Child of My Heart Read Online Free

in the neighborhood. Flora was easy enough. She was two and a half and mostly docile, and my charge was to pick her up every morning and, if the weather was good, push her in her stroller to the beach, give her lunch there, let her take her nap, and then bring her home again at four or five so the housekeeper could bathe her and put her to bed. On rainy days, I would play with her in her room or walk her back to my house, where I would have to keep her, like some delicate china vase, just slightly beyond the full grasp of the Moran kids’ dirty hands. She was tiny for her age, with very little hair, and her mother dressed her always in loose white dresses, like a baby in a painting. Her mother was some kind of dancer or actress. She was thin and tall, with something severe about her face—a sharp nose and high cheekbones and a narrow mouth, a certain gray roughness to her otherwise flawless skin that would put you in mind of expertly poured concrete. She was a good thirty or forty years younger than Flora’s father, the artist—maybe more. He was an unremarkable old man, glasses, khaki pants, a stoop.
    He had a long thatch of white hair that seemed to rise over his head like a pure white tongue of smoky fire. I don’t think I ever figured out just where it took root, but it seemed to me that his hair moved constantly, like a flame—perhaps fanned by the constant stirring of his artistic brain. My parents said he was supposed to be a genius. He painted huge abstracts in a garage-sized studio beside the house, and sometimes out on the gravel driveway itself. They weren’t particularly colorful or interesting pictures, but he had done some sketches of Flora and his wife that hung in Flora’s bedroom, and these were good enough to make me believe he actually knew what he was doing.
    The first time I baby sat for Flora he gave me a bit of his work. It was an evening in the early spring, the April before Daisy came. They had called me at the last minute because their housekeeper had missed her train from the city and they had an affair to attend (or so it was put to me by my mother, who took the phone call) in Southampton . My father dropped me at the door and the cook let me in. I found him sitting at a narrow desk in their long, low living room. He was waiting for his wife and he was drawing, scrawling really, two or three charcoal lines on sketch paper. As soon as he had done one, he threw it on the floor and began another. I introduced myself and he said, still drawing, that the girls would be right out. He sat sideways at the little desk, his long legs crossed, drawing, tossing, drawing again. As I waited (sitting on the edge of what seemed a quite modern and impractical white leather couch), he must have gone through fifty pieces of paper, and from what I could see, the pattern of marks on each one was exactly the same. When Flora toddled into the room, he barely looked up, not even when she stepped on some of his strewn papers. She was in a white nightgown and her thin hair rose straight up like her father’s. A pretty child in her own, odd way. I showed her the magazine I’d been paging through, and without hesitation she leaned against my knees. She was on my lap by the time her mother came in (dressed, as I recall, in something elegant and vaguely Chinese), and as I received my usual instructions about where they would be and what lights should be left on when Flora went to sleep, I noticed that he continued drawing and tossing his drawings on the floor. Then suddenly, without a word to him, his wife leaned down to kiss her daughter’s head, turned her long nose toward the front door, and followed it out. I had a moment when I wondered if he was going along. I even wondered if he was the husband at all and not some visiting grandfather I’d be expected to mind as well. I kept talking to Flora about the pictures in the magazine, keeping her distracted from her mother’s departure but watching him, too, from the