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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Reading Alice McDermott's new novel, "Child of My Heart" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), we know that a child is going to die--the book is strewn with omens--but we don't know which one. Could it be Theresa? She is our narrator, looking back on a summer she spent, as she tells us in her opening sentence, taking care of "four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids; Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin; and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist." The time is the sixties; the place is the North Shore of Long Island. In the story, Theresa is fifteen, nubile, and precocious. "Send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die," she says, quoting Eustacia Vye. (She is reading "The Return of the Native.") She may get her wish, though not in the form she imagines. As Flora's father, the "local artist," fingers Theresa's thigh, we cringe. But she can't die, we figure. She's our narrator--hence still alive, presumably.
Failing her, the Moran children seem ripe for woe. There are five of them, and no father in sight. All that the Morans have is a mother who divides her time between having sex with the local cop and fighting with her dipsomaniac father. In the Morans' house, next door to Theresa's, screams are heard, doors slam. The children are later found "in the road, on our lawn, across our back steps, like the detritus of some explosion."
Another endangered child is Flora, the little girl whom Theresa is babysitting. Early in the book, Flora's mother leaves town, not without first saying to Theresa, "If my husband tries to fuck you while I'm gone, don't be frightened. He's an old man, and he drinks. Chances are it will be brief." Flora's father is an Abstract Expressionist, something like a Jackson Pollock grown old and rich and discouraged. He does indeed drink, starting in the morning, and he's already bedding the maid. While they are at their business, Flora could easily toddle down the lawn of...
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