The Dutch House (31 page)

A heavyset Hispanic woman with a long single braid and the cheerful pastel scrubs of a pediatric nurse moved quickly into the frame and gathered Andrea into her arms, pulling her back. She saw the two of us there in front of the station wagon, tall and thin and similar. My mother, with her short brush of gray hair, deep wrinkles, and drilling gaze of preternatural calm, nodded as if to say,
Don’t worry, we will not be advancing
, and so the woman opened the door. Clearly it had been her intention to ask who we were, but before she had the chance Andrea shot out like a cat. In a second she had crossed the terrace and came straight to me, at me, as if she meant to go through my chest. The force with which she hit punched the air from my lungs. She buried her face into my shirt, her small arms locking around my waist. She was wailing, her narrow back straining against her grief. In half a second Maeve was out of the car. She took hold of Andrea’s shoulders and was trying to pull her off of me.

“Jesus,” Maeve said. “Andrea, stop this.”

But there was no stopping this. She had locked herself to me like a protester chained to a fence at a demonstration, and I could feel her heartbeat, her ragged breathing. I’d shaken Andrea’s hand that first day she came to the house, and with the exception of brushing past her in the small kitchen or being forcibly crowded together for a Christmas photograph, we’d never touched again, not at the wedding and certainly not at the funeral. I looked down at the top of her head, her blond hair brushed back and caught in a clip at the nape of her neck. I could see the smallest line of white growing in where her hair was parted. I could smell the powder of her perfume.

My mother put her hand on Andrea’s back. “Mrs. Conroy?” she said.

Maeve stayed very close to me. “What the
fuck
?”

The Hispanic woman, who clearly had a bad knee, came limping down the stairs towards us. “Missus,” she said to Andrea. “Missus, you need to be inside.”

“Can you get her off of him?” Maeve asked, her voice bright with rage, her hand on my shoulder. Only the two of us were there.

“You,” Andrea said, and then gasped to find her breath. She was crying like the end of all the earth. “You, you.”

“Missus,” the woman said again when she reached us, her stiff knee making me think of our father. He went down the stairs like that. “Why are you crying? Your friends have come to say hello.” She looked at me to confirm this but I had no idea what we were doing there.

“I’m Elna Conroy,” my mother said finally. “These are my children, Danny and Maeve. Mrs. Conroy was their stepmother.”

At this news, the woman broke into a wide smile. “Missus, look. Family! Your family has come to see you.”

Andrea ground her forehead into the space beneath my sternum as if she could crawl inside of me.

“Missus,” the woman said, petting Andrea’s head. “Come inside now with your family. Come inside and sit.”

Getting Andrea back in the house was no small feat. She had the will of a barnacle. I lifted her up one step and then another. She wasn’t heavy but her clinging made her nearly impossible to maneuver. Her shoes slipped off her stocking feet and my mother bent down to retrieve them.

“I had this dream once,” Maeve said to me, and I started to laugh.

“My mother wanted to visit,” I told the woman over Andrea’s head. She was a housekeeper, a nurse, a warden, I didn’t know.

The woman rushed ahead of us into the house, as much as her knee allowed for it. “Doctor!” she shouted up the stairs.

“Don’t,” Andrea said into my shirt, and I knew exactly what she was saying,
Don’t shout, don’t run.

I lifted her up the last step. I had to keep my arm around her back in order to do it. I had not been born with an imagination large enough to encompass this moment.

“She thinks your father’s come back,” my mother said, lifting her empty hand to shade her eyes from the reflection of the late afternoon sun. “She thinks you’re Cyril.” Then she walked into the foyer, past the round marble-topped table, the two French chairs, the mirror framed by the arms of a golden octopus, the grandfather clock where the ship rocked between two rows of painted metal waves.

In my dreams, the intervening years were never kind to the Dutch House. I was certain it would have become something shabby in my absence, the peeling and threadbare remains of grandeur, when in fact nothing of the sort had happened. The house looked the same as it did when we walked out thirty years before. I came into the drawing room with Andrea firmly affixed, the dark, wet smear of mascara and tears spreading across my shirt. Maybe a few pieces of furniture had been rearranged, reupholstered, replaced, who could remember? There were the silk drapes, the yellow silk chairs, the Dutch books still in the glass-fronted secretary reaching up and up towards the ceiling, forever unread. Even the silver cigarette boxes were there, polished and waiting on the end tables, just as they had been when the VanHoebeeks walked the earth. By folding Andrea onto the sofa with me I managed to sit. She pushed herself beneath my arm so as to nestle her small weight against my rib cage. She had stopped crying and was making quiet smacking noises instead. She was no one I had ever known.

Maeve and my mother floated into the room in silence, both of them looking at things they had never planned on seeing again: the tapestry ottoman, the Chinese lamp, the heavy tasseled ropes of twisted silk, blue and green, that held the draperies back. If I had ever seen the two of them in this room before it was in a time before memory. I was able to reach into my pocket and hand Andrea a handkerchief, remembering that it had been Andrea, not Maeve or Sandy, who had taught me to carry one. She wiped at her face and then pressed her ear to my chest to listen to my heart. My mother and sister went to the fireplace to stand beneath the VanHoebeeks.

“I hated them,” my mother said quietly, still holding Andrea’s shoes.

Maeve nodded, her eyes on those eyes that had followed us through our youth. “I loved them.”

That was when Norma came running down the stairs saying, “Inez! I’m sorry, sorry. I was on the phone with the hospital. What happened?” She ran through the foyer. Norma was always running and her mother was always telling her to stop. What stopped her now? My mother and sister in front of the blue delft mantel? Me on the couch wearing her mother like a vine? Inez beamed. The family had come to visit.

I wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d seen her on the street, and maybe I had seen her on the street, but in this room there was no question. Norma was considerably taller than her mother, infinitely sturdier. She wore small gold-rimmed glasses that spoke of a fondness for John Lennon or Teddy Roosevelt, her thick brown hair pulled back in an artless ponytail. It had been thirty years since we left but I knew her. She had woken me from a sound sleep on so many nights, wanting to tell me her dreams. “Norma, this is our mother, Elna Conroy,” I said, and then I looked at my mother. “Norma was our sister-in-law.”

“I was your stepsister,” Norma said. She was staring at the room, the entire tableau of us, but her eyes kept going back to Maeve. “My god,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

“Norma got my room,” Maeve said to our mother.

Norma blinked. She was wearing dark slacks, a pink blouse. No embellishment or frill, nothing to make herself noticeable, an outfit that said she was not her mother’s daughter. “I didn’t mean the room.”

“The room with the window seat?” our mother asked, suddenly able to picture that place her daughter had slept all those years ago.

Maeve looked up at the ceiling, at the crown molding called egg-and-dart. “Actually, she got the whole house. I mean, her mother got the house.”

That was when I saw Norma, eight again, the weight of that bedroom still crushing her. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

Did she sleep there all these years later? Did she live in this house and sleep in Maeve’s bed?

Maeve looked right at her. “I’m kidding,” she whispered.

Norma shook her head. “I missed you so much after you left.”

“After your mother threw us out?” Maeve couldn’t help herself, even if she didn’t mean to say it to Norma. She had waited for such a long time.

“Then,” Norma said, “and all the way up until a few minutes ago.”

“How’s your mother doing?” Elna asked her, as if we didn’t know. Maybe she wanted to change the subject. The current that ran between Norma and Maeve was something our mother couldn’t have understood. She hadn’t been there.

A Kleenex box sat on the coffee table. There would never have been Kleenex in the drawing room had Andrea been in her right mind. Norma came closer in order to take a tissue. “It’s primary progressive aphasia or it’s plain old Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure, and it doesn’t really matter since there’s nothing you can do about it either way.” Norma’s mother was, at least for that minute, the last thing on Norma’s mind.

“Do you take care of her?” Maeve asked. I really thought she might spit on the carpet.

Norma held out her hand to the woman with the braid. “Inez does most of it. I only moved back a few months ago.”

Inez smiled. It wasn’t her mother.

Elna came and kneeled before Andrea, slipping her shoes back on her feet, then she sat on the couch so that my father’s tiny widow was sandwiched between the two of us. “How wonderful that your daughter’s come home,” she said to my stepmother.

And Andrea, still smacking, looked at my mother for the first time, then she pointed to the painting that hung on the wall across from the VanHoebeeks. “My daughter,” she said.

We turned to look, all of us, and there was the portrait of my sister, hanging exactly where it always had been. Maeve was ten years old, her shining black hair down past the shoulders of her red coat, the wallpaper from the observatory behind her, graceful imaginary swallows flying past pink roses, Maeve’s blue eyes dark and bright. Anyone looking at that painting would have wondered what had become of her. She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front of her, covered in stars.

Maeve cut a wide path around the sofa where we were sitting and walked across the room to stand in front of the girl she had been. “I was sure she would have thrown that away,” she said.

“She loves the painting,” Norma said.

Andrea gave a deep nod and pointed at the painting. “My daughter.”

“No,” Maeve said.

“My daughter,” Andrea said again, and then she turned and looked at the VanHoebeeks. “My parents.”

Maeve stood there as if she were trying to get used to the idea. We were spellbound as we watched her put a firm hand on either side of the frame to lift the painting off the wall. The frame was wide and lacquered black, no doubt to match her hair, but the painting itself was only the size of a ten-year-old child from the waist up. She struggled for moment to free the wire from the nail and Norma reached up behind the canvas to help her. The painting came away from the wall.

“It’s heavy,” Norma said, and put out her hands to help.

“I’ve got it,” Maeve said. There was a slightly darker rectangle left behind on the wallpaper, outlining the place where it had been.

“I’m going to give this to May,” Maeve said to me. “It looks like May.”

Andrea smoothed my handkerchief out across her lap. Then she started folding it again, each of the four corners in towards the middle.

Maeve stopped and looked at Norma. With her hands full, she leaned over and kissed her. “I should have come back for you,” she said. “You and Bright.”

Then she left the house.

I would have expected Andrea to panic when I got up to follow my sister, or to mark the painting’s departure with some level of violence, but she was consumed by the pleasures of my handkerchief. When I stood she was unbalanced for a moment, then tilted over to rest against my mother like a plant in need of staking. My mother put an arm around her, and why not? Maeve was already gone.

I gave Norma a small embrace at the door. I had never known that Maeve thought about the girls again, but it made sense. Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.

“I’m going to stay a minute,” my mother said to me. It was funny to see the two Mrs. Conroys sitting there together—though funny wasn’t the word—the little one dressed like a doll, the tall one still reminiscent of Death.

“Take all the time you need,” I said, and I meant it, all the time in the world. I would wait with my sister in the car.

I walked out the glass front doors and into the late afternoon of the beautiful day. It did not feel strange to see the world from this vantage point, nor did it make any difference. Maeve was in the driver’s seat with the painting in the back. The windows were down and she was smoking. When I got into the car she handed me the pack.

“I swear to you, I don’t smoke anymore,” she said.

“Neither do I.” I took the matches.

“Did that really happen?”

I pointed to the large stain on my shirt, the smear of lipstick and mascara.

Maeve shook her head. “Andrea lost her mind. What kind of justice is that?”

“I feel like we just went to the moon.”

“And Norma!” Maeve looked at me. “Oh my god, poor Norma.”

“At least you got the painting of Andrea’s daughter. I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind for that.”