The Dutch House (21 page)

I, who had bought property in Harlem and Washington Heights, would not have touched the Bowery with a stick. “When did she leave India?”

Fluffy tore open two sugar packets, added them to her iced coffee and stirred. I wanted to tell her the whole thing would have gone better if she’d put the sugar in the coffee while the coffee was still hot. In fact, I wanted to tell her it would have been infinitely preferable to get together in order to discuss how sugar dissolves. “A long time ago. She said it had been years and years. She said the people had been very kind to her. Can you imagine? She would have been happy to stay there but she had to go where she was needed.”

“Which wasn’t Elkins Park.”

“She gave up everything, that’s what you have to understand. She gave up you and your sister and your father and that house so she could help the poor. She’s lived in India and God only knows how many other horrible places. She was down there on the Bowery. The whole place stinks, you know. It’s foul down there, the trash and the people, and your mother’s serving soup to the junkies and drunks. If that’s not being sorry, I don’t know what is.”

I shook my head. “That’s being delusional, not sorry.”

“I wish I could have talked to her more,” Fluffy said, her feelings clearly hurt. “But I was going to be late for my job. I’m a baby nurse now. I get in and get out before I get too attached. And to tell you the truth, the bums were crawling all over the place and I didn’t feel so comfortable standing there on the street. Just as soon as I had that thought, she told me she was going to walk me to the bus stop. She put my arm in hers like we were two old friends. She told me she’d be working down there for a while, and that I could come back and serve if I wanted to, or just come back and visit. I kept thinking I’d go see her again on my day off, but Bobby wasn’t having it. He said I had no business making lunch for a bunch of guys on the needle.”

I sat back in my chair, trying to take it in. I was glad that Maeve didn’t come to the city. I didn’t want her looking out a bus window and seeing our mother on the street. “Do you know where she is now?”

She shook her head. “I should have tried to find you sooner so I could have told you. It wouldn’t have been hard. I feel bad about that.”

I motioned to Lizzy for the check. “If my mother had wanted to see us she would have found us herself. Like you said, it wouldn’t have been hard.”

Fluffy was twisting the paper napkin in her fingers. “Believe me, I know what a bad time everyone went through. I was there. But your mother has a higher calling than we do, that’s all.”

I put my money on the table. “Then I hope she enjoys it.”

When I looked at my watch, I realized I was already late. I’d scheduled a meeting with a contractor as a means of ensuring my time with Fluffy would be limited. She walked with me two blocks before it became clear she was going in the wrong direction. She took my hand. “We’ll do this again, won’t we?” she said. “Maeve has my number. I’d like to see you both. I want you to meet my kids. They’re great kids, like you and your sister.”

Maeve was right. Not only was it remarkable to see Fluffy again, but I felt a complete absence of anger towards her. She had been in an impossible situation. No one would say that what had happened had been her fault. “Would you leave them?”

“Who?”

“Your great kids,” I said. “Would you walk away and leave them now and never let them know that you were still alive? Would you have left them before they were old enough to remember you? Left them for Bobby to raise on his own?”

I could see the blow travel through her and she took a step away from me. “No,” she said.

“Then you’re the good person,” I said, “not my mother.”

“Oh, Danny,” she said, and her voice caught in her throat. She hugged me goodbye. When she walked away, she turned back to look at me so many times she appeared to be going up the sidewalk in a loose series of concentric circles.

The fact of the matter was I had seen my mother, too, though I hadn’t known it at the time. As I walked to 116th street after leaving Fluffy, I had no doubt that it had happened. It had been in the emergency room at Albert Einstein around midnight, maybe two years before, maybe three. All the chairs in the waiting room were full. Parents held half-grown children in their laps, paced with children in their arms. People were propped up against the walls, bleeding and moaning, vomiting into their laps, a standard Saturday night in the Gun and Knife Club. I had just scoped a young woman with a crushed airway (a steering wheel? a boyfriend?), and once I got the endoscope down past her nasal passages, both of her vocal cords were collapsed. Blood and spit were bubbling in every direction and it took forever to get an endotracheal tube in place. When I finished the procedure, I went to the waiting room to look for whoever had brought her in. As I called the name on the chart, a woman behind me tapped my shoulder saying,
Doctor
. Everyone did that, the sick and those advocating for the sick, they chanted and begged,
doctor, nurse, doctor, nurse
. The emergency room at Albert Einstein was a cyclone of human need and the trick was to keep focused on the thing you’d come to do, ignoring the rest. But when I turned around the woman looked at me with such—what? Surprise? Fear? I remember raising my hand to my face to see if there was blood on it. That had happened before. She was tall and dismally thin, and in my mind I assigned her to the ash heap of late-stage lung cancer or tuberculosis. None of this distinguished her in that particular crowd. The only reason she’d stuck with me at all was because she called me Cyril.

I would have asked her how she knew my father, but then a man was there saying it was his girlfriend I had just scoped. I was taking him into the hallway, wondering if he in fact had strangled her. I’d been in the waiting room for less than a minute, and by the time I had the chance to wonder about the woman with the gray braid who’d called me by my father’s name, she was long gone, and I was no longer interested. I didn’t wonder if she’d been a tenant in one of the Conroy buildings or if she was someone he had known in Brooklyn. I certainly never thought about my mother. Like everyone else who worked in an ER, I pressed ahead with what was in front of me and made it through the night.

To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing—there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.

The contractor was waiting for me in the lobby when I got back and we talked about the window frames that were pulling away from the brick in the front of the building. He was still there taking measurements an hour later when Celeste came home from school. She was so buoyant, so bright, her yellow hair tangled from the wind that had kicked up. She was telling me about the children in her class, and how they had all cut out leaves from construction paper and printed their names on the leaves so she could make a tree on her classroom door, and as I listened, less to what she was saying and more to the pleasing sound of her voice, I knew that Celeste would always be there. She had proven her commitment to me time and again. If men were fated to marry their mothers, well, here was my chance to buck the trend.

“Ah!” she said, dropping her book bags on the floor and reaching up to kiss me. “I’m talking too much! I’m like the kids. I get all wound up. Tell me about the grown-up world. Tell me about your day.”

But I didn’t tell her anything, not about the Pastry Shop or Fluffy or my mother. I told her instead that I’d been thinking, and I thought it was time we got married.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

Maeve rolled her eyes. “Well it isn’t like you’re going to do it. Either I get involved or we have no representation at the wedding.”

“I’m planning on representing us at the wedding.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not even married and I understand.”

Celeste said it was hard for Maeve to watch me get married before she did. Celeste said that, at thirty-seven, there was pretty much no chance of Maeve finding someone, and so the wedding plans were no doubt filling her with something less than joy. But that wasn’t it. In the first place, Maeve would never begrudge me any happiness, and in the second place, I had never once heard her mention even a passing interest in marriage. Maeve didn’t care about the wedding. Her issue was with the bride.

I tried to explain to my sister that I had dated plenty of women and Celeste really was the best choice. I hadn’t rushed into anything, either. We’d been going together off and on since college.

“You’re picking the woman you like the best from a group of women you don’t like,” Maeve said. “Your control group is fundamentally flawed.”

But I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life. The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself.

As for Maeve’s love life or lack thereof, I knew nothing. But I will say this: I’d watched her test her blood sugar and inject herself with insulin all my life, but she didn’t do it around other people, not unless it was a full-on emergency. When I was in medical school, and then later in my residency, I tried to talk to her about her management, but she would have no part of it. “I have an endocrinologist,” she’d say.

“And I have no interest in being your endocrinologist. I’m just saying as your brother that I’m interested in your health.”

“Very kind. Now cut it out.”

Maeve and I had endless reasons to be suspicious of marriage—the history of our youth would be enough to make anyone bet against it—but if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have put the blame on Andrea or either of our parents. If I’d had to guess, where Maeve was concerned, I would have said she could never have allowed anyone else in the room when she stabbed a needle into her stomach.

“Tell me again what my not being married has to do with you marrying Celeste.”

“Nothing. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Trust me,” she said. “I don’t want to marry Celeste. She’s all yours.”

Had it not been for Maeve, every aspect of the wedding, all the costs and decisions, would have fallen to the Norcross family. Maeve believed we Conroys should not begin the alliance of families in such a state of inequality. After all, when you added in uncles and aunts and all the various degrees of cousins both by marriage and blood, there were more Norcrosses than there were stars in the sky, and there were only the two of us Conroys. I understood that someone from our side needed to show up, and since our side consisted of Maeve and me, it fell to Maeve. I was meeting with electricians in those days and learning the surprisingly difficult skill of repairing drywall. I was too busy to participate in the details, and so I sent my sister, who lived a scant fifteen minutes from Celeste’s parents, as my emissary.

In this spirit of division of labor, Maeve volunteered to write our engagement announcement for the paper
. Mary Celeste Norcross, daughter of William and Julie Norcross, will marry Daniel James Conroy, son of Elna Conroy and the late Cyril Conroy, on Saturday, the 23rd of July.

But Celeste didn’t like the word “late.” She thought it was a downer in light of the happy occasion.

“And your mother?” Maeve said to me over the phone, doing an uncanny imitation of Celeste’s voice. “Do you seriously want your mother’s name in the engagement announcement?”

“Ah,” I said.

“I told her you do in fact have a mother. A missing mother and a dead father. That’s what we’ve got. Then she asked if we could just leave them out altogether, seeing as how they’re not here? It’s not as if we’d be hurting their feelings.”

“Well?” It didn’t strike me as an outrageous proposal.

“We’d be hurting
my
feelings,” Maeve said. “You’re not a mushroom who popped up after a rain. You have parents.”

Julie Norcross, my ever-rational future mother-in-law, broke the tie in Maeve’s favor. “That’s the way it’s done,” she said to her daughter. The proposed compromise, to which Maeve finally capitulated after much grousing, was that our parents’ names would not appear on the wedding invitation.

And through all of this, I never told my sister that our mother was out there, circling. I put it off not because I thought it would harm Maeve’s health, but because we were better off without her. That was what Fluffy’s news had made me realize. After so many years of chaos and exile, our lives had finally settled. Now that it was no longer my job to draw down the trust, we rarely spoke of Andrea at all. We didn’t think about her. I wasn’t practicing medicine. I owned three buildings. I was getting married. Maeve, for whatever reasons of her own, continued on at Otterson’s without complaint. She seemed happier than I had ever known her to be, even if she didn’t want me to marry Celeste. After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow become miraculously unstuck, moving forward in time just like everyone else. To tell Maeve our mother was out there, to tell her I wasn’t sure if our parents had ever divorced, meant reigniting the fire I’d spent my life stamping out. Why should we go looking for her? She’d never come looking for us.

I don’t mean that Maeve didn’t deserve to know, or that I would never tell her. I just didn’t think this was the time.

Celeste and I were married on a sweltering day in late July at St. Hilary’s in Rydal. A fall wedding would have been more comfortable, but Celeste said she wanted to have everything settled and done before school started in September. Maeve said Celeste didn’t want to give me time to back out. The Norcrosses rented a tent for the reception, and Celeste and Maeve put aside their considerable differences for the occasion. Morey Able stood up as my best man. He found my defection from science to be hilarious. “I wasted half of my professional career on you,” he said, his arm around my shoulder like any proud father. Years later, I would buy a building on Riverside Drive, a pre-war jewel box with an Art Deco lobby and green glass inlays on the elevator doors. I gave the Ables half of the top floor and a key to the roof for what they would have paid for an efficiency. They would stay there for the rest of their lives.