Parachutes and Kisses (27 page)

Would she remember Daddy coming to visit on Serpentine Hill Road and then leaving again and again? Would she remember her ancient great-grandfather Stoloff—who, just a wink of time before, had been a baby himself—painting her portrait when she was only a tiny child? Would she remember the divorce Olympics —the crying on the telephones, the shouting in the bedroom, Mommy and Daddy screaming behind locked doors? Would she remember the nannies—from Mary Hogg to Bertha-Belle to Nurse Librium? Isadora was reasonably sure she would remember Cicely from Stoke-on-Trent. She had stayed the longest: the others' tenure had been very brief.

 

Cicely had arrived when Mandy was just past two, and had stayed until she was just past three—departing, in fact, a little while after her parents split. That was a real trauma—for Cicely was Amanda's Mary Poppins, the nanny you dream of and idealize when you are grown—and she had had the bad faith to leave two months after Josh and Isadora broke up.

Isadora had found Cicely in London. It was not long after Bertha-Belle's food-buying habits had been discovered, and not long after dolorous Olive had tied the knot with Beryl Springer. Isadora had had to go to London to negotiate a prospective film deal (a BBC producer wanted to make a miniseries about Marietta Robusti and Isadora was to write it), and since she and Josh were currently sans nanny, she figured she would give the famed NNEBs of England a tumble. (NNEB was short for National Nursery Education Board—for only in England was nannying still considered an honorific profession.)

Isadora got a list of nanny agencies from a British friend, and one day, sitting in a splendid mirrored suite at the Savoy, before a cart of gorgeous crustless Oscar Wildean cucumber-and-butter sandwiches, she interviewed a motley parade of English girls, who all came equipped with a National Nursery Education Board degree, and were all dying to go to the New World.

One was a timorous blonde with albino eyelashes (who also looked distinctly pregnant). Her name was Arabella and she squeaked like a mouse. One was an Irish wench who confessed under duress that she had a boyfriend in America who studied at NYU—but that she had absolutely no intention of getting married. One was a well-born lass from Oxfordshire named Sophie who appeared to be fleeing a lecherous stepfather (as in some eighteenth-century saga). And one was Cicely from Stoke-on-Trent.

Cicely was red-haired, buxom and sloe-eyed. She had what appeared to be a Heidelberg dueling scar on her cheek from some mysterious accident, but this somehow only made her sexier. She wore spike heels, a frilly white blouse, and a black flannel skirt that seemed to have been shrunk onto her body.

“How do you feel about marriage?” Isadora asked. That was the first question she always asked.

“Oh, I don't think I want to get married until I'm thirty or so,” Cicely said, tossing her marmalade mane.

Famous last words.

A few weeks later, Cicely arrived in America on a Laker flight, with a temporary visa in her pocket. She took to the baby immediately, bringing Amanda puppets she had sewn with her own hands. She cooked steak-and-kidney pies, onion tarts, and blood puddings, and she assembled fabulous trifles out of ladyfingers, clotted cream, and strawberry jam. She was Brisk, British, and Organized. She made Isadora think of the glories of the British Empire, and of course she won Amanda's heart at once.

Isadora and Josh breathed a great, shared sigh of relief. They had found Mary Poppins. But Mary Poppins is notorious for appearing and disappearing at will.

Cicely did a brilliant job for the first six months. (“Brill,” as the Sloane Rangers say.) Amanda adored her, adored her brisk British discipline, adored her cooking, her accent, her elaborate way of making up her face. And Cicely was devoted to Amanda, too. Baby and Nanny were clearly in love. But then construction began on Isadora's new studio and into their island paradise came Carl the Carpenter. You could almost see Cicely suck in her breath and mutter, “0 Brave New World that has such people in‘t,” when Carl first crossed their threshold.

He was the sort of dumb California beachboy hunk an English girl adores—handlebar mustache, platinum-blond surfer hair, loutish male chauvinist ways. In his hand, he carried a six-pack. In his head, visions of big English tits. He would hang from the rafters wielding his great big hammer, and Cicely would flounce in, wearing her flannel nightgown, tits abounce underneath, and she would say, “Coffee anyone?”

Carl would salivate and smile: “Please.”

“Black or white?” Cicely would sing. “One lump or two?”

This mating dance went on morning after morning as the office was framed, floored, roofed, outfitted with bookshelves, built-in desks, library ladders, balconies, and decks. Hammers rang in the house all day and hammers must have been ringing in Cicely's thighs too.

Carl hailed from Canoga Park and he was married (to a wife he did not love, Cicely informed Isadora), but he seemed to have a glad eye for the girls. Cicely was clearly mooning over him, but Isadora did not think things had got past the mooning stage—which only goes to show how wrong she can be.

Oh yes—there
was
the time that Cicely had asked Isadora whether she had ever been in love with a married man—but Isadora did not make the appropriate connection. She could be quite dense and naive in her way. Her head was always so full of her own fantasies that she sometimes failed to see what was happening around her, in her own house. Anyway, things did not really come to a head until one ghastly day—the first day of spring it was, and just slightly before Isadora's birthday—when Cicely's love intersected with Chekarf's life.

Isadora was putting on her makeup—listening to the sounds of hammers ringing above her in the half-built studio—when she heard anguished barking, the unmistakable sound of tragedy in the driveway.

She ran out of the bathroom, a lipstick in hand, and at the front door collided with Cicely, who was sobbing uncontrollably.

“I wouldn't have hurt him for the world,” she choked.

“Where
is
he?” Isadora demanded.

“There!” she cried, running past her into the house.

In the driveway, sat Chekarf, wearing a stunned expression on his wholly trustful face. He was a small, quizzical ball of white fur, oozing blood onto the asphalt of the driveway.

Isadora scooped him up in her arms, screaming for Josh to come, to come quickly, so that they could rush him to the vet's. At that very moment, Isadora saw her other baby, Amanda, sitting in the back of the same black Datsun that had just run over Chekarf. Amanda witnessed this mayhem calmly as two-year-olds tend to do. The significance dawns later.

“Where Cee gone?” she asked in her two-year-old cadences. Cee, being her name for Cicely.

Where indeed? Cee was having hysterics in the secretary's office, while the baby was stranded in the car, the dog was dying, and Isadora was realizing to her horror that she could not both hold Chekarf and rescue Amanda from her infant seat. The mortally wounded took precedence over the healthy.

“Wait a minute, darling,” Isadora said, “Cee will come to get you.”

“No—
you
get me, Mommy,” Amanda said.

“I can‘t, darling. Chekarf is hurt.”

“Chekarf
not
hurt,” Isadora's daughter said, sweeping away death with a wave of her small pink hand.

Just then, Carl the carpenter appeared in the driveway.

“Carl—get the baby, will you? We have to rush to the vet's.”

Carl opened the Datsun door and took Amanda in his arms; Josh emerged with the keys to the other car and they began their maddening trip through the winding Connecticut roads to the vet‘s—getting stuck behind trucks, behind cars that seemed driven by the lame, the halt, and the brain-damaged, behind earth-moving equipment, tractors, school buses.

“Oh God, God, God, let him be okay,” Isadora said, looking down at Chekarf, her first baby, now six years old. Was she holding him right? Did he have internal injuries? Had he been run over, or only broken in a mendable way like a chipped cup?

“Let it be a broken paw,” Isadora pleaded with the deity, “please only a broken paw.” And she almost convinced herself, despite the blood that flowed over her brown leather jacket, despite the stunned expression in those eyes like wet Greek olives, despite the anguished howls and growls he uttered periodically before he lay still again, still again, still again.

“It will be okay, Chekarf my love,” Isadora said. “It will be okay.”

Josh swerved around a garbage truck, nearly colliding with an oncoming car. Isadora's own death seemed less important to her at that moment than Chekarf's.

That dog represented
her
—he was her alter ego—a bouncy little ball of fluff—cocky, yet vulnerable-sensitive, almost psychic, yet childlike in his willingness to trust. He was the Don Quixote of dogs, the Candide of canines, simultaneously the Portnoy of pooches—always jerking off on the sofa cushions until they were stiff. He was the first animal Isadora wholly loved, the first animal she trained (if you could call it that), the first animal who taught her about the bond between humans and other species.

Because of Chekarf, Isadora gave money to animal rights' groups, and picketed outside furriers' conventions. Because of Chekarf, Isadora wrote letters to congressmen deploring the baby seal slaughter, the dolphin slaughter, the slaughter of calves, and the confining of chickens to brightly lit coops where they laid eggs, day and night, until they dropped.

Because of Chekarf, Isadora knew that the souls of dogs and the souls of people partook of a great communal soul, that we were, on some level, all one being. Because of Chekarf, Isadora understood certain mysteries of the universe she had always scoffed at before.

Chekarf was her familiar, her friend, her reflection. Were she a witch, he would do her bidding. Was that why he had to be killed?

At the vet‘s, Chekarf let out another mournful howl, and then he was taken into the inner sanctum of the operating room. The vet, a nice, plain-faced young woman with ash-blond hair, advised Isadora and Josh to take a walk. They did.

Arm in arm, both trembling, they ambled down the Post Road, where the traffic was roaring by. Isadora thought of all the times they had brought Chekarf here and how happy he always was to go home. Would he this time? She thought of their big red mutt, Virginia Woof, who had come to them from the pound, almost dead from her various canine diseases, but who now stood an excellent chance of outliving Chekarf.

“Our first baby,” Josh said. “I hope he makes it.”

“God—I hope so.”

Like Mandy, Chekarf was a pulsing flesh-and-blood link between them. They had not conceived him, perhaps, but they had raised him, trained him, loved him, slept with him. He had guarded their homes, slept between them in bed, watched them fuck, amused them with his antics, prompted them to invent a whole language of intimacy, jokes, songs, games. They had driven out in search of him at night when he strayed on the road; they had offered to get the bitch an abortion when he knocked up a neighbor's pet. (The offer was declined.) They had cuddled him, brushed him, bathed with him, picked off his ticks, powdered his fleas.

They walked mournfully back to the vet's office, both praying. When they came in, the vet was there to greet them.

“He died on the table,” she said. “I think he was in deep shock when you brought him, but I had to probe his internal organs just to be sure. He had massive internal injuries. When I inserted a tube in his throat, it filled with blood. I'm sorry. There was nothing I could do to save him. Thank goodness it was so quick. I don't think he felt much after he was hit. He was in shock.”

Isadora remembered the wide, staring eyes on the way to the vet's. Those pupils were a sure sign of shock. But if he had felt nothing, why those hideous howls and yelps? Chekarf had felt pain—not only pain, but betrayal—the betrayal of a small creature who depends on big creatures for life.

“What should we do with the body?” Isadora asked, feeling her heart go cold as a stone.

“We can send it to be cremated, if you wish.”

Isadora looked at Josh.

“Yes,” they both said in unison—because they could not bear looking at that broken body again. Isadora felt as she might have if it were her baby's broken body—the finality of rended flesh. How difficult to believe in spirit at such a time. What an abstraction spirit seems at that moment. And yet, what a lottery it was—flesh. Had the tires of the car swerved slightly, they would be taking their beloved bundle home.

They drove back to the house silenced by grief. Isadora's brown leather jacket was crusted with blood and bits of white fur clung to it. She vowed never to clean it. It smelled of Chekarf. She loved his smell as she loved the smell of Josh's armpits, the smell of Amanda's pee, the smell of the sweaty back of her baby's neck, all moist and pink. If flesh is merely a lesson, a way of learning spirit, why does it mark us so, why do we love it so? Why do we grow so attached to flesh if it is only a way station? And where is that world of pure spirit in which we do not grieve over mere flesh?

At home, Cicely was still sobbing and Amanda was toddling about, pursuing Virginia Woof. She did not instantly notice the absence of the other animal.

“I wouldn't have hurt him for the world,” Cicely sobbed again, “not for the world.”

Isadora wanted to murder the girl with her bare hands. She wanted to thrash her with a broom, or bring down a hot poker upon her head. Yet it was difficult to commit mayhem against somebody who sniveled so. At the very least, she wanted to take Amanda out of her care lest she kill
her,
too.