CHAPTER 1

It was Mary who’d found the ad in the Tablet. “Unusual house for sale by owner,” it read. “Holy Child Parish north.”

“Hmm,” said Claire.

“Take a quick drive up,” Mary told her over the phone. “What have you got to lose?”

“By the time I get Anthony away from the TV and dressed and into the car—”

“From the phone number it’s up around here. Anything four-four-one is north of Myrtle.”

“Ma. Anything that far north would cost too much. You know Johnny. He won’t even look at anything—”

“I know time waits for no man. You’re the one always spoutin’ about how you’ve got to take a chance. Claire. Do yourself a favor. Call the nice lady up and inquire.”

Claire lifted the white kitchen curtain and looked at the brick of the wall just an alley away. She could hear her small three-year-old Anthony rewind the videotape once again to the excellent fight scene. There were no little boys on the block here for him to go outside and play with; there were only the ones big enough to ignore his alluring new toys on display on the driveway. Away they would ride on their dazzling two-wheelers while Anthony, ears very red, watched them go every time with renewed, puzzled sadness.

“And what makes you think it’s a nice lady who’s doing the selling?”

“Oh, ’tis. It always is. And you could take his cousin, Michaelaen, along with you. Anthony’s always good when he’s along.”

“Not that good. I do like the bit about ‘unusual’ house, though. Only a nut would write that.”

“And a nut’s just what you need.”

“You can say that again.”

“Yes. It’s just foolish of me to get you all worked up about it when Johnny will turn around and hate the whole idea.”

“I never said that he’d hate it. Johnny would like that it’s in Holy Child. He’d love Anthony to go to the grammar school. It isn’t his fault he can’t live in the same precinct where he works.”

“I know, I know. It’s just a shame, is all. He would have to work in the same precinct where you grew up.”

“I wouldn’t have met him if he hadn’t.”

“Of course you’re right,” Mary said.

“Give me that number there, Ma. If I can’t get away for a while, let me anyway dream a new life.”

And call up she had. Only it hadn’t been a nice lady as Mary had so picturesquely predicted, but a man. Quite an old man in fact, from what Claire could make out over the phone. Measured and deliberate. Reserved. Not pushy at all. Take your time, he’d told her about coming to look at the house. If not today, some other time.

She tried to forget about it right away, while they spoke. The house was, after all, smack in the middle of Johnny’s precinct and even if she did like the place, she’d never get the chance to have it. She hung up the phone with the dim sense that nothing would ever come of it. Nothing seemed to come of anything these days. No, no, she mustn’t feel that way, she was a lucky woman, a happy woman. One didn’t leave one’s husband because he refused to move to the neighborhood of one’s childhood. Although, she supposed, one could. In circles she had lived in up till recently, one certainly did. Splendid people. Divorcing for reasons as simple as sexual boredom.

Unfortunately, Claire had discovered the most amazing thing about herself the moment she’d become a mother. Ethics. Bourgeois ethics, true, but ethics nonetheless. She could never leave the father of her child. Nor separate the father from the child. Not for something as complicated as the wrong neighborhood. Only something far more simple could separate them: the end of love. No, Claire felt the very way Mary Kate had done in that John Wayne film, The Quiet Man. Not able to settle in until she had her own things about her.

Or, in this case, her own place about her. Not some gaudy, treeless racetrack trap she’d had no hand in choosing. This was his place, not theirs. Out back the trucks and Caterpillars from Aqueduct converged upon her rusty yard in an ongoing, fruitless attempt to beautify the garish periphery of Rockaway Boulevard.

Out the front door of this house, Johnny’s house, Claire could just see long brash lines of dressed-up women ramble up the path of Johnny’s past. They strode in determined succession past mummified fig trees and clairvoyant grapevines. To be fair, the women in Johnny’s past didn’t bother her so much; the line was not that long (and if it was, there was safety in numbers), but she thought of these neighborly women as one excellent point for her argument to move. Not that her parents’ neighborhood, where she wanted to move, was a whole hell of a lot better in the eyes of, say, the world. There wasn’t much of Queens that was desirable anymore. But that didn’t matter to Claire. She loved the lost grandeur of the Queen Annes and Victorians in Richmond Hill. If she had to be lower middle class (and she did), she thought she might as well do it on the more genteel lawns of the past and Richmond Hill, not on pied-and-quartered perfections of swept and displayed concrete of South Ozone Park, where they lived now.

Claire had always thought that love would be enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the point. Honor. And place. Hadn’t Johnny seduced her with the lure of a house in Richmond Hill up on Eighty-fourth Avenue? A house with a kitchen from the forties and a fireplace and a lot of work to be done, but by golly for her he would do it? He had. And then balked at the mortgage. Claire, four months pregnant, bleeding, and persuaded by the obstetrician to put her feet up, was in no position to argue.

She did not want to be sullen. She was thankful, after all, for what he had given her; stability, order, a healthy son. Although—a niggling inner voice pursued the issue—she’d given him these very things as well. Oh, it was useless thinking about it. Johnny simply wasn’t allowed to live in his precinct and he refused point blank to transfer. Why should he, he argued, and of course he was right. When they’d met it had been almost sure that he was to be transferred. Then out of the blue and the obscure world of politics, he hadn’t been.

“So just change precincts on your own,” Claire had said.

“I worked too hard for this,” he’d say. “Too many years to just dump it.”

“Not dump it,” Claire replied, and she’d tried not to look as if she was gnashing her teeth. “Just move it over. Like I’ve done these last five years.”

Still and all, he would say, look at all the long years he’d spent building up contacts, his position, not to mention the respect of his peers and so on and so forth, and only a fool would expect him to give all that up so a wife could move back to a silly old neighborhood where she hadn’t lived for years anyway; a place, by her own admission, she’d been relieved to get away from in the first place, where the streets were superior, she now said, because they were shady and on a slant.

“On a slant.” Johnny would look at her beneath hooded, Italian eyes. He would think about her thoughts. At first he’d done this indulgently, deriving enormous pleasure from her unfamiliar motivations. He’d never known anyone like Claire. So pretty and good. And still she’d made him hot. Before her he had always gone for sluts. Now here he was in bed with some Buddhist nun or something. And on top, she was a Catholic. At least educated as a Catholic. Claire had spent so many years in the Far East researching Buddhism and Hinduism that her knowledge and tolerance of heathen ideas were impressive. Fortunately, her moronic superstitions kept him from taking her too seriously.

Claire drifted off for a moment. It was true that she had spent all that time in those places, but it hadn’t been for research, really. She’d only stopped at the ashram to have her tire fixed. Dear Swamiji had offered her a place to stay for far less than she would have had to pay in town. He’d needed the money—all the poor swami had was one follower and that fellow didn’t look like much: young, lanky, good-looking, mad for rock music. One day, as Swamiji said, he’d turn into something, but right now—well, right now it was all you could do to get him to go clean the loo. Swamiji would shrug and they would both watch young Narayan snap his fingers from the room.

There had been so much to do at the ashram: clean up after the parrot, the monkey, and the lizards (well, not really the lizards; they cleaned up after themselves). The creatures’ presence was just to ensure the perception that Swamiji’s little ashram was filled with life, despite the fact that he had no followers. Swamiji grew healing herbs and dried them. He rolled many of the sediments into pills and sold them to the nearby Tibetan Buddhist seminary, where they were packaged and sent off to Delhi. They would eventually wind up, Swamiji informed Claire proudly, in the far-off land of Berkeley.

After a very short while, Claire made herself useful; living in Germany had honed her cleaning skills, and before you knew it Swamiji couldn’t do without her. As he couldn’t pay, he’d made her president and secretary of the ashram all at once. He’d called her Maharani Claire because she’d take no guff from Narayan, even had him eating from her palm with stories of photo jobs in Paris and Milano. There she would be, bending over her camera in the clean morning light, just set to photograph the dried haws of hawthorn (Latin name Crataegus oxyacantha L.) placed above the herb’s calligraphed label describing “History, Habitat, Medicinal Action and Uses.” (The purists from the far-off land of Berkeley seemed to like the calligraphed labels. They should only know they were penned by an unholy Irish Polack girl from Queens.) And there would be Narayan, pungent with orris root and anise, asking, Please, was he tall enough to model? Would an agency, a good agency, ever accept him? These were the starry truths young Narayan pondered day and night as he penciled long, sincere requests for funds from concerned private parties in Switzerland on behalf of Swamiji.

Sometimes Johnny did wonder if Claire didn’t really have the odd screw or two loose. It didn’t bother him so much that she talked to plants, or even dishes (“No, you’re not the one I want, you daggle cup, get back up there on that old shelf and let me have the blue one, your cousin.”). Cousin? He would sit there still and pretend to continue reading the sports page, but he would be wondering what would come next. And this was the woman raising his son? He sighed. What was really odd was that he felt completely safe and at ease with her doing it. There was no one wiser or kinder than Claire. She might be crazy but she wasn’t nuts. Not diabolically. He’d seen enough half-tanks out there on the job to know she wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t cruel. On the contrary. Her light blue eyes would fill up twice a day at breakfast, listening to the news. She would brush her long brown hair angrily from her crumpled face, and he would express his obligatory, disgusted “Tch” at her oversensitivity, but their eyes would meet above the empty glasses of orange juice and they would both think, Dear, dear Lord, never please let anything like that ever touch our Anthony.

If anyone ever tried to hurt Claire, Johnny would happily shoot said party’s eyes right out. And if she ever tried to leave him, he’d shoot her, too, no questions asked.

Now, at breakfast, Claire tilted her hand-held head and looked up at her husband. Johnny poked around at a cavity with a bright red party toothpick. He had to get to a dentist, he thought, then promptly forgot as she stirred her bowl of hot, light coffee round and round. He eyed her tits in that goddam yellow slippery robe.

In Claire’s experience (and Lord knew she’d had plenty of that) there were two kinds of men. The first found himself a little plot of life and worked it, farmed it. The other never figured out what it was he was looking for but on and on he looked, unbroken, untamed, and internally ill by forty-seven. Johnny encompassed both these types of males. At least in her eyes he did. She found herself hating Johnny Benedetto and most things about him often. Nevertheless, all he had to do was graze her with his breath and she would consciously go warmer. He kept her erect. On her toes. She didn’t know how he did this, but she was aware that it was done. Even though Johnny was irrefutably the least intellectual man Claire had ever been with, he was also the smartest. And he had a sixth sense about things, things and people, that Claire had forgotten could exist in men. He’d told her, “You know, even though I believe you’ve got to go by the book, it’s still the days I just follow my instinct that I’m the best cop. You lose touch with your instincts and only go by the book, and you lose something, you’re out of touch. You’re walking on theories.”

Claire understood this man. She liked what he meant. She felt him looking and her breathing quickened. Now if only their Anthony would put the Peter Pan tape back in, they’d manage five minutes alone while Hook plotted Tinkerbell’s dark, very deadly demise. Intimacy was a reprieve from their dread of each other. An island they both knew how to meet on.

The telephone rang and put the pain back in Johnny’s bad tooth. He got up to go without saying a word.

It was Carmela, Claire’s slightly older and, yes, much more beautiful sister. Carmela called every time at the wrong time. She had, in fact, a consistently unerring sense of bad timing, did Carmela, and she would not be hurried. “Hello, darling,” she said. “You sound out of breath.”

“I just ran up the st—”

“The reason I called, dear heart, is to ask you to come over next Friday. I’m having a couple of the old crowd—”

“Johnny’s working Friday night.” Carmela knew very well Johnny was working. That was, no doubt, why she’d make the engagement for then. Those two could do without each other. For her part, Carmela considered Johnny a major galoop. Dangerous, yes. But unable, in the end, to read a simple menu out loud without making some third-grade mistake. Worse than that (and this was, Claire supposed, the really indigestible part), he could obviously care less about her superb and slender thighs. Johnny was one of the few men not bowled over by Carmela’s tart movie-star charms. “Too many years workin’ Vice,” Johnny explained away his indifference with a shrug.

“Oh,” Carmela said. “Pity. Well, we’ll have to carry on without him. I’m sure I can recruit one of the men to drop you off home if it runs late.”

“Ah. And where shall I dump my son now that we’ve got rid of my husband?”

Any sarcasm was lost on Carmela. “Hmm,” she said. “Mommy would be best. She’s never busy on Fridays. Unless there’s a novena. Have you got a religious calendar? We must know before we ask her or she’ll lie and pretend it’s some obscure saint we’ve never heard of, just to get out of it.”

“So why don’t you tell me what’s so important about having me at your party.”

“Can’t I ask my sister to come to my home without being suspected of treachery?”

“No.”

“Well, if you must know, it’s Jupiter Dodd, that old queen from She She magazine. He rather fancies you, or your work, if we’re allowed to separate one from the other at this point in your career. Are we? Anyway,” she continued without waiting for a reply, “he’ll be here and this is a command performance.”

“That old queen,” as Carmela so flightily dismissed him, was a highly respected critic and probably the main reason Claire had found good work at all in New York. And, if Claire remembered correctly, it had been she who’d introduced him to Carmela, not the other way around. But it didn’t matter. Claire was so deep in this supermarket slash playground slash shopping-mall world that she was no longer sure she’d ever been out of it. The glossier, gossamer plane of photography-as-life was more like a dream. Her interactions with Jupiter Dodd had, after all, taken place a good four years ago. He’d put one of the more prestigious galleries on to her work and then the most remarkable thing had happened: out of the blue she’d gotten outstanding reviews. When she’d meant to follow her purist inclinations, to please herself, she’d wound up pleasing just the right people. It was almost embarrassing, the critics were so kind. Unfortunately, their coverage of her portrayals was so condescending to the very subjects she had meant to present in a standing position—plain, honest, working-class people shot in the garish light of their gaudy excesses—that she suffered for them every time she reread those reviews. The good thing was that the people themselves didn’t mind you looking at them with warped vision—as long, it seemed, as you looked at them.

She hadn’t made a pot of money. Johnny was dreadfully impressed with his own wife’s name staring at him from the newspapers, but after the subtle brouhaha of his colleagues’ “hey hey, how ’bout thats,” he thought some great wad of moolah was bound to arrive. It stood to figure, he figured. Why else would anyone work so hard for so long if not for money? Why indeed? she asked herself. Of course she did make some. But after you deducted for film, lab fees, studio fees, and that whole gap in time when she hadn’t worked, it really wasn’t much of a living. If her medical and dental insurance hadn’t been paid for by Johnny’s excellent on-the-job coverage, she certainly wouldn’t have been able to survive from her “Art.”

“Carmela, I’m sure he’s forgotten all about me by now.”

“Listen, he won’t come if you don’t.”

“Oh.” She could hear what it cost Carmela for having admitted this, and rewarded her by pretending not to notice. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“That’s not good enough.”

“I’ll come.”

“Lovely.” Now that she had what she wanted, Carmela could afford to be magnanimous. “And how is my beautiful, brilliant nephew?”

“Fine. Would you like to say hello? He’s right here.”

“Um. Not just now.”

“How’s Stefan?”

“He’s fine. Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why?’ You asked how Anthony is and I’m asking how’s Stefan?” Of course she shouldn’t have bothered. Any reference to Stefan by Claire only meant one thing to Carmela, some shady innuendo to their past relationship, when Stefan had “courted” Claire. She ought to know better than to mention him, because it never failed to set Carmela off. Still, it wasn’t Claire’s fault Carmela had settled down with someone she’d rejected. Claire was getting to the point where she was starting to resent being resented. “Look, I only asked how he was to let you off the hook about talking to Anthony. I know it can be boring listening to some three-year-old drawl on and on about nothing he, you, or I can make out. And if you want to make an issue out of this now, you have all my attention.”

“Of course not, my love,” Carmela choraled prettily, happily. Once she’d irked you she felt a whole lot better. “I’m glad to have you on the phone at all, my little prize fighter. You’re always so busy. We never get to talk anymore. And apropos Stefan, you’re probably right, I am edgy about him. Do you think it’s easy being married to a bona fide Polack?”

Claire most certainly did not. She leaned over to shut off the little black-and-white TV she kept on the counter. She only kept it on to catch the first ten minutes of the Regis and Kathie Lee show on weekdays, when they talked about what they’d been up to the night before, what restaurants they’d been to, and who they’d run into. After that she lost interest. The guests didn’t intrigue her at all, just what went on each night in the city without her.

Carmela continued. Did Claire know what it was like attending cocktail party after cocktail party, not with interesting types as one had foreseen, but with deliberately tedious colonists—or at least that’s what they thought they were. They drank on and on and did not get drunk. They leered on and on but were too polite (or paranoid) to touch … and Stefan! (here Claire settled down for a long winter’s nap) Stefan was without an iota of a doubt the very worst of the lot, insisting they continue to live on and on in this drafty mausoleum of a house in this long-ago outmoded neighborhood and now, now did she know what he wanted her to do? Did she? She did not. He wanted her to give up wearing the diamonds he’d given her when they’d married, that she’d come to cherish, that were hers to do with as she chose, that were now, he’d decided, too ostentatious, those days are over. I ask you, what days? Here he is jogging through the streets of Queens wearing his great-grandfather’s family ring worth three yearly family incomes, and he has the audacity, ah! And you know what else? This is the latest. He’s got me on high-estrogen-content birth-control pills so my breasts will be big. I mean, this is an irresponsible attitude towards women in general, isn’t it? Towards health? Towards life the natural way?

Claire, who baptized each suspicious menstrual clot, agreed.

“Do you know,” Carmela asked, “what he has for breakfast? Wheaties.”

“Oh dear. Oh yes. I see what you mean …”

She went on and on, did Carmela, enjoying herself, analyzing, portraying Stefan wittily at his worst, telling all—and then finally finishing him off with tight-lipped satisfaction. Claire couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She knew when the tale ended, so would Carmela’s happy rage and yes, even now she could almost see Carmela’s crestfallen eyes gaze startled, puzzled, at her scarlet toenails. Claire remembered those toes from when they’d both been very little girls and Carmela had been so proud of hers, beautifully shaped and long as little fingers. She’d known even then that she was the stunner. Claire remembered those toes gripped and planted to the diving board so long ago and herself, her blue fingers chewed up and happy, just almost touching the cool, perfect tootsy from underneath the diving board. “Jump!” she’d cried out. “Just jump!” And Carmela had instead turned around, thrust her chin into the air, and carried herself hurriedly, importantly away. Away from Claire, away from the dumb kids, away from the fun.

Now, Claire always tried not to see the beginnings of yellowy calluses beneath Carmela’s unsuspecting feet. She didn’t mind her own body rotting away so much. When she’d happened to see the total, irrevocable devastation of her elbows in a two-way department store mirror once, it had been more of a shocking awakening than the end of the world. So the days of succulent, presentable flesh were at last at an end, she’d thought, and was surprised that she could moan good-naturedly about it instead of hiccup in hysterical distress. She knew, at least, she’d used this body fully. Had enjoyed it as much as it had been enjoyed by others. But Carmela. Carmela had always waited, in some strange way—even though she’d seemed to have had it all. She’d always held something back in the guise of irony. Claire knew she was afraid. Had always been. And she had to protect her.

“Oh,” Carmela’s contralto came back into focus, “just in case nobody told you, they’re bringing that badly behaved dog of Freddy’s to the pound.”

“Excuse me?”

“The little one. The runt. You know. Nobody wants her.”

“What do you mean, nobody wants her? Freddy took her. He wanted her. She’s his.” (Freddy was Carmela and Claire’s mutual brother-in-law. He was divorced from their other sister, Zinnie, but somehow, through habit and the fact that he was Zinnie’s boy Michaelaen’s father, they’d all remained involved.)

“Well, she’s not his anymore. He’s taking her out to the North Shore shelter or something. She peed all over his antique Dhera Gaz for the third and last time. You know Freddy, three strikes, you’re out.”

“I can’t believe this. You can’t take an animal and then just decide you don’t want it.”

“Sure you can. People do it all the time. That’s why all the pounds are full.”

“Why don’t you take her?”

“Me? Are you kidding? The only dog Stefan would have would be a whippet. Or a Russian wolfhound.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“What about Mommy?”

“She’s got the two puppies, Claire.”

“You’ve got two, you might as well have three.”

“I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her that.”

“Mmm,” they said together in characteristic, synchronized, well-modulated sibling-phonics.

“Get that thought right out of your head!” Claire said.

“What? I didn’t say boo.”

“You know what you’re thinking!”

“Claire, I would never suggest that you take that skeevy, ugly, uriney mutt.”

“I will not have another dog in my life,” Claire vowed out loud.

“Hey, listen. I know what you went through when the Mayor died.”

“Yeah. And the Mayor was this skeevy, ugly, uriney mutt’s grandfather, don’t forget.”

“What I cannot forget is the vile smut trollop that was her grandmother.”

“Carmela. She was a French poodle.”

“Exactly.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I most certainly do. If she had left the Mayor alone, he might still be alive today.”

“Oh, come on. At least be fair. The Mayor used to gallivant as far as Queens Boulevard looking for a little action. What about Zinnie? Michaelaen would love a little dog.”

“That’s all she needs. A dog. Suppose she has a collar? An arrest? Sometimes she doesn’t get home for eighteen hours. As it is Michaelaen is more at Mommy’s than he is at her place. I can’t imagine why she ever wanted to be a cop. Can you? Uh oh. Here comes Stefan. If you’re coming up to Mommy’s later, do you think you could drop off that lovely dress of yours from Peshawar? The one with all the threads and things? I’d love to wear it. It always reminds me of that Dylan Thomas poem, how did it go? ‘Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly.’ Don’t ask me why. Ciao, then.” She hung up the phone.

Claire stood very still in her kitchen. She opened the window up all the way, then wet the wooden table down for it to dry in the air. One of those little feather whites, the ones you wish upon and fling into the sky, came in and passed directly in front of her face, easy bait. She went for it. Whoops! She went for it again. And again and again until it eluded her up and away outside across the alleyway, gone for good. She rested on the sill and looked out. The mailman passed and went. Anthony leaned on her shoulder from behind. “He’s going to the Bat Cave,” he confided.

“Ah,” she said.

Then the telephone rang. “What now?” she said. “Hello?”

“Claire? It’s me.”

“Johnny, what’s all that noise?”

“All hell is breaking loose over here.”

“Wait. Wait, Anthony. Let me talk to Daddy first. Where? Where are you?”

“I’m here. At the one-oh-two. Guess what?”

“Honey, what?”

“I’ve been transferred.”

It was the afternoon. She was sitting there in her car, outside the house that was for sale. Anthony was asleep on the back seat, mouth open, done waging war off in Never Land and now at last he was kaput. For the while. Claire had dropped the dress for Carmela off at her mother’s, but that had just been an excuse. She’d really come out here to have a look. The house, wrapped in a porch, sat there stout and calm and trusting; looking right at her, it was waiting for her to find a way to take charge.

It was of a cream color. Faded yellow, roofed and trimmed in darkest green. There was a small lawn in front, a peach tree on it, and a wide lawn on the side. It looked as if there was a nice square back yard, but you couldn’t tell, as the house was hedged high with juniper, hollyhock, foxglove, and lupin. It was old, all right. The roof didn’t look too good. What struck Claire most of all was that this was exactly the perfect house. With all the others she’d looked at (and she’d looked at what felt like three thousand), each one had had one thing in common with the one before it and the one after it. They were each of them next door to the one Claire would have liked. It had been, with uncanny regularity, so.

There had to be some catch here. And if there wasn’t, Johnny would certainly hate the house. Something. Life, with the exception of the existence of her son, couldn’t possibly be that perfect. Why, just to look at the place. A screened-in porch. A tear of overwhelming hope and hopelessness rolled down her cheek. Desire, she had learned all those years ago in India, was the source of all unhappiness. Of heartache. Fortunately, though, it was also prerequisite to all progress. If you didn’t mind thinking of Western benefits as progress. Claire, having experienced the incomparable bliss of an epidural during labor, did.

Claire sat on in the car, a wonderful car; one thing about Johnny, when you were with him you might not be rich but you drove a great car. The only thing was, he would take it away from you the minute he got it totally restored, and he’d sell it. Well, he wasn’t going to get his hands on this one. It might have more than a hundred thousand miles on it, but it was a Mercedes, midnight blue, its cracked butterscotch leather smelling luxurious to Claire every time she climbed into it. It wafted its delicious, masculine scent even now, the comfy seats heating up with sunshine. This was her car. And her house.

“Psst. Hey, toots.”

Claire jumped in place. It was a girl. A woman. Was she blocking her driveway? What did she want? She had no idea—uh oh. It couldn’t be. It was. No, it couldn’t be.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“Tree!”

Oh, it was her all right. It was Tree. Wicked, wonderful Tree, who’d enlightened and taunted her all through grammar school. Of course it should not have been so unusual to come across a friend, an old girlfriend, when here was where she’d grown up, but it was. Anyone their own age not dead or on drugs had moved away. To the city. Or at least to Manhasset. But here she was.

“Are you visiting your mom?” Claire asked her when they finally stopped hugging through the car’s moon roof.

“Hell, no. I live across the street.”

Claire covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, Jesus, this is too good to be true. I’m looking at this house here.”

“This one? Kinkaid’s? What for?”

“To live in. I mean if Johnny, that’s my husband, if Johnny would go for it.”

“Claire. That would be so great. I knew you were married. I see your sister Carmela all the time. Didn’t she tell you? You mean she never told you? No wonder you never called me, then.” She spotted Anthony in the back seat. “Oh, God. Is he yours? Is that your boy? So big?”

“Yes, he’s three. Have you got one?”

“A girl.” Tree’s eyes shone. “I can’t believe Carmela never told you. She’s seven. Oh, you’ll love her. He’ll love her.”

They looked each other up and down again. Tree’s purple sundress shimmered with red and plum embroidery. She shook her head. “Can you come in? Have a cup of coffee?”

“I can’t. I have to go get Johnny. This Mr. Kinkaid said we could look at the house at five. But we could stop over later?”

“Theresa!” a man’s voice called loudly, angrily from across the street.

Tree’s bright eyes darkened. “Oh. Shit. I’d better get going, too. Have to pick up the kid. You’ll come back another time?”

Had she flinched? Claire kept on smiling. “Of course. What do you think? I’m going to let you go after all the times you made me break up when I had to recite in school? Hah?”

Tree laughed. She looked over her shoulder. The man was coming across the street. He smiled. Nicest guy in the world. Handsome.

“Come over in the daytime,” Tree said quickly, softly. Harriedly.

“My pleasure.” This handsome man stuck out a firm hand and shook hers good-naturedly.

Tree introduced them. Her husband, Andrew Dover. He gave Claire an appreciative grin. He didn’t look at Tree. “Theresa,” he said, “your daughter.”

“Yikes,” Tree agreed. She took off. He strolled back across the street with his hands in his pockets, no sweat.

Claire was so excited about the house that she hardly thought of Tree until she was doing the dishes after supper. She mopped the plates thoughtfully, remembering how she had admired her back in school. If she admitted the truth, she’d wanted to be just like Tree. Courageous, she thought, smiling. She couldn’t wait to meet her child. For Anthony to meet her. Perhaps she would be more like the Tree she remembered. It wasn’t that Tree had changed exactly. Oh, well, wait, yes, she had done exactly that, changed. But of course, so had she herself. Tree was probably thinking the very same thoughts about her at this minute. Except that there was something else. Something almost dissipated about Tree.

Tree had been, all those years ago, Claire’s idol. Tree would flaunt her brazen attitude at any authority: the nuns, one’s own mother. Getting into trouble wasn’t the end of the world for her, it was where she seemed to feel she belonged. At least for all the time she put in in the cloakroom, it would seem so. She would hang her head and she would blush, but those eyes would twinkle. Tree would maintain her U in conduct all through school.

Claire had been afraid of her. Tree dared to be bad. Claire might have been bad herself, but she was too dishonest to admit it before authority, or even to get caught. Claire found it more acceptable to present herself as well behaved, well motivated. Secretly, she’d admired Tree’s success with rebellion, her comfort within her own skin. Her world did not collapse with punishment, scolding. On the contrary. She not only didn’t get away with it, because she was almost always caught and punished, but what upset Claire was that Tree was admired, not only by herself, but by the nuns as well. Claire could see that they got a kick out of Tree’s escapades, and every time she saw it she was eaten away with jealousy. Tree’s notoriety reminded Claire how dishonest she was with herself, with her family, her life. She would have loved to have been as bad as Tree if she’d had the nerve. So not only was she dishonest, she was a Feigling, a coward. And she knew it best when she was with Tree. Tree, small and pearly, eyes mocking, forehead high, defiant. Deeply clefted chin. She would knit her imperceptible brows together, turn her face away from you, and watch you sideways, mocking, with a too-much-vinegar expression and her corkscrew curls recoiling.

Claire had learned to be more free from having known Tree. She was revealed to herself through the jealousy. It had been the hard way and it had hurt, but Claire had learned. She’d had to make a choice. You learned and grew or you stayed where you were. In Claire’s case that meant staring endlessly, eyes lowered, into the gummy, dried-up etchings of initials in her wooden, well-behaved school desk—or letting go, flying freely in her mind where no good nun could find her. She hugged herself with anticipation. To have Tree across the street like that would be just too good. Too good to be true.

Time continued, dreamlike and warm, without Claire, who was busy. One fleeting moment did pass while Claire was on her knees in the bathtub, with water streaming from the faucet, drain unplugged, just a hurried wet wash to go, her hair up in a knot on the top of her head, busy with the foamy Dove, when from somewhere she heard her luck shift. Like a favorite song starting up after one you can’t stand. Like a breeze. A sudden breeze. Maybe that was my luck shifting, she said to herself. She shrugged. Or maybe—she scooped water over her face—I just ovulated.

When time resumed, Claire had to go to Liberty Avenue and see the real estate agent who was selling her house. She had to stop at the bank about that other, hopelessly confusing, mortgage. She had to pick up Anthony from her mother’s. Arriving there, she came in, dropped her sample fabrics from the upholsterer on the table, and sank into a chair. Zinnie was there, too, so she pried her shoes off and dug in to stay for a while. Mary was talking up a storm, as usual when she had adult company over, preferably one or more of her daughters. The mini-house was having a sale. (All the ladies from the parish sent their secondhand things there.) The block association was going to have a meeting to discuss the graffiti on the railroad arches out back on Bessemer and Babbage. She went on and on, did Mary. Claire was gazing at Mary’s flourishing tuberous begonias. How ever did she get them that big?

“I said, did you hear what I said, Claire?”

“Sorry. What?”

“Didn’t you know the Medicino girl? The singer in Carmela’s play? Theresa Medicino? Wasn’t she in your Brownie troop or something? You know, the one who married that Andy Dover fellow, the one does so much for the P.T.A.?”

“Ma. What are you talking about?”

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, dear. That she died. Up and died just like that. Be laid out at Mahegganey’s tonight. You knew her, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. You used to call her, what was it, something funny … Treeza, no. Tree. Remember, Claire? Gee, she was young. That’s why you’ve got to live your life now while you’ve got it, for who knows—Claire? Are you all right, Claire?”

Claire was looking straight ahead at Tree. She was watching her, and Tree was smiling, her sharp little teeth very white in her face. She was standing in front of the house Claire so wanted. Dead in front. Her dun, fairy bells of brown hair would be framed now forever in sunlight and ravishing foxglove.