The Dutch House (27 page)

Fluffy proved adept at avoiding me, and when I finally caught her alone at the elevator bank, she pretended she’d been looking for me. “I’ve always known you to be a decent man,” she said, instructing me to be nicer.

“And I’ve known you to make some bad decisions, but you’ve really outdone yourself here.”

Fluffy held her ground. “I did what was best for Maeve.” An elevator door opened in front of us and when the people inside looked out we shook our heads.

“How is it that hearing from our mother was a bad idea for Maeve when she was just a diabetic, but now that she’s a diabetic who’s had a heart attack you think it’s a good idea?”

“It’s different,” Fluffy said, her cheeks reddening.

“Explain it to me then because I don’t understand.” I tried to remember how deeply I trusted her, how she had taught Celeste and me to raise our children, how confidently we left the house with only Fluffy there to guard Kevin and May.

“I was afraid Maeve would die,” Fluffy said, her eyes going watery. “I wanted her to see her mother before she died.”

But of course Maeve didn’t die. Every day she improved, overcame her setbacks. Every day she asked for no one but her mother.

I found it remarkable that our mother could work Maeve into her schedule. She had somehow secured the right to push the flower cart, to sit and visit with the people who had no mothers of their own to contend with. I didn’t know whom she had talked into letting her do this, or how, since when we found ourselves together she was more or less mute. I thought she was too restless to sit in the waiting room, but it was probably closer to the truth to say she didn’t want to sit with me. She couldn’t look at me. When Fluffy arrived for a visit, or Sandy or Jocelyn or Mr. Otterson or the Norcrosses or good old Lawyer Gooch or any group of Maeve’s friends from work or church or the neighborhood, there my mother would be, picking up the newspapers and magazines, seeing who wanted a bottle of water or an orange. She was forever peeling someone an orange. She had some special trick for it.

“So what was India like?” Jocelyn asked one afternoon, as if my mother had just returned from vacation. Jocelyn remained the most suspicious of our mother, or, I should say, the second-most suspicious.

I noticed the dark circles under my mother’s eyes had diminished somewhat. She must have been the only person in human history to have been improved by a waiting room. Jocelyn and I were there with Fluffy. Sandy was working. Sooner or later Elna was going to have to tell us something.

“India was a mistake,” she said finally.

“But you wanted to help,” Fluffy said. “You helped people.”

“Why India?” I had meant to sit through the conversation in silence but on this point my curiosity got the better of me.

My mother picked at a piece of yarn that dangled from the cuff of her dark green sweater, the same sweater she wore every day. “I read an article in a magazine about Mother Teresa, how she asked the sisters to send her to Calcutta to help the destitutes. I can’t even remember what magazine it was now. Something your father subscribed to.”

That wasn’t a connection I would have made, my mother sitting in the kitchen of the Dutch House, circa 1950, reading about Mother Teresa in
Newsweek
or
Life
while the other women on VanHoebeek street took leadership positions in the garden club and went to summer dances.

“She’s a great lady, Mother Teresa,” Fluffy said.

My mother nodded. “Of course she wasn’t Mother Teresa then.”

“You worked with Mother Teresa?” Jocelyn asked.

At this point anything seemed possible, including my mother in a white cotton sari holding the dying in her arms. There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns. Or maybe I was reading too much into the bony contours of her face. The long, thin hands she kept folded in her lap made me think of kindling. The fingers of her right hand kept finding their way back to the ring she wore on her left.

“I meant to, but the ship went to Bombay. I don’t think I even looked at a map before I left. I ended up on the wrong side of the country.” She said it by way of acknowledging that everyone made mistakes. “They told me I’d have to take a train, and I was going to, I was going to go to Calcutta, but once you’ve spent a couple of days in Bombay—” She finished the sentence there.

“What?” Fluffy prompted.

“There was plenty to do in Bombay,” my mother said quietly.

“There’s plenty to do in Brooklyn.” I picked up the Styrofoam cup at my feet but the coffee was cold. Gone were the days I’d drink cold coffee in a hospital.

“Danny,” Fluffy said, warning me of what I do not know.

“No, he’s right,” my mother said. “That’s what I should have done. I could have served the poor of Philadelphia and come home at night but I didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. That house—”

“The house?” Jocelyn said, as if she had no business blaming the Dutch House for her neglect.

“It took away all sense of proportion.”

“It was huge,” Fluffy said.

A television set that hung from a high corner near the ceiling of the waiting room was playing a show about tearing apart an old house. There was no remote, but on my first day there I stood on a chair and muted the sound. Four days later, the people on the television walked silently through empty rooms, pointing out the walls they were going to knock through.

“I could never understand why your father wanted it and he could never understand why I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” Surely there were worse hells than a beautiful house.

“We were
poor
people,” my mother said. I hadn’t known she was capable of inflection. “I had no business in a place like that, all those fireplaces and staircases, all those people waiting on me.”

Fluffy let out a small snort. “That’s ridiculous. We never waited on you. You made my breakfast every morning.”

My mother shook her head. “I was so ashamed of myself.”

“Not of Dad?” I would have thought my father was the obvious choice. After all, he had bought the house.

“Your father wasn’t ashamed,” she said, misunderstanding. “He was thrilled. Ten times a day he’d find something to show me. ‘Elna, would you look at this banister?’ ‘Elna, come outside and see this garage.’”

“He loved the garage,” Fluffy said.

“He never understood how anyone could have been miserable in that house.”

“The VanHoebeeks were miserable,” Fluffy said. “At least they were in the end.”

“You went to India to get away from the
house
?” Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.

My mother’s pale eyes were clouded by cataracts and I wondered how much she could see. “What else could it have been?”

“I guess I just assumed it was Dad.”

“I loved your father,” she said. The words were right there. She didn’t have to reach for them at all.
I loved your father.

That was Fluffy’s cue to stand. She stretched onto the balls of her feet, lifting her arms over her head. She said, as if responding to some unspoken request, that she would walk down the block and bring us back some decent coffee, at which point my mother stood as well, saying she was going to the third floor to look at the new babies, and I said I was going to the pay phone to call Celeste, and Jocelyn said if that was the case, then she’d be heading home. We had talked until we couldn’t stand it another second, and then we stopped.

Of course it wasn’t just my mother who was expected to provide the conversation on those long days. We were all looking to pass the time. Jocelyn had retired but Sandy kept working. She talked about her employer who wanted the carpet vacuumed in a single direction. Fluffy talked about the Dutch House before the Conroys had come, about taking care of Mrs. VanHoebeek after the money was gone, and how she took the train into New York with pieces of jewelry to sell. It seemed to me an astonishing act of bravery for a young woman at the time.

“You couldn’t sell them in Philadelphia?” I asked her.

“Sure I could,” she said, “but whoever I sold a ring to in Philadelphia would have just taken it into Manhattan and sold it again for double the price.”

Fluffy sold a triple strand of pearls to cover the hospital bill when Mrs. VanHoebeek broke her hip, and when the old woman died, Fluffy sold a brooch for the funeral, a small gold bird with an emerald pinched in its beak.

“There were still things left,” Fluffy said. “Nothing like what had been there to start, but the Missus and I paced ourselves. We didn’t know how long she was going to last. Those bankers who sold the house? Absolute idiots. They asked me to make a list of everything of value so that they could have it appraised. I left most of it alone, but there were things I took.” She held up her hand to show us a diamond ring in an old-fashioned setting, a little ruby on either side. For as long as I’d known Fluffy she’d worn that ring.

I suppose it was a stark confession, seeing as how the contents of the house had been purchased by my father in their entirety. After the ring had belonged to Mrs. VanHoebeek it would have belonged to him, along with everything else, and maybe he would have given it to my mother, who might have passed it on to Maeve when she was older, or given it to me to give to Celeste. But that idea was predicated on my father being the sort of man who would look through a jewelry box, which he was not, or my mother being the sort of person who would stick around. More likely, the ring would have sat where it was until Andrea arrived. Andrea would not have overlooked any jewelry the house had to offer.

Fluffy would have turned the ring over to either of us had we asked, but instead my mother leaned forward, peering at Fluffy’s hand with her cloudy eyes. “So pretty,” she said, and gave her hand a kiss. “Good for you.”

“And what do you do?” the woman on my left asked me. She was one of Celeste’s many aunts. I couldn’t remember her name, though I knew we’d been introduced at the door.

“Danny’s in medical school at Columbia,” Mrs. Norcross said from across the table, on the off chance this was information I’d be unwilling to share myself.

“Medical school?” the aunt said, and then, remarkably, she looked at Celeste. “You didn’t tell me he was in medical school.”

The middle section of the long table fell silent and Celeste shrugged her pretty shoulders. “You didn’t ask.”

“What kind of medicine do you plan to practice?” one of the uncles asked. I had just that minute become interesting. I didn’t know if he was the uncle who was matched to this particular aunt.

I envisioned all the empty buildings I’d seen up in Washington Heights, and for a minute I thought it would really be something to tell them the truth: I was planning on practicing real estate. From the end of the table I saw Maeve flash me a wild smile, confirming that she alone understood how insane this was. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Do you have to cut people up?” Celeste’s younger brother asked me. I had been told this was his first year in the dining room. He was the youngest person at the table.

“Teddy,” his mother said in warning.

“
Au
topsies,” Teddy said, bored out of his mind. “They have to do them, you know.”

“We do,” I said, “but they make us take an oath never to discuss it at dinner.”

For that withholding, the room sent up a grateful round of laughter. From a distance, I heard someone ask Maeve if she was a doctor as well. “No,” she said, holding up her fork speared with green beans. “I’m in vegetables.”

When the dinner was over and we’d been piled up with leftovers for the weekend, Celeste kissed me goodbye. Maeve promised that we would pick her up Sunday morning on our way to the train. They trailed us out to the car, all those happy Norcrosses, telling us we should stay. There would be movies later on, popcorn, games of Hearts. Lumpy ran out of the house and into the yard, barking and barking at the piles of leaves until they shooed him back inside.

“This is our chance,” Maeve whispered, and jumped into the driver’s side. I went around and got in the car beside her while they stood there, the whole host of them waving and laughing as we pulled away.

The Norcrosses had their dinner early so it was barely dusk. We had just enough time to make it back to the Dutch House before the lights went on. We’d promised Jocelyn we’d come to her house later for pie, so this was just a brief interlude between dipping into other people’s splendid meals. We were still young enough then to conjure up the exact feeling of how Thanksgivings had been when we were children, but it was a memory with no longing attached. Either it had been me and Maeve and our father eating in the dining room, and Sandy and Jocelyn trying their best not to look like they were rushing to get home to their own families, or it was the years with Andrea and the girls, in which Sandy and Jocelyn rushed openly. After that disastrous Thanksgiving when Maeve was banished to the third floor, she had stayed away from Elkins Park, and every year I looked at her empty place at the table and felt miserable, even though I never could understand how her being gone on Thanksgiving was any worse than it was on all the other nights of the year. Having spent this particular Thanksgiving with the Norcross family had made up for a lot, and we both left the dinner feeling restored, even if our exit had smacked of escape. Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Maeve said, rolling down her window to meet the frigid air, “but if I don’t have a cigarette right this minute I’m going to die.” She pulled one out then handed me the pack so I could decide for myself, then she handed me the lighter. Soon we were each blowing smoke out of our respective windows.

“As good as that dinner was, this cigarette might be better,” I said.

“If you did an
au
topsy on me right now you would find I am nothing but dark meat and gravy, with maybe a tiny vein of mashed potatoes inside my right arm.” Maeve was careful about her carbohydrates. She had forgone the Norcross pie in order to have a slice at Jocelyn’s.

“I could present you at grand rounds,” I said, and thought of Bill Norcross sawing into the carcass of the turkey.

Maeve shuddered slightly. “I can’t believe they make you cut people up.”

“I can’t believe you make me go to medical school.”

She laughed, and then pressed her fingers to her lips as if to quell her dinner’s revolt. “Oh, stop complaining. Seriously, apart from dissecting other human beings, tell me one thing that’s so terrible.”

I tipped my head back, exhaling. Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats. Especially orthopedists. You couldn’t be an orthopedist without smoking. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.”

She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. “You didn’t understand that?”

I shook my head. “You
think
you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”

“I never for a minute thought I was going to die on the couch at ninety-six, or be ninety-six for that matter.”

But I wasn’t listening, I was talking. “You just don’t realize how many ways there are to die, excluding gunshots and knife fights and falling out windows and all the other things that probably aren’t going to happen.”

“Tell me, Doc, what
is
going to happen?” She was trying not to laugh at me, but it was true: death was all I thought about in those days.

“Too many white blood cells, too few red blood cells, too much iron, a respiratory infection, sepsis. You can get a blockage in your bile duct. Your esophagus can rupture. And the cancers.” I looked at her. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you, it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”

“Which makes a person wonder why we need doctors in the first place.”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” Maeve said, taking a long pull on her cigarette, “I already know how I’m going to die so I don’t have to worry about that.”

I looked at her profile lit up by the street lights clicking on, by the lights Andrea had turned on in the Dutch House. Everything about her was sharp and straight and beautiful, everything about her was life and health. “How are you going to die?” I don’t know why I asked because I sure as hell didn’t want to know.

Unlike the medical students in my class who sounded like they were idling over a catalog of disease when hypothesizing their deaths, Maeve spoke with authority. “Heart disease or stroke. That’s how diabetics go. Probably heart disease when you factor Dad into the equation, which is fine by me. It’s quicker, right? Bang.”

Suddenly I was angry at her. She had no idea what she was talking about, and anyway, this was Thanksgiving, and we were supposed to be playing a game, not unlike the Norcrosses dealing out their hands of Hearts. “If you’re so damned worried about a heart attack then why’re we sitting here smoking?”

She blinked. “I’m not worried. I told you, I’m not the one who’s going to die after dinner at ninety-six. That’s you.”

I threw my cigarette out the window.

“Jesus, Danny, open the door and pick that up.” She gave my shoulder a smack with the back of her hand. “That’s Mrs. Buchsbaum’s yard.”