My Dearest Friend (6 page)

“I remember feeling that way myself.” Daphne laughed. “It never did seem fair to me that the babies got all the energy that the parents needed.” Although I had my child under more control than you do by a long way, she thought.

“Where’s your daughter now?” Carey Ann asked.

“She went to live with her father. In California.” Daphne felt pain shoot through her, and poison, as the bitterness within her flicked its tongue. She took a deep breath. “Well, she’s sixteen years old. And it was something she needed to do,” she said. “She hadn’t had a chance to get to know her father before.”

“You must miss her,” Carey Ann said.

“I do,” Daphne replied. “Very much.”

“I know I miss my parents,” Carey Ann went on. “Especially my father. He always took care of me. Sometimes—”

“Bottle!”
Alexandra yelled, popping her thumb from her mouth. She turned around and grabbed her mother’s face with her two small chubby hands. She wrenched Carey Ann’s face around to hers.
“Bottle!”
she said again, directly into her mother’s face.

“Oh, dear, I didn’t bring her bottle,” Carey Ann said. She rose, letting her daughter slip to the floor. “Let’s go home, Alexandra,” she said. “Your bottle’s at home. Thank you for the tea,” she said, turning back to Daphne.

“Perhaps she’d like a glass of milk?” Daphne offered.

The little girl left her mother’s side and ran off into the living room, her hands flying out sideways to hit whatever she passed.
“Bottle!”
she yelled as she went.

Carey Ann shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not really the milk she wants, you know, it’s the bottle. Maybe she’ll take a nap now. Then I’ll be able to get something done around the house. It’s so much work unpacking, isn’t it?”

The two women moved, as they talked, into the living room. Alexandra had discovered the piano and was suddenly up on the piano bench, pounding out chords that would have made John Cage weep.

“What I don’t understand is how you decide where everything goes,” Carey Ann said wearily. “I mean, the kitchen things go in the kitchen, of course, but where? I mean, should the dishes go in the cupboards next to the sink, or the food? I mean, they both have to be near the sink, right? Oh …” she said, a smile breaking out over her face. “That sounds like ‘Frère Jacques,’ doesn’t it? I wonder if we should get Alexandra a piano. She’s so smart that way.”

Daphne thought that what the child was hammering away at sounded nothing at all like any organized musical notes she’d ever heard before, and she was amused and somehow strangely saddened that Carey Ann thought they should get a piano for the little girl now. “She’s only two,” Daphne said. “I think that’s really too young for a piano. Even if she is smart. Their hands have to be a certain size in order to reach the keys, or it’s frustrating for them, you know.”

Carey Ann said, “But didn’t Mozart perform when he was three?”

“It’s difficult to hear you!” Daphne said. “Perhaps we should—”

But suddenly she sounded insane, as her voice, which had been raised to carry over the sounds of Alexandra’s banging, roared out in the quiet living room. Alexandra had abruptly stopped playing. She was staring, her adorably rosy face rapt with delight, at something on top of the piano.

Many valuable things were on top of the piano. This house was so small that Daphne had of necessity used the top of the baby grand as a surface for the certain objects of her life she wanted to have near her, available to sight and touch every day. Mostly there were pictures: of herself as a young graduate student, a picture that had been taken for the school newspaper and that showed her as she had really been at that time in her life—devoted, studious, profoundly serious, and radiantly beautiful. It was almost her favorite picture of herself, and it was in a silver frame. There were pictures of her with Cynthia at different stages of their lives together, when Cyn was a baby, when they were at the Cape or riding horses, and then a huge azurite-framed picture of Cynthia in
costume as Maria in
West Side Story,
which the local high school had put on last year and in which she had been cast in the lead role even though she was only a sophomore. Cynthia had dyed her long blond hair black for the part, and in this photo she looked devastatingly beautiful and utterly
dramatic.
Daphne still was amazed to think, every time she looked at the picture, that this creature was her daughter.

There were other objects on the piano top too—it held so much. An alabaster box trimmed in brass, fading from emerald green to pearl. A large Chinese vase, a reproduction, but costly—for Daphne—nonetheless, which Daphne had filled with multicolored zinnias from the back garden.

It was the flowers that Alexandra was focused on.

“Pretty fwower, Mommy!” the little girl said.

And in a flash she was clambering up from the piano bench, and then onto the piano keyboard. For a moment she stood with both feet in their tiny pink rubber sneakers, balanced on the piano keys. The piano plinked and plonked as she shifted forward, reaching for the flowers.

Daphne looked at Carey Ann, who was calmly watching her daughter with adoration on her face. “I don’t think it’s wise for her to stand on the piano keyboard,” Daphne said. But the words were scarcely out of her mouth when Alexandra, unable to reach the flowers, stepped on the music rack and crawled up onto the piano lid. Then, scooting along on her knees, she made her way toward the vase of flowers, knocking picture frames to the left and right as she went. The picture of Daphne’s parents, poised rigidly inside an old gilded wooden frame, thwacked to the floor. The alabaster box, struck by the child’s knee, flew to the edge of the piano and hovered there. Alexandra reached out for the flowers, and Daphne took three giant strides and grabbed the vase just before it toppled, as Carey Ann raced across the room and scooped up her daughter.

“Oh, sweetie,
be careful
!” she said. “You could fall and hurt yourself!”

Daphne stood, the vase of flowers in her arms, staring at Carey Ann. Carey Ann turned, holding Alexandra in her arms, and, at Daphne’s expression, her own turned immediately into one of childish alarm.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. Her daughter was trying to squirm away from her to get back to the piano; her arms were waving frantically and she was kicking her feet.
“Fwower!”
she screamed.

Daphne took a deep breath. “Carey Ann, I think you need to learn to control your
daughter more, at least when she’s in someone else’s home. She almost broke several valuable things of mine, irreplaceable objects.”

Carey Ann gasped at Daphne’s words, and Alexandra must have felt the shock waves in her mother’s body, for the little girl went quiet suddenly and stared up at her mother’s face.

“Oh!” Carey Ann said. Suddenly she was trembling all over, and her face had gone white, drained of all color. “Oh! No wonder your daughter won’t live with you!” she cried. Her lower lip quivered and her mouth opened as if she were about to say something else, when instead she swept across the room, clutching her baby to her tightly, pulled open the door, and hurried out into the rain. Alexandra, face round with surprise, gazed over Carey Ann’s shoulder at Daphne and then at the house.

Daphne stood, the vase of flowers in her hand, and felt such a wave of despair sweep over her that she, too, began to shake. Tears sprang to her eyes. She felt both violated and guilty. Something about Carey Ann reminded her of Cynthia—perhaps it was just her youth—although she knew she had taught Cynthia better manners. Cyn would never act this way in someone else’s home, though she might act this way around Daphne, in her own home.

Daphne strode to the front door and stood watching as Carey Ann bent into the passenger side of the car, strapping her daughter into her car seat. Then she went to the driver’s side, got in, and drove off. Soon, where the white convertible had been, only a wall of pouring rain remained.

Daphne shut the door and leaned against it. She grinned, for the yellow rain slickers of both Hamilton females were still hanging on the antique oak coatrack in the front corner of the living room. Those rain slickers made Daphne feel triumphant, made her feel that she had
won.

But won what? My God, Daphne thought, what had happened? She put the vase of flowers back on the piano lid and set up the picture frames again. Nothing was broken. Suddenly the room seemed very empty,
emptied,
and she was overcome with an extreme and immediate exhaustion.

The soggy tea things were strewn all over the kitchen table, but she left them and walked into her bedroom and lay down on her bed. Here it was dim and cool. She kicked off her shoes and pulled a quilt up over her. Rain streamed down the windows, the outside walls, enclosing the house in a steady, heavy thrumming noise; and it was like
being on a ferry or in an airplane with the engine drumming away incessantly. She had that sensation of being trapped for a while in something bigger than she was, something moving, carrying her someplace, and she could only calmly let herself be carried, while the droning around her assured her that something else around her was persevering, and she could rest.

Memory was bizarre: it was so
defensive.
How many times had she tried to remember a time, an event, with David, or even being in Joe’s arms—and her memory threw up walls of brick, clouds of fog. She couldn’t get through to her own past life! Or she would try and try to focus, only to find herself becoming irritated, agitated, restless, and without the memory she was craving.

But Carey Ann’s dramatic exit, and the sight of Alexandra at the piano, a small blond girl child at the piano, had released a memory in Daphne that was as ripe and full as the present. Or, rather, it had released Daphne into the memory, and as she lay on her bed surrounded by the sound of rain, it was as if she had just sunk down into a pool of remembrance.

Three years ago (three million years ago, so much had changed since then), Daphne and David had been seated in the Grange Hall with half the other people in the town, waiting for the local spring student music recital to begin. David had gone to Westhampton College, and like many other alums, had loved it so much he had come back to Westhampton to live. He was a lawyer, a handsome and eloquent man, but he was an alcoholic. Two wives had left him because of his drinking. Now, in his forties, he and Daphne were lovers. He wanted Daphne to marry him, and Daphne had promised him she would—as soon as he managed to get himself sober and to stay that way. His states of ugly drunkenness did not come often, but when they did, they were terrifying, and she would not inflict them on Cynthia, who adored David.

Tonight David had promised that he had had only the two gin-and-tonics that Daphne had given him, and she thought she believed him. He was being very quiet and contained as he sat upright on his uncomfortable metal folding chair next to her. It was early May, and although the spring had so far been unseasonably cool, today the temperature had shot up to nearly eighty and the humidity and pollen made the air dense with invisible, irritating motes and flecks. Daphne had leaned over to put her hand on David’s arm to let him know she loved him now and was grateful that he had come with
her.

It had always seemed to Daphne to go against ordinary logic and even Christian compassion that student music recitals were held in such mundane and insufficiently ventilated rooms, where the audience shifted their numbed bums on tiny ancient folding metal chairs that threatened at every moment to collapse beneath them. These recitals were always, at the best, horrible torturous events, while earnest or uninterested little children pecked and blatted their way through asinine little tunes that no one over the age of ten ever wanted to hear again in her life. Daphne’s vision of eternity was listening to Heather Goldman, who was six years old, turgidly plonking her way through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while her parents, who also had the poor child taking ballet, ice skating, tap dancing, and art studio, slunk to the front (bent over so as not to deprive the rest of the audience of the sight of their daughter at the piano) to snap pictures of her hitting every single note.

Oh, David did love her, Daphne thought, to sit through all of this, and if he could put up with this for her, why couldn’t she put up with his bad patches? As the other cute or nasty little children appeared to maim and camouflage “Lightly Row,” “Old MacDonald” (Oh, Christ, oh, Christ, why hadn’t all the music teachers in the world long ago conspired to eradicate “Old MacDonald” from the music books?), “Little Indian Dance,” “Frère Jacques,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel,” Daphne occupied herself by going over in her mind for the millionth time just why it was she was not marrying David when she loved him so and he loved her. The answer was always the same, and irrefutable: she did not want Cynthia exposed to David drunk.

After a brief intermission during which all the parents sprang from their chairs as if released from the rack and stretched their arms and rubbed their backsides and yawned and made a lot of noise, it was time for the older students to play. This was almost pleasurable, even worth waiting for, but now of course all the younger pupils who had already performed were seated in the audience, giggling and picking their noses and falling off their chairs and making paper airplanes out of their programs. Dorothy Kasper, the head teacher, came out onstage to say a few words about the proper behavior at a concert, then disappeared behind the curtain, leaving the older students to perform to a room that sounded vaguely like a mutinous insane asylum.

Daphne managed to filter out the other noise and focus on the pianists. She thought it was just possible that Cynthia might make a career out of music, for she
wanted to do something in the performing arts, and she had lost interest in ballet. Cynthia was thirteen, and taller than a lot of her classmates, and filling out with what Daphne considered astonishing rapidity. Seniors in high school were already calling to ask her out (Daphne wouldn’t let her go). So far she had not hit that humiliating “awkward” stage so many teenagers hit. She was tall, and slender, and tonight wore her long blond hair in an elaborate French braid that hung down her back and was entwined with tiny lilac flowers. Her best friend had done it—if Daphne had done it, it would have been pronounced, for some reason,
wrong.
Daphne had offered to buy Cynthia a Laura Ashley dress even though they were so damned expensive, but Cynthia had rolled her eyes in disbelief and said, “Oh, Mom, you’re so
archaic
,” and left the room exhausted with the burden of her mother’s hopeless gaucherie. Now, as she came across the stage to sit at the piano, she was wearing layers of clothing that actually looked like layers of old sheets and tablecloths and that made it impossible for anyone to believe there was an actual human body hidden inside, which was probably, after all, Cynthia’s intent.