The Dutch House (25 page)

“No small parts,” her mother said. “Only small mice.”

May stayed in character through the long autumn of rehearsals, keeping her hands curled beneath her chin as she scurried around the house, nibbling at carrots with her front teeth in a way that irritated her brother to no end. She insisted that her aunt come to see her on the New York stage (May’s phrasing), and her aunt agreed that this was exactly the sort of occasion for which rules were broken.

Maeve made plans to bring Celeste’s parents into the city for the first Sunday matinee. She would pick them up in Rydal then drive to the train station so they could all come in together. One of Celeste’s brothers lived in New Rochelle, and her sister was in the city, so they came with their families as well. We made a strong showing in the audience, considering there would be no way of knowing which mouse was ours. When the theater darkened and the audience ceased its collective rustling, the curtain rose to Tchaikovsky’s overture. Beautiful children dressed as children never are came racing out to the Christmas tree, and the lights came up on a set that might as well have been the Dutch House. It was a kind of architectural mirage, if such a thing were possible, a visual misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing. Maeve was a half-dozen seats away from me in the long row of the Norcross and Conroy families, so there was no leaning over to ask if she saw it too: the two giant portraits of people who were not the VanHoebeeks, each slightly turned in the direction of the other above an elaborate mantel. There was the long green settee. Had ours been green? The table, the chairs, the second sofa, the massive burled secretary with the glass front full of beautiful leather-bound books that all turned out to be written in Dutch. I remembered the first time I’d taken the key out of the desk as a boy and stood on a chair to open those glass doors, the amazement of taking down book after book and seeing my familiar alphabet arranged into a senseless configuration. The set of the ballet was like that. I knew the chandelier suspended above the stage, there was no mistaking it. How many countless hours had I spent on my back staring into that chandelier, the light and the crystal combining as I doubled down on my childhood attempts at self-hypnosis? I had read about it at the library. Of course the grouping of furniture had been flattened out, pushed back into an unnatural line in order to make room for the dancers, but were I able to go onstage and rearrange it, I could have recreated my past. In truth, it wasn’t just
The Nutcracker
. Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth. That’s how far away youth was. Celeste was on my left, Kevin on my right, their faces warmed by stage light. The party guests were dancing and the children held hands and formed a ring around them. After they had all danced off into the wings and stage-night fell, the mice made their entrance behind the evil Mouse King. They rolled around on the floor, kicking their little feet furiously in the air. I covered Celeste’s hand with my hand. So many mice! So many children dancing. The soldiers of the Nutcracker came, the war was fought, dead mice were dragged away by the living to make room for more dancers.

There was a certain amount of storyline in the first act but the second act was nothing but dancing: Spanish dancers, Arab dancers, Chinese dancers, Russian dancers, endless dancing flowers. Too much dancing wasn’t a valid complaint to make about a ballet, but without the mice to look forward to, without the furniture to consider, I struggled to find meaning. Kevin poked my arm and I leaned over to him. I could smell the butterscotch Lifesaver in his mouth. “How can it be so long?” he whispered.

I looked at him helplessly and mouthed the words
No idea
. Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of
The Nutcracker
.

When at last the ballet was over and the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Nutcracker and Clara and Uncle Drosselmeyer and the snowflakes each had their fair share of thunderous applause (no curtain call for mice!), the audience collected their coats and stood to make their way to the aisles, all except Maeve. She stayed in her seat, eyes straight ahead. I noticed my mother-in-law had her hand on Maeve’s shoulder, then she was leaning over to say something. There was a tremendous bustle of activity around us. Our family, standing without moving forward, was blocking the path. The grandmothers and mothers who had filled the row beside us, turned their charges around to exit in the opposite direction.

“Danny?” my mother-in-law called.

We were a significant group, the few Conroys and many Norcrosses—spouses, children, parents, siblings. I made my way past all of them. The sweat was beading on Maeve’s nose and chin. Her hair was soaked through, as if she had slipped out for a swim while the rest of us watched the ballet. Maeve’s purse was on the floor and I found the same old yellow plastic box inside, now held together by a rubber band, and took two glucose tablets out of the little plastic bag she kept.

“Home,” she said in a quiet voice, still looking straight ahead though her eyelids were drooping.

I pushed a glucose tab between her teeth and then another. I told her to chew.

“What should I do?” my father-in-law asked. Maeve had picked them up and brought them in on the train because none of us liked the idea of Bill Norcross driving into the city. “Does she need an ambulance?”

“No,” Maeve said, still not turning her head.

“She’ll be okay,” I said to Bill, like this was our routine. A very old calm settled on me.

“I need—” Maeve said, then closed her eyes.

“What?”

Then Celeste and Kevin were there with a glass of orange juice and a cloth napkin full of ice. I hadn’t seen them leave and already they were back with what we needed. They had known. Standing in the row behind us, Celeste lifted the sopping wool of Maeve’s hair and rested the ice pack against her neck. Kevin handed me the juice.

“How did you get this so fast?” The aisles were packed with little girls and their minders excitedly recounting each jeté.

“I ran,” said my son, who had choked on his own excess of energy throughout the performance. “I said it was an emergency.”

Kevin knew how to move around people—a benefit of growing up in the city. I held my handkerchief under Maeve’s mouth. “Sip.”

“You know this will make your sister insanely jealous that you were the one who got the juice,” Celeste said to Kevin. “She would rather have been the hero than a mouse.”

Kevin smiled, his stoicism in the face of boredom rewarded. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Okay,” Maeve said quietly.

“You get everyone out to the lobby,” Celeste told her father, who, like Kevin, was looking for work. “I’ll be there in one minute.”

Maeve pressed her eyes closed and then opened them wider. She was trying to chew the tablets and drink the juice with minimal success. Some of it was slipping from the side of her mouth. I gave the glass to Celeste and fished a test strip out of the yellow box. Maeve’s hands were wet and cold when I stuck her finger.

“What do you think happened?” Celeste asked me.

Maeve nodded, swallowed. She was coming slowly into focus. “Dance so long.”

Everyone was always in such a hurry to leave a theater. They hoped to be the first to get to the bathroom, to get a taxi, get to the restaurant before the reservation was cancelled. It had been scarcely ten minutes since the raucous ovation and the distribution of roses and already the giant New York State Theater was almost empty. The last of the little girls, the ones who had been sitting in the very front rows, came pirouetting up the aisle in their fur-collared coats. All those velvet seats had folded back in on themselves. One of the ushers stopped at our row, a woman in a white shirt and a buttoned green vest. “You folks need help?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “She just needs a minute.”

“He’s a doctor,” Celeste said.

Maeve smiled, mouthed the word
doctor
.

The usher nodded. “If you need something, you let us know.”

“We just need to sit here awhile.”

“Take your time,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry,” Maeve said. I wiped down her face. The test strip reported her sugar at thirty-eight. It should have been ninety and I would have been happy with seventy.

“You should have told someone you weren’t feeling well.” Celeste moved the ice to the top of Maeve’s head.

“Ah, that’s good,” Maeve said. “I didn’t want to get up. I thought—” She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes.

I told her to take another sip of juice.

She swallowed, began again. “I’d be disruptive?” Maeve was wearing a blouse with a sweater over it, wool slacks, all of it wet.

Celeste had Maeve’s hair gathered up in one hand, the ice pack in the other. “I’m going backstage to get May and we’ll go on to dinner,” she said to me. “When she’s feeling better, bring her over to the house.”

“Danny should go,” Maeve said. She still hadn’t tried to look at either of us.

“Danny isn’t going to go,” Celeste said. “There’s a big crowd and no one will miss him. It’s a detente, okay? You’re sick. May’s going to want to see you, so plan on coming back to the house.” She handed me the shards of ice, the sopping napkin. The glucose was doing its job. I watched the life come creeping back into my sister’s face.

“Tell May she was a good mouse,” Maeve said.

“You’ll tell her,” Celeste said.

“I have to get your parents home.” Maeve’s voice, which had a tendency to boom in other circumstances, was so light I don’t know how Celeste could have heard her. It floated up towards the high ceiling.

Celeste shook her head. “Just do what Danny tells you for a change. I have to go.”

I leaned over and kissed Celeste. She was more than capable of rising to the occasion. She passed the ushers who were coming back down the aisles to pick up the scattered programs from the floor, sweeping the candy wrappers into their dustpans.

Maeve and I sat together in the theater seats. She let her head rest on my shoulder.

“She was very nice,” Maeve said.

“Most of the time she is.”

“Detente,” Maeve said.

“You’re feeling better.”

“A little. But it’s good to sit.” She took my handkerchief and blotted her face and neck. I took her hand and punched another hole in her fingertip to test her blood again.

“What is it?”

I peered at the strip. “Forty-two.”

“We’ll wait another minute.” She closed her eyes.

I looked across the sea of empty seats, inhaled the mix of perfumes hanging above us in the air. The mice and the snowflakes and the Christmas tree and the living room set, the audience who sat in the dark to watch—everything was gone now, everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us.

It had been just a minor miscalculation. Maeve would be fine.

I started to think I could put Maeve in my car and drive her around to see my buildings. I could drive her to Harlem and show her the very first brownstone I ever bought, then go to Washington Heights and show her the Health Sciences building that sat on top of the two parking lots I had owned for five months. I could give her the entire tour. Maeve may have known my business to the last dime but she’d never actually seen it. We could wind up at Café Luxembourg when we were finished, eat steak frites before going home. Kevin and May would be so happy to have her in the house that maybe Maeve and Celeste would see it was time to put it all to rest. If it was ever going to happen then this would be the day, lost as we had been to
The Nutcracker
and then the precipitous drop in blood sugar. Celeste had come to her aid, after all, and Maeve had been grateful. Even the oldest angers could be displaced. After a glass of wine, if she felt up to a glass of wine, Maeve would climb the stairs to May’s room, push the stuffed animals off the second bed so they could lie across from each other in the dark. May would tell her what the world looked like from those two cut-out eyeholes, and Maeve would tell her what she had seen from the fourteenth row. Upstairs in our own bed, Celeste would tell me it was okay that my sister was here, or better than okay. She’d finally been able to see Maeve as the person I had always known.

“No,” Maeve said. “Drive me home.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s a big night.”

She picked at the neck of her sweater. “I can’t wear these clothes for the rest of the night. I don’t even know if I can stand them on the drive home.”

“I’ll get you some clothes. Do you remember when I came and stayed with you in college? Dad dropped me off without a toothbrush, without anything. You took me shopping.”

“Oh, Danny, are you serious? I can’t go shopping, and I can’t spend the evening talking to the Norcrosses about ballet. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here. My car’s at the train station. I have a meeting at work in the morning. I want to eat something and fall asleep in my own bed.” She turned to me in her seat. Soon enough we were going to wear out our welcome at the New York State Theater.