The Dutch House (26 page)

She was right, of course. I should have been thinking about how I was going to get her to the lobby, not how we would take a tour of the city and then stay up half the night. Fragility wasn’t a word I could attach to my sister but everything in her countenance made it clear. She took hold of my hand. “I’ll tell you what: you drive me home and spend the night. You haven’t spent the night in how many years? In the morning we’ll get up before the birds. I’ll be fine then. You can drive me to the station to get my car and then drive straight back to the city before the traffic. You could be home by seven. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, would there? Celeste has her family here.”

There was plenty wrong with it, but I didn’t know what else we could have done. While everyone was off at May’s dinner, before the mouse-shaped cake that Celeste had taken over to the restaurant had been served, Maeve and I took a taxi back to the house. I knew that May would be disappointed and Celeste would be furious, but I also knew how sick Maeve had been, how exhausted she was. I knew that she alone in all the world would have done the same for me. Maeve sat on a little bench we kept by the front door for pulling boots off and on in the winter, and I ran upstairs, packed a bag and left a note.

Maeve slept in the car most of the way home. It was early December and the days were short and cold. I drove to Jenkintown in the dark, thinking all the time about the dinner I was missing, about May dancing in the mouse head. I called as soon as we got to Maeve’s house but no one answered. “Celeste, Celeste, Celeste,” I said into the machine. I pictured her in the kitchen, looking at the phone and turning away. Maeve had gone straight in to take a bath. I made us eggs and toast and we ate at her little kitchen table. When we went to bed it wasn’t even eight o’clock.

“At least we each have our own bedroom now,” I said. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

“I never minded sleeping on the couch,” she said.

We said goodnight in the hallway. Maeve’s second bedroom doubled as her office, and I looked at the bookshelf full of binders that said
conroy
on the spine. I meant to pull one down for kicks, to take my mind off the disasters of the day, but then decided to close my eyes for just a minute and that was that.

When Maeve knocked on my door, she woke me from a dream in which I was trying to swim to Kevin. Every stroke I took towards him seemed to push him farther out, until I was struggling to see his head above the water’s chop. I kept calling for him to swim back but he was too far away to hear me. I sat straight up, gasping, trying to make sense of where I was. Then I remembered. I had never been so happy to be awake.

Maeve opened the door a crack. “Too early?”

Now that it was morning, yesterday’s plan seemed utterly sensible, necessary. Maeve in the kitchen was her own bright self, making coffee, telling me how fine she felt, like none of it had happened. (“I just needed a bath and a good night’s sleep,” she said.) I could see that I would be home early enough to make amends. We were outside in the dark again just past four o’clock, Maeve locking the back door of her little house. We were ahead of the schedule we had laid out for ourselves. Nothing would be lost.

“Let’s go to the house,” Maeve said once we were back in my car.

“Really?”

“We’ve never gone over there this time of day.”

“We’ve never done anything this time of day.”

“It’s not like we’re going to be late.” She had so much energy. I had forgotten the way she was in the morning, like each new day came in on a wave she had managed to catch. The Dutch House wasn’t far from where Maeve lived, and since it was in the general direction of where we were going, and since we had gotten out so early, I didn’t see how there was any harm in it. The neighborhoods were dark, the street lights on. It wouldn’t be light until after seven. I had left New York in the dark and I would get home before it was light again. That wasn’t too bad.

The houses on VanHoebeek Street were never entirely dark. People left their porch lights on all night, as if they were always waiting for someone to come home. Gas lights flickered at the ends of driveways, a lamp in the front window of a living room stayed on through the night, but even with all these small bursts of illumination there was a stillness about the place that made it clear the inhabitants were all in their beds, even the dogs of Elkins Park were asleep. I pulled the car into our spot and turned off the engine. The moon in the west was bright enough to drown out any stars. It poured over everything equally: the leafless trees and the driveway, the wide lawn scattered with leaves and the wide stone stairs. Moonlight poured across the house and into the car where Maeve and I sat. When would I have seen this as a boy, up hours before dawn on the clear, cold winter night? I would have been like everyone else in the neighborhood, sound asleep in my bed.

“You’ll tell May and Kevin I’m sorry,” Maeve said.

We were in the car together, each of us deep in our separate thoughts. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the ballet and the dinner after. “They won’t be upset.”

“I don’t want to think I ruined it for her.”

I couldn’t focus myself on May when everything around me was shimmering frost and moonlight. Maybe I was still half asleep. “Do you ever come over here in the morning, early like this?”

Maeve shook her head. I don’t think she was even looking at the house, how beautiful it was rising up out of the darkness. For the most part I had stopped seeing it a long time ago, but every now and then something would happen, something like this, and my eyes would open again and I would see it there—enormous, preposterous, spectacular. A brigade of nutcrackers could come pouring out of the dark hedges at any minute and be met by a battalion of mice. The lawn was sugared with ice. The stage at Lincoln Center hadn’t been made to look like the Dutch House, it was that the Dutch House was the setting for a ridiculous fairy tale ballet. Was it possible our father had turned into the driveway that first time and been struck by the revelation that this was where he wanted to raise his family? Was that what it meant to be a poor man, newly rich?

“Look,” Maeve said in a whisper.

The light in the master bedroom had come on. The master bedroom faced the front of the house, while Maeve’s room, the better room with the smaller closet, looked over the back gardens. Several minutes later we saw the light in the upstairs hallway, and then the light on the stairs, like the first time Maeve had brought me back when I came home from Choate, but now the whole thing was happening in reverse. In the car, in the dark, we said nothing. Five minutes passed, ten minutes. Then a woman was walking down the driveway in a light-colored coat. While logic would suggest that it could have been a housekeeper or one of the girls, it was clear to both of us even from a distance that it was Andrea. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was a brighter blond in the moonlight. She kept her arms around herself, holding her coat tightly closed, the edge of something pink trailing behind her. We could see some slippers that might have been boots. It looked for all the world like she was coming straight for us.

“She sees us.” Maeve’s voice was low and I put my hand on her wrist on the off chance she was planning to get out of the car.

When Andrea was still a good ten feet from the end of the driveway, she stopped and turned her face to the moon, moving one hand up to hold closed the collar of her coat. She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in. She was twenty years older than I was, or that’s how I remembered it. I was forty-two, Maeve was forty-nine, soon to be fifty. Andrea took a few more steps towards us and Maeve slipped her fingers through mine. She was entirely too close, our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street. I could see both how she had aged and how she was exactly herself: eyes, nose, chin. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a woman I had known in my childhood and now did not know at all, a woman who had, for several years, been married to our father. She leaned over, picked up the folded newspaper from the pea gravel, and, tucking it under one arm, turned away, walking into the frost-covered field of the front lawn.

“Where is she going?” Maeve whispered, because for all the world it looked like she was headed towards the hedge that bordered the property to the south. The moon hung on her pale coat, her pale hair, until she passed behind the line of trees and we couldn’t see her anymore. We waited. Andrea didn’t reappear at the front doors.

“Do you think she’s gone around to the back? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s freezing.” It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I was never the one driving when we went to the Dutch House, and that from this vantage point the view was subtly changed.

“Go,” Maeve said.

We stopped at a diner instead of going straight to the train station to pick up her car, and over eggs and toast, the same thing we’d eaten for dinner, broke down Andrea’s trip to get the paper frame by frame. Had she seen something out there we couldn’t see? Were those slippers or boots? Andrea had never gone to get the paper herself. She had never come downstairs in her nightgown, or maybe she had, when none of us were awake. Of course, she would be living in the house alone now. Norma and Bright, whom we always thought of as being so young, must be in their late thirties by now. How long had Andrea been there alone?

Finally, when we had exhausted every fact and supposition, Maeve put her coffee cup down in its saucer. “I’m done,” she said.

The waitress came by and I told her we’d take the check.

Maeve shook her head. She put her hands on the table and looked at me straight, the way our father would tell her to do. “I’m done with Andrea. I’m making a pledge to you right here. I’m done with the house. I’m not going back there anymore.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When she started walking towards the car I thought I was having a heart attack. I felt an actual pain in my chest just seeing her again, and it’s been how many years since she threw us out?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? We don’t need to do this. We can go someplace else. We can park at the arboretum and look at the trees.”

Habit is a funny thing. You might think you understand it, but you can never exactly see what it looks like when you’re doing it. I was thinking about Celeste and all the years she told me how insane it was that Maeve and I parked in front of the house we had lived in as children, and how I thought the problem was that she could never understand.

“You look disappointed,” Maeve said.

“Do I?” I leaned back in the booth. “This isn’t disappointment.” We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.

But I didn’t need to say any of that because Maeve understood it all perfectly. “Just imagine if she’d come to get the paper sooner,” she said. “Say, twenty years ago.”

“We could have had our lives back.”

I paid the check and we got in the car and drove to the parking lot at 30th Street Station. It had been only yesterday that Maeve had come to New York to see May dance. It could be said that by stopping at the Dutch House, and then going to the diner, we had wasted the advantage we’d gained by getting up so early. There wouldn’t be much traffic for Maeve going back to Jenkintown, but I would hit the full force of rush hour driving into the city now. I would do my best to explain it all to Celeste. I’d tell her I was sorry I’d been gone, sorry I was late coming back, and then I would tell her what we had accomplished.

Maeve and I agreed, our days at the Dutch House were over.

I appreciated that but told her no. “Call Jocelyn,” I said, because Jocelyn was on my mind. My father was on my mind. He had been fifty-three, Maeve was fifty-two. I thought less about his dying and more about the deal I’d struck with God when I walked out of my high school geometry class that day at Bishop McDevitt: He would spare Maeve, and in return could take anything else. Anyone else.

The small waiting room for the coronary care unit was hidden past the restrooms and water fountains. Mr. Otterson was there, looking like he’d been sitting in that same gray chair for a week, his elbows resting on his knees, his hair thinning and gray. Sandy and Jocelyn were with him. They had heard the story about what had happened but they asked him to tell it again. Otterson had saved Maeve’s life.

“We were meeting with an advertiser and Maeve stood up and said she needed to go home,” Mr. Otterson began in his quiet voice. He was wearing gray suit pants and a white shirt. He’d taken off his jacket and tie. “No doubt she’d ignored whatever it was she was feeling for as long as possible. You know Maeve.”

We all agreed.

They had left the meeting right away. He asked if her blood sugar was low and she told him no, this was something else, maybe the flu. “When I told her I was going to drive her home she didn’t say a word about it,” Mr. Otterson said. “That’s how bad it was.”

They were two blocks from her house when he turned the car around and drove her to the hospital in Abington. He said it was intuition as much as anything. She had put her head against the window of the car door. “She was melting,” he said. “I can’t explain it.”

Had Mr. Otterson let her off at her house, walked her to the front door and told her to get some rest, that would have been that.

It was Maeve who told me the rest of the story when I saw her in recovery. She was still swimming up from the anesthesia and kept trying to laugh. She told me Mr. Otterson had raised his voice to the young woman at the desk in the emergency room. Otterson raising his voice was like another man pointing a gun. Maeve heard him say
diabetic
. She heard him say
coronary
, though she thought he was only throwing the word around so someone would come and help them. It had never occurred to her that it was her heart. Then finally she could feel it, the pressure creeping up into her jaw, the room swirling back, our father climbing the last flight of concrete stairs in the terrible heat.

“Stop making that face,” she whispered. “I’m going back to sleep.” They kept those rooms so bright, and I wanted to shade her eyes with my hand, but I held her hand instead, watching her heart monitor scaling slowly up and down until a nurse came and guided me away. I was calm through the night I spent in the waiting room, Mr. Otterson staying past midnight no matter how many times I told him he should go. I was calm the next afternoon when the cardiologist told me she’d had a malignant arrhythmia during the placement of the stent and they would need to keep her in the unit longer than had been expected. I went to Maeve’s house to take a shower and a nap. I was calm, going back and forth from the waiting room to her house, receiving the visitors who were not allowed in to see her, waiting for the three times a day I could go and sit by her bed. I stayed calm until the fourth morning when I came into the waiting room and found another person there—an old woman, very thin, with short gray hair. I nodded at her and took my regular seat. I was just about to ask her if she was a friend of Maeve’s because I was certain I knew her. Then I realized she was my mother.

Maeve’s heart attack had lured her out from beneath the floorboards. She had not been there for graduations or our father’s funeral. She had not been there when we were told to leave the house. She wasn’t at my wedding or at the births of my children or at Thanksgiving or Easter or any of the countless Saturdays when there had been nothing but time and energy to talk everything through, but she was there now, at Abington Memorial Hospital, like the Angel of Death. I said nothing to her because one should never initiate a conversation with Death.

“Oh, Danny,” she said. She was crying. She covered her eyes with her hand. Her wrist looked like ten pencils bundled together.

I knew what happened when people explored their anger in hospitals. The hospitals got rid of those people. It didn’t matter if their anger was justified. Jocelyn had told me that people who got upset weren’t helpful, and it was my job to take care of Maeve.

“You were the doctor,” she said at last.

“That was me.”

If Maeve was fifty-two that would make her what? Seventy-three? She looked a decade older.

“You remember?” she asked.

I gave a slow nod, wondering if I should acknowledge even this much. “You had a braid.”

She ran her hand over her short hair. “I had lice. I’d had them before but this last time, I don’t know, it bothered me.”

I asked her what she wanted.

She dropped her eyes again. She could have been a ghost. “To see you,” she said, not looking at me. “To tell you I’m sorry.” She rubbed the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes. She was like any old woman in a hospital waiting room, only taller and thinner. She was wearing jeans and blue canvas tennis shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s done.”

“I came to see Maeve,” she said, rolling the small gold band on her finger.

I made a mental note to kill Fluffy. “Maeve is very sick,” I said, thinking I needed to get her out of there before Fluffy showed up to defend her, before Sandy and Jocelyn and Mr. Otterson and all the rest of them arrived to cast their vote on whether she should stay or go. “Come back when she’s better. She needs to focus on getting well now. You can wait, can’t you? After all this time?”

My mother’s head tipped down like a sunflower at the end of the day, down and down until her chin hovered just above the bony dip of her chest. The tears hung for a moment on her jaw and then fell. She told me she had already been in to see Maeve that morning.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock. While I had eaten my eggs in Maeve’s kitchen, our mother sat by Maeve’s bed in the glass fishbowl of the coronary care unit, holding her hand and crying, laying the tremendous burden of her grief and shame directly on my sister’s heart. She had gotten into the unit by the most direct means possible: she told the truth, or she told some of it. She went to the charge nurse and said her daughter Maeve Conroy had had a heart attack, and now she was here, the mother, just arrived. The mother looked like she was a minute away from coding herself, so when the nurse waived the rules and let my mother in for a visit that was both too long and not in keeping with the unit’s schedule, she did so to benefit the mother, not the daughter. I know this because I spoke to the nurse myself. I spoke to her later, when I could speak again.

“She was happy,” my mother said, her voice as quiet as a page turned. She looked at me with such tremendous need, and I didn’t know if she was asking me to make this right, or telling me that she had returned to make this right.

I stood up quickly and left her in the waiting room, skipping the elevator in favor of the five flights of stairs. It was April and starting to rain. For the first time in my life I wondered if my father might have loved my sister, beyond the abstract and inattentive way I had always imagined he loved her. Was it possible that he believed Maeve to be in danger and so thought to keep her safe from our mother? I walked manically up and down the rows of cars. If someone were to look out the window of his hospital room and see me, he would say,
Look at that poor man. He doesn’t remember where he parked.
I wanted to keep my sister safe from our mother, to keep her safe from anyone who could leave her so carelessly and then reappear at the worst time imaginable. I wanted to attest to my commitment, to reassure my sister that I was watching now and no harm would come again, but she was sleeping.

There is no story of the prodigal mother. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back. They hurried down the road to lock the gate, the father and his sons together, the wind whipping at their coats. A friend had tipped them off. They knew she was coming and the gate must be locked.

A patient in the coronary care unit was allowed three fifteen-minute visits a day, one visitor at a time. My mother went to Maeve’s bedside for the next two visits: the regular morning visit and the mid-afternoon. The nurse came into the waiting room and told us Maeve was asking for her mother. I was allowed in at seven that evening, and I understood that it was not a moment for petulance, confrontation or discussion. No wrongs would be righted, no injustices examined. I would go in and see my sister, that was all. Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.

Maybe it was because a full twenty-four hours had passed since I had last seen her, and maybe it was because our mother’s arrival had thrilled her, but Maeve looked better than she had. She was sitting in the single chair beside her bed, her monitors all beeping in accordance with her improved heart function. “Look at you!” I said, and leaned down to kiss her.

Maeve gave me one of her rare Christmas-morning smiles, no guile, all teeth. She looked like she might pop straight up and throw her arms around me. “Can you believe it?”

And I didn’t say,
What?
And I didn’t say,
I know! You’re doing so much better!
because I knew what she was talking about and this wasn’t the time to be coy. I said, “It was a big surprise.”

“She told me Fluffy found her and told her I was sick.” Maeve’s eyes were shining in the dim light. “She said she came right away.”

And I didn’t say,
Right away plus forty-two years
. “I know she’s been worried about you. Everyone’s been worried about you. I think that everyone you’ve ever known has come by.”

“Danny, our
mother
is here. It doesn’t matter about anyone else. Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

I sat down on the unmade bed. “Beautiful,” I said.

“You’re not happy about this.”

“I am. I’m happy for you.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Maeve, I want you to be healthy. I want whatever’s going to be best for you.”

“You have got to learn to lie.” Her hair had been brushed and I wondered if our mother had brushed it.

“I am lying,” I said. “You can’t believe how well I’m lying.”

“I’m so happy. I’ve just had a heart attack and this has been the happiest day of my life.”

I told her the truth, more or less, that her happiness was all I cared about.

“I’m just glad she came back for my heart attack and not my funeral.”

“Why would you even say that?” For the first time since Mr. Otterson had called my office, I was in danger of giving way to my emotions.

“It’s true,” she said. “Let her sleep in the house. Make sure there’s food. I don’t want her in the waiting room all night.”

I nodded. There was so much to hold back that I couldn’t say another word.

“I love her,” Maeve said. “Don’t mess this up for me. Don’t chase her off while I’m locked up in the aquarium.”

Later that day I went back to Maeve’s and packed up my things. It would be easier for me to stay in a hotel anyway. I asked Sandy to pick my mother up and take her to Maeve’s. Sandy knew everything already, including how I felt, which was miraculous considering my inability to put my feelings into words. From what I could piece together, Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy had each dealt with the return of Elna Conroy in her own way.

“I know how hard this is,” Sandy said to me, “because I know how hard it was. But I think if you’d known her back then you’d be happy to see her.”

I just looked at her.

“Okay, maybe not, but we have to make this work for Maeve’s sake.” Meaning that I would make it work and she would help me. Sandy had always had a lighter touch than the other two.

My mother offered nothing to explain herself. When we were in the waiting room together she stayed near the window as if contemplating her exit. A high-pitched whine seemed to emanate from her misery, like fluorescent tubing just before it burns out, like tinnitus, something nearly imperceptible that almost drove me to insanity. Then, without a word, she would leave, as if even she could not stand herself another minute. When she returned hours later she was more relaxed. Sandy told me she went to the other floors and found people to walk with, patients or anxious family members waiting for news. She would loop around the various nurses’ stations with strangers for hours.

“And they let her?” I asked. I would have thought there would be rules against it.

Sandy shrugged. “She tells them her daughter had a heart attack and that she’s waiting, too. She isn’t exactly a dangerous character, your mother.”

It was a point on which I could not be convinced.

Sandy sighed. “I know. I think I’d still be mad at her too if she wasn’t so old.”

I believed that Sandy and my mother were pretty much the same age, at least in the same ballpark, but I also knew what she meant. My mother was like a pilgrim who had fallen into the ice for hundreds of years and then was thawed against her will. Everything about her indicated that she had meant to be dead by now.