The Dutch House (30 page)

Maeve looked down the street. Since I hadn’t realized we were coming outside to discuss the circumstances of our lives, I hadn’t thought to put on my coat and now I was cold. “There is a finite amount of time,” Maeve said. “Maybe I understand that better now. I’ve wanted my mother back since I was ten years old, and now she’s here. I can use the time I’ve got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.”

“Those are the two choices?” I wished we could get in the car and drive over to the Dutch House, just sit by ourselves for a minute even though we didn’t do that anymore.

Maeve looked back at the gutter and nodded. “Pretty much.”

Other than Mr. Otterson’s insight and Maeve’s recovery, I couldn’t imagine feeling lucky where any of this was concerned. Our mother’s gain had been my decisive loss. “Does she even know what happened to us after she left? Have you told her about Andrea, about how she threw us out?”

“Jesus, of course she knows about Andrea. Do you think we’ve been playing cards all summer? I’ve told her everything that’s happened, and I know what happened to her, too. It’s amazing what you can find out about a person if you’re interested. All these conversations were open to you, by the way. Don’t think you’ve been excluded. Every time she opens her mouth you find a reason to leave the room.”

“I’m not the one she’s interested in.”

Maeve shook her head. “Grow up.”

It seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say to a forty-five-year-old that I started to laugh and then caught myself. It had been a long time since we’d had something to fight about. “Okay, if you know so much about her, tell me why she left. And don’t say she didn’t like the wallpaper.”

“She wanted—” Maeve stopped, exhaled, her frozen breath making me think of smoke. “She wanted to help people.”

“People other than her family.”

“She made a mistake. Can’t you understand that? She’s covered up in shame. That’s why she never got in touch with us, you know, when she came back from India. She was afraid we’d treat her pretty much the way you’ve treated her. It’s her belief that your cruelty is what she deserves.”

“I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it
is
what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there.

“Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re
fine
. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.”

Her cheeks were red, and while it was probably just the cold I couldn’t help but worry about her heart. I said nothing.

“For the record, I’m sick of misery,” she said, then she turned and went back inside, leaving me to stand in the swirl of leaves and think about what I owed her. By any calculation, it was everything.

And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.

“A very uneventful ride.” I kissed them both.

When we got to the parking lot, my mother told me she was driving. Once Maeve was fully recovered, she had launched our mother on a plan of self-improvement. In the past six months our mother had had cataract surgery on both of her eyes, three basal cell carcinomas removed (one from her left temple, one from the top of her left ear, one on her right nostril), and a significant amount of dentistry. Housekeeping, Maeve called it. I paid the bills. Maeve fought me at first but I told her if she wanted me to do better, she had to let me do better. I didn’t mention any of this to Celeste.

“You have no idea what it’s like to see again,” our mother said. “That thing—” she pointed to a telephone pole. “Six months ago I would have told you that was a tree.”

“It was a tree at some point,” Maeve said, getting into the back seat of her own station wagon.

Our mother put on a giant pair of Jackie O sunglasses her ophthalmologist had given her as a gift. “Dr. Shivitz told me the reason my cataracts were so bad is because I never wore sunglasses. I’ve lived in a lot of sunny places.”

Maeve opened her purse and began rooting around for her sunglasses while our mother left the parking lot, working her way through the maze of Philadelphia. I hadn’t felt particularly confident about getting in the car with her, but once she found her place in the traffic she stayed up to speed. She and Maeve were still going on about Pissarro, his paintings of Normandy and Paris, the way he understood the people and the light. They spoke as if he were a friend they both admired.

“We should go to Paris,” Maeve said to our mother. Maeve, who never wanted to go anywhere.

Our mother agreed. “Now’s the time,” she said.

I don’t think I ever took the train to Philadelphia without thinking of chemistry, and how Morey Able told me that without a solid grasp of chapter 1, chapter 2 would be impossible. Maeve had done that work when our mother came back, gone all the way to the beginning until she was certain she understood what had happened. But for me, the discipline had been the exact opposite: when I could look at our mother only as the person she was now—the old lady driving the Volvo—I thought she was fine. She was energetic, helpful, she had a good laugh. She seemed like somebody’s mother, and for the most part I was able to block the fact that she was mine. Or, to put it another way, I thought of her as Maeve’s mother. That worked for all of us.

I paid little attention to their talk of Impressionism and kept a close eye on the cars around us, noting their speed in relation to our speed, calculating their distance. We were well out of the city and there hadn’t been so much as a near miss. I felt grateful that my children showed no interest in learning to drive. One of the many advantages of living in New York was that the streets were full of taxis waiting to take them places. “You’re a good driver,” I said to my mother finally.

“I’ve always driven,” she said, turning her ridiculous sunglasses in my direction. “Even these past few years when I couldn’t see a thing. I drove in New York and Los Angeles for heaven’s sake. I drove in Bombay. I drove in Mexico City. I really think that was the worst.” She put on the turn indicator and changed lanes without self-consciousness. “Your father taught me to drive, you know.”

“Now there’s something we all have in common,” Maeve said.

He had given me a few lessons in the church parking lot when I was fifteen. It had been one of the many means we had of prolonging our Sundays out of the house. “He taught you to drive in Brooklyn?”

“Oh, heavens, no. No one had a car in Brooklyn back then. I learned to drive when we moved to the country. Your father came home one night and said, ‘Elna, I bought you a car. Come on and I’ll show you how it works.’ He had me go up and down the driveway a few times and then he told me to take it out on the street. Two days later I had a driver’s license. Nothing was crowded back then. You didn’t have to worry so much that you were going to hit somebody.”

Yet another thing I’d discovered about our mother: she liked to talk. “Still,” I said, “two days is fast.”

“That was the way your father did things.”

“That was the way he did things,” Maeve said.

“I was never as grateful for anything as I was that car. I didn’t even feel bad about the money it cost. It was a Studebaker Champion. The good old Champion. Back then, all of this was farmland. Right over there”—she pointed to a long block of shop fronts and apartments—“that was a field of cows. I’d never lived in the country before and the quiet made me so nervous. You’d started school,” she said to Maeve, “and all I did was sit there in that huge house all day waiting for you to come home. If it wasn’t for Fluffy and Sandy I would have gone out of my mind, though they drove me out of my mind a little bit, too. Don’t tell them I said that.”

“Of course not,” Maeve said, leaning forward so that her head was more or less between the two front seats.

“I loved them so much, but they wouldn’t let me do
anything
. They were always running just in front of me so that they could wash something or pick something up. I hired Jocelyn because I was so afraid Sandy wouldn’t stay without her sister, and then Jocelyn started doing all the cooking. The one thing I was good at was cooking and they wouldn’t even let me make dinner. But once I got the Champion, things really did get better for a while. After I took you to school in the mornings, I’d drive into Philadelphia and see our friends on the base, or I’d drive to Immaculate Conception and make myself useful until school let out. That’s when I got to be friends with the Mercy nuns. They were great fun. We started a clothing drive and the nuns and I would drive around picking up things people didn’t need, then I would take the clothes home and get everything washed and mended and drive it all back to the church. There was a lot of clothing in the house when we first moved in, things that had been the VanHoebeeks’. A lot of it was hopeless but there were other things Sandy and I fixed up. We made all the coats work—cashmere, furs. You wouldn’t have believed what we found.”

I thought of Fluffy’s diamond.

“I always wondered what happened to the clothes,” Maeve said.

“Your father used to say I lived in that car,” my mother said, undeterred from her original point. “He used to let me drive him around to collect the rent. You know he never liked to drive. I’d pack up the back seat with jars of stew. So many of those people had nothing. One day there was a family we called on, five little children in two rooms, the mother was crying. I said to her, ‘You don’t ever have to pay us rent! You should see the house we live in.’ And that was that.” My mother laughed. “He was so mad he never took me with him again. Then every week he’d come home and say people were asking where I was. He said they wanted their stew.”

In my memory, my father loved to drive. Not that it mattered.

Our mother came to a stop sign, looked in one direction and then the other. “Look at this street, all full up. There used to be three houses on this street.”

Two blocks later she turned left, and then turned left again. I had paid so much attention to how she was driving, I hadn’t noticed where she was driving. We were in Elkins Park. She was heading towards VanHoebeek Street.

“Have you come back here since you’ve been home?” I asked, but really, I meant the question for Maeve.
Do you bring her here?
We had avoided the Dutch House for years and I could feel the strangeness of being in the neighborhood again, as if we’d been caught someplace we weren’t supposed to be.

Our mother shook her head. “I don’t know anyone over here anymore. Do you still know the neighbors?”

Maeve looked out the window. “I used to. Not anymore. Danny and I used to come over and park in front of the house sometimes.” It sounded like a confession, but of what? Sometimes we sat in the car and we talked.

“You went back to the house?”

“We went back to the street,” Maeve said. “We’d drive by. Why did we do that?” she asked me, the very soul of innocence. “Old times’ sake?”

“Did you ever go see your stepmother?” our mother asked.

Had we been to see
Andrea
? Had we paid a social call? I had not been part of the conversations Maeve and my mother had about Andrea. I didn’t want to be. Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present. I understood there was no way our mother could have foreseen Andrea’s coming, but leaving your children meant leaving them to chance.

“Never once,” Maeve said absently.

“But why, if you came over here, if you wanted to see the house?” Our mother slowed the car down and then pulled over. She was in the wrong place, still a block away from where the Buchsbaums had lived.

“We weren’t—” I was looking for the word, but Maeve finished my sentence for me.

“Welcome.”

“As adults?” Our mother took off her sunglasses. She looked at me and then my sister. The places the cancers had been cut away were puckered and red.

Maeve thought about it, shook her head. “No.”

It was late spring, the prettiest time of year on VanHoebeek Street unless you counted the fall. I rolled down the window and the scent of petals and new leaves and grass swam into the car, making us dizzy. Was that what made us dizzy? I wondered if there was any chance Maeve still kept cigarettes in the glove compartment.

“We should go then,” my mother said. “Pop in just to see it, say hello.”

“We shouldn’t,” I said.

“Look at the three of us, undone by a house. It’s insane. We’ll go up the driveway, see who’s there. It may be someone else by now.”

“It’s not,” Maeve said.

“It will be good for us,” our mother said, shifting the car into drive. Clearly, she saw this as a spiritual exercise. It meant nothing to her.

“Don’t do this,” Maeve said. There was no tension in her voice, no urgency, as if she understood that this was the way things were going to play out and nothing short of jumping from the car was going to stop it. We were moving forward, forward, forward.

When had our mother left? In the middle of the night? Did she walk outside with her suitcase in the dark? Did she tell our father goodbye? Did she go to our rooms to watch us sleeping?

She drove through the break in the linden trees. The driveway wasn’t as long as I remembered but the house seemed exactly the same: sunlit, flower-decked, gleaming. I had known since my earliest days at Choate that the world was full of bigger houses, grander and more ridiculous houses, but none were so beautiful. There was the familiar crunch of pea gravel beneath the tires, and when she stopped the car in front of the stone steps I could imagine how elated my father must have felt, and how my sister must have wanted to run off in the grass, and how my mother, alone, had stared up at so much glass and wondered what this fantastical museum was doing in the countryside.

My mother exhaled. She took her dark glasses off the top of her head and left them in the console between the seats. “Let’s go see.”

Maeve kept her seatbelt on.

My mother turned around to look at her daughter. “Aren’t you the one who always says the past is in the past and we need to let things go? This is going to be good for us.”

Maeve turned her face away from the house.

“When I worked in the orphanage, people came back all the time. Some of them were as old as me. They’d come in and walk up and down the halls, look in the rooms. They’d talk to the children there. They said it helped them.”

“This isn’t an orphanage,” Maeve said. “We weren’t orphans.”

My mother shook her head, then looked at me. “Are you coming?”

“Ah, no,” I said.

“Go on,” Maeve said.

I looked back but she wouldn’t look at me. “We don’t have to stay for this,” I said to my sister.

“I mean it,” she said. “Go with her. I’ll wait.”

And so I did, because the layers of loyalty that were being tested were too complicated to dissect, and because, I will admit this now, I was curious, like those aging Indian orphans were curious. I wanted to see the past. I got out of the car and stood in front of the Dutch House again, and my mother came and stood beside me. For that moment it was the two of us, me and Elna. I would never have believed it would happen.

As for what was coming, we were not made to wait. By the time we were at the foot of the steps, Andrea was on the other side of the glass door. She was wearing a blue tweed suit with gold buttons, lipstick, low-heeled shoes, like she was on her way to see Lawyer Gooch. When she saw us there she raised her hands and began slapping them hard against the glass, her mouth open in a rounded howl. I’d heard that sound in emergency rooms late at night: a knife pulled out, a child dead.

“That’s Andrea,” I told our mother, just to underscore what a spectacularly bad idea this had been. Our father’s second wife was a tiny woman, either smaller than she once had been or smaller than I remembered, but she pounded the window like a warrior beats a drum. Along with the screaming and the slapping I could hear the sound of her rings, the distinctive crack of metal against glass. We were frozen, the two of us outside and Maeve in the car, waiting for the moment when the whole front of the house would shatter into a million knives and she would come for us like the fury of hell itself.