CHAPTER 2

Mahegganey’s Roman Catholic Funeral Parlour on Myrtle was all white, polished, grim and Colonial, run by, of all things, a Protestant. The place, like some dreaded relation caught sight of years later, was in no sense a stranger to Claire. Her own twin brother Michael had lain there a young man, a boy, crisp in his New York policeman’s fine uniform, not worn long enough to be shiny from ironing. A waste. A dead waste. Claire sat in the car a while longer and looked at the place. She could still see her mother and father, arms clasped around each other, holding each other up there in the vestibule, sodden with grief, bewildered by the fanfare of Police Department tribute.

The show of support had been fantastic. There’d been no end to the steady stream of young men and women coming and going in uniform. It had even, Claire smiled through her great rush of sadness, been beautiful. Well. That was then and this was now. She’d never recovered; she’d run away for ten years, that was true enough, but she’d come back. And now she had a life. A good life she refused to feel guilty for. With trembling fingers, Claire reached for a cigarette, then realized she’d given it up more than four years ago, when she’d become pregnant with Anthony.

The parking lot of this place was rarely as full as it was today. Even the streets. Up and down, the cars were wedged one up against the other. Another florist’s truck arrived, double-parked, and dropped off one more extravagant arrangement. The smell of flowers reached right out to the street and it all came back to her, right down to the mahogany casket that had housed her silent brother.

She did not hesitate going in. These were her things, her memories, no one else’s. She wasn’t going to let anyone find her outside looking at this place, remembering. If she saw somebody, anybody, watching her with an oh-look-at-the-poor-thing look on their face, she would lose it. She couldn’t afford that. Falling backwards after all these years. Michael was dead and that was that. She was fine. Just fine. She took the steps at a brisk gallop. The very cement beneath her feet came back to her, with cracks just the way they were back then, those steps she’d memorized and thought she’d forgotten. Ah, well. Just do what you have to and be gone, she reminded herself. No one’s looking at you, and even if they are and feeling sorry, is it the worst that could happen? Don’t they have their own dead to remember? Is there anyone who doesn’t have their own sorry dead to remember?

She walked forward carefully. She wouldn’t want anyone to come up to her and actually show her sympathy, take her arm, believing her not to be able to handle it.… She wouldn’t have it. Then a surge of not caring lifted her, freed her from the desire not to be pitied. If they pitied her, then that was all they could see, because that would be all that there was. She felt the strength she had earned from her grief. She wasn’t going to deny it now so that they wouldn’t feel a certain way. Claire did feel the cold sweat underneath her arms and on her lip and the ringing in her ears. She sat down slowly in the back of the room when someone got up. She would just sit here. Not move, not try to get up. She wouldn’t fall down if she just sat here.

The crowd was backed out to the street. Well, of course it was a well-attended wake. Such a young woman. One whose husband is as active and well liked in the community as Tree Dover’s. There she was. Oh my God, there she was. Claire would look at the flowers and not at the wax-white profile of Tree. In that box. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking at her old friend turned to wax the way her brother had. She couldn’t bear it. Claire tasted the back of her hand, brown and salty, alive. She stood, tripped over someone’s feet, struck through arms and legs and people’s still summer clothes, and made her way through the crowd and down the hall, out to the hazy porch filled with smokers. She found an empty folding chair at the back.

“Doesn’t she make a magnificent corpse?” the woman behind her said.

Claire looked at her blankly.

“Oh, sorry. I’m Mrs. Rieve.”

Claire, always polite, always, even on the brink of nervous collapse, extended her cold hand to the sinewy, outstretched one offered her.

“This is the best spot,” the woman continued loudly. “You can still see the body but you can talk if you like. Know what I mean?”

Claire closed her eyes.

“You ask me,” Mrs. Rieve whispered suddenly, “it was that wild life-style killed her. They don’t lay you out in your red dress for nuthin’, you know. And I don’t buy that coroner’s bit. About a stroke.”

“What?”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire, I always say.”

“Mrs. Rieve, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but it was a creepy feeling that gusted through her insides and raised up the hairs on her neck. People did, after all, kill people. It happened every day, according to the papers.

“Why, surely she must have confided in you—aren’t you the one who wrote the play?”

“Mrs. Rieve, I only just moved back to Richmond Hill.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Rieve regarded Claire with one wary eyebrow up.

Claire caught sight of the husband, Andrew, who was shaking hands up near the casket. Tree was indeed dressed up in scarlet, Claire was shocked to see.

“Looks more like he’s runnin’ for office than grievin’ for his dead wife, don’t he?”

Claire silently agreed. How could he have put her in red? There was a very pretty woman standing near him, also shaking people’s hands. Claire wondered who she was. She seemed to have the situation well in hand, whoever she was. Kindly pointing out available seating to flabbergasted old ladies, directing women with children to the rear. You couldn’t fault the woman. She seemed tremendously wholesome. Her high color came from Nordic eons of oatmeal and salt seas, not makeup, and her natural blond hair, very thick and dark and rich, was restrained for the moment in a severe, if bursting, bun.

“Who’s she?” Claire couldn’t help asking Mrs. Rieve.

Mrs. Rieve snorted. “You mean Goody Goldilocks? That’s Portia McTavish. You don’t know her? Oh. I guess you’d be older, wouldn’t you?”

Stung, Claire heard this woman’s radiant name with a stab of instant jealousy. Now she could never name a daughter that. Here was a name she’d kept in her hat all these years and now tzak, just like that, along comes this one. And not bad to look at, either. She is, Claire was suddenly more interested to see, downright pink in the cheek whenever anywhere near the handsome, bereaved Mr. Andrew Dover.

One couldn’t blame her for that, surely. Andrew Dover seemed well liked by just about everyone. Claire wondered where the little daughter was. Who would be with her, the poor kid? Tears welled up at the thought of her own Anthony facing life without her if she were to die. Who would love him the way she did? Oh, it didn’t matter about the name Portia. She was lucky she had her one child. At least somebody out there had that lovely name to live up to.

And then, Carmela came in. Trust Carmela to stop the show in a navy-blue suede Italian design with black trim and matching lamb’s wool beret. Still ridiculously warm for that sort of thing, mulled Claire, anyway glad to see her. Carmela walked right past her, though, after paying her respects. Blowing in one door and out the other, without a glance at the common folk all sitting there; she just kissed Andrew’s cheeks, then Portia’s, deposited a waft of Cartier in the already heavy air, then was gone. Probably ready to drop dead from the heat herself if she didn’t get out of there. Claire was glad she hadn’t informed Mrs. Rieve that that was her sister. Even Mrs. Rieve was rendered mute at the sight of big-time Carmela, wife of a diplomat, a woman who knew how to carry herself. She’d probably come in the limo and had the chauffeur at the door. Made sure everybody got a gander. She wore, Claire almost laughed, gloves. There was a pack of Marlboros on one of the standing ashtrays. It looked mighty inviting. What the hell. She hadn’t had a cigarette since she’d gotten pregnant. She was only waiting for a good reason to pick them up again. And when there was a good reason there was never a pack around. This was certainly as good a time as any. She opened the cellophane. Already her head swam in nicotonic expectation. She held the bugger up. Ah, sophistication. She put it between two ready lips. And then she saw the little girl outside the open door, sitting on the concrete steps. It was just the back of her head, but it had to be her. Those ringlet curls. Just the way her mother’s used to look. Claire put the cigarette down and walked outside. In the driveway an elderly woman sat upright, open-mouthed and sound asleep at the steering wheel of a seen-better-days Coup de Ville.

Claire knew better than to say hello. She searched her purse for something to intrigue a child. Nothing. Of all days. Here was a woman who couldn’t pull out a charge card without a Ninja Turtle sticker attached to it, who carried yo-yos in her makeup bag—and here she comes up empty. Claire dropped to her knees. “Oh, my God,” she said, so the kid looked up, “I’ve lost my contact lens. Do you think you could help me?”

She was already certain no one could do enough for this child, and so of course no one could reach her. Claire remembered her own grief and how she couldn’t get out of it until Swamiji had needed her help. So Claire was going to need this kid’s help. “My son, Anthony,” she started right in talking as she groped the ground, “he’s almost four. Well. We just moved. Right across the street from you, as a matter of fact and Anthony, he’s depressed because he’s got no one to play with. Well. You’re an only child, too. You must know how it is. I’m just thinking. Seeing as how we live so close by and …” She rambled on that let’s face it, he was becoming a problem and, gee, this was really good her running into her like this because she didn’t know where to turn. Claire asked, did she think she could ask her father if they could work something out? Like maybe help her a little bit with Anthony? And what was her name?

The child, looking not in her eyes but at the open back door of Mahegganey’s white-and-green funeral parlor, shivered. “My name,” she said to her, “is Dharma.”

Now that Claire had secured the child’s father’s offhand permission to take her away, what was she going to do with her? Anthony would still be on his excursion to Toys “R” Us with his grandparents. Claire drove up Freedom Drive through the only road still open through the park (the rest was permanently reserved for joggers), then thought better of it. The woods would undoubtedly remind Dharma of happier times with her mother. What child grew up near Forest Park not learning happiness from good times playing Big Ball with her mommy under the pines, ice skating on her ankles around the carefully choppy pond, waving every time around to Mommy, tasting summer water on her face from the cement sprinkler?

No. She cleared her throat, deciding she’d drive her somewhere else. A different way, where Dharma had never been. Where she herself had never been, for that matter. As long as she had Dharma with her she would not break down, wouldn’t sin. It would fit in nicely. One more day of abstinence. Tomorrow she would smoke. Claire drove up Park Lane South, made a left on Metropolitan, and then a right onto the Northern State Parkway. “So. Where shall we go?” She looked optimistically into the rear-view mirror. There was Dharma. Huddled as one can be by a window, looking out, her top teeth over her unsteady bottom lip tight as a vice, her mother just dead. Her father willing to let her ride off with a neighbor he’d only just met.

“I have a terrific idea,” Claire barked, her voice beany cheesy on a ledge. “There’s this dog. Some dog. My brother-in-law, Freddy, he’s married to my sister, Zinnie, the detective, she’s an undercover policeman is my sister Zinnie, and … I’m sorry, what? Did you say something?”

Came a wee voice: “I said I know Zinnie. She’s Mrs. Stefanovitch’s sister. The lady who came to the wake in the limousine. Her sister. There’s a rich one and there’s a poor one.”

It took Claire a good moment to digest this news. “That’s right,” said Claire. “And the funny thing is, Mrs. Stefanovitch is my sister, too. The brunette, the blond, and then me in the middle. Red. Sort of. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said, the voice a bit more there.

“And who do you like the best?”

“I like Zinnie very much,” said Dharma, more certain than before.

“Yes, I suspected that you would.” How like Zinnie to go by her first name, even with a child. And how very like Carmela to be “Mrs. Stefanovitch.” Especially with a child.

“Well,” Claire continued, not caring if she rambled, just to get the child’s attention, keep it off her own reality, talk to her as though she were an adult. Don’t patronize the poor thing, she hissed inwardly, it won’t work. Claire had heard her newly-aroused grandmother do it at the funeral parlor and she’d watched Dharma patronize her right back. She’d not do that to her. If she’s lost her mother, holy God, didn’t she deserve to be talked to on at least an able-to-deal-with-it level, so eventually, she would be? “My sister Zinnie’s ex-husband gave away a puppy because the puppy peed all over his very expensive carpet, you see. He gave the dog to the North Shore animal shelter. I thought we might take a ride out there and visit it, see how it’s doing, sort of. Would you mind if we did that?”

“No,” Dharma said, not wild about the idea from the tone of her voice, but not against it, either.

“Thrown away, the dog?” she asked.

“Mmm,” answered Claire, uninterested as she could sound.

“We don’t have to meet the man who threw the dog away?”

“Him? No, just the dog.”

“Oh, I’d like to meet that dog.” Dharma smirked sarcastically, one eyebrow raised up in stunning replica of Tree’s in childhood. “Sounds like a helluvan animal.”

They drove north in companionable if stressful silence.

They drove south with the dog in Dharma’s lap.

“What we’ll do is this,” Claire chattered brightly, “we’ll keep the dog overnight and tomorrow we’ll bring him over to school and ask who wants a puppy. Surely there are plenty of families who’d love to have a puppy. Kids only have to look at a puppy and they fall in love.”

“You might as well face it,” Dharma said, very matter-of-fact, “no one’s going to fall in love with this little runt just from looking at her. You’re going to have to think of some hard-luck story to sell her with.”

Claire noticed Dharma’s good funeral parlor dress was wet all around the mangy dog. That meant her leather seat was also wet. Claire sighed. Dharma sighed. The dog, wounded, car sick and baffled once again, sighed too.

“And I said,” Johnny shouted from behind the bolted door, “you’re not getting in this effing house with that effing, filthy dog!”

“Johnny, please. Be reasonable. It’s just for the night.”

“Ha! That old one. Forget it!”

“Johnny—”

“I said no!”

“Johnny—”

“Claire, go away and come back without that mutt and I’ll open the door.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.” She was just about to add that he might let her in just to get some rags and Murphy’s Oil Soap to mop the back car seat when she realized this would do little to help her case. And what if Andrew Dover were across the street watching her husband bar her and Dharma from their house? Who was this barbaric entity to whom she’d bound her very life? Why had she married this man? She remembered very well why. She hadn’t wanted to be one of those perfumed frowzy women in everyone’s family who has no family of her own and so comes dressed up and laden with cream cakes, sitting on the outskirts, but always taking up the comfy chair on each and every holiday.

She had wanted her own life. Her own clan. Her own children. And yes, her own man to fight with. And when they’d found that she was pregnant, that week when every coffee she drank tasted fishy, he had been more than adamant. She’d kept herself single up until the fourth month, just in case they lost the baby (in which case there would be no reason to marry) but she hadn’t lost it, she’d grown and blossomed and continued to bloom, seventy-five pounds she’d put on, in fact, and the whole time Johnny would walk her anywhere she wanted to waddle. And he would always walk a little bit ahead and to the side like a football tight end, one hand extended and ready to knock over anyone coming too near. God, how they loved each other, these two disbelieving, cynical misfits, suddenly believing, suddenly fitting. Their eyes would meet with liquid love across any miserable moment or place, and the whole room could feel it. Well, maybe not. People said later they couldn’t believe how fat Claire had become. “I’d like to see them give up two compulsive packs a day like I did, cold turkey,” she’d think complacently, smugly, schlurping her black cherries over vanilla Carvel.

“Darling,” said Claire in a lower key, taking a newer tack. “I’m here with Dharma Dover. You haven’t met Dharma yet, have you? No, I think you were on duty that day.” (If the orphan part didn’t get him, the reference to his responsibility and authority surely would.)

Johnny opened the door all the way. From the look on his face, Claire knew it was the orphan part that got him. Johnny’s mother had died when he was eleven. He’d come home from school one day and all his neighbors had been in the kitchen. Sometimes, late at night, Claire would be awakened by flailing arms and legs. Johnny would be trying to fight off those neighbors and get into the bedroom to hold onto his pretty mother. (“She’s already cold,” Nicky Antonelli’s mother kept shrieking in his nightmare. “Don’t let him get to her!”)

Claire would leave the bed (she’d learned to after three or four times of getting bopped in the eye) and would come back with a glass of cool water to hold to his lips when he’d wake up and find himself crying. When it first started happening, he used to tell her it was from Nam, something that happened to him in Nam. He thought it wouldn’t be manly to tell her the truth, a grown man crying like a baby over the death of his mother. But once he had told her. And she’d done the right thing, she hadn’t followed form reactions, which were to hold him in her arms and comfort him. Something told her this wouldn’t work. She’d turned her back on him and gone into the bathroom, coming back a good two minutes later with the water.

“Dharma Dover, eh?” Johnny crossed his arms suspiciously and looked the small girl up and down. “If you have any idea of bringing that mutt in here you’d better head straight up to the bathroom with it and give it a bath.”

From the expression on her face, Claire thought Dharma was going to bolt or burst into tears. Instead, she said, “Tch,” and went off to look for the bathroom. Anthony, all eyes and open mouth, flew from his hiding spot and led girl and dog up the stairs. Claire looked at Johnny, and he narrowed his eyes at her. “And you,” he said, “don’t be thinking I’ll go suddenly softhearted on you and fall in love with that ugly scrap of dog meat. Jeez, that’s an ugly dog! I hate dogs. You should never have brought it here. And what do you think you’re doing with the kid?”

“Johnny.” Claire shook her head distractedly while she pulled a pan from under the cabinet, lit the stove, and started to pull chicken and vegetables from the refrigerator. “If you could have seen how that kid was being taken care of! The grandmother was supposed to watch her and you know where I found her? Drunk and out cold in a car by the waiting room with a run up her stocking and her daughter-in-law inside dead. It was a sin. The kid was playing out in the parking lot! Well, not playing. Sitting there on the back steps of the funeral parlor, Johnny, with her mother in the casket hardly cold.

“And I even went up and talked to Andrew Dover. You know, sort of to notify him of the state of his mother out there drunk when she should have been looking after the child, and I asked if I could be of assistance and said I would be happy to look after the girl for the afternoon. I didn’t even get to the part about giving him our number yet and he says, ‘Sure.’ Just like that. No asking me for my number or anything. I mean, I gave it to him, but I’m sure he lost it. Can you believe it? I mean, I know he must be crazed, but you have to think of the child. That would be your only reason to hold it together, wouldn’t it? I mean, it would be for me. Or you. I hope. I think. I mean, God forbid.” She raved on. She hardly knew Johnny was there after a while, she just kept talking, angry, trembling, brutally scrubbing the chicken with coarse kosher salt. They could hear the two children up the stairs laughing at the ugly dog. Johnny came up behind her and put his big head down on her shoulder from behind. Claire stood there with a knife and a carrot in her hand and Johnny pressing on her, and she realized she hadn’t heard her son laugh like that in a while.

The front doorbell rang. It had a rich, refined, grand-piano-in-the-drawing-room ring to it that Claire never got tired of hearing, but just now she could have done without it. She handed the knife and carrot to Johnny and went to answer it. It was Portia McTavish, pretty as a picture. Her eyebrows were up in polite interest, her nice hair arranged in a more stylish twist now, her eyes, slightly mocking, held back and above Claire.

“Oh, hello,” Claire said, surprised, wiping her chin with the back of her hand, hoping it wouldn’t be coated in chicken fat.

Portia smiled. When she smiled, she lit up like a Lutheran. “Hi,” she cooed in a three-syllable, we-understand-each-other conspiratorial song, “I’m Portia McTavish. I just found out you got stuck looking after Dharma and I just wanted to rush right by and take her off your hands.”

“But she’s no trouble,” Claire frowned, annoyed that Portia would assume that the child would be a nuisance to her. “I’ve enjoyed having her, really. She kept me company, to tell you the truth. Drove all the way out to Port Washington with me.”

Portia’s pretty, beady eyes took in the foyer and all that was—or wasn’t—in it. They hadn’t gotten to the foyer yet, and Claire felt it already falling short of this establishment-oriented person’s expectations. She knew Portia was establishment-oriented because of her shoes. Claire had photographed too many fashion layouts not to immediately recognize the good stuff. The life she’d once led gave her an immediate feel for what was good, what was pretending to be good, and what was just plain cheap. You can always tell how someone appears to herself by her shoes. Who she is that moment is portrayed in the shoes she’s got on. Portia’s opinion of herself was very good indeed. The leather was subtle, low to the ground, and cashew-colored, hemstitched along the rim with an intricate Indian princess Morocco stitch. Expensive shoes. Understated. Claire tried not to look down at her own vagabond unwashed Keds.

One of the hardest things, for Claire, about not being wealthy, was the inability to buy good shoes. She loved her Keds, savored a life that was conducive to wearing them all the time, but she really did miss sticking her big long feet into sinfully gingerbread shoes. Why did this woman remind her of this? Claire didn’t need to be wealthy, felt sorry for people stuck in the appearances and the roles that it cast you into; she was all right where she was, wasn’t she? Her dream, her family in this house, had come true for her. She was standing in her own doorway in her own dream; kindly tell her why was she feeling so darned uncomfortable. Because, she knew, some people simply had that effect on you. They looked at at you under their own myopic magnifying glass, giving nothing, offering nothing, instinctively knowing you’ll fill in the slack with your kindness. They stood there, like Portia, with their minuscule waistlines accentuated sharply with a slender belt, and made you ask yourself how long it had been since you’d had one on yourself? How long had it been since you’d worn any item so fitted it required a belt?

Johnny, who came out to have a look at who was there, had himself what seemed to Claire like a very long look. Claire found this annoying, but she didn’t like to show it. Not for Narrow-hips here. No nine-pound child had ever passed through that pelvis. And perhaps never would. She might be daintily built, but she wasn’t the youngest, noted Claire with satisfaction. It registered in her heart that this was an unworthy thought. It did. But she was still annoyed that this woman had been alive and flushed and happy (she couldn’t hide the fact that she was happy, for all her displays of deep sighs preceding tch-tch-tchs) at the funeral parlor, talking to Andrew Dover, and Tree, Claire’s only just rediscovered Tree, was dead.

“Well, come in while I get her,” said Claire, understanding at once that this woman was not going to disappear until she had gotten that for which she’d come. She left Portia and Johnny talking in concerned tones. If Claire ever had any doubt that she was in love with Johnny, all she had to do was to leave him alone with a woman like Portia McTavish for fifteen minutes. Then the passion ran rampant in her own imagination, and she could feel her pulse clicking briskly in and out of her emerald-green heart. Never mind. A little while and she’d be gone.

Claire found the kids in Anthony’s room, the dog in a towel on the floor between them, and Claire was struck once again by Dharma’s strong resemblance to her mother. That determined, cleft chin. She had certainly charmed their Anthony. He seemed to be as captivated with Dharma as he was with the dog. They were building the dog a house of blocks. They would get her settled and in there and then she’d whack her way out of it, having figured out quickly enough that this was what was getting the big laugh. She might be ugly, but she wasn’t stupid.

“Damn straight,” thought the dog, already world-weary and adept at telepathy.

Claire cleared her throat. “Portia McTavish is here to pick you up, Dharma.”

“Well, I’m not going with her,” Dharma answered without turning her eyes to Claire. She didn’t sound petulant, merely firm. Claire couldn’t help the shoot of joy that leapt through her at Dharma’s decision. It meant that she would rather be here with Claire’s family than with Portia McTavish. Claire knew it didn’t mean she didn’t want to be with her own father. A parent in grief is not a true parent for the moment, needing understanding himself the way he so understandably does, but the idea of the child rejecting Portia in her favor was undeniably agreeable.

“She’s not going, Mom,” Anthony repeated patiently, as though his mother were an out-island Greek or intensely hard of hearing.

Claire hesitated. Did Dharma want to be forced, the way children so often did when they were unsure? The dog crossed eyes with Claire. She didn’t look any better for having had a bath. Bedraggled little wreck, she shook like a vibrating toy installed with fresh batteries.

“Maa-aa,” Anthony whined familiarly, “go away!”

“Tell you what,” Claire decided. “I’ll suggest we keep things the way they are. I’ll set up your sleeping bag for Dharma—”

“No, I want the sleeping bag!” Anthony cried.

“Okay, so you sleep in the sleeping bag, that’s more polite anyway, and I’ll make up your bed for Dharma.”

That decided, the children forgot her and went back to their serious and gentle investigation into the canine world. Mentally noting that she would need to do an urgent hand wash of a couple of sheets and pillowcases, spin dry them twice and then throw them into the dryer, she came down the stairs to find Portia alone. Good, she thought, then saw Johnny returning to the living room with a drink. It threw Claire off for a moment to see Johnny coming in like that, drink in hand, shit-ass grin on his face.

Claire smiled brightly. Portia gave a characteristic shake of her wrist, her gold bangle making no sound against itself, and Claire lowered herself opposite her. Her easy chairs might not be new, but the covers were, old-fashioned muted yellow chintz. Claire had hunted through hundreds of tacky neighborhood fabric shops to come up with something like the expensive ones in the magazines, and she knew she had done well here; you couldn’t do better than these. This, and the fact that the cushions were indeed good goose down, gave her the courage to say what she did. She was, after all, the lady of the house. “Dharma will be spending the night here,” she said with more authority than she felt. “It is late and the children seem to have settled in.”

She need not have bothered to continue. Portia seemed quite happy with the decision without even an explanation. She took a deep breath, exonerated, and let it out contentedly. She stretched her toes, settling in, and fluttered her mascaraed lashes. “John,” she said, “what were you saying?”

“John?” Claire sucked in her cheeks. She had to sit very still while Johnny continued his story about the child murderer of Richmond Hill. He had played a role in the murderer’s capture, and Claire concentrated on her own battered fingernails while “John” embellished his part for his captive audience. This, then, was the true test of marriage. Not adultery, not the strains of time, but listening to the same, same, same story fall from your husband’s vain lips onto unmarried, unattached, feminine wide-eyed violet ears.

She would let it go. She would let it pass. She would wrap it in an imaginary ball and breathe it out and blow it up to the sky and send it far, far away. It was up the chimney, over Forest Park, it was speeding north over Queens Boulevard on its way to the city. She would puncture the bugger on top of the Chrysler Building. It would fragment in pieces all over nonchalant Murray Hill. She smiled. She must be gracious. A good sport. She ought to be flattered. Her husband was, after all, an attractive, desirable man and she ought to have the good sense to appreciate his worth and enjoy feminine covetousness.

She ought to, but she didn’t. Not with this woman. This, bitch. All right. Calm down. Don’t lose control. At least wait until she leaves before you do. Claire grabbed hold of the chair arm and kneaded it till her thumb grew numb. How would they get rid of her? Or, how would she get rid of her, as Johnny didn’t seem to be in any rush. Uh oh! Claire stood and ran into the kitchen, remembering her chicken, then realizing she’d better just throw some of those carrots in the soup before she went back in or they’d never have supper. Then, while she was doing it, and so as not to hear the two of them enjoying each other, she snapped on the radio. Who should it be but Mozart? I’d rather be in here with him than in there with them anyway, she snarled to herself.

How funny life was. Years ago, she would have raced back inside to supervise Johnny’s apparent interest, torture herself if she had to, but be witness to it all she must be; and now here she was, in her own happy kitchen, the evening light just the way she’d always hoped it would shine for her, right on the still life of a table there. How many people had an eat-in kitchen this big? She congratulated herself. If people wouldn’t be the way you wanted them to be, at least the things about you could comply with your dreams and moods and wishes. Claire snapped a leaf of tarragon from the overflowing window box. The next thing she’d do was go find that big tick-tock alarm clock she’d seen in the attic. The puppy would think it was her own mother’s heartbeat and sleep through the night. Maybe.

Good old Mozart, she marvelled as the room opened about her, and how right she had been to leave that long-legged, antique stove dark blue. She’d had Johnny mortar in a blue-and-white handpainted tile she’d shlepped from Mykonos on the splashback. It was a scene of the three windmills over the village hill. The hell with them, she thought. Soon enough propriety would drive Portia away, and if it didn’t she’d make Johnny’s life such a living hell that he’d think twice about neglecting her for a woman she couldn’t stand.

This was very simple to do when you spoiled a man rotten the way she had done, and still did Johnny. Just let him have a couple of days of no freshly ironed shirts, no coffee continental on a tray with Lorna Doones and a flower on his napkin beside the News. No bubble bath waiting for him when he walked in the door, no hot supper on the table. She didn’t do these things for him because they were expected of her. She did them because he treated her a certain way, as though he was in love with her, and she reciprocated in kind. If he thought she was going to let little googooeyes in there ruin her fantasy—always a woman’s reality—he was momentarily to be rudely awakened. She scraped a shard of nutmeg over the soup and sat back down with some nice baby white potatoes. Anthony couldn’t bear them, but if she kept them whole and out of his bowl he’d never notice. Would Dharma eat? If she wouldn’t, she’d keep it to the side for her. When her brother Michael had died she hadn’t been able to eat for days, and then would suddenly wake up ravenous in the middle of the night.

A sharp rattling behind her turned her head. It was Carmela, making faces at her through the pane. Sophisticated women, whenever they got together they were dimwits once again. Always enemies, at least Carmela was an old, familiar enemy—and one she loved.

“Why didn’t you knock on the door like a normal person?”

“I was enjoying watching you thinking with your lips moving.”

“Did I really?”

“Just like Daddy.”

“Why on earth did you come to the back? Great lady of the manor. What will people say? What’s that?”

“Oh. Your dress. The one you loaned me.”

“Feels like a year ago.” Claire sat back down. “So much has happened. I’ve got Tree Dover’s kid Dharma upstairs with Anthony and a dog—Freddy’s frigging dog—up there with them.”

“When did this happen?”

“Today. Everything today. What’s today’s date? I ought to write this one down. And I went to the funeral parlor—”

Feminine laughter from inside brought their gazes together.

“It’s what’s-her-face. Portia McTavish.”

“Oh. Her.”

“Yes. She’s come for Dharma. For Andrew Dover. You know.”

“Sure.” She took a snapping bite of a carrot. “A little hot for chicken soup.”

“Yuh. It might cool down. It’s never too hot in here, anyway.” Claire wasn’t going to say “If I didn’t make the chicken I’d have had to throw it away.” Nothing turned everybody off dinner as much as the thought it wasn’t bought, intended, and designed for that day.

Carmela’s eyes swept the room. However much money was spent, she could never seem to capture Claire’s wizardry with color, with things, making a room come to life. Claire had old paintings even in the kitchen. Bright children’s paintings, odd things she’d collected round the world full of water and blue skies. The only prints she allowed herself were some obscure Renoirs. You couldn’t fault her for those. Claire’s style was clutter and clean empty spaces. You felt as though you were in some granny’s house, left of the ashram. Once you sat down in the easy chair it was hard to get up. Carmela knicked in the direction of the living room. “Is she staying?”

“Over my dead body.”

“Good. Then I shall.”

“Good. Hand me that celery. Where’s Stefan?”

“Some meeting or other. You want this dill?”

“Yes. Now. What else?”

“How about this bread? It’s hard as a rock.”

“Give it here. I’ll do something with it.”

“You’re a rip,” said Carmela. “May I have a soda?”

“Just don’t take Johnny’s last Coca Cola Classic. He thinks it’s the Chateau Pumpernickel of sodas. On second thought, help yourself.”

“Ooolala. Trouble in paradise?”

“Don’t be so pleased, if you don’t mind.” Her fingers, she noticed, were trembling. “I’ll fry up some croutons.”

“‘I’ll fry up some croutons!’ If my husband were in the living room with Portia McTavish I’d be more likely to be making martinis.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s the difference between me and you.”

“Honey?” Johnny stood at the door. “Oh, hello, Carmela.”

“Don’t get so excited,” Carmela snorted, “I’m leaving after supper.”

Johnny smiled, preoccupied. “I was just thinking. Should we ask Portia to stay? Considering everything?”

“Considering what?” Claire glared at him.

“Well. She was Theresa Dover’s best friend.”

“I hardly think that, Johnny.” Claire made a face like bad fish. “I hardly think Tree Dover’s best friend would be laughing it up in my living room while Tree was still open in her coffin.”

“Laughing it up?”

“One thing I love about men,” cut in Carmela, “is their abject innocence when it comes to vile women.”

“Oh good heavens!” Portia stood behind Johnny. “What an absolute treasure of a kitchen!”

Claire said nothing. If this was going to be Johnny’s friend, let him bother.

He jumped aside, elevating his great thick arms about himself in presentation. She must have heard Carmela. She couldn’t possibly not have.

Portia smiled innocently at all of them. Was she really dense? Or did she simply not give a damn?

“Portia dear,” said Carmela, tipping her cheek in a benevolent Auntie Mame, “how delightful to see you again. And in such glowing good health!” She did not get up. Portia had to bend down.

“Ah, Carmela! Imagine running into you here.”

“Imagine what?” Carmela said to no one. “She is my sister, after all.”

“What is that lovely aroma?” Portia sniffed the air.

“That,” Johnny said out of the side of his mouth, “is my wife’s great cooking.”

Claire did not look up. She continued grating Emmentaler cheese into sour cream. But she could feel her shoulders loosen. She could feel herself relax enough to remember to take the pie crust out of the freezer and throw it into the oven to defrost. One thing she would not do was to chatter politely with them and make everyone feel all right, the way she usually would have done. She had Tree Dover’s little girl upstairs, motherless. That gave her some severity, some dark truth that she wouldn’t give up. She would hold onto her feelings of hurt for as long as she bloody well felt like it. And they could all go jump in a lake. As it always is, when you feel your most indisposed to being kind, the balance turns; people sense your disregard and turn solicitous.

“Need any help, honey?” Johnny came over to her and put his arm around her waist.

“I need a slice of ham for my quiche. Can you go down to the pantry and get it for me?” For one wacky moment, Claire wondered if Portia were about to follow him down the stairs. She did watch him go with what Claire considered a rude open mouth, then seemed to flounder, no longer to know who she was or what she was doing there. Was she really one of those people who took their power from the admiration of men? No one was ever just one thing, of course; the moment you categorize someone they turn around and prove you wrong, and Portia might just be a buff, a harmless idolizer of detectives, hanging on their every word as though there would be some answer there, or safety, some reflected shine from their golden badges, some sexy lick from the hidden burly gun beneath a dark pant leg.

Claire had grown up close to those very feelings herself. Her own twin brother Michael used to drag her down to the 102 when they were kids, he loved the idea of cops so much. They used to sneak into the horse stables and chitchat with the grooms. The cops themselves would come in and out like movie stars, in boots and badges. There were two of them, Charlie and Andy, who used to sit underneath the trestle in their squad cars and have lunch from Jahn’s. They used to talk to them, to Michael really, while Claire kicked stones and climbed the logs old Mr. Lours had five feet high for his fireplace.

Michael would come away from those talks very private and boy-like. He was lost to her then. And he was lost to her now. The only great decision in Michael’s life had been whether or not to go to college first. He decided not to. He should have gone. Zinnie had. Anyway, before you knew it the whole family was attending his graduation from the police academy. They’d been so proud of him. It wasn’t just that he’d become a cop, but that he’d achieved his dream. There had never been a doubt in anyone’s mind as to what Michael Breslinsky wanted out of life. He was a natural hurry-the-crowd-along kid, even in grammar school, when the nuns had given him a badge and had him directing schoolyard traffic, supervising kiddie-brawl breakups and lavishing authority on the needy-of-stern-father crew. He would have made a wonderful father, Claire thought.

All he was was twenty-one when he’d taken a knife in the heart and died on the spot in a stairwell on Decatur Avenue. He was so used to taking knives and guns away from little kids, so used to being trusted and loved, that Claire didn’t believe it had ever dawned on him that any paranoid junkie would do him bodily harm. It must have been such a shock to him to die.

And here she was. Married to a cop. There were moments she couldn’t believe that either, but here she was. She regarded the knife in her hand.

“How’s Andrew?” Carmela asked Portia.

Portia made a sorry face and shook her head. “A basket case, I’m afraid. I believe he hasn’t sat down since she died.” She turned to Claire. “That’s why it really is so nice of you to take Dharma for the night. I can’t imagine her getting any sleep over there with him pacing back and forth and all the lights on.” She shivered.

“You were Tree’s friend?” Claire asked bluntly.

“Tree?”

“Theresa. Sorry. I always called her Tree when I knew her.”

“Oh, yes. We all were.” She looked to Carmela for confirmation. Claire wondered fleetingly, jealously, why Tree hadn’t bothered to get in touch with her when she seemed to know Carmela so well. When Carmela didn’t look up, Portia continued. “And Andrew’s friend. He sort of had a hand in everything over at church. You know, all the secular events. Sports. And Theresa had such a beautiful voice. Well, Carmela can tell you that. She was her Snow White. The lead in her play.”

“Really?”

“I suppose that’s all cancelled now.”

“I don’t see why,” Carmela said.

Portia’s face drained of all its color. “You can’t possibly mean to go on with the play.”

“It’s my play.” Carmela lit the cigarette between her lips. “Not Tree’s.” She raised her eyes coolly to their shocked faces. She shrugged. “All due respect,” she added.

Portia McTavish’s piggy-widdle blue eyes filled up with tears. She blinked them back, missionary of the braveries, and smiled at Carmela. “I suppose now that you’ll be looking for a new Snow White, then,” Portia said. A bit too casually, Claire thought. She couldn’t possibly want the role for herself? Could she? Well, why not? What better platform upon which to seduce the entire male population of Richmond Hill? And Carmela would import all and any city stuff she could. She certainly had a vast source, what with Stefan’s contacts with the U.N.—they’d all arrive in navy blue, they and Carmela’s own artsy, magaziney crew. They’d probably get off on the idea of a slumming jaunt to Queens, just the thing to make them all feel like big shots. No wonder Carmela wanted her to juice up her relationship with Jupiter Dodd. She wouldn’t mention it now, in front of Portia, but Claire wondered if Carmela still planned to have her party on Friday.

“You never told me, Carmela.” Claire turned to her sister. “What your play was about. Or anything about it, for that matter.”

“You never asked,” said Carmela.

Was Carmela as put out about this as her tone indicated, or was she pretending to be to store up good will for some near future advantage? Knowing Carmela, it was probably both. “So what’s the story?” She sat down.

Carmela primped her hair with a bent ring finger. “The Snow White thing,” she said, “turned around. I’ve painted the wicked queen a tempestuous Bette Davis. The way the older woman was in All About Eve. You remember.”

“How could I forget? You made me watch it every time it was on. And it was always on till two in the morning. On a school night.”

“So naturally, Snow White is very much the upstart Eve Harrington, a calculating bit of a bitch.”

“Oh no!” Portia cried. “You can’t paint Snow White in a harsh light. Why, she’s a girlhood hero!”

“Passive? Dumb as dirt? Malleable?” Claire said. “Hooking up with the first rich guy who comes along? She’s not my hero.”

“Come to think of it,” Carmela turned her not-unqueenly eyes to Portia, “you’d make a pretty good Snow White, yourself.”

“Me?” Portia, quivering between injury and flattery, decided to choose what would suit her best. “I should love to play Snow White,” she said demurely, eyes chastely down.

“I’ll bet you would,” Carmela sneered, and looked at Claire. Carmela would often kill and then dissect for Claire’s enjoyment. In this case, with Tree dead, Claire found it all just sad. Pathetic and sad. And what was worse, Claire worried that Carmela had married herself to a Polish Addison De Witt.

Carmela leaned in closer. “Do you remember Daddy once when we were little, drunk?”

“No.”

“And he,” she snorted, “he’d been painting the house, so he put up all these—like, fences, so we couldn’t climb out with him, don’t you remember?”

Carmela was just trying to alienate Portia all the more. She was doing a good job. Confused, Portia fidgeted in her purse. Carmela laughed so hard tears came to her eyes. “… And he was calling, ‘Mary! Come get me! I’m out on the birch tree behind the blockade!’”

“So what’s the point of the story?” Portia finally said.

“There is no point,” Claire snapped.

“Anyway,” Carmela said, pulling herself together, “this is of course the musical Snow White, a modern-day adaptation. Young girl from broken home comes to New York and falls in with a weird rock group—”

“How weird?”

“Oh, you know, garden-variety, everyday weird, all skulls and drugs on the outside, money-mad and corny lyrics on the inside—Doc’s pre med, Sneezy’s got a coke habit, Bashful’s in therapy, Grumpy is, well, to be frank, me.”

“You?” Claire, taken off guard by this uncharacteristic observation of self, laughed out loud.

Carmela’s eyes, rewarded buttons pushed by Claire’s sob of sudden laughter, glittered. She continued, “You might think Holy Child an unlikely stage to present the play. I suppose it even is.”

“Well, it’s charity,” Portia supplied, “for the battered-women’s shelter.”

She really is stupid, thought Claire, pleased by the news.

“And free talent,” said Carmela.

“Yes,” said Claire.

“Ma.” Anthony came in quickly and stood directly in front of Claire. “Mom,” he said accusingly. “What have you done with my bottles?”

Claire went red. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve put them away. I told you I did.”

“Yes, but where are they? Hah?”

“They’re in the broom closet, in a plastic bag.”

“Show me!”

“Anthony, as you see that I am very busy, why don’t you find them yourself. And don’t sound so accusing. I told you I wouldn’t throw them away without your permission and I won’t. Go and see for yourself.”

“Ma,” Anthony gestured patiently. “I wouldn’t sound that way if you didn’t look so guilty.”

“Oh, Anthony, I’m not guilty, I’m losing patience.”

Appeased by the ring of truth, he broke his ninja stance and neared. He leaned against her arm. “Maybe I’ll just have a Juicy Juice, then.”

“That’s a good idea. That won’t rub against your two front teeth the way those bottles were beginning to do. And you know you can always go back to the bottle if you must. Just let’s try and get through today without it, shall we? You and I? I have the feeling if we stick together we can do it.”

“Yes,” Anthony agreed. “One day at a time.”

Carmela dropped her lighter and had to go under the table to fetch it.

“Now watch this,” said Anthony, “watch very carefully.” He held his yo-yo on a string and swung it as a pendulum. “You are getting sleepy. Very sleepy. So sleepy that—now watch—‘Hocus pocus,’” he softly said, and he meant it.

Claire yawned obligingly and let her head hit the table away from the knives and the vegetables.

“Well—” Portia stood, out of reasons to stay and bored by the sudden intrusion of yet another demanding child. She let herself out without much of a fuss. Claire watched her snail-paced retreat with an increasing sense of relief.

“Claire,” Johnny said, at the door with a big hunk of nice provolone, “there’s no ham down here.”

At least, Claire noted, his eyes did not dart about the room looking for his new friend.

“Yes there is, of course there is.” Claire remained with her head on the table and looked at him heavily. The idea of finishing making dinner was suddenly very tiresome. Portia McTavish’s departure had drained her, just as her presence had pumped her with nervous, livid energy. Portia might have bothered her, but she’d reminded her of another dimension as well: the leafy green and nowhere land of edge, beautiful women, of complicated men who were no good, no good at all as they sat there grinning through hashish fumes, of conversations where you didn’t know where it was going, what would come of it, a land of danger. Ah, danger.

How long had it been? Sitting idly all day long in bustling white linen cafes and long weekends riding in horse carts under boulevards of orange trees in Marrakesh. She was back in Queens, in Queens! She had failed. It didn’t matter now where she had been, what she had done, when all of it had led to now, to this. They weren’t in some cultivated Connecticut dale, a right haven to come home to, with galleries and bookshops past the pleasant church yard. Here were out-and-out drug dealers and deliberate shopping malls and marathon, sound-elevated television commercials and polyester overcoats in summer as the ladies walked like white-haired zombies through air conditioned aisles of chain-store syndicates. Now now, calm down. She was tired. Drained from all the goings on. Here were also people who counted on her to stop them from drinking Coca Cola and eating breakfast cereals composed of pure sugar, who wanted her, whether they knew it or not, to scrape them carrots and cut them into little daggers of health. She was needed here. She was no longer a vagabond adventuress. Her life had meaning, if not pfiff. And anyway, she smiled to herself, what else could one ask of life if not the first half rowdy pleasure and the other contemplative effort? She had done well, if you put it into perspective. If she wasn’t rich and well situated, wasn’t it because she’d chosen the other way—and not because it had chosen her? Look at all the rich men she’d rejected. Some of them so rich it would make your head twirl—or at least Carmela’s. Just look at Stefan. She’d dumped him, hadn’t she? She didn’t spout about it either, did she, although even admitting it to oneself was enough right there to make you ill. Anyway, she had gone for the love instead of the money. They would build their kingdom together, she and Johnny would, and when she got into bed at night and the sheets smelled of him, she wouldn’t have to gag and think of other things—she’d get downright hot and grope for his hairy bear arms, and they’d lie in the watermelon light of the Chinatown lantern he’d bought her on Mott Street. So what was so bad?

“I’ll show you where the ham is, Daddy.” Anthony brought her back from her reverie. “Come with me!” Anthony jumped in place, thrilled to be the expert.

“Anthony, what’s Dharma doing?”

“She’s upstairs, Ma. Daddy, come on, I’ll show you.”

“Is she all right?” She watched identical dark heads, one big one, one small, dart down the stairs.

“Sure.” Anthony’s voice trailed up. “She’s crying on my bed.”

The women traded looks. “I’ll go,” said Claire.

She heard Dharma before she saw her, muffled little-girl cries underneath the covers. All alone in a big foreign house with total strangers and no more mommy. Claire’s heart went out to her. She looked at the palms of her own hands. How was she going to help this little girl? What could she possibly say to make things right? Claire thought of her own mother and what she would do. “Nothin’ ya can do.” Mary’s lilting voice seemed to speak to her. “Just be there. Be there and lick the wounds.”

Claire cleared her throat, walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She let her cry it out. Eventually, the sobs subsided and turned to sniffles. The tousled head emerged reluctantly and the eiderdown fell back, revealing the fluffy damp dog as well. The dog and Dharma looked at Claire, their lives a mess, their destinies entwined.

“Private ladies’ meeting, or may I join in?”

“We were just looking for contacts,” deadpanned Dharma. She smoothed the dog across her lap. Dharma wore three rings, the way her mother always had. Claire, whose mother did not approve of jewelry for children, and who could never have afforded such frivolity if she did, seemed to remember these very rings glinting provocatively across the classroom long ago. Eighteenkarat gold Italian jewelry. Miniature jewelry presented by godparents at every occasion.

“Those were your mother’s rings, when she was small, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were.”

“I remember them.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Your mother used to have the best reading voice, you know. I used to get very upset because Sister would always choose her to read for story time, instead of me, you see, but once she’d begun—” Claire closed her eyes, remembering. “I used to put my head down on the wooden desk and just take off—”

“Mommy!” Dharma cried, suddenly remembering all the times she’d read to her. Her shocked, poor face dissolved into renewed wracking sobs at the realization that this would never be again.

“Oh. Oh, gee,” Claire said standing up, then falling helplessly back down into the rocker. This wasn’t the kind of trouble you could cure with sentimental stories or cuddles with puppies or a sleep-over in someone else’s bed for the night. What a jerk she was for having thought she could have interfered and made a positive difference. “Oh, God, Dharma. I’m so sorry. That was so insensitive of me. Let me call your father, please. Let him come and pick you up. Or I’ll bring you home.”

Her arms hesitated, reached out, hesitated. Before she could even pull them back, Dharma was in them. She wasn’t much bigger than Anthony, so frail and all narrow elbows; all that hair gave you the impression that there was some sturdiness there, but there wasn’t. Poor thing. Poor thing. They rocked and rocked.

“Do you want me to call your father, now?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll wait. We’ll wait till after supper, all right?”

“No. I don’t want to go home. Please.” Her voice rose up in a forlorn plea.

“Dharma, I love having you in my home. You must believe that. I just didn’t want to intrude upon your need to be with your father, now, when you must need him. I didn’t want my selfish needs to interfere with your right to grieve privately. That’s why I suggested you go home. It’s such a comfort to have you with me, you can’t imagine.” Claire felt her eyes fill with tears at the truth of what she said.

“Mommy!” There was Anthony at the door then, his face not yet past the shock and onto the recriminations part—how dare she hold another child inside her arms! They were his arms! His! She could see the blood bubble behind those black Sicilian hot spots. He was not a little animal, her Anthony; she saw his wild face soften at the sight of Dharma’s haggard, teary face lifting to look. Soften and care. He took two steps forward in pure compassion, then remembered his machismo and went back to his post in the doorway.

“Aunt Zinnie’s here, Ma,” he said with some reserve.

“Zinnie? Michaelaen come with her?”

“Yeah. I better go help him set the table.”

“Oh. Are they all staying for supper, then?”

“They sure are!” Anthony whooped and cantered down the hallway.

“Glad somebody told me,” Claire thought blandly as she went back to rocking. It was grand to rock. She hadn’t sat in this chair in months. Anthony was growing so quickly. She could put it by the window and face it towards the fireplace—or what would be the fireplace once Johnny knocked that plaster out. The dog hopped down from Dharma’s lap and raced downstairs. She’d got hold of Michaelaen’s scent, probably—or recognized his name. The dog knew Michaelaen no doubt from Freddy (her former master), before he’d given her away to North Shore. Freddy was Michaelaen’s dad, and although he and Zinnie were divorced, they remained great friends. Freddy had a few years ago decided to accept himself as he was, homosexual (bisexual, insisted Zinnie). He had separated from Zinnie and Michaelaen, given up his job as an insurance salesman, taken Zinnie’s and his savings, and risked it all opening a restaurant in Forest Hills. It turned out to be just the thing. Not only did he love doing it, the area seemed to crave an artsy, clean-tableclothed place just then. After one false start up on Queens Boulevard with an incompetent lover in charge and a place that was better suited to beef burgers and ribs for lawyers and frantic prisoners-to-be (it was, after all, just across from the courthouse), he’d been smart enough to get two beat-up stores together on a pretty street, gutted them, put roof windows in, placed tables on the sidewalk, attached an awning—even hung twinkle lights in the back yard on the trees and set tables out there, too. Then he’d made a deal with a Soho gallery and hung great big showy pictures all over the place. He was very good with the music, too, mixing Mozart with light jazz with Billie Holiday with quick shots of carefree rock and roll and then back to Telemann. Everyone wanted to eat, meet, or get drunk up at Freddy’s. You can’t mix blue collar, gay, and yuppie—you had to cater to one or the other—but Freddy did. And he did it very well indeed. He used too much garlic on everything, everyone said—you could always tell if someone had been at Freddy’s the night before—but that didn’t stop them from coming and having a damn swell time while they were there. He could be perfectly unpleasant, Freddy could. Scathing, in fact, if you crossed him (every week there was another story about some waiter reduced to tears) yet everybody was drawn to Freddy. You couldn’t help it. Which goes to show you how enigmatic a thing charm is.

Even Stan Breslinsky, stodgily conventional father of Claire, Carmela, and Zinnie, bowling champ and opera lover, kept a pile of “free coffee with dessert after lunch during the week” coupons in his hardware store behind the cash register, and when decent-looking customers came in he’d dole them stingily out like prizes at a congratulatory dinner. Freddy may have deserted his daughter, but he was, after all, the father of his grandson and entitled, therefore, to his support.

And Zinnie was not the type to abandon one of her own, leastwise the husband who’d abandoned her. She would shrug, would Zinnie, implying you didn’t know the half of it, then get on with whatever it was that had to be done. Lord knew Zinnie had plenty to do.

She’d gone through the police academy quietly—everyone said it was a tribute to her dead brother Michael; she’d idolized him after all—but hero worship wasn’t what made her a good cop. Surely it had started her on her way, Claire pointed out. Yeah, Johnny would say, but the men on the job didn’t respect steady, just-do-your-job from a woman. You really had to excel with that bunch of Brooklyn honchos. Zinnie was a hell of a cop.

Whenever Claire started going off the deep end about anything or anyone, all she had to do was think of Zinnie and her big-hearted, matter-of-fact view of life and she felt better. She just had to imitate her in attitude and her spirit followed.

She wasn’t a saint, Zinnie. She had a temper like an August squall and a vocabulary like a rollicking vacationing longshoreman, and she was as quick to criticize as to forgive, but every time Claire thought of her she was glad, and that is saying quite a bit about any human being, in the end, where we all get on each other’s nerves and we all get disgusted and fed up.

Claire rocked and sighed and thought what had to still be done before dinner could be served. She hated when everything was catch as catch can. Dinner parties ought to be planned and set with flowers on the table. All hers were haphazard, with her silver set missing a fork at least and the napkins nowhere to be found and the minute you all sat down the nice music that had been carrying everything along stopped abruptly with the scraping of the chairs and dinner invariably commenced with a long, loud commercial for Radio Shack. Ah, well, life was more important than an organized living room, hubbub preferable to a clean kitchen floor. Wasn’t it? Something crashed below. Certainly it was. The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” shouted Anthony and she could hear him and Michaelaen tearing through the house. She hoped it wasn’t Portia, come back again, and so it wasn’t. “There’s a man down here,” Carmela hissed from the bottom of the stairs. “A Mr. Kinkaid.”

“Oh. Him,” Claire said, relieved. “We bought the house from him.” Mr. Kinkaid was temporarily living in a half-finished basement apartment up the block. This arrangement was provided by a long-time neighbor until Mr. Kinkaid’s condominium on the golf course in Florida became available. Mr. Kinkaid was becoming something of a likable old pest. He excitedly rubbed his palms together in diabolical expectation of cold weather and Johnny’s skyrocketing fuel bills. He didn’t understand how a healthy girl like that Dover woman could just up and die. He wouldn’t like to point no finger, see, but there’ve been things going on in that there house make your hair stand up on end.

“Oh, Mr. Kinkaid, do be real,” Claire would say. She had had it with violent crime, vicious neighbors and, finally, Mr. Kinkaid himself, who likes his tea sweet and he’ll take it in his old recliner under that there winder. Thanks.

“Is he all right for the moment, do you think?” Claire called down. “I’d like to try to convince Dharma to eat with us.”

“All right would be putting it mildly, I think.” Carmela twirled one fancy earring between manicured fingernails. “He’s helped himself to the easy chair in the living room. Got his feet up, too. On your new hassock.”

“Be right down,” Claire said, and she was, Dharma in tow, all cried out for the moment, curious as well to see what was going on.

Zinnie had efficiently wound up the quiche, adding sour cream and fresh spinach, Claire noticed from the mess on the table, and had had the good sense to stick the thing into the oven, so they were that much further along. She’d emptied the entire bottle of Yugoslavian wine into the soup, too, while she was about it. Claire rallied between annoyance—now they would have to drink beer or juice—and the wish that she’d thought of it herself. It smelled absolutely good. Inside, there was Mr. Kinkaid, poor gnarly thing, looking out his old window at his—or what had been his—front yard. How devastated he must be, Claire sympathized, not having it to enjoy to himself anymore. Johnny sat politely in respectful, if bored, deference to age and fellow—if former—property owner.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Kinkaid sighed as she came in, “nothing pleases me more than the thought I’ll never have to mow that goddam lawn no more.” He let out a gleeful cackle.

Johnny’s eyes scanned his moderately long sweep of lawn protectively. He couldn’t wait for the lot to grow so he could get out there with the electric lawnmower that had come with the house.

Zinnie was out on the grass with Michaelaen, doing something, digging and sticking wires into the earth from the look of it, and after saying hello to Mr. Kinkaid and begging him to stay (really just so she wouldn’t have to face talking to him at the moment), Claire went out the front door and stood looking at them from the porch. Her porch.

“So what do you think of my asylum, eh?”

“I want to ask you something,” Zinnie said without looking up.

“Shoot.”

“Could Michaelaen and I move in with you guys for a week?”

Claire gulped. “Of course you may,” she said, looking for all the world as though it would be the most delightful experience.

“It’s just that Freddy’s having our apartment painted and Michaelaen’s allergic to paint and if we move in with Mommy, she’ll never let us go. Please, Claire? This place is as big as a boarding house. You’ll hardly know we’re here.”

“Okay, okay. You’re on the top floor. Choose a room.”

“And will you be happy, Charlotte?” Zinnie put two little sticks in her mouth as if to light them.

“Oh, Jerry. Don’t let’s ask for the moon.” Claire half covered her eyes with her lids. “We have the stars.”

Zinnie let her breath out more easily. This is what Claire had always wanted, after all. A home full of love and people and all that. She always said she did. “You’re gonna love it even more after I get done doing what I’m doing.”

Claire’s heart leapt in fright. Johnny had developed what might well be diagnosed as lawn neurosis. She sympathized. She supposed she was just pleased to be where she was. She was finally in the climate she cherished, happily strolling down long-out-of-vogue streets like some aborigine who walked apparently useless invisible song lines.

Later, Claire would look back and remember the very moment, out there on the porch, thinking all was well. Because that was the last time for a long time it would be so absolutely so.

She stood there, equal parts Chanel and holy water, surveying her domain. The dog scuttled out on her miniature legs, halting decisively between Claire’s well-worn sneakers. Down went the fluffy skull kerplunk on Claire’s big toe.

She looked down at the mutt. “I see you’ve figured out upon which side your bread is buttered.”

“Most floozies do,” Carmela muttered from behind the screen.

“Floozie’s good.” Claire enjoyed puncturing Carmela’s blast of disapproval. “It fits. What do you say, old girl? How’s that for a moniker?”

“Hullo,” the dog seemed to say, Floozie’s injured eyes looking into hers. “About time you got to me.”

“Yes. She says she likes it.”

“She does, does she?” Carmela’s tightening lips and skeptical tone indicated that Claire had, as usual, gone too far. Claire felt a sudden clear and sympathetic understanding for herself and why she’d stayed away ten years. There really was no stress to dealing only with people who didn’t matter. It was the ones you loved and who loved you who would kill you. However calm you might be, however advantageously, emotionally, your menstrual cycle was placed, there were those who wore you out and drained you just being near.

And, she thought happily, realizing suddenly that it was croquet hoops Zinnie was assembling, there were those who charged you up and filled you with energy as well.

“Floozie,” rather sweet in her newly shampooed ginger coat, trotted across the porch, put one paw out and patted the naked universe, then closed both eyes and dropped into the azaleas.

“Tch,” said Carmela.

Floozie picked herself up, sniffed about and took a discreet constitutional behind the basil bush.

“Uh!” Carmela said.

“Good girl!” Claire cried.

“Remind me never to eat pesto at your house again.”

“Oh, Carmela, you’re such a fuddy duddy.” Claire swept the puppy onto her breast and smothered her with approval and kisses. Michaelaen distributed mallets to Anthony and Dharma. The first heady game of croquet was under way.

“Uh oh!” Zinnie looked up from her spot on the lawn. “Claire! I thought you never wanted a dog again! Just look at you. Slobberin’ all over it. Jesus! That is not the dog to get involved with. Didn’t Freddy tell you how she destroyed his apartment?”

“I haven’t spoken to Freddy in weeks. He hasn’t even seen the house.” She wondered if she ought to give him a call. Freddy liked a mob.

“Well, ask him. Just ask him. That dog is trouble.”

“What rubbish.” Claire pressed her nose against the clean puppy tummy. “Freddy probably left her all alone all day long in that apartment. How can a wee doggy like this be trouble?”

Zinnie and Carmela locked world-weary eyes but said not a word.

A translucent moon but escaped them in the pale cool sky. Across the street, blue music came from Tree Dover’s house and the sun went down behind it.