Free Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott Page B

nose, and kissed Flora on the head, leaving lipstick and the scent of her face powder on the child’s pale scalp.
    I sat for a few minutes after she had gone, waiting for the heat to leave my cheeks before I looked at Daisy. I had one arm around Flora, but my right hand was on the table and I was surprised to see that my fingers were trembling. I was embarrassed and angry and surprised—I would have thought the housekeeper was too old to be included in such talk, just as, a few minutes ago, I might have presumed I was too young and Flora’s mother too elegant to speak such a word. I heard the car pull out of the driveway, and then waited a few minutes more before I slowly raised my eyes to Daisy. She was looking at me with more expectation than caution, certainly with no fear. I wondered if she’d missed the word, or if she recognized its sound only when it was shouted in anger or used as an adjective, as her father tended to do. I blew some air through my lips and Daisy did the same: even if she didn’t know the word when used in its proper context, she knew a marital spat when she saw one, and she nodded a little, wisely, when I said, “Oh, what fools these mortals be.”
    “She’s falling asleep,” Daisy whispered, pointing at Flora in my lap, whose eyelids were indeed fluttering closed. I hoisted her to my shoulder and stood, pushing my chair back with the back of my knees. I told Daisy to go out to the porch to fetch the beach bag and then carried Flora to her bedroom.
    I fully expected her to revive when I placed her on the changing table, but she only whined and cried and did not open her eyes, so when I was finished, I lifted her into her crib and covered her with a thin blanket. She smiled sleepily. She seemed grateful to be out of the fray. I wondered what had gone on in the village this morning, and whether it was her daughter’s tantrum or her husband’s familiarity (my parents’ word) with the maid that had sent Flora’s mother off to
New York
. I smoothed Flora’s hair. Either way, the door had been shut on the child.
    On the wall above the crib were the three simple pencil sketches of Flora and her mother—sweet enough to be hung in a church. Good drawings, I thought. But in the living room I had just passed through there was also a large canvas of what seemed to me to be only smashed images, perhaps of a woman—an ear, a breast, some lips. And another, smaller painting that was simply color, and not even particularly pretty color, dark paints that had merely been dropped or spilled or smeared. I pulled the blanket up to Flora’s cheek.
    It suddenly occurred to me that Ana was not too old and I was not too young, because he was both this baby’s father and an old, old man. Because he could draw sweet Madonnas and dismembered faces and pictures of nothing, nothing at all. I wondered if it took an act of will or just a long, long life to achieve this—to exceed or to outlive or simply to escape the limits of time and age, of what could or couldn’t be done, should or shouldn’t be done. To use no other criteria but your own, straight out of your head.
    I turned away from the crib and saw Daisy coming along the narrow hallway that led from the living room, the beach bag over her arm. She seemed to be favoring her right leg as she walked. I put my finger to my lips and touched her on the small of her back to lead her out again, and as soon as we had passed through the front door I asked if she was getting a blister from her shoes. She said no, her foot was just asleep, but not without a bit of a flush rising to her cheeks.
    “If they’re hurting you,” I said, “you might want to take them off for a while.” But she shook her head and handed me the beach bag and changed the subject by asking, “Now what are we supposed to do?”
    “Sit and wait,” I said.
    “Until she wakes up.” And seeing that was unsatisfactory, I offered, “We can read.” I moved two of the canvas chairs under