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
Bernadette, of course, was not the walker Daisy was and found the huge, winking tree in
Greenwich Village
. She complained of a stomach ache 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
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 shanties—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.