She wasn’t sure if she’d ever make what her father would call “real” money, but she wanted a career. She’d spent a lot of time on the presentation she’d made to David that morning. Her idea was to persuade Agnes Lee to write a book called Agnes When, a memoir about her childhood and how she came to write the When Nan books. Alongside it the company could reissue all the When Nan books in six volumes, both in hardcover and paperback. A new generation of children would become Nan fans. Boys too, now. Marketing could emphasize that. Maud had made it clear that she wanted to handle this memoir project herself—that she’d be the editor, not an assistant.
When she’d dropped it off with him, she’d turned at the door of his office and said, “It’s a good idea.” Then left. That had been a risk. Who turned her back on David? She’d felt powerful. Now when she pictured it, she winced.
She turned on 18th and walked across to Fifth Avenue. Had she been too assertive? She hadn’t seen him the rest of the day. Was that meaningful, or was he just busy?
There were a few crazy people on the walk home. Nothing like when her mother was young in the eighties and the mental hospitals had tipped forward and all the patients had fallen onto the streets. Heidi told Maud that people were frightened of them, but that she never was. “Our minds are made by a weaver. Your mind is a strong tapestry that can’t be ripped. My mind is a fishing net with lots of holes where strange notions can enter and get caught.” Heidi spent hours chatting, laughing, and commiserating with the unseen people of Manhattan. Maud was proud of her—and jealous of the time she gave away. Like all children, she wanted her mother’s full attention.
The fastest route to the Village was across and down, but in the warm months, if she had time, Maud charted longer routes down all the different avenues. Today, Fifth, right to Washington Square Park. Her spirits invariably lifted as she crossed the street where Henry James had sent carriages rolling, couples flirting, long skirts lifting above puddles, calling cards waiting on silver trays. She passed triumphally under the arch and her spirit expanded. Skateboarders, chess players, street performers, dog walkers, drug dealers. Children, students, old friends, dogs. Every creature touched by the pale green of June. The month of promise, when people married and believed they’d always be happy.
She turned west and stopped at the light at Sixth Avenue. The streets teemed with men. Mesh shirts, motorcycle boots, tattoos. She nodded to a couple she knew. She’d grown up among gay men and had heard their stories of how they realized they were different and how they told their families. “They’re ahead of most straight men,” Heidi said. “They had to figure out who they are and not take it for granted. You’ll figure out who you are, too.”
Maud had given the question a lot of thought, but she wasn’t sure yet of an answer. She wasn’t a free spirit like Heidi. She wasn’t social like the men who roamed her neighborhood. She had pursued her love of books into a career, but she still felt there was something essential about herself yet to uncover. But she was already twenty-six. She hoped she’d discover whatever it was soon.
She stepped into the day care center. A dozen sets of searching eyes looked up—Are you my mother? She had to disappoint all but one, the nearly three-year-old balancing a block on top of a construction of other blocks. Clemmie—for Clemence, a French name that Maud had loved since she first heard it—looked so small when she was at a distance. A tiny girl in tiny sneakers and shorts and a T-shirt, with large gray eyes like Heidi’s and embarrassingly matted dark blonde hair. One of the women on duty alerted her to her mother’s arrival, and Clemmie knocked over the block tower in her hurry to cross the room. Maud pushed her shoulder bag behind her back and lifted Clemmie onto her hip.
“Ready?”
Clemmie nodded from her waist, her whole body bobbing forward.
“Let’s go make dinner.” She inhaled the scent of Clemmie’s hair, sweaty and rank. No one told you that you’d be all right with your child’s worst scents.
Clemmie reached out a chubby hand to every dog they passed. Some people stopped to let her say hello, and Maud lowered her and lifted her again. “That was very gentle,” Maud said. “Good girl.”
They turned into Charles Street. When Maud was little, she’d enjoyed the sensation of envious eyes on her back as she walked up the steps and through the dark green door of their house. Then, and now, the first impression inside was the scent of lilies and cool, quiet space. When she wasn’t sick, Heidi bought new flowers every week—otherwise Maud did. The house was worth a lot of money at this point. Her father didn’t have much to offer in the way of loyalty or thoughtfulness, but he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He’d bought this place in the late seventies, when he was a student at NYU. Even then he’d been making money on the stock market, and investing in property seemed like a good idea. Heidi had never criticized Maud’s father after their divorce, which had frustrated teenage Maud, who had a lot on her mind already without having to decide what to think of Moses Silver. Now she was glad that decision had been left up to her.
She set her bag on the floor and placed her keys in the ceramic dish on the hall table. A mirror hung directly in front of her, but she didn’t glance at it. She wasn’t beautiful like her mother, but she had heavy brown shiny hair, and she looked like a girl of the city. She was New York thin. She could either stand out or disappear into crowds, depending on her mood, and she could walk as fast as many people ran.
“Hello? Ma?”
She lowered Clemmie and got her a juice box from the refrigerator. The living room and kitchen and back garden were empty. She called up the stairs. “Anyone home?” she called. “Ma?” Her voice echoed between the walls, and faded to expose the creaks of an old house. She held Clemmie’s hand and climbed upward. An old beige runner covered the second-floor hallway. She peered into the rooms but sensed their emptiness even before she looked.
She headed up to the third floor. Halfway up she felt anxious. Before reaching the top step she knew—her mother had turned blue again.
Maud paused to steady herself. She carried within an emotion for which there was no exact word, though it was in the range of well-being—pink in hue, warm in temperature, June-like in atmosphere, feminine in nature. It was her touchstone, her self. Her being and beliefs had formed around it, both her conviction that hope was rational and her certainty that the world was moving toward an actualization of noble ideals. She’d once described it to a doctor of Heidi’s, who told her it was a memory of innocence—or a dream—most likely from the time before she understood that something was wrong with her mother. Maud couldn’t remember that time. What had it been like? All she had left was a sentence Heidi still repeated sometimes. I loved you before I knew you. She said it came from the Bible, but Maud wouldn’t know.
Once Heidi had appeared on Maud’s blacktop playground in the middle of the school day and swung next to the children, laughing loudly yet in a perceptibly joyless way, until a teacher coaxed her to stop. She might stay in bed for days, unwashed, smelling of the jumbled inside of her body. Or she might take Maud on a subway to a hotel uptown and rent a room so they could swim in the pool and order room service and jump on the beds. “No one knows where we are!” she’d say delightedly. “Should we live here, like Eloise?” Or they might go to Central Park at dusk and lie on their backs in the Great Meadow to watch night fall, then not leave until the sun came up. “No one can see us, Maudie, we are spirits of the night.” No, we’re not, Maud thought, missing her bed. She was both exasperated by Heidi and wished she could be less conventional. Maud was rigid and aware. Heidi was fearless and clueless. “I named you Maud because it is a word for meadow. Meadows are the most beautiful places.” When Heidi was manic, life was fun, if unnerving. When she was depressed, Maud couldn’t find her among the shadows.