Two writers, one brand new and one
experienced and award-winning begin to write a story about a child who possesses
affection for extraordinary children—abused, neglected, ignored, sick, and
dying. The stories share the same title, Child of My Heart. I was the new
writer, fumbling for proper grammar and eloquent enough prose to tell Annie’s
story, my story—the story of a nurse. On the other hand, Alice McDermott, already
proficient in prose and confident enough to use her own style of
grammar, tells the story of Theresa, a teenage girl on the cusp of fifteen who
is clever and beloved by children and animals alike, but also a solitary soul
with an already complex understanding of human nature. Theresa’s working class
parents decide that their “born beautiful” daughter’s best chance in life is to
marry a wealthy man, so she is raised on the east end of Long Island among the
country houses of the rich. She’s the town’s most sought after babysitter when her
favorite niece, Daisy (who is eight) comes to spend the summer. The story
begins, “I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids,
Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local
artist.”
The precocious Theresa believes that
Daisy is the least cared for child of her father’s sister who has six boys and one
bossy sister, Bernadette. When Theresa visits the family, actually Daisy, she
shows the reader what she’s made of by telling them a tall tale about how she
and Daisy obtained over eight dozen lollypops:
“There was a barrel of lollipops beside
the newspaper rack, a handwritten sign, TWO FOR A NICKEL. Her parents had made
her too polite to ask for one, so I casually bought a hundred of them, refusing
a paper bag and stuffing them instead into our pockets, pant pockets and coat
pockets, and then lifting the hem of her sweater to form another pocket and
filling it as well. When we got back to the house, we dumped all of them over
her brothers and Bernadette, who were lying on the living-room floor watching
their allotted hour of television before dinner. The lollipops in their
wrappers were wet with snow, some were muddy from where we had dropped them on
the walk home. “Where did you get these?” Bernadette asked, and before Daisy
could answer, I said, “We found a lollipop tree. You should have come.” The
boys said, “Yeah, sure,” but Bernadette couldn’t resist grilling us on the
particulars, her eyes narrowed, her thin mouth opened skeptically, showing the
little blowfish teeth. A house on the boulevard, I said. A willow tree. A huge
willow tree filled with lollipops for the taking. The tree belongs to an old
couple, I said, whose only child, a little boy, had dreamed of a lollipop tree
in his front yard on the night he died, fifty years ago this very day. Once a year
and only on this day, I said, they make his dream come true by filling their
willow tree with lollipops. (And the odd thing is, I said, it was snowing in
his dream, too, and it snows every year on this date the minute the old couple
hangs the last lollipop on the tree.) They invite children from miles around.
I’m surprised you guys have never heard about it before. The old couple serves
hot chocolate out on their lawn while the children collect the lollipops from
the tree. They hire tall men to help lift the smaller children high into the
branches. The single rule is that you can pick only as many lollipops as you
can carry home— no paper bags or suitcases, oh, and that the picking lasts for
just one hour, from dusk to nightfall, to the second the first star appears.
Corresponding to their son’s last hour on earth, since the evening star in the
dark blue winter sky was the first thing the old couple had noticed when they
went to the bedroom window only a minute after the doctor had pulled a blanket
up over his peaceful little face. Although Bernadette squinted skeptically
through it all, the boys had their backs to the TV set by the time I’d finished.
“We’ll have to go next year,” Jack Jr. said softly. But Bernadette turned on
Daisy. “Is this true?” she demanded. Daisy shrugged her thin shoulders. There
was a remnant of hot chocolate on her upper lip and the top of her wiry hair
was darkened by a little skullcap of melted snow. “You should have come,” she
said matter-of-factly, skirting the lie. Child of my heart.”
And thus sets the stage for the rest of
the novel.
In my Child of My Heart, Annie begins her
story the summer just after she turns twelve when she has her first taste of
death—not of a child she loves but of a beloved doll:
“I ran across the alley and hurdled
myself over a neighbor’s croton hedge. Before my feet hit the ground I spotted
an object that turned my spinning world to slow motion. I stopped to look at
the thing, hoping my eyes had lied. But there on her chest was the tiny heart
I’d drawn with a red ballpoint pen. My heart cried out but I couldn’t make a
sound. From atop a trash heap I picked up my small broken doll and stared at
her as if we were frozen in time. She was the most cherished thing I’d ever
owned. The doll’s shiny yellow braids tied with tiny pink bows were torn from her
scalp. Dirty smudges covered her naked body, her blue eyes scratched off, belly
slashed open, a leg amputated. A filthy pink ribbon tied her one remaining
possession to her hand—a tiny white toothbrush.”
The two protagonists, Theresa and Annie,
deal with much more abuse of children, animals, and possessions. Although both
stories seem gruesome—and parts of them are—the neglected children are cared
for by spunky teenagers who refuse to accept the world the way it is.
In Alice McDermott’s effortless and
passionate prose, she brings the “expected” portion of her story to an end.
But, this is not the end of the book:
“Daisy speaks. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be
back here.’ I laughed, just a puff of air against her scalp. ‘Why?’ I asked
her. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I just have that feeling.’ I tightened my
arm around her. ‘Of course you will,’ I said. ‘Every summer. You could come at
Easter, too, if you want, even Christmas. You can come back anytime, all the
way until you’re grown up.’ I said it fondly, assuredly, with all the authority
I knew she gave me, all the authority I knew I had, here in my own kingdom, but
I also said it against a flash of black anger that suddenly…made me want to
banish every parable, every song, every story ever told, even by me, about
children who never returned. The newborn children named for Irish patriots. The
children who said, I want to show it to the angels. Children who kissed their
toys at night and said, Wait for me, who dreamt lollipop trees, who bid
farewell to their parents from the evening star, children who crawled ghostly
into their grieving father’s lap, who took to heart an old man’s advice that
they never grow old, and never did. All my pretty ones? All? I wanted them
banished, the stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children’s tragic
premonitions. I wanted them scribbled over, torn up. Start over again. Draw a
world where it simply doesn’t happen, a world of only color, no form. Out of my
head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the sea, eternal summer, a brush of
fairy wings and all dark things banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead
cats, harried parents, lonely children, all the coming griefs, all the
sentimental, maudlin tales fashioned out of the death of children.”
I hope you'll read and enjoy both.
