Child of My Heart Read Free

stomach ache the whole train ride home and then sabotaged the day completely by asking her mother that evening to go and tell me that sometime during the course of the afternoon she had been visited by her “friend.” I suppose it was an apology of sorts, for what a whiner she had been. Or maybe it was just an excuse. A plea for sympathy from a being as discouraged by herself, by the humorless personality, the unshakable intelligence, the heavy face and limbs—none of which she would have chosen had the choice been hers—as was everyone else.
    I told my aunt that I understood, and smiled warmly at Bernadette in her pajamas, but when I invited Daisy into my bed that night, or back into her own bed, I curled around her little body and, while her sister slept and bled, promised a summer visit, all by herself, a week or two, or three or four-as many as her father would allow. Just the two of us, I whispered.
    Would she be brave enough to take the train out by herself? In the darkness she nodded. She would.
    My own parents had moved out to Long Island when I was two years old.
    They had done so because they knew by then that I was the only child they would ever have—they were already in their mid-forties—and that I would be good-looking. Unusually so. A young Elizabeth Taylor was the immediate word.
    (Later, among the East End crowd, it was a young Jackie Kennedy.) Blue eyes and dark hair and full lips and pale skin.
    A somewhat startling change from the red-haired or red-faced relatives who leaned over my crib, speculating, as they would continue to do until I was in my thirties, if I wasn’t evidence of some French blood in the family. But my mother claimed that my looks were due only to the intercession of St. Theresa of the Little Flower, my Gallic patron saint—which was her homely and pious way of deflecting both their vanity provoking praise and the notion that somewhere in our Irish heritage there had been dropped a tincture of impious blood.
    Being who they were—children of immigrants, well-read but undereducated—my parents saw my future only in terms of how I would marry, and they saw my opportunities narrowed by the Jewish/Irish/Polish/Italian kids who swarmed the city and the close-in neighborhoods where they could afford to buy a home. They moved way out on Long Island because they knew rich people lived way out on Long Island , even if only for the summer months, and putting me in a place where I might be spotted by some of them was their equivalent of offering me every opportunity.
    It hardly mattered that we lived in a two-bedroom house that had once been a fisherman’s cottage, or that our neighbors, the Morans, piled bedsprings and car parts in their front yard, or that both my parents had to commute to Riverhead to work. Proximity to wealth was what they were after, and to that end, they encouraged me to answer ads for summer babysitter or mother’s helper from the time I was ten or so, driving me to my June interviews in order to check out the size of the house and the pool and the number of servants before I accepted the job. Walking into those interviews, across high ceilinged entry ways that opened onto the sea, or around back to a pool where the lady of the house—always slim and already tanned—would remove her sunglasses at my approach, I must have fit right into the pretty summer dreams those pretty young mothers had had back on Fifth Avenue in March. I was hired immediately, first time out, although I was only ten and Mrs. Carew had been looking for a teenager. By the next summer, I was in demand—having been checked out thoroughly by the other young mothers at the Maidstone Club and the
Main
Beach
. Pretty, intelligent, mature in speech although undeveloped physically (another plus), well immersed in my parents’ old-fashioned Irish Catholic manners (inherited from their parents, who had spent their careers in service to this very breed of American rich), and, best of all, beloved