“Sure,” Claire agreed, unwilling to tell them she was afraid to go to that house in the dark. Swamiji had her ironing board set up in the kitchen. Mary would wash and wipe the dishes and Swamiji would iron. He was, he said happily, her dhoby. He did have, she noted, a plastic atomizer filled with sachet and water for the collars and cuffs. Not once since they’d moved in had any of them had an ironed shirt or blouse actually on a hanger in a closet. This was always a last-moment thing, done in a hurry on a floor cushion of folded towels. So she was afraid to go to the house alone but, weighing that against the prospect of returning to a lavender-scented wardrobe, decided she would give it a go. She remembered her father was still here.
“Dad?” she called down to the cellar.
“What?” he turned down the radio. He had on the trickling Chopin.
She went down the stairs and sidled up to the workbench where he was re-gluing her chopping block.
“Do you think you could come with me? Daddy,” she said, “I’m afraid to go into Dharma’s house alone.”
“Well, then don’t go, knucklehead.”
“Daddy, please. I have to get Dharma’s clothes for school and—”
“All right,” he stopped her. He’d spent what felt like most of his life interrupting whatever it was he was doing for his kids, to do something else for one of his kids.
They went out the back way and walked around the house. Floozie zoomed out the doggie door and ran up to them. Claire let her walk along beside her. It was good for her. She looked a little pudgy, their Floozie. Claire took out the keys. Stan whistled the good parts of the Chopin. “Smells like snow, don’t it?”
Claire pushed in the Dovers’ door. She looked down on the floor. A tumble of mail cluttered the spot where they stood. She picked it all up and Stan went around turning on lights. Claire paged nosily through the bills and the letters. There was something from a child-services agency. Claire slipped this easily into her pocket.
“Okay,” Stan said. “There you go. No ghosts can get you now.”
“Daddy! You can’t just leave me here.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Honey, you sound like you’re ten years old. Is this the daughter who singlehandedly spent ten years circumnavigating the globe?”
“This is different,” she frowned. “I knew her.”
“All right, I’ll stand right here and wait for you.”
Satisfied, she bolted through to Dharma’s room, noting that the clothes for the dry cleaner Andrew had told her he’d left on the table were actually on the floor. Perhaps he’d come back. Astonishing, she clicked her tongue, how neatly that little girl kept her own things. Claire wasn’t going to be discriminating. She was going to take as much as she could carry. Why not? She wasn’t going to let any child-welfare agency get its hands on her. That was for sure. She had every intention of keeping this child, it dawned on her, amazed at her own determination to accept the responsibility.
“Dad,” she called through. “What do you think about Johnny and me keeping Dharma?”
“She’s got her own home, Claire. No matter what it seems like now. Don’t go getting excited about something that can’t be. And her father might not have time for her now, but get past the tragedy of the moment, he’ll be wanting her back.”
“Sure he will,” Claire muttered sarcastically under her breath.
“What’s that?” he called.
“Nothing.”
“Hurry up, will you?” he complained. “I’ve got to walk the puppies for your mother before they go messing up her kitchen.”
“Right there!” She plunked everything neatly into a laundry basket and started to go, then spotted Dharma’s jewelry box. Imagining Andrew might take offense if she just walked off with the whole thing, she opened it up, meaning to rummage through and just take what Dharma might especially like. An enormous green stone glittered at her. She picked it up. It was an emerald! Claire sat down on her haunches and held the stone between herself and the hourglass lamp. No, it wasn’t an emerald. There was something more dense, more alluring about it. Claire had spent time in Pagan and Mandalay in the north of Myanmar and more time still in Kandy, Sri Lanka. She knew which stones were good and which weren’t. This one, she suspected, was quite magical. It was certainly worth a lot of money. A sapphire, it came to her. Of course! Rare, this color in a sapphire. Although sapphires and emeralds are basically the same stone. And the size! Wherever did she get it? It must have been Tree’s. Claire wrapped it carefully in her handkerchief and put it into her pocket. She didn’t tell her father. She knew why, too. He’d tell her she was overstepping boundaries. It was none of her business. Knowing he was right, she put the box away and they locked up and went back across the street.
Mary was in the kitchen. “They’re all tucked in,” she said. “So all you have to do is lock up.”
Was there a note of disgust in her voice? She was all done in, poor thing. She probably just wanted to be in her own house with her old bones in a nice hot bath.
“You’ve done too much, Mom. Go. Go home.”
Mary touched her head. “Ever since old Mrs. Dixon whacked me with the typewriter I’m feeling a little creaky.”
“Claire’s talking about keeping the Dover girl,” Stan said.
“What rubbish,” Mary said. “She has a grandmother. Although—”
“It’s not rubbish. I even spoke to Andrew about it.”
“Oh, Andrew. That’s a good one. What does he know about what it takes to raise a child?”
“Exactly my point,” Claire said.
Mary turned and scrutinized her daughter. “And then the minute you’ve got her settled in and you’re used to her and she to you, he’ll up and marry someone new and he’ll want her back.”
“And what?” Claire sputtered. “Suddenly set up housekeeping and be a proper daddy? You can’t be serious. He doesn’t even look at Dharma when he speaks to her!”
Mary’s jaw set with disapproval. “You’re so critical of everything about Andrew, Claire. It makes one wonder why. I mean why, so much? He hasn’t had an easy lot, you know. Not by a long shot. Why, the way you speak! As though Theresa had been a decent wife to him. As though her shameless behavior was somehow commendable because she flaunted it at him and called it bohemianism. As though that somehow made it virtuous! I don’t know, but I get the feeling you’ve condemned Andrew Dover on the very grounds that you’ve consecrated your old friend on. Just because he conscientiously went out to work each day, committed the contemptible crime of being steady and conservative and behaving with dignity when his wife was out and hard at it to make him a laughingstock. I’m not one to be speaking ill of the dead, mind, but you mustn’t go allowing yourself to write it off as dullness and tedium that killed Theresa Dover. And it certainly wasn’t Andrew himself. If anything, it was he who stood by her while she behaved abominably! There. I’ve said it. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but there it is.”
Grudgingly, Claire admitted to herself that this was so. But it was also so that treachery often lurked under the guise of respectability.
“And what if,” Mary pounded the table with her pointer finger, “the grandmother turns around and joins AA and cleans up her act?”
“Can you see Andrew, or his mother, wanting Dharma around ever, for any reason?”
Mary shrugged agreement. “Isn’t it sad? You’d think it just the opposite, wouldn’t you? She being such a bonny lass and all. God love ’er.”
“She is that,” Stan said, washing his hands in the sink.
“Is she?” Claire asked. “I mean I know she has beautiful hair and eyes. Is she a beauty?”
“That one?” Stan wiped his hands on the dish towel. “She’ll be having them all coming and going, you watch.”
“You think?”
“Hadn’t you noticed, Claire?” Mary laughed.
Claire shook her head. “No. All I ever see is her mother in her, or her sadness.”
“Well,” Mary
sighed, “that takes a sort of an eye as well.” She paused. “Look at all the years I lived next door to Mrs. Dixon. I still can’t believe she would hurt those children.”
“She did, though.” Claire narrowed her eyes. “And by the way, something I never told you: One day she tried to electrocute me. In the bathtub. She pulled on the extension wire from the hall and dropped the live portable radio into the tub with me. She came into our house. So remember that next time you start feeling sorry for her.”
They looked at her, astonished. “You saw her?” Stan asked.
“Well, no, but I know now that it was her. I never told you because I had no proof. But I know it was her.”
“What are you saying?” Mary said. “Now you’re telling us that because time has gone by you don’t need to have proof?”
“She did. It was one day you and Dad had taken Michaelaen bowling. I remember because I stole Carmela’s car afterwards, and she was fit to be tied. Remember? I went to visit Johnny. I wanted to see where he lived.”
“Of course I don’t remember. That was four years ago.”
“Almost five. And I remember everything. Oh, this you’ll remember. You got your hair cut off that day. You must remember that.”
She shook her head, bewildered.
The doorbell rang.
“Get that, Dad,” Claire said, “before it wakes up the kids.”
Carmela came in, kaput.
Claire’s heart sank. Whatever it was Carmela wanted, Claire doubted she had it in her to give.
“Sure you look,” Mary clucked, “like you’ve died and gone to Hades.”
“Still looking,” Stan shuffled in, “better than most folks in Falak al aflak.”
“Except women”—Carmela stared, glaze-eyed, at him—“don’t get in to Falak al aflak. Only men and their horses, but thanks all the same, old faithful.”
“Well nirvana, then,” he said, “apropos Swamiji. Where is the old boy anyway?”
“He’s upstairs,” Claire said.
“What’s wrong with plain old paradise?” Mary wanted to know.
“Mary, you started it,” Stanley yelled at her.
“Let’s go,” Mary said. “All this heathen influence,” she muttered.
“Mary!” Stan yanked her arm. “If it weren’t for him, you’d still be wheezing with your hay fever!”
“I know. You’re right.” She straightened her braids. “I’m ashamed of myself and well I should be. That dried nettle Swamiji got me takin’ cleared me up like a charm.” She smacked her own face. “Take that!” she said.
“’Bye,” they all said at once, and Mary and Stan went down the porch steps. Claire shut the door. “What’s up?”
“Where’s Zinnie?”
“Beats me. Why?”
“Claire! She didn’t come to dress rehearsal!”
“Oh.”
They both looked at the phone. “Nobody called,” Claire assured her. “If they had, somebody would have been here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if she’s not dead, I’m going to kill her.”
“Calm down,” Claire said. They both sat down. “It isn’t like her to not call and say goodnight to Michaelaen.” Undercover cops had all sorts of ex-cons out there who might want them dead. So you never knew.
Carmela took out a cigarette and fished around her Gucci bag for a light.
“Please don’t smoke in here,” Claire begged.
Carmela snapped her Dunhill torch into effect, ignoring her sister. She scanned the room. “That hassock is new,” she accused.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“I just saw one like that at Roche Bobois,” Carmela said, suspicious.
“You know how I haunt the material shops on Liberty Avenue. It’s all crap, which is why nobody bothers over there, but if you’re relentless, you occasionally run into a piece of something breathtaking. As they think you have no money or you wouldn’t be there, they only charge you a pittance.”
Carmela, her bag, cigarette, and ashtray clutched to her lap, crouched across the room to inspect the fabric with her fingers. “I mean, if you think it’s worth risking your life going over there, just to save money,” she said, “be my guest.”
Claire stayed where she was and wouldn’t answer. Carmela would argue about anything right now. Claire had had to go back to the shop five or six times until she’d gotten the merchants to agree to a good price. It was prerequisite to bargaining. If you didn’t, they considered you a fool. But Claire knew very well she wasn’t going to get killed exploring Liberty Avenue, east of Lefferts, despite the fact that she was the only “white” person far and wide. They were used to her. They thought she was quite mad, scooting from store to store. Whenever she was there, she was in a hurry, wearing her warm Tibetan hat—they probably thought she was a Russian woman, which would explain it all.
The marketplace reminded one of Istanbul and Cayenne, Port-au-Prince and Herat all at once. There were strong smells of turmeric and nutmeg, red chile peppers and syrupy coffee. She held her shoulder bag across her chest and tightly in front of her. Where poor people lived and worked and shopped, pickpockets and addicts did too. But there was also honor there, faces not numbed by years of television and white bread. There were sparkling eyes, and children climbing the merchandise while granny was sick because childcare by strangers was unheard of. Claire loved this side of Liberty. Music from Paramaribo bumped into music from Delhi and Montego Bay. So her visits weren’t just a shopping spree, they were travel. When you returned home, you felt that you had been somewhere. Claire regarded the hassock triumphantly. She always valued things that much more when Carmela coveted them.
“I found a poem of yours,” she said, an offering.
“Oh? Which one?”
“That one about Ephesus.”
“Ephesus?”
“And something, ‘spittle in it’?”
“Oh. I hope you threw it away.”
“I never throw anything away.”
“Right. Recycling Claire. But my poems you may dispose of. You have my permission.” She stopped. “I have another.” She looked hopefully at Claire.
“Oh, good.”
Carmela shuffled through her agenda, ripped out a page, and presented it to her. “Read it out loud,” she instructed, pursing her lips in pleased expectation. She wiggled into her seat.
Claire cleared her throat.
Today aboard two subway trains
a rice sprout song to pale the rain
A shiny licorice-looking ant
with pincer wriggling, threadlike gams
came in behind his shadow
called me out, ‘Ondine,’ he said.
And on and on I tasted fruit
that ripened mold and rounded mute
all ready as a nightshade bed
woke up and found my child instead.
The clock ticked on the mantel, the only sound. Claire folded the paper in half.
Carmela grinned. “It was a dream. I mean I really dreamed it. Good, eh?”
“Certainly frightening.”
“Tch. If I thought you were going to qualify it, I wouldn’t have shown you.”
“Well, then, don’t show them to me anymore. You always write your dreams in poems, and then I wind up dreaming about them. So quit it. Or start dreaming nicer stuff. And by the way, how come you never told Tree Dover my telephone number? How come you never even told me she was trying to get in touch with me?”
Carmela’s face fell. “What do you mean?” was all she could think of to say.
“I mean, why is it that Tree Dover asked about me and getting in touch with me on a number of occasions and you never gave her my number, never even mentioned to me that she was starring in your play?”
“I did tell you.”
“You did not.”
Carmela raised open palms in a quick, casual movement. “I thought I had done. It must have slipped my mind.”
“How could it slip your mind? You knew how I felt about Tree, how I adored her while we were growing up.”
“And how she always dumped you when she found someone more interesting to play with?”
“Oh. Now you’re going to tell me that you were protecting me from her hurtful influence? All of a sudden you’re worried about my feelings? Carmela, do you mind? You just had a cigarette.”
“If you must know, I didn’t want you to have Tree back.”
“Have her back? You make it sound like—”
“Well, maybe that’s how it seemed to me. You always doubled off with her. And she was my friend. I found her first. I brought her home first.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Tree was my age, not yours.”
“She was not.”
“She was, too.”
“God, this is ridiculous. Now we’re fighting over the dead.”
Carmela smashed her cigarette out in Claire’s pink seashell. She loosened her thick mane of black hair from its clip, and shook it free, a sign of surrender and reason. She could accept default if it was accompanied by the compensation she took in her own beauty.
Claire wondered, should she confide in Carmela about Tree’s stone? Carmela knew a bit about stones from Stefan. She decided not to. She would ask Iris von Lillienfeld, instead, ensuring it got no further. Iris was tight-lipped as a clam.
“Do you have your car?” she asked Carmela.
“I thought you’d drive me home. Stefan took my car to the airport.”
Resigned, Claire said, “I’ll walk you. I’ve got to take Floozie out anyway.”
Oh, she didn’t like that idea. “What about the kids?”
“Swamiji’s here. I’ll just tell him.”
“He’s always here. When’s he leaving?”
“Mom?” Anthony came down the stairs. His cheek on one side was all crumpled and imprinted with the folds of his pillow. She went up to him and held him around his small, chubby waist. “Mom,” he said, “what do you call these again?” He pointed down his leg.
“Ankles.”
“Ah, ankles!” He turned, glad, and went back up the stairs, ignoring Carmela.
Swamiji stood at the landing, arms out for him. He signalled Claire to go with a couple of waves of his hand, indicating he had heard her plans. Carmela already stood waiting in her cherry-red Susan Slade scarf, and the dog was at the door with her “let’s get this show on the road” attitude. So Claire put on her coat and they left, catching their breath at the snap in the air. They hurried up the block.
Foxglove Page 24
