CHAPTER 3

Mary came over in the morning. It was fair, with the still mist of early. She rubbed her big elbows, but that was as far as she’d go to acknowledge the cool. Mary would wear her thin housedresses straight through to the end of the year, relinquishing them only then to the sturdier armor of Orlon and white pearly buttons. Over the back yards she strode, cutting her way through the September flowers and larks in the rectory garden, across front lawns and back, her great donnering breasts and strong thighs apump, worried lines her starched uniform over the grace and the hard-earned clean lunacy of serene goodly woman, crestfallen acceptance the only haphazard of time. Mary’s neat braids were wrapped, sunlit, around her head. Without the pins they would sit there just as well, kinetically bound. She’d cut them once, in a desperate urge to assuage what was to come, but she’d felt like a faker, someone she’d never be: a woman in a corporate office, someone who would wear those jackets, who had her nails done by the week, not by the wedding or the christening. And so, back they’d grown and here she was, herself, better off and the good Lord knew with enough to do.

“Hullo.” She clopped on the screen with big knuckles. “It’s me.”

Claire’s face lit up when she saw her out there. “Hey,” she said.

Mary didn’t love Claire any more than she loved any of them, but with Claire there was a special bond of pain; she’d lost a son and Claire a twin, and for the two of them there would be no comfort, only the ever-widening lightening of time, then the sudden horrifying grasp of remembrance. It didn’t make it better, by they shared it and kept it, the same festering pain that between them was faced, like the thought that can’t bear thinking, when done is just lost.

“I’ve brought you some puppy porridge.”

“Oh, good. She loved the hard bagel Johnny gave her, but all she did was tear it up into a million crumbs.”

“Thus the vacuum cleaner.”

“Yes.”

They looked together at the monster machine that took up so much of the kitchen. It was one of those ugly old-fashioned ones that no one wants to store but when you really needed a vacuum, you couldn’t beat it, so no one had ever gotten rid of it, just passed it on to the next likely victim. Every time Claire used it she couldn’t help marveling what an utterly magnificent machine it was, whooshing up all and anything in its way. (Putting it away was another story altogether.)

Mary watched her old vacuum cleaner, puzzled. She remembered how Stan had named it Lips Lummox, back in the days when it had been theirs. Long enough ago it had been when she’d first lain eyes on that snout. Funny how it had survived when so many others hadn’t. She and Stan had only just married when one of his horrid, silent relations descended upon them, some aunt or uncle or other toting babka and sausage and outrage that their talented piano-playing impresario Stanley would marry an Irish immigrant with not only no grand education, but who couldn’t, if her very life depended upon it, carry a tune. Their Stanley, you could just read their minds by looking at the cloud of disappointment and disgust across their wrinkled brows, their chins up suspiciously, like something here smelled off. Their Stanley: doomed.

Which one had presented them with this vacuum cleaner? It didn’t matter much now, they’d be long dead. Still. Some things you looked at brought back the hurt of years ago as if it were yesterday. There was no birthright baby grand for Stanley, as he’d expected. Not even an upright. It was, instead, a vacuum cleaner. Oh, yes, she remembered now. It was the aunt with the three thins. She’d brought her own music stand with her violin when she’d come to stay. Mary still remembered the look of bewildered hurt on Stan’s face when he’d unwrapped the vacuum cleaner. She would love him all his life for the hurried phony flash of delight he’d bestowed upon her then, so she wouldn’t see his shame for her sake.

Claire sighed and Mary sighed about their different things.

“What’s with the little girl? The Medicino girl?” Mary asked finally, suddenly.

“Dharma? Her father came for her very late last night. I almost hated letting her go. It’s funny. She’s more like the Tree I remember than Tree was.”

“Time marches on, me darlin’.”

Claire squinted into her bowl of milk coffee. “Mmm, I mean something else. Only I don’t know what. You want breakfast?”

“I’ll take my breakfast with my grandson, if you don’t mind.”

Mary looked down at the nutty old wood of the table. Her old table from when she and Stan had started out. It wasn’t pretty, but it was sturdy and Johnny had sanded it down to Claire’s “country French” specifications. Carmela had had it first, but she’d given it back. Or, rather, Stan had retrieved it before Carmela’s first husband Arnold had sold it at his yard sale. His horrifying, vindictive, divorce yard sale. It had never been grand enough for Carmela anyway, Mary thought with the mixture of pride and shame she so often felt when it came to Carmela.

“So, what about this play Carmela’s got going?” Claire asked pleasantly, instantly reading Mary’s mind with troubled, albeit recovered, familial telepathy.

Mary shrugged, pretending not to care too much. She knew that Carmela suffered every time she saw her old rejected table so successfully renovated. Claire had always taken Carmela’s rejects and turned them around and made them beautiful. This infuriated Carmela, but then, so many things infuriated Carmela. One couldn’t keep up. Had Carmela married Stefan because Claire had toyed with the idea herself? It was hard to know who or what Stefan Stefanovitch really was. So wrapped up he was in himself and others in his image: sophisticated connoisseur of wines and women, cars and countries, ideas as commodities.

Carmela had the mansion on the hill, all right. And all the atrocities that went along with it.

“Ma!” Anthony cried from just outside, “the dog threw up!” Claire landed in the real world with a thud.

“Is she all right?”

“Well, now she’s trying to eat my flip-flop.”

“So we’ll interpret that as she’s all right, okay?”

A laugh hooted through the screen.

“Get the hose and wash it away, oh, the heck, I’ll be right out.” Claire stood reluctantly.

“Let him be,” said Mary. “Now that he thinks you want to do it, he’ll be all insistence to do it himself. Sit down now and tell me what you think of Carmela’s play.”

“I don’t think anything at all. The first I heard of it was yesterday. I think. Nobody tells me anything.”

“Ooo. I hope that’s not the verge of recrimination in your voice. For it’s you who’s in your own little world, isn’t it?”

“I am?” Claire was delighted to hear anything at all about what people thought of her, that was how often it ran directly opposite to what she expected them to think. “And here I was thinking of me as a regular busybody.”

“Huh! I’m sure I don’t know which is worse.”

“Neither do I,” said Claire with sincerity.

“Well. It’s a play about people at least. Not your angels and symbols.”

“I can’t imagine Carmela writing about the supernatural.”

Mary gave her a funny look.

“I mean, Carmela’s so down to earth. So you’re pretty safe there.”

“Don’t be too sure. Just when you think you know someone, they’ll turn around and be somebody else, won’t they?”

“They will?”

“Sure. Just look at the play she wanted to put on!”

“Which play?”

“Oh glory be, now don’t go back and tell her I told you or she’ll say I’m tellin’ tales out of school, like. She wouldn’t want me to tell you about what didn’t work out. Carmela is so—”

“—touchy,” Claire supplied.

“Well, see, it was to be a story about the Virgin Mary falling in love with a visitor from outer space.”

“Ha! She did, sort of.”

“Carmela had her secretly meeting him for mint tea over in Nazareth, against her parents’ wishes and all. Then before you know it, they were having it off in the desert.” Here Mary’s face went red. “There was no question of marriage,” she continued, tight-lipped, the scandal an appalling concern to her now. “He had to go back to wherever it was that he had come from. In the end, the family found a nice fella from the town, the carpenter’s son, a simple, good fellow, and they married them off.”

“The mint tea is good.”

“Oh! Don’t go telling her that! She’ll think she ought to go back to it!”

“Mom. Carmela would certainly never take up something because I thought it was good. On the contrary.”

“Still and all—the worst of it was, it was a musical. I mean, a musical!”

“Yes, well, she is her father’s daughter. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll never even mention it, all right?” Mary lived in a world of don’t mention this’s and don’t mention that’s.

“Aunt Claire?”

“Ah, it’s Michaelaen, is it?!” Mary sprang from her chair and gave the big eight-year-old boy a bear hug. He let himself be smothered, wiped his mouth with one arm, and grabbed a doughnut from the counter with the other. A powdered sugar doughnut it was, still soft and squishy with freshness. Michaelaen, Zinnie’s son, was always dropping over; even when Claire and Johnny had the house in South Ozone Park, he would come over sometimes after school. He would take the bus, all by himself, arriving blase and carrying big-boy geography books and looseleaf binders. He sported his shirt purposely out of his uniform trousers, his skateboard an integral part of his being. Zinnie was often stuck in court and Claire felt better if he came to her for supper. Johnny could always drop him off at home later, when he was working nights, and when he wasn’t, Zinnie would pick him up sometime, today or tomorrow, it didn’t matter to Claire. Claire loved that kid. And Anthony was as good as he could be when his big cousin was around, following him all over the place. “Race ya,” he’d say, hopefully, as they leapt from room to room. And Michaelaen, good natured as Zinnie, so often complied.

He stood there now, self-important, self-assured. Not shy before his aunt and grandmother, Claire noticed, congratulating herself and her mother. Not all children could be themselves with adults, but Michaelaen was. They had both contributed a lot of time to making this so. A lot of hours reading this kid stories and playing Mr. Potato Head went into making this fellow look into your eyes without guile or mistrust. This, Claire knew, was a success to be counted, shared by them all, especially her mom and dad, while Zinnie had had to work. Her dad had walked him through the woods with stories and silences and plain old being there—there had been a time when Michaelaen hadn’t been so trusting—the divorce, of course, and other things. Horrible things. The important thing was that now he was. He was opening, he announced, a detective agency. Five dollars a case. Only twenty-five cents, he rushed to assure them, deposit. Five bucks if he solved the case. Mary made a great show of looking for a quarter.

Really it was only Carmela who wasn’t that close with Michaelaen. She wasn’t that into kids, really. Not yet, anyway. One day, Claire hoped, she would get pregnant and that all would change. It would soften her, loosen those brittle bones, she wouldn’t look at herself so much as a failure. It didn’t matter that to the world Carmela looked like the undefeated champ; Claire understood her better. True, she had the house at the top of the hill, mansion really, but Claire understood from having known Stefan first what price Carmela must be having to pay to live there. It would always be Stefan’s deal. Cool, flaxen-haired, fast-driving Stefan, who, every time you crooked your little finger to pick up his fragile champagne crystal, watched you with sardonic, superior eyes. He enjoyed making you feel the fool. Expecting, waiting, even, for you to break that glass. And Carmela, knowing, deeply, herself to be the fool, fit snugly in.

Carmela didn’t have to work as a fashion columnist anymore (it wouldn’t become the wife of a diplomat like Stefan) and so she was a playwright. Not successful as yet, but then most playwrights were unsuccessful so that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Carmela’s title be pronounceable at cocktail parties. “My wife, Carmela Stefanovitch, the playwright.” The way he had of saying things would make the listener feel inferior and out of touch for not knowing who she was. Oh, well. That all didn’t matter.

Johnny staggered into the kitchen and lurched into the bathroom.

“What was that?” Mary’s voice rose shrilly.

“It’s all right, Mom, it’s just Johnny.”

“Why doesn’t he use the bathroom up the stairs?”

“Beats me. He says it’s too small and if he closes the door he feels all boxed in. This is an awfully big bathroom.”

Mary looked doubtful.

“I think he likes to see what’s going on,” Claire whispered. “You know. Johnny Dick.” She walked over to the big kitchen window and poked her head out.

There was Tree Dover’s house across the street. A moaning in the glaring sunshine, right now, empty of a woman rushing up stairs and down to the dryer, silent and quiet in her kitchen with her coffee cup, nervous and balanced by the moon, the months, the years. Claire blinked at the closed kitchen windows, no friend inside them now, the way there might have been, to catch sight of, run out and go gossip with. Floozie looked up through the screen at her with perky, smart little eyes that summed you up. Funny how she seemed to zoom in on Claire’s thoughts. Always looking up at her quickly and shrewdly when she felt anything palpable. There was, of course, no single reason for Claire to think this, it was just a feeling, odd and true.

Claire did a double take.

“What’s the matter now?” said Mary. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No. It’s just that I—it’s Dharma Dover in the yard.”

“Well, that’s good. Do her good to play with the boys.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. I’m glad to see her. I just can’t figure her father letting her come and go as she pleases just now.” She turned to look at Mary sitting there. “Wouldn’t you think he’d want her with him all the time? Every minute?”

Mary made a wry face and shrugged heavily. “Everyone carries grief in a different way, Claire. He might not be able to bear the sight of the child just now. Not be able to handle her grief as well as his own.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Ma. How does he—I mean, what does he do? What kind of job—always home?”

“He’s in real estate, Claire. He makes his own hours.” She stopped and looked at her daughter. “You must have heard of ‘Dover Estates’?”

“‘Estates,’ is it? Thinks well of himself, eh?”

“Well of the neighborhood. And the only one who does,” she sniffed. “Those big real estate conglomerates don’t give a hoot or a holler who they sell to. Andrew Dover sees to it the neighborhood doesn’t go to—” She looked at Claire’s Greenpeace-liberal shoulders at the window. “Gypsies.”

“Hey!” Claire shouted out at the kids. “Anyone want orange juice ice pops?”

“Ma,” Anthony waved her away, annoyed. Any chance he could get with children was gold for him. He didn’t want her intruding upon that.

“Right,” she said and shut the window. She stood there, then opened it again. “Dharma,” she said, “would you come over here for a moment?”

Dharma came. She held the dog. They looked up at Claire with bold, unshrinking eyes, the two of them, little orphans. Not any more, thought Claire, in a surge of effusive emotion. Not any more. I’ll take these two on as my own. She sucked a great gust of air up through her nostrils in ferocious promise. It would be a karmic debt paid off.

In high school, some principal or other had had the bright idea of rounding up the sophomore class and leading them on four trains into Brooklyn to some orphanage. These private-school girls—and that’s all they were was girls, skirts rolled up above their knees in case Prince Charming rode the A train too—went down to Brooklyn and everyone was assigned a kid. Claire’s kid was Anthony. She thought. Yes, now that she thought about it, his name had been Anthony as well, remembered Claire, and he had looked at her with big Diana Ross eyes and had said, “You gonna come see me?”

“Yes,” Claire had said firmly, hoping she meant it.

She guessed she had, at the time.

“Really?” asked the little boy, not believing her.

“Yes, really,” she’d said, and smiled her charming smile, her eyes misting over at the goodness innate of her.

That smile had fooled a lot of people, had made an awful lot of false promises in its time, had done a lot of damage, hadn’t it? It wasn’t the teary-eyed promises that meant anything, that got anywhere, that anyone lived up to; it was the ones people kept, annoyed, maybe, but kept.

“I just wanted to say,” Claire started to say then stopped as she thought of that little boy on line in the schoolyard, watching while the other girls came and no one came for him until it was clearer and clearer as the time went on, that nobody would come for him; nobody ever did. They must have assigned him another girl. And still, Claire saw him every morning in the papers, every evening on the news, a gangly kid, arrested, then a bigger guy, a man, been up in prison and released, coming uptown to see his parole officer. On the F train when she went to the city she saw him all the time, sitting there half-looking at her with mistrustful reproach in his eyes. She’d never come. The glitzy immediacy of debate club and hitch-hiking down to Greenwich Village to hang out with musicians had knocked that great goodness right out of her. He had been lonesome and she could have made a difference. It was not arrogance this time. She really had let that soul completely down. She knew it then, she knew it now.

“Dharma,” Claire said easily, “would you help me with Anthony this year? It’s just that I’m having such a hard time with him and if I had someone young, someone who could get through to him, like …”

And Dharma, slowly becoming aware that she was again being called upon for help and it wasn’t some pitying grown-up funeral-parlor soppy stuff here where Claire would fall into her arms sobbing, decided, for now, she might give it a go.

Floozie looked up and caught Claire with suddenly impressed bright eyes.

“I hear you’re running Cascade now,” they seemed to say. This family was always using some old Bette Davis film as their point of reference.

“Yes, Doctor Jackowitz,” Claire agreed, kneeling down to tousle the dog’s fluffy, nifty head. “I’m running Cascade now.”

Claire returned to the funeral parlor in the afternoon. Not having found the courage to walk up to the body at the wake, she knew she’d have to go back or regret it. She returned before hours, when no one was around. Mahegganey’s was a family funeral parlor. They all used Mahegganey’s.

Claire walked in without hesitation. Tree was all alone. She knelt down on the padded velvet stool and said her Our Father out loud. The hearing is the last to go in the dead, she knew. “Oh, Tree,” she said, tears already running down her cheeks, “I’d forgotten I knew you so well. I’d forgotten how much you mean to me. You meant to me. How much you’ve influenced my life. I wish I’d told you before. Before this—”

When Claire did finally finish, she stood up and saw Andrew Dover pass in the hallway. Embarrassed, she dried her eyes, then wondered why the hell she should feel embarrassed. Outside, she heard Andrew talking in hushed important tones on the office phone. He had, she supposed, the makings of a bigshot. Claire wondered just how big? And how far was he prepared to go to get there? Murder? She held her purse in both her hands and went quietly back home.

In the playground on the Overlook, the highest spot atop the neighborhood, above the cloying magnificence of everybody’s fabric softener, where Forest Park ends, or begins, birds from everywhere stop, leave, and stop again, stunned into circling confusion by furious global warming, overcrowding the woods, bunking into each other, sending birdwatchers berserk with good fortune.

From her spot on a bench by the sprinkler, Claire watched Dharma douse her angry Anthony with one more round of a blue pailful of water. Floozie the dog sat majestically on Claire’s soft lap. The leaves were in the trees, on the ground, in the air.

All at once, it was fall. After the nerve-wracking white light of summer, it was the most wonderful thing to sit still in the round rusty yellow of it. Tomorrow was Carmela’s grand party. Claire pulled her legs up underneath herself on the park bench and savored her position. She had settled on what she would wear. It wasn’t a dress, really, but a ready-made, one of those Punjabi dresses over pants that you could suddenly find in shops all over Jamaica Avenue. It was apricot with threads of green and vague cream-colored stencils, trimmed and dotted in tiny almost indiscernible gold stars. The whole effect was shimmering and light and when she had put it up against her face in the store the proprietress’s face had burst with happiness. There was no question, she had had to buy it. Such solicitous, forthright approval must be respected. And it had come with a silk peach scarf so deliriously soft it resembled the underbelly of a leaf to the touch.

Zinnie was off tonight and was to stay home with Michaelaen and Anthony. And Dharma, too, of course. This arrangement was working out quite well. Dharma was allowed to stay the night. This and any other night. Claire rocked back and forth, disturbed. Both Anthony and Michaelaen were better behaved with Dharma in the house. Each child was awed and if not silenced, certainly quieter, from Dharma’s enormous loss. If nothing else, it was a great learning experience, reverence for life and all that, but Claire was growing increasingly unnerved by Andrew Dover’s behavior towards Dharma. If it was none of her business then she wouldn’t feel so involved, now would she? She was just waiting to say something to him, to Andrew, about it, and she was just waiting for him to say to her it was none of her business. “I lived too many years in Germany to feel like that, to let that kind of an attitude just go by,” she would say to him. She had her arguments ready, like packages in her arms to drop into his, just in case he ever dismissed his formal, grieving, polite attitude and showed his proper self. Big phony. Claire was furious at him. The gall of him, to be alive and happy while Tree was dead. She knew he was happy. She wasn’t fooled by that morose puss he would put on for the outside world when he walked out the door and down to the church. Claire, home all day with the children, out beating a rug in the rain, had heard him whistling, heard him clear as a bell when he’d thought no one could hear him. What was it he’d been whistling? It didn’t matter. You don’t whistle when you’re in grief. You don’t want to do anything but think about, talk about, and cry about the one who’s gone.

Claire looked at Dharma. They were all in a cluster. Someone had brought their new Play-Doh up to the playground and they were all around it, greedy to be in on its lovely smell, its untouched newness. Only Dharma looked off into space. Inconsolable. Claire made another silent prayer that her Anthony wouldn’t lose her until she was old enough to want to be lost. It wasn’t right. So just let Andrew say one word to her about whose business it was. Just let him try. “Long Way to Tipperary.” That was it. That’s what he’d whistled. Twit.

So Mary was coming over for the first part of the evening, while Zinnie wrote up her bills, and she would keep them occupied with making jelly tarts. Mary was very good at all that. All three daughters had fond memories of jelly tarts in times of crisis. It wouldn’t be bad. Playing with the dog would keep the kids occupied for a while. She’d let them take Floozie on a good long walk with Aunt Zinnie. You never had to worry about them when Zinnie was with them, she would protect them and hold their interest. And if she didn’t, they’d get the old one-two right into the grubby corner—so they knew just like magic, she would shrug, what was expected.

“Kids!” she shouted, gathering the scattered entrails of her bag about her. They came, slowly at first, then became revved up by the novelty of their spontaneous idea of racing down the great hill all together. Excitedly they left the park, the thought of a race gaining momentum. Unfortunately, fatigue won out, and before they even reached Metropolitan Avenue screams of ownership over some staff-like stick one of them had picked up (“It’s mine!” “No mine!”) were obliterated by “I saw it first,” and “No, I did! Gimme back!”

Claire noticed that her son was the crankiest in the bunch. This was nothing new. He always was. You’d think she’d beat him when he was an infant, the way he carried on. Dharma had lost her mother, Michaelaen had been through a divorce and a terrible trauma known only to himself, and who behaved atrociously? Her tyranical, whiney son. So what was she supposed to do? Smack him silly? Yes. She was going to have to start to whack him if he didn’t shape up. A good bop on the butt, that’s what he needed. Maybe it was the move. Maybe not.

Yesterday, she could have killed him. They’d been up here at the Overlook; she’d specifically taken them up here to be out of the vicinity because Andrew didn’t think Dharma should be at the funeral and had asked Claire to keep her. Claire had been only too happy to oblige, agreeing that putting one’s mother into the earth was hard enough at middle age, and probably insufferably traumatic at seven. So she’d taken them up here and they had been getting along fine, playing kickball, when Anthony had spotted the hearse and funeral party winding up Park Lane South. Claire had signalled to him with her eyes not to say a word, but he had. “Look,” he’d shouted, and Dharma had looked, along with everyone else in the playground. Claire could have died for her, that little girl, standing there by the sandbox in her chartreuse dress, her fingernails still chipped pink in polish her mother had let her put on. Claire hadn’t known what to do. She had sat there, frozen, and Dharma had stood very still and not bothered with Anthony or any of the others. There she’d stood and looked down the great hill and held on to the tall, chain-link fence.

That had been yesterday. Well, there was nothing to be done.

Dharma came running back to her. Claire noticed her clothes were all wet. Normally, she wouldn’t take notice, but the weather was changing and you couldn’t leave her like that for too long.

“We’ll stop off at your house and you can run in and get some dry clothes. All right?”

Dharma looked down at herself. “Good Lord,” she said, the way a woman would. She must have spent most of her time with her mother, Claire thought, her adult behavior was so pronounced.

“Dharma, is there anyone from school, some little girl in your class, someone you’d like to invite over? I wouldn’t mind. One more or less.”

Dharma shook her head.

“Then you don’t mind hanging out with us? Helping me with Anthony? At least for a while?”

“No, Mrs. Benedetto. I told you already three times I wouldn’t. Really.”

“That’s fine. Look, Dharma, I’m all for form and proper behavior, but if you’d like to call me something else—I don’t know. Mrs. Benedetto seems too formal for the way I feel towards you. I don’t suppose you’d like to call me ‘Aunt Claire’ or something like that …”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, no, of course not. So. Fine.”

Claire watched her run off, back to the children. They had grabbed sticks and were using them as staffs, great herders they were, now. Dharma had to run to catch up. The hill was steep and it warmed up. Claire blew on her upper lip. To the right were the woods and they followed the path that rimmed it. To the left was Park Lane South and across that Stefan’s house. Carmela’s house. Claire still thought of it as Stefan’s. Actually, she didn’t think of it as either of theirs. Years ago, when she’d gone to high school on the bus, she would pull the buzzer here to notify the driver to let her off at this stop. So everyone, those all-important other passengers, would think she lived specifically in this villa. She was quite sure they would know it would be that particular villa, to which she belonged, no other. She fit so well to it, with her sweater nestled onto her shoulders just so well bred, with the pearls, the single strand, and her so-well-scrubbed fingernails buffed, not polished. They were not just passengers on a bus, these passengers, they were her public, the audience hushed in a Lincoln Center theater. They were savvy. They watched, on other nights, Fritz Lang in black-and-white. They certainly were not simply people on their way home. They were her audience. When, years later, as if by magic, she had literally run into Stefan jogging through the woods and he had invited her home, home being the very villa of her adolescent dreams, she had taken it as a sign. The fact that Stefan was handsome and interested in her had not been as meaningful as the mystical incredibility of what was going on.

Yes. So long ago. Even what had happened later had been so long ago. Four years. The fact that she had met Johnny at the same time had been rich with meaning as well. It had allowed her free will over destiny. Or so it had seemed at the time.

Claire felt the opulence jiggle in the rear of her thighs as she marched down the hill. She let it jiggle, jiggling it more for the good it would do them. She looked, no doubt, like a wooden soldier, but what she looked like now had not the same significance it had once had. I’ve changed, Claire told herself, astonished, relieved, appreciative. I’m another person looking back on someone else.

She caught up with the children at the crossing, as the cars whizzed by on Park Lane South. You had to be careful here. After that it was as if you descended into the tops of the trees. The villas changed here to stately rundown elderly Queen Anne Victorians and Colonials. The neighborhood wasn’t as fancy, but it also wasn’t irritated by the interjection of rude apartment houses. Here it was quiet, you could park anywhere you liked. As a matter of fact, in this part of town, the homeowners considered the street in front of their own homes their private domain, and if you parked once too often in front of someone else’s house you’d find your tires flat. “And rightly so,” you’d hear them say.

Claire’s heart still leapt at first sight of her house. She felt herself hurry toward it, so much still to do to make it really perfect.

Johnny had already started pulling down the walls around the chimney. It was an awful job, and every room was littered on the first floor, but when it was done, when the fireplace flues were open and the stones and tiles restored to their original grandeur, Johnny said a fireplace like this would really heat the house, not rob from it, the way the modern ones did. To have four open fireplaces in one house was a wonderful thing for the both of them. It meant so much. Especially to him, who’d only known fireplaces in films. They would whisper about it in their bed when Anthony was asleep, how wonderful it would be when it was finished. They would invite Red Torneo, Johnny’s old friend from Brooklyn, and sit him in front of the fire and make him drink hot toddies. “He’d go for that,” Johnny would say, and she could tell, by the unconscious wiggle of his bare toes against hers, how the idea genuinely delighted him. His eyes would be wide open in the darkness and he would be dreaming out loud. “And then,” he would say, drawing it out for her so she could savor it too, “then, we’ll invite your friends from overseas and they’ll take up the whole top floor.” Johnny liked to be fair.

Claire smiled. She wondered who on earth he thought she would invite. There was no one there who was interested in her life any more.

Johnny would hold her softly in his warm protective arms. She was important here, she knew. Her life meant more now than it ever had. She would hear his breathing change and feel his grip go slack and peaceful. She was important here. Still, she stayed awake and overheard the mindless chatter of the world she’d left behind. It glittered and disdained and chirped until it turned into the odd, occasional late-night squirrel on the roof, hurrying before the raccoon came down at last from the oozy wood.

Dharma stood and looked across the street.

“Michaelaen,” Claire said, “would you take Anthony on in and turn on the Disney Channel and let him have a Snickers from the tin drum? One Snickers, remember. Just one. I’ll take Dharma over and help her get some dry clothes. And give Floozie fresh water, if you think of it.”

“I can go by myself,” Dharma said.

“Never mind,” Claire dismissed her. She was very good at this when she meant it. She would narrow her eyes and look a certain way, the way she’d seen Sister Saint Stephen do so many years ago. Sister Saint Stephen had done a fine job of terrifying the entire class of sixty-four children. “You’ll not go anywhere alone while I’ve got charge of you. Got that?”

Dharma pursed her lips but waited for Claire while she opened the door to let the boys in. They walked across the road together, and Claire remembered the time she’d first come to this place and sat there in the car with Anthony asleep and Tree had come upon her. How astonished they’d both been. And Claire remembered still the way Tree looked forward to her meeting her daughter.

Claire didn’t want to go canonizing Tree in her mind, now. She remembered, even then, a light but deliberate sense of reserve, not wanting Tree to enter entirely into her world, not inviting her directly to her house. She’d known, even in that short meeting, a feeling of caution, of not surrendering everything at once. She hadn’t given Tree her number straight away. One holds on to painful memories, even broken ones that seem so pointed. When they were children, Claire had lured Tree into her garage with the promise of a ride on the silver painted scooter bike. It was an unusual bike; it had no chain, just a smooth rubber loop thing. It was great fun. Claire, though she only measuredly liked the thing, recognized it immediately for what it could bring her, and that was a chance at the notorious Tree Medicino’s friendship. And it had done.

And then, one day, Michael, Claire’s brother, had hot-rodded the thing down to Jamaica Avenue and the rubber loop had slipped off and broken. Claire still remembered the moment when she’d told Tree she couldn’t have the bike today, it was broken, sorry. She remembered still the unhesitating look turn from impatient waiting joy to raging fury. Not disappointment, fury. She had not even waited to play out the day but had gone, just like that, and had not come back. Not that day nor any other that winter.

When Mary had unconsciously bullied her with an unthinking “Where’s that friend of yours, the one you just can’t live without,” Claire had answered with an unconcerned, “Oh, her. She’s boring.” “Like a lightswitch, that Claire,” Mary had dismissed her, had shaken her head and gone on smearing apple butter onto toast.

And Claire could remember arranging her face to appear nonchalant, involved all at once in the setup, the pretense, the job of convincing the viewer she was fine and dandy, busy, like all of us, pretending not to feel, until, who knows, maybe we don’t. Or at least we don’t know that we don’t.

“I have to go in the back way,” Dharma said.

“You haven’t got your key?” Claire asked. They crunched uneasily along the white pebbles in the drive with their feet, neither looking forward to this.

“My father said I didn’t need it today. Because I would be at your house and all.”

“Oh, yes, of course. The back door’s open?”

“No. I climb inside the bathroom window.”

“Do you really?”

Before anything else, Dharma had hoisted herself up onto the sturdy Rubbermaid garbage pail. In the small window she went. She appeared, some moments later, at the back door, not smiling.

Claire hesitated. She had overstepped so many bounds already, today. “Shall I come with you?”

“Yes,” Dharma said quickly.

Claire went in. A morbid thrill of curious expectation went right through her. The kitchen was brown, all brown. There was a brown shiny refrigerator as well. Orange and yellow silk flowers were on the round Formica table. It was not Claire’s style, but it was cozy. There were plenty of cabinets. Dharma waited while she took in the room. “So come on,” she said.

They walked along a corridor that reminded Claire of her Polish great-aunt’s place over in Ridgewood. It was a narrow house, full of beams, wallpaper trim and excessive dollies and runners. It was dark, the shades were drawn, and if that wasn’t dark enough the furniture was mahogany. The only touch of something else was Tree’s great collection of hats. They lined the walls on pegs. It gave the gloomy Victorian interior a touch of the theatric, backstage at the Valencia vaudeville theater. There were big hats, little hats, plumed hats, pill boxes, and bonnets. Claire loved Victorian exteriors, but she wasn’t too crazy about these heavy interiors. Now that she was in, she couldn’t wait to get out. “What’s that smell?” She sniffed the air.

“It’s myrrh. Mommy always burned it in the egg. The brass egg.”

“Ah. Which room is yours?”

“In the front.” She touched Claire’s arm. “I’ll be right out.”

Claire didn’t like to intrude upon a little girl’s messy room and rumpled bed. She remembered her own hurricane of chaos as a child. Dharma’s ringlets hardly bounced as she made her way down the hallway. The walls were also dotted with Tree’s extravagant and picturesque hats. Claire followed her with a craned long neck and was astonished to see a spotless room, a made-up canopy bed and a dainty white shag rug. It was the room of a television child, hardly anyone Claire would know. Dharma walked directly to her low white dresser and opened a pink and golden jewelry box. A ballerina pirouetted around an oval mirror. “Somewhere, My Love,” the music box warbled. Dharma relieved her fingers of her rings and shut the box. She opened a drawer of folded little-girl tops, pulled one out, opened the drawer beneath it, inspected the row of folded little-girl bottoms, chose the corresponding pair of pedal pushers and shut that drawer as well. She turned to see if Claire was watching, but Claire had apprehended this and turned her back on Dharma so she’d have some privacy without shutting her door. She sensed that Dharma was too polite to shut it in her face. She hummed the little ballerina’s song so Dharma would know she was fine, not a care in the world, and she was out here, planted firmly, not leaving, not coming a bit closer. “La-la-la,” she sang, then saw them and almost missed a beat, but didn’t: a pair of butter-soft beige moccasins in hurried discard atop the landing on the stairs.

Claire kept on humming, singing, singing, humming. Jesus, let’s get out of here, she whispered silently to herself, and turned back to see if Dharma was almost ready. Come on, come on. She couldn’t bear the thought of the two of them coming down the stairs and Dharma seeing them together. Portia and Andrew. It wasn’t possible. But it also wasn’t possible that Tree would have had the same shoes she’d so admired, and that they would be lying about. It was too much to imagine. Claire was petrified, afraid to speak and at the same time afraid not to. She held her right hand with her left, her shoulders squinched up with indecision. “La-la-la-la-la,” she continued her piece. She held her elbows now; she was quite cold.

Dharma stood before her and they turned in silence and left the house. The light swallowed them up totally like darkness and hid them from each other. Dharma trotted hurriedly along, relieved in her sly way that Claire hadn’t noticed who it was in the house. Claire walked briskly alongside her, ashamed for the both of them. She didn’t like it. And then again, suppose this Portia person had been up the stairs on her own, furrowing through bureau drawers—or even worse, alone on Tree’s dark, tumbled, anguished bed?