The Dutch House (14 page)

My sister was never hard to find. For one thing, I could pretty much count on her being taller than everyone else, and for another she was always on time. If I was coming in on a train, Maeve would be front and center in the waiting crowd. She was there on this particular Wednesday before Thanksgiving across the terminal, wearing jeans and a red wool sweater of mine I thought I’d lost. She waved to me and I lifted my hand to wave back but my seatmate grabbed my wrist.

“Goodbye!” she said, all blond and smiling. “Good luck with the chemistry.” She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder. I guess she’d put it down to wait for me.

“Thanks.” I had some strange inclination to hide her or to shoo her away, but there was my sister, striding towards us. Maeve wrapped me in her arms, lifted me an inch or so off the ground, and shook me. The first time she’d done that was the first Easter I’d come home from Choate, and she’d kept up the tradition just to prove she could.

“Did you meet someone on the train?” Maeve said, looking at me instead of her.

I turned to the girl. She was a perfectly average size, though everyone looked small when they stood between me and my sister. I remembered then that I hadn’t asked her name.

“Celeste,” the girl said, and held out her hand, so we all shook hands. “Maeve,” said Maeve, and I said, “Danny,” and then we all wished one another a happy Thanksgiving, said goodbye, and walked away.

“You cut off your hair!” I said once we were out of earshot.

Maeve reached up and touched her neck just below the place where her dark hair ended in an abrupt bob. “Do you like it? I thought it made me look more like an adult.”

I laughed. “I would have thought you’d be sick of always looking like the adult.”

She linked her arm through mine and dipped her head sideways to touch my shoulder. Her hair fell forward and covered her face for an instant, so she tossed her head back.
Like a girl
, I thought, and then remembered Maeve was a girl.

“These will be the best four days of the year,” she said. “The best four days until you come home for Christmas.”

“Maybe for Christmas you’ll come see me. I came to see you for Easter when you were in college.”

“I don’t like the train,” Maeve said, as if that were the end of that.

“You could drive.”

“To Manhattan?” She stared at me to underscore the stupidity of the suggestion. “It’s so much easier to take the train.”

“The train was a nightmare,” I said.

“Was the girl a nightmare?”

“No, the girl was fine. She was a big help, actually.”

“Did you like her?” We were nearly to the door that led out to the parking lot. Maeve had insisted on driving in to get me.

“I liked her as well as you like the person you sit next to on the train.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Why do you care where she’s from?”

“Because she’s still standing there waiting and no one’s come to meet her. If you like her then we could offer her a ride.”

I stopped and looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t watching us. She was looking in the other direction. “Now you have eyes in the back of your head?” I had always thought it was possible. Celeste, who had seemed so competent on the train, looked decidedly lost in the station. She had saved me from a lot of luggage handling. “She’s from Rydal.”

“We could spare the extra ten minutes to drive to Rydal.”

My sister was more aware of her surroundings than I was. She was also a nicer person. She waited with my bags and sent me back to ask Celeste if she needed a ride. After taking a few more minutes to scan the station for some member of her family—it had never been made clear which one of them was supposed to pick her up—she asked me again if she wasn’t going to be a huge imposition. I said she was no trouble at all. The three of us walked to the parking lot together while Celeste continued to apologize. Then she crawled into the back of my sister’s Volkswagen and we drove her home.

“I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.”

I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.”

“Would you
stop
? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.”

We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow.

But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing. The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark. This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up. Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister. On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family. Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown. We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made. We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table. My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth. I told her she had no idea what she was talking about.

“I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.”

“Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.”

Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.”

I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t.

“What?”

“That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said.

“What does Celeste always say about me?”

“That you think no one would have been good enough for me.”

“I’ve never said no one was good enough for you. I’ve said you could have found someone better than her.”

“Ah,” I said, and held up my hand. “Easy.” My wife made disparaging remarks about my sister and my sister made disparaging remarks about my wife, and I listened to both of them because it was impossible not to. For years I worked to break them of their habits, to defend the honor of one to the other, and I had given up. Still, there were limits to how far they could go and they both knew it.

Maeve looked back out the window to the house. “Celeste has beautiful children,” Maeve said.

“Thank you.”

“They look nothing like her.”

Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films. I would have loved to have evidence more irrefutable than my own memory, since neither my sister nor my wife would back me on this: it was Maeve who had picked out Celeste, and it was Maeve that Celeste first loved. I was there on that snowy car ride between 30th Street Station and Celeste’s parents’ house in Rydal in 1968, and Maeve was warm enough to clear the ice off the roads. Celeste was in the back seat, wedged between our suitcases, her knees pulled up because there was no room in the back of the little Beetle. Maeve’s eyes kept drifting to the rearview mirror as she piled on the questions: Where was she in school?

Celeste was a sophomore at Thomas More College. “I tell myself it’s Fordham.”

“That’s where I would have gone. I had wanted to study with the Jesuits.”

“Where did you go to school?” Celeste asked.

Maeve sighed. “Barnard. They came through with a scholarship so that was that.”

As far as I knew nothing in this story was true. Maeve certainly hadn’t been a scholarship student.

“What are you studying?” Maeve asked her.

“I’m an English major,” Celeste said. “I’m taking Twentieth Century American Poetry this semester.”

“Poetry was my favorite class!” Maeve’s eyebrows raised in amazement. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.”

“When did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked my sister.

“Home is so sad,” Maeve said. “It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft.”

Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice. “And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.”

“
Larkin
,” the two cried out together. They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment.

I looked at Maeve in astonishment. “How did you
know
that?”

“I didn’t clear my curriculum with him.” Maeve laughed, tilting her head in my direction, and so Celeste laughed too.

“What was your major?” Celeste asked. When I turned around to look at her now she was utterly mysterious to me. They both were.

“Accounting.” Maeve downshifted with a smack of her open palm as we gently slid down a snowy hill. Over the river and through the woods. “Very dull, very practical. I needed to make a living.”

“Oh, sure,” Celeste nodded.

But Maeve hadn’t majored in accounting. There was no such thing as an accounting major at Barnard. She’d majored in math. And she was first in her class. Accounting was what she did, not what she’d studied. Accounting was what she could do in her sleep.

“There’s that cute little Episcopal church.” Maeve slowed down on Homestead Road. “I went to a wedding there once. When I was growing up the nuns about had a fit if they heard we’d even set foot in a Protestant church.”

Celeste nodded, having no idea she’d been asked a question. Thomas More was a Jesuit school but that didn’t necessarily mean the girl in the back of the car was a Catholic. “We go to St. Hilary.”

She was Catholic.

The house, when we pulled up in front of it, proved to be considerably less grand than the Dutch House and considerably grander than the third floor walk-up where Maeve still lived in those days. Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood, though in Celeste’s case those assumptions proved true.

“You’ve been so nice,” Celeste started, but Maeve cut her off.

“We’ll take you in.”

“But you don’t—”

“We’ve made it this far,” Maeve said, putting the car in park. “The least we can do is see you to the door.”

I had to get out anyway. I folded my seat forward and leaned back in to help Celeste out, then I took her bag. Her father was still at his dental practice filling cavities, staying late because the office would be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. People came home for the holidays with toothaches they’d been putting off. Her two younger brothers were watching television with friends and shouted to Celeste but didn’t trouble themselves to leave their program. There was a much warmer greeting from a black Lab named Lumpy. “His name was Larry when he was a puppy but he’s gotten sort of lumpy,” Celeste said.

Celeste’s mother was friendly and harried, cooking a sit-down dinner for twenty-two relatives who would descend the next day at noon. Small wonder she’d forgotten to pick up her third child at the train station. (There were five Norcross children in total.) After introductions had been made, Maeve got Celeste to write her phone number on a scrap of paper, saying that she drove into the city every now and then and could give her a ride, could even promise her the front seat next time. Celeste was grateful and her mother was grateful, stirring a pot of cranberries on the stove.

“You two should stay for dinner. I owe you such a favor!” Celeste’s mother said to us, and then she realized her mistake. “What am I saying? You’re just home yourself. Columbia! Your parents must be dying to see you.”

Maeve thanked her for the invitation and accepted a small hug from Celeste, who shook my hand. My sister and I went down the snowy front walk. It seemed that every light in every house was on, up and down the block, on both sides of the street. Everyone in Rydal had come home for Thanksgiving.

“Since when did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked once we had climbed back in the car.

“Since I saw her shove a book of poetry in her bag.” Maeve cranked up the car’s useless heater. “So what?”

Maeve never tried to impress anyone, not even Lawyer Gooch, whom I believed she was secretly in love with. “Why would you care if Celeste of Rydal thinks you read poetry?”

“Because sooner or later you’ll find someone, and I’d rather you found a Catholic from Rydal than a Buddhist from, I don’t know,
Morocco
.”

“Are you serious? You’re trying to find me a girlfriend?”

“I’m trying to protect my own interests, that’s all. Don’t give it too much thought.”

I didn’t.