, he said, had gone to Smith.

"Don't go to Smith."

"You might want to think about modeling," he said, and when I told him
I didn't think so, he said, "Oh no, you could.

You really could."  He asked Daisy, "Don't you think your cousin could
be in magazines?"  Daisy looked at me to see what it was I wanted her
to say--perhaps sensing my distaste for such talk.

"If she wanted to," she said softly.

"You could," he insisted, warming up to his own idea.  His voice, his
whole manner seemed to be changing, some kind of transformation I
didn't quite understand yet but knew to be somehow akin to the
transformation that had made "my wife" into "their mother."

"I know some people in the business," he said.

"Some of my patients.  I could introduce you.  Point you in the right
direction.  I'm telling you, you could be in magazines.

Like Seventeen.  You read Seventeen, don't you?  Even my daughter
reads Seventeen, and she's only six."  He laughed.  It occurred to me
to remind him that I knew his daughter, I was her babysitter.

"I know some of these models," he said.  He laughed again.

"I'm a bachelor now, you know," by way of explanation.

"They all started very young, and what are you now, almost eighteen?"

"Fifteen," I said, although I was tempted to say twelve.

He looked at me over his shoulder, Red pulling at the leash.

There was still the smell of sleep on his polo shirt, the faint odor of
perspiration.

"Is that all?"  he said.

"I thought you were older."  Then he said, "You were a real baby then,
when you worked for us.  Boy, I didn't realize it."  He seemed, slowly,
to remember something.

"Wow," he said.

"You were thirteen.  Did their mother know you were thirteen?"

I shrugged.

"I suppose so," I said.  He continued to shake his head.

"Wow," he said again.  After we had walked awhile in silence, only the
sounds of the birds and Red Rover's rapid panting, Daisy's hard shoes
against the street, he said, "I'm not going to tell you what went
through that woman's head."

I might have thanked him for that, but instead I said, "This is where
the Scotties live."

We had finally reached the Richardsons' driveway, and when we paused
there, he looked so bereft, I thought for a minute he would burst into
tears.  Whoever he was trying to be just a few minutes ago, with all
his energetic talk about modeling, and how gorgeous I was, and how old
I was, seemed to have vanished, and he was once again as soft-spoken
and disoriented as he had seemed when we came upon him this morning.
Still holding Red on the leash, he suddenly cupped

his free hand over the back of my neck, over my hair and the collar of
my father's old white shirt, and gently leaned to kiss me on the cheek.
Then he ran his hand over the shirt to grip my shoulder softly before
he let go and stepped away.  He turned to Daisy.

"Can I give you a little kiss, too?"  he said.

"I've got a daughter just about your age who's way up in Maine this
morning."  Daisy simply said, "Yes," and I suppose I saw a mirror image
of myself in the way she leaned forward, her cheek proffered, demurely
accepting his sad affection.  He touched her shoulder, too, and, seeing
the bruise Petey had left there, put a finger to it for a moment and
said, "How'd you get this?"

"A little boy," Daisy said, with no further explanation required, as if
she had said a wasp or a mosquito.

"An angry little boy," I added.

He pursed his lips and nodded.

"Watch out for those," he said, and then added, "us."  But he also ran
his fingers from her shoulder down behind her arm, lifting her hand
when he got to it, her palm in his fingertips.  I saw him study, for
just a second or two, her fingernails.  It occurred to me that I wasn't
exactly sure what kind of doctor Dr.  Kaufman was.  A Park Avenue
doctor was all I could recall.  Something that required him to be in
the city only three days a week.  Someone my mother was quite pleased
to have me work for.

"You girls come take a swim sometime," he said as he left us, walking
backward as Red pulled him along, calling out, "That pool's just going
to sit there till the kids come down in August.  It breaks my heart.
You girls come use it.  Really.  You'll be doing me a favor."

After we had walked the Scotties and fed Moe, Larry, and
Curly--finding a note on the kitchen table that said the Swansons would
be down tomorrow--we double-timed it to Flora's, walking quickly for
the first half and then, when Daisy became too breathless with walking
and swinging her arms and laughing, I lifted her onto my shoulder and
carried her-- "Tiny Tim--style," I said--the rest of the way.

Flora was already strapped into her stroller, and the stroller was on
the front porch with the beach quilt folded into its basket and the
lunch bag hung from the handle.  She had been given a baby bottle full
of Hawaiian Punch, although her mother had prohibited all bottles just
last month, and although she was sucking at it contentedly when we
climbed the steps, I could tell immediately that she had shed some
tears this morning, too.  The vacuum cleaner was running inside the
house.  I gathered I was to take the child and disappear for the day,
and although this was pretty much what I had always done, I suddenly
felt a bolt of black anger cross my eyes and my chest.  I turned around
and bent down to help Daisy slip off my shoulders, trying not to grip
her ankles or her wrists with too much pressure.  I thought at first
that I would pull open the screen door and find Ana and pull the plug
on the vacuum cleaner and tell her in no uncertain terms (my mother's
phrase again) that Flora was not supposed to have any more bottles and
should never be left alone on the porch like a sack of potatoes, but I
knew, too, that Ana would just pretend she didn't understand and speak
a stream of French until I went away, which was pretty much what she
did to the cook every time they had an encounter.

I looked at Daisy.

"I wonder how long this poor kid's been sitting out here," I said.  She
shrugged.  Her red ribbon had come undone, and so I retied it, slowly,
and then brushed back some of the wisps of hair that had fallen around
her face.  She was warm, sweating a little, although, with the clouds
gathering, the morning was cooler than it had been.  She was paler than
she should have been, too.  I looked over my shoulder to Flora.

"How long have you been out here, Flora Dora?"  And Flora pulled the
nipple from her mouth and said, "I have a bottle," pointing to the
three fingers of bright red juice still left in it.

"That's right," I said.

"And your mother doesn't want you to, does she?"

"Ana gave it to me," she said, and then quickly stuck the thing back
into her mouth in case anyone entertained any notions of trying to get
it away from her.

Daisy laughed, leaning against me.

"Is it good, Flora?"  she asked, and Flora nodded and then pulled out
the bottle again, with a smack.

"It's good," she said, and plugged it in again.

Swinging her baby shoes and her fat, dimpled legs, content with the
world.

"Take a rest for a minute," I told Daisy, and I moved one of the canvas
chairs next to Flora's stroller.  I went into the house.

The vacuum was back in the master bedroom now.  I walked down the hall
to Flora's room, checked the shoebox in her closet, and, seeing that
the bottle of aspirin had not been returned, walked into the kitchen.
The can of punch, just opened, was on the counter, and I poured a glass
for Daisy, to cool her off.  There was a dimpled bottle of Scotch on
the counter as well, also opened.  I put some ice into another juice

glass and poured some Scotch into it, and then carried both outside. I
gave Daisy the punch.  Flora assessed the situation with her
unremarkable brown eyes, and then was moved to take the bottle out of
her mouth once again.

"Red juice," she said to Daisy.  She had already dribbled some of her
own onto the front of her white baby dress.

"It's good," she added, as if urging Daisy to drink.  She might have
said, Skoal.

I told the girls I'd be back in a minute.  The clouds had grown a bit
darker, a bit thicker, and it occurred to me that if I delayed our
start just a few minutes longer we might end up spending the day in the
house.  Poor Ana.  The painting was no longer leaning against the
outside wall of his studio, although there was a line in the grass that
marked where it had been.

Seeing for an instant Flora's mother with her little white sweater
marching through this door, and then Ana, with her lunch tray and her
wide blue hips, I almost said forget it and turned around, but I
didn't, and stepped over the threshold, onto the concrete floor.  The
place was much more stark than I'd imagined, really just a converted
garage or storage shed with a skylight carved into its roof, something
I had never seen from the outside.  The light it cast into the room was
milky gray.  There were a few piles of canvases leaning against the
walls, and a couple of sawhorses and old door tables, a single tall
shelf with a jumble of paints and cloths and papers and brushes, the
two bare lightbulbs on long wires, neither one of them turned on. There
was paint spattered on the floor, as I might have expected, and in the
far corner a single bed (something I never expected) draped with what
looked like heavy silk.  He was lying on it, posed, it seemed--and if
he'd been a different kind of painter, I would have said it was a bed
meant

exactly for that purpose--one arm hanging off the edge (I saw where he
had dropped his glasses on the floor), the other thrown across his
face, a knee raised, the other leg stretched out.  There was a small
stool beside the bed, a glass already on it, and another, larger,
bottle of St.  Joseph's aspirin.  I wondered if he had spent the night
out here or if this was just an early morning nap.  I said, Excuse me,
twice, until he moved his head just a little and asked, "Who's there?"
An old man brought back from sleep.

"Theresa," I said.

An old man brought back with some reluctance and confusion.

He lay there for a moment, not moving, and then turned his head more
fully and raised his arm from his face.

"Theresa," he said, moving his mouth, tasting the word.

"Theresa," as if to himself.

"The babysitter," I said.

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 Empire State Building would be red, I
told them, and St.  Patrick's blue and Saks Fifth Avenue would be
bright green.  We'd make 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.

"I'm.  with my mom," he said, and pointed, and sure enough, just down
the beach, there was Sondra in a black bathing suit and a large black
hat, baby June and Janey digging in the sand at her feet.  Janey was
still wearing Flora's mother's straw hat, and her own mother was
sitting like a movie star on her blanket, her back arched, one knee
raised, her hands cupped around it.  Suddenly she waved to us, and we
both waved back.

Petey still had his hand in my hair, and he tugged at it a little to
say, "She's with the police."

Although I recalled what my mother had said this morning about the
police being at the Morans' again, I had no idea what he was talking
about.  I remembered Tony telling Janey that the cops would pick her up
if she left the street and wondered for a minute if this unusual family
excursion to the shore wasn't part of some sentence that had been doled
out by the local criminal justice system.  I actually felt heartened by
the notion until I saw a burly young man come out of the water and

head for Mrs.  Moran's blanket, with Tony, as exuberant as a puppy,
high-stepping it through the sand behind him, and then Judy, also wet
and buoyant, running to catch up with them both.  The young man threw
himself on the blanket beside Sondra, and the two children, as if
uncertain about how far they should follow, stood a short distance away
from it, like puppies waiting for the stick to be tossed once more. The
man spoke to them while drying his broad chest with a small towel, and
then sank back behind their mother, who suddenly leaned back, too, on
her elbows, in the shade of their umbrella.  Judy and Tony, rebuffed, I
supposed, but showing no indication of it, simply dropped to their
knees beside their two sisters and began to throw sand into the hole
they had just dug.

I looked once again at Petey, who had taken full possession of that
handful of my hair, touching it idly to his lips.

"Your mother's here with a policeman?"  I asked.

He nodded.  His black eye had faded to a gray shadow, nearly healed.

"He took Grandpa to jail last night," Petey said.

"And then he brought him back this morning.  And then we met him here."
He shrugged, as if none of it concerned him.

"Don't tell Daisy about her present."

I took hold of his wrist and gently slipped my tangled hair from
between his fingers.

"I have nothing to tell," I whispered.

Later that afternoon, when I carried our lunch wrappers to the garbage
cans at the top of the parking lot, I saw Dr.  Kauf man, a beach chair
and a newspaper under his arm, walking to his car.  He waved to me and
I waved back, and then he turned on his heel, as if he had just thought
of something, and gestured that I should wait.  Now he was wearing a
bathing suit under that same dark tennis shirt, and black leather
sandals.

"Sugar," he said, squinting in the sun although his sunglasses were on
top of his head, "I'd tell this to my own daughter.

You're lovely to look at, but you can get fined for baring your breasts
like that on this beach.  A couple of Village Improvement Society
matrons by me went apoplectic.  If there'd been a cop nearby, they'd
have had you arrested."

I lowered my eyes and said, "There was," but he didn't seem to hear me.
He stepped closer.

"Come use our pool if you want an all-over tan," he said.

"It's perfectly private."

I looked up at him, I had to, but I didn't say anything, and I didn't
say anything for long enough to make it seem purposeful.

I knew my cheeks were red, but I felt I was looking at him from behind
them somehow, that my face was only something I had placed between us,
like a fan.  His smile faltered a bit and then he said, "I don't mean
to embarrass you.  Just thought you should know."  He began to turn
away and then turned back again.

"Also," he said.  It occurred to me that he was going home to Red Rover
and an empty summer house, a solitary summer evening.

"The little girl, your cousin."

"Daisy," I said.

He nodded.

"Daisy.  Is she all right?"

I looked over my shoulder as if to check on her.  She and Flora both
were lying on the quilt, under their beach towels.

"Yes," I said.

"She's all right."

"Has she been sick recently?"  he asked.

"Had any surgery, accidents?"  There was suddenly something solid and
reliable in his manner, something I had seen before, when he was with
his own children, but had missed in him today.  If I hadn't already
been sunburned and blushing, I might have blushed again.

I shook my head.

"She's always pale," I said, to show him I understood his concern.

"She looks anemic," he said.

"She may well be.  You might want to mention it to her parents.  A
blood test might be a good idea.  And sooner rather than later."

"She's fine," I said.

"I'm sure she is," he told me.

"But you should mention it to her parents.  Tell them it's my
suggestion, as a friend of the family."  He smiled, a nicer smile than
before.

"So that's enough advice out of me.  I'm gone Monday through Wednesday
again next week," he said.

"But I might come back early if it's real hot in the city.  Red will be
looking for you."

I nodded.

"We'll be there," I said.

"Daisy and I."

He turned again.

"Use the pool," he said over his shoulder.

When we brought Flora home that afternoon, there was no sign of the
cook, and Ana, dressed in slacks and a silky blue shirt that showed her
cleavage, was cooking something in the kitchen.  Something in a big pot
that smelled oniony and thick.

Without a word to Ana, Daisy and I gave Flora her bath and put her in
her pajamas and then sat with her while she ate.

Then we put her in her stroller again and walked her up and down the
street until her head began to droop.  I lifted her out at the end of
the driveway, and Daisy pushed her empty stroller over the gravel while
I carried Flora inside and put her in her crib.  I put a light blanket
over her shoulders.  The pictures on the wall seemed to have very
little to do with the actual child sleeping here or her missing mother.
Flora, for one thing, was no longer an infant.  I stopped into the
kitchen to tell Ana that Flora was asleep and she cried, "Merci,
merci," in a sweet voice that was straight out of a movie.

"Good night,

girls," she added, in English, waving her fingers over her
shoulders.

"Have a pleasant evening."

He was on the porch in one of the canvas chairs, with his pipe and a
glass of red wine, but he let us pass without a word.

Halfway down the drive, I found myself thinking of excuses to turn
back, maybe to ask Ana if I should come earlier tomorrow, maybe to
thank him for telling her not to give Flora any more bottles--although
I suspected he'd done no such thing.

Holding Daisy's hand, walking quietly toward home--we were both
weary--I felt a tremendous reluctance I didn't quite understand.  Part
of it, I supposed, was a reluctance to leave Flora--which one of them,
I wondered, would go to her if she woke up in the middle of the night?
Part of it was my disappointment that he had let us leave without
saying a word.  After this morning, we were comp licit in something, he
and I, something that had little to do with my having found him asleep
or with the way he had touched my knee, that had more to do with the
way he had bent down to Daisy and opened his palm, just as I had hoped
he would.  Part of it, perhaps, was the quiet house and what was for
them, I imagined, the dark jewel of the approaching evening.

I lifted Daisy's hand and swung it.

"I love having you here, Daisy Mae," I said.  And she smiled.

"I love it, too."  I kissed the back of her hand and put my arm under
hers.  She was just a little sunburned.  I had slathered her with
lotion, but only after the first half hour, so she could get some color
in her cheeks.

"We'll put some cold cream on this tonight," I said.  I ran my fingers
down the back of her arm, to tickle her.  She raised her shoulders and
giggled.

"Last night you giggled in your sleep," I told her, and she said she
knew.

"I always do," she said.

"Bernadette always tells me.  She gets mad when I can't remember what
I was dreaming about.  She says if a dream was good enough to make me
laugh in my sleep, then it was good enough to remember."  She paused.
She might have been favoring that right leg again.

"Sometimes I do remember," she said, "but I don't always tell her."

"Good for you," I said.

"Last night I dreamt about the lollipop tree," she said.

"The one we're going to make for Flora."

I nodded.  She seemed a little breathless as she spoke, and her shoes
were scraping along the street.  I slowed my pace.  I said, "I bet
Bernadette is missing you like crazy."

Daisy shook her head.

"I don't think so."

I reached down and pulled the hem of my father's shirt across her
shoulders.

"I'm sure she wakes up in the middle of the night and listens and can't
understand why she doesn't hear you.  I'm sure she even thinks you're
there, when she's first falling asleep.  I bet she even says something
to you, as she's drifting off.  And then she remembers your bed is
empty and she's there all alone."

Streaks of white clouds across the lovely sky, and the sun, deep gold
again and at moments blinding, just behind the thick black leaves of
the trees.  Bernadette alone in that tiny room with her Honor Roll
certificates, four for each year she has been in school, and space left
on the wall for what was to come.

"I bet two big fat tears pop right out of her eyes as she's lying
there.  I bet they roll right into her ears."

Daisy laughed and slipped her arm around my waist.  I pressed her
against my hip, holding the shirt across her shoulders, her pink shoes
scraping against the road.  We both felt, for

just a moment, I think, the loneliness of that imagined scene.  I
felt, only briefly, only until I banished it from my mind, my own
terrible prescience.

"Do you want me to carry you?"  I asked her, and she shook her head.

"Do you feel all right?"  I said, and my heart sank when she shook her
head again.

"Not too good," she said.

Petey's rabbit trap was still on our lawn when we got home, moved now
to another corner of the yard, and we weren't in the house more than a
few minutes when he rattled our back door.  I had just put Daisy in the
shower and would have told him through the screen to come back later
except that his face was a mask of sorrow, his mouth open wide, tears
streaming down his cheeks.  I opened the door and he said, trying to
whisper but with his voice hoarse from crying, "It ran away."

He put his arms around my waist and pressed his head against my shirt,
digging his fingers into my flesh.

"The present I had for Daisy," he sobbed.

"It's gone."

I touched his head.  I could feel the sand still caked on his scalp.
The tips of his ears were sunburned, although the rest of his skin was
a solid brown.

"What was it?"  I said.  And he shook his head.

"I don't want to tell you," he said.  And then, as if against his own
intentions, he said, "I caught one.  It was in the box when we went to
the beach.  I thought it would be safe.  I didn't think it could get
out.  But when we got back, the box was tipped over and it was gone. It
took all the carrots."

"You caught something?"  I asked.

"In that box?"

He nodded into my shirt.

"But it ran away."

"Are you sure you caught one?"  I asked him.  I understood that we had
entered into some kind of agreement not to say the actual word.

He nodded again, but with less certainty this time.

"You saw it in the trap?"

He looked up at me, the tears spread all over his face.

"It was in the box," he said.

"I checked the box before we went to the beach and it was turned over.
The stick had fallen.  It was in there.  I caught it."

I pushed him away, my hands on his shoulders.

"Did you see it in there?"  I asked, and he shook his head.

"Did you hear it moving?"  He shook his head again, his sobs becoming
only a slight groan at the back of his throat.

"Maybe the box just fell over," I said.

"Maybe the stick broke.  Maybe it was the wind."

He considered this for a minute, sniffling.

"But all the carrots are gone," he said.  We both looked over at the
cardboard box propped on its thin stick, the replica of my father's
matchbox this morning.

"Has Rags been around today?"  I asked.

He stood there for a moment, and then I felt his shoulders slump, as if
all the bones within them had just shattered, fallen to the ground.  He
stepped away from me, the extent of his disappointment displacing even
the need he had felt, just a few seconds ago, to bury his head in my
chest.  He looked at the box again and said, "Shit," and didn't even
glance at me for a reprimand.

"I'll never catch one," he said.

I heard Daisy calling me from the shower, and I called back that I'd be
right there.  I held up a finger to Petey and then went to the
refrigerator and found some lettuce.  I brought it out to him.  I
didn't say that my father had given me the same instructions some years
ago, and that I had spent the better part of a summer trying to catch a
wild rabbit with just such a

trap.  I said, "Bugs Bunny is probably the only rabbit that really
eats carrots (and Rags may well be the only dog).  Lettuce might do
better."

He softened, thinking this over, wiping his nose on the back of his
arm.

"Twilight's the best time for rabbits, anyway," I whispered.

"You're not likely to catch one in the middle of the day."

He sucked in some air.

"Yeah?"  he said.

"And you're not going to catch one while you're watching," I added.

"They can smell you if you're nearby.  They can smell you even when
you're asleep, Petey, even if you're hidden under the bushes."

He nodded, as if this might be a legitimate bit of impersonal
information.  Admitting nothing.  I rubbed his head again.

"Good luck," I said.

Daisy was sitting on my bed when I went back.  She was wrapped in a
towel and there was an opened package of new underwear and an opened
package of ankle socks on the bed beside her.  Her hair was wet and
dark and Petey's bruise was a dark brooch on her shoulder.  Against my
white bedspread her little feet seemed blackened.  I took the jar of
Noxzema from my dresser and before I smoothed any of it over her arms
or her shoulders or her red nose, I covered her feet, gently, with the
cool stuff.  She sat back, against my pillows, watching me through
half-closed eyes, something fond and sympathetic in her expression. And
then I pulled on the new socks.  She wanted to wear the red-checked
sundress again, but I said I'd run upstairs and find her a cleaner
outfit.  I chose a pair of pink-and-white-striped pedal pushers and a
white shirt with pink pockets and short sleeves that would cover her
shoulder.

The chair was still in front of the attic window, catching the setting
sunlight.  It was a light that swarmed with dust motes, and I knew that
if I stood there for just a minute, alone as I was, and willed my eyes
to see, I could conjure Uncle Tommy's sea captain ghost, or his little
boy, or even Uncle Tommy himself, with his wink and his laugh.

When I got back to my room, it seemed Daisy had been doing her own bit
of conjuring.  She was still sitting on the bed, in her towel and her
socks, but Judy and Janey were leaning across the mattress on either
side of her and baby June was on the floor.  Remarkably enough, all
three of the Moran kids had been showered and changed, baby June even
had a thin ribbon in her wet hair, and the entire rose-covered room
smelled of their shampoo and their soap and the hours they had spent
outside.  A bit of sun had caught the cut-glass base of my bedside lamp
and scattered itself across the floor, and baby June was playing with
these pieces of light while the other three girls leaned over the
mattress, studying Flora's mother's hat on the bed between them.  It
looked a bit more battered than it had this morning.  I gave them my
ribbon box and then went to take a shower myself, thinking only
briefly--it was like a glance thrown over my shoulder--of how Ana's
plump body might compare with my own.  I returned to the girls and
dressed quickly.  Then I climbed onto the bed with all four of them and
one by one combed out their wet hair and braided each with a ribbon of
their choosing.  I was just doing my own, baby June and Janey still
sitting between my legs and Judy and Daisy stretched out on either side
of me, my ribbons scattered all over the floor and the white spread,
when I heard my parents come in, calling for us.  I called back to say
we were in

here, and when they came to the doorway in their dark clothes, my
father's usual expression of surprise and delight struck me, for the
first time perhaps, as authentic.

We didn't sleep in the attic that night.  We stayed awake a long time,
Daisy and I, to listen for Petey beneath the bushes.

But the Moran house was quiet, and I wondered if the police hadn't
finally found an effective way to keep them all subdued by sending in a
full-time cop to be Mrs.  Moran's boyfriend.  I held Daisy's hand under
the thin summer blanket and instead of reciting Hail Marys began a long
list of "God blesses," starting with my parents, who were talking
quietly in the twin beds on the other side of the wall, then each of
the Morans (plus the policeman), then Rags, wherever he might be
tonight, and Red Rover and Dr.  Kaufman, and then Angus and Rupert and
the Richardsons, Moe, Larry, and Curly, and the Clarkes and the
Swansons, and Flora, of course, and her mother and her father and Ana
(why not?) and the fat cook, and then all the conductors on the Long
Island Railroad--we could hear the whistle of the last train to Montauk
(Daisy was not asleep yet, but I could tell by the way she laughed that
she was heading that way) --and all the workers in every station I
could remember between here and Jamaica.  And Daisy's father, who might
well be among them if he was not already sound asleep in his own room
under the sad brown eyes of the Sacred Heart.  And Daisy's mother
beside him.  And each of her brothers, and Bernadette, of course, lying
in the dark, the tears in her ears making her dream about swimming in
the ocean with Daisy, eyes wide open and hair floating, right by her
side--no response from Daisy this time, only her soft breath-and Uncle
Tommy in his apartment on the Upper West Side,

all alone after more than fifty years of living, all alone, talking to
ghosts, determined to be happy.  And you, Daisy Mae, I whispered to put
an end to it.  I leaned over to kiss her cheek and then turned to
sleep.  And me, I might have added--God bless me--but I didn't.  No
doubt it was because I had begun to suspect that God and I, as Uncle
Tommy would have put it, weren't seeing eye to eye.

Flora was back out on the porch again the next morning, another bottle
of red juice tucked tightly between her teeth, and no sign of Ana
anywhere, although the door to the master bedroom was closed.  Both
lights were on in his studio, but I didn't go in again.  I wasn't
exactly certain that I'd find him there.  I told the girls I'd had
enough of the beach and thought we might instead take a nature walk
through the woods and look for salamanders and wildflowers, and then
maybe, after lunch, walk to the shore.

Daisy said that would be fine, and Flora told me, pulling the bottle
from her mouth, that her mommy was coming home tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," she repeated.  She said it with great firmness, frowning as
she spoke, and I recognized the word as something she had been told
emphatically by someone, sternly perhaps.  Mommy will be home tomorrow.
Even hearing the word secondhand from a toddler, I had a sense it was a
lie.

"Tomorrow," I repeated.

"Tomorrow is tomorrow."  I touched her nose to erase that furrow
between her brows.  I wondered which of them had told her the lie,
which of them had spoken to my Flora so harshly.  Ana, I suspected.

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," I said, and kissed her head.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from
day to day ..."  I unhooked the strap from around Flora's waist and
helped her out of the stroller, pulling her up by her one free hand.
Then I held my other hand out for Daisy and we walked down the steps
together.

"And all our yesterdays," I went on, Flora pulling at the bottle as she
walked, her head thrown back and her elbow raised, like a trumpeter in
some New Orleans funeral parade.  Daisy kicking up the gravel with her
pink shoes.

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death."  We
passed the door of his studio.  I could tell by the sharp smell of the
paint that he was indeed inside and "working."

"Out, out, brief candle!"  I called as we passed (and congratulated
myself on my timing--he might have at least told Ana not to let me see
Flora with a bottle).

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his
hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."

"What's 'struts'?"  Daisy asked, and I showed her.  And we strutted
together, all three of us across the grass and onto the path through
the woods.  We wandered a bit, picking up sticks and rocks and trying
unsuccessfully to catch the darting shadows of salamanders.  When we
got to the caretaker's gate, I tried giving them both a ride, but the
hinges were too old and the grass beneath the gate too high to make it
much fun.  We stopped for a while in the grass beside the road to make
clover chains, and as we did I tried telling them the story of Macbeth.
But Flora wandered, and while Daisy let her eyes grow wide at the
witches and the murder of the king and the appearance of Banquo's
ghost, she didn't like the bit about Lady Macbeth scrubbing at the
stain on her poor little hand and suddenly, as I spoke, leaned over to
put her fingers to my lips.  I held her

wrist.

"It's all right, Daisy Mae," I whispered.  I told her it was not
something she would have to hear about again until high school.

Walking back through the woods, she said, "Why wouldn't the stain come
off her hand, even after she washed it a lot?"

I smiled at her.  I had placed bluebells and buttercups into the
pigtails I had made for her this morning, and one of the clover chains
dipped down over her forehead.

"It was only her imagination," I told her.

"It wasn't really there.  It was all in her mind."

She thought about this for a while, walking with Flora, who still
clutched the empty bottle in her hand.

"Everything's in your mind," she said.  And I said no.  I touched the
bark of a tree, picked up a fallen branch.

"This is real," I said.

"And this."  I touched her arm.

"You are."

"But it's all in my mind, too," she said.  She was wearing one of my
tennis dresses today, a much better fit than the cheap ones bought by
her mother.  Her pink shoes were dusty from the gravel and the trail.

"If it wasn't in my mind, how would I know about it?"

I tugged at her hair.

"You're an old soul, Daisy Mae," I said.

She thought about this for a second.

"Is that good?"  she said.

"It's what my mother says people always used to say about me."

She smiled, clearly pleased.  And then she said, "Yeah, but you
remembered more.  You remembered heaven from before you were even
born."

I laughed.  I could see she was rehearsing the stories she would tell
her brothers, and maybe even Bernadette, when she got home, if anyone
would listen to her.  Stories about me.

"You're the one who seems to remember everything, little friend," I
said, and then added, "Sutton Place."

She let out a pink, open-mouthed laugh.

"I don't even know where that is," she said, as if this made her hubris
more delightful.

"I don't even know why you told the Scotties' mother that's where I
live."

I lifted my hair off my neck, it was soft and thick from the humidity,
and then ran my fingers through it, making it look a little wild,
making Flora laugh.  One of the clover chains I wore broke and floated
to the ground.

"I was playing tricks with her mind," I told Daisy, sweeping my wild
hair back off my shoulders.

"Just like the witches with Macbeth."

I picked up the broken chain and draped it over Flora's head.  She was
already covered in them--bracelets and necklaces and three wreaths
around her hair.  In her free hand she clutched several sticks and a
few orange and white pebbles and a long stalk of milkweed and one of
Queen Anne's lace.

"I don't remember heaven, though," Daisy said, after a while.

"Like you do."

I scooped Flora up to lift her over a fallen tree trunk.

"It's just like this," I told her.

Had she been the child of a different father, I would have sent Flora
through the door of his studio to show him how she looked draped in
clover and dandelions and bits of milkweed and buttercups.  But given
the father she had, I knew I would be sending her in only as a lure to
draw him out, only to see what was on his face when he looked at me.

We ate our lunch under the weeping-cherry trees again, and then brought
Flora inside to read to her for a while in her



shaded room.  She was only half awake when I put her in her crib, but
she stood up and started to whine each time Daisy and I attempted to
leave.  So we both stretched out on the pale carpet beside her bed, and
soon enough both Flora and Daisy were breathing softly.  I may have
fallen asleep myself, because I heard Ana's voice and saw her standing
in the doorway, had a conversation with her even, all without opening
my eyes.

When I did open them, no one was there and the house was quiet.  I sat
up.  Daisy was beside me, her hands beneath her cheek, her head resting
on one of Flora's stuffed dogs, and her lips parted, moving with each
breath.  The clover chains were still on her head, the fading flowers
still stuck into her hair, and I resisted the urge to shake her awake,
just to see her green eyes.  Instead, I put the back of my hand to her
cheek and then to her forehead.  She was warm, but comfortably so.  It
occurred to me that I was beginning to know the difference, the
difference between the warmth of healthy blood beneath the skin and the
odd heat of a fever.  As a child, I had thought my mother's ability to
determine this with just the touch of her hand utterly magical,
mysterious.  Now I could do it, too.  I stood, checked on Flora, who
was also still in her full forest regalia, and then walked down the
hall into the living room.

An eye, a jaw, the curve of a breast, all of it disproportionate and
ugly, somehow, all of it laid on with thick paint.  As if he wanted
there to be no doubt that he knew what he was doing.

As if he wanted there to be no doubt that he could transform what might
otherwise be arbitrary and unskilled into something intentional,
something of value.  His alone.  His work.

I turned to look at the other painting, which had no images at all, a
blur of paint.  Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking
and make up a new one, something better.

I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.  I wondered if Ana had
left, since there were still cups and dishes in the sink and the floor
needed sweeping.  I went through the screen door and sat on the steps
of the porch.  The car was still there.

The lights were still on in his studio.  I stood up and walked, as
Daisy had done, toward the path, leaning a bit to see if the canvas was
against the wall.  It wasn't.  I walked a little farther.

I could smell the paint, but I heard no voices.  Keeping my footsteps
light, I passed by the side door and saw he was in there, standing over
the same canvas, which was now lying on the concrete floor.  His legs
spread, his hands on his hips, staring down at his work in his white
shirt and his khaki pants like some old colossus.  I couldn't see the
bed in the far corner, but I had the impression that someone else was
in there with him, and I walked on by, toward the caretaker's path, as
if that had been my destination all along.  But then I thought I heard
my name called and I stopped.  I listened for a minute, sure I was
mistaken, and then I heard him say, "You can come in."

I walked back toward the door, uncertain but curious.  He was still
standing in the same place, in the same pose, a large cloth in one of
the hands he held against his hip, what looked like a putty knife in
the other.  The light from the skylight was clearer today, a lovely
bleached light that seemed to make his hair and his skin and his
clothes and the cloth he held--it was a diaper, actually, stained with
paint--all seem the same shade.

He said, "We thought the three of you were napping," and standing on
the threshold, I saw that Ana was indeed in there

with him, sitting on the hard bed.  She was wearing a sleeveless
sweater and a black skirt, and her plump, bare legs were crossed.  Her
chin was lowered and thus had multiplied itself by three.  She looked
unhappy and her expression did not change as she watched me.

"Come on in," he said again.  And I crossed the threshold, into the
bleached light.  I stood on the other side of his painting, which, I
supposed, was progressing.  There was more paint on it, anyway.  He
turned to look at Ana over his shoulder, said something to her in
French, and then turned back to me.

"The wood nymph," he said, translating, I assumed, what he had told
her.  I realized I still had the clover chains in my hair, too.  I
touched one of them.

"A Thomas Hardy-reading, Shakespeare-quoting, drink-pouring wood
nymph."  He walked around the painting toward me, but then veered off
to the shelves of paints and clutter, throwing the diaper and the knife
onto one of them.  I smiled politely.

"Flora," I said, "told me her mother is coming home tomorrow, so I
wondered if you needed me to come so early--or at all."

He turned, laughing, as if he had caught me in another lie.

He rested an elbow on a shelf above him, put his other hand on his hip.
Only my experience with Uncle Tommy led me to know he had been, or
still was, drinking.  There was no lack of steadiness about him, no
weaving or slurring, but an odd deliberateness in each gesture, a
determination in his focus.

"No," he said.

"No.  Flora's mother won't be here tomorrow.  Or the next day, I
imagine."  He pulled off his glasses and pinched the space between his
eyes.

"Flora's mother is in the city," he said.

"And Flora's mother is an ardent practitioner of out of sight,

out of mind.  There's really no telling when she'll return."  He put
his glasses on again, moving away from the shelves.

"So your services will continue to be needed."

He walked toward me again.  He reached out and touched my hair, lifting
it from my shoulder with one hand and plucking out of it one of the
clover flowers with the other.  He spun the flower in his fingers.

"And the little redhead, too," he said, looking at me from over his
glasses.

"What was her name?"

"Daisy," I said.  There was the scent of Uncle Tommy as well, tinged,
it seemed to me, with the orange aspirins.  He raised his chin, getting
a better look.

"Daisy," he said.

"Who's having a rough time."

I nodded, but then added, "At home.  Not now."

He nodded, too.

"I see," he said.

"You've rescued her."  He was placing my hair behind my shoulder now,
gently, as if to put it back where it belonged.  He took another clover
flower from the back of my head.  His neck was sinewy, full of hollows,
that pale, papery skin.

"And home is .. ."  he asked, his eyes searching my hair.

"Brooklyn?"

"Queens Village," I said.

He nodded, as if he should have known.

"Father a fireman?"

He smoothed some of my hair behind my ear, his fingertips brushing the
side of my face and my scalp.  And then he lifted it again, as if
measuring its weight.  I could smell the paint on his palm.

"Policeman," I said.

He nodded in the same way.

"Ten kids?"  he said.

"Eight," I answered.

He smiled.  There was something odd about the way his

small teeth met his gums on one side.  Dentures, I supposed.  A
partial plate, as my parents might say.  Nothing better to remind you
of your mortality, he had said.  His own mortality in his mouth.

He kept his one hand in my hair and took off his glasses with the
other, a gesture so swift and so casual he might have done it only to
see something better, maybe to read some fine print, and bending into
what was his natural stoop, he leaned down and kissed me on the lips,
softly, but long enough to make me have to take a breath through my
nose before he was finished.  And when he was finished--the taste of
the alcohol on my own lips--he simply slipped his hand from my hair to
my waist, brushing the backs of his fingers past my shoulder and my
breast, slipped his glasses on again, and guided me to the door.  We
stepped over the threshold together, into the sunshine, onto the gravel
path.  Walking toward the house, he said, casually, "So Daisy is the
eighth child of an exhausted mother," and I said--imitating his tone as
well as I could, aware of the pulse in my throat--no, the fifth child.
Smack in the middle of them all, I said.  Three boys older and three
boys younger and one older sister, Bernadette.

It was like reciting lines on a stage, pretending to be calm despite
the throbbing of your own blood in your ears.

He asked what Bernadette was like.

Very smart and chubby, I said.  Homely enough, I said, to keep her
parents constantly apologizing.

Reaching for the screen door, he threw his head back and laughed.  He
put his hand to the small of my back.

"In here first," he said, pointing toward the kitchen.  And we both
turned right, into the messy kitchen, where the Scotch was already

on the table and Flora's mother's scarves were now on a high shelf by
the window.  He took his hand from my back in order to pour himself a
drink, and as he did I stepped away, leaning against the doorframe.  He
looked at me from over the rim of his glass, just the slightest trace
of worry, or doubt, coming briefly into his eyes.

"And you've rescued poor Daisy from Queens Village and her harried
parents," he said.

"To give her a few summer days out here in the country."

I nodded.

"And to teach her Shakespeare."

I shrugged.

"And let her feast on St.  Joseph's aspirin."

Behind me I could hear Flora calling softly from her crib.

"You gave her the aspirin," I said.

He drank again.  Now he heard her, too, his daughter; I saw his eyes
register the sound.  I heard Daisy sleepily responding.  I thought of
the surprised look she always wore when she first woke up, her features
not yet fully her own.

He looked me up and down again, his head once more drawn back.  Up and
down from my ankles to my waist to my chest and neck and hair, the
corners of his mouth drawn a little and that little bit of fear
crossing his face.

"You're some kid," he said finally.  And then he raised his chin toward
the hallway and his daughter's bedroom.

"Your charges are calling," he said.

To my surprise, he went with me, walking just behind me down the narrow
hallway to the bedrooms, following me right up to Flora's crib, where
Daisy was standing, stroking Flora's plump wrist and saying, "Here she
is.  And here's your daddy."

Flora held her arms out to me, of course, and I lifted her onto the
changing table.  Behind me, he said to Daisy, "Come with me, won't
you?"  And when I looked over my shoulder, he was walking hand in hand
with her down the hallway.  I heard the screen door close and followed
with Flora as soon as I had changed her.  They were both standing at
the bottom of the steps when we got outside, both of them chewing
aspirin between their back teeth.  He was pointing out something to her
in one of the high branches of the far trees--a jay's nest, he
said--and she was looking up, following his arm, still holding his
hand.

I put Flora in her stroller, and she began to cry, asking for a bottle
of red juice.  I said, "No more bottles, Flora.  You don't want a
bottle."  But she was cranky, still not fully awake, and her voice
began to get shrill.  I leaned over her.

"Mommy doesn't want you to have a bottle, Flora," I said softly.

"You're such a big girl now, you don't need a bottle."  She kicked her
feet against the bars of the stroller, crying in earnest now.  I put my
hand on her arm.

"Oh, Flora," I whispered.

That's when he turned to us, still holding Daisy's hand, and said, "Go
ahead and give her one."

I stood up straight, tossing my hair over my shoulder.  Looking down at
the two of them from the shade of the porch, I saw that they were both
sun-washed and faded, Daisy still blurred from her nap, he, perhaps,
blurred from the need for one.  I was about to say either "your wife"
or "her mother," had probably hesitated simply to decide which was
best, when he held up a hand.

"We've vanished," he said.

He said it softly, under Flora's crying, and so it was the word itself
that made me start.

"We're gone," he said.  He glanced down at Daisy for a moment,
pleasantly, including her in the conversation.

"All my life I've known women who could do this.  Turn their backs and
make things disappear.  It's a wonderful talent."  He smiled up at me.
His white hair stood straight up over his head, and while Uncle Tommy's
focus went awry when he drank, fell slightly to the left or right of
whatever he seemed to be seeing, his was direct and thorough.

"Although a bit much for a man my age.  A bit too much irony."  Daisy
was looking up at him in her polite, attentive way.  Mournfully, Flora
said, "Red juice, please.  Please."  He looked at me.

"Don't worry about my wife.

Let the poor kid have a bottle."

I shrugged.

"All right," I said to him, and to his daughter, "Hold on, Flora Dora."
As I pulled open the screen door to go back into the kitchen, he said,
"And pour something for her old man while pleasures of the flesh."  He
winked at me.

"What a teenager she's going to make."

He raised the glass to the three of us.

"Three beauties," he said, and drank, and winced when the cold hit his
bad tooth.

He rubbed his jaw.

"How many years would it earn me," he said, "if I swallowed each one of
you whole?"  Daisy, with her pink shoes tucked up under her knees and
the hem of my old white tennis dress, said simply, "I don't know."

He laughed, one of his deep shouts of real laughter, and

leaning forward, reached down to pat her head.

"Neither do I," he said.

"But it would be worth finding out."

With his drink in his hand, he stood cautiously, the other hand
gripping the wood banister, pulling himself up with it.

He turned from us, walking down the gravel path a little stiffly,
perhaps a little more stooped, and went into his studio, where Ana, as
far as I could tell, was still waiting for him.

I convinced the girls to spend the rest of the afternoon at home, in
the house and on the lawn, playing blindman's bluff and paper dolls and
perfecting our cartwheels and somersaults on the grass.  About
mid-afternoon, Ana came out of his studio and went into the house,
looking much as she always did, acting much the same as well--ignoring
us in her Frenchified way.  I heard the vacuum go on inside, and a few
minutes later saw her come to the door to shake out a small rug.  She
was in her blue uniform again, although she had one of Flora's mother's
scarves tied around her hair.  She no longer seemed particularly
unhappy, and although she was the only one who had witnessed what had
happened in his studio this morning, I wasn't particularly embarrassed
by her glance.  It was as if I had somehow taken to heart his startling
phrase, as if we had vanished, the girls and I, and this house and
lawn, the studio, the gravel path, the woods up to the caretaker's
gate, was the last place we lingered.  Like little ghosts.

It wasn't until just before dinner that we finally walked down to the
beach, and that was only so Daisy could take her therapy at the edge of
the ocean.  Her skin did not seem to be improving, nor was it getting
any worse, although the seriousness with which she watched her feet
sink into the sand as the foamy water spread around them made me think
that she, too,

could erase the bruises, and whatever it was the bruises indicated
--perhaps anemia (I had looked it up, and had asked my mother to make
liver and onions)--by an act of will.

Walking back, we ran into the Richardsons again, with Rupert and Angus
and another couple, a thinner and authentically British version of
themselves, a Mr.  and Mrs.  Hyphenated Name, down for the weekend.
Mrs.  Richardson introduced Flora as the daughter of "one of our better
known artists"--the thin couple gave a satisfying exclamation at his
name--and Daisy as a "little visitor" who lived on Sutton Place, and me
as the girl who had stolen her puppies' hearts (poor Rupert and Angus
beating their stumpy tails and panting as if to say, It's true, it's
true), who lived in that charming cottage with the dahlias.

"The village beauty," she said, as if this were merrie olde England and
I were Eustacia Vye herself.

The thin couple--gaunt, really, and dressed for fall--shook hands with
us all and smiled broadly, and actually said, Enchanting, enchanting,
as they looked at us in the dusk.  The tall trees were full now of
birdsong and setting sunlight.  We chatted for a while, although the
conversation quickly ran its course and we needed to get Flora home. We
spoke about the weather and the weekend and the fireworks at the Main
Beach, and Mrs.  Richardson's preference for June over July, September
over August.  ("Of course you schoolchildren dread it," she said,
taking us all in with a warm Beatrix Potter kind of glance, "but
September is really the best month of the summer.

The crowds are gone.  We have those warm days and those glorious cool
nights."

"Sleeping weather," her husband said,

taking the pipe from his mouth, and the British woman exclaimed, "Oh,
indeed, sleeping weather," as if it were something out of King Arthur.)
With Angus and Rupert panting contentedly at my feet, absorbing into
their bellies the warmth of my sneakers and whatever heat was left in
the road, we lingered.

We lingered although it was growing late and Flora was nodding off in
her stroller and Daisy was sighing quietly, shifting from foot to foot.
We discussed the fragrant air, the stars at night, the soothing sound
of the ocean.  Mrs.  Richardson was beaming, at us, and at her thin and
shadowy friends, as if we were all her own creation, and I paused
longer than I should have to let her enjoy it, this fairy tale she had
made of us, her own England, under the thick trees, on the quiet road
that ran between a deep green lawn lit by fireflies and the brown
potato field where just yesterday afternoon baby June had tumbled up
out of the ground.

There was still no cook that night.  When we finally got Flora into
bed, it was later than usual, almost dark, and the light from his
studio cast shapes on the gravel drive.  As we passed the open door I
could see him stretched out on the bed, in that same fallen-warrior
pose, one leg up and his arm over his eyes, the painting still on the
floor.  At home, my mother turned from the stove as we walked in and
said over her shoulder, "I was beginning to worry."

As usual, the Clarkes came over for dinner on Sunday.  They liked to
drive down from their summer apartment on the North Shore during the
day, have dinner with us, and then stop

off at the house later in the evening, once they could be sure the
Swansons had left for Westchester, just to check on things, on the cats
in particular, before heading back to their temporary quarters on the
lesser shore.

My parents enjoyed their company.  Although they had not known one
another in childhood, had only met since they'd all moved out here,
they had grown up in close proximity and knew many of the same people
and places, and these reminiscences made up the bulk of their
conversation.  It was odd, I suppose, that even though they had both
ended up here in this beautiful place--my parents through conscious
effort to put me in the way of good fortune, the Clarkes through the
good fortune delivered to them by his fairy uncle--all their interest
and enthusiasm were reserved for the places they had left.

Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves
but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they
had abandoned.  Even after twelve years of friendship, they were still
discovering, weekly it seemed, places where their paths had crossed or
their histories had merged--a familiar candy store in Brooklyn, a
friend of a friend's sister whom one of them used to date, another GI
who also was on the Queen Mary, an office mate who'd once held a job
that was also once held by a friend from high school.  Circuitous,
circumstantial lineages that seemed to encompass all the years of their
youth and the breadth of the five boroughs, and were always
linked--even then I thought there was something medieval about it--to
the names of Catholic parishes, as if no identity of friend or cousin
or co-worker could be truly established without first determining where
he or she had been baptized or schooled or married or (their phrase
again)

buried from--no landmark of their histories truly confirmed without
the name of the nearest church to authenticate it.

Daisy's presence, of course, proved great fodder for this, their
favorite kind of conversation, and over dinner in our corner dining
room, under the slanting ceiling that accommodated the attic stairs,
the pursuit began when Mr.  Clarke pointed his fork toward Daisy and
said to my father, "I wonder if my brother Bill might have known her
mother.  She's your younger sister, right?  And she graduated from St.
Xavier's, right?"  There followed the usual testing of names and dates
and parish dances and high school teams--the names of saints and of all
the familiar hopeful, holy phrases (Incarnation, Redemption, Perpetual
Help)--passing over the white tablecloth and the liver and onions and
mashed potatoes and fresh peas, over Daisy's head and mine, until they
struck pay dirt with a link, tentative at first, between Daisy's
father's older brother (St.  Peter's parish), who had briefly
distinguished himself as a band leader at a series of Knights of
Columbus dances, and Mrs.  Clarke's sister (Holy Name), whose best
friend, for a good year or so, had been his girl.

Isn't that something?  they all said in amazement and quiet
satisfaction.  Small world--forgetting, it seemed, the tremendous
effort they had just gone through to establish this link.

They all ate quietly for a while, shaking their heads at the pleasure
of it--lives connected and bound, the world made small, parish-sized,
and logical.  Inevitable, somehow.  Mrs.  Clarke said to Daisy, "My
goodness, we're nearly related, I might have been your aunt's best
friend's little sister, if they hadn't parted ways.  I certainly would
have known your father, and your mother, too."

Daisy made a polite attempt at looking impressed and surprised (I
noticed she was more interested in hiding her liver under her mashed
potatoes), until the conversation took off again in pursuit of further
connections.

Now Peg, my father went on, graduated from St.  Xavier's, and Jack, as
far as he knew, was the only boy she had ever dated.  He played
basketball at St.  Peter's and lived with his brother, the band leader
and another, younger sister who was now a Dominican nun on Long Island,
having lost both his parents fairly early.  Jack's father had been a
beat cop in Harlem, you see, until some no-goods toppled a chimney on
him, killing him in an instant, right there on the street, and as far
as anyone could tell, just for the fun of it.  The mother, Jack's
mother, had a kind of nervous breakdown--she was expecting what would
have been her fourth child, and neither one of them made it through the
birth.  The three kids were split up for a while, and then Jack's
brother, Frank, got out of high school and got this orchestra started,
and with his day job was doing well enough to bring the three of them
together again, just when Jack was starting high school himself.

"I guess Jack," my father said, "was a pretty sad case in those
days--he tells some stories" (glancing at Daisy and me, indicating by
his look the stories were not for our ears).  A real little hoodlum
himself--but then the good Fathers knocked him around a bit and got him
playing basketball every spare minute of the day, and then Peggy showed
up at one of the games.  And the rest is history.  Eight kids--little
Daisy here our particular favorite--a nice house in Queens Village.
Jack didn't make it into the police academy, but the transit authority
took him.  He needed to be a cop, he said.  Because of his father, no
doubt.  He sometimes says he got into so much trouble as a kid just so
he could spend time in police stations.  You know, around men in his
father's uniform.  He needed that.

I thought of Petey and Tony and the cop on the beach.

Not wanting to lose her connection, Mrs.  Clarke said, "That was some
nice orchestra his brother had."  She turned to Daisy.

"This would be your uncle."

Daisy smiled politely, her hand in her lap.

"Wasn't it, though?"  my mother said.

"I guess Frank was some musician," my father went on.

"Jack says his brother could play anything--piano, drums, clarinet.  He
said he could walk into a room and pick up an instrument he'd never
seen before--trombone, flute, you name it--and play it for all it was
worth.  And he never had a lesson."

"No kidding," Mrs.  Clarke said.

"Never," my father said, equally astonished.

"According to Jack, it just came to him naturally."

"That's a gift," Mrs.  Clarke said.

"That's what got him through his troubles, Jack said."  My father
seemed to withdraw a little, picturing it.

"Jack said all Frank would have to do is close his eyes and play
something, and it would be like everything else that was happening to
him--his mother, his father, even the stomach cancer that eventually
killed him at, what was he_" And my mother said sadly, "Forty-three."

"--at forty-three," my father went on, "everything that was happening
to him just vanished and he was without a care in the world.  Just his
music."

"That's a gift," Mrs.  Clarke said again, but my father had begun to
chuckle.

"At Frank's wake," he said, glancing at my mother, who had lowered her
head and was chuckling, too, knowing, of course, what he was recalling,
knowing as always what he would say, "which was at Fagin's, we walk in
and here the room is completely filled with colored people.  Packed
with them.  And we're both thinking that we're in the wrong place and
we're just starting to back out--and we're saying, Sorry for your
trouble, sorry for your trouble, to all these colored people squeezed
in there--when along comes Jack, from the lobby, and he's mad as
anything and he whispers to me from between his teeth, "Doesn't this
look like the' "--pause, glance at us minors--" 'the GD dark town
strutters' ball?"" My parents both laughed, recalling it, in complete
synchronization.

"Turns out Frank had been playing in clubs up in Harlem for years,
years.  And never told Jack about it.  Harlem, where his father had
been killed.  And a whole contingent of them, there must have been
eighty of them, I guess they were other musicians and fans and club
owners, you know, hep cats and zoot suits, the whole scene, had come
out to Brooklyn together to pay their respects.  And here's Jack, all
red-faced and furious, and surrounded by his cop friends, in this Irish
Catholic funeral parlor, having to shake hands and get hugged by every
one of them."

Now all four adults were laughing and shaking their heads, and my
parents said together, somewhat wistfully, "Only in New York, right?"
as if New York were long lost to them all.

"But see," my father said.

"It was just the way Jack had always told it.  When Frank played music,
everything else, for him, just vanished.  He probably didn't know what
color anybody was."

Mr.  Clarke reached his short arm across the table to lift his water
glass, shaking his head, laughing.  And then he asked, one eyebrow
cocked a bit in a way that would indicate, if he were indeed one of the
Three Stooges, something up a sleeve.

"You folks ever know Jimmy Fagin?  Not the old man, the younger one.
From St.  Cyril's?"

"Oh sure," my mother said.

"He and my brother Tommy worked together right after the war.  At
Brooklyn Union.  They were great pals for a while there."

Mr.  Clarke chuckled, rolled his tongue into his cheek.

"Well, he was my cousin Marty's best man!"

"No kidding," my parents said together, and took up anew the pursuit of
these vague connections.

Since our television was in a corner of the living room, and since the
adults were still lingering over their coffee at the dining-room table,
Daisy and I went up to the attic together after dinner.  I had a deck
of cards with me, and my book, and the jar of Noxzema for Daisy's feet.
The light was low up there, one of the ceiling lights had burned out
and I had only the bedside lamp turned on.  We could hear a gentle rain
falling overhead.  We sat on one of the beds and played rummy for a
while, and when we grew bored with that, we went to my old clothes and
picked out another outfit for tomorrow--a seersucker shorts set in
yellow and white stripes.  I told Daisy that it seemed I could recall
the entire summer I had worn it just by touching the cloth.  The summer
I was Daisy's size, if not her age.  Not so very long ago, and yet a
time as lost as my parents' days of basketball games and the service
and first jobs, when the world was divided into parishes named for
saints who had lived and died, or for the intricate stories that made

up our faith--Incarnation, Holy Redeemer, Queen of Heaven, Most Holy
Innocents.

I laid the shorts set out on the bed and then took the jar from the
nightstand and smoothed some of the cold cream over Daisy's thin arms.
I asked her if she had known that story about her father's father, the
policeman, and she said yes.  She said she knew he had fallen off a
roof and died, and although that wasn't quite the way I'd heard it, I
didn't contradict her.  I asked if that was why she always worried
about falling, but she shook her head and shrugged.  She said she
didn't think that was why--she said she didn't remember meeting her
father's father in heaven before she was born.  She suddenly
brightened.

But maybe she had, she said, an idea dawning, and maybe he had told her
to be careful.

I laughed and she grinned up at me, and then I said, "Give me your
leg," and smoothed some Noxzema onto her calf.  I slipped her sock off
and examined her instep in the dim light.

"See, it's going away," I said.  And it was, or it appeared to be.

"Those shoes are doing the trick."  I looked at the other one.  It,
too, seemed to have faded.

"I wonder what could have caused it," I said, as if whatever it was had
already passed--vanished.

"You should have eaten more of that liver," I said, and she made a
face.

"Seriously," I said.

"And we have to get some spinach into you, too.  Anything with iron."

She folded her arms across her chest.

"I only eat creamed spinach," she said haughtily.  And I said, "All
right, Miss Sutton Place, creamed spinach.  Spinach souffle.  Spinach
with caviar, for all I care."  I rubbed the cold cream carefully into
her instep, holding her foot in my hands.  The light that obscured the
odd bruises also brought out the pale blue hollows beneath her

eyes.

"I don't want you to have to go back home too soon, Daisy Mae," I
said.

"I want to keep you with me."

When my mother called up the attic stairs, I saw Daisy start and I
quickly reached for her socks.  But my mother climbed only halfway up
to ask if we wanted to take a walk with my father and Mr.  Clarke over
to the house, to check on the cats.

Daisy considered this for a minute, I knew she loved the cats, but then
shook her head.

"Too tired," she whispered.

I called back that we would probably just stay here.  We went
downstairs to get ready for bed.  My mother and Mrs.  Clarke were doing
the dishes in the kitchen, talking and smoking.

Daisy and I brushed our teeth together and got into our nightgowns, and
then she lay down beside me on my bed and went instantly to sleep while
I read, looking back first to find the part where it said that ghosts
only visit people who sleep alone, going ahead to find out what would
become of lovely Eustacia, who wanted so much.  I was half asleep
myself when I heard a car pull up outside and a car door slam and I
thought vaguely that it had something to do with the Morans.  And then
I heard my father's voice in the kitchen, and then my mother and father
both were standing in the doorway.

My mother whispered, "Get dressed," and they both turned away.  I
pulled on my shorts and a T-shirt and went out into the living room,
where my mother was standing, holding my raincoat.

"You need to go over to the house," she said, her face calm and severe,
maybe annoyed, the look she wore in adversity.

"One of the cats got hit by a car and the little girl won't let it go.
The Swansons want you to talk to her.  Where are your shoes?"

My father was standing in the kitchen, holding a black umbrella

and my grass-stained sneakers.  Mrs.  Clarke had her wrists in her
hands and was saying, "Poor Curly," tears in her voice, and my father
simply turned to me and said, "Let's go."

I slipped into my sneakers.  The smell of the exhaust from the car
outside had filled the kitchen.

It was Mr.  Swanson's car, a big Cadillac, and he was at the wheel.
Oddly enough, my father opened the front door for me and then got into
the back himself, as if Mr.  Swanson and I were peers, or as if I were
more of Mr.  Swanson's world than his own.  The car smelled of its new
leather and of Mr.  Swanson's cigars.

"Sorry to get you out of bed," he said.  He wore a windbreaker and
corduroy pants, a crew cut going gray at his temples.  He had the kind
of looks that made you believe he was powerful.

"But you were the only person we could think of.  She won't listen to
us."

Apparently, just as the Swansons were packing their car this evening,
getting ready for the drive home, Curly had run out the door, and they
had spent the better part of the past two hours searching for him. They
had even called Mr.  and Mrs.  Clarke's apartment on the North Shore to
solicit their help, but of course they weren't home.  Not half an hour
ago they were all in the house, debating whether they should spend the
night or go on home, with the hope that Curly would simply come back on
his own (they were going to stop by our house on the way out, he said,
just so I would know to look for the cat in the morning), when they
heard the screech of tires on the road outside the house, and sure
enough--their worst fears--there was the poor cat in a heap by the side
of the road.

Debbie, their daughter, was the first to reach it, and she scooped it
up and cried out that it was still breathing.  Mr.

Swanson had put his hand on the bloodied thing and felt a bit of a
pulse, but he told her to take it under the porch light so they could
see how badly it was hurt.

"Badly," Mr.  Swanson said, but nothing he could say or do would make
his daughter let go of the thing.  She just held it and rocked it and
insisted it was still breathing and would probably be all right soon.
It was clearly dead by the time Mr.  Clarke and my father came along,
but still she couldn't be convinced to let go.  It was Mrs.  Swanson
who had suggested they come and get me.

Mr.  Swanson swung the big car into the drive.  The house was all lit
up on the inside, looking more than ever like something conjured by
fairies, although the group gathered on the porch steps was stooped and
mostly in shadow.  I could hear Debbie wailing.  She had a deep,
guttural voice for a child, even when she was laughing, and behind her
wailing I could hear her mother and her brother and even Mr.  Clarke
offering soothing, ineffectual bits of comfort.  Her mother looked up
when we approached and said, "Thank God," and then turned to place her
hands on her son's shoulders and steer him back into the house.  Mr.
Clarke stepped away, to a far corner of the porch.  Mr.  Swanson and my
father stayed at the bottom of the steps, well behind me.

Debbie was sitting pigeon-toed on the steps, her sneakers and her socks
and a bit of her bare knee touched with shadows that may have been
blood.  She had poor Curly in her lap, her arms clutching him to her
chest, his head just under her chin, and she was moving back and forth
with him, keening, crying, "He's fine, he's fine."

I climbed two of the steps and then sat down beside her.

The floorboards were wet and slick from the rain.  In the porch

light I could see her shoulder, smeared with blood, and what was left
of Curly's face--an ear, an eye, the awful bit of sharp cat teeth, as
many as might have been revealed by a snarl.  It was not only a
lifeless thing, but, sodden with rain and with blood, it was not even
close to something that had ever had life in it.  And yet Debbie, as I
sat beside her, buried her face in its fur.

I touched her arm.  The blood was sticky on her skin.

"Hey, little swan," I said.

She raised her head to look at me.  The blood was smeared on her cheek
and her chin, she may even have had some of it in her mouth, and I
wondered for a moment if she might have bitten her own tongue with her
crying.

"It's Curly," she said, in her hoarse voice, her body shaking with her
tears.

"A car hit him."

I nodded.

"Poor little guy," I said.  I could smell the blood, something like the
metallic smell of the rain, rising from the darkness in her arms.

She lowered her face into his fur again.  And then looked up.

"I think he's still breathing," she said.

"I felt his heart.  Before."

I reached out and stroked him, feeling the blood stiffening on his fur.
Debbie watched as I did, growing still, or at least stopping her
keening for a moment, though her shoulders still shook.

"I think he'll be okay," she said, looking at me to confirm this.

I continued to pet him, not sure just what I was running my hand
through.  I said, "It was nice of you to hold him."

Another car pulled into the driveway, a police car, and I heard Mr.
Swanson and my father move toward it.  I saw an officer

get out, but I didn't look long enough to see if he was the new Mr.
Moran.  I heard Mr.  Swanson say, "Didn't even stop .  had to be
speeding .. . thought we should tell the police."

I moved my hand off the cat and placed it on Debbie's knee.

"Little swan," I said, leaning toward her but trying to keep my eyes
off the terrible skull, "Curly might like it if you let Mr.  Clarke
hold him awhile, too.  Don't you think?"

I looked over my shoulder toward the house.  Mr.  Clarke was standing
by the bay window, in the multi paned light cast from the living room
onto the porch, looking small and wet and bereft himself here on the
prow of his magical inheritance.

"Mr.  Clarke," I said, "do you think you could hold Curly for a
while?"

I felt Debbie flex beside me, every little-girl muscle in her body
ready to protest, but as I slid my arms into her lap, under the limp
and heavy body of the cat, I felt her fall back, too.  She let go, and
I lifted the heavy thing, handing it to Mr.  Clarke, who cradled it in
his arms like his own lost child, turning away.

Now Debbie began to cry in earnest, but it was that helpless, pliable
brokenhearted crying of a less determined child.  I touched her elbow
and she got up slowly, her bloodied arms outstretched, her wrists limp,
and I led her as she cried up the steps and to the front door, which I
tried not to mark with blood, into the light of the hallway and up the
ornate Victorian stair.  From the living room I heard her brother say,
"Eeewww!"  and we were only halfway up the stairs when her mother
called softly, from behind us, "Try not to touch anything."

I took her into the hall bathroom, a small pink-and-black linoleum
bathroom with a thick, shaggy bath rug and the cloying

scent of rose-shaped decorative soaps mixed with Mrs.  Swanson's
decaying wildflowers.  First I unbuttoned her shirt as she cried, the
material so soaked with blood that I could barely work the slick
buttons through the sodden holes, and then I unbuttoned her shorts and
pulled them down to her ankles and asked her to step out of them,
pulling off her bloodied socks and sneakers as she did.  The blood had
pooled in her lap, the shorts were no doubt ruined, but I put them in
the pink sink anyway and ran cold water over them.

"Always use cold water on bloodstains," I told her, washing my own
hands in the cold stream.  I smiled at her, pushed back her thin hair,
which also had blood in it.

"Future reference," I said.

I took her hand and helped her into the tub.  She began to bend her
knees, but I said, Not yet, and instead ran the water, getting it warm
enough.  I found a washcloth and soaked it and first ran it across her
face, over her mouth and her cheeks and her still falling tears,
rinsing it again and again, and then I ran it over her arms and her
shoulders and between her fingers, until most of the blood, the sad,
wet smell of it, had gone down the drain.  I told her to sit down. Then
I filled up the tub and swished the warm water around her body, which
was tanned and beautifully healthy and showed the perfect outline of
her bathing suit.  I let her hold on to my wet arm, her mouth against
my skin, and cry some more.

"Poor little swan," I said.

Her mother peeked in twice while I bathed her, the second time to
deposit a pile of thick pink towels, and then went away.

I shampooed her hair, rinsing it with the pink plastic cup on the sink,
and then helped her out, wrapping her body in one towel, her hair in
another.  We walked together down the hall to her bedroom.

Her small valise lay open on the bright pink bedspread, just a few
pieces of clothing folded into it, her damp bathing suit still on the
floor.  Seeing it all, she began to cry again, and I realized that
this, of course, was what she had been doing when the benign day
shifted on her and someone called up from downstairs that Curly had run
out the door.  I hugged her and tried to see the room with her
eyes--the colorful drawings and the bright-eyed stuffed pets, the new
seashells scattered across the dresser in a little pool of sand, the
old ones painted yellow and blue and bright green on the shelves.  I
thought it must seem to her a very long time ago that she was here,
simply getting ready to go home, busy and naive and sun-tired, vaguely
contented.  A Sunday afternoon in summer a very long time ago.

I found a nightgown in her dresser and slipped it over her head.  And
then sat her on the bed and combed out her hair.

"Moe and Larry are going to be so sad," Debbie said softly, and I said,
"Gosh, I know.  We'll have to be extra nice to them."

Debbie said, "If only he hadn't run out the door like that."

"That wasn't really like him, was it?"  I said.

"Sleepy old Curly."

She was pulling at her fingers, one after the other.

"I

should have locked him in up here," she said.

I laughed.

"He wouldn't have liked that."

"I should have, though."  She turned to look at me, tears coming back
into her eyes.

"He was right on my bed when we got back from the beach.  I should have
locked him in."

"You didn't know," I said.

"No one could have known."

I lowered the valise to the floor and pulled back the bedspread.

Wearily, she climbed under the covers.  I put her stuffed

animals around her, every one I could find, although she usually slept
with just a bear and a worn-out calico cat.  She didn't seem to mind.
Looking out from among them, she moved her eyes all over the room.  I
leaned down to kiss her.

"You couldn't have known," I said again.

"You couldn't have known what you know now."

The Swanson kids didn't say prayers at night.  They didn't, as far as I
could tell, have any kind of religion at all.  So I said nothing about
Curly among the angels, or Curly as a kitten again, rolled up against
his mother's fur.  I simply said that Curly was probably very grateful
to her for the way she had held him all night.  Curly always liked
being held.  It seemed a rather insubstantial consolation, and as I
offered it I had a funny recollection of Petey's rabbit trap in the
yard--of the thin twig he'd used to prop up the cardboard box, of
something slight and fragile holding back a weighty darkness.  But
Debbie nodded, and then threw her arms around my neck.

"Can you babysit for us next weekend?"  she whispered into my hair.

"Can you come over and babysit?"

"Sure," I said, and kissed her again.

As I went toward the door, she said, "Do you think my mother will come
up?"  and I said I was sure she would.

In the living room, Mr.  and Mrs.  Swanson seemed to be arguing, but
when I got all the way down the stairs I realized they were actually
agreeing with each other, albeit angrily.

"This is why I never wanted them," Mrs.  Swanson was saying.  And he
was saying, "I never thought she'd get so attached."

They both turned to look at me when I stood in the doorway, and Mrs.
Swanson said, in that same angry tone, "Jesus,

look at your nice coat.  You leave it with us and we'll get it cleaned
for you."  I looked down and saw that my raincoat was smeared with
Curly's blood.

As Mrs.  Swanson advanced toward me, determined to get my coat, Mr.
Swanson said, "George and your dad went on home.  I said I'd give you a
ride.  You were a godsend, really."

"Oh God, yes," Mrs.  Swanson said.  She had my raincoat by the collar
and I let her slip it off.  She looked at it with some disgust.

"Poor Debbie was just beside herself.  I've never seen her like that.
She even frightened Donny, and God knows he was crazy about that damn
cat, too.  Honestly, it was just too much."

She was a thin, attractive woman, a frosted blonde, with one of those
high foreheads and straight hairlines that I always associated with
smart, wealthy women.  Newly tanned, like her daughter.  Given to
wearing shades of orange and pink and bright green.  The Clarkes had
told us that she didn't stay out here during the week because she was
afraid to sleep alone in this house, without her husband.  Looking at
her now I found it difficult to believe she was afraid of anything. She
folded my coat inside out, as if to avoid looking at the stains.  I
told her I had left Debbie's clothes soaking in the upstairs sink, and
she waved her hand, grimacing.

"We'll just throw those away," she said.

"My husband's already hosed down the steps."

She shuddered, and then glanced at him.

"This is exactly why I never wanted pets."  And he nodded and held out
his hands, to show he wasn't disagreeing with her.  She turned back to
me and eyed my T-shirt and my cutoffs.

"Let me just get you a sweater," she said.

Mr.  Swanson and I walked into the hallway.  I saw Donny in

his pajamas peering down from the top of the stairs and I blew him a
quick kiss.  He grinned, and then, as his father followed my eye, he
backed away and disappeared.  Mrs.  Swanson brought me a cardigan, a
bright yellow cashmere.

"You can return this next weekend," she said.

"We'll need you Saturday."

I nodded.  I told her Debbie had asked if she would go up, and she
said, Of course.  But then she folded her arms across her chest and
leaned against the banister.  She wore a gold charm bracelet on her
tanned wrist.  She looked at her husband again.

"Christ, it was all out of proportion, wasn't it?  Her reaction.

Just madness."

He nodded.

"I'm afraid there's more to it than meets the eye."

She pulled her arms tighter across her chest.

"I told you, I'm calling Dr.  Temple as soon as we get home."  She said
this somewhat defiantly, her chin raised.

"He did wonders for Sue Bailey's kid, the one who wet the bed.  We need
to know what we're dealing with here."

Her husband held his arms out once more to indicate he was not
objecting.

I draped the sweater over my shoulders, shades of Flora's mother.  I
threw back my hair.  I said, "Curly was her favorite," and the way they
both looked at me, you'd think I'd claimed he was her sibling.

"It broke her heart," I said.

They both studied me for a moment, as if to decide which side I was on,
or what other dimension I came from, and then Mrs.  Swanson said,
"Well, we don't need this kind of grief."

Mr.  Swanson said, "And it had been such a nice weekend up until
tonight."

When he dropped me off at home, my mother was still

awake, although my father had gone to bed and the Clarkes back to the
North Shore.  She was sitting on the couch with Larry on her lap and
Moe on the cushion beside her.  The Swansons, it seemed, didn't want
the cats there in the morning, as a reminder to the children.  As if, I
said to my mother, the kids are just going to forget.  My mother
shrugged.  It seemed the Swansons were debating this whole idea of
letting their children have pets, even if it was just for the summer.

Unfortunately, the apartment complex where the Clarkes were renting
didn't allow pets, either.

"Well, Daisy will be pleased to see them," I said.

"Though I hate to have to tell her about Curly."

My mother lifted Larry off her lap and placed him beside his brother.

"Just tell her he ran away," she said.

"Just tell her you're sure he'll be back any day now."

I took a quick shower to wash off any other traces of blood, and then
got into bed beside Daisy.  My mother had told me that she'd slept
soundly the whole time I was gone, but when I got in beside her and put
my arm across her hip she whispered, "Poor Curly," and put her hand
over mine.  I could tell she'd been crying.  Together, we said a prayer
for him in the dark, Curly among the angels.

The Moran kids must have had their radar out, because all five of them
had their noses pressed to our screen door the next morning, asking to
see the cats.  I wondered if the news had reached them somehow through
the policeman.  I let them in after swearing them to utter
silence--Daisy was still asleep-and they knelt in our living room for a
while as Moe and Larry

strutted among them, rubbing jowls to knees and accepting the long
strokes down their backs, the eye-closing luxury of a patient and
unending scratch behind the ear.  True to their word, the Moran kids,
even baby June, mouthed and pantomimed their exchanges.  (My turn.  You
petted him enough.  Let me.) And in the odd, and oddly graceful,
silence, the cats' luxuriant purring took over the room.  It was sort
of wonderful, the silence and the cold-cave smell of the fireplace, the
towheads and the tanned limbs of the Moran kids as they spread
themselves across the living-room carpet.  The new light of a summer
morning after a night of rain.  When Daisy emerged from my bedroom, she
was wearing my old seersucker outfit, and her socks and pink shoes were
already in place.  She stood in the doorway for a minute, the sunlight
behind her wiry hair.

She watched for a while before quietly joining the Moran kids on the
floor, and it seemed to me they took just a minute too long to notice
her.  Suddenly I'd had enough quiet.  I clapped my hands and cried out,
"Work to do," which suddenly got them all talking and quarreling again,
although Daisy said little.

Later, she told me she was surprised, and, I thought, disappointed, to
see Moe and Larry in such happy form.

I toasted nearly a whole loaf of bread on cookie sheets in the oven,
sprinkled each slice with cinnamon and sugar, and filled their hands as
I herded them out the door.  Petey's rabbit trap was still in the
corner of the yard, the cardboard box sagging now and somewhat lopsided
after last night's rain.  I could see the limp lettuce leaves still
inside.  Like so much of the detritus in the Morans' own yard, it had
taken on the look of an abandoned enterprise.

Without the Clarkes' house on the morning agenda, we

were able to take longer with Red Rover and the Scotties, and still
get to Flora's house while the grass was wet.  Daisy was convinced that
Flora's mother would be back today--her own experience did not allow
for mothers to be so long gone from their children--but Flora was once
more placed out on the porch in her stroller.  When she saw us, she
tossed aside the bottle, which was mostly empty anyway, and strained
against the stroller strap.

"Out," she cried, leaning, her face nearly to her knees.

"Get me out."  As I bent to free her, I saw the cloth strap had been
reinforced today with a man's leather belt that I had to go to the back
of the stroller to unbuckle.  She needed to be changed, of course, and
when I brought her inside, the house was once again utterly silent, the
kitchen empty, the doors to all but Flora's bedroom closed.  Only a
pair of woman's red espadrilles under the glass coffee table in the
living room.  The counter in the kitchen was littered with glasses,
wineglasses and highball glasses and the short juice glasses he used
for his Scotch, as well as a half dozen empty but still smudged
ashtrays.

I sat the girls at the table with some crayons and paper, filled the
sink with soapy water, and washed and dried everything.

Then I wiped down all the counters and found some eggs in the
refrigerator and scrambled them with lots of butter and cream.  I was
just spooning the eggs onto saucers for Daisy and Flora when I heard
the screen door open and the fat cook appeared in the kitchen door,

"Bless your heart," she said when she saw me.

"I would have done that."  She was breathless and her lip was beaded
with sweat.  Her husband, she said, had dropped her off at the head of
the drive.  She'd been here yesterday, there was a get-together--she
took an apron from the shopping bag she carried

and tied it on, then sat beside Flora at the table--some people from
the city, quite a crowd.  There had been an argument of some sort.

"I was back in Flora's room, but I heard it going on."  One of the men
hauled off and socked another, and one of the girls got on the phone to
call the police.  Quite a commotion.  Things seemed to settle down
after the police came, and there had been only a few people left by the
time her husband fetched her at three this morning.  She suddenly
lowered her voice.

"Have you seen Frenchy yet?"  she asked, and I said no, although, I
told her, Flora had already been dressed and set out on the porch when
I got here.

She nodded.

"She served at the party, but then went off to her room without doing a
bit of cleaning up.  I did what I could, but I was dead on my feet."
She gestured, raising her plump arm to indicate the cleaned kitchen.

"I thought I'd leave a few things for her.  Not for you."

"I didn't mind," I said.  I heard footsteps out in the living room,
coming forward and then going back.  I suspected it was Ana, perhaps
just checking to see that I had arrived to take Flora.  But then I
heard a car pulling into the gravel driveway and Flora and Daisy both
looked toward the window with the same bright expression.

"Your mommy," Daisy said, and Flora squealed.  Both girls went to the
window together.

It was indeed a station taxi, but it was empty.  It sat for a few
minutes, its engine idling, and then we heard the footsteps again and
the screen door open, then a woman in a rather loose and flowing dress
emerged from the shadow of the house.  The dress was a pretty shade of
dark red swirled with black, more suited to evening than morning.  The
woman was not thin, but she moved elegantly in the dress, and though it
was impossible

to tell how old she was--she wore long bangs and dark glasses and
pitch-black hair that was cut to her chin--there was something about
the brisk way she got into the cab and leaned forward to speak to the
driver that proved she was not terribly young.

Behind me the cook said, "Oh brother," and I turned to see her eyeing
me cautiously.

"One of the party guests," she said in a soft voice, as if the girls
wouldn't hear her.  She was looking at me carefully, trying to gauge,
it was clear, how well I understood the situation.  She knew my mother,
she went to our church, she knew I went to the academy.  With last
night's party fresh in her mind, wineglasses and highball glasses and
loaded ashtrays, loaded men socking one another and a young woman
summoning the town police, she was considering whether this place was
any place for a girl like me to be.  She was considering whether my
parents should be informed.

"Lucky they have a guest room," I said, and the cook smiled as if to
say, You're not fooling me.

"It's a wild life they lead," she said, getting up slowly to collect
the girls' plates.

"These artists.  If they don't die young, they go on acting like
teenagers till they're seventy."

Daisy took Flora out to the yard while I made her lunch and packed it
in the beach bag with our own.  Today, I had no inclination to linger,
although I had already begun to rehearse what I would say to my parents
if the cook did indeed call.  I was at the beach with Flora every day,
I would tell them.  What did I care what else went on?  He was a nice
man, especially nice to poor Daisy.  What did some servant's gossip
matter?

As I went to the door, I heard Ana's voice coming from the back
bedrooms, loud and fast.  I paused for a moment, and

then turned and walked into the living room.  It was difficult to
know, given her French and its natural changes in pitch and speed, but
she might have been sobbing, or just telling him off.

Either way, the more I listened, the more I realized that whatever she
was saying, the frenzied sound she was making was a kind of duplicate
of his painting on the wall, the one of the woman in parts.  I thought
it should serve as a reminder to him to stick with pictures that were
of nothing at all.

That morning, my father had gone down to the beach before work to set
up the umbrella for us--I loved thinking of him barefoot in his suit
and his rolled-up trousers, securing the big umbrella in the sand. He'd
told Aunt Peg on the phone Sunday afternoon that with the two of us
fair-skinned beauties in the house, he'd have to buy stock in Noxzema. 
When we got to the beach, we lowered the top of the umbrella down into
the sand, and then hung our beach towels from it, anchoring them
against the quilt with our shoes and our lunches and my book, making a
little towel-shaded cave for our changing room.

We changed together, all three of us, in a game I called tops off,
bottoms up, the girls laughing as all three of us pulled our shirts up
over our heads and pulled our shorts off.  Wearing nothing at all, I
paused for a moment to help Flora into her suit and then turned to find
Daisy sitting beside me with my old shorts set in her lap and her hair
fallen over her thin arms and chest, taking me in.  I pushed my own
hair behind my shoulders.

"I haven't got anything you aren't going to have someday, Daisy Mae," I
told her.

"I just hope you get more."

And she smiled, she may have blushed, in the muted light.

"I

get to see the old me in you," I said.

"When you wear my clothes.  You get to see in me the you to come.  It's
only fair."

"I guess," she said, and giggled.  Petey's bruise was still on her
shoulder, might even have begun to spread.

"Sure," I said.  I turned to Flora, who was leaning against me, her
hands in my hair, plump and rosy in her skirted suit.

"You and Flora both, someday."

I picked up Daisy's suit from the quilt between us, rolled it down a
bit.

"Let me help you," I said, and leaned toward Daisy's feet and pulled
the suit up over them.  Even in this light, the bruises looked bad
again, maybe worse than they had been.  I closed my eyes.  I pulled the
suit up over her knees and then whispered, Stand up, and pulled it up
over her body, one strap and then the other, pushing her hair away.
With my eyes still closed, I put my arms around her waist and put my
head to her chest, and Flora at my back reached her arms around my
head, as if to embrace her, too.

"Hug sandwich," I said;

then the girls said it, too.  I could hear Daisy's heartbeat in my ear,
I could feel the quick, lively rhythm of it against the more stately
sound of the ocean.  For a moment, it occurred to me that it was Dr.
Kaufman I had trumped, sitting here behind our beach blankets with
nothing on, the voices of other bathers drifting toward us, someone
walking right past us on the sand, the sound of the gulls and the feel
of the warm terry-cloth-filtered sunlight on my skin.  Dr.  Kaufman and
his dire warnings about baring my breasts on the beach, about my pallid
cousin, had been trumped: I had bared every bit of myself, I had shut
my eyes, I had shown my cousin what her healthy future held.

I whispered to the girls that it was time to swim, and we broke our
embrace and I opened my eyes again.  I reached for my suit and dressed
quickly, Flora still leaning heavily, comically,

against me, as if she were reluctant to lose contact with my skin,
Daisy no longer turning demurely away.

At the end of the day, I folded the umbrella down and carried it to the
edge of the parking lot as my father had instructed.

He would pick it up on his way home from work and replant it for us
again in the morning.  Saving himself a bundle, he said, on Noxzema,
saving us girls from an old age of wrinkles and leathered skin.  We
pushed Flora in her stroller back to my house so we could show her the
two cats, and just as she was climbing out, along came Rags, running at
a mad pace, circling us, nearly knocking Flora over, and then darting
away, up the Morans' driveway.  We heard a shout and a curse from the
old man, saw Rags come tearing down the drive again.  He skirted us,
Daisy and Flora laughing, headed up the street, saw something that
interested him on another driveway, and disappeared behind a summer
neighbor's hedge.

"That dog really is going to get himself shot," I said.  I saw that
Petey's limp rabbit trap was knocked over on its side, the lettuce
gone.  I saw, too, first having the impression that someone had
scattered a handful of straw across the grass, that Flora's mother's
hat had been torn to pieces over the side lawn.

"Poor Janey," I said, and the girls shook their heads solemnly.

"I guess I'll have to buy one hat for your mommy, Flora," I said.

"And one for Janey, too."

Inside, Moe and Larry greeted us with their tails up and their motors
already running, no worse for the wear of a new house and a new routine
and a change in their number.  Flora and Daisy crouched on the floor,
Daisy greeting them, perhaps with not quite the warmth and enthusiasm
she had once had, disappointed as she was with their indifference.  For
the first

time, I felt a little repulsed, too, as I petted them, remembering the
snarl on that horrible skull.  It was not Curly anymore, that lifeless
thing Debbie had cradled, not in my recollection of it.  It was the
worst thing.  It was what I was up against.

I washed off three ripe peaches and wrapped them in paper towels, and
we ate them as we walked back to Flora's.  Both lights were on in the
studio and the cook was gone and Ana was not in the house, although the
place had been recently cleaned and still smelled strongly of furniture
polish and bleach.  Flora was sticky from the fruit, so I put her in
the bathtub and then slipped her nightgown on while Daisy, still too
sandy for a clean house, waited for me on the porch.  There was no sign
of dinner in the kitchen.  I carried Flora out onto the porch.  I was
prepared to go into his studio again if I had to, but he was sitting in
one of the canvas chairs, Daisy in another.

They were sitting quietly, he in that way he had, with his fingers
splayed across his cheek.  Both of them were looking at the sky above
the trees, and at the changing light.  Flora and I watched them for a
minute, and then Flora said, "Daddy"-or maybe, "Daisy," it was
impossible to tell--and they both looked at us briefly.  He put a
finger to his lips.

"My redheaded friend and I," he said, "are waiting for the first star."
And even before he could finish, Daisy had lifted her arm and said,
"There."

I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel.  Ana was scurrying along
the path, wearing the same silky shirt she'd had on the other night.
She climbed the steps and immediately took Flora from my arms,
scratching me a bit as she did with one of her polished nails.

"Merci," she said, singing it.

"Bonsoir, zee you tomorrow, zame time," and carried Flora into the
house so

quickly it was a minute or two before the poor, startled child began
to cry.

I took the beach quilt from under the stroller, carried it down to the
lawn, where the lightning bugs were already beginning to appear.  I
shook it out, then folded it up again and carried it back up to the
porch.

"Let's go, Daisy Mae," I said.

In the growing shadow of the porch, I could see him watching me.  Maybe
it was the glasses, or that white flame of hair above his head, or the
way he held his fingers to his cheek, but it was this watching that
disturbed me most of all.  He put out his hand as Daisy stood.

"Stay a minute longer," he said to her.

And to me, "Sit down for a minute."  I hesitated, holding the quilt
against my chest, until he said, in a whisper, "It will drive Ana
crazy."  Inside, I could hear Flora whining, crying a little, maybe
saying my name.  I placed the quilt over the porch railing and I went
to the third canvas chair beside him and sat down.  Now he was really
smiling, as if we were once more in collusion.

We sat in silence for a minute, stubborn silence on my part, casual,
amused silence for him.  It was this watching that disturbed me,
because in it I saw his belief that he could penetrate with his amused
eyes the person I thought I was and find something more to his liking
at the core.  Erase me and start over again, out of his own design. His
own head.  It made me feel buffeted, somehow, as if, from moment to
moment, I had to catch my breath, plant myself more firmly, as you do
between waves.  I had years left, I had beauty, I had the capacity to
make uncertainty cross his face.  And yet I had also entered into some
agreement with him.  There was some complicity between us, in the way
we had left his studio together and

headed for the house.  In here first, he had said, as we went into the
kitchen, as if we both understood what was to follow.

Some unspoken complicity in the way I had drawn him into Daisy's care,
in what I was doing now, driving Ana crazy.  An uneasy alliance, as
Sister Irene would have said in World History class.

I raised my eyes and looked back at him.  I wondered for a moment why
he didn't have a drink, if his toothache had been cured, and then I saw
there was an empty glass on the floor beside his chair.

"So what made you choose Macbeth?"  he said finally.

"Out of all the fairy tales you might recite for my daughter?"

I shrugged.

"We did it in school freshman year," I said.

His glasses seemed to flash with the setting light.

"I

thought it might have had something to do with her mother," he said. He
leaned forward a bit.

"Don't tell me you were one of the witches."

I shook my head.

"I was Macduff.  It's an all-girl school."

He gave his true laugh.

"Of course," he said.  He reached down for the empty glass and turned
to Daisy.

"Would you run inside, Daisy Mae, and ask the lady of the house to fill
this for me?"

Daisy took the glass and slipped off her chair.

"Okay," she said.  I might have resented him for appropriating my
nickname, except that it so clearly pleased her.  We both watched her
go through the door, the pink shoes clicking on the floorboards.

He turned back to me.

"Lots of room for histrionics," he said.

"Playing Macduff.  Great sorrow, bloody revenge.  Are you that kind of
actress?"

I let the silence come back for a second and then I said, "I didn't
play it that way.  That was how the nun who directed wanted me to do
it.  She kept yelling at me to wring my hands.

She wanted me to get all pop-eyed when he hears about his family.  But
I didn't."  His head was to one side, against his artist's hand.  I was
aware of him watching me, his own world whirling inside his head.

"Well, I did in rehearsals," I said, planting myself more firmly, "but
not when we put it on, when she couldn't do anything about it.  I just
said it beside me, his long legs spread out before him, crossed at the
bare ankles.

Something regal in his slouch, his white shirt rolled at the sleeves
and open at the collar, the white flame of his hair.

"Always knew his children would be slaughtered?"  he said softly.

I straightened my spine, aiming for something regal myself.

"In a way," to look both besieged and neglected.  He said a shy "Hi" to
Daisy and then pulled me0 0,722,1543lawn  There was the sound of
Flora's voice from inside, Ana's musical if terse replies.  The drill
of summer locusts in the trees.  I felt him studying me, fingers along
his cheek, although I still kept my head turned toward the lawn and the
weeping cherries.

"I didn't have him scream at Macbeth at the end, either," I said
finally.

"I didn't make it a triumph.  I made it look like he was crying.  Like
he was sick of all this blood."  I had a momentary recollection of that
wet and tinny smell.

"I had him drop Macbeth's head, at the end.  This papier-mache thing. I
had him look like he was sick of the whole thing.  Everybody dying."

I turned to him and he lifted his chin out of his palm.  I couldn't
tell if he was bored.

"How'd that go over?"  he asked.

"She didn't like it," I said.

"She gave me a C."

He chuckled.

"Understatement is a hard sell," he said.

I took my arms from the armrest and folded them across my lap.

"Some of the other girls said I made Macduff seem like a fairy."  I
recalled the slow dawning; Mr.  Clarke's house suddenly sunk back onto
solid, sordid earth.  I looked at him to see if he knew what I meant.

He wasn't smiling.

"Nice girls," he whispered.

Daisy, just beside him, was gently swinging her feet, utterly
patient.

"We should go," I said, although I didn't want to, somehow.  I stood,
and she stood.  He raised his glass to us both, still slouched in his
chair.

"Bonsoir," he said, and nothing more, although I knew he watched us as
we walked across the lawn to the drive.

Petey was on the back steps when we got home, the light

in the kitchen behind him already on and my mother inside making
dinner, our folded beach umbrella leaning up against the house.

Petey stood as soon as we approached, something behind his back.  I
looked quickly to see if his rabbit trap was still there.  It was
gone.

He said to Daisy, "This isn't what I told you about.  The thing I
really want to get you, but"--and he thrust out his hand.  It was a
bracelet made of caramel-colored stones, looped in rings of something
that even in the dim light I could tell was not real gold.  Daisy
seemed to have no idea what to do, and so he shoved the bracelet toward
her and said, "It's for you."

Hesitantly, she took it from him.  I wouldn't ask him, in front of her,
where it had come from, but I suspected the worst.  And then Petey
said, looking up at me, as if he well understood an explanation was
needed.

"The cop gave it to my mom, but she didn't like it at all.

She said I could have it."  He scratched at an already-broken mosquito
bite on his arm.

"I don't know if you like it," he said to Daisy.

Daisy looked at it and then looked at me.

"It's pretty," she said.

I asked, "Are you sure it's okay with your mom?"

"Oh yeah."  He was absentmindedly picking at the scab, a string of
blood running down his arm.

"She was going to throw it away.  Honest."

If this was true, it could not bode well for the policeman.

I reached out and gently moved his hand from his arm.

"Well, that's nice of you, Petey," I said.  And Daisy said, "Thank

you," and Petey explained once again that it was not the thing he
intended to give her, the thing he was still working on.

I asked him if he wanted to come into the house and put a Band-Aid on
that and he looked at the place he had been scratching as if no part of
it were his own.

"No," he said.

"It's all right."  And wiped off the blood with his shirt.  He motioned
toward the bracelet again.

"Put it on," he said.

I put the beach bag on the ground and took the bracelet from Daisy.

"Hold out your hand," I said, and then turned her wrist over to fasten
it.  We were in shadow from the porch light and the kitchen light but I
knew what I saw along the inside of her arm was another spreading
bruise.  I fastened the bracelet and turned her arm over, and the thing
immediately slipped over her hand and onto the grass.  We all bent to
pick it up, Petey beating us to it.

He held it, looking pained and disappointed.

"It's too big," he said.  And I said, no, it could be fixed.  I slipped
it back over Daisy's tiny hand and then pinched it to show how it could
be made tighter.

"I can have my dad take out a few links," I said.

Petey seemed skeptical, and his shoulders sank into that disintegrating
slouch.  But Daisy held her wrist up so that the bracelet slipped
nearly to her elbow and shyly said, "Thank you very much," once more,
and Petey walked off with his hands deep in his pockets but his step
light, somehow, as if not quite convinced of the success of his
offering but neither resigned to its failure.  He was barefoot and his
shorts came nearly to his knees and his white T-shirt might well have
been left behind by one of the fathers.

"Sometimes," I told Daisy as we walked into the house, "I think Petey's
the loneliest kid on earth."

I thought she would object, given his brother and his sisters

and all the various temporary residents, animal and human, of his
house, but she only nodded and said, "I know what you mean."

Larry and Moe followed us into my room, where I took off the bracelet,
and I held her arm under the lamplight.  The bruise was there, but it
had been exaggerated by the shadows and might only have been something
caused by Red Rover's pulling when I let her walk him.  Daisy watched
me quietly as I examined her, said, "Both," solemnly when I asked her
which hand she used to take the leash, and then, when I assured her it
was nothing, she grinned her goofy grin.

"Out, damned spot," she said.  And I put my finger to her lips.

"Darn," I said.

"Out darn spot."

While she was in the shower I sat with my father at the dining-room
table, the cats about our feet, counting the links on the bracelet and
trying to figure out the best way to remove them.  There was another
rattle at the screen door, and then Janey came in through the kitchen,
a small paper bag in her hand and her chiseled face dirty and streaked
with tears.  Her blond hair was still braided, probably the braid I put
in it last week, although the ribbon was gone.  Moe and Larry came out
from under the table to greet her, but she had nothing for them
today.

"Rags tore up your hat," she said simply, and handed me the paper bag.
Inside were the remnants of Flora's mother's hat, only a bit of the
crown, and the chewed-up leather hatband, the remains of a bright red
ribbon.  Janey glanced at my father as if he were somehow inanimate. He
had his miniature leather-bound tool set on the table in front of him,
his glasses well down on his nose.

"I don't know if you can fix it," she said, her eyes on the air

between us, as if she were uncertain of just whom she was appealing
to.  And then her eyes fell on the bracelet.  Her pale brows narrowed.
She raised her hand, pointing.

"I wanted that bracelet," she said, and as she did I saw--I had glanced
at the paler inside of her arm, making a comparison with Daisy's--a
cuff of red skin around her wrist.  I took the finger she was pointing
and turned her arm over.

"What happened here?"  I said.

"Petey did it," she said, raising her chin and her bottom lip, a look
that promised, simultaneously, defiance and tears.

"Mommy threw the bracelet on the floor and I got it first," she said.
And to my father, "I got it."  Back to me, "But Petey took it away."
She held out her wrist.

"He gave me an Indian sunburn."

To my father, "He twisted my skin."  To me, "Until I had to let it go.
Then he pushed me."  Now her voice rose into another, tearful
register.

"I came over to see if you were home yet but you weren't, and that's
when I found the hat on the grass, all chewed up."  A tear welled and
fell.

"Nothing's gone right for me today."

I held out my arms and she immediately came to me, and although she
held her body a little stiffly, she put her forehead on my shoulder. My
mother, a spatula in her hand, came to the kitchen door to see what the
trouble was.  A few minutes later Daisy, her hair still draped with a
towel, came out of the bedroom.

I explained to them both what had happened, and then Daisy stepped
forward and lifted the bracelet from the table and handed it to
Janey.

"You can have it," she said.

"It's okay."

Janey looked at her through her tears and shook her head.

"Petey will kill me if I take it."

I assured her he wouldn't.

"I'll explain it to Petey," I said.

"I'll make it okay."

Sympathetically, Daisy put her fingertips on Janey's sore wrist.  She
said, "Petey has something else he wants to give me.

I'll tell him I'd just rather wait for the other thing."

I glanced at my father to see if he'd made the connection between this
other thing and Petey's futile rabbit trap.  But he didn't.  My mother
was saying, "That's very nice of you, Daisy," and Janey was tentatively
reaching out to take the bracelet.

"I can shorten that for you," my father said as she tried it on.  He
leaned toward her, counting with one finger the pale brown stones, and
then suggested he remove three of them for a perfect fit.

"And I'll tell you what," he said to her over his bifocals.

"We'll save the three of them for you so they don't get lost, and as
you get bigger, you just come over here and one by one we'll put them
back.  That way, you can wear the bracelet now and the whole time
you're growing up."

Janey sniffled and nodded and further streaked her dirty face with the
back of her hand.

"Okay," she said softly.  My mother returned to the kitchen, and we all
watched my father as he bent over the bracelet like a watchmaker.
(Later he would declare that the thing was hardly worth five bucks,
which no doubt is why Sondra threw it to her children.) I put my arm
around Daisy to pull her closer and whisper "Thank you" in her ear. She
seemed to be shivering, and I reached up and moved the towel over her
head to dry her hair.

I suggested that the bracelet should probably stay here until I had a
chance to talk to Petey about it and Janey happily agreed, and happily
agreed to stay for dinner as well, tasting creamed spinach for the
first time (first by a tentative touch of

a forkful to the tip of her pink tongue) and declaring it really
good.

That night in bed as I curled around her, Moe and Larry two warm
weights at our feet, I told Daisy again how nice she had been to poor
Janey.  And once again I felt that shiver in her spine.

"Janey's lucky," Daisy whispered.

"She can come to your house anytime she wants, for years, all the way
until she's grown up."

Faintly, I could hear my parents' voices on the other side of the wall,
their quiet and unending exchange.

"Well, you can, too, Daisy Mae," I told her, whispering into her
hair.

"Just hop on the train."

I felt her shake her head against the pillow.  For a second, when she
didn't speak, I thought she might have been crying, homesick again. But
then she whispered, "I don't think I'll ever be back here."

I laughed, just a puff of air against her scalp.

"Why?"  I asked her.

"I don't know," she whispered.

"I just have that feeling."

I tightened my arm around her.

"Of course you will," I said.

"Every summer.  You could come at Easter, too, if you want, even
Christmas.  You can come back anytime, all the way until you're grown
up."  I said it fondly, assuredly, with all the authority I knew she
gave me, all the authority I knew I had, here in my own kingdom, but I
also said it against a flash of black anger that suddenly made me want
to kick those damn cats off the bed and banish every parable, every
song, every story ever told, even by me, about children who never
returned.

The newborn children named for Irish patriots.  The children who said,
I want to show it to the angels.  Children

r

who kissed their toys at night and said, Wait for me, who dreamt
lollipop trees, who bid farewell to their parents from the evening
star, children who crawled ghostly into their grieving father's lap,
who took to heart an old man's advice that they never grow old, and
never did.  All my pretty ones?  All?  I wanted them banished, the
stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children's tragic
premonitions.  I wanted them scribbled over, torn up.  Start over
again.  Draw a world where it simply doesn't happen, a world of only
color, no form.  Out of my head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the
sea, eternal summer, a brush of fairy wings and all dark things
banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead cats, harried parents,
lonely children, all the coming griefs, all the sentimental, maudlin
tales fashioned out of the death of children.

"And when you grow up," I said, "you can move out here, with me.  And
we'll bring our babies to the beach together and teach them to swim in
the ocean and we'll have a hundred puppies in the yard and we'll hire
Petey to come over every day and clean up the poop."

She laughed.

"And Mrs.  Richardson will have us over for tea, and Mrs.  Clarke will
give you her house because you were almost her older sister's best
friend's boyfriend's niece."

"I didn't get that," Daisy murmured, and I murmured back, "Me neither.
But I think it makes you her closest relative.

And I'll tell you a secret about that house," I said.

"If you promise not to tell anybody.  This is absolutely true: Nobody
ever saw that house get built.  One day there was just grass and trees
and that little pond with the dragonflies, and then one night there was
a house, lit up like a lightning bug.  And

although nobody saw anyone go in, in the morning the front door opened
and out came a man, kind of short and bald, with a round, happy-looking
face and a round stomach and wearing a beautiful gold shirt and brown
pants and a black jacket so he kind of looked like a lightning bug
himself.  And that was Mr.

Clarke's uncle, and that's how Mr.  Clarke came to own the house.  And
when it's time to leave it to someone, since they haven't got any
children of their own, Mr.  and Mrs.  Clarke will have to leave it to
you, so when you grow up, you'll live in a house built by fairies."

She was quiet again, thinking this over, I could tell.  Then she asked,
"Why will they have to leave it to someone?"

I said, Only because they miss the city so much--didn't you notice,
it's all they talk about?  Sooner or later they're going to want to go
back to the city and leave the house to someone else.

"To you," I said.  Everyone who misses a place so much, I said,
eventually goes back to it.

"Which is why I know you'll always come back here, to me."

Now she nodded, ready to leave behind, it seemed, whatever notion she'd
had, just moments ago, about never returning.

"Will you live there, too?"  she whispered.

"With me?"

I considered this for a minute.

"I'll be living here," I said.

"But I could visit."

"Will you sleep over?"

"Sure," I said.

"Sometimes."

"I wouldn't want to sleep there alone," she said.

"What a coininkydink," I said in my best Three Stooges voice.

"Neither does Mrs.  Swanson."  I moved my head to a cooler part of the
pillow.

"I don't know what there is to be

afraid of.  Fairies?  I'd love to see some fairies dancing around my
room."

But Daisy shook her head again.

"Ghosts," she said.

"Like the book said, if you sleep alone."

I laughed, and tightened my grip around her.

"I don't think seeing ghosts would be such a bad thing, either.  You
might see someone you used to know."

"Like Curly," she said, sleepy at last, and I said, "There you go."

I held her, listening to her breath until I matched it with my own, and
then woke briefly to hear Petey's breath as well, and to see his
shadowed form against our window.

Whcli !.!r.  Kauffian Qftie our blanket at the beach that afternoon,
Flora was still napping in the shade of my father's umbrella and Daisy
and I were sitting on the edge of the quilt, drawing finger pictures in
the sand.  As I saw him approach, I quickly erased my picture, throwing
the sand over Daisy's feet, pretending I was unhappy with what I had
drawn.

He'd just come out on the train.  The city was unbearable, he said, 108
in the shade.  (My parents had listened to the weather on the radio
that morning, had smiled smugly at each other when they'd heard.) He
had his beach chair and his newspaper and he dropped both in the sand
to sit at my feet.

He wore the same black polo shirt and red trunks.  The insides of his
thighs were still pale.

"I have something to show you," he said, opening the paper and pulling
out two long envelopes.

"And a favor to ask."

They were letters from the twins, camp letters decorated

r

with stick figures sitting in canoes and dancing around bright orange
fires.  On wide-lined paper and in their shaky, oversized hands,
Patricia had written that she loved swimming, got stung by a bee, and
sang Doe, a Deer at the talent show.  Colby, less prolific, went
fishing and won a prize--although he didn't say, as Dr.  Kaufman
pointed out, delighted, leaning over my knees as I read, if one was the
result of the other.

I folded my legs under me as I handed the letters back.

"Tell them I said hi."  And he said, buoyantly, "Oh, I already have."

He looked the letters over again and then folded them up and returned
them to their envelopes.

"They'll be out here August 10," he said.

"And here's the thing.  I've met this woman, her name is Jill, she'll
be here this weekend.  I'll introduce you.

Anyway, she's going to be out here that week, too.  For the whole week.
She really wants to spend some time with the kids, get to know them.
Which is great and all, but I don't want to overwhelm her."  He smiled.
The bright sun shone through his thinning brown hair and lit his scalp.
It seemed to light his brown eyes as well, and I realized he had,
since last week, been relieved of the burden of his loneliness.

"So," he said, "can I book you, the week of the tenth?"

I saw Daisy turn her head over her shoulder, listening.

"I've got Flora," I said, but he held up his hand.

"I know, I know."

He lightly touched his fist to my knee.  I saw his eyes slip from my
face to my chest to my lap, a happy little tour.

"This is just for the nights," he said.

"We'll do things with the kids during the day, but I'd really like to
give her, give Jill, her nights off."

He smiled again.  It occurred to me that Ana, too, had her nights off.
He suddenly reached out and moved away a strand

of hair the wind had blown across my mouth.

"It'd be a big help to me," he said.

"And the kids would love it.  I really want it to be a great week."

I recalled the summer afternoon that I had held his children in my lap
while he and his wife--their mother--were inside, the rising tenor of
her voice: Oh, what happened; oh, where is it?  I wondered if I could
anticipate something of the same, the week of the tenth, now with a
different woman's voice crying out.  The sand had slipped from Daisy's
instep, I could see through it to the bruise, but I knew, too, that Dr.
Kaufman's attention was elsewhere--on himself, to be exact.

I thought there was something Red Roverish, something panting and a
little dumb about his new enthusiasm, for this woman, for his kids, for
his sudden reprieve from his bachelor summer.  I knew Daisy, her
bruises and her pale skin, would be lost in it all.

I said I'd do it, and he said, "Great," a little too loudly.

Flora stirred beneath the umbrella and he hunched his shoulders and put
his fingers to his lips.

"Sorry," he said, mouthing the word.  He leaned closer; for a minute I
thought he was going to kiss me again, but he merely whispered, "We'll
look for you on the beach this weekend.  You'll get to meet Jill."  He
stood.  He waved to Daisy and she waved back.  He pointed to his own
cheek.

"She's getting some nice color," he said, as if that was that.  He
picked up his newspaper and his chair and headed down the beach, his
calves muscular, slightly bowed, his shoulders thrown back, and his
head turning, unabashedly it seemed, toward every young woman he
passed.  With his every step, a happy spurt of sand was thrown up by
his heels.

I packed us up as soon as Flora woke.  Even this far out on

the Island, it was a hot, hot day, and by the time we got back to
Flora's house, we were all cranky.  There was a strange car in the
driveway and as we walked past the studio I heard another man's voice,
and some laughter.  Ana was in the kitchen, in her blue uniform.  She
was putting tiny sandwiches on a tray that already held crackers topped
with caviar and bits of hard boiled egg.  There was a table fan
spinning in front of the window.

She said something in French that I gathered meant "Don't bother me,"
so I took both girls back to Flora's bathroom and put them in the
shower.  I got them dressed and combed out their hair and put some of
Flora's baby dolls on the floor for them to play with and then went in
to take a shower myself.  It was not something I'd ever done before.  I
had been warned early on by my mother, who had learned it from her own
parents, that the last thing I should do in the homes of my employers
was to act as if it were my home as well.  No matter how warm and
friendly and welcoming my employers might be, a bit of distance and
decorum, my mother and her mother before her had said, is always
appreciated.

Helping myself to their shower and to Flora's mother's skin cream (a
lovely lily-of-the-valley scent that really put Noxzema to shame) was
hardly distant or decorous, but I was hot and salty and tired, and more
and more I was coming to realize that Flora's house was the only place
I really wanted to be.  I put on my shorts and, because of the heat,
dispensed with a T-shirt and just slipped into another one of my
father's crisp button-downs, one that I had taken from his closet that
morning and placed in the bottom of the beach bag.  I wrapped my hair
in a towel and, barefoot, carried the skin cream back to the bedroom to
share it with the girls.  I was just smoothing

some on Flora's arms when he came to the doorway.  He asked if I would
bring her out to the living room, someone wanted to meet her.  I took
the towel from my head and shook my hair like a dog, wetting us all,
getting the girls laughing and running.

Then I used the towel to dry Flora's and Daisy's hair and scooted them
out the door.

He was a short, thin young man, with dark hair slicked back from his
high forehead and dark eyes and a long, elegant nose.  He was standing
by the plate-glass window, looking out into the trees, with one hand in
the pocket of his slouchy pants and a cigarette he looked too young for
in the other.  He turned when we entered and a kind of astonishment
came into his face.

"Look at this," he said, taking in the three of us, and then turning
his full attention to Flora when her father said, "This one's my
daughter."

The man bent, as if to shake her hand, but instead waved at her, just a
diddle of his fingertips, and Flora smiled from behind my leg and did
the same.  He then straightened up and looked at me.  He had large eyes
and pale skin and a slight shadow of a beard.  He was the type of guy
the girls at the academy would have called cute, dreamy.  I was
introduced as the babysitter, and he took my hand and shook it and then
raised it to his lips and kissed my knuckles.  He looked up at Flora's
father.

"Fortunate babies," he said, still holding my hand, and then his eyes
took in the damp shirt I wore and whatever was under it.  Daisy was
introduced as "the faithful companion."  He shook her hand, too,
saying, "Will you look at this hair."

He turned to Flora's father.

"This is a riot," he said.

"You among all these females."  And Flora's father smiled and

shrugged.  There was something both fond and tolerant in his manner.
As Ana swung in with the tray of caviar, the young man took a small
notepad and pencil from his back pocket and Flora's father said,
good-naturedly, "Oh, for Christ's sake, Bill," but he waved the pencil
and then jotted something down.  He closed the book with a grin,
returned it to his pants.

"Just a note," he said.

Over her shoulder, Ana told me that Flora's dinner was ready in the
kitchen.

Once again, he raised his hand and wiggled his fingers at us.

"Bon appetit," he said.  On a plate on the table there were some
crackers, some carrot and celery sticks, and a mashed hard-boiled egg.
I had a feeling that Ana had just put it all together, perhaps when
she'd heard us out in the living room.

She didn't return to the kitchen the whole time we were there, coaxing
Flora to eat (I finally made her a cream-cheese-and jelly sandwich, the
fail-safe), and it was only after we had gone outside to look for
fireflies that I heard the water running in the sink and the clink of
ice and glass.

A little while later, I heard the screen door slam, and the young man
came down the steps and into the yard.  I had a firefly in my palm, but
I let it go as I saw him approach, suddenly feeling a little foolish to
be playing such games.  It was still warm, but a breeze had begun to
stir.

"Oh, it escaped," he said.  He stood beside me and watched it rise into
the air.  Then he kept his chin raised and said, "How old are you?"

I told him and he nodded, his eyes still on the sky.

"Are you too young," he said, "to know what's going on here?  I mean,
what the arrangement is."  I paused for a moment.  He had a long neck
and a jaw and cheekbones that might have been

carved.  I still couldn't guess how old he was.  Twenties, perhaps.

"I just take care of Flora," I said.

He looked down at me, his chin still raised.

"I guess that means you are," he said.  Then he lowered his chin.

"When does Mommy get back?"  he asked.

I shrugged.

"I don't know."

He put his hands in his pockets, raised his shoulders, and gave a great
sigh.  For a minute we both watched Daisy and Flora crossing the
lawn.

"Someone told me she's in Europe," he said, and I felt my heart sink,
for Flora.

"I don't know," I said.

"I thought she was in the city."

"She is," he said.

"Some city.  Somewhere or other."  He looked at me again.

"This may turn into a permanent position for you," he said.  We were
nearly the same height and he was standing very close to me, our arms
nearly touching.  I'd had very little experience with boys my own age,
but somehow I understood that he was not flirting.  The admiration that
occasionally showed in his eyes--that familiar prelude to being told I
was pretty--seemed entirely incidental.

"I mean," he said, as if we were old friends, "the French lady is fine
and all.

He has a taste for such things.  But I've never known him to want a
steady diet of middle-aged and plump.  There's always got to be
something young and lively"--he motioned toward Flora--"child-bearing,
for dessert."  He swept his gaze over me again.

"I don't know," he said.

"It's a blood-of-a-virgin kind of thing, I guess."  I looked at his
dark eyes and his handsome face.  He had straight white teeth, thin
lips.  I blinked twice, and then he suddenly touched my arm and laughed
as if there were a pit caught in his throat.

"Oh no," he said, still holding my arm.

"Now you're going

to quit.  Oh God, he'll murder me.  I've lost him his beautiful
teenage babysitter.  Oh God."  He leaned closer, moving his hand to my
back.

"Don't quit," he said, and I felt his fingertips along my spine.

"Tell me you're not going to quit," he said.

"Forget what I said.  He's a perfectly harmless guy.  He'll probably
have to marry that maid in there if you quit."

I saw that Daisy and Flora had turned their attention to him, drawn by
his spluttering laughter.

"I wouldn't quit," I said softly, trying to smile.

"Why should I quit?"

He suddenly waved a hand in front of his lips, as if he'd just taken a
mouthful of something hot.

"I talk too much," he said.

"It's what he likes about me."  He put his hands into his pockets once
again.

"Of course, there's no reason for you to quit and no reason he
shouldn't stay out here in this perfectly lovely place with all of you
perfectly lovely little females."  He waited a beat.  I heard the
screen door open behind us, and then felt his hand on my back again,
his nails scratching my spine.

"And if you've got nothing on at all under that big white shirt," he
said softly, into my ear, "well, that's perfectly lovely, too."

Flora went to her father with her hands cupped around a lightning bug
and we both turned to watch them.  He bent over her, placed his hand on
her head, and then looked at the two of us.

The young man suddenly slipped his arm under mine, laughing.

"I just asked your babysitter out on a date.  Completely innocent.  A
movie and an ice cream soda.  Do you mind?"

He drew closer to us.

"I don't mind," he said.

"She should be going out for movies and ice cream sodas," he said. He

plucked at the young man's shirtsleeve, moving him away.

"But not with you."  He looked at me.

"He is, you know, what some of your schoolmates might refer to as a
Macduff."

The young man laughed, a deep laugh in the back of his throat, and
said, "That's a new one."  And then Flora was at my knees, reaching up.
I stepped away from them both and bent down and lifted her.  She
immediately put her head on my shoulder.

I looked at her father from over her head, and as if in response he
took the young man's arm again and said, "Let's go eat."  The man
stumbled a bit over the grass, calling, "Good night, girls," as they
made their way to the car.  He got into the driver's seat, and then
Flora's father shut the car door and turned back to us.  Passing her,
he touched Daisy's head gently, in a kind of benediction, and then he
put his arm across my shoulder and leaned to kiss his daughter's
hair.

"Good night, sweetheart," he said, as if this were a nightly routine. I
could smell the drinks on his breath.  Flora snuggled shyly against my
shoulder.  Straightening, he turned to kiss me lightly on the forehead,
my own lips just inches from the fragile skin of his throat. The faint
odor of aftershave, of bay rum.  He touched the back of my hair, still
damp from my shower, and lifted a handful of it off my neck.  Suddenly
it was all I could do not to lean my head into his palm.  It was all I
wanted to do.  But I was aware of Macduff watching, perhaps scribbling
something in his little notebook.  I was aware of Daisy, too, and Flora
in my arms.

"I apologize," he whispered.  He lifted a handful of my hair and then
let it fall through his fingers, catching just the last bit of it and
raising it to his lips.  Then he turned back toward the car.

Flora, her head tucked into my shoulder, suddenly reached out and put
her hand over my heart, as if she had felt the change in its rhythm.
Daisy turned to watch the car pull out, returning Macduff's little
fingertip wave as he passed.  Then she turned back to me.  I put my
hand out for her.

"Let's get Flora to bed."  And was grateful for the steadying effect of
her grip.

We met Ana just inside the door.  She had her black skirt and the
sleeveless top on again, now with one of Flora's mother's scarves tied
jauntily around her neck.  She had her purse over her arm and said,
"Bonsoir," and I had to put my hand out and touch her in order to make
her pause.  Her flesh was cool.

"You're leaving?"  I asked.  She was wearing more lipstick, more
makeup, than I was used to seeing, and I could smell Flora's mother's
Chanel.

"I have a dinner appointment," she said, without a pause in her forward
momentum.

"I will be back later on."  She had the car keys in her hand and she
raised them a bit, let them jingle.

"You are the babysitter," she said as she pushed through the screen
door.

"Goodbye, Ana," Flora said to the scented air.  And then to me, "Ana's
gone."

"Vanished," I said.

I called my parents to tell them I'd be here a while longer, and they
suggested they come over and pick up Daisy if we were out much later
than ten.  Daisy grimaced when I told her this, but I put my arm around
her and said not to worry about it.  How late could they be?

We read to Flora for a while and then played with her a

while longer on the rug.  When she was finally asleep, Daisy and I
went into the kitchen and snacked on crackers and celery and
hard-boiled eggs, little sweet pickles and Spanish olives and bright
red maraschino cherries.  We washed what dishes there were and put
everything away, and then I made us both grilled cheese sandwiches. The
television was in the guest room and we carried our dinner in there. 
But Macduff had a thick leather overnight bag opened on the bed--a pair
of trousers hung over the back of the chair--and although I spread a
towel out on the floor in front of the TV and we put our plates on it
and ate our sandwiches there, neither one of us felt comfortable enough
to linger.  Instead, I took a blanket from Flora's closet and spread it
over the white leather couch in the living room and told Daisy to lie
down awhile.  I sat on the floor beside her and let her braid and un
braid my hair until her responses grew shorter and her hands grew
still.  I crossed my arms over my raised knees and bent my head into
them, waiting.

I imagined a thousand different scenes.  Ana would come home first and
I would simply call my father to come and get us.  Macduff's car would
pull into the drive and he and Flora's father would come in and I would
tell them, "I'll just call home," and wake Daisy and wait out on the
front porch.  Mac duff would disappear and Ana would disappear, and
with Daisy and Flora asleep, we would sit together, he and I, and he
would put his hand under my hair and I would lean my head back into his
palm.  His artist's fingers on the buttons of my shirt.  How many more
years will this earn me, he would ask, and Daisy would say, I don't
know.  How many more do you want, and he and Daisy, in collusion, would
simply say, More,

breaking aspirin between their teeth.  More, more years, years thick
as paint laid on with a putty knife.  More.

I heard the car first, the wheels against the gravel, and then saw the
headlights change the shadows in the darkened kitchen.  I got off the
floor and sat on the couch at Daisy's feet.

I covered her pink shoes with my hand.  Then I heard the two men's
voices.  I was grateful it wasn't Ana.  But then they were silent, and
only Macduff came in through the screen door.  He had one hand in his
pocket and he made a casual expression of surprise when he saw me, and
Daisy asleep beside me, as if he hadn't expected to see us but probably
should have.  He walked into the room and sat in one of the white
chairs opposite us as if he had just left it.

"He's gone off to his studio," he whispered.

"I'm supposed to tell Ana he's there."

I told him Ana had gone out for dinner.  I didn't know when she would
be back.

"Oh dear."  He frowned and pursed his lips.  Then he leaned toward
me.

"You could go out there instead," he whispered, his dark eyebrows
raised.

"That might give him a thrill."  He was both coy and devilish, smiling
at me as if he saw on my face some remnant of my own recent dreams. His
own face as dark and handsome as one would expect of some comic-book
Satan.

I lowered my head.  The point was, I knew, that I could.  I could go
out there, nearly wanted to, cross the dark path, and the threshold and
the paint-spattered floor, Daisy and Flora asleep, Macduff in here with
his little notebook, find him on that bed or that bier in the corner of
the studio.  Rearrange the world to my own liking, out of my own
dreams, my own head--better at it even than he was.

I stood up--Macduff's eyes following me, expectantly, I

thought--and said I would just call home to get a ride.  He nodded.
When I came back from the phone in the hallway, he had lit a cigarette
and he was watching Daisy sleep on the couch.  As I began to bend over
her, he said, "Oh, do you have to wake her up?"

"My father will be here," I said, and he waved his hand.

"Just wait a few minutes.  I can't remember the last time I saw a kid
asleep like this."  He leaned forward, his chin in his hand, the
cigarette burning.  The shadow of his beard had grown darker and it had
made his hair and eyes seem that much darker still.

"It's so pure," he said.  I sat down beside her again, uncertain if it
was the right thing to do, to let him watch her like this, but a few
seconds later he drew on his cigarette and then said, moving it around,
"Does he sleep out there, in the studio?"

I shrugged.

"I think he takes naps," I said.

"During the day."

He laughed through his nose.

"How much is he out there?"

he asked.

"I mean, on any given day?"

I shrugged.

"I don't know," I said.

"A lot."

He nodded, touched a finger to the tip of his elegant nose.

"And how much does he drink?"  he asked.

I shrugged again.

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm at the beach all day.  With Flora."

He nodded.

"Flora," he said, and tapped his chin, considering this.

"Does he spend much time with Flora, you think?  I mean, when you're
not here being the babysitter."

I shook my head.

"I don't know," I said once more.

He crossed his legs, tucked one hand under his elbow.

"What do you think possessed him," he went on, "to finally have a
child, at his age?"  I shrugged again, and he said, for me, running the
words together, his eyes opened wide in imitation, "You don't know." He
leaned toward the wide coffee table between us, flicked his cigarette,
shaking his head.

"I don't know either."

He looked around the room.

"Four wives and God knows how many girlfriends, and finally, at
seventy, he has a child."

His eyes fell on the painting of the woman.  He looked at it fondly, as
if it were a recognizable portrait of someone he knew.

"The wives and the girlfriends I can understand.  He loves women.
Truly.  All shapes and sizes."  He glanced at me.

"Insatiably.  I don't think he could paint without them, you know,
without his daily allowance."  His eyes went back to the painting.

"But a kid, at seventy?  And after all the abortionists he's helped put
through medical school."  He laughed deeply in his throat and then
looked at me and put his fingers to his lips.

"Sorry," he said.  He fanned his fingers in front of his mouth again.

"Just stop me when I get offensive."  He nodded toward the wall.

"What do you think of his paintings?"  He pointed the two fingers that
held his cigarette toward me like a gun.

"And don't say you don't know.  This is an opinion question."

His slicked-back hair had begun to fall a little, over his high
forehead and his large and sleepy-looking eyes.  I strained to hear my
father's car.

"I don't think I understand them," I said.

"You don't like them."  He stepped over my words.

"That's always what people say when they don't like them.  That's
okay."  He took another drag of his cigarette and looked at me

through the smoke.

"What I really want to know is what he thinks of them, these days."

I shrugged, keeping my hand on Daisy's shoe.  I wasn't going to say, I
don't know, again.

He leaned forward, his cheek against his wrist, as if we were
exchanging secrets in school.

"I think he's feeling kind of desperate, to tell you the truth," he
said, whispering.

"I think that's why he had the kid.  I think it's beginning to occur to
him that the work's not going to last, not the way he thought it
would."  He looked at me, a little smug, a little too proud of his own
insight.  He reminded me of the gossiping girls at school, the tiny,
plain-faced ones, or the overweight and acned ones, even the
conventionally pretty but dumb ones--all of them who talked behind
their hands, behind my back.

"I think his confidence failed him," he went on.

"I think maybe he looked at his career, at fifty years of work, and
realized it was all laid down, it was pretty much done--and it wasn't
good enough.  It wasn't going to last."  He raised his eyebrows, nearly
delighted.

"So he had a kid, in desperation."  He flicked his cigarette toward the
ashtray again.

"I mean, at least that's something.  A kid.  Even if the art ends up
being worthless, you can always say, well, there was a kid."

I had a brief recollection of Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack's neat bedroom,
the high, tightly made bed, the sympathetic eyes of the Sacred Heart.

"He's still painting," I said softly.

Macduff squinted at me through the smoke.

"Yeah," he said.

"And drinking like a fish.  And balling the maid while his beautiful
young wife is God knows where.  Don't you think that's desperation?"

I resisted saying, I don't know.  I said instead, "He gave me one of
his drawings once.  Just a small one.  My parents had it framed.  The
framer offered them a hundred dollars for it."

He chuckled.

"They probably should have taken it," he said, and then he waved his
fingers in front of his face again.

"No, I'm being mean.  Who knows what will happen.  Lots of great
artists die in obscurity, right?  He might just be in a slump now.  His
prices will probably soar after he dies."

It was quiet for a minute and I could hear Daisy's soft breathing.  I
imagined I could hear Flora, too, in her crib, softly breathing.

"Are you writing something about him?"  I asked.

And now his dark eyes flashed.

"I am," he said, sitting up rather primly, brushing something from his
pant leg.

"It started out as an article, but now I don't know what I'm going to
do with it.  If he dies in the next two or three years, it will be a
biography.  If he hangs on till ninety, I'll have to make it a novel."
He laughed that deep, back-of his-throat laugh again.

"Either way, I figure I'm his last best chance at greatness."

I heard a car on the driveway and I went to the kitchen to make sure it
was my father and not Ana.  It was, and I waved through the glass and
then returned to the living room to get Daisy.  She was limp and
perspiring, heavier than she would have been awake, and much to my
surprise Macduff rushed forward to help me with her, gently moving her
arm onto my shoulder, whispering, "Have you got her now?"  as I hoisted
her a bit to get a better grip.  He put his fingertips to the back of
her calf as it dangled over my hip, stroked her flesh, and said, "Ooh,
bad bruise."  I looked over her shoulder to the bruise that

rose up out of her white anklet, spreading across her skin.  I knew it
had not been there this afternoon.

He opened the screen door for me and lifted the beach bag from the
porch and carried it down the steps to my father's car.

He opened the passenger door, said, "Good evening, sir," to my father,
like a seminarian taking me to the prom, and then kept his hand just
under my elbow as I got in with Daisy and settled her on my lap.  He
opened the back door to put the beach bag in, then closed the front
door for me.

He leaned into the window, his face right next to mine.

"Lovely to meet you," he said, and to my father, "You have a lovely
daughter."

My father, tired even in the dim light of the dashboard, a pale
windbreaker thrown over his pajamas, leaned toward the steering wheel
and said, "Thank you," pleased, and puzzled, and uncertain, it was
clear, which expression was the proper one to show.

As we backed out, I said, over Daisy's head, "A man writing an article
about Flora's father."

"A reporter," my father said, impressed--the circles I traveled in--and
then after a moment's thought, "I hope you weren't in there alone with
him."  I gave him my "Oh honestly" look and said, no, they'd all just
come back from dinner.

"There's the great man himself," my father said.  I turned to see
Flora's father standing in the door of his studio, a dark silhouette
with one arm raised against the doorframe, the other in his pocket.
Macduff was sauntering toward him.  I thought to say to my poor father,
There's more in heaven and hell than in your philosophy, Horatio, but
instead I put my lips

to Daisy's wiry hair.  In a day or two, at least--at most--I knew I
would have to tell someone, my mother, my father, perhaps Dr.  Kaufman
himself, and already I felt the loss of her, taken from my arms.

I WOke next morning to the sound of hammering, coming from the Morans'
side yard.  And when we passed their house on the way to Red Rover's,
Petey came running down the drive to ask what time we'd be home.  I
said, The usual, around dinnertime.

He was shirtless and breathing hard, his eyes wider and even paler, it
seemed, with his own brand of excitement.

"But don't go crazy if we're late," I warned him.

He suddenly grabbed my fingers with one hand and my wrist with
another.

"Come here for a minute," he said, and then to Daisy, "Wait here just a
minute," and began to haul me up the driveway.  Over my shoulder I told
Daisy I'd be right back.  She shrugged and sat down cross-legged on the
grass.

Today, out of that lingering homesickness, perhaps, she had agreed to
wear the plaid shorts set her mother had bought her, and as she sat, it
seemed to bloom up around her shoulders.

There was a long Chevy parked in the Morans' driveway, and as we came
around it I saw that the young policeman, once again shirtless, was
standing over a sawhorse table, fitting together a couple of pieces of
wood.  Tony was sitting at his feet with a hammer and another piece of
square wood in his lap.

There was sawdust around them and the smell of new pine.

"Can I show her?"  Petey said, and the policeman smiled.

"Is she the one?"  he asked.

"The rabbit lover?"

Petey pulled back his head and said, "No," as if such things should be
obvious.

"She lives right next door," which should be more obvious still.

"It's Daisy," he said.

"Oh yeah, Daisy," the policeman said, nodding.  It occurred to me that
I'd seen him in the village, in his uniform, a new recruit as of this
summer.  He was broad-shouldered and muscular, with a crew cut and
small eyes.  An altogether optimistic face.  I introduced myself and he
said, "Oh yeah, I met your dad," and then Petey was holding up a small
wooden box, pushing it into my hands.

"Look at this," he said.

"We just made it.  We're making three of them."

It was, I quickly gathered, an expert rabbit trap with a hinged door
and two wire mesh windows in front and back, and a little latch
swinging from the top.

"I'm going to man one," Petey was saying breathlessly.

"And Tony's going to man one, and the girls are going to man one. We're
going to spread them out to different locations so we increase our
chances."

The policeman reached over and rubbed Petey's head.  He suddenly seemed
bashful, as if a little chagrined to hear himself so enthusiastically
quoted.

"The way I understand it," he said, "no one's keeping any rabbits. Just
showing."

Petey nodded.

"Yeah, I just want to show her."

"For her birthday," the policeman said, and I saw Petey glance at me,
to see if I would expose his lie.  Daisy's birthday, like mine, was in
April.  He nodded, "Yeah," and ducked under the policeman's arm to pick
up a scrap of wire mesh.

"See?"  he said to me, and held the mesh up to his eyes.

"We can see through it now.  See if it's really in there."

I touched the wire.

"Good idea," I said, and the cop

laughed and clapped Petey on the shoulder.  Also shirtless, the two
boys might have been his sons.

"Quite a Casanova here," he said, smiling at me.

"Whatever his lady love wants, his lady love gets."  Petey ducked his
head again and Tony snickered, fitting a piece of mesh to the board in
his lap.

"Hey, don't laugh," the cop said.

"Knowing how to keep your girlfriend happy is an art."  And then he
leaned down and showed Tony where to place the tack, gently moving his
hand to the right spot.  I thought of the discarded bracelet.

Beside us, the house was quiet, most of the shades still drawn.  I
gathered that the cop must have arrived early this morning, bringing
these supplies.  I had heard the hammering well before I got up.  Or
maybe he had been here all night and the rabbit traps were only his
excuse to linger--this battered place, these ragged kids, transformed
for him by the presence of his lady love, asleep behind one of the
crooked shades.

"I better go," I told Petey, and he grabbed my arm again and said,
"Don't tell."

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 7 a.m.

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 Queens Village, Bernadette and her brothers would be
doing enough of that.  But I took her hand as we walked, to keep her, I
said, from blowing away.

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.

"What am I going to do without you, Daisy Mae?"  I asked.

"What am I going to do when you go home?"

"I don't know," she said, but I picked her up and put her over my
shoulder so her words fell off into a delighted squeal.

She was so much lighter than she'd been last night, although a good bit
squirmier.  I jogged with her over my shoulder, along the path through
the trees, and she exaggerated the way the bouncing disrupted her
words.

"You'll just have to remember me," she said.

When we came out, I was relieved to see that Macduff's car was gone.
The lights were on in his studio and the side door open.  Although I
could smell the paint, I didn't glance inside, just put Daisy down and
let her walk along the gravel, her shoes crunching, letting him know we
were here.  Flora was not on the porch, I was relieved to see, but
inside, in the kitchen with Ana, eating a bowl of cereal.  Ana was
sitting beside her, leaning close, both elbows up on the table, and
speaking French to Flora in what seemed to me an overly sweet and
childish way.  She pretended not to notice us at first, and only

sat up after she laughed delightedly, as if over something Flora had
said--although Flora had said nothing, only turned to Daisy with her
spoon held out--and kissed the child on the forehead.  Then she looked
straight at me, smiling, as if to say she was prepared to beat me at my
own game, to out-babysit the babysitter.

"Good morning," she said.  She pushed herself out of the chair--she was
in her blue uniform, but she had opened it at the collar, enough to
show cleavage--and then went to the counter, where she'd already filled
a baby bottle with Hawaiian Punch.  She waved it in the air.

"Are you thirsty, Flora?"  she said, in English, and Flora held out
both hands.

"Red juice," she said.

"Give me."  Ana walked across the floor and handed it to her.  Flora
grabbed it, stuck it in her mouth.

Smiling, Ana put her hands on her broad hips and turned to me as if to
say, Want to make something of it?

I shrugged, refusing to meet her eye.  But Daisy spoke up and said,
"Her mother doesn't want her to drink bottles."

Ana frowned.  She was good-looking, I suppose, that olive skin and
those brown eyes, but there were two lines like dark gashes on either
side of her mouth.  Not laugh lines, it seemed clear, but lines of
anger or trouble or grief.  They were drawn clearly on her face now.

"Her mother is not here," she said to Daisy, her voice going up the
scale.  She turned to me, her hands on her hips, that coquettish tilt
to her head.

"When she gets here, you can tell her I give Flora bottles."  The lines
grew deeper as she pretended to smile.

"And I will tell her you have stolen her hat."

We looked at each other for a moment, and then I threw back my head and
laughed.  I can't say it was a conscious imitation

of the way he laughed, his true laugh, but I heard an echo of it in my
own voice, and I think maybe Ana did, too.  An echo of our complicity,
a complicity even I didn't understand, but one that I saw now left Ana,
left any number of things, well behind.  I was nobody's rival.  Daisy,
her eyes full of concern, smiled, watching me, and Flora pulled the
bottle out of her mouth to laugh, too.

I moved to the table to lift Flora out of her chair.

"We're going to take a walk into the village," I said, and then carried
Flora, still attached to her bottle, out to the porch.  Daisy
followed.

"Why's she so mad at you?"  she asked as I put Flora into the stroller.
I shrugged.

"That's what I get," I said, "for driving Ana crazy."

Daisy thought for a moment, looking toward the canvas chairs.  Then she
said, as if recalling his words, "Oh yeah."

I pushed the stroller down the steps on its back wheels, and then over
the gravel drive the same way, Flora's little feet straight up in the
air and her voice, from deep within the stroller, from behind the
scarlet juice, humming and bouncing.

It was a good walk to the village, and whether it was from the wind or
the walk, halfway there, I heard the breathlessness come into Daisy's
voice.  I took Flora out of the stroller and told Daisy to get in, and
then put Flora on her lap and pushed them both.  Looking down at the
two pairs of little-girl legs, I saw that Daisy's, in contrast to
Flora's plump and browned knees and calves, were not only thin but
colorless, despite the time we had spent in the sun, as if the Noxzema
had bleached not only her sunburn but any trace of natural color as
well.  I stopped to ask Flora if she wanted to walk, and so for a
while

she scurried ahead of us while I continued to push Daisy in the
stroller.  At one point, I reached down to feel her forehead, but she
pushed my hand away.  She said she was just tired.

At the five-and-dime we bought a kite and some string and enough
lollipops and licorice shoelaces to decorate one of the weeping
cherries.  As we left, I saw Dr.  Kaufman just coming out of the A&P
across the street.  He had a brown grocery sack in his arms and a woman
beside him.  She was holding on to his free arm with both hands and she
was laughing, they both were.  She had dark red hair, something like
Red Rover's, teased into a high crown at the top of her head.  She was
short and a little heavy, dressed in gold pedal pushers and a gold top,
a black sweater thrown over her shoulders--about as different as he
could get, I guessed, from his wife and their mother.

Erase it and start over again.  I suddenly recalled seeing the web of
white stretch marks on Mrs.  Kaufman's chest that summer I had been
their babysitter, like the lines left on a piece of paper that had been
crumpled up and then unfolded.  It was skin, of course, that resisted,
refused to relent: Daisy's bruise, Flora's growing, her father's arms
turning to dust.  You could reimagine, rename, things all you wanted,
but it was flesh, somehow, that would not relent.

I paused to put our purchases in the basket beneath the stroller,
waiting for them to round the corner into the parking lot, hoping they
wouldn't see us, but we were barely out of the village, had just paused
to let Daisy sit in the stroller a while longer, when he pulled up in
his car.  She was in the passenger seat, smiling at us, and he leaned
across her lap to call my name.  He began to say something, but the
wind was still gusting and he held up his hand to say, Wait a minute,
and turned

off the engine and got out.  He ran around the back of the car and
then opened the door for her.  She got out slowly, as if she were at
the end of a long ride.  She wore black high-heeled sandals and her
toes were painted bright red, and she was smiling at us all the while,
the black sweater over her shoulders and her gold clothes nearly
iridescent in the sun.

"This is Jill," Dr.  Kaufman said, his chest puffy in his pride over
her.

"She just got in on the train.  This," he said, introducing her to me,
"is the girl I was telling you about, Theresa.

She'll be taking care of the twins that week."

Jill held out a well-manicured hand, her wrist full of bangles.

She asked me a sudden series of questions--pointless, most of them:
what grade are you in and what's your favorite subject and what singers
do you like--as if she felt obliged to interview me there on the spot.
She was perfumed and overly made up, but pretty, already tanned, a
general impression of red and gold and auburn.  As she grilled me, Dr.
Kaufman crouched down on the sidewalk to talk to Flora, who was showing
him the candy bracelet I had bought her, and then, still squatting, he
turned his attention to Daisy, and I saw her hold out her candy
bracelet, too.  He took her hand to look at it, and then he reached up
and put his fingers to her throat, just briefly, as if he were taking
her pulse.  He straightened up and interrupted Jill's conversation to
introduce her to the two girls.

"What grade are you in?"  Jill asked Daisy.

"What's your favorite subject?"

Dr.  Kaufman turned to me.  I found myself not wanting to meet his
eye.

"Do you girls want a ride?"  he asked softly, as if this were something
just between the two of us.

I shook my head.

"No," I said.

"Thanks, though."  I told him this was our morning excursion, meant to
get Flora ready for a nap.

He nodded, his hands on his hips, as if he understood.

"She okay?"  he asked.  I knew he meant Daisy.

"Yeah, fine," I said.  The wind was blowing my hair across my face.

"She may be getting a little head cold."

He frowned.

"You mention what I said?  To her parents?"

I let the wind obscure a yes or a no.

"As soon as she gets home," I said.

This seemed to satisfy him, because he looked at Jill, who had run out
of things to say to the two girls, questions to ask.

"Shall we go?"  she said.  And then to me, "I'm glad we got a chance to
meet."

We waved to them as they pulled away, and then Flora and I pushed Daisy
for a while, and then Daisy helped me push Flora.  When we reached the
driveway, I felt the wind fall away, much as it had this morning, when
we took the caretaker's gate and the path through the woods, and the
feeling was so much like coming into harbor that I said to Daisy and
Flora, as my father always said when he docked his boat, "All ashore
that's going ashore."

He had the sawhorses set up in the driveway, the old door stretched
over them, but there was no other sign of him.

Flora climbed out of the stroller eagerly, and Daisy said, smiling at
me, "Finally returned."  The girls wanted to decorate the tree first,
so we pushed the stroller right over the grass, right up to the middle
of the three trees, the one they had chosen.

I took the beach quilt from the porch and spread it out, and then the
girls spread the licorice and lollipops across it.  I

went into the house for a pair of scissors--Ana walking past me as I
took them from the desk drawer, looking over my shoulder to see what I
was up to--and then sat with them on the quilt, unwrapping lollipops
and tying each with a little piece of kite string.  One by one, they
carried the lollipops to the tree and tied them to its lower branches,
Flora holding the thin branches still while Daisy tied the bow, then
coming to me to help them, all of us with lollipops in our mouths as we
moved back and forth from the quilt to the tree, "working."

Once or twice I became aware of him behind us, as he stood in the
doorway of his studio or carried small cans of paint out to the
driveway.  I let Flora stand on the seat of her stroller to reach some
higher branches, and then lifted her up when she wanted to go higher
still, Daisy on the quilt, tying more strings to the remaining
lollipops.  He carried the canvas through the door of the studio and
placed it against the wall, the sun catching it as he did, making it
seem to me as I hoisted Flora into the leaves that someone was waving
to get my attention.  I turned and saw what it was.  He had a cigarette
in his mouth, his shoulders were stooped, and there was something of
Petey's boneless, disappointed slouch to his stance as he looked at his
handiwork, the canvas filled with black and gray and white paint,
slashed and smeared.  He threw his cigarette on the driveway and went
into his studio again.

Daisy brought us the licorice strings, and we began to add these to the
thin branches as well, draping them just above each lollipop.  Although
the wind here was only a breeze, Daisy's cheeks were bright red, but
then, I noticed, Flora's cheeks, and eyes, and lips were bright, too.
Positively windblown.

We tied the red licorice to the branches, which seemed

heavy now with the weight of the candy, even threw some in the air to
get them caught at the top of the tree.  He came out of the studio
again, carrying a few more small cans of paint, and in an instant, it
seemed--I had only turned to take some more licorice strings from the
quilt--there was a red stroke across the canvas.  The girls were
laughing now, doing a little dance around the tree as they tossed the
remaining strings of licorice as high as they could.  I touched their
shoulders and told them to stand back, to get the full effect of their
work, and to check for any bare spots, as you do with Christmas trees.
We made a circuit of the tree, its branches hanging a bit lower now but
full of odd colors, purple and green and bright orange, that caught the
sun as the breeze passed.  I pulled the quilt out from under the tree a
bit and we stretched across it, our backs to the house, and viewed our
masterpiece.  Then we all three fell back and studied the sky.  The
clouds were high and still moving swiftly, and we spotted a face and a
fish and a crocodile's shape, a lady floating sideways in a long dress
that became a tall ship with its sail being bent by the wind.  Flora
was between us, and Daisy and I raised our arms, pointing, while she
followed suit.  A castle, Flora said, her little arm in the air, a
birthday cake, a pig--although Daisy and I couldn't see them.

"Are you making this up?"  Daisy finally asked her, and Flora said,
"Yes, I am."  Delighted, Daisy curled herself sideways, holding her
stomach while she laughed, knocking together the hard sides of her
magical shoes.

Flora sat up and said, "Daddy, do you see?"

He was standing just behind us, and as he moved closer in his soft
shoes, Flora leaned over me.

"Do you see the clouds?"

she said.

I'm not sure he understood her, because he simply stood there beside
us, his hands in his pockets, and said, "Pretty fancy tree."

Flora leaned closer to me, her hands on my stomach.

"Look at the clouds, Daddy," she called.

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.

"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 licorice, 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 licorice 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 six
o'clock and the light outside was still bright.  There was a pot of
water boiling on the stove and some dough rolled out on a cutting board
on

the table.  Something lovely and ordinary about the scene, and about
her solid presence in her hairnet and calico apron, the beads of
perspiration above her lip.  What had happened this afternoon, in that
pale, enchanted light of the studio where he painted, suddenly struck
me as imaginary, a place and time and series of events that were only
conjured, recited, wished for, dreamt about, a fanciful antidote to
what was real and solid and inevitable--this kitchen, this food, this
woman, the preparation of yet another meal at the closing of yet
another day.

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.

"I have no doubt that you do."

We had just turned the corner onto our road when we heard the
commotion: Rags barking and Petey and Tony shouting, and maybe Janey's
voice and the old man's mixed in there, too, mixed and carried by the
wind.  We had not reached the Moran place yet when out of their
driveway came Tony, and then Petey, with one of the wooden rabbit traps
held aloft' high above his head, and Rags leaping and jumping and
barking beneath it, and Janey and Judy following, trying to bat the dog
away.  Tony was the first to see us and he pointed, and then Petey saw
us and came running, knees high, triumphantly holding up the rabbit
trap, Rags snapping at his heels, the girls following, screaming and
yelling, all joyous, all oblivious to the old man's voice, which was
still coming from behind their hedge, shouting and swearing.  Baby June
following up behind.

They descended on us, Petey yelling, "We got one, we got one," his face
flushed and perspiring, his eyes crazy and bright.

He thrust the rabbit trap into Daisy's hands as Rags followed along
under it, barking and spinning, the wind blowing his fur "For you,"
Petey shouted.  And Tony, like an echo, leaning over her, repeated,
"For you, for you."  And then the girls were upon her, Janey crying,
"Let me see, let me see," Judy trying to swat the dog away.

They engulfed Daisy, with their brown limbs and their

blond heads, their voices and their quick breaths, their hands on the
cage, on her arms, all of them pressing together, Rags barking and
leaping.  I saw Daisy's foot go up behind her, either to regain her
balance or to move the dog away, and then I saw Rags with his teeth
sunk into her ankle.  She cried out and Rags was jumping toward Janey
and Petey, who were suddenly holding the cage, suddenly stepping away
from Daisy as she bent, screaming, both hands to her leg.  I saw the
blood blossom into her thin white anklet.

I scooped her up and ran to the house.  She was crying, holding her
leg, screaming in breathless bursts.

"You're all right," I told her.

"You're all right, Daisy Mae.  You're all right."

I was aware only of the sound of the Morans running behind me.  Then of
Petey shouting in his adult voice, "I'll get the cop."  I pulled open
the back door and ran through the silent kitchen, through the living
room, where the cats bounded from the couch to welcome our arrival.

"You're all right, you're all right," I kept repeating, through her
panting tears.

"You're all right, Daisy Mae."

I carried her into the bathroom and sat her on the edge of the tub.  I
pulled off her shoe and the white socks.  The bite was precise, two
deep toothmarks already beginning to swell and then a smaller set of
punctures between them.  I turned on the water in the tub.  She had her
arm around me, she was gripping my hair, burying her face in it.  I
told her to move her leg under the water, to rinse off the blood, while
I pulled a towel down from the rack and wrapped it around her calf. Moe
and Larry padded gently around my knees.

"It hurts it hurts it hurts," she said.  I said, "I know, I know.

It'll be all right."

I leaned back and found the bottle of hydrogen peroxide my mother kept
under the sink and poured it over her ankle as well, making the blood
foam.  She screamed and tightened her grip on my hair.

"I know," I said, holding her.

"I know."

I was hardly aware of the Moran kids, piled like a logjam in the
bathroom door, until I heard Mrs.  Richardson's voice saying, "Move
away, you children, move away."  And then, "Scat, scat," to Moe and
Larry.

And then--with a dream's inappropriate and nonchalant merging of people
and place--Mrs.  Richardson, in her tweed skirt and sensible shoes and
her wide, capable body, was behind me in our narrow bathroom, her hand
on my shoulder as she leaned to see Daisy's leg.

"Oh, that's bad," she said, drawing in her breath.

"Terribly discolored."  She patted Daisy's shoulder as well.

"We're going to get you to a doctor, my dear," she said, shouting a bit
to be heard over the running water.  And to me, "She should go straight
to the emergency room."

I felt Daisy's arm tighten around my neck, her fingers gripping my
hair.  I leaned to scoop the water over her foot, over the blood,
handful after handful.

"It'll be all right, Daisy Mae," I told her, trying to keep my voice
sure.

"It'll be okay."

"The man next door has gotten hold of the dog," Mrs.  Richardson was
saying.  She seemed to be bustling about, as much as she could in such
a narrow space, opening and closing the vanity doors.

"That's the important thing, in case of rabies.

I gather it's a stray."

Daisy was crying so hard by then, I doubt if she heard.  I hardly heard
myself, with the water running and Daisy leaning over my back, her
mouth against my shoulder.  One of the Moran kids said, "It was Rags,"
and I think there was a sound

that I associated with the wind--I had the image of a tree limb
breaking, the clap of a black wave--and a few minutes later Tony was
shouting, "Here he comes."

Then I recognized the cop's voice saying, patiently, "Get out of the
way, guys."  Now the cop, Mrs.  Moran's boyfriend, was in the bathroom
as well, leaning past Mrs.  Richardson's solid front.

"I'll drive you to the hospital," he said.  I continued scooping the
water over Daisy's leg.

He moved closer.  Mrs.  Richardson pressed up against the sink.

"Let me carry her," he said.

But I blocked him with my elbow and my shoulder.

"The sooner the better," Mrs.  Richardson said.

I looked at Daisy, her little chin raised and her eyes shut tightly
against the pain.

"I'll carry her," I said.

Slowly, I turned off the water and asked someone to hand me another
towel.  Mrs.  Richardson already had one in her hands.  I turned Daisy
around and had her place the bitten leg on the towel, and then I
wrapped it carefully, bending over her, my hair against her bare
legs.

"Apply pressure, dear," Mrs.  Richardson said.

And the cop said, "Let me get my car."

He squeezed out through the door, herding the Moran kids in front of
him, saying, "Come on, guys, give her space.  She'll be okay."

I carried her through the living room, where the light had begun to
take on its peachy, golden hue, through the kitchen, and out into the
yard, where the Moran kids were all standing, Janey and Tony
dumbfounded, their mouths open, Judy crying into her hands, Petey with
his fists balled up tight, his face both furious and full of tears. Mr.
 Richardson was out there,

too, with Angus and Rupert held short-leashed, close to his side. Even
old Mr.  Moran.  He was unshaven, wearing a gray looking undershirt and
baggy pants, leaning wearily on our back fence, above my father's
dahlias.  He was holding baby June in his arms.  The cop pulled his car
out of the Morans' driveway and then swung up to our gate.

Mrs.  Richardson placed her broad hand on my shoulder.

"When will your parents be home?"  she asked me, and I said, "Soon."
She called across the lawn to her husband.

"They'll be home any minute.  Tell them we've gone to the emergency
room in Southampton.  We'll meet them there."  And then, to her dogs,
"You be good boys, now."

The cop got out and opened the back door for us.  Holding Daisy in my
arms, I slid into the back seat, and then Mrs.  Richardson slid in
right beside me.  The cop took a red light out of his glove
compartment, wires trailing from it, and put it on the dashboard.

"Well, isn't this fortunate?"  Mrs.  Richardson said pleasantly.

"To have a policeman right next door."

There was a small black radio under the dashboard as well, and as he
drove, he pulled a microphone from it and, in an efficient and nasal
voice that did not seem his own, reported that he was taking a child to
the Southampton emergency room, dog bite, ankle, and then turned over
his shoulder to ask us if she'd been bitten anywhere else.  Daisy and I
both said, "No."

Then, with his voice lowered, he said, "A stray" and "taken care of."
He gave the Morans' address.

"Under a tarp and some pine boards," he said.

"West side of the house, toward the back."

Mrs.  Richardson was unwrapping the bloodied towel from

Daisy's foot.

"We want to keep some pressure on this," she said, as she wrapped it
again, more tightly, her solid gray bangs moving over her steely eyes.
And then she said, in the same determined voice, "Such a pretty shoe,
Daisy, you'll have to tell me where you found them."

Crying, her head under my chin, Daisy whispered, "It hurts, it hurts."
I stroked her arm.

"I know," I said.

"I know."

Then I remembered the aspirins I had taken from Flora's room.  I
slipped my fingers under her head, into the pocket of my shirt, and
slid out as many as I could, finding the turquoise jewel as I did.  I
held the aspirins out to her in the palm of my hand, and she took them
one by one.

We were in the hospital only twenty minutes or so when my parents
arrived.  Daisy's parents were there by ten.  By then the conversations
had begun, whispered conversations between the doctors and the parents,
mine and Daisy's, conversations to which I was not privy.

She spent the night there, Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack sleeping on chairs
beside her.  My parents and I went home and gathered her things, all
the new and unused outfits, the hairbrush and toothbrush, the new
sneakers still bound together with their plastic string.  I added a few
of my old clothes to her suitcase--the red-and-blue-checked sundress,
the white Sunday dress with the green sash, the red Gypsy skirt, on a
whim, certain somehow that it would not meet with Uncle Jack's
approval.

There was only a bit of blood on the inside of her pink shoe and I
scrubbed at it with cold water until it was gone.

Then I glued the jewel back into place and brought the shoe to her in
her hospital room the next morning.  Uncle Jack shouted, "Hey,
Cinderella," but then turned to Aunt Peg,

frowning, to say, "Maybe she shouldn't have been wearing these," a
last attempt to find something he might add to his lengthy list of
prohibitions, to find an ordinary and avoidable cause that would yield
an attainable antidote for whatever it was that troubled poor Daisy.

They left for Queens Village that afternoon, and for another hospital,
in the city, by the following morning.  Driving back to our own house,
my parents told me, hesitantly, vaguely, but speaking together and for
each other, as was their way, that the doctors were afraid there was
some trouble with Daisy's blood.  Had I noticed her bruises, they
asked, and I said I had.

Perhaps, they said, I should have mentioned them to someone.

I said I figured it was just the result of being raised with so many
siblings.

"Like the Moran kids," my parents said together, and I was absolved.

I took care of the Scotties and Red Rover for the rest of the week. And
on Saturday night I baby sat for the Swanson kids.

Mr.  Clarke had returned Moe and Larry to them that morning.

They were, apparently, ready to take on the experience of owning pets
again.  The two cats curled around my legs when I came to the house,
oblivious to all, and when I asked Debbie how she'd managed to change
her mother's mind, she gave me a sly look and said she had just asked
nicely if the cats could come back.  But Donny laughed.  He was
straddling the back of the wicker couch where we sat.

"Yeah, right," he said.

"She told the doctor she goes to that she'd kill herself if the cats
didn't come back."

Debbie turned on him with all the vehemence of a woman betrayed.

"Did not," she said.

"You know you did."

I held up my hands.  It was another lovely summer twilight and we were
on the wide front porch, just below the widow's watch, waiting for the
fireflies to begin to appear once more.

"I

don't even want to know," I said.

"Don't even tell me."

I didn't go back to Flora's.  When we ran into the cook outside church
on Sunday, my mother was the one to explain what had happened to Daisy
and why I had been missing.  The good lady clucked her tongue and shook
her head and said the poor little thing never did look right to her, so
pale.  She said it was perfectly fine that I hadn't been by--absolution
all around-she was quite enjoying the little girl, Frenchy had returned
just yesterday morning, and her own mother was due back next weekend.

"No doubt," she said to me, "she'll be giving you a call, to get back
into the routine."

But she never did.  That evening I had a call from Mrs.  Carew, my
first employer.  Her sister was visiting from Prince ton with two young
children and she wondered if I'd be free for the week.  Then the
Swansons moved in for the rest of the summer, and I was busy with them.
Then the Kaufman twins and Jill arrived.  She had now become "my
fiancee" and wore a huge ruby ring about the size and shape of the
English muffin I had folded over Daisy's finger, back on that morning
in June.

She slept in the guest bedroom, I was happy to see, and was modest
around the pool.  She winked at me once, after she had rebuffed Dr.
Kaufman for placing his hand on her thigh.

"Three words to live by," she told me, shaking her bangles, counting
them off on her manicured fingers, "after--the-wedding."

I spoke to Daisy every Sunday, just a word or two when she was sick,
longer conversations when she was feeling better.  She

always asked about the dogs and the cats, and I told her stories about
all of them, Rags included.  I told her the Moran kids were always
asking for her.  And that poor Petey sent his love-which was always met
by a purposeful silence that brought more vividly to my mind her
freckled blush and her goofy grin than any words she might have spoken.
In March she left us-as all the family took to saying, harking back to
some ancient, ancestral turn of phrase none of us, separately, could
have claimed as our own, although Bernadette and I, alone in our beds,
might over the years have thought to say, She left me.

Uncle Tommy was visiting us when the long-expected phone call finally
came, and he was the first to point out (determined to be happy) that
she had left us in the season of the Resurrection, the beginning of
spring.

Late in August of the summer Daisy came, just after my parents had left
for work,

I went into the house, through the kitchen and the living room and
into my bedroom, where I dumped the ribbons out of my ribbon box--just
a shoebox covered with fabric--and carried it outside.  I went around
the perimeter of our lawn, pulling at the long grass, filling the box.
I knew without asking that this was Petey's gift, indistinguishable as
it was from a burden.

Petey, who always used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same
time, "Do you like me?  Do you like my family?"  Who had wept with his
fists tight.  Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection,
by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he
got and what he longed for-by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried
like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.

I tore at the grass around our yard, handful after quick handful, and
as if the sound of it had drawn them, when I looked up, the Moran kids
were slowly moving through our gate.  Judy with baby June in her arms,
Janey with a box of sweet cereal clutched to her chest, Tony and Petey
bumping arms and hips as if battling to share the same space.

Without a word, I carried the box to the steps and bent down, and with
the Moran kids gathered around me, I gently lifted the hopeless little
things, still breathing, into the nest of torn grass.