Foxglove

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “What’s up?” Zinnie slid from the table.

  “It’s this letter that’s come for me finally,” Swamiji said, “from the people at Berkeley.” So the five of them sat down to listen and completely forgot Dharma’s package sitting there in full view on the cool pantry shelf.

  Mrs. Fatima put down her spoon, snapped her purse shut, and pushed the table away from her great lap with a scrape. She looked herself over in the silver papered wall. This dress was clean enough. Her daughters had already left for the play. She herself had never been to an American play. She wondered if she should wear something else. No, she would have her coat on the whole time anyway. It was cold in those auditoriums and she was sure it would snow. She’d been watching channel seven. She would wear the Totes her oldest daughter had given her for her birthday. She opened her purse up again and looked inside. Her pudgy face lit up with greedy delight. Andrew Dover paid her handsomely. And all she had to do was put off any dark-skinned people from buying north of Jamaica Avenue. So many came in for a reading when they wanted to buy a new house, white and black. They were all superstitious. Such an enormous purchase required much deliberation and why not a consultation with an astrologer as well as a real estate agent? Who better than the local fortuneteller? It didn’t matter that she wasn’t a real astrologer. They thought she was. And Andrew Dover had always just finished dropping some amazing story of how he had gone to her for a reading, just on a lark, and had gotten such great advice about not buying that old building on Eighty-sixth Street that nobody could move and which was now condemned. Crazy, he would shake his head, wonderingly, but true!

  Mrs. Fatima knew enough of the lingo to give them a good scare. Ill winds to the north. Sunlight and much happiness to the south. And all the while acting as though she didn’t know what it was they were asking about. It was so simple it was absurd. All she had to do was keep her eyes open and see who went in and out of Dover Estates. Didn’t hurt anybody. She was a woman who wouldn’t hurt a soul. But this was America. Gotta make a buck, right? She tottered across the dirty floor with her tub of rum raisin ice cream and closed it safely away in her portable freezer. She shut it tight and let loose a satisfied and well-fed belch, then went to pull down the gate and lock up. You had to lock up. This neighborhood was going to the dogs.

  Dharma took hold of her package and climbed the stairs. She went into the closet and unwrapped the paper and the string and pushed them under Michaelaen’s Ninja Turtles toy sewers. Carefully, she opened the glossy white box. There was pretty tissue paper. She plucked it off, and underneath found a pair of earrings on black velvet, glittering tourmaline. “Unlucky,” she could just hear her mother say. Still, they were hers. She held them up to her ears, got up and ran with them like that to the mirror. She stood up on the neatly filled suitcase. In the last slanting rays of afternoon light they were shimmering and irresistible. She smiled unhappily into the blazing yellow mirror.

  Claire went through Tree’s front hallway with the same trepidation she always felt in there. Only this time she was all alone. Well—she looked at loyal Floozie at her feet—not all alone. She’d just get what she needed and be out before she went and got spooked. She was always much more of a coward at night and soon it would be dark. One of the cats from down the block was outside in the yard yowling unpleasantly. Was that Lü? Miss von Lillienfeld’s cat? She peeked out the window at the scattered yard. What was he doing over here? Oh. The moon.

  She scanned the room quickly. Andrew shouldn’t leave his valuables out like that, on his desk. His passport, his money, and checks and things. Although, she realized, the only snoop here was she.

  In Dharma’s room, she found the rest of the things she needed quickly. She was a little taken aback at the disarray. Probably Andrew had been in there looking for another school uniform to give her. She went back inside to inspect the hats along the wall. Those hats were valuable, she realized. They ought to be wrapped up and put into boxes for Dharma one day when she could appreciate them. Tonight, she would discuss it with Andrew, after the play. Or before. Andrew, elusive as silk when there was anything time-consuming to be dealt with, had to be tackled and tied down in front of Johnny. He didn’t brush Johnny off lightly, she noticed. He was even, if she wasn’t mistaken, a little bit afraid of him. No one would mind, surely, if she just borrowed the one hatpin for her mom. She slid the most beautiful one, a cluster of dangling pink foxglove petals, from a crispy red straw bonnet. “My God,” she said to Floozie. It was a good ten inches long. “I don’t think we need anything that, um, phallic.” She stuck it back in and went for another, a glass-blown daisy poking modestly out of a white linen cloche.

  Gorgeous stuff, she thought, wrapping the shorter, more suitable pin in a hanky and putting it carefully into her pocket. There was one really stunning, glass-blown one, she noticed, depicting the borage flower. It was stuck into a brown sunbonnet. There must be a set. Yes, it was borage, all right. You couldn’t mistake that flower, the color too blue, the five-petal star unique. That was the flower of happiness, she remembered, having photographed all Swamiji’s herbs and labelled them to boot. Borago officinalis: The Latin name clicked into her consciousness. She cheerfully congratulated herself for a memory, which, though reduced in efficiency from years of abuse, still, apparently, occasionally functioned. The hell, she said, and she switched the pins. Her mother deserved all the happiness she could get.

  She looked thoughtfully around the hallway of hats and drifted, no longer intimidated by the emptiness of the house, into Tree’s kitchen. Here, then, was where the two of them would have sat chatting over steaming cups of coffee, or tea, from the look of Tree’s exotic row of cannisters. There were brightly colored Chinese tins: rectangles, exquisite oblongs, and unusual hexagons. All of them were from the notorious Kennedy Town in Hong Kong. They were just too delightfully beautiful, she marveled, sitting down to look more closely, and open, and sniff. The Great Wall of China was pictured wrapped in pale greens and blues around a six-sided Woo Long tea tin. There was a clove spice tea in a black cannister oblong dotted with gold, pinks, reds, and greens. She pulled off the lid, all red and yellow circles, and swooned. Such a sweet, far-off fragrance! It transported her to the high hills of clean, melting snow.

  Floozie, set to get going since a while, nipped at her feet. Claire ignored her. There was nothing in fact she enjoyed more than this sort of reverie. But the prettiest picture, on the jasmine tea tin, and certainly the gaudiest, was a six-sided scene on green grass and blue sky of a throng of twenty-four brightly clothed children carrying a phoenix lantern and playing cymbals and drums and bright golden horns.

  Claire slid out of her coat. The lid, as she held it, popped off, and as she wedged it back on carefully she noticed, stuck behind the others, Tree’s mother’s paisley tin from years ago.

  “The treasure tin!” she cried out loud. She almost could not believe her eyes. Then she realized. But of course, where else would you keep your tin but with the others? You see, she congratulated her adult self, you lose your fear, you’ll be rewarded! The jasmine tea lid popped off again and fell, clattering, to the floor. She almost jumped through the roof. Floozie sprang onto her lap, soothing them both. Claire jimmied open the lid of the old paisley tin with a dime from her pocket.

  It was like looking into a fairy box. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t what she saw, for there, in front of her, were enough emeralds and opals and rubies and heaven-knew-what other glittering gems to finance a first-class overland expedition for eleven to North Dharam Sala and back to Graubunden.

  She hadn’t a clue what to think. She didn’t know—should she take this home and hand it over to Johnny? But then, why? Who, in this business, was he? She could just hear the disgust in his voice when she tried to talk to him about it. Oh, she should have taken that other stone she’d found straight to Iris when things had calmed down. She shouldn’t have hid it in her underwear drawer. She would bring it tonight and show Iris. Sho
uld she take all this and hide it for Dharma? Because certainly Andrew had no idea of the worth in this tin on his high kitchen shelf.

  Or did he? Was that why he suddenly seemed to have money? No more cares in the world? A cold chill went through her. Suppose he came home as she was leaving the house with this hoard? He’d have her arrested. Or, worse, he’d accuse her and then let it go, making it look like he’d dropped charges out of the goodness of his heart. In Richmond Hill, there weren’t many who would give her the benefit of the doubt. The half of them looked at her as though she were loony as it was, what with the Buddha in the backyard and the swami in the hammock in the upstairs window and she herself, lurching deliberately about with her long-lens Olympus and her ugly, runt-legged dog.

  She put the lid back on. “Come on, Floozie,” she said, suddenly not feeling so well. She’d better get back, before they all started accusing her of making them miss the first act and plotting to bamboozle Carmela’s play. They would say she was jealous of Carmela. They might be, she conceded at this point, quite right.

  The whole house was lit up as they crossed the street. Stefan was sitting out on the front steps. He was wearing a tux and he’d taken the doormat to sit on. “You’d better hurry,” he glowered, accusingly. “They’re all waiting for you. Where, in the name of God, have you been?”

  “Stefan!” she gasped. “In Tree’s house. In Dharma’s house, you won’t believe what I found!”

  Michaelaen flung open the door. “Here she is!” he cried out. Anthony flew from inside. “Mommy!” he shouted, and threw himself into her arms.

  “Don’t you know what’s happened?” Stefan yelled at her.

  “Claire!” Mary came out the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Freddy came out, too. He didn’t look happy. “You won’t believe it,” he said, “they’ve forecast a storm.”

  “Tonight,” Mary sobbed, peering furiously up to the sky.

  “Don’t you see?” Freddy took hold of her elbows. “Now, none of the good ones will come.”

  “Good ones?”

  “Critics! Newspaper people! You think it’s easy to get them out here?”

  Claire shook her head at the sky. “That can’t be.” But it could.

  “Come inside,” Mary said. They were standing out there on the porch in a huddle. Mary shepherded them in. Stan stood there holding Mary’s coat. He was dressed in his well-brushed, if shiny, nice navy-blue suit and the cranberry tie Carmela had given him last Christmas. He looked tired, Stan did, but still handsome. He held Dharma’s hand. She’d been ready to go since this morning, their Dharma, only now she was complete with her muff.

  “You’d better get dressed,” Mary told Claire.

  “Oh, I can go as I am,” she said.

  They all looked, she was almost amused to note, aghast. “All right, all right. Maybe I’ll just run up and jump into the tub. I can be ready in ten minutes. Where’s Zinnie?” she asked.

  “She’s already there, Aunt Claire. We didn’t know where you was!”

  “Where you were,” Mary corrected automatically. “Claire,” she called as Claire went flying up the stairs, “put on that nice beige sheath. We’ll wait for you.”

  “Beige sheath?” she wrapped her hair in a towel and jumped into the tub. Was her mother finally losing her marbles? She hadn’t had a beige sheath since high school. Quickly she slathered her body top to toe in Mysore government sandalwood soap and rinsed off with the handy hose she’d insisted Johnny put in for shampooing the kids. You see, she told him silently, now, doesn’t that save time? She was getting a little bit giddy with excitement for her sisters. And wait till she told them about the treasure!

  There was not, as she’d hoped, some magically installed appropriate outfit hanging in the closet. There was some sort of commotion going on downstairs. Her mother would take care of it. Johnny was dressed and gone, she saw. How could she miss it, his old clothes strewn dramatically across the room. Those socks, she sighed, would never get clean.

  Let me see. She stood back. Come on, come on. What would look great? All right then, what was clean and pressed? Why on Earth had she waited this long to get dressed? She would simply wear black. There was one lot of clothes Claire would keep for her more bloated intervals throughout the year. Now if she could come up with an opaque pair of tights with no run. But where were they? There you go! She went down on her knees and shimmied through to the back of the closet floor and came up with a still-good pair of sort-of riding boots. They were a little bit scuffed. She dumped open her purse and blackened the toes and heels with her mascara, then rubbed them briskly with a tissue and threw the mascara into the bin. She needed a new mascara, anyhow. She peered into the mirror. There were eyebrows there she hadn’t seen since she was a girl, and then for only as short a time as it took her to run for a tweezer and pluck them out. Claire didn’t know what sensual female warrior instinct drove her to proclaim herself entitled to her own antennae, despite the perpetual signals of self-loathing from all the major networks, but there it was.

  She flew down the stairway, still brushing her hair, and knew by the relieved looks on her family’s worried faces that she hadn’t made a mistake. She would do for her sisters, her family. She wouldn’t embarrass them with her eccentric foreign clothing. This, after all, was their night.

  Swamiji stood at the front door, swaddled in cashmere, all set to go. He had bought a corsage for Mary and she wore it, reverently, upon a rubber band atop her gloves. Freddy, very dapper, swept them into the double-parked little parade of cars. Johnny had gone on ahead and had been instructed to stay put at the door. Guard the take. Just in case. You never knew what might happen. This wasn’t the old days, Mary’s eyes shone feverishly as she told Swamiji, when you could walk the streets without the slightest regard.

  Yes, yes, they all agreed and slammed the door as Mary pulled her phosphorescent skirts in and out of the way. Anthony sat on Claire’s lap. For one night, just this special occasion, they would drive the few blocks without seat belts. She nuzzled his hair, just like his father’s own, with her nose. This, then, was a moment to cherish. Here they were on their way to what would always be looked back upon as a milestone in every one of their lives. They would not all be here together next year, she knew, counting heads in the old car as it went bumping along the great potholes. Swamiji was in the lead car with her parents but in hers, commandeered by Fred, were an astonishingly dressed Iris von Lillienfeld (Iris had really dug out the glad rags for this one) and Mr. Kinkaid, who was pressed in there beside her. He’d done them all the honor of reviving his retired brown suit. Narayan had the other two kids riding with him in Stefan’s fancy car.

  “Get a load of this,” Claire opened her hand underneath Iris’s aristocratic, freely running nose. Iris couldn’t see what it was at first, and Claire had to be patient while she took aim and focused her eyes. The stinging smell of mothballs and the green-olive tilt of martinis lit up the rear of the car. It would take more than that under Iris’s belt to slow her down, though. She didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll give you five thousand for it,” she said, gazing back out the window. “Tonight.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s not mine to sell, but thanks anyway. I should have shown you this when I found it.” She would have gone on but they were already there. Andrew Dover stood behind a poster-festooned card table at the front door. He wore, if Claire wasn’t mistaken, a paisley ascot. Johnny stood self-consciously beside him.

  “Just as I predicted,” Fred complained. “Nowhere to park.”

  “We should have walked.” Iris rapped her ring against the window pane.

  Mr. Kinkaid, genuinely concerned for the hammertoes squashed inside his brand-new shoes, resolved to take himself home early. Victory at Sea would be on at eleven.

  Claire watched Johnny as they drove past. He wore his beloved black silk shirt, black jeans, and a black gangster jacket. He smoothed his lapels and rocked back and forth, always comfortable in his chase-th
e-perp Reeboks. His Felony Flyers, he called them. She knew he was self-conscious. He chewed his gum quickly, that determined upper-lip never moving. A no-frills kind of guy. You’d never catch him with a beeper, he would be too worried about what his friends would think. But he had one tonight, just in case. She knew just in case what. Just in case the horse took a turn for the worse. Oh, well, at least they fit together, she and him, dressed in black, the uniform of Bay Ridge. When she looked at him like that, she couldn’t help remembering Anthony’s christening.

  Johnny had insisted upon having the party at one of those enormous, gaudy halls where even the restrooms are Capodimonte ornate but the food is the essence of good taste, so she’d agreed. Actually, she hadn’t agreed, but she’d been so happy, she’d said yes. It had cost a fortune. That didn’t matter, Johnny said, this was his son. At the very beginning, when everyone was finally seated and Claire appropriately throned in a white wicker giant’s chair, they’d lowered the lights and Johnny carried the four-month-old Anthony in above his head and across the entire football field of a floor under a spotlight while the band thundered out the theme from Rocky.

  Claire had thought she would die. But she hadn’t died. The funny thing was, there was so much raw pride and joy on Johnny’s face that she’d found herself tearing up with the same heartfelt sentiment as the rest of those cops’ wives. They all knew that this was what made life worth living. Not the stars all lit up in the last Broadway show, or the paintings, magnificent paintings that hung on a gallery wall. These were the moments. They downed their diluted screwdrivers with gusto. Lord knew, come tomorrow, they’d be back folding laundry at the dryer.

  Jupiter Dodd, in a floor-length ranch mink, gingerly stepped from a yellow city cab. It was like, “Yuch. Queens sidewalk.” He kept hold of the side of his hem and looked helplessly about.