The Dutch House (11 page)

It had been two weeks.

“Look at you,” Sandy said, reaching up to put her hands on my shoulders. I thought her hair was grayer. There were tears in her eyes.

Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine).

“You can’t feed us!” Maeve said.

“I’ve always fed you,” Jocelyn said.

Sandy took a skeptical glance around the living room. “I could come by every now and then, help you keep things up.”

Maeve laughed. “How could I not keep this clean?”

“You have a job,” Sandy said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe across the floor. “You don’t need to worry about keeping house on top of everything else. Anyway, how long could the whole thing take me, an hour?”

“I can do it,” I said, and the three of them looked at me like I was suggesting I make my own clothes. “Maeve won’t let me get a job.”

“Stick to basketball,” Sandy said.

“And making decent grades,” Jocelyn said.

Maeve nodded. “Let’s just wait for a little bit, see how we do.”

“We’re doing fine, really,” I said.

Sandy disappeared into the bedroom and came back five seconds later, looking at me. “Where do you sleep?”

“Does he know how to take care of you?” Jocelyn asked my sister.

Maeve waved her hand. “I’m fine.”

“Maeve,” Jocelyn said. It’s a funny thing to say but she was being stern. Sandy and Jocelyn were never stern with Maeve.

“I take care of everything.”

Jocelyn turned to me. “I have found your sister passed out cold on more than one occasion. Sometimes she forgets to eat or she doesn’t take enough of her insulin. Sometimes it’s nothing she’s done wrong but her sugar goes off all the same. You’ve got to keep an eye on her, especially when things are stressful. She’ll tell you stress has nothing to do with it, but it does.”

“Stop,” Maeve said.

“She has sugar tablets. You make her show you where she keeps them, make sure she has extras in her purse. If she’s in trouble you have to give her a sugar tablet and call an ambulance.”

I tried to take in the thought of Maeve on the floor. “I know that,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I knew about the insulin but not the sugar. “She showed me.”

Maeve sat back, smiling. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Jocelyn looked at us for a minute, then shook her head. “You’re appalling, both of you, but it doesn’t matter. Now that he knows about it he’ll make you show him. You’ll bug her once we leave, won’t you Danny?”

Even though I was sensitive to the fluctuation of Maeve’s blood sugar, I realized I didn’t know the details. I knew how to stand by and watch her take care of herself, but that was not the same thing as taking care of her. Jocelyn was right though, I would make Maeve explain everything to me once they were gone. “I will.”

“You know I’ve been living in this apartment by myself all this time, don’t you?” Maeve said. “It’s not like Danny’s been riding his bike over here at night to give me injections.”

“Or you can call me,” Jocelyn said, ignoring her completely. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Sandy had found a job keeping house in Elkins Park. “They’re nice enough. Not as much money,” she said, “and not as much work.” Jocelyn had found a family to cook for in Jenkintown but she also had to help with the two children and was expected to walk the dog. Not as much money and considerably more work. The sisters laughed. Better to have been fired, was what they said. That made it a badge of honor. They wouldn’t have stayed in that house a minute without me anyway.

“Once I get settled I’m going to try to talk my family into hiring Jocelyn. They need a cook. That way we could be together again,” Sandy said.

Had I handled the situation better and not been critical—not just at the end but for all the years Andrea had been in our lives—Sandy and Jocelyn would still be sitting together at the blue kitchen table, shelling peas and listening to the radio.

Sandy was looking up at the ceiling, the windows, like she was measuring the place in her head. “Why didn’t you move into one of your father’s buildings?” she asked my sister.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Maeve said. She was still flustered about the insulin.

Jocelyn took the spot beside Sandy on the couch. Maeve had the chair and I sat on the floor. “I didn’t think about it when you got this place but it doesn’t make any sense,” Sandy said. “You must have really had to work to find an apartment building in this town your father didn’t own.”

I’d wondered about it myself. The only reason I could come up with was that she had asked him for an apartment and he’d said no.

Maeve looked at us, the three of us, all the family she had. “I thought I would impress him.”

“With this place?” Sandy leaned over and straightened a stack of my school books on the coffee table in front of her.

Maeve smiled again. “I made out a budget and this was what I could afford. I thought he’d notice that I hadn’t asked him for anything, that I’d saved up my spending money from my last year of school. I had first and last month’s rent. I got the job. I bought the bed and then the next month I bought the couch and then I bought the chair at Goodwill. You know him, the way he liked to go on about the wonders of poverty, how making it all by yourself was the only way to learn anything. I thought I was showing him I wasn’t like the rich girls I knew from school. I wasn’t waiting around for him to buy me a horse.”

Sandy laughed. “I never thought anyone was going to buy me a horse.”

“Well, that’s just fine.” Jocelyn smiled. “I know he was proud of you, the way you did all this yourself.”

“He didn’t notice,” Maeve said.

Sandy shook her head. “Of course he did.”

But Maeve was right. He’d never seen what she had meant to show him. He had no notion of her self-reliance. The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture.

Maeve made coffee and she and Jocelyn smoked while Sandy and I watched them. We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know. We talked about how late she slept and every unflattering dress she’d worn and how she would spend an hour on the phone with her mother but would never invite her mother to the house. She wasted food and left the lights on all night and gave no evidence of having ever read a book. She’d sit by the pool for hours just staring at her fingernails and then expect Jocelyn to bring her lunch on a tray. She didn’t listen to our father. She gave away Maeve’s bedroom. She threw me out. We dug a pit and roasted her.

“Can anyone explain to me why he married her in the first place?” Maeve asked.

“Sure.” Jocelyn didn’t need to give it a thought. “Andrea loved the house. Your father thought that house was the most beautiful thing in the world and he found himself a woman who agreed.”

Maeve threw her hands up. “Everyone agreed! It’s not like it would have been so hard to find a decent woman who liked the house.”

Jocelyn shrugged. “Well, your mother hated it and Andrea loved it. He thought he’d solved the problem. But I got to her, didn’t I? Saying all that about your mother.”

Sandy covered her face with her hands and laughed. “I thought she was going to drop dead right on the spot.”

I looked at Sandy and then Jocelyn. Now they were both laughing. “You didn’t mean it?”

“What?” Sandy said, wiping at her eyes.

“About our mother being, I don’t know, like a saint?”

The tension in the room shifted and then we were all very aware of how we were sitting and what we were doing with our hands. “Your mother,” Jocelyn said, and then she stopped and looked at her sister.

“Of course we loved your mother,” Sandy said.

“We all loved her,” Maeve said.

“She was gone a lot,” Jocelyn said, trying to pick her words.

“She was working.” Maeve was tense but in a different way from Sandy and Jocelyn.

I had no idea what any of them were talking about, nor did I know that our mother had ever had a job. “What did she do?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “What didn’t she do?”

“She worked for the poor,” Maeve said to me.

“In Elkins Park?” There were no poor people in Elkins Park, or none that I’d ever seen.

“She worked for the poor everywhere,” Sandy said, though I could tell she was trying her best to explain the situation kindly. “She could always find people who needed something.”

“She went out looking for poor people?” I asked.

“Dawn to dusk,” Jocelyn said.

Maeve stubbed out her cigarette. “Okay, stop this. You make it sound like she was never there.”

Jocelyn shrugged and Sandy reached down for the thumb-print cookie with the round spot of apricot jam.

“Well,” Maeve said, “we were always happy when she came home.”

Sandy smiled and nodded. “Always,” she said.

Maeve leaned over and pulled off the pillow. “I mean it. Up, up.”

I looked at her from one slitted eye. She was wearing a skirt, and her hair, still wet from the shower, was braided. “I’m sleeping.”

“I’ve been very nice. I let you sleep through the eight o’clock service. We’re going to make the ten-thirty.”

I dug my face into the pillow. I was waking up and I did not want to wake up. “There’s no one watching. No one can make us go to church anymore.”

“I can make us go.”

I shook my head. “Make yourself go. I’m going back to sleep.”

She dropped down hard on the edge of the bed, making me bounce a little. “We go to church. That’s what we do.”

I turned over on my back and opened my eyes grudgingly. “You’re not following.”

“Up, up.”

“I don’t want anyone hugging me or telling me how sorry they are. I want to go back to sleep.”

“They’ll hug you this Sunday and next Sunday they’ll just wave like nothing ever happened.”

“I’m not going next Sunday either.”

“Why are you being like this? You never complained about going to church before.”

“Who would I have complained to? Dad?” I looked at her. “You win all the fights. You know that, right? When you have kids of your own you can make them go to church every morning and say the rosary before school. But I don’t have to go, you don’t have to go. We don’t have parents. We can go out for pancakes.”

She shrugged. “Get your own pancakes,” she said. “I’m going.”

“You don’t need to do this for me.” I raised up on my elbows. I couldn’t believe she was carrying her point so far. “I don’t need a good example.”

“I’m not doing this for you. Jesus, Danny. I like going to Mass, I like believing in God. Community, kindness, I buy into the whole thing. What in the hell have you been doing in church all these years?”

“Memorizing basketball stats mostly.”

“Then go back to sleep.”

“Are you telling me you went to church when you were in college? You got up all those Sunday mornings in New York when no one was watching?”

“Of course I went to church. Don’t you remember when you came to see me? We went to Good Friday service together.”

“I thought you were just making me go.” That was the truth, too. Even at the time I assumed she’d promised our father that she’d get me to church for Good Friday if he let me stay.

She started to say something else then let it go. She patted my ankle beneath the bedspread. “Get some rest,” she said, and then she left.

It would have been hard to say exactly why we went to church, but everyone did. My father saw his colleagues and his tenants there. Maeve and I saw our teachers and our friends. Maybe my father went to pray for the souls of his dead Irish parents, or maybe church was the last vestige of respect he paid our mother. To hear people talk, she had loved not only the church and the parish community but every last priest and nun. Maeve said our mother had felt most at home in the church when the sisters stood and sang. From what little I knew of her, I was sure she wouldn’t have married my father if he hadn’t been willing to go to church, and without her he continued to drag us to the altar, preserving the form in the absence of content. Maybe it was because he had never considered it could have been otherwise, or maybe because his daughter listened to the homily leaning forward, the missalette in her hands, while his son considered the Sixers’ chances in the playoffs and he contemplated a building that was for sale at the edge of Cheltenham township, though for all I knew my father listened to the priest and heard the voice of God. We never talked about it. In my memory, it was always Maeve who was racing around on Sunday morning, making sure we were ready: dressed, fed, in the car in plenty of time. After she had gone to college, it would have been so easy for my father and me to put the whole enterprise to bed. But then there was Andrea to consider. She despised Catholicism, thought it was a cult of lunatics who worshiped idols and claimed to eat flesh. My father could go to the office before first light Monday through Friday and find excuses to stay out through dinner. He could eat up Saturdays in the car collecting rent or visiting various construction projects. But Sunday was a tricky day to occupy. Church was all he had to work with if he wanted to get away from his young wife. My father talked to Father Brewer about my becoming an altar boy, then signed me up without consultation. The altar boys had to be at church a half hour early to help prepare the sacraments and assist Father Brewer with his vestments. And while I was slated for eight o’clock Mass, there were plenty of times I worked the ten-thirty as well. Someone was always calling in sick or going on vacation or simply refusing to get out of bed, luxuries I had never been afforded. Since I was an altar boy, my father thought it was important for me to attend Sunday school as well, to be a good example he said, even though Sunday school was for public school kids who weren’t already getting some brand of religious indoctrination five days a week. But there was no place in the conversation to tell my father he was being ridiculous. After Mass, he sat in the car with his cigarettes and newspaper and waited for me, and when all the work was done, every last prayer recited and chalice washed, he would take me to lunch. We had never gone out to lunch when Maeve was at home. Thus our single hour of Mass stretched to cover half of Sunday, protecting us from family obligations and giving us at least some time together between the lighting of the candles and the blowing out. For this I will always be grateful, though not grateful enough to get out of bed.

But on Monday morning Coach Martin called me into his office and reiterated his sorrow for my circumstances. Then he said I needed to be at Mass to pray for my father. “All the varsity players at Bishop McDevitt go to Mass,” he told me. “Every single one of them.”

I would be included in that number for a little while longer.