I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the 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, whenapparently 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 dormitoryfor 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 onthe 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 questionsabout 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 sunrooms, and by some wonderful neighborhood consensus every windowpane of every one of them had been decorated with a sprayed-onparabola 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 chocolat back and forth between us—and hugging the cups like Europeans, our elbowson 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 wassnowing 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. Child of my heart.
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 silverknobs 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 Iwas 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 summerbabysitter 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 entryways 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 wasthirteen 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 hadever 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 twicemy 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, bonechilling 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 andwent 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 wassupposed 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.
Copyright © 2002 by Alice McDermott
