Swift as a shadow, short as any dream

One winter afternoon in Queens, circa 1960, Theresa, the 15-year-old narrator of Alice McDermott’s wondrous new novel, takes her little cousin Daisy to a candy store. They buy 100 lollipops and bring them home to Daisy’s siblings, six brothers and a skeptical sister, who asks, as any child would, “Where’d you get these?” Before Daisy can answer, Theresa is inventing a sugary but morbid fantasy about an old couple whose only child, 50 years ago to the day, dreamed of a lollipop tree in his frontyard at dusk, and then suddenly died. Each year on the anniversary of his death, in the brief February hour between daylight and dark, the couple hang lollipops on their front willow for the neighborhood children.

By the time Theresa finishes telling the story, with the 100 lollipops as her evidence, the six boys have turned their backs to the television set, so entranced are they. But Bernadette, the cynic, demands of Daisy to know whether this is true. Daisy -- tiny, shy and only 8 -- neither confirms nor denies the tale. She shrugs her shoulders and says, “You should have come.” Theresa, herself in the twilight hour between childhood and the world of adults, is pleased: “Child of my heart,” she thinks.

Like William Trevor, Alice McDermott is a genius of quiet observation. Her antenna is perpetually raised and turning, humming and warm with reception. Her novels possess a satisfying sameness, in the same way that Jane Austen’s novels share certain similarities in content and tone but are uniquely enchanting. Readers of “Charming Billy,” her 1998 novel that won the National Book Award, will recognize the setting of “Child of My Heart” on the eastern end of Long Island and its elegiac, end-of-summer tone.

Theresa is the only child of middle-class Irish Catholic parents who moved to a fisherman’s cottage in tony East Hampton when she was a toddler because, as Theresa explains, “[t]hey knew rich people lived way out on Long Island, even if only for the summer months, and putting me in a place where I might be spotted by some of them was their equivalent of offering me every opportunity.” By the time she’s a young teenager, many people in East Hampton have indeed noticed her, both for her beauty (“a young Elizabeth Taylor”) and for her uncanny ability to win the hearts of children and small animals alike. She spends her summers baby-sitting, cat-sitting and dog-walking for her fecklessly rich neighbors and peers with perfect vision into their expensive but immature lives.

Theresa is what she would call a “wise soul.” Like her patron saint, she has a rare and spiritual understanding of the spectrum of human souls. She describes people in swift and accurate swipes, summing them up unequivocally. Daisy’s mother is “a thin and wiry woman, only, it seemed, a good night’s sleep away from being pretty.” The very young wife of a famous septuagenarian painter, is “thin and tall, with something severe about her face ... a certain gray roughness to her otherwise flawless skin that would put you in mind of expertly poured concrete.” When she speaks for the first time with the painter himself, an artist whose infant daughter Theresa babysits, she intuits their fundamental differences. “ ‘I hear you’re a babysitter par excellence,’ he said -- not the way I would say it, but the way someone who really spoke French would say it. I told him I just liked children. He nodded slowly, as if this were a sad but complex piece of information.”

The novel spans the few summer weeks when Daisy leaves her home in Queens -- a household of 10 living on a transit cop’s salary -- to visit Theresa in East Hampton. “Poor Daisy,” her family collectively refers to her. They only think about her in terms of her physical frailty: “Her ears stood out like the handles on a teacup. Her skin, the bones of her bare shoulders seemed teacup thin, pale blue and fragile.” There is something fairy-like about Daisy -- all quiet bone and wild red hair -- that makes her family feel as if there’s little they can do to save her from the world. Only Theresa has paid her any attention in her short life, and hence the almost magical event of her visit to her cousin’s in East Hampton.

Immediately, Daisy becomes Theresa’s sidekick as she makes her rounds walking the dogs and minding the children of people too busy, or lazy, to do it themselves. Their first day together is a long, masterful arc that runs about 70 pages; everything about it, in McDermott’s skilled hand, possesses the joyous, free-spirited, soul-exhausting quality of a child’s summer day: “There was the lovely scent of fading summer afternoon in the air -- maybe a hint of the unseen children’s suntan lotion.” Yet, as every child knows, melancholy, or worse, can shadow even the most perfect day.

As a guide to the many layers of this world -- the social hierarchies, the expectations about gender, and, most important, the division between children and adults -- Theresa is both innocent and wise; she is a step or two from the center of things but never ironically detached. She understands things, “in a way that 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 of the world but not yet of it.” She’s a spirit hovering, momentarily, between the complex fairyland of childhood and the lumbering reality of adults, a narrator whose hand the reader never wants to release -- a hand that Daisy holds and trusts even as the surrounding world darkens.

It is no coincidence that Theresa refers to herself as “Titania among her fairies.” She even nicknames two of the kids she baby-sits Peaseblossom and Cobweb. It is apt that McDermott weaves into her story elements of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for this novel casts the same mystical spell as Shakespeare’s fantasy. Theresa is, like Titania, queen of the fairies, “a spirit of no common rate; / The summer still doth tend upon my state,” and the admixture of events of that brief summer in East Hampton possesses the music of discord, “such sweet thunder,” as Shakespeare writes.

Like a summer storm at first far away, the momentum of McDermott’s story is both uncertain and ominous. Just when you think these childhoods are too precious, she reminds you just how perilous childhood can be. For on this fine day -- a day we come to believe as Daisy’s first true extended moment of happiness -- tragedy looms all that much greater when, late at night, Theresa, while rubbing Noxzema into Daisy’s sunburned skin, discovers foreboding bruises upon her feet. Because Theresa’s greatest fear is the end of childhood (none more so than her own), she decides to wait before telling anyone what she knows.

It is a fateful decision, born of a child’s wish for the world not to change, but the bruises continue to reappear on Daisy’s tiny body. One night as the girls are preparing for bed, she looks into her hands. “Out, damned spot,” she says, but Theresa lovingly admonishes her. “I put a finger to her lips. ‘Darn,’ I said. ‘Out darn spot.’ ” Without another word, McDermott makes it clear that the spot Daisy and Theresa are wishing away is the bruise of early leukemia. All Theresa can offer is baby aspirin.

Soon the storm will arrive, and Daisy will be taken away. Theresa, in the torment of her changing world, finds herself drawn to the “old, old man” artist. McDermott’s denouement -- a mix of candy and cancer, purity and prurience -- isn’t so much a malevolent exchange between adult and child as an inexorable culmination of shuddering events.

Like Jane Austen, McDermott, one of our finest novelists at work today, is the master of a domain that in the hands of most writers would be limiting. In “Child of My Heart,” she has transformed her trademark material of Irish American life into a poignant and rewarding fictional world. “Child of My Heart” extends her artistic triumphs, and we should rejoice.