Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott, Alice McDermott

From the Publisher

In Alice McDermott's first work of fiction since her best-selling, National Book Award-winning Charming Billy, a woman recalls her fifteenth summer with the wry and bittersweet wisdom of hindsight.

The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island, Theresa is her town's most sought-after babysitter--cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has come to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place. While Theresa copes with the challenge presented by the neighborhood's waiflike children, the tumultuous households of her employers, the attentions of an aging painter, and Daisy's fragility of body and spirit, her precocious, tongue-in-check sense of order is tested as she makes the perilous crossing into adulthood. In her deeply etched rendering of all that happened that seemingly idyllic season, McDermott once again peers into the depths of everyday life with inimitable insight and grace.

The New York Times Book Review

There is...something Jamesian about McDermott's style: this novel's craftsmanship and its moral intelligence are as one.

Book Magazine

In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night , At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy , which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart , the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines.

At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa—the only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all thehelpmate ads. By the following summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island—loved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits.

When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father.

Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do.

But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer.

So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic.

It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken. —Beth Kephart

Book Magazine

In the seductive, sumptuous world of Alice McDermott's fiction, life is always subdued by loss, love is always inseparable from ache and compassion is always the incomparable salvation, the counterweight to both circumstance and fate. In books like That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award in 1998, McDermott created characters so real and so complex that one could hear them, see them and know them. With Child of My Heart, the author's fifth novel, McDermott introduces a cast of preternaturally precocious children who move about a seaside town with the sort of tenderness and disquieting foreknowledge that is denied to most preoccupied adults. Child of My Heart is startlingly touching, limned with both glimmer and shadow, sweetness and despair, premonition and memory. Its nostalgia is of the Irish variety, in which beauty and heartbreak are kept apart by very slender lines.

At first, this appears to be McDermott's simplest book. The core of the story plays out over the course of just a few days, for one thing, and the events are relayed in neat, nearly chronological order, for another. And yet so much happens to so many hearts, so much is revealed and then forsaken, and so much is finally placed at stake that this may well be McDermott's finest achievement. The novel's protagonist and narrator is a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty named Theresa—the only child of older, undereducated parents whose move to Long Island years before was precipitated by their desire to place their daughter in close proximity to wealth and status. By the time Theresa is ten, Theresa's mother is encouraging her to answer all the helpmate ads. By thefollowing summer, she is the most sought-after caretaker on the eastern tip of Long Island—loved by little girls and boys, by dogs and cats and rabbits.

When the book opens, Theresa is fifteen. Her eight-year-old cousin, whom she dubs Daisy Mae, has come to Long Island for an extended visit, and together the two administer to a growing entourage of animals and neighbors, not to mention the toddler daughter of an inscrutable and possibly famous local artist. They move from house to house, taking dogs out for walks, rescuing a dirty baby from her brothers' abandonment, saving the toddler Flora from the inconceivable neglect of her recently departed mother and her old (but still sexy) painter-father.

Theresa, of course, is the one in charge, but Daisy Mae, the shy and seemingly tentative child of an overcrowded household, soon reveals her own enormous capacity for improving the lives of others. They are a stunning duo, Theresa and Daisy Mae, and McDermott spins their story with aplomb, revealing them to the reader as they reveal themselves to each other. Theresa is never anything short of loving or imaginative. Daisy Mae is nothing less than the perfect recipient for Theresa's love. They grow sweetly conspiratorial in the stories they tell, in the games they make up, in the kindness they dollop onto others. They grow closer than most sisters ever do.

But there is something dark beneath this surface. There is something neither girl is saying. There is, for example, the unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention shown to them by lonely men. There is the chaos of the neighbors next door, so many filthy children, so much parental neglect. But most of all, Daisy Mae is not well, and this is no temporary sickness. There are bruises on her feet, on her back, on her arms. There is a fever in her skin. She is pale and anemic and she tires easily, and none of the adults are paying much attention. Theresa knows that it is up to her to tell the truth about her cousin's blooming bruises. Yet she is wise enough to recognize that if she tells an adult what she has seen, she will rob her cousin of the summer.

So Theresa finds a way to feed Daisy Mae St. Joseph's aspirins instead. She gets more liver and spinach into her cousin's diet. She takes her to the beach and begins what she calls a "peculiar therapy," hoping it will cure the bright blue feet: "I had Daisy stand at the shoreline," Theresa says, "where the waves could swirl around her feet, but not so far in that they could upset her balance. I told her to stand in one place while the water rushed around her ankles and her feet sank into the sand, and then, when the wave went out again, to pull her feet out, move a bit to the left or the right, and then let them sink in again." The love Theresa has for Daisy Mae is huge and overwhelming, but it is the way that Daisy Mae reciprocates that is most touching of all. Love this big can never survive, and McDermott is keen to that. What she gives us here is the dream and its denial, a novel that hurts as much as it heals, and that has all the weight and beauty of a classic.

It is all too beautiful, especially because McDermott, writing with her famous subtlety and style, makes us understand that the girls' innocence might be coming to its end. Child of My Heart is a book of astonishing craft and enormous heart. Line after line evokes and pricks. Truth after truth gets spoken.

Publishers Weekly

There is something almost too good to be true about Theresa, the introspective and unusually perceptive narrator who recalls the summer of her 15th year in this engaging, taut novel by McDermott (Charming Billy). Theresa's Irish-American "well-read but undereducated" parents have little money but plenty of foresight; when they see that their only daughter will be beautiful, they move to East Hampton, Long Island, summer playground of New York City's richest, in the hopes that Theresa's beauty will eventually win her a wealthy husband. Because she has a way with children and animals, her parents have long encouraged her to baby-sit and pet-sit as a way to meet and impress the right people. This particular summer, her favorite cousin, eight-year-old Daisy, tags along as Theresa cares for dogs, cats, neighbor kids and a toddler named Flora, the only child of a 70-year-old womanizing artist and his fourth trophy wife. Entirely self-involved, the artist does manage to look away from his canvas and mistress long enough to notice Theresa, who finds his attentions exciting. Early on, Theresa discovers a tragic secret of Daisy's that she decides to keep to herself, which gives the summer and the book a wistful, melancholy air. As the girls corral their charges, Theresa offers half-innocent, half-ironic comments on the vanities and topsy-turvy family lives of her employers. This is another charmer from McDermott; it's evocative, gently funny and resonant with a sense of impending loss, as all stories of youthful summers must be. There's a whisper of maudlin sentimentality throughout, but Theresa is so likable, and her observations so acute, that one easily forgives it. (Nov. 25) Forecast: A tartly luscious lollipop-studded jacket makes this an enticing option for readers craving a taste of summer. McDermott fans will be thoroughly satisfied. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Unfolding like the waves that roll onto the shore of the East End's beaches, this story about 15-year-old Theresa, the only child of understanding if somewhat absent parents, is threaded with foreboding. Theresa, who lives year 'round in East Hampton, narrates a summer she spends with younger cousin Daisy, who is visiting. Poised and mature, Theresa longs to comfort and care for children-to be surrounded by others so as not to be alone. Her days are spent working as a pet and babysitter for various residents, part-time or otherwise. Mostly, she watches the two-year-old daughter of a famous, 70-year-old painter, with Daisy of course in tow. The narrative soon takes on an ominous feel as mysterious bruises start to appear on Daisy's legs and passionate glances from the painter linger on Theresa a little too long. National Book Award winner McDermott's prose is even and elegant, and the complex character of Theresa offers subtle emotion imbued with haunting prescience. Though some of the details about being a local in the Hamptons are slightly off the mark, McDermott's true-to-life evocation of the lazy, sun-soaked summers in such a heaven (albeit a troubled heaven) outweighs this deficit. A nice addition to any literary collection. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/02.]-Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Theresa, 15, is poised to be a heartbreaker, but she is also the ultimate caregiver. In early childhood, she left Brooklyn with her blue-collar parents for the fashionable Hamptons on Long Island, and her obvious beauty was to be her ticket to a prosperous marriage and easy life. Seemingly oblivious to her potential, Theresa moves serenely through the summer, gathering small animals and children in need of love and comfort. Prime among them is her cousin Daisy, eight, the middle child in a large, mostly male Irish family from Queens, who is so compliant that she seems lost among her siblings. Theresa invites this child of her heart for what is to be a luxurious and indulgent summer by the sea but, immediately upon her arrival, realizes that Daisy is not well. While short on plot, this deceptively simple story about a few days in the early '60s carries an emotional impact that lingers after the novel is finished. Theresa's intuitively kind treatment of her charges is a model of nurturance, and her brief liaison with an elderly painter is a jarring indication of the unplanned path her life might take. The teen's character is fully formed, her clueless parents are likable, and the other inhabitants of the resort are well portrayed, too; the whole is a perfect jewel of exposition. Readers will respond to Theresa and be awed by her understanding of the adults around her.-Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

After the National Book Award–winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns to the familiar turf of her earlier fiction: East Hampton and the inner life of a precocious girl one crucial summer. Theresa lives a quietly secure life as the only child of doting, middle-aged Irish Catholic parents with upwardly mobile aspirations. By the summer she is 15, Theresa--the name’s saintly resonance may strike readers as a bit obvious--is not only lovely but wise and kind as well, adored by the young children and animals she cares for. In contrast, her eight-year-old cousin, "Poor Daisy," is mousy, pale, and generally overlooked among a cramped houseful of siblings in Queens Village. Sorry for Daisy and also sensing a special kinship of imagination, Theresa invites the younger girl to East Hampton for the summer. Daisy arrives with pink plastic sandals she won’t take off. When Theresa stumbles across the reason--bruises on Daisy’s feet and body she can’t explain--a sense of foreboding falls like a shadow of death across the summer. But the foreboding is sexual as well. Theresa and Daisy spend most of their days babysitting the two-year-old daughter of a famous artist. When his much younger wife decamps one morning after letting Theresa know she may be the painter’s next conquest, Theresa finds herself both repulsed and attracted. Day by day, as Daisy’s health deteriorates, Theresa’s sexuality ripens. Meanwhile, the ever-observant Theresa is silent witness to the tragedies rippling under her community’s placid surface: neglected children desperate for affection; a divorced father whose longing for his children almost perverts him; the "tweedy" dowager whose overbearing cheerfulness masks maternalgrief. Though hobbled by a tendency toward sentimentality and self-consciousness, McDermott sculpts her small story with a meticulous eye for the telling detail and transcendent metaphor. We know what’s coming, but so do the characters--that’s part of this tale’s bittersweet power. Author tour

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
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Reading Group Guide

About This Guide
The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to augment your group's reading of Alice McDermott's stunning new novel, Child of My Heart. Steeped in fantasy, love, and clever humor, Child of My Heart explores a torrent of emotions through the innocent eyes of the young and the weathered hearts of the aging. We hope this guide will help your group improve its understanding and appreciation of this exquisite story.

Introduction
"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. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps" (p. 3). So begins Alice McDermott's bittersweet tale of one telling summer, when Theresa, a swanlike fifteen-year-old beauty, faces sadness and surprise as she leaves her fantasylike childhood behind and enters the shocking realm of maturity.

Theresa is the most sought-after baby-sitter and dog-walker in all of East Hampton, where her working-class Irish Catholic parents moved to expose her to wealthy potential husbands. Uncannily adored by children and animals alike, Theresa spends each summer day, with Daisy in tow, splendidly enchanting her bedraggled neighbors, the Moran kids; Flora, the angelic toddler of the local artist; Red Rover, Dr. Kaufman's half-witted golden retriever; and Rupert and Angus, Mr. and Mrs. Richardson's prim Scottish pups. Theresa creates a dreamlike haven for the children and pets where lollipops grow on trees, friendly ghosts visit in the night, and magical pink shoes banish bruises from poor Daisy's feet. Theresa's own dream sequence is interrupted, though, as she discovers her sexual desires, the impending death of her favorite cousin, and the neglected longings for love of the deprived children for whom she cares.

Questions for Discussion
1. How old is Theresa as she narrates her memoir? In what time period is the novel set? How were you able to figure this out?

2. Discuss McDermott's writing style. Why doesn't she separate the novel into chapters? Would you describe her language as poetic? Is it easy to understand?

3. Theresa describes herself as "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 by children and pets" (p. 14). Describe Theresa's other characteristics. How does her personality develop throughout the novel?

4. "He might well have been a genius, a famous artist, a man whose signature and doodles were valuable, but I was fifteen and pretty and I didn't doubt for a moment that I was the one with the advantage here" (p. 22). How does Theresa use her good looks to manipulate people? Does she do it intentionally?

5. Theresa acknowledges that her parents are "wary . . . of what they must have believed was the fast-approaching time of my fulfillment of their dream for me-of my absorption into that world they had taken so much trouble to place me on the threshold of" (p. 33). Describe Theresa's parents. Do you find them superficial or genuine? Are they good parents? How do they compare to the other parents in the novel? What does Theresa think of her parents?

6. How does Theresa's childhood compare to Daisy's, the Morans', the Kaufmans', and Flora's?

7. "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" (pp. 64-65). What does Theresa think of adults? Does she consider herself one? Would you describe this book as a coming-of-age novel?

8. The name Theresa is prevalent in Catholic religious history. Do you think McDermott is making a reference to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a beautiful child of doting parents who entered the convent with special permission from the Vatican at age fifteen; or to Saint Teresa of Ávila, who partially recovered from a serious illness through the intercession of Saint Joseph; or to Mother Teresa, renowned caregiver of the sick and dying? McDermott references another saint as well -- Saint Joseph, chaste husband of the Virgin Mary. Is McDermott referring to the artist with irony?

9. Does Theresa consider herself better than Ana and the cook even though they are all employees of the house?

10. "It was this watching that disturbed me, because in it I saw his belief that he could penetrate with his amused eyes the person I thought I was and find something more to his liking at the core" (p. 170). Theresa is acknowledging that the artist makes her feel as if she is no longer merely a pretty child, but a sexual being and a woman. Is Theresa afraid of growing up? Is she nervous about the sexual urgings developing between her and the artist? What does the artist find at her "core"?

11. Do you find the love scene between the artist and Theresa disturbing?

12. Bill, the young writer who visits Flora's father, asks Theresa, "Are you too young to know what's going on here? I mean, what the arrangement is" (p. 187). Is she too young? What is the arrangement?

13. McDermott draws a number of secondary characters into the story. Why are Petey, Bernadette, Dr. Kaufman, Mrs. Richardson, and all of the others so important? Do you relate to any one character the best?

14. How important is location to the novel? Are you able to visualize East Hampton? Can you imagine this novel set in any other location?

15. Why does Theresa keep Daisy's ailing health a secret? How does this make you feel?

16. "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" (p. 180). Describe the emotions in this statement. Why does Theresa incorporate so much magic and fantasy into her life and the lives of the suffering children who surround her?

17. What is Theresa's vision of love?

18. Children are at the forefront of this novel. Why are McDermott's juvenile characters so captivating? Does she depict childhood realistically?

19. At the close of the novel, we've lost the two central characters-Daisy to death, and Theresa to adulthood. How do these two forms of loss differ?

About the Author
Alice McDermott is the author of four previous novels: Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award in 1998; At Weddings and Wakes, a New York Times bestseller; That Night; and A Bigamist's Daughter. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2002 by Alice McDermott. To be published in December, 2002 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.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. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps. They were wet and blind, curled up like grubs and wrapped in a kind of gray caul--so small it was difficult to know if their bodies moved with the beating of their hearts or the rise of their breaths. Not meant to live, as my parents had told me, being wild things, although I tried for nearly a week to feed them a watery mixture of milk and torn clover. But that was late August.Late in June, Daisy arrived, the middle child of my father's only sister. She came out by herself on the Long Island Railroad, her name and address written on a piece of torn brown paper and attached to her dress with a safety pin. In my bedroom, which she was to share, I opened her suitcase, and a dozen slick packages slid out--tennis sets and pedal-pusher sets, Bermuda shorts and baby doll pajamas and underwear, all brand-new and still wrapped in cellophane. There was a brand-new pair of sneakers as well, the cheap, pulled-from-a-bin kind, bound together with the same plastic thread that held their price tag, and another, even cheaper pair of brittle pale pink slip-ons studded with blue and turquoise jewels. Princess shoes. Daisy was vain about them, I could tell. She asked me immediately-she was the shy child of strict parents so most of what she said involved asking forpermission--if she could take off the worn saddle shoes she had traveled in and put them on. "I won't wear them outside till Sunday," she promised. She had the pale blue, nearly translucent skin of true redheads, a plain wisp of a child under the thick hair and the large head. It made no difference to me what kind of shoes she wore, and I told her so. I was pretty sure they were meant to be bedroom slippers anyway. "Why wait for Sunday?" I said.Kneeling among the packages that made up her wardrobe, I asked, "Didn't you bring any old clothes, Daisy Mae?" She said her mother had told her that whatever else she needed to wear she could borrow from me. I was fifteen that summer and already as tall as my father, but my entire life's wardrobe was stored in the attic, so I knew what she meant. Daisy herself had six brothers and a sister, and even at fifteen I knew that my aunt and uncle resented what they saw as the lavish time and money my parents spent on me, an only child. I knew, in the way fifteen-year-old girls know things-intuitively, in some sense; in some sense based purely on the precise and indifferent observation of a creature very much in the world but not yet of it--that Daisy's parents resented any number of things, not the least of which, of course, was Daisy. She was only one of what must have been to them a long series of unexpected children. Eight over the course of ten years, when apparently what they had been aiming for was something more like two or three.Just the winter before I had spent a weekend with them in their tidy house in Queens Village. I had come up from East Hampton precisely to take poor Daisy (to us, she was always "poor Daisy") into Manhattan to see the Christmas show at Radio City. My Aunt Peg, my father's sister, picked me up at the Jamaica station and immediately dropped the hint that it was impolite and unfair of me not to have invited Bernadette, her twelve-year-old, to come along, too. Aunt Peg was a thin and wiry woman, only, it seemed, a good night's sleep away from being pretty. Under her freckles, her dry skin was pale, and her thick, brittle hair was a weary, sun-faded shade of auburn. Even as she drove, she had a way of constantly leaning forward, as if into a wind, which of course added to her air of determined efficiency. (I could well imagine her pushing a shopping cart through the Great Eastern Mills in Elmont, pulling shorts sets and tennis sets from the crowded bins--one, two, three, four, underwear, pajamas, shoes--dumping all of them directly from shopping bag to suitcase, toss in a hairbrush and a toothbrush, slam the case, done.) "Bernadette will have to find her own fun tomorrow" was the way she put it to me, leaning into the steering wheel as if we were all headed downhill.Their house was at the bottom of a dead-end street: narrow, painted brick, with a long driveway and a shingled garage and a square little back yard big enough for only an umbrella clothesline and a long-disused sandbox. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, and then up another flight of stairs, hidden behind a door, a finished attic that served as a kind of dormitory for the three older boys. There was the odor of children about the place-endemic to any house I have ever visited with more than three kids living in it-a distillation of the domestic scents of milk and wet socks combined with the paper and paste and industrial-strength disinfectant of elementary-school hallways. Despite the number of people living in the small house, there was a remarkable sense of order about the rooms, most especially in my aunt and uncle's bedroom, which was at the head of the stairs. It was a small, square room with one large window that looked out into the street. It held a high four-poster bed, a tall dresser (his) and a low bureau (hers) with a mirror, two night tables, and a straight-backed chair with a tapestry seat. The curtains that crisscrossed the window were white lace. There was a crucifix above the bed, a large oil painting of the Sacred Heart on the far wall--the first thing you saw when you looked into the room from the hallway--a mostly blood-red Oriental carpet on the floor. There was only one photograph in the room: my aunt and uncle's wedding picture. No sign, in other words, of the eight children that had been conceived on the double mattress, under the eternally smooth bedspread. Explanation enough, it seemed to me, for the apparent forgetfulness on their part that had yielded all those unexpected pregnancies. With the bedroom door pulled closed, they couldn't have found it difficult to make themselves believe that they were perfectly free to begin again.Uncle Jack was a transit cop. He had a pitted, handsome face, dark eyes, thin lips, and a thousand and one inscrutable but insurmountable rules regarding his home and his children. No one, for instance, was to walk on the front lawn. Or sit on the bumper of his car when it was parked in the driveway. No one was to call out from an upstairs window when someone was at the front door. No one was to play handball against the garage, or stoop ball against the stoop. There was no going barefoot around the house. No getting up from the dinner table without a precise answer to the precise question "May I please be excused?" No sitting on the curb or standing under the streetlight. No dishes left in the dish drainer. No phone calls from friends after 6 p.m. No playing down in the basement after eight. No sleeping on the couch--day or night, in sickness or in health--which put me in the smallest of the three bedrooms with Daisy and Bernadette, Daisy on the rickety army cot because I was the guest and because Bernadette was not going to have the wonderful day in the city that Daisy was getting the next morning, so she might as well, said Aunt Peg, at least have a good night's sleep.I didn't much care for Bernadette-she was plain and chubby, but, more to the point, she was also extremely smart, which made her mean. It was as if she had already weighed the value of her intelligence against the value the world would assign it and knew instinctively that she would be gypped. Although I always attempted to feel sorry for her, I was more successful at feeling a smug satisfaction as I placed my overnight bag on Daisy's bed and realized that all of Bernadette's Honor Roll certificates plastering the walls could not earn her my affection, or my company. Because whatever sympathy her forlorn expression might have elicited as she watched me from her frilly, dancing-ballerinas bedspread (a bedspread meant for another kind of child altogether) was dissipated by her questions about how I tolerated living "way out at the end of Long Island" after all the interesting summer people had gone.She refused to come along on a walk. It was too cold for walking, she said. There was nothing worth walking to, anyway, not around here-as if she alone had some experience of a better place, a place filled with worthy destinations. I understood even then that this cool disdain of hers was the last refuge of the homely (generosity and sweetness--which was what she saved for adult company--being the next to last), and was glad enough to leave her to it. There is no misanthrope like a chubby misanthrope. Daisy and I were free, then, to slip through the slight jog of space between the tall hurricane fence that ran along my cousins' property and the chain-link that ran along their neighbors', into an alleyway that no doubt had some part in Uncle Jack's listed prohibitions. It ran behind the series of dead ends that made up the neighborhood, and was broken here and there by even smaller paths that led between other narrow yards and other houses and out into other streets. We followed these smaller passageways randomly, emerging from between fenced winter gardens and storage sheds, or battered garbage cans and tangles of abandoned bicycles, onto streets neither one of us had ever seen before. I was, of course, within half an hour, totally lost, but Daisy held my hand with complete confidence, marveling, I could tell, at just how I knew where to turn.When we came out onto a broad boulevard divided by a series of lacy, winter-bare willows, I heard her catch her breath. All the little houses here had front sunrooms, and by some wonderful neighborhood consensus every windowpane of every one of them had been decorated with a sprayed-on parabola of snow. "We're in Bavaria," I said, and Daisy whispered, "We are?" as if this were a surprise, and a destination, I had planned for her. And then real snow began to fall. If you had seen the way she glanced up at the sky, you'd have thought I'd planned this, too. It accumulated first on the grass, and then, more rapidly, on the street and sidewalk. Our footprints were the first to mark it. We walked down the narrow divide, under the thin willow branches as they gathered snow, unable to tell if it was the yellow sky that was darkening above us or only the thickening canopy of coated trees. We threw back our heads and opened our mouths and stuck out our tongues and felt the snowflakes in our eyes and on our bare throats. When other children started to come out of the houses behind us, shouting, optimistically scraping sleds over sidewalks, we ran to get away from them, up to Jamaica Avenue, where the streetlights were already on. It was that odd light of early winter, afternoon turning prematurely to steel-blue night. We went into a candy store on a corner, its entrance already slick with wet footprints and its smell of newsprint and candy bars and the cold overcoats of men just up from the subway making us feel we had indeed traveled a long way.fs20At the counter, I bought us each a hot chocolate with the extra money I always put in my shoe when I took the Long Island Railroad. It was lovely stuff, made with hot water, not milk, and topped with whipped cream from a cold silver can. It was served in chipped and yellowing cups and saucers that smelled faintly of coffee--the warm rims of the cups delightfully dry and thick against our lips. Drinking it, we pretended to speak French-tossing the word chocolat back and forth between us--and hugging the cups like Europeans, our elbows on the counter. (Cup-hugging and elbows on the table being, of course, Daisy said, two more of her father's taboos.) After I paid, I asked for directions home from the man at the register, pretending I was only out to confirm what I already knew, although I'm not sure Daisy would have noticed anyway. 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.