Child of My Heart Read Free Page A

by children and pets.
    I don’t know how to account for it, my way with small creatures.
    Nor did it ever occur to me to try. Because I was a child myself when I began to take care of other children, I saw them from the start as only a part of my realm, and saw my ascendance as a simple matter of hierarchy—I was the oldest (if only by a year or two) among them, and as such, I would naturally be worshipped and glorified. I really thought no more of it than that. And when they clung to me and petted me, when the boys, lovesick, put their heads in my lap and the girls begged to wear my rings or comb my hair, I simply took it as my due. I was Titania among her fairies (the summer I was thirteen I even named the Kaufman kids Cobweb and Pease blossom, to their unending delight); and the dogs and cats and bunnies and gerbils that seemed to follow their young owners in their affection were only doing what nature, in our little realm, prescribed.
    Ironically, it was my way with pets that caused me more trouble with my employers than my way with children-because while on occasion a mother would pretend to be hurt by a child’s insistence on my company if a nightmare woke her from a nap or if a knee was scraped, fathers were genuinely offended by their pets’ changes in loyalty. I remember in particular one young black Lab, Joker was his name, who would not leave my side, not even for a run on the beach with his down for-the-weekend master, not even when I urged him to go ahead, pushed him to his feet, whispered into his velvet ear. He would only slowly wag his tail at the sound of my voice and then sit down again at my feet—much laughter from the children on the porch or the beach blanket, much consternation from the rejected owner. I gathered from the children the next summer that there had been some advocacy on the father’s part not to have me back.
    If there was any trick, any knack, to my success as a minder of children, it was, I suppose, the fact that I was as delighted with my charges as they were with me. Although I had spent my own childhood in what seemed to me a kind of leafy green contentment, I had been alone much of the time, as happens with only children of older, working parents—especially only children of older parents who live in a village filled with summer houses and temporary residents—and the time I spent with my charges was probably the longest stretch of time I had ever spent with anyone other than my parents and myself. As a result, I didn’t have to devise games and entertainments for the children I watched, I had only to include them in the ongoing games and entertainments I had devised for myself long ago.
    And then there were the Morans. Except for an elderly couple I saw only when my mother sent me to their house with a jar of beach-plum jelly or a basket of tomatoes from our garden or the extra bluefish my father had caught, the Morans were our only full-time neighbors. In my earliest memories, Mr. Moran lived in his house alone. I have the impression I thought then he was a retired sea captain—maybe my father had made some joke about it that I had misinterpreted (he often referred to Mr. Moran as being “three sheets to the wind”—a nautical-enough reference for a six-year-old), or maybe my Uncle Tommy, my mother’s dissipated younger brother, told me the tale and I believed him (because if I inherited my way with children and animals from anyone, it must have been from Tommy). Or maybe it was just the way Mr. Moran looked—bowlegged and Popeye-thin, with a constant two-day growth of beard. His house was behind and perpendicular to ours, surrounded by a tall hedge that obscured all but the gravel driveway and a bit of his overgrown lawn. I don’t recall seeing much of him then. I’d hear him singing sometimes on the other side of the hedge when I played alone in our back yard—burring, Celtic folk songs that I took to be sea shanties—and I’d sometimes see my father chatting