The Dutch House / Голландский дом (by Ann Patchett, 2019) - аудиокнига на английском

Part One Chapter 1 The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,” she said. “Is it a work friend?” Maeve asked. She was older and so had a more complex understanding of friendship. Sandy considered the question. “I’d say not. Where’s your brother?” “Window seat,” Maeve said. Sandy had to pull the draperies back to find me. “Why do you have to close the drapes?” I was reading. “Privacy,” I said, though at eight I had no notion of privacy. I liked the word, and I liked the boxed-in feel the draperies gave when they were closed. As for the visitor, it was a mystery. Our father didn’t have friends, at least not the kind who came to the house late on a Saturday afternoon. I left my secret spot and went to the top of the stairs to lie down on the rug that covered the landing. I knew from experience I could see into the drawing room by looking between the newel post and first baluster if I was on the floor. There was our father in front of the fireplace with a woman, and from what I could tell they were studying the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeek. I got up and went back to my sister’s room to make my report. “It’s a woman,” I said to Maeve. Sandy would have known this already. Sandy asked me if I’d brushed my teeth, by which she meant had I brushed them that morning. No one brushed their teeth at four o’clock in the afternoon. Sandy had to do everything herself because Jocelyn had Saturdays off. Sandy would have laid the fire and answered the door and offered drinks and, on top of all of that, was now responsible for my teeth. Sandy was off on Mondays. Sandy and Jocelyn were both off on Sundays because my father didn’t think people should be made to work on Sundays. “I did,” I said, because I probably had. “Do it again,” she said. “And brush your hair.” The last part she meant for my sister, whose hair was long and black and as thick as ten horse tails tied together. No amount of brushing ever made it look brushed. Once we were deemed presentable, Maeve and I went downstairs and stood beneath the wide archway of the foyer, watching our father and Andrea watch the VanHoebeeks. They didn’t notice us, or they didn’t acknowledge us—hard to say—and so we waited. Maeve and I knew how to be quiet in the house, a habit born of trying not to irritate our father, though it irritated him more when he felt we were sneaking up on him. He was wearing his blue suit. He never wore a suit on Saturdays. For the first time I could see that his hair was starting to gray in the back. Standing next to Andrea, he looked even taller than he was. “It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings. Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeek, who had no first names that I had ever heard, were old in their portraits but not entirely ancient. They both dressed in black and stood with an erect formality that spoke of another time. Even in their separate frames they were so together, so married, I always thought it must have been one large painting that someone cut in half. Andrea’s head tilted back to study those four cunning eyes that appeared to follow a boy with disapproval no matter which of the sofas he chose to sit on. Maeve, silent, stuck her finger in between my ribs to make me yelp but I held on to myself. We had not yet been introduced to Andrea, who, from the back, looked small and neat in her belted dress, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of pale hair. Having been schooled by nuns, I knew better than to embarrass a guest by laughing. Andrea would have had no way of knowing that the people in the paintings had come with the house, that everything in the house had come with the house. The drawing-room VanHoebeeks were the show-stoppers, life-sized documentation of people worn by time, their stern and unlovely faces rendered with Dutch exactitude and a distinctly Dutch understanding of light, but there were dozens of other lesser portraits on every floor—their children in the hallways, their ancestors in the bedrooms, the unnamed people they’d admired scattered throughout. There was also one portrait of Maeve when she was ten, and while it wasn’t nearly as big as the paintings of the VanHoebeeks, it was every bit as good. My father had brought in a famous artist from Chicago on the train. As the story goes, he was supposed to paint our mother, but our mother, who hadn’t been told that the painter was coming to stay in our house for two weeks, refused to sit, and so he painted Maeve instead. When the portrait was finished and framed, my father hung it in the drawing room right across from the VanHoebeeks. Maeve liked to say that was where she learned to stare people down. “Danny,” my father said when finally he turned, looking like he expected us to be exactly where we were. “Come say hello to Mrs. Smith.” I will always believe that Andrea’s face fell for an instant when she looked at Maeve and me. Even if my father hadn’t mentioned his children, she would have known he had them. Everyone in Elkins Park knew what went on in the Dutch House. Maybe she thought we would stay upstairs. She’d come to see the house, after all, not the children. Or maybe the look on Andrea’s face was just for Maeve, who, at fifteen and in her tennis shoes, was already a head taller than Andrea in her heels. Maeve had been inclined to slouch when it first became apparent she was going to be taller than all the other girls in her class and most of the boys, and our father was relentless in his correction of her posture. Head-up-shoulders-back might as well have been her name. For years he thumped her between the shoulder blades with the flat of his palm whenever he passed her in a room, the unintended consequence of which was that Maeve now stood like a soldier in the queen’s court, or like the queen herself. Even I could see how she might have been intimidating: her height, the shining black wall of hair, the way she would lower her eyes to look at a person rather than bend her neck. But at eight I was still comfortably smaller than the woman our father would later marry. I held out my hand to shake her little hand and said my name, then Maeve did the same. Though the story will be remembered that Maeve and Andrea were at odds right from the start, that wasn’t true. Maeve was perfectly fair and polite when they met, and she remained fair and polite until doing so was no longer possible. “How do you do?” Maeve said, and Andrea replied that she was very well. Andrea was well. Of course she was. It had been Andrea’s goal for years to get inside the house, to loop her arm through our father’s arm when going up the wide stone steps and across the red-tiled terrace. She was the first woman our father had brought home since our mother left, though Maeve told me that he had had something going with our nanny for a while, an Irish girl named Fiona. “You think he was sleeping with Fluffy?” I asked her. Fluffy was what we called Fiona when we were children, partly because I had a hard time with the name Fiona and partly because of the soft waves of red hair that fell down her back in a transfixing cloud. The news of this affair came to me as most information did: many years after the fact, in a car parked outside the Dutch House with my sister. “Either that or she cleaned his room in the middle of the night,” Maeve said. My father and Fluffy in flagrante delicto. I shook my head. “Can’t picture it.” “You shouldn’t try to picture it. God, Danny, that’s disgusting. Anyway, you were practically a baby during the Fluffy administration. I’m surprised you’d even remember her.” But Fluffy had hit me with a wooden spoon when I was four years old. I still have a small scar in the shape of a golf club beside my left eye—the mark of Fluffy, Maeve called it. Fluffy claimed she’d been cooking a pot of applesauce when I startled her by grabbing her skirt. She said she was trying to get me away from the stove and had certainly never meant to hit me, though I’d think it would be hard to accidentally hit a child in the face with a spoon. The story was only interesting insofar as it was my first distinct memory—of another person or the Dutch House or my own life. I didn’t have a single memory of our mother, but I remembered Fluffy’s spoon cracking into the side of my head. I remembered Maeve, who had been down the hall when I screamed, flying into the kitchen the way the deer would fly across the hedgerow at the back of the property. She threw herself into Fluffy, knocking her into the stove, the blue flames leaping as the boiling pot of applesauce crashed to the floor so that we were all burned in pinpoint splatters. I was sent to the doctor’s office for six stitches and Maeve’s hand was wrapped and Fluffy was dismissed, even though I could remember her crying and saying how sorry she was, how it was only an accident. She didn’t want to go. That was our father’s other relationship according to my sister, and she should know, because if I was four when I got that scar then she was already eleven. As it happened, Fluffy’s parents had worked for the VanHoebeeks as their driver and cook. Fluffy had spent her childhood in the Dutch House, or in the small apartment over the garage, so I had to wonder, when her name came up again after so many years, where she would have gone when she was told to leave. Fluffy was the only person in the house who had known the VanHoebeeks. Not even our father had met them, though we sat on their chairs and slept in their beds and ate our meals off their delftware. The VanHoebeeks weren’t the story, but in a sense the house was the story, and it was their house. They had made their fortune in the wholesale distribution of cigarettes, a lucky business Mr. VanHoebeek had entered into just before the start of the First World War. Cigarettes were given to soldiers in the field for purposes of morale, and the habit followed them home to celebrate a decade of prosperity. The VanHoebeeks, richer by the hour, commissioned a house to be built on what was then farmland outside of Philadelphia. The stunning success of the house could be attributed to the architect, though by the time I thought to go looking I could find no other extant examples of his work. It could be that one or both of those dour VanHoebeeks had been some sort of aesthetic visionary, or that the property inspired a marvel beyond what any of them had imagined, or that America after the First World War was teeming with craftsmen who worked to standards long since abandoned. Whatever the explanation, the house they wound up with—the house we later wound up with—was a singular confluence of talent and luck. I can’t explain how a house that was three stories high could seem like just the right amount of space, but it did. Or maybe it would be better to say that it was too much of a house for anyone, an immense and ridiculous waste, but that we never wanted it to be different. The Dutch House, as it came to be known in Elkins Park and Jenkintown and Glenside and all the way to Philadelphia, referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants. The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived. Seen from certain vantage points of distance, it appeared to float several inches above the hill it sat on. The panes of glass that surrounded the glass front doors were as big as storefront windows and held in place by wrought-iron vines. The windows both took in the sun and reflected it back across the wide lawn. Maybe it was neoclassical, though with a simplicity in the lines that came closer to Mediterranean or French, and while it was not Dutch, the blue delft mantels in the drawing room, library, and master bedroom were said to have been pried out of a castle in Utrecht and sold to the VanHoebeeks to pay a prince’s gambling debts. The house, complete with mantels, had been finished in 1922. “They had seven good years before the bankers started jumping out of windows,” Maeve said, giving our predecessors their place in history. The first I ever heard of the property that had been sold off was that first day Andrea came to the house. She followed our father to the foyer and was looking out at the front lawn. “It’s so much glass,” Andrea said, as if making a calculation to see if the glass could be changed, swapped out for an actual wall. “Don’t you worry about people looking in?” Not only could you see into the Dutch House, you could see straight through it. The house was shortened in the middle, and the deep foyer led directly into what we called the observatory, which had a wall of windows facing the backyard. From the driveway you could let your eye go up the front steps, across the terrace, through the front doors, across the long marble floor of the foyer, through the observatory, and catch sight of the lilacs waving obliviously in the garden behind the house. Our father glanced towards the ceiling and then to either side of the door, as if he were just now considering this. “We’re far enough from the street,” he said. On this May afternoon, the wall of linden trees that ran along the property line was thick with leaves, and the slant of green lawn where I rolled like a dog in the summers was both deep and wide. “But at night,” Andrea said, her voice concerned. “I wonder if there wouldn’t be some way to hang drapes.” Drapes to block the view struck me not only as impossible but the single stupidest idea I’d ever heard. “You’ve seen us at night?” Maeve asked. “You have to remember the land that was here when they built the place,” our father said, speaking over Maeve. “There were more than two hundred acres. The property went all the way to Melrose Park.” “But why would they have sold it?” Suddenly Andrea could see how much more sense the house would have made had there been no other houses. The sight line should have gone far past the slope of the lawn, past the peony beds and the roses. The eye was meant to travel down a wide valley and bank into a forest, so that even if the VanHoebeeks or one of their guests were to look out a window from the ballroom at night, the only light they’d see would be starlight. There wasn’t a street back then, there wasn’t a neighborhood, though now both the street and the Buchsbaums’ house across the street were perfectly visible in the winter when the leaves came off the trees. “Money,” Maeve said. “Money,” our father said, nodding. It wasn’t a complicated idea. Even at eight I was able to figure it out. “But they were wrong,” Andrea said. There was a tightness around her mouth. “Think about how beautiful this place must have been. They should have had more respect, if you ask me. The house is a piece of art.” And then I did laugh, because what I understood Andrea to say was that the VanHoebeeks should have asked her before they sold the land. My father, irritated, told Maeve to take me upstairs, as if I might have forgotten the way. Ready-made cigarettes lined up in their cartons were a luxury for the rich, as were acres never walked on by the people who owned them. Bit by bit the land was shaved away from the house. The demise of the estate was a matter of public record, history recorded in property deeds. Parcels were sold to pay debts—ten acres, then fifty, then twenty-eight. Elkins Park came closer and closer to the door. In this way the VanHoebeek family made it through the Depression, only to have Mr. VanHoebeek die of pneumonia in 1940. One VanHoebeek boy died in childhood and the two older sons died in the war. Mrs. VanHoebeek died in 1945 when there was nothing left to sell but the side yard. The house and all it contained went back to the bank, dust to dust. Fluffy stayed behind courtesy of the Pennsylvania Savings and Loan, and was paid a small stipend to manage the property. Fluffy’s parents were dead, or maybe they had found other jobs. At any rate, she lived alone above the garage, checking the house every day to make sure the roof wasn’t leaking and the pipes hadn’t burst. She cut a straight path from the garage to the front doors with a push mower and let the rest of the lawn grow wild. She picked the fruit from the trees that were left near the back of the house and made apple butter and canned the peaches for winter. By the time our father bought the place in 1946, raccoons had taken over the ballroom and chewed into the wiring. Fluffy went into the house only when the sun was straight overhead, the very hour when all nocturnal animals were piled up together and fast asleep. The miracle was they didn’t burn the place down. The raccoons were eventually captured and disposed of, but they left behind their fleas and the fleas sifted into everything. Maeve said her earliest memories of life in the house were of scratching, and of how Fluffy dotted each welt with a Q-tip dipped in calamine lotion. My parents had hired Fluffy to be my sister’s nanny. * * * The first time Maeve and I ever parked on VanHoebeek Street (Van Who-bake, mispronounced as Van Ho-bik by everyone in Elkins Park) was the first time I’d come home from Choate for spring break. Spring was something of a misnomer that year since there was a foot of snow on the ground, an April Fool’s Day joke to cap a bitter winter. True spring, I knew from my first half-semester at boarding school, was for the boys whose parents took them sailing in Bermuda. “What are you doing?” I asked her when she stopped in front of the Buchsbaums’ house, across the street from the Dutch House. “I want to see something.” Maeve leaned over and pushed in the cigarette lighter. “Nothing to see here,” I said to her. “Move along.” I was in a crappy mood because of the weather and what I saw as the inequity between what I had and what I deserved, but still, I was glad to be back in Elkins Park, glad to be in my sister’s car, the blue Oldsmobile wagon of our childhood that my father let her have when she got her own apartment. Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister. “Are you in a rush to get someplace?” She shook a cigarette out of the pack then put her hand over the lighter. If you weren’t right there to catch the lighter, it would eject too forcibly and burn a hole in the seat or the floor mat or your leg, depending on where it landed. “Do you drive over here when I’m at school?” Pop. She caught it and lit her cigarette. “I do not.” “But here we are,” I said. The snow came steady and soft as the last light of day was folded into the clouds. Maeve was an Icelandic truck driver at heart, no weather stopped her, but I had recently gotten off a train and was tired and cold. I thought it would be nice to make grilled cheese sandwiches and soak in the tub. Baths were the subject of endless ridicule at Choate, I never knew why. Only showers were thought to be manly. Maeve filled her lungs with smoke, exhaled, then turned off the car. “I thought about coming over here a couple of times but I decided to wait for you.” She smiled at me then, cranking the window down just far enough to let in a shelf of arctic air. I had nagged her to give the cigarettes up before I’d left for school, and then neglected to tell her that I’d started. Smoking was what we did at Choate in lieu of taking baths. I craned my head to look up the drive. “Do you see them?” Maeve looked out the driver’s side window. “I don’t know why, but I just keep thinking about that first time she came to the house a million years ago. Do you even remember?” Of course I remembered. Who could forget Andrea showing up? “And she said that business about worrying that people were looking in our windows at night?” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the foyer was flooded in the warm gold light of the chandelier. Then after a pause the lights above the staircase went on, and a few moments after that the light in the master bedroom on the second floor. The illumination of the Dutch House was timed so exactly to her words it nearly stopped my heart. Of course Maeve had been coming to the house without me. She knew that Andrea turned on the lights the very minute the sun went down. Denying it was just a bit of theatrics on my sister’s part, and I appreciated her efforts once I realized them later. It made for one hell of a show. “Look at that,” I whispered. There were no leaves on the linden trees, and the snow was falling but not too heavily. Sure enough, you could see right into the house, through the house, not with any detail of course but memory filled in the picture: there was the round table beneath the chandelier where Sandy had left our father’s mail in the evening, and behind it the grandfather clock that had been my job to wind every Sunday after Mass so that the ship beneath the 6 would continue to gently rock between two blue rows of painted waves. I couldn’t see the ship or the waves but I knew. There was the half-moon console table against the wall, the cobalt vase with the painting of the girl and the dog, the two French chairs no one ever sat in, the giant mirror whose frame always made me think of the twisted arms of a golden octopus. Andrea crossed through the foyer as if on cue. We were too far away to see her face but I knew her from the way she walked. Norma came down the stairs at full speed and then stopped abruptly because her mother would have told her not to run. Norma was taller now, although I guess it could have been Bright. “She must have watched us,” Maeve said, “before she ever came in that first time.” “Or maybe everybody watched us, everyone who ever drove down this street in winter.” I reached into her purse and took out the cigarettes. “That seems a little self-aggrandizing,” Maeve said. “Everyone.” “They teach us that at Choate.” She laughed. I could tell she hadn’t been expecting to laugh and it pleased me to no end. “Five whole days with you at home,” she said, blowing smoke out the open window. “The best five days of the year.” Chapter 2 After her first appearance at the Dutch House, Andrea lingered like a virus. As soon as we were sure we’d seen the last of her and months would go by without a mention of her name, there she’d be at the dining-room table again, chastened by her absence at first and then slowly warming over time. Andrea, fully warmed, talked about nothing but the house. She was forever going on about some detail of the crown molding or speculating as to the exact height of the ceiling, as if the ceiling were entirely new to us. “That’s called egg and dart,” she’d say to me, pointing up. Just when she’d reach the point of being truly intolerable, she’d disappear again, and the relief would wash over Maeve and me (and, we had assumed, our father) with its glorious silence. There was the Sunday we came home from Mass and found her sitting in one of the white iron chairs by the pool, or Maeve found her. Maeve had been walking through the library and had seen her through the window just by chance. She didn’t call for our father the way I would have, she just walked around to the back door off the kitchen and went outside. “Mrs. Smith?” Maeve said, shading her eyes with her hand. We called her Mrs. Smith until they were married, having never been invited to do otherwise. After they were married I’m sure she would have preferred us to call her Mrs. Conroy, but that would have only intensified the awkwardness, seeing as how Maeve and I were Conroys as well. Maeve told me Andrea was startled, and who knows, maybe she’d been sleeping. “Where’s your father?” “In the house.” Maeve looked over her shoulder. “Was he expecting you?” “I was expecting him an hour ago,” Andrea corrected. Since it was Sunday, Sandy and Jocelyn were both off. I don’t think they would have let her in if we weren’t home but I don’t know that for sure. Sandy was the warmer of the two, Jocelyn more suspicious. They didn’t like Andrea, and they probably would have made her wait outside until we got home. It was only a little cold, a nice enough day to sit by the pool, the sunlight glittering across the blue water, the tender lines of moss growing up between the flagstones. Maeve told her we’d been to church. And then they just stared at each other, neither of them looking away. “I’m half Dutch, you know,” Andrea said finally. “I beg your pardon?” “On my mother’s side. She was full-blood Dutch.” “We’re Irish,” Maeve said. Andrea nodded, as if there had been some disagreement that now was settled in her favor. When it became clear there would be no more conversation, Maeve went inside to tell our father that Mrs. Smith was waiting by the pool. “Where in the hell did she park?” Maeve said to me after our father had gone outside. She almost never swore in those days, especially not right after Mass. “She always parks in front of the house.” And so we went to find the car, looking first on the far side of the house and then back behind the garage. When none of the obvious spots panned out we walked down the driveway, the pea gravel crunching beneath our Sunday shoes, and onto the street. We had no idea where Andrea lived but we knew she wasn’t our neighbor, she hadn’t just walked over. Finally we found her cream-colored Impala parked a block away, the front left corner crumpled in on itself. Maeve crouched down to inspect the damage and I went so far as to touch the hanging fender, marveling at the headlight which had been spared. Clearly, Andrea had banged into something and she didn’t want us to know. We didn’t tell our father about the car. After all, he didn’t tell us anything. He never talked about Andrea, not when she was gone or when she was back. He didn’t tell us if he had her in mind for some role in our future. When she was there he acted like she’d always been there, and when she was gone we never wanted to remind him for fear he’d ask her back. In truth, I don’t think he was particularly interested in Andrea. I just don’t think he had the means to deal with her tenacity. His strategy, as far as I could tell, was to ignore her until she went away. “That’s never going to work,” Maeve said to me. The only thing our father really cared about in life was his work: the buildings he built and owned and rented out. He rarely sold anything, choosing instead to leverage what he had in order to buy more. When he had an appointment with the bank, the banker came to him, and my father made him wait. Mrs. Kennedy, my father’s secretary, would offer the banker a cup of coffee and tell him it shouldn’t be much longer, though sometimes it was. There was nothing the banker could do but sit there in the small anteroom of my father’s office, holding his hat. The little attention my father had left at the end of the week he saved for me, and even that he made part of his job. He took me with him in the Buick on the first Saturday of every month to collect the rent, and gave me a pencil and a ledger book so I could write down how much the tenants had paid in the column next to what they had owed. Very soon I knew who would never be home, and who would be right there at the door with an envelope. I knew who would have complaints—a toilet that ran, a toilet that was stopped, a light switch that was dead. Certain people came up with something every month and would not part with their money until the problem was resolved. My father, whose knee had been ruined in the war, limped slightly as he went to the trunk of his car and pulled out whatever was needed to make things right. When I was a boy, I thought of the trunk as a sort of magic chest—pliers, clamps, hammers, screwdrivers, caulk, nails—everything was there. Now I know the things people ask you for on a Saturday morning tend to be easy fixes, and my father liked to do those jobs himself. He was a rich man, but he wanted to show people he still knew how things worked. Or maybe the show was all for me, because he didn’t need to drive around picking up rent any more than he needed to drag his bad leg up a ladder to inspect a patch of loose shingles. He had maintenance men for that. Maybe it was for my sake that he rolled up his shirt sleeves and pulled the top off a stove to inspect the heating element while I stood there marveling at all the things he knew. He would tell me to pay attention because one day the business was going to be mine. I would need to know how things were done. “The only way to really understand what money means is to have been poor,” he said to me when we were eating lunch in the car. “That’s the strike you have against you. A boy grows up rich like you, never wanting for anything, never being hungry”—he shook his head, as if it had been a disappointing choice I’d made—“I don’t know how a person overcomes a thing like that. You can watch these people all you want and see what it’s been like for them, but that’s not the same as living it yourself.” He put down his sandwich and took a drink of coffee from the thermos. “Yes, sir,” I said, because what else was there to say? “The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money. Remember that. You’ve got to be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.” My father wasn’t much for imparting advice, and this seemed to have worn him out. When he was finished, he took his handkerchief from his pocket and ran it across his forehead. When I’m in a charitable mood, I look back on this moment and I tell myself that this was the reason things played out the way they did. My father was trying to give me the benefit of his experience. My father was always more comfortable with his tenants than he was the people in his office or the people in his house. A tenant would start in on a story, which sometimes was about the Phillies’ inability to pitch against Brooklyn and other times was about why there wasn’t enough money in the envelope, and I could tell by the way my father was standing, the way he nodded at one part or another, that he was paying attention. The people who were short on the rent never complained about a window that was painted shut. They only wanted the chance to tell him what had happened to them that month, and to assure him that it wouldn’t happen again. I never saw my father scold the tenants or make any threats. He only listened, and then he told them to try their best. But after three months of conversation, there would be a different family living in the apartment the next time we came back. I never knew what happened to the people with hard luck, but it happened on some day other than the first Saturday of the month. My father smoked more as the day went on. I sat beside him on the car’s wide bench seat, looking over the numbers in the ledger or staring out the window at the trees as they flicked past. When my father smoked I knew he was thinking, and that I was meant to be quiet. The neighborhoods got worse as we headed into Philadelphia. He saved the very poorest of his tenants for the end of the day, as if to give them the extra hours to get together what they owed. I would rather have waited in the car on those last stops, fiddled with the radio, but I knew enough to skip the part where I would ask him to let me stay behind and he would tell me no. The tenants in Mount Airy and Jenkintown were always nice to me, asking about school and basketball, offering me candy I’d been told never to accept. “Looking more like your daddy every day,” they’d say. “Growing up just like him.” But in the poorer neighborhoods things were different. It’s not that the tenants weren’t nice, but they were nervous even when the money was in their hand, maybe thinking how it had been the month before or how it would be a month from now. They were deferential not only to my father but to me, and it was the deference that made me want to crawl out of my skin. Men older than my father called me Mr. Conroy when I was no more than ten, as if the resemblance they saw between the two of us was more than physical. Maybe they saw the situation the way my father did, that someday they’d be paying the rent to me and so had no business calling me Danny. As we climbed the steps of the buildings, I peeled off chips of paint and stepped over the broken slats. Half-open doors flapped on their hinges and there were never any screens. The heat in the hallways either ran to tropical or didn’t run at all. It made me think what a luxury it was to rattle on about a faucet in need of a washer, while failing to remind me that this too was a building my father owned, and that it was well within his power to open the trunk of his car and make things better for the people who lived there. One by one, he knocked on the doors and the doors opened and we listened to whatever the people inside had to say: husbands out of work, husbands gone, wives gone, children sick. One time a man was going on about not having the rent because his son had been so sick and he had to stay home himself and watch the boy. The boy and the man were alone in the dark apartment, everyone else had gone I guess. When my father had heard enough he went into the living room and picked up the feverish child from the couch. I had no idea what dead looked like in those days but the boy’s arm swung back from his side and his head dropped back in my father’s arms. It put the fear of God in me. If it hadn’t been for the deep congestion of his breathing I would have thought we’d come too late. The air in the apartment was heavy with the mentholated smell of suffering. Maybe the boy was five or six, he was very small. My father carried him down the stairs and put him in the Buick while the boy’s father came behind us saying there was no need to worry. “It’ll be nothing,” he kept saying. “The boy’s gonna be fine.” But he climbed into the back seat of our car all the same and rode beside his son to the hospital. I had never sat in the front of a car while an adult was sitting in the back and it made me nervous. I could only imagine what the nuns would have said had they seen us go by. When we got to the hospital, my father made arrangements with the woman at the desk, and then we left them there, driving back to our own house in the dark without saying a single word about what had happened. “Why would he have done that?” Maeve had asked me that night after dinner when we were in her bedroom. Our father never took Maeve to collect the rent, even though she was seven years older than me and had won the math prize in school every year and would have been so much better with the ledger it was ridiculous. On the first Saturday of every month, after we’d been excused from the table and our father had gone to the library with his drink and the paper, Maeve would pull me into her bedroom and close the door. She wanted a recounting of the entire day, blow by blow: what had happened at every apartment, what the tenants had said, and what our father had said to them in return. She even wanted to know what we’d bought for lunch at Carter’s Market where we always stopped for sandwiches. “The kid was really sick, that’s all. He didn’t open his eyes once, not even when Dad put him in the car.” When we got to the hospital, my father had told me to go to the men’s room and wash my hands, to get the water hot and use soap even though I hadn’t touched the boy. Maeve mulled this over. “What?” I asked. “Well, think about it. He hates sick people. Has he ever so much as crossed the door of your room when you were sick?” She stretched out on the bed beside me, fluffing the pillow under her head. “If you’re going to put your feet on my bed then the least you can do is take off your filthy shoes.” I kicked off my shoes. Did he sit on the edge of my bed and put his hand on my forehead? Did he bring me a ginger ale, ask me if I felt like I was going to throw up again? That’s what Maeve did. That’s what Sandy and Jocelyn did when Maeve was at school. “He never comes in my room.” “But why would he have done all that if the boy’s father was there?” I almost never got to an answer before Maeve did but in this case it was perfectly obvious. “Because the mother wasn’t there.” If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things. Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. After our mother left, Maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her. Of course Sandy and Jocelyn mothered us. They made sure we were washed and fed and that our lunches were packed and our scouting dues paid. They loved us, I know they did, but they went home at the end of the day. There was no crawling into bed with Sandy or Jocelyn when I had a bad dream in the middle of the night, and it never once occurred to me to knock on my father’s door. I went to Maeve. She taught me the proper way to hold a fork. She attended my basketball games and knew all my friends and oversaw my homework and kissed me every morning before we went our separate ways to school and again at night before I went to bed regardless of whether or not I wanted to be kissed. She told me repeatedly, relentlessly, that I was kind and smart and fast, that I could be as great a man as I made up my mind to be. She was so good at all that, despite the fact that no one had done it for her. “Mommy did it for me,” she said, surprised that I’d even brought it up. “Listen, kiddo, I was the lucky one. I got years with her and you didn’t. I can’t even think about how much you must miss her.” But how could I miss someone I’d never known? I was only three at the time, and if I knew what was happening I had no memory of it. Sandy was the one who told me the whole story, though parts of it I knew of course from my sister. Maeve had been ten when our mother first started to leave. One morning Maeve got out of bed and opened the drapes over the window seat to see if it had snowed during the night and it had. The Dutch House was always freezing. There was a fireplace in Maeve’s bedroom and Sandy kept dry wood on the grate above a bed of crumpled newspaper so that in the morning all Maeve had to do was strike a match, something she had been allowed to do since her eighth birthday. (“Mommy gave me a box of matches for my eighth birthday,” she told me once. “She said her mother had given her a box of matches when she turned eight, and they spent the morning learning how to strike them. She showed me how to light the fire, and then that night she let me light the candles on my cake.”) Maeve lit the fire and put on her robe and slippers and came next door to my room to check on me. I was three, still asleep. I had no part in this story. Then she crossed the hall to our parents’ room and found it empty, the bed already made. Maeve went back to her room to get ready for school. She had brushed her teeth and washed her face and was halfway dressed when Fluffy came in to wake her up. “Every morning you beat me,” Fluffy said. “You should wake me up earlier,” Maeve said. Fluffy told her she didn’t need to get up any earlier. The fact that our father had already left the house wasn’t unusual. The fact that our mother wasn’t in the house was unusual but not without precedent. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy all seemed to be themselves. If they weren’t worried there was no reason to worry. Our mother was the one who took Maeve to school but on this morning Fluffy drove her, letting her out with the lunch that Jocelyn had packed. At the end of the day Fluffy was there to pick her up again. When Maeve asked where our mother was, she shrugged. “With your father, maybe?” Our mother wasn’t there for dinner that night, and when our father appeared, Maeve asked him where she’d gone. He wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her neck. Such things still happened in those days. He told Maeve her mother had gone to Philadelphia to visit old friends. “Without saying goodbye?” “She said goodbye to me,” our father said. “She got up very early.” “I was up early.” “Well, she was up even before you, and she told me to tell you she’d see you in a day or two. Everybody needs a vacation.” “From what?” Maeve asked, when what she meant was, From me? From us? “From the house.” He took her hand and walked her in to dinner. “This place is a big responsibility.” How big of a responsibility could it have been when Jocelyn and Sandy and Fluffy did so much of the work, when the gardeners came to take care of the lawn and rake the leaves and shovel the snow, when Maeve would have done anything in the world to be helpful? Our mother wasn’t there when Maeve woke up the next morning, and again Fluffy drove her to school and picked her up. But when they came back to the house on that second day, our mother was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with Sandy and Jocelyn. I was playing on the floor, taking the lids off all the pots. “She looked so tired,” Maeve told me. “She looked like she hadn’t been to sleep the whole time she’d been gone.” Our mother put down her cup and pulled Maeve into her lap. “There’s my darling,” she said, and kissed her forehead and kissed the part of her hair. “There’s my true love.” Maeve put her arms around our mother’s neck and rested her head against our mother’s chest and breathed her in while our mother stroked her hair. “Who gets a girl like this?” she asked Sandy and Jocelyn. “Who gets such a beautiful girl who’s kind and smart? What did I ever do to deserve a girl like this?” Some variation of this story happened three more times. Over the course of the next two months, our mother was gone for two nights, then four nights, and then a week. Maeve started getting up in the middle of the night to check our parents’ room and make sure she was still there. Sometimes our mother was awake, and she would see Maeve at the door and lift up the covers and Maeve would float across the room to the bed without making a sound and slip into the warm curve of her body. She would fall asleep without thinking, her mother’s arms around her, her mother’s heartbeat and breath behind her. No other moment in life could match this. “Why don’t you say goodbye to me before you leave?” Maeve would ask her, and our mother would just shake her head. “I could never do that. Never in a million years could I say goodbye to you.” Was our mother sick? Was she getting worse? Maeve nodded. “She was turning into a ghost. One week she was thinner, then she was paler, everything deteriorated so fast. We were all folding up. Mommy would come home and cry for days. I would go and sit with her in her bed after school. Sometimes you’d be in the bed with her, playing. Whenever Dad was home he always looked like he was trying to catch her, like he might as well have been walking around with his hands out. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy, they were all nervous as cats by then, but no one talked about it. When she was gone it was unbearable and when she was home it was unbearable in a different way because we knew that she was going to leave again.” When finally she did leave again, Maeve asked our father when she was coming back. He looked at her for a very long time. He didn’t know what part of the truth he was supposed to tell a ten-year-old, and what he decided on was the whole thing. He told Maeve our mother wasn’t coming back. She had gone to India and she wasn’t coming back. Maeve could never make up her mind what part of this story was the worst: that her mother was gone or that India was on the other side of the planet. “No one goes to India!” “Maeve,” he said. “Maybe she hasn’t left yet!” She didn’t believe him, not for a minute, but if the story had been started it needed to be stopped. Our father shook his head but he didn’t reach for her. Somehow that might have been the strangest part of all. This was the story of our mother leaving, and this was the point at which the story stopped. There should have been questions, explanations. If she was in India our father should have gone to find her and bring her back, but none of this happened because Maeve stopped getting up in the morning. She wouldn’t go to school. Sandy would bring her Cream of Wheat on a tray and sit on the edge of her bed, trying to talk her into taking a couple of bites, but she said Maeve was rarely persuaded. Everyone saw it as the understandable sickness of a girl longing for her mother. They were all suffering from some related version, and so they let the child sink down into it, never really thinking about the fact that she would still drink her orange juice, and drink her glass of water, and drink the entire pot of chamomile tea. She’d take her cup into the bathroom and fill it over and over again, until finally she stuck her head in the sink and drank from the running tap. Fluffy would bring me into Maeve’s room and put me in her bed and Maeve would read me a story before falling back to sleep. Then one afternoon, less than a week after our mother left for good, Maeve didn’t wake up. Fluffy shook her and shook her and then scooped Maeve up in her arms and ran down the stairs and out to the car. Where was everyone then? Where had our father and Sandy and Jocelyn gone? Where was I? Sandy said she couldn’t remember. “Such a terrible time,” she said, shaking her head. What she knew was that Fluffy drove Maeve to the hospital and carried her into the lobby where some nurses took the sleeping child from her arms. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. The doctors said the diabetes could have been brought on by trauma, or it could have been a virus. The body had all sorts of means to deal with what it couldn’t understand. In the hospital, Maeve swam in and out of consciousness while they worked to stabilize her blood sugar. Everything that happened to her was part of a dream. She told herself her mother wasn’t allowed to visit, a punishment meted out to both of them for something she had done and couldn’t quite remember. The Sisters of Mercy, all friends of our mother’s, came to see her. Two girls from Sacred Heart presented her with a card signed by the entire class, but they weren’t allowed to stay. Our father would come in the evenings, though he said very little. He would hold Maeve’s foot through the white cotton blanket and tell her that she needed to get better now, no one was up for this. Jocelyn and Sandy and Fluffy took turns staying with her in the room. “One of us for you, one for your brother, and one for your father,” Sandy would say. “Everyone’s covered.” Sandy said that when she needed to cry she would wait until Maeve was asleep, then she would go out to the hall. After Maeve came home from the hospital things got worse. Logic said our mother’s absence had made her sick, and so logic concluded that further talk of our mother could kill her. The Dutch House grew quiet. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy devoted themselves to my sister, the needles, the insulin. They were terrified of the way every injection changed her. Our father would have nothing to do with it. Fluffy, who in those weeks slept in the bed with Maeve, ended up taking her back to the hospital in the middle of the night. Again, they worked to stabilize her, again they sent her home. Maeve would cry and cry until my father would come into her room and tell her to stop. They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale. He was now a hundred years old. “Stop,” he would say, as if he could barely make the words. “You have to stop.” And finally, she did. Chapter 3 Nearly two years into her irregular tenure, Andrea walked in the house one Saturday afternoon with two small girls. Say what you will for Andrea, she had a knack for making the impossible seem natural. I wasn’t clear about whether it was only Maeve and I who were meeting her daughters for the first time, or if the existence of Norma and Bright Smith was news to our father as well. No, he must have known. The very fact that he didn’t look at them meant they were already familiar. They were much younger than me. Bright, the smaller of the two, looked like she should have been on a Christmas card, fair like her mother with flushed cheeks and blue eyes, a big smile for everyone. Norma had light-brown hair and green eyes. She was no match for her shining sister, if only because she was so serious. Her lips stayed pressed together in a straight line. Clearly it was Norma’s job to look after things. “Girls,” their mother said, “this is Danny, and this is his sister Maeve.” We were shocked, of course, but in our heart of hearts we were happy too, certain that the Smith girls would spell the end of Andrea for good. Our father wasn’t about to put up with two more children in the house, especially not two more girls. Who had been taking care of them on all those Saturday nights she’d come to dinner, never once mentioning she needed to get home? This would not be forgiven. When we stood at the door and said goodbye to the three of them after what had been a comparatively brief visit, we thought that we were saying goodbye for good. “Sayonara, Mrs. Smith,” Maeve said that night in the bathroom as she put the toothpaste on my toothbrush and then hers. I was perfectly capable of handling a tube of toothpaste but this was our ritual. We brushed our teeth together then said our prayers. “Buenas noches, Bright and Norma,” I said. Maeve looked at me for a second, not believing I’d come up with that, then she started laughing so hard she barked like a seal. Maeve and I were forever under the impression that we were moments away from cracking the code on our life, and that soon we would understand the impenetrable mystery that was our father, but we’d misread the appearance of Andrea’s daughters completely. It was not some half-baked introduction. The final disclosure that Andrea came as a package deal was proof that she had fully assimilated, and we, somehow, had missed it. Soon the girls were regulars, sitting with us at the dinner table or taking off their socks to splash their feet in the swimming pool—neither of them knew how to swim. It felt strange to have other children around. Maeve and I both had friends at school but we went to their houses for parties and studying and sleep-overs. No one ever came to the Dutch House. Maybe it was because we didn’t want to draw attention to our motherless state, or we feared the house would subject us to ridicule, but really, I think we understood that our father didn’t like children, which was why it made no sense that he’d let these two in. One night the girls showed up with their mother who was wearing a very fancy blue silk dress. Bright kept running her hands across the full skirt to make it rustle like blowing leaves, while Norma made a game out of trying to step only on the small black squares of marble in the foyer. Andrea announced to the four of us that she and my father were going out for the evening. With no warning at all she planned to leave the girls for Maeve and me to mind. “What are we supposed to do with them?” Maeve asked, because truly, we didn’t know. They weren’t our responsibility. We had never been alone with them before. Andrea waved her question away. She was ebullient in those days, as if everything had been decided. Maybe it had. “You’ll do nothing,” she said to Maeve, and then gave a great smile to her girls. “You take care of yourselves, don’t you girls? Do you have books? Norma, ask Maeve to get you a book.” Maeve had a stack of Henry James novels on her bedside table. The Turn of the Screw? Was that what they wanted? Our father came down the wide stairs in his best suit, eyes straight ahead. He was holding onto the banister, which meant his knee was hurting him, which meant he was in a bad mood. Would Andrea know that? “Time to get going,” he said to her, but he didn’t have a word for the rest of us, not a thank you or goodnight. He went straight for the door. I think he was ashamed of himself. “You be perfect,” Andrea sang over her shoulder and followed our father out. He wasn’t waiting for her. The two little girls looked stricken until they could no longer see the top of their mother’s hat, and then they started to cry. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Maeve said, and went off in search of Kleenex. In fairness to the girls, it wasn’t as if they were wailing. In fact I think they were making their best effort not to cry, but it overtook them all the same. They sat down together in a single French chair. Bright dropped her head onto her sister’s chest and Norma buried her face in her hands like they’d just gotten news of the Apocalypse. I asked them if they really did want a book or if they wanted to watch television or if they wanted ice cream. They wouldn’t look at me. But then Maeve came back, handed each of them a tissue, and, speaking as if no one were crying at all, asked if they would like to see the house. Even in their misery, it was clear that Norma and Bright heard her. They wanted to keep crying, as crying was the direction the evening was headed in, but they snuffled less in order to listen. “The foyer is not the house,” Maeve said. “It’s just a little part of it. Please notice that you can see all the way through it. Front yard”—she pointed to the door where they’d come in, then turned in the opposite direction and pointed to the windows in the observatory—“back yard.” Bright sat up to look in both directions, and when Norma had leaked out the last of her tears she gave a tentative glance as well. “You’ve seen the dining room and the drawing room.” Maeve turned to me. “I think that’s it, right? I don’t think they’ve been in the kitchen.” “Why would they have been in the kitchen?” I was trying not to be sullen—the girls were the ones who were sullen—but I could think of about a hundred things I would have rather been doing with my evening than entertaining Andrea’s children. Maeve went off to find a flashlight and then opened the door to the basement. “Don’t use the handrail,” she said over her shoulder. “You’ll get splinters. Just pay attention and look at your feet.” “I don’t want to go to the basement,” Bright said, peering into the darkness from the top step. “Then don’t,” Maeve said. “We won’t be long.” “Carry me,” Bright suggested. Maeve didn’t even answer that one. Norma stopped two steps down. “Are there spiders?” “Definitely.” Maeve kept going. She was looking for the string that hung from the single lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling. The girls considered their options: up or down, and soon enough they followed her while I brought up the rear of the expedition. The girls were both in dresses, white tights, and patent leather shoes. The basement of the house was from another century. It bore no relationship to the structure that sat on top of it. In certain corners the walls devolved into piles of dirt. I had once found an arrowhead there. I would have dug around for more but the truth was I didn’t like the basement myself. “Why do you come down here?” Norma asked, half in horror, half in wonder. “I’ll show you.” Maeve then turned her flashlight to the far corner of the room until the beam bounced off a small metal door in the wall. “That’s the fuse box. Say a light burns out in the upstairs hall powder room and you know it’s not the lightbulb. Then you have to come down here and check the fuse box. Sometimes if we’re out of fuses we’ll stick a penny behind it to make the old one work again. And if the heat goes out you have to come down here to check the furnace, and if there’s no hot water you have to check the boiler. It could just be that the pilot light’s blown out, in which case you’ve got to be careful lighting a match. There could be a gas leak. Boom,” she said flatly. Honestly, I had no idea. Maeve went bravely ahead while Norma and Bright and I tried to stay in the general vicinity of her flashlight’s beam. She opened a wooden door that creaked so loudly the girls pressed against me for a second, then Maeve pulled another string, illuminating yet another bare lightbulb. “This is the basement pantry where the extra food is kept, just in case you’re here and get hungry. Sandy and Jocelyn make pickles and jams and stewed tomatoes. Pretty much anything that goes in a jar.” We looked up at the shelves of immaculate jars, every one labeled with a date and organized by color, golden peach halves floating in syrup, raspberry jam. There were crates of sweet potatoes and russets and onions on the cold floor. I had never exactly thought of being rich until then, seeing all that food stored away in the presence of those little girls. When finally we were ready to go up again, Bright stopped and pointed to the boxes stacked beneath the stairs. “What’s in there?” Maeve turned her flashlight to the musty tower of cardboard. “Christmas ornaments, decorations, that sort of thing.” Bright looked cheerful at the mention of Christmas and asked if she could open the boxes. It stood to reason that where there were ornaments, there would be presents, maybe even a present for her, but Maeve said no. “You can come back at Christmas and open them then.” I didn’t say a word to Maeve that night when we brushed our teeth, and when we said our prayers I left her out. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be mad.” But I was mad. I got into bed mad. The tour had occupied the entire evening. She had shown them everything there was to see: the butler’s pantry where dishes were kept and the tablecloths were rolled onto wide spools, the closet in the third floor bedroom with the tiny door in the back that led to an attic crawl space. She let them spin around in the ballroom, pretending to waltz. It had never once occurred to us to dance up there. “Who puts the ballroom on the third floor?” Norma had asked. Maeve explained that when the house was built a third floor ballroom was considered the height of fashion. “A fad, really,” she said. “It didn’t last. But once you’ve put a ballroom on the third floor it’s pretty much impossible to move it.” Maeve showed them every last bedroom in the house. Norma and Bright both agreed that Maeve’s room was best, and they sat in her window seat while Maeve closed the draperies over them. The girls squealed with laughter and then called, “No, don’t!” when she opened the draperies up again. When the tour was over she brought a stepladder from the kitchen so they could take turns winding the grandfather clock, even though she knew I did that myself first thing Sunday morning. Maeve sat beside me on my bed. “Think of how overwhelming the house must be to them, how overwhelming we must be, so if we showed them everything instead of just the nice things it would be, I don’t know, friendlier?” “It was very friendly,” I said in a voice that was not friendly. Maeve put her hand on my forehead, the way she did when I was sick. “They’re little, Danny. I feel sorry for anyone who’s that little.” She had put them in her own bed, and when our father came back with Andrea they each carried one sleeping girl down the stairs and took them out to Andrea’s car. Maeve had to run down the stairs after them. They had forgotten the girls’ shoes. Maeve told me Andrea was a little bit drunk. To the long list of things my sister never got credit for, add this: she was good to those girls. If my father or Andrea was in the room, Maeve would politely ignore the children, but leave her alone with Norma and Bright and she was always doing something nice—teaching them to crochet or letting them braid her hair or showing them how to make tapioca. In return they followed her through the house like a pair of worshipful cocker spaniels. Where we ate dinner on any given night was dictated by a complicated set of household laws put in place by Sandy and Jocelyn. If our father was home from work in time then the three of us ate in the dining room, Sandy serving us our plates while we breathed in the oily scent of the lemon furniture polish that hung in a fog over the massive table. But if our father stayed late or had other plans, Maeve and I ate in the kitchen. On those nights Sandy put a plate of food in the refrigerator under a sheet of waxed paper and our father would eat it in the kitchen when he came home. Or I assumed he did. Maybe he carried his plate to the dining room to sit alone. Of course, when Andrea and the girls were there, we ate in the dining room. If Andrea was there, Sandy not only served our dinner but she cleared the plates as well, whereas if Andrea wasn’t there we each picked up our own plate at the end of the meal and took it back to the kitchen. None of this had been explained to us, but we all understood, just as we understood that on Sunday night Maeve and my father and I would gather in the kitchen at six o’clock to eat the cold supper that Sandy had left for us the day before. Andrea and the girls never ate with us on Sunday night. Alone in the house, the three of us would crowd around the little kitchen table and have a sensation of something close to being a family, if only because we were pushed together in a small space. As big as the Dutch House was, the kitchen was oddly small. Sandy told me that was because the only people ever meant to see the kitchen were the servants, and no one in the business of building grand estates ever gave a rat’s hindquarters (that was a very Sandy thing to say, rat’s hindquarters) if the servants had the room to turn around. There was a little blue Formica table in the corner where Jocelyn sat and shelled peas or rolled out pie dough, the same table where Sandy and Jocelyn took their lunch and dinner. Maeve was always careful to wipe the table down when we were finished and put everything back the way we found it because she thought of the kitchen as belonging to Sandy and Jocelyn. What little space there was was mostly taken up by the huge gas range with nine burners, a warming drawer and two ovens, each big enough to roast a turkey. The rest of the house was a polar ice cap in the winter no matter how high Sandy stoked the fires, but the stove kept the little kitchen warm. Summers, of course, were a different story, but even in the summer I preferred the kitchen. The door out to the pool was always open and there was a fan in the corner that blew around the smell of whatever was baking. I could be floating on my back in the pool in the blinding midday sun and smell the cherry pie Jocelyn had in the oven. On the Sunday evening after Andrea’s daughters had been tossed in our laps, I was watching Maeve carefully, thinking that something about her was definitely off. I could read her blood sugar like the weather. I knew when she wasn’t listening to me anymore and was just about to keel over. I was always the first one to notice when she was sweaty or pale. Sandy and Jocelyn could see it too. They knew when she needed juice and when to give the shot themselves, but it took our father by surprise every single time. He was always looking at the space just over Maeve’s head. But in this case, it wasn’t her sugar at all. While I had my eye on her, Maeve did the most astonishing thing I had ever known her to do: very casually, while spooning out potato salad, she told our father that it wasn’t our responsibility to take care of Andrea’s daughters. He sat with this for a moment, chewing the bite of chicken he’d just put in his mouth. “Were you planning on doing something else last night?” “Homework,” Maeve said. “On a Saturday?” Maeve was pretty enough and popular enough that she would never have had to stay home on Saturday nights, but for the most part she did, and for the first time I realized it was because of me. She would never have left me alone in the house. “There was a lot of work this week.” “Well,” my father said, “looks like you managed. You can still do your homework with the girls in the house.” “I didn’t get any homework done on Saturday. I was entertaining the girls.” “But your homework is done now, isn’t it? You won’t embarrass yourself in school tomorrow.” “That isn’t the point.” My father crossed his knife and fork on his plate and looked at her. “Then why don’t you tell me the point?” Maeve was ready for him. She’d thought it all out in advance. Maybe she’d been thinking about it since I objected to the tour. “They’re Andrea’s children and she should take care of them, not me.” My father tipped his head slightly towards me. “You look after him.” She looked after me morning, noon and night. Was that what she was saying? She didn’t need two more children to take care of? “Danny’s my brother. Those girls have nothing to do with us.” Everything my father had ever taught her was used against him now: Maeve, sit up straight. Maeve, look me in the eye if you want to ask me for something. Maeve, get your hands out of your hair. Maeve, speak up, don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice. “But if the girls were your family, you wouldn’t mind?” He lit a cigarette at the table with food still on his plate, an act of aggressive incivility I had never before witnessed. Maeve just stared at him. I could hardly believe the way she held his gaze. “They’re not.” He nodded his head. “When you live under my roof and eat my food I suppose you can trouble yourself to look after our guests when I ask you to.” There was a drip coming from the kitchen faucet. Drip, drip, drip. It made an unbelievable racket, echoing off the walls just like the renters said when they complained about their own faucets. I had watched my father change enough washers to think I’d have no problem doing it myself. I wondered, were I to get up from the table and look for a wrench, if either of them would notice I was gone. “You didn’t ask me,” Maeve said. My father was pushing back his chair but she beat him to it. She got up from the table, her napkin still tight in her fist, and left the room without asking to be excused. My father sat for a while in his customary silence then put out his cigarette on his bread plate. He and I finished our meal, though I don’t know how I stood it. When we were done, he went to the library to watch the news and I cleared the table and rinsed and stacked the dishes in the sink for Jocelyn to wash in the morning. It was Maeve’s job to clean up after dinner but I did it. My father had forgotten about dessert. There were lemon bars in a shallow dish in the refrigerator and I cut one for myself and got an orange for Maeve and took them both upstairs on a single plate. She was in her room, sitting on the window seat with her long legs straight out in front of her. She had a book in her lap but she wasn’t reading it, she was looking out at the garden. The room was angled to the west while not facing west directly, and the way the last bit of light fell over her, she looked like a painting. I handed her the orange and she dug in her nails to open it up. She bent her knees so I could sit down in front of her. “This doesn’t bode well for us, Danny,” she said. “You might as well know that.” Chapter 4 Six weeks after she left for her freshman year at Barnard, Maeve was summoned back to Elkins Park for the wedding. Our father married Andrea in the drawing room beneath the watchful eyes of the VanHoebeeks. Bright dropped handfuls of pink rose petals on the Spanish Savonnerie rug while Norma leaned against her mother and held two wedding bands on a pink velvet pillow. Maeve and I stood with the thirty or so guests. That was when we learned that Andrea also had a mother, a sister, a brother-in-law who sold insurance, and a handful of friends who tipped back their heads to gape at the dining-room ceiling while the cake was being served. (The dining room ceiling was painted a shade of blue both deep and intense, and was covered in intricate configurations of carved leaves that had been painted gold, or, more accurately, the leaves had been gilded. The gilt leaves were arranged in flourishes which were surrounded by circles of gilt leaves within squares of gilt leaves. The ceiling was more in keeping with Versailles than Eastern Pennsylvania, and when I was a child I found it mortifying. Maeve and my father and I made a point of keeping our eyes on our plates during dinner.) Sandy and Jocelyn served champagne at the reception, wearing matching black uniforms with white collars and cuffs that Andrea had bought for the occasion. “We look like matrons at a women’s penitentiary,” Jocelyn said, holding up her wrists. Maeve came back to the kitchen every time another bottle of champagne needed to be opened because she had announced with great bravado that popping corks was pretty much the first thing she’d learned to do in college. Champagne was just a loaded gun as far as Sandy and Jocelyn were concerned. The wedding was held on a fall day of such brightness that the light seemed to be coming not just from the sun but from the grass and the leaves. All of the windows in the back of the house were triple hung and went to the floor, and for the occasion my father took the trouble of opening every last one of them, something I’d never seen done before. Open, the windows made a dozen doors onto the back terrace leading to the pool, which had been filled with water lilies. Who knew that water lilies could be rented for the day? Everyone was going on about how beautiful it all was: the house and the flowers and the light, even the woman who played the piano in the observatory was beautiful, but Maeve and Sandy and Jocelyn and I knew that all of it was wasted. Our father couldn’t marry Andrea at Immaculate Conception or ask Father Brewer to come to the house to marry them because he was divorced and she wasn’t Catholic, which made it seem like they weren’t really getting married at all. The ceremony was performed by a judge that none of us knew, a man my father had paid to come to the house to do the job, the way you’d pay an electrician. When it was over, Andrea kept holding up her glass to the light, remarking on how the champagne matched the color of her dress exactly. For the first time I was able to see how pretty she was, how happy and young. My father was forty-nine on the day of his second wedding, and his new wife in her champagne satin was thirty-one. Still, Maeve and I had no idea why he married her. Looking back, I have to say we lacked imagination. * * * “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer. The linden trees kept us from seeing anything except the linden trees. I had thought the trees were enormous when I was young but they’d kept right on growing. Maybe one day they’d grow into the wall of Andrea’s dreams. The car windows were rolled down and we each kept an arm out—Maeve’s left, my right—while we smoked. I had finished my first year of medical school at Columbia. It would be the summer we would quit smoking, more or less, but on this particular day we were still only thinking about it. “I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. “But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.” Maeve took a drag off her cigarette and smiled. “I love this. Is this what they’re teaching you in school?” “Introduction to Psychiatry.” “Tell me you’re going to be a shrink. It would be so beneficial.” “Do you ever think about going to see a psychiatrist?” This would have been 1971. Psychiatry was very much the rage. “I don’t need a psychiatrist because I can see the past clearly, but if you need to practice on someone, then by all means, be my guest. My psyche is your psyche.” “Why aren’t you at work today?” Maeve looked completely surprised. “What kind of stupid question is that? You just got here. I’m not going to work.” “Did you call in sick?” “I told Otterson you were coming home. He doesn’t care when I’m there. I get everything done.” She tapped her ashes out the window. Maeve had worked as a bookkeeper for Otterson’s ever since she’d graduated from college. They packaged and shipped frozen vegetables. My sister had won the math medal at Barnard. She had a higher cumulative GPA than the guy who’d won the math medal at Columbia that year, a sweet fact she learned from the guy’s sister who was also Maeve’s friend. With all of her knowledge and ability, she not only managed the payroll and calculated the taxes, she improved the delivery system, ensuring that bags of frozen corn would be quickly ferried to the grocers’ freezers throughout the Northeast. “Are you always going to work there? You should go back to school.” “We’re talking about the past, doctor, not the future. You need to stay on point.” I tapped at my cigarette. Andrea was the past I wanted to talk about, but Mrs. Buchsbaum came out of her house to check the mail and saw us sitting there. She came straight to my open window and leaned in. “Danny, you’re home!” she said. “How’s Columbia?” “It’s like it was before, only harder.” I had gone to Columbia as an undergraduate also. “Well, I know this one is happy to see you.” She nodded her head to Maeve. “Hi, Mrs. Buchsbaum,” Maeve said. Mrs. Buchsbaum put her hand on my arm. “You need to find your sister a boyfriend. There’s got to be some nice doctor at the hospital who doesn’t have time to look for a wife. A nice tall doctor.” “My criteria go beyond height,” Maeve said. “Don’t misunderstand me: I always love to see her back in the neighborhood, but still, it worries me.” Mrs. Buchsbaum was speaking only to me, as if she and I were in our own private section of the car. “She shouldn’t just be sitting out here by herself. Some people may get the wrong impression. She’s welcome, of course, I don’t mean that.” “I know,” I said. “It worries me, too. I’ll talk to her.” “And this one across the street.” Mrs. Buchsbaum gestured vaguely towards the linden trees with her forehead. “Nothing. When she drives by she does not wave. She does not acknowledge that anyone else is here. I think she must be a very sad person.” “Or not,” Maeve said. “I see the girls sometimes. Do you see the girls? They have better manners. If you ask me, they’re the ones to feel sorry for.” I shook my head. “We don’t see them.” Mrs. Buchsbaum squeezed my forearm and then waved goodbye to Maeve. “You can always come in the house,” she said, and we thanked her as she walked away. “Mrs. Buchsbaum corroborates my memory of the past,” Maeve said when we were alone again. * * * After Andrea and the girls had moved into the Dutch House and Maeve was back at school, my father and I were closer. My care had always been my sister’s responsibility, and now that she was gone he took an unexpected interest in my schoolwork and my basketball games. No one thought that Maeve’s role in my life was transferable to Andrea. The real question was to what extent I, at eleven, was old enough to lead an unsupervised life. Sandy and Jocelyn did their part as always, keeping me fed and telling me when I was not allowed to go outside without a hat. They had keen antennae, both of them, for my loneliness. I could be doing homework in my room and Sandy would knock on the door. “Come study downstairs,” she would say, then turn around without giving me the chance to answer. I would go, algebra book in hand. In the kitchen, Jocelyn would turn off her little radio and pull out a chair for me. “Everybody thinks better around food.” She sliced off the heel from a loaf of bread she’d made and buttered it for me. I have always been partial to the heel. “We got a postcard from Maeve,” Sandy said, and pointed to a card caught to the refrigerator with a magnet, the Barnard library covered in snow. The fact that the card was displayed was proof that Andrea never went in the kitchen. “She says we should keep feeding you.” Jocelyn nodded. “We hadn’t planned to feed you once she left, but if Maeve says we have to then we have to.” Maeve wrote me long letters, telling me about New York and her classes and her roommate, a girl named Leslie who worked the dinner shift in the cafeteria every night as part of her financial aid package and then fell asleep in her clothes while she tried to study in bed. Maeve gave no indication that school was difficult or that she was homesick, though she always said she missed me. Now that she wasn’t around to help me with my homework, I wondered for the first time who had ever helped her when she was young. Fluffy? I doubted it. I sat down at the kitchen table and opened my book. Sandy looked over my shoulder. “Let me see that. I used to be good in math.” “I’ve got it,” I said. “You only think you want to get rid of your sister,” Jocelyn said, clapping her hand on my shoulder in a firm manner so as not to embarrass me. “Then when she’s gone it turns out you miss her.” Sandy laughed and swatted Jocelyn with a dish towel. She was only right about half of it. I had never wanted to get rid of Maeve. “Do you have a sister?” I asked Jocelyn. Sandy and Jocelyn had both been laughing and then at the same time they stopped. “Are you kidding me?” Jocelyn asked. “I don’t think so,” I said, wondering what had been funny and then not funny, but in the second before they could correct me, I saw it: the similarity in these two women I had known before knowing. Sandy cocked her head. “Danny, seriously? You didn’t know we were sisters?” In that moment I could have told them all the ways they favored each other and all the ways they looked nothing alike, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I had never wondered who they were related to or who they went home to. All I knew was that they cared for us. I remembered Sandy being gone for two weeks when her husband was sick and then again for a few days when he died. “I didn’t know.” “That’s because I’m so much prettier,” Jocelyn said. She was trying to be funny, to let me off the hook, but I couldn’t see that one was prettier than the other. They were younger than my father and older than Andrea but I couldn’t narrow it down any further than that. I knew not to ask. Jocelyn was taller and thinner, her hair an unnatural shade of blond, whereas Sandy, whose thick brown hair was always held back with two barrettes, maybe had the nicer face. Her cheeks were pink and she had very pretty eyebrows, if such a thing were even possible. I didn’t know. Jocelyn was married, Sandy a widow. Both of them had children, I knew that because Maeve gave them whatever clothes we’d outgrown. I knew because when one of their children was really sick they didn’t come to work. Did I ask them when they came back, who was sick? Is she better now? I did not. I liked them both so much, Sandy and Jocelyn. I felt terrible for failing them. Sandy shook her head. “Boys,” she said, and with that single word excused me from all responsibility. There was a phone at the front desk of the dorm where Maeve lived. I had the number memorized. If I called her, some girl would be dispatched to the third floor to knock on her door and see if she was in, which she usually wasn’t because Maeve liked to study in the library. That whole transaction to find out she wasn’t there and then leave a message took at least seven minutes—approximately four minutes longer than my father thought a long-distance call should last. So while I was desperate to talk to my sister and ask her if she knew—and if she did know then ask her how she’d neglected to tell me—I didn’t call. I went into the drawing room where I stood in front of her portrait, cursing quietly to myself under her benevolent ten-year-old gaze. I resolved to wait until Saturday and ask my father instead. With every passing day the similarities between Sandy and Jocelyn became glaringly obvious: I saw it every morning as they stood side by side in the kitchen when I left to catch the school bus, I saw it in the way they waved like a couple of synchronized swimmers, and of course they had exactly the same voice. I realized I had never known which one of them was calling for me when I was upstairs. What could have been wrong with me that I’d missed all that? “What difference does it make?” my father said when finally it was Saturday and we were off to collect the rent. “But you knew.” “Of course I knew. I hired them, or your mother hired them. Your mother was always hiring people. First there was Sandy and then a couple of weeks later Sandy said that her sister needed a job, so we wound up with the pair. You’ve always been perfectly nice to them. I don’t see the problem.” The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world. Even in my own house I had no idea what was going on. My mother hired them because she knew they were sisters, meaning she was a good person. I didn’t even know they were sisters, meaning I was a toad. But that’s me layering the present onto the past. At the time, I couldn’t have begun to say why I was so upset. For weeks I tried to avoid Sandy and Jocelyn whenever I could, but that was impossible. Finally, I resolved to believe that I had always known who they were to each other, and that I had forgotten. Sandy and Jocelyn had always run the house with complete autonomy. Maybe on occasion we would tell them how nice it would be to have beef stew with dumplings again, or that wonderful apple cake, but even that was rare. They knew what we liked and they gave it to us without our needing to ask. We never ran out of apples or crackers, there were always stamps in the left-hand drawer of the library desk, clean towels in the bathroom. Sandy ironed not only our clothes but our sheets and pillowcases. There was always a bright row of silver-topped insulin bottles that shivered on the refrigerator door whenever Maeve was home. They sterilized syringes, back in the day before they were disposable. We would never tell them the laundry needed doing or a floor needed cleaning because everything was done before we’d had the chance to notice. All of that changed after Andrea arrived. She made weekly menus for Jocelyn to follow and gave her opinion on every course: there wasn’t enough salt in the soup; she had given the girls too many mashed potatoes. How could they be expected to eat so many mashed potatoes? Why was Jocelyn serving cod when Andrea had specifically told her sole? Could she not have troubled herself to check another market? Did Andrea have to do everything? Every day she worked to find something extra for Sandy to do, dusting the shelves in the pantry or washing the curtain sheers. I no longer heard Sandy and Jocelyn talking to each other in the halls. I no longer heard Jocelyn’s spectacular whistling when she arrived at the house in the morning. They were no longer allowed to call up the stairs to ask a question, they were to walk up and find us like civilized people. That’s what Andrea said. Sandy and Jocelyn made it a point to be less visible, more civilized, to work wherever we were not. Or maybe that was me. I was in my bedroom more after Maeve left. There were six bedrooms on the second floor of the house: my father’s room, mine, Maeve’s, a sunny room with twin beds where Bright and Norma slept, a room for the guests we never had, and the last room, which had been made into a household office. There was also a sort of sitting area at the top of the stairs where no one had ever sat until Norma and Bright showed up. They seemed to love to sit at the top of the stairs. Andrea announced her plans for the reconfiguration one night at dinner. “I’m going to move Norma into the room with the window seat,” she said. My father and I could only look at her while Sandy, who was refilling the water glasses, took a step back from the table. Andrea noticed nothing. “Norma’s the oldest girl now. That’s the room for the biggest girl.” Norma’s mouth opened a bit. I could see that all of this was news to her. If she had wanted to be in Maeve’s room it was because she wanted to be with Maeve. “Maeve’s coming home again,” my father said. “She’s only gone to New York.” “And when she comes back to visit she’ll have a beautiful room on the third floor. Sandy will see to that, won’t you, Sandy?” But Sandy didn’t answer. She held the water pitcher to her chest as if to keep herself from throwing it. “I don’t think we need to do this now,” my father said. “There’s no shortage of places to sleep around here. Norma can have the guest room if she wants it.” “The guest room is for our guests. Norma will sleep in the room with the window seat. It’s the nicest bedroom in the house, the nicest view. It’s silly to hold it as a shrine for someone who doesn’t live here. Honestly, I thought that maybe we should take the room ourselves but the closet isn’t very big. Norma has such little dresses. The closet will be fine for you, won’t it?” Norma nodded slowly, both horrified by her mother and mesmerized by the thought of that window seat, those wonderful drapes that could close a person off from everything. “I want to sleep in Maeve’s room,” Bright said. Bright hadn’t adjusted to living in so much space and she clung to her sister in the way I had clung to mine. “You’ll each have your own room, and Norma will let you visit,” her mother said. “Everyone will adjust just fine. It’s like your father said, this house is big enough for everyone to have her own room.” And with that the matter was closed. I never said a thing. I looked at my father, who was apparently now the father of Norma and Bright as well, hoping he would give it another shot, but he let it go. Andrea was a very pretty woman. He could give her her way now or he could wait and give her her way later, but either way, she was going to get what she wanted. All of this happened around the time I’d fallen in love with one of the VanHoebeek daughters, or rather with her portrait, which I called Julia. Julia had narrow shoulders and yellow hair held back by a green ribbon. Her portrait hung in a bedroom on the third floor of the Dutch House above a bed no one ever slept in. With the exception of Sandy, who ran the vacuum and wiped things down with a dust rag on Thursdays, no one but me set foot up there. I believed that Julia and I were true lovers thwarted by the misalignment of our births. I worked myself into such a state over the injustice of it all that I once made the error of calling my sister at Barnard to ask if she had ever wondered about the girl whose painting hung in the third-floor bedroom, the girl with the gray-green eyes who was one of the VanHoebeek daughters. “A daughter?” Maeve said. I was lucky to have caught her on the phone. “They didn’t have any daughters. I think that’s Mrs. VanHoebeek when she was a girl. Take the painting downstairs and look at them together. I think they’re both her.” My sister was fully capable of teasing me until I could have bled from my ears, but just as often she spoke as if we were equals, giving me an honest answer to any question. I could tell by her voice she wasn’t joking, or even particularly paying attention to what I had asked. I ran up the turning staircase to the third floor and stood on the unused bed to lift the carved gilt frame of my beloved off the wall (the frame was grander than what she would have wanted and not as grand as what she deserved). My Julia was not Mrs. VanHoebeek. But when I carried the painting downstairs to lean it on the mantelpiece, it was clear that Maeve was right. They were paintings of the same woman seated at either end of her life, old Mrs. VanHoebeek with the black silk buttons marching up to her neck and young Julia caught in a breeze. And really, even if it wasn’t the same woman, such a likeness made it clear how one day the daughter would become the mother. Then Jocelyn came around the corner and caught me standing there looking at the two paintings together. She shook her head. “Time flies,” she said. Sandy and Jocelyn moved Maeve’s things up to the third floor. At least the room faced the back garden like her old room did. At least the view would be more or less the same and arguably even better: fewer branches, more leaves. But the windows were dormers, of course, and there was no window seat. The new room was also a fraction of the size, and under the eaves so the ceiling sloped. As tall as Maeve was she’d be hitting her head every other minute. The whole depressing enterprise of turning Maeve’s room into Norma’s room took longer than anyone could have imagined, since once Maeve’s things were out Andrea wanted the place painted, and after it was painted she changed her mind and started bringing home books of wallpaper. She shopped for a new bedspread, a new rug. For a couple of weeks the redecoration was all anyone heard about, but it wasn’t until Maeve came home for Thanksgiving that I realized none of us had been brave enough to inform my sister of her exile. Surely that was my father’s job, and surely the rest of us would have known that he would never do it. Maeve was in the foyer, swinging me around, kissing Sandy and Jocelyn, kissing the little girls, and suddenly we all understood that she was about to go upstairs and find a raft of dolls spread across what had been her bed. In that moment it was Andrea, always the general, who showed presence of mind. “Maeve, we’ve changed some things around since you’ve been gone. You’re on the third floor now. It’s very nice.” “The attic?” Maeve asked. “The third floor,” Andrea repeated. My father picked up her suitcase. He had nothing to say on the subject but at least he was willing to go up there with her. What with his knee that bothered him on stairs, our father never went to the third floor. Maeve still had her red coat on, she was wearing gloves. She laughed. “It’s just like The Little Princess!” she said. “The girl loses all of her money and so they put her in the attic and make her clean the fireplaces.” She turned to Norma. “No big ideas for you, Miss. I will not be cleaning your fireplace.” “That’s still my job,” Sandy said. I hadn’t heard Sandy get in on a joke in months, if there was in fact anything funny about Maeve moving to the third floor. “Well, let’s go then,” Maeve said to our father. “It’s a long hike. We should get started if we’re going to make it back in time for supper. Something smells good.” She looked at Bright. “Is it you?” Bright laughed but then Norma ran out of the room in tears, suddenly understanding what taking Maeve’s room might mean to Maeve. Maeve watched her go and I could see on her face she wasn’t sure whom she should be comforting: Norma? Sandy? Me? Our father had her bag and was already heading up. After a moment’s hesitation she followed him. In truth they were gone for a very long time, and no one went up to the third floor to rush them, to tell them that dinner was on the table and we were waiting. Chapter 5 Maeve came home again for Christmas that year but she stayed only a few days. She’d been invited to a friend’s house in New Hampshire to ski and could get a ride up with another Barnard girl who lived in Philadelphia. They were rich girls, all of them. Smart, popular girls who knew how to work a slope and aspired to read The Red and the Black in French. When she found out the dorms wouldn’t be closed at Easter, Maeve decided to stay at school. Plenty of her friends lived in the city, and there were always invitations to go to dinners. Besides, she had work to do. She could go to Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s and walk down Fifth Avenue with girls who did exactly that every year. No one could have blamed her, but I blamed her all the same. How was I supposed to get through Easter without her? “Take the train into the city,” she said on the phone. “I’ll pick you up. I’ll call Dad at work and get it set. You can manage the train by yourself.” I felt older than my friends at school, the ones with two parents and normal-sized houses. I looked older, too. I was the tallest person in my class now. “Boys with tall sisters wind up being tall boys,” Maeve had said, and she was right. Still, I wasn’t sure my father would let me go to New York by myself. Even if I was tall and a good student, even though I largely fended for myself on any given day, I was still only twelve. But my father surprised me, saying he would drive me to New York himself and let me come home on the train. Barnard was about two and a half hours by car. My father said we would pick Maeve up and the three of us would have lunch, then he would drive back to Elkins Park without me. It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance. Andrea caught wind of the plan and announced at dinner that she would ride along. There were plenty of things she needed in the city. But after she thought about it some more she said the girls should come too, and that after they dropped me off at Maeve’s, my father could take them sightseeing. “The girls still haven’t been to New York, and you’re from there!” Andrea said, as if he’d conspired to keep New York from them. “We’ll take the boat out to see the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn’t that be something?” she asked the girls. I hadn’t been to New York either but I wasn’t about to bring that up for fear I’d be seen as asking to tag along. By the time Sandy brought dessert, Andrea was talking about making reservations at a hotel and going to a show. Did my father know anyone who could get tickets to The Sound of Music? “Why do you always wait until the last minute to make plans?” she asked him, then went on to discuss the possibility of lining up some interviews with portrait artists. “We need to have the girls’ portraits painted.” I studied the final smear of the rhubarb crisp on my plate. It didn’t matter. I was only missing lunch, that ridiculous notion of the three of us. I was still getting my ride to see Maeve, and that was all I really wanted. It didn’t matter who was in the car. Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted. But in the morning, my father pushed through the swinging kitchen door while I was still eating my cereal. He tapped two fingers on the table just in front of my bowl. “Time to go,” he said. “Right now.” Andrea was nowhere in evidence. The girls were still in Maeve’s room (they slept there together, as per Bright’s prediction), Sandy and Jocelyn had yet to arrive. I didn’t ask him what had happened, or remind him that his wife and her daughters were supposed to come along. I didn’t go and get the book I planned to read on the train coming home or tell him we were supposed to leave two hours from now. I left my bowl of half-eaten Cheerios on the table for Sandy to find, and followed him out the door. We were ditching Andrea. Easter was late that year, and the morning was flush with the insane sweetness of hyacinth. My father was walking fast and his legs were so long that even with his bad knee I had to run to keep up. We went beneath the long trellis of wisteria that had yet to bloom, and all the way to the garage I thought, Escape, escape, escape. We beat the word into the gravel with every step. I could scarcely imagine the courage it required to tell Andrea she couldn’t come with us, and she in turn must have started the kind of argument he found untenable. All that mattered to him was getting out of the house before she came downstairs to make another point in her case, and with that imperative, we fled. We were in the car hours earlier than we had planned. If I asked my father a question when he was quiet, he would say he was having a conversation with himself and that I shouldn’t interrupt. I could tell he was having one of those conversations now, so I looked out the car window at the glorious morning and thought about Manhattan and my sister and all the fun we were going to have. I wouldn’t ask Maeve to take me to see the Statue of Liberty, Maeve got sick on boats, but I wondered if I could talk her into the Empire State Building. “You know I used to live in New York,” my father said once we were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I said I guessed I did. What I didn’t say was that Andrea had just brought it up at the dinner table. Then he put on his turn signal to work his way towards the exit. “We’ve got plenty of time. I’ll show you.” For the most part, what I knew about my father was what I saw: he was tall and thin with weathered skin and hair the color of rust, the color of my hair. All three of us had blue eyes. His left knee was slow to bend, worse in the winter and when it rained. He never said a word about it but it was easy enough to tell when it hurt him. He smoked Pall Malls, put milk in his coffee, worked the crossword puzzle before reading the front page. He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs. When I was eight years old, I asked my father at the dinner table if he was going to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson. Eisenhower was running for a second term and all the boys in school were for him. My father clicked the point of his knife against his plate and told me I was never to ask a question like that, not of him, not of anyone. “It may be fine for boys to speculate on whom they might vote for because boys can’t vote,” he said. “But to ask an adult such a question is to violate a man’s right to privacy.” In retrospect, I imagine my father was horrified that I might think there was any chance he’d vote for Stevenson, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I knew was that you had to touch a hot stove only once. Here are the things I talked to my father about when I was a boy: baseball—he liked the Phillies. Trees—he knew the name of every one, though he would chastise me for asking about the same kind of tree more than once. Birds—likewise. He kept feeders in the backyard and could easily identify all of his customers. Buildings—be it their structural soundness, architectural details, property value, property tax, you name it—my father liked to talk about buildings. To list the things I didn’t ask my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea. Why it was that this day should have been different I couldn’t have said, though surely the fight with Andrea must have had something to do with it. Maybe that, along with the fact he was going to back New York where he and my mother were from, and he was going to see Maeve in school for the first time, prompted a wave of nostalgia in him. Or maybe it was nothing more than what he told me: we had extra time. “All of this was different,” he said to me as we drove from street to street in Brooklyn. But Brooklyn wasn’t so different from neighborhoods I knew in Philadelphia, neighborhoods where we collected rent on Saturdays. There was just more of everything in Brooklyn, a feeling of density that stretched in every direction. He slowed the car to crawl, pointed. “Those apartment buildings? When I lived in the neighborhood those were wood. They took the old ones down, or there was a fire. The whole block. That coffee shop was there—” He pointed out Bob’s Cup and Saucer. The people at the window counter were finishing a very late breakfast, some of them reading the paper and others staring out at the street. “They made their own crullers. I’ve never found anything like them. On Sunday after church there’d be a line down the block. See that shoe shop? Honest Shoe Repair. That’s always been there.” He pointed again, a shop window barely wider than the door itself. “I went to school with the kid whose father owned it. I bet if we walked in right now he’d be there, banging new soles onto shoes. That would be some sort of life.” “I guess,” I said. I sounded like an idiot but I wasn’t sure how to take it all in. He turned the car at the corner and again at the light, and then we were on Fourteenth Avenue. “Right there,” he said, and pointed to the third floor of a building that looked like every other building we’d passed. “I lived there, and your mother was a block back that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Where?” “Right behind us.” I kneeled on the seat and looked out the back window, my heart in my throat. My mother? “I want to see,” I said. “It’s just like all the other ones.” “It’s still early.” It was Maundy Thursday, and the people who went to Mass had either gone early or they would go late, after work. The only people walking around were women out doing their shopping. We were double parked, and just as my father was about to tell me no, the car right in front of us pulled out like it was issuing an invitation. “Well, what am I supposed to say to that?” my father said, and took the space. The day had turned overcast since we left Pennsylvania but it wasn’t raining and we walked back down the street a block, my father limping slightly in the cold. “Right there. First floor.” The building looked like all the others, but to think that my mother had lived there made me feel like we had landed on the moon, it was that impossible. There were bars over the windows and I raised my hand to touch them. “Those keep out the knuckleheads,” my father said. “That’s what your grandfather used to say. He put them on.” I looked at him. “My grandfather?” “Your mother’s father. He was a fireman. A lot of nights he slept at the station, so he put bars on the windows. I don’t know if he needed them, though; not much happened back then.” My fingers curled around one of the bars. “Does he still live here?” “Who?” “My grandfather.” I had never put those two words together before. “Oh, heavens no.” My father shook his head at the memory. “Old Jack’s been dead forever. There was something wrong with his lungs. I don’t know what. Too many fires.” “And my grandmother?” Again, the sentence astounded me. I could tell by his face that this wasn’t what he’d signed on for. He only wanted to drive through Brooklyn, show me the places he knew, the building where he had lived. “Pneumonia, not too long after Jack died.” I asked him if there were any others. “You don’t know this?” I shook my head. He peeled my fingers off the window bar, not unkindly, and turned me back towards the car while he spoke. “Buddy and Tom died of the flu, and Loretta died having a baby. Doreen moved to Canada with some fellow she married, and James, James was my friend, he died in the war. Your mother was the baby of the family and she outlasted all of them, except maybe Doreen. I guess Doreen could still be up there in Canada.” I reached down deep to find something in myself I wasn’t sure was there, the part of me that was like my sister. “Why did she leave?” “The guy she married wanted to move,” he said, not understanding. “He was from Canada or he got a job there. I can’t remember which.” I stopped walking. I didn’t even bother to shake my head, I just started again. It was the central question of my life and I had never asked before. “Why did my mother leave?” My father sighed, sank his hands down in his pockets and raised his eyes to assess the position of the clouds, then he told me she was crazy. That was both the long and the short of it. “Crazy how?” “Crazy like taking off her coat and handing it to someone on the street who never asked her for a coat in the first place. Crazy like taking off your coat and giving it away too.” “But aren’t we supposed to do that?” I mean, we didn’t do it, but wasn’t it the goal? My father shook his head. “No. We’re not. Listen, there’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.” After we were back in the car the conversation between us was done and we drove into Manhattan like two people who had never met. We made our way to Barnard and picked Maeve up right on time. She was waiting on the street in front of her dorm wearing her red winter coat, her black hair in a single heavy braid lying across her shoulder. Sandy was always telling Maeve she looked better when she braided her hair but at home she’d never do it. I was overwhelmed by the need to talk to my sister alone but there was nothing to be done about it. If it had been up to me we would have said goodbye to our father on the spot and sent him home, but there was a plan for the three of us to have lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant Maeve knew not far from campus, where I was served a giant bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, something Jocelyn never would have believed possible for lunch. My father asked Maeve about her classes and Maeve, basking in this rare light, told him everything. She was taking Calculus II and Economics, along with European History and a course on the Japanese novel. My father shook his head in disbelief over the novel part but offered no criticism. Maybe he was glad to see her, or maybe he was glad he wasn’t standing on a street corner in Brooklyn talking to me, but for once in his life he gave his daughter his full attention. Maeve was in her second semester and he had no idea what her classes were, but I knew everything: The Makioka Sisters was her reward for having finished The Tale of Genji; her economics professor had written the textbook they used in class; she was finding Calculus II to be easier than Calculus I. I stuffed my mouth with spaghetti to keep myself from changing the subject. When lunch was over, and it was over soon enough because my father had no patience for restaurants, we walked him back to the car. I didn’t know if I was supposed to come home that night or the next day. We hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t brought anything with me, but there was no mention of my return. I was Maeve’s again and that was that. He gave her a quick embrace and slipped some money in her coat pocket, then Maeve and I stood together and waved goodbye as he pulled away. A cold rain had blown in during lunch, and while it wasn’t heavy, Maeve said we should take the subway to the Metropolitan and see the Egyptian exhibit because there was no point in getting wet. After the Empire State Building, the subway was the thing I’d been most excited to see, and now I hardly paid attention as we went down the stairs. Maeve stopped and gave me a hard look just before we got to the turnstile. She might have thought I was going to throw up, which wouldn’t have been a bad guess. “Did you eat too much?” I shook my head. “We went to Brooklyn.” There must have been some better way to tell her this but the morning was more than I knew how to shape into words. “Today?” There was a black metal gate in front of us, and on the other side of the gate was the platform for the train. The train came up and the doors opened and the people got off and got on but Maeve and I just stood there. Other people rushed past, trying to get through the turnstile in time. “We left too early. I think he and Andrea must have had a fight because she was going to come with us, Andrea and the girls, and then Dad came down alone and he was in a huge hurry to leave.” I had started to cry when there was nothing to cry about. I was long past the age anyway. Maeve took me to a wooden bench and we sat there together and she fished a Kleenex out of her purse and handed it to me. She had her hand on my knee. Once I’d told her the whole of the story I could see there wasn’t much to it, but I couldn’t stop thinking that all of the people who had lived in that apartment were dead now, except for the sister who went to Canada and our mother, and they could easily be dead too. Maeve was very close. She’d eaten a peppermint from a bowl by the door in the restaurant. We both had. Her eyes weren’t blue like mine. They were much darker, almost navy. “Could you find the street again?” “It’s Fourteenth, but I couldn’t tell you how to get there.” “But you remember the coffee shop and the shoe repair, so we could find it.” Maeve went to the man in the booth who sold tokens and came back with a map. She found Fourteenth Avenue and then figured out the train, then she gave the map back and gave me a token. Brooklyn is a big place, bigger than Manhattan, and a person wouldn’t think that a twelve-year-old boy who had never been there before could possibly find his way back to a single apartment building he’d seen for five minutes, but I had Maeve with me. When we got off the train she asked directions to Bob’s Cup and Saucer, and once we were there I knew how to find it: a turn at the corner, a turn at the light. I showed her the bars our grandfather had put on the windows as a defense against knuckleheads, and for a while we stood there, our backs against the bricks. She asked me to tell her the names of the uncles and the aunts. I could remember Loretta and Buddy and James but not the other two. She said I shouldn’t worry about it. When the rain got harder we walked back to Bob’s. The waitress laughed when we asked for a cruller. She said they were gone by eight o’clock every morning. That was fine with us, seeing as how we weren’t hungry. Maeve had a cup of coffee and I had hot chocolate. We stayed until we were warm and halfway dry. “I can’t believe he showed you where she lived,” Maeve said. “All the years I asked him about her, about her family, about where she had gone, he’d never tell me anything.” “Because he thought it would kill you.” I didn’t like being in the position of defending my father to my sister but that was the case. Our mother’s leaving had made Maeve sick. “That’s ridiculous. People don’t die from information. He just didn’t want to talk to me. One time when I was in high school I told him I was going to India to try to find her and you know what he said?” I shook my head, stunned by the horrible thought of Maeve in India, both of them gone. “He told me I needed to think of her as dead, that she probably was dead by now.” And still, as terrible as it was, I understood. “He didn’t want you to go.” “He said, ‘There are almost 450 million people in India now. Good luck with that.’” The waitress came back and held up her pot of coffee but Maeve declined. I thought about the bars on the windows of the apartment. I thought of all the knuckleheads in the world. “Do you know why she left?” Maeve finished what was in her cup. “All I know for sure was that she hated the house.” “The Dutch House?” “Couldn’t stand it.” “She didn’t say that.” “Oh, she did. She made it known every day. The only room she’d ever sit in was the kitchen. Whenever Fluffy would ask her a question, she’d say, ‘Do whatever you think best. It’s your house.’ She was always saying it was Fluffy’s house. It drove Dad to distraction, I remember that. She told me once if it were up to her she’d give the place to the nuns, let them turn it into an orphanage or an old folks’ home. Then she said the nuns and the orphans and the old folks would probably be too embarrassed to live there.” I tried to imagine such a thing. Hate the dining-room ceiling, sure, but the entire house? There was no better house. “Maybe you misunderstood her.” “She said it more than once.” “Then she was crazy,” I said, but as soon as I said it I was sorry. Maeve shook her head. “She wasn’t crazy.” When we got back to Manhattan, Maeve took me to a men’s store and bought me extra underwear, a new shirt, and a pair of pajamas, then she got me a toothbrush at the drugstore next door. That night we went to the Paris Theater and saw Mon Oncle. Maeve said she was in love with Jacques Tati. I was nervous about seeing a movie with subtitles but it turned out that nobody really said anything. After it was finished, we stopped for ice cream then went back to Barnard. Boys of every stripe were expressly forbidden to go past the dorm lobby, but Maeve just explained the situation to the girl at the desk, another friend of hers, and took me upstairs. Leslie, her roommate, had gone home for Easter break and so I slept in her bed. The room was so small we could have easily reached across the empty space and touched fingers. I slept in Maeve’s room all the time when I was young, and I had forgotten how nice it was to wake up in the middle of the night and hear the steadiness of her breathing. I ended up staying in New York for all of Friday and most of Saturday, and if Maeve ever called the house to let anyone know our plans, I wasn’t there to witness it. She said she’d been studying too much to do all the tourist things she’d meant to, and so we went to the Museum of Natural History and the zoo in Central Park. We went to the top of the Empire State Building in spite of the rain and all we could see were the deep wet clouds we were standing inside. She walked me around the Columbia University campus and told me that this was where I should go to college. We went to Good Friday service at the Church of Notre Dame and the beauty of the building held my attention through nearly half of that interminable exercise. Maeve finally had to excuse herself and go out to the vestibule on the side of the church to give herself some insulin. She told me later that people probably thought she was a junkie in a sweater set. Late on Holy Saturday she took me to Penn Station. She said Dad would want me home for Easter, and anyway, we both had to go back to school on Monday. She bought me a ticket, promising that she would call the house and tell Sandy when to meet me, making me promise I would call her as soon as I got home. Maeve gave the porter a tip and asked him to seat me next to the safest-looking person on the train, but as it turned out there were only a handful of us going to Philadelphia in the late afternoon of Holy Saturday and I had a whole row to myself. Maeve had bought me the book about Julius Caesar I had begged her for in Brentano’s but I wound up keeping it on my lap and looking out the window the entire time. The train was past Newark before I realized I’d forgotten to show her the apartment building where Dad had grown up, and that she had forgotten to ask. I hadn’t thought about Andrea at all while I was gone, but now I wondered if there had been some god-awful fight. Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds. I gave it a try and found that it was easier than I imagined. All I did was watch the world shoot past the train window: towns then houses then trees then cows then trees then houses then towns, over and over again. Sandy picked me up at the train station as Maeve had promised, and I told her all about the trip in the car. Sandy wanted to know how Maeve was doing, and about her dorm room, which I told her was very small. She asked me if I thought she was getting enough to eat. “She looked so skinny at Christmas.” “Do you think?” I asked. She seemed just the same to me. When we got back to the house they were all eating dinner, and my father said, “Look who’s back.” There was a setting at my usual place. “I’m going to get a rabbit for Easter,” Bright said to me. “No you’re not,” Norma said. “Let’s wait for tomorrow and see what happens,” Andrea said, not looking at me. “Eat your dinner.” Jocelyn was there, and she gave me a wink as she brought me my plate. She’d come over to help since Sandy had to get me at the station. “Are there rabbits in New York City?” Bright asked. The girls were funny the way they treated me like I was already grown, closer to my father and Andrea in age and station than I was to them. “Loads of them,” I said. “Did you see them?” In fact, I had seen rabbits in an Easter window display at Saks Fifth Avenue. I told her how they hopped around the ankles of mannequins in fancy dresses, and how Maeve and I had stood out on the street with crowds of other people and watched them for a good ten minutes. “Did you get to see the play?” Norma asked, and then Andrea did look up. I could tell how crushed she’d be to think that Maeve and I had done something she wanted to do. I nodded. “There was a lot of singing but it was better than I thought it would be.” “How in the world did you get tickets?” my father asked. “A friend of Maeve’s at school. Her father works in the theater.” I didn’t have much experience lying in those days but it came naturally to me. No one at that table would have checked my story, and even if they had, Maeve would have backed me without a thought. There were no more questions after that, so I kept the penguins at the Central Park Zoo and the dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History and Mon Oncle and the dorm room and all the rest of it to myself. I planned to tell my friend Matthew everything when we were in school on Monday. Matthew was half-crazed by the idea of seeing Manhattan. Andrea started up about tomorrow’s Easter lunch and how busy she would be, even though Sandy had told me in the car that every bit of the cooking was done. I kept waiting for my father to catch my eye, to give me some small signal that things had changed between us, but it didn’t come. He never asked me about my time with Maeve or the play I hadn’t seen, and we never talked about Brooklyn again. * * * “Don’t you think it’s strange we never see her?” I asked Maeve. I was in my late twenties then. I thought it might have happened once or twice. “Why would we see her?” “Well, we park in front of her house. It seems like we would have overlapped at some point.” We had once seen Norma and Bright walking across the yard in their swimsuits but that was it, and that was ages ago. “This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.” “It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months. “Whatever. We’ve been lucky.” “Do you ever think about her?” I didn’t think of Andrea often, but there were times when we were parked in front of the Dutch House that she might as well have been in the back seat of the car. “Sometimes I wonder if she’s dying,” Maeve said. “I wonder when she’ll die. That’s about it.” I laughed, even though I was pretty sure she wasn’t joking. “I was thinking more along the lines of—I wonder if she’s happy, I wonder if she ever met anyone.” “No. I don’t wonder about that.” “She couldn’t be very old. She could have found someone.” “She’d never let anyone in that house.” “Listen,” I said, “she was horrible to us in the end, I’ll grant you that, but sometimes I wonder if she just didn’t know any better. Maybe she was too young to deal with everything, or maybe it was grief. Or maybe things had happened in her own life that had nothing to do with us. I mean, what did we ever know about Andrea? The truth is I have plenty of memories of her being perfectly decent. I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t.” “Why do you feel the need to say anything good about her?” Maeve asked. “I don’t see the point.” “The point is that it’s true. At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?” The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street. “Did you love her?” I let out a sound that could only be described as exasperation. “No, I didn’t love her. Those are my two choices? I love her or I hate her?” “Well,” my sister said, “you’re telling me you didn’t hate her, so I just want to know what the parameters are. I think it’s a ridiculous conversation to be having in the first place, if you want my opinion. Say there’s a kid who lives next door, a kid you have no particular friendship with but no problems with either. Then one day he walks into your house and kills your sister with a baseball bat.” “Maeve, for the love of God.” She held up her hand. “Hear me out. Does that present fact obliterate the past? Maybe not if you loved the kid. Maybe if you loved the kid you’d dig in and try to find out what had happened, see things from his perspective, wonder what his parents had done to him, wonder if there wasn’t some chemical imbalance. You might even consider that your sister could have played a role in the outcome—did she torment this boy? Was she cruel to him? But you’d only wonder about that if you loved him. If you only liked the kid, if he was never anything more to you than an okay neighbor, I don’t see the point in scratching around for good memories. He’s gone to prison. You’re never going to see the son-of-a-bitch again.” I was doing my residency in internal medicine at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and every two or three weeks I took the train to Philadelphia. There wasn’t enough time to spend the night but I never let an entire month go by without visiting. Maeve was always saying she thought she’d see more of me when medical school was over but that wasn’t the case. There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside. There had already been a few cold nights and the leaves on the linden trees were starting to yellow. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll drop it.” Maeve turned away from me and looked at the trees. “Thank you.” So alone I tried to remember the good in her: Andrea laughing with Norma and Bright; Andrea coming in to check on me once in the middle of the night after I had my wisdom teeth out, her standing in the door of my room, asking if I was okay; a handful of moments early on when I saw her bring a lightness to our father, his briefly resting his hand against the small of her back. They were minuscule things, and in truth it made me tired to think of them, so I let my mind go back to the hospital, checking off the patients I would need to see tonight, preparing what I would say to them. I was back on call at seven. Chapter 6 Maeve came home after she graduated, but there was never any talk of her moving back into the house. She’d scarcely been in residence since her exile to the third floor. Instead, she got herself a little apartment in Jenkintown, which was considerably cheaper than Elkins Park and not far from Immaculate Conception where we went to church. She took a job with a new company that shipped frozen vegetables. Her stated plan was to take a year or two off before going back to get her masters in economics or a law degree, but I knew she was hanging around to keep an eye on me for my last years of high school, give me something regular I could count on. Otterson’s Frozen Vegetables didn’t know what hit them. After two months of working in the billing department, Maeve came up with a new invoice system and a new way of tracking inventory. Pretty soon she was preparing both the company’s taxes and Mr. Otterson’s personal taxes. The work was ridiculously easy for her, and she said that’s what she wanted: a break. Maeve’s friends from Barnard were taking breaks as well, spending a year in Paris or getting married or doing an unpaid internship at the Museum of Modern Art while their fathers footed the bill for their Manhattan apartments. Maeve always had her own definition of rest. There was something like peace in those days. I was playing varsity basketball as a sophomore, or I should say I was sitting on the varsity bench, but I was happy to be there, earning my place in the future. I had plenty of friends and so plenty of places I could go after school, including Maeve’s apartment. I wasn’t trying to avoid being home, but like every other fifteen-year-old boy I knew, I found fewer reasons to be there. Andrea and the girls seemed to exist in their own parallel universe of ballet classes and shopping trips. Their orbit had drifted so far from mine that I almost never thought about them. Sometimes I would hear Norma and Bright in Maeve’s room when I was studying. They would be laughing or fighting over a hairbrush or chasing each other up and down the stairs, but they were nothing more than sound. They never had friends over, just like Maeve and I never had friends over, or maybe they didn’t have friends. I thought of them as a single unit: Norma-and-Bright, like an advertising agency consisting of two small girls. When I got tired of hearing them I turned on my radio and closed the door. My father had spun away as well, making my own absence a convenience for everyone. He said it was because the suburbs were booming and he had an eye towards doubling his business, and while that was true, it also seemed pretty clear he had married the wrong woman. If we all kept to our own corners it was easier for everyone. Not just easier, happier, and the house gave us plenty of space in which to carry on our individual lives. Sandy served an early dinner to Andrea and the girls in the dining room and Jocelyn saved me a plate. When I came home from basketball practice I ate, regardless of the pizza I’d already had with friends. Sometimes I would ride my bike in the dark to take sandwiches to my father at his office, and I would eat again with him. He would unroll the huge white sheaves of architectural renderings and show me what the future held. Every commercial building going up from Jenkintown to Glenside had the name CONROY on a big wooden sign at the front of the construction site. Three Saturdays a month he would send me wherever I was needed—to carry lumber and hammer nails and sweep out the newly built rooms. The foundations were poured, the houses framed. I learned to walk on rafters while the regular workers, the guys who did not go home to their own mansions in Elkins Park, heckled me from below. “Better not fall there, Danny boy!” they’d call out, but once I’d learned to leap from board to board like they did, once I was talking about the electrical and the plumbing, they left me alone. I was cutting crown molding in the miter box by then. More than school or the basketball court, more than the Dutch House, I was at home on a building site. Whenever I could I’d work after school, not for the money—my father considered very few of my hours to be billable—but because I loved the smell and the noise. I loved being part of a building being made. On the first Saturday of the month, my father and I still made the rounds to collect the rents, but now we talked about scheduling the cement truck for one project while making someone else wait. There were never enough trucks, enough men, enough hours in the day for all we meant to accomplish. We talked about how far behind one project was and how another was due to come in right on time. “The day you get your driver’s license may well be the happiest day of my life,” my father said. “Are you sick of driving? You could teach me.” He shook his head, his elbow pointing out the open window. “It’s a waste of time, that’s all, both of us going out. Once you’re sixteen you can collect the rent yourself.” That’s the way it goes, I thought, admiring my own maturity. I would rather have kept the one Saturday a month with the two of us together in the car but I would take his trust instead. That was what it meant to grow up. As it turned out, I got neither. He died when I was still fifteen. I’m sorry to say I thought my father was old when he died. He was fifty-three. He was climbing the five flights of stairs in a nearly completed office building to check on some window flashing and caulk on the top floor that the contractor told him was leaking. The day was boiling hot, the tenth of September. The building was still a month away from having the electricity turned on, which meant no elevator and no air conditioning. There were lights rigged up in the stairwell that ran off a generator that only made it hotter. Mr. Brennan, who was the project manager, said it must have been a hundred degrees. My father complained about being out of shape when they passed the second floor, and after that he said nothing. He was never fast on account of his knee but on this day it took him twice as long. He was sweating through his suit jacket. Six steps short of his destination, he sat down without a word, threw up, and then fell straight forward, his head hitting the concrete stair, his long body following in a tumble. Mr. Brennan couldn’t catch him, but he stretched him out on the landing as best he could and ran down the stairs and across the street to a pharmacy where he told the girl at the register to call an ambulance, then he rounded up four of the men working at the site and together they carried my father down the turns of the stairs. Mr. Brennan said he had never seen a man go as white, and Mr. Brennan had been in the war. Mr. Brennan rode along in the ambulance, and when they got to the hospital, he called Mrs. Kennedy at my father’s office. Mrs. Kennedy called Maeve. Some kid came into my geometry class and handed a folded note to the teacher, who read it to himself and then told me to get my things and go to the principal’s office. No one comes into the middle of geometry and tells you to get your things because you’re going to be a starter at the next basketball game. When I went down the hall I had only one thought and it was for Maeve. I was so sick with fear it was all I could do to make myself walk. She had run out of insulin or the insulin wasn’t any good. Too much, not enough, either way it had killed her. Until that minute I never realized the extent to which I carried this fear with me everywhere, every minute of my life. I was the tallest boy in my class, and muscled up from basketball and construction. The principal’s office was a glass-fronted room that opened onto the lobby and when I saw Maeve standing at the desk with her back to me, her unmistakable hair in a braid trailing down her back, I made a sound, something high and sharp that seemed to have come up from my knees. She turned around, everybody turned around, but I didn’t care. I had asked God for one thing and God had given it to me—my sister wasn’t dead. Maeve was crying when she put her arms around me and I didn’t even ask her. Later she would say she assumed I knew because of the look on my face, but I had no idea. I didn’t know until we got in the car and she said we were going to the hospital and that our father was dead. We made a terrible mistake but even now it’s hard for me to say exactly whose mistake it was. Mr. Brennan’s? Mrs. Kennedy’s? Maeve’s? My own? Mrs. Kennedy made it to the hospital before us and was waiting with Mr. Brennan when we arrived. Mr. Brennan told us what had happened. He told us that he didn’t know CPR. Hardly anyone knew CPR in those days. His wife was a nurse and she had told him he should take the class but he hadn’t done it. There was such pain on his face that Maeve hugged him and Mr. Brennan leaned against her shoulder and cried. They had kept our father in a small room off to the side of the emergency room so that we wouldn’t have to go the morgue. He was in a regular hospital bed, his tie and jacket gone, his blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck and stained with blood. His mouth was open in a way that made it clear to me his mouth could not be closed. His bare white feet were sticking out from the bottom of the sheet. I couldn’t imagine where his shoes and socks had gone. I hadn’t seen my father’s feet in years, since whatever summer it was we had last gone to the lake. There was a terrible, bloodless cut on his forehead that had been crudely taped together. I didn’t touch him, but Maeve leaned over and kissed his forehead just beside the bandage, then kissed it again, her long braid falling across his neck. She didn’t seem to mind his open mouth but it was horrifying to me. She was so tender with him, and I found myself thinking that when he woke up I would tell him how good she was, how much she loved him. Or maybe I would tell him when I woke up. One of us was sleeping and I didn’t know which one of us it was. The nurse gave us too much time alone with him, and then the doctor came into the room and explained the nature of the death. He told us that the heart attack had happened very fast and that there was nothing that could have been done to save him. “Chances are he was dead before he fell. Even if it had happened right here in the hospital,” he said, “chances are it wouldn’t have been any different.” This was before I knew that doctors could lie as a means of comfort. Without an autopsy, he was telling us nothing more than a likely story, but we clung to it without question. Maeve was given papers to sign and in return received his suit jacket and tie in a bag, along with a manila envelope containing his wallet, watch and wedding ring. We were very young, and our father had died. To this day I don’t think we were responsible. We came in the kitchen door and Sandy and Jocelyn were there and we told them what had happened. The second they started to cry I knew what we had done. Sandy had her arms around me and I twisted to get away from her. I had to find Andrea. It had to be me finding Andrea, she could not find us there, but as soon as I’d had the thought she walked into the kitchen, into the mess of the four of us and our collective, exclusive grief. She had heard the howling. Jocelyn turned and put her arms around her employer, something I would guarantee she’d not done before or since. “Oh, Mrs. Smith,” was what she said. The look of terror that came over Andrea then—that look has stayed with me all these years. Long after I could no longer see my father on his hospital bed, I could still see the fear on Andrea’s face. She took a step back from us. “Where are my girls?” she whispered. Maeve shook her head the smallest bit, because of course by then she realized it too. “They’re fine,” she said, her voice barely coming out of her mouth. “It’s Dad. We’ve lost Dad.” There was the plastic bag of his clothes on the kitchen table, the evidence against us. Later we would tell ourselves that we were sure Mrs. Kennedy had called her, but nothing had happened to make us think that. The truth was we had come this far and had never given Andrea a thought. Our cruelty became the story: not our father’s death but how we had excluded her from it. Had we done a better job would the outcome have been the same? Had Mr. Brennan called Andrea and not Mrs. Kennedy (but Mr. Brennan had never met Andrea, and had worked with Mrs. Kennedy for twenty years), had Mrs. Kennedy called Andrea and not Maeve (but Andrea was rude to Mrs. Kennedy on the phone every time she called our father at work, never saying one thing more than “Let me speak to my husband.” Mrs. Kennedy would never have called Andrea. She told me as much at the funeral). Had Maeve left Otterson’s and rushed to the Dutch House to tell Andrea instead of coming to the school to get me, or if we had left the school together and gone to pick her up, the three of us going to the hospital, where would we be now? “Right here,” Maeve would say. “We didn’t make her who she is.” But I was never sure. Andrea’s hurt was her prize blue ribbon, and in return what I felt in those blinded days just after my father’s death was not the grief for who I had lost but the shame over what I had done. Norma and Bright were solemn every minute they could remember to be, but they were still too young. The sadness was impossible for them to hold onto. Andrea kept them out of school the day after he died but on the next day they begged to go back. Home was so sad. I went back to school too, not wanting to be in the house with her. She bought twin plots in the Protestant cemetery and made clear her plans to bury him there beside the empty space where she planned to go to herself someday. That was when Maeve called Father Brewer. Andrea and the priest disappeared into the library for twenty-five minutes, the doors closed, and when they came out again my father’s rights were restored. Andrea had agreed to have our father buried in the Catholic cemetery. She held that against us as well. “He’ll be all alone now,” she said when she passed me in the hall. No preamble. “Just the way you want it. Well, good for you. I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend eternity with a bunch of Catholics.” The day after they were married, Maeve and my father and I were going off to Mass. Andrea was sitting alone in the dining room, and in an attempt to be friendly I asked my new stepmother if she and the girls wanted to come with us. “You wouldn’t catch me dead in that place,” she said, and went on eating her soft-cooked eggs as if she had reminded me to take an umbrella. “If she hates the Catholics so much you have to wonder why she married one,” Maeve said as we were climbing into the car. And my father laughed, a big-hearted laugh of the kind we rarely heard from him. “She wanted the Catholic’s house,” he said. Contrary to what Maeve assumed, I thought about our mother very little when I was young. I didn’t know her, and I found it hard to pine for a person or a time I couldn’t remember. The family she left me with—a cook, a housekeeper, a doting sister and distant father—functioned to my advantage. Even when I looked at the few pictures of her that were squirreled away, the tall thin woman with a sharp jaw and dark hair was too much like Maeve to make me think there was something I had missed. But on the day of our father’s funeral, my mother was all I could think of, and I longed for her comfort with an ache I could never have imagined. The house was overburdened with flowers. Andrea didn’t think we’d get enough, and so she ordered dozens of arrangements. If she’d been clever, she would have thought to forge some cards. Andrea had never understood our father’s place in the community; the flowers poured in from everywhere, from the people at church and the men who worked construction, the people in his office and at the bank. There were flowers from cops and restaurateurs and teachers, people my father had done quiet favors for over the years. The flowers came from the tenants who paid their full rent every month, as well as the ones he had carried in lean times. For the most part they were people I knew, but there were also flowers sent from people who were well before my time, people who had moved away or bought houses of their own. Some of their names I recognized from the ledger. The flowers made a continuous blanket across every table and over the piano. They balanced on rented pedestals and stood on wire easels. The house was a garden of impossible pairings and sudden explosions of height. There was no place to put down a glass. Andrea insisted that the arrangements that had been sent to Immaculate Conception for the funeral be gathered up and driven over to the house while we were at the graveside watching strong men lower his casket into the ground with straps. When we came home there were bouquets lining the front steps, and the doors of the house were opened wide. Andrea had put it in the obituary: a reception to follow at the house, forgetting that there were people like her who would come to gawk even on a day like this. Sandy and Jocelyn were in the kitchen making finger sandwiches that were being passed around by hired women in black dresses and white aprons. Sandy and Jocelyn were hurt because they hadn’t been excused from work to attend the service, and they were hurt that they weren’t deemed good enough to be in the front rooms filling glasses. “I guess it takes someone prettier than me to pour a glass of wine,” Sandy said. Maeve went back to the kitchen to be with them, spreading cream cheese on slices of soft white bread, a dish towel tied around the waist of her best navy dress, while I stayed in the front to look after Andrea and the girls. I usually had little patience for the way Norma and Bright followed me, but on this day I kept them close. If my father was no longer there to tell me what kind of man I should be, I still knew what he would have expected. The girls ran their fingers along the petals, dipping their faces too deeply into the clustered roses to breathe them in. They said they were trying to decide which bouquet was their favorite because their mother had told them they could each take one vase up to their bedroom, Maeve’s room. “Which one do you want?” Norma asked. She was wearing a black cotton dress with smocking across the front. She was twelve and Bright was ten. “I bet she’d let you have one.” In the spirit of the game, I chose a small vase with some strange orange flowers that looked like they must have grown on the ocean floor. I had no idea what they were, but I gave them credit for being orange on a day of so much terrible whiteness. It seems funny to remember how worried I was about Andrea then. She’d been crying for four days. She’d cried through every minute of the funeral. In that short span of time since my father’s death she’d grown even smaller, her blue eyes swollen with tears. Again and again the people my father worked with came and held her hand, paying their respects in quiet voices. Neighbors who had never been invited to the house were everywhere. I recognized them, and they spoke to me warmly while trying to take in as much of their environment as discretion allowed. I met a quiet Swede who bowed his head when giving his condolences. He asked to be remembered to my sister. It turned out to be Mr. Otterson. When I told him to wait, that I would find Maeve and bring her back, he gave me a definitive no. “You mustn’t disturb her,” he said, as if she might have been up on the third floor crying instead of in the kitchen putting the sandwiches on trays. Father Brewer stayed on the porch, trapped against the house by two women from the altar society. When I saw Maeve taking him a glass of tea, I told her Mr. Otterson was there to see her. I’d only been talking to him a minute before but when we set out to look we couldn’t find him anywhere. There was no place I could go in the crowd without being petted or hugged. The entire day was like a dream, in just the way they tell you it’s like a dream. How had my family shifted away from me? I had done so well with just one parent but now I could see that one parent was no insurance against the future. Maeve would go to graduate school soon enough, and I would live with Andrea and the girls, with Sandy and Jocelyn? I’d knock around in the house with only women? That wasn’t right, that wasn’t what my father would have wanted. He and I, I said to myself, but the sentence went no further. That was exactly what I meant to say about my past life, he and I. The fragrance of the competing flowers was beginning to overtake the crowded room and I started to wonder if Father Brewer was staying outside in order to breathe. From a distance I saw Coach Martin come into the foyer with the entire varsity basketball team, every last one of them. They had been at the funeral but I didn’t think they’d come to the reception. They’d never been to my house before. I took a glass of wine off the tray of a woman in a maid’s uniform and when she didn’t so much as look at me, I went in the bathroom and drank it. The Dutch House was impossible. I had never had that thought before. When Maeve told me that our mother had hated it, I couldn’t even understand what she was saying. The walls of the powder room were bas-relief, swallows carved into walnut, swallows shooting through flowered stalks towards a crescent moon. The panels had been carved in Italy in the early 1920s and shipped over in crates to be installed in the downstairs powder room of the VanHoebeeks’ house. How many years of someone’s life had gone into carving those walls in some other country? I reached up and traced a swallow with one finger. Is this what our mother had meant? I could feel the entire house sitting on top of me like a shell I would have to drag around for the rest of my life. It didn’t go like that, of course, but on the day of his funeral I thought I was seeing the future. As for the future, the first shots were quickly fired. Maeve came back to the house the next day and told Andrea she would quit her job at Otterson’s and go to work at Conroy. It didn’t need to be said that Andrea had never taken any interest in the business, and that she might not even fully understand what it was our father did. At her best she probably wasn’t competent to run the company, and in her present grief she was far from her best. “I can make sure all the scheduled projects are completed,” Maeve said. “I can take care of payroll and taxes. It would just be for now, just until we decide what we’re going to do with the company.” We were all sitting in the drawing room, Bright with her head in Maeve’s lap and Maeve running her fingers through the tangle of Bright’s yellow hair, Norma on the sofa beside her. “No,” Andrea said. At first Maeve thought maybe Andrea doubted she was capable, or doubted it would be what was best for the company or, God knows, best for Maeve. “I can do it,” she said. “I used to work in the office in the summers before college. I know the books. I know the people who work there. It isn’t so different from what I do at Otterson’s now.” We waited. Even Bright looked up for the explanation that would follow, but nothing came. “Do you have another plan?” Maeve asked finally. Andrea nodded slowly. “Norma, go tell Sandy to bring me a cup of coffee.” Norma, anxious to get away from the tension and the boring conversation, leapt to her feet and vanished. “Don’t run!” Andrea called behind her. “I’m not talking about taking over,” Maeve said, as if maybe she’d been seen as overreaching. “It’s just for now.” “Your mother would have made you cut that hair,” Andrea said. “What?” “I must have said it to your father a hundred times: make her cut that hair. But he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t care. I always wanted to tell you myself, for your own good—it’s appalling—but he wouldn’t let me. He always said it was your hair.” Bright blinked up at my sister. The comment was so strange that it was easy to push it away, put it down to grief, to shock, whatever. Andrea couldn’t really have cared about Maeve’s hair. The flowers from the funeral were everywhere. I kept thinking what a catastrophe it was going to be when they all died. I wondered if our conversation should have started with something smaller—an offer to empty the vases when the time came, to write the thank-you notes. “I can pick up the rent on Saturday,” I said, hoping to bring us back to the land of the reasonable. “Maeve can drive me. I know the route.” “That won’t be necessary.” This I didn’t understand at all. “I’ve always collected the rent.” “Your father always collected the rent,” Andrea said. “You rode in the car.” A silence came over the room that none of us knew how to get out from under. I felt the VanHoebeeks’ eyes drilling into my skull. I always did. “What we’re trying to say is that we want to be helpful,” Maeve said. “I know you do,” Andrea said, and then tilted her head sideways and smiled at her daughter in my sister’s lap. “You know she does.” She looked up at us again. “I don’t know how it can take so long to bring a cup of coffee. You know they have a pot of it in the kitchen. Maybe they think it’s their coffee.” Andrea tapped her open hands on her thighs in a gesture of impatience, then stood. “Looks as if I’ll have to get it myself. You know what they say, don’t you? ‘If you want something done right.’” We waited for quite a while after she left, Maeve and Bright and I, and then we heard footsteps upstairs. She had gone up the kitchen stairs with her coffee. The interview was over. In the two brief weeks after his death, I grieved both the loss of my father and what I saw as the postponement of my place in the world. Had there been the option, I would have quit high school at fifteen and run the Conroy business with Maeve. The business was what I wanted, what I expected, and what my father had planned for me. If it had come before I was ready then I would just have to get ready faster. I didn’t believe I knew how to do everything, not by a long shot, but I knew every single person who could help me. Those people liked me. They’d been watching me work for years. The rest of my problem was a marriage of sadness and discomfort that could not be picked apart. Andrea avoided me while the girls stayed close. Either Norma or Bright came into my room almost every night to wake me up to tell me their dreams. Or they didn’t wake me up but I’d find one of them asleep on the couch in my room in the morning. The loss of my father was their loss too, I guess, though I could barely remember him ever speaking a word to either of them. Then one afternoon I came home from school, said hello to Sandy and Jocelyn, and made myself a ham sandwich in the kitchen. Twenty minutes later Maeve flew in the back door. She looked like she had run all the way from Otterson’s to the Dutch House her face was so flushed. I was reading something, I can’t remember what. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you working?” Most days Maeve didn’t get off until six. “Are you all right?” I looked down as if checking to see if there was blood on my shirt. “Why wouldn’t I be all right?” “Andrea called. She told me to come and get you. She said I had to come right away.” “Come and get me for what?” She ran her sleeve over her forehead, then put her keys on top of her purse. I don’t know where Sandy and Jocelyn had gone but at that moment Maeve and I were alone in the kitchen. “She scared the shit out of me. I thought—” “I’m fine.” “Let me find out,” she said. I got up to follow her, seeing as how I was the one who was supposed to be going someplace. We went to the foyer and looked around. I hadn’t seen the girls since I came home but that wasn’t unusual. They were forever practicing for one thing or another. Maeve called Andrea’s name. “I’m in the drawing room,” she said. “You don’t need to shout.” She was in front of the fireplace, standing there beneath the two massive VanHoebeeks, just where we first found her all those years before. “I came from work,” Maeve said. “You need to take Danny.” Andrea was looking only at her. “Take him where?” “To your house, to a friend’s house.” She shook her head. “That’s up to you.” “Is something going on?” Maeve was the one speaking but we were both asking the question. “Is something going on?” Andrea repeated. “Well, let’s see, your father died. We can start there.” Andrea looked very nice. Her hair was put up. She was wearing a red-and-white checked dress I didn’t remember, red lipstick. I wondered if she was on her way to a party, a luncheon. I didn’t realize she had gotten dressed up for us. “Andrea?” Maeve said. “He isn’t my son,” she said, and right there her voice broke. “You can’t expect me to raise him. He isn’t my responsibility. Your father never told me I was going to have to raise his son.” “No one’s asking you—” I started, but she held up her hand. “This is my house,” she said. “I deserve to feel safe in my house. You’ve been awful to me, both of you. You’ve never liked me. You’ve never supported me. I guess when your father was alive it was my obligation to accept that—” “This is your house?” Maeve said. “When your father died, that’s when you showed yourself. Both of you. He left this house to me. He wanted me to have it. He wanted me to be happy here, me and the girls. I need you to take him—go upstairs and get his things and leave. This isn’t easy for me.” “How is this your house?” Maeve asked. I could see the two of us almost as if we were reflected in her eyes, how ridiculously tall we were by comparison, how young and strong, basketball, construction work. I had passed Maeve in height long ago, just like she had promised I would. I was still wearing my clothes from practice, a T-shirt and warm-up pants. “You can talk to the lawyer,” Andrea said. “But we’ve been over everything, every inch. He has all the papers. Talk to him as long as you want but for now you need to leave.” “Where are the girls?” Maeve said. “My daughters are none of your business.” Her face was burnished with the energy it took to hate us, the energy it took to convince herself that every wrong thing that had happened in her life was our fault. I still didn’t fully grasp what was happening at that point, which was ridiculous because Andrea could not have been more clear. Maeve, on the other hand, understood exactly, and she drew herself up like Saint Joan to meet the fire. “They’ll hate you,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “You’ll come up with some lie for them to swallow with dinner tonight but it won’t hold. They’re smart girls. They know we wouldn’t just leave them. Once they start to look, they’ll find out what you’ve done. Not from us, but they’ll hear about it. Everyone will know. Your daughters will hate you even more than we do. They’ll hate you after we’ve forgotten who you are.” There I was, still thinking I might be able to work something out, that maybe in the future Andrea and I would find a way to talk and she would see I wasn’t her enemy, but Maeve closed that door and nailed it shut. She wasn’t writing Andrea’s future—Andrea was doing that herself—but what Maeve said, the way she said it, it sounded like a curse. Maeve and I went up to my room and filled my single suitcase with clothes, then she went down to the kitchen to get some lawn and leaf bags and came back with Sandy and Jocelyn. Both of them were crying. “Hey,” I said, “hey, don’t do that. We’ll figure this out.” I didn’t mean that I would somehow smooth out this present moment, but that Maeve and I would be revealed as the rightful heirs to the Dutch House and overthrow the interloper. I was the Count of Monte Cristo. I had every intention of coming home. “It’s a nightmare,” Jocelyn said, shaking her head. “Your poor father.” Sandy was emptying my dresser into a leaf bag drawer by drawer when Andrea came and stood in the doorway to watch what we were taking. “You need to be gone before the girls get home.” Jocelyn ran her wrist beneath her eyes. “I need to finish dinner.” “Don’t finish dinner,” she said. “All of you go, the four of you. You’ve always been in this together. I don’t need spies left behind.” “Oh, for god’s sake,” Maeve said, raising her voice for the first time in all of this. “You can’t fire them. What in the world did they ever do to you?” “You’re a set.” Andrea smiled like she’d said something funny. She hadn’t intended to fire Sandy and Jocelyn. It clearly hadn’t occurred to her until just that minute, but once she’d said it, it felt right. “You can’t break up the set.” “Andrea,” I said. I took a step towards her, I don’t know why. I wanted to stop her somehow, restore her to herself. She was never my favorite person but she wasn’t as bad as this. She took a step back. “I’ll tell you what we did to her,” Jocelyn said, as if Andrea wasn’t there. “We knew your mother, that’s what. Your mother hired us, first Sandy, then me. Sandy told your mother that she had a sister who needed a job, and Elna said, bring your sister over tomorrow. That’s who your mother was, everyone was welcome. People came to this house all day long and she gave them food and she gave them work. She loved us and we loved her and this one knows it.” She gave her head a small backwards hitch to acknowledge the woman behind her. Andrea’s eyes were round with disbelief. “That woman left her children! She left her husband and she left her children. I won’t stand here and listen to you—” “There was never a kinder woman than your mother,” Jocelyn went on as if no one else was speaking. She scooped up my sweaters and dropped them into the open bag. “And a true beauty, right from her heart. Every person who met her saw it, and everybody loved her. She was a servant, do you know what I mean?” She was looking right at me. “Just like Jesus tells us. All of this was hers and she never gave it a thought. All she wanted to know was what she could do for you, how she could help.” Sandy and Jocelyn never talked about our mother. Never. They had saved this bomb to detonate on exactly this occasion. Andrea put her hand on the doorframe to steady herself. “Finish up,” she said in a voice without volume. “I’ll be downstairs.” Jocelyn looked at the woman she had once worked for. “Every single day you were in this house we said to each other, ‘What could Mr. Conroy have been thinking?’” “Jocelyn,” her sister said, just that one word as a warning. But Jocelyn shook her head. “She heard me.” Andrea’s mouth opened slightly but there were no words. She was losing herself, we could see it. She took her blows and left us to our work. What was I thinking on that day, in that hour? Not about the room I’d slept in pretty much every night of my life. Maeve said my crib had been in the corner where the couch was now, that Fluffy slept in the room with me at first so our mother could rest. I wasn’t thinking about the light that filled the room or the oak tree that brushed up against my window when it stormed. My oak tree. My window. I was thinking about getting the hell out of there and away from Andrea as quickly as possible. We went down the wide staircase, the four of us each with a trash bag, and loaded Maeve’s car. The house was magnificent as we were walking away from it: three stories of towering windows looking down over the front lawn. The pale-yellow stucco, nearly white, was the exact color of the late afternoon clouds. The wide veranda where Andrea, wearing her champagne-colored suit, had thrown the wedding bouquet over her shoulder was the very place people stood in line to pay their respects to my father’s widow four years later. I picked up my bike and shoved it in the back of the car on top of the bags, only because I’d left it lying in the grass and all but tripped over it. Andrea was always telling my father to tell me to pick up my bike. She would tell him that when both of us were there in the room together, “Cyril, can’t you teach Danny to take better care of what you’ve given him?” We kissed Sandy and Jocelyn goodbye. We made promises that once things were sorted out we’d all be back together, none of us understanding that we were out of the Dutch House for good. When we got in the car Maeve’s hands were shaking. She turned her purse over on the front seat and pulled open the bright yellow box where she kept her supplies. She needed to test her blood sugar. “We have to get out of here,” she said. She was starting to sweat. I got out of the car and walked around to the other side. This was all that mattered: Maeve. Sandy and Jocelyn had already gone off in Sandy’s car. There was nobody watching us. I told Maeve to move over. She was fixing a syringe. She didn’t tell me that I didn’t know how to drive. She knew I could at least get us to Jenkintown. The idiocy of what we took and what we left cannot be overstated. We packed up clothes and shoes I would outgrow in six months, and left behind the blanket at the foot of my bed my mother had pieced together out of her dresses. We took the books from my desk and left the pressed-glass butter dish in the kitchen that was, as far as we knew, the only thing that had made its way from that apartment in Brooklyn with our mother. I didn’t pick up a single thing of my father’s, though later I could think of a hundred things I wished I had: the watch that he always wore had been in the envelope with his wallet and ring. It had been in my hands the whole way home from the hospital and I had given it to Andrea. Most of Maeve’s things had been sorted through and boxed up when Norma took her room, and many of those boxes had been taken to her apartment after college, as Andrea had said that Maeve was an adult now and should be a steward of her own possessions (a direct quote). Still, Maeve’s good winter coat was in the cedar closet because the summer before she’d had a problem with moths, and there were some other things—yearbooks, a couple boxes of novels she’d already read, some dolls she was saving for the daughter she was sure she would have one day, all in the attic under the eaves and behind the tiny door in the back of the third-floor bedroom closet. Did Andrea even know about that space? Maeve had shown it to the girls the night of the house tour, but would they remember or ever think to look in there again? Or would those boxes just belong to the house now, sealed into the wall like a time capsule from her youth? Maeve claimed not to care. She had all the photo albums. She had taken those with her to college. The only photo that was lost was a framed one of my father taken when he was a boy, holding a rabbit in his lap. That had somehow stayed behind in Norma’s room. Later, when we had fully realized what had happened, Maeve would be angry over the loss of my stupid scouting certificates framed on the wall, some basketball trophies, the quilt, the butter dish, the picture. But the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was the portrait of Maeve hanging there in the drawing room without us. How had we had forgotten her? Maeve at ten in a red coat, her eyes bright and direct, her black hair loose. The painting was as good as any of the paintings of the VanHoebeeks, but it was of Maeve, so what would Andrea do with it? Stash her in the damp basement? Throw her away? Even as my sister was right in front of me I felt like I had somehow left her behind, back in the house alone where she wouldn’t be safe. Maeve was feeling better but I told her to go upstairs and sit down while I lugged what I had up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. There was only one bedroom and she told me to take it. I told her no. “You’re going to take the bed,” she said, “because you’re too long for the couch and I’m not. I sleep on the couch all the time.” I looked around her little apartment. I’d been there plenty of times but you see a place differently when you know you’re going to be living there. It was small and plain and suddenly I felt bad for her, thinking it wasn’t right that she should be in this place when I was living on VanHoebeek Street, forgetting for a minute that I wasn’t living there anymore. “Why do you sleep on the couch?” “I fall asleep watching television,” she said, then she sat down on that couch and closed her eyes. I was afraid she was going to cry but she didn’t. Maeve wasn’t a crier. She pushed her thick black hair away from her face and looked at me. “I’m glad you’re here.” I nodded. For a second I wondered what I would have done if Maeve hadn’t been there—gone home with Sandy or Jocelyn? Called Mr. Martin the basketball coach to see if he would have me? I would never have to know. That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes. Chapter 7 Lawyer Gooch—that was what we always called him—was our father’s contemporary and his friend, and it was as a friend he agreed to see Maeve the next day on her lunch hour. She did not agree to let me miss school to come with her. “I’m just going to get the lay of the land,” she said over cereal the next morning at her little kitchen table. “I have a feeling there will be many more opportunities for us to go together.” Maeve dropped me off at school on her way to work. Everyone knew that my father had died and they all made a point of being nice to me. For the teachers and the coach that meant taking me aside to tell me they were there to listen, and that I could have whatever time I needed on work that was due. For my friends—Robert, who was a slightly better basketball player than I was, and T.J., who was considerably worse, and Matthew, who liked nothing more than to come to the construction sites with me—it meant something else entirely: their discomfort at my circumstances manifested itself as awkwardness, a concerted effort not to laugh at anything funny in my presence, the temporary suspension of the grief we gave one another. No grief for grief, something like that. It would never have occurred to me to pretend my father wasn’t dead, but I didn’t want anyone to know about the Dutch House. That loss was too private, shameful in a way I couldn’t understand. I still believed Maeve and Lawyer Gooch would get it all straightened out and we would be back before anyone had to know I’d been thrown out. But did “back in the house” mean being there without Andrea and the girls? What would happen to them exactly? My imagination had yet to work out that part of the equation. I had a late practice, so Maeve was already home from work when I got to the apartment. She said she was planning to make scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. Neither of us knew how to cook. I dropped my book bag in the living room. “Well?” “It’s so much worse than anything I imagined.” There was a lightness in her tone that made me think she was joking. “Do you want a beer?” I nodded. The invitation hadn’t been extended before. “I’d take a beer.” “Get two.” She leaned over to light her cigarette off the stove’s gas flame. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.” What I meant to say was, You are my sister, my only relation. Do not put your face in the fucking fire. She straightened up and exhaled a long plume of smoke across the kitchen. “I’ve got it down now. I burned off my eyelashes at a party in the Village a couple of years ago. You only have to do that once.” “Terrific.” I took out two bottles of beer, found the opener, and handed one to her. She took a swig, then cleared her throat to begin. “So, to the best of my understanding, what we own in the world is pretty much what you see around you.” “Which is nothing.” “Exactly.” I hadn’t considered the possibility of nothing before and a flush of adrenaline shot through me, preparing me for fight or flight. “How?” “Lawyer Gooch, and he was lovely, by the way, could not have been nicer, Lawyer Gooch said the general rule of thumb is shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, but we made it in two, or I guess technically we made it in one.” “Which means what?” “It means that traditionally the first generation makes the money, the second generation spends the money, and the third generation has to go to work again. But in our case, our father made a fortune and then he blew it. He completed the entire cycle in his own lifetime. He was poor, then rich, and now we’re poor.” “Dad didn’t have money?” She shook her head, glad to explain. “He had tons of money, just not tons of acumen. His young wife told him she believed that marriage was a partnership. Remember those words, Danny: Marriage is a partnership. She had him put her name on everything.” “He put her name on all the buildings?” That didn’t seem possible. There were a lot of buildings, and he bought them and sold them all the time. She shook her head and took another drink. “That would be for amateurs. Conroy Real Estate and Construction is a corporation, which means that everything in the company is gathered together under one roof. When he sold a building, the cash stayed in the corporation, and then he used it to buy another building. Andrea had him put her name on the company, which means she has joint ownership with right of survivorship.” “That’s legal?” “All assets are passed by operation of the law to his wife because of joint titling. Are you following this? I know it took me a minute.” “I’m following.” I wasn’t sure that was true. “Smart boy. The same goes for the house. The house and all its contents.” “And Lawyer Gooch did this?” I knew Lawyer Gooch. He came to my basketball games sometimes and sat in the bleachers with our father. Two of his sons had gone to Bishop McDevitt. “Oh, no.” She shook her head. She liked Lawyer Gooch. “Andrea came with her own lawyer. Someone in Philadelphia. Big firm. Lawyer Gooch said he talked to Dad about it many times, and you know what Dad said? He said, ‘Andrea’s a good mother. She’ll look after the children.’ Like, he married her because he thought she was good with children.” “What about the will?” Maybe Maeve was right about the second generation because even I knew enough to ask about a will. She shook her head. “No will.” I sat down in a kitchen chair and took a long drink. I looked up at my sister. “Why aren’t we screaming?” “We’re still in shock.” “There has to be a way out of this.” Maeve nodded. “I think so, too. I know I’m going to try. But Lawyer Gooch told me not to get my hopes up. Dad knew what he was doing. He was competent. She didn’t make him sign the papers.” “Of course she made him!” “I mean she didn’t hold a gun to his head. Think about it: Mommy leaves him, then this slinky chinchilla comes along and tells him she’s never going to leave him. She wants to be part of everything he does, what’s mine is yours. She’ll look after all of it and he’ll never have to worry.” “Well, that much is true. He doesn’t have to worry.” “The wife of four years gets it all. She even owns my car. Lawyer Gooch told me that. She owns my car but she told him I could keep it. I’m definitely going to sell it before she changes her mind. I think I’m going to get a Volkswagen. What do you think?” “Why not?” Maeve nodded. “You’re smart,” she said, “and I’m pretty smart, and I used to think Dad was smart, but the three of us together couldn’t hold a candle to Andrea Smith Conroy. Lawyer Gooch wants you and me to come in together. He said there are still a few things left to go over. He said he’d keep working on our behalf, free of charge.” “It would have been better if he’d worked on our behalf while Dad was still alive.” “Apparently he tried. He said Dad didn’t think he was old enough for a will.” Maeve thought about this for a minute. “I bet Andrea has a will.” I drained my beer while Maeve leaned against the stove and smoked. We were delinquents in our own small way. “Two dead husbands,” I said, though Andrea must have been, what then? Thirty-four? Thirty-five? Ancient by the standards of a teenaged boy. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Mr. Smith?” I asked. “Never once.” I shook my head. “Me neither. That’s strange, isn’t it? That we never thought about Mr. Smith, how he died?” “What makes you think he’s dead? I always thought he put her out on the curb with the kids, and Dad must have driven by at just the wrong moment, offered them a ride.” “I feel bad for Norma and Bright over there by themselves.” “May they rot in hell.” Maeve stubbed her cigarette out on a saucer. “All three of them.” “You don’t mean that,” I said. “Not the girls.” My sister reared back with such ferocity that for a split second I thought she meant to hit me. “She stole from us. Do you not understand that? They’re sleeping in our beds and eating off our plates and we will never, never get any of it back.” I nodded. What I wanted to say, what I did not say, was that I’d been thinking the same thing about our father. We would never get him back. Maeve and I set up housekeeping together. We found a secondhand dresser at the Goodwill and stuck it in the corner of the bedroom so I could put my clothes away. I still didn’t like taking the bedroom, but every night, Maeve went to the couch with her stack of blankets. I wanted to ask her about finding a bigger place, but seeing as how it was all on her—our food and our shelter—I thought better of it. When everything was all set up, we called Sandy and Jocelyn to come and see what we’d accomplished. Maeve brought home a white box of cookies from the bakery. She arranged the cookies on a plate and threw out the box, as if we were going to fool them. I straightened up the cushions on the couch, she put away the glasses that were in the drainboard. When the bell finally rang we threw open the door and the four of us exploded with joy. What a reunion! You would have thought it had been years since we’d seen one another. It had been two weeks. “Look at you,” Sandy said, reaching up to put her hands on my shoulders. I thought her hair was grayer. There were tears in her eyes. Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine). “You can’t feed us!” Maeve said. “I’ve always fed you,” Jocelyn said. Sandy took a skeptical glance around the living room. “I could come by every now and then, help you keep things up.” Maeve laughed. “How could I not keep this clean?” “You have a job,” Sandy said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe across the floor. “You don’t need to worry about keeping house on top of everything else. Anyway, how long could the whole thing take me, an hour?” “I can do it,” I said, and the three of them looked at me like I was suggesting I make my own clothes. “Maeve won’t let me get a job.” “Stick to basketball,” Sandy said. “And making decent grades,” Jocelyn said. Maeve nodded. “Let’s just wait for a little bit, see how we do.” “We’re doing fine, really,” I said. Sandy disappeared into the bedroom and came back five seconds later, looking at me. “Where do you sleep?” “Does he know how to take care of you?” Jocelyn asked my sister. Maeve waved her hand. “I’m fine.” “Maeve,” Jocelyn said. It’s a funny thing to say but she was being stern. Sandy and Jocelyn were never stern with Maeve. “I take care of everything.” Jocelyn turned to me. “I have found your sister passed out cold on more than one occasion. Sometimes she forgets to eat or she doesn’t take enough of her insulin. Sometimes it’s nothing she’s done wrong but her sugar goes off all the same. You’ve got to keep an eye on her, especially when things are stressful. She’ll tell you stress has nothing to do with it, but it does.” “Stop,” Maeve said. “She has sugar tablets. You make her show you where she keeps them, make sure she has extras in her purse. If she’s in trouble you have to give her a sugar tablet and call an ambulance.” I tried to take in the thought of Maeve on the floor. “I know that,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I knew about the insulin but not the sugar. “She showed me.” Maeve sat back, smiling. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.” Jocelyn looked at us for a minute, then shook her head. “You’re appalling, both of you, but it doesn’t matter. Now that he knows about it he’ll make you show him. You’ll bug her once we leave, won’t you Danny?” Even though I was sensitive to the fluctuation of Maeve’s blood sugar, I realized I didn’t know the details. I knew how to stand by and watch her take care of herself, but that was not the same thing as taking care of her. Jocelyn was right though, I would make Maeve explain everything to me once they were gone. “I will.” “You know I’ve been living in this apartment by myself all this time, don’t you?” Maeve said. “It’s not like Danny’s been riding his bike over here at night to give me injections.” “Or you can call me,” Jocelyn said, ignoring her completely. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know.” Sandy had found a job keeping house in Elkins Park. “They’re nice enough. Not as much money,” she said, “and not as much work.” Jocelyn had found a family to cook for in Jenkintown but she also had to help with the two children and was expected to walk the dog. Not as much money and considerably more work. The sisters laughed. Better to have been fired, was what they said. That made it a badge of honor. They wouldn’t have stayed in that house a minute without me anyway. “Once I get settled I’m going to try to talk my family into hiring Jocelyn. They need a cook. That way we could be together again,” Sandy said. Had I handled the situation better and not been critical—not just at the end but for all the years Andrea had been in our lives—Sandy and Jocelyn would still be sitting together at the blue kitchen table, shelling peas and listening to the radio. Sandy was looking up at the ceiling, the windows, like she was measuring the place in her head. “Why didn’t you move into one of your father’s buildings?” she asked my sister. “Oh, I don’t know,” Maeve said. She was still flustered about the insulin. Jocelyn took the spot beside Sandy on the couch. Maeve had the chair and I sat on the floor. “I didn’t think about it when you got this place but it doesn’t make any sense,” Sandy said. “You must have really had to work to find an apartment building in this town your father didn’t own.” I’d wondered about it myself. The only reason I could come up with was that she had asked him for an apartment and he’d said no. Maeve looked at us, the three of us, all the family she had. “I thought I would impress him.” “With this place?” Sandy leaned over and straightened a stack of my school books on the coffee table in front of her. Maeve smiled again. “I made out a budget and this was what I could afford. I thought he’d notice that I hadn’t asked him for anything, that I’d saved up my spending money from my last year of school. I had first and last month’s rent. I got the job. I bought the bed and then the next month I bought the couch and then I bought the chair at Goodwill. You know him, the way he liked to go on about the wonders of poverty, how making it all by yourself was the only way to learn anything. I thought I was showing him I wasn’t like the rich girls I knew from school. I wasn’t waiting around for him to buy me a horse.” Sandy laughed. “I never thought anyone was going to buy me a horse.” “Well, that’s just fine.” Jocelyn smiled. “I know he was proud of you, the way you did all this yourself.” “He didn’t notice,” Maeve said. Sandy shook her head. “Of course he did.” But Maeve was right. He’d never seen what she had meant to show him. He had no notion of her self-reliance. The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture. Maeve made coffee and she and Jocelyn smoked while Sandy and I watched them. We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know. We talked about how late she slept and every unflattering dress she’d worn and how she would spend an hour on the phone with her mother but would never invite her mother to the house. She wasted food and left the lights on all night and gave no evidence of having ever read a book. She’d sit by the pool for hours just staring at her fingernails and then expect Jocelyn to bring her lunch on a tray. She didn’t listen to our father. She gave away Maeve’s bedroom. She threw me out. We dug a pit and roasted her. “Can anyone explain to me why he married her in the first place?” Maeve asked. “Sure.” Jocelyn didn’t need to give it a thought. “Andrea loved the house. Your father thought that house was the most beautiful thing in the world and he found himself a woman who agreed.” Maeve threw her hands up. “Everyone agreed! It’s not like it would have been so hard to find a decent woman who liked the house.” Jocelyn shrugged. “Well, your mother hated it and Andrea loved it. He thought he’d solved the problem. But I got to her, didn’t I? Saying all that about your mother.” Sandy covered her face with her hands and laughed. “I thought she was going to drop dead right on the spot.” I looked at Sandy and then Jocelyn. Now they were both laughing. “You didn’t mean it?” “What?” Sandy said, wiping at her eyes. “About our mother being, I don’t know, like a saint?” The tension in the room shifted and then we were all very aware of how we were sitting and what we were doing with our hands. “Your mother,” Jocelyn said, and then she stopped and looked at her sister. “Of course we loved your mother,” Sandy said. “We all loved her,” Maeve said. “She was gone a lot,” Jocelyn said, trying to pick her words. “She was working.” Maeve was tense but in a different way from Sandy and Jocelyn. I had no idea what any of them were talking about, nor did I know that our mother had ever had a job. “What did she do?” Jocelyn shook her head. “What didn’t she do?” “She worked for the poor,” Maeve said to me. “In Elkins Park?” There were no poor people in Elkins Park, or none that I’d ever seen. “She worked for the poor everywhere,” Sandy said, though I could tell she was trying her best to explain the situation kindly. “She could always find people who needed something.” “She went out looking for poor people?” I asked. “Dawn to dusk,” Jocelyn said. Maeve stubbed out her cigarette. “Okay, stop this. You make it sound like she was never there.” Jocelyn shrugged and Sandy reached down for the thumb-print cookie with the round spot of apricot jam. “Well,” Maeve said, “we were always happy when she came home.” Sandy smiled and nodded. “Always,” she said. Early Sunday morning Maeve came into the bedroom and opened the blinds. “Get up, get dressed. We’re going to church.” I pulled a pillow over my head, hoping to find my way back into the dream I was falling out of, a dream I already couldn’t remember. “No.” Maeve leaned over and pulled off the pillow. “I mean it. Up, up.” I looked at her from one slitted eye. She was wearing a skirt, and her hair, still wet from the shower, was braided. “I’m sleeping.” “I’ve been very nice. I let you sleep through the eight o’clock service. We’re going to make the ten-thirty.” I dug my face into the pillow. I was waking up and I did not want to wake up. “There’s no one watching. No one can make us go to church anymore.” “I can make us go.” I shook my head. “Make yourself go. I’m going back to sleep.” She dropped down hard on the edge of the bed, making me bounce a little. “We go to church. That’s what we do.” I turned over on my back and opened my eyes grudgingly. “You’re not following.” “Up, up.” “I don’t want anyone hugging me or telling me how sorry they are. I want to go back to sleep.” “They’ll hug you this Sunday and next Sunday they’ll just wave like nothing ever happened.” “I’m not going next Sunday either.” “Why are you being like this? You never complained about going to church before.” “Who would I have complained to? Dad?” I looked at her. “You win all the fights. You know that, right? When you have kids of your own you can make them go to church every morning and say the rosary before school. But I don’t have to go, you don’t have to go. We don’t have parents. We can go out for pancakes.” She shrugged. “Get your own pancakes,” she said. “I’m going.” “You don’t need to do this for me.” I raised up on my elbows. I couldn’t believe she was carrying her point so far. “I don’t need a good example.” “I’m not doing this for you. Jesus, Danny. I like going to Mass, I like believing in God. Community, kindness, I buy into the whole thing. What in the hell have you been doing in church all these years?” “Memorizing basketball stats mostly.” “Then go back to sleep.” “Are you telling me you went to church when you were in college? You got up all those Sunday mornings in New York when no one was watching?” “Of course I went to church. Don’t you remember when you came to see me? We went to Good Friday service together.” “I thought you were just making me go.” That was the truth, too. Even at the time I assumed she’d promised our father that she’d get me to church for Good Friday if he let me stay. She started to say something else then let it go. She patted my ankle beneath the bedspread. “Get some rest,” she said, and then she left. It would have been hard to say exactly why we went to church, but everyone did. My father saw his colleagues and his tenants there. Maeve and I saw our teachers and our friends. Maybe my father went to pray for the souls of his dead Irish parents, or maybe church was the last vestige of respect he paid our mother. To hear people talk, she had loved not only the church and the parish community but every last priest and nun. Maeve said our mother had felt most at home in the church when the sisters stood and sang. From what little I knew of her, I was sure she wouldn’t have married my father if he hadn’t been willing to go to church, and without her he continued to drag us to the altar, preserving the form in the absence of content. Maybe it was because he had never considered it could have been otherwise, or maybe because his daughter listened to the homily leaning forward, the missalette in her hands, while his son considered the Sixers’ chances in the playoffs and he contemplated a building that was for sale at the edge of Cheltenham township, though for all I knew my father listened to the priest and heard the voice of God. We never talked about it. In my memory, it was always Maeve who was racing around on Sunday morning, making sure we were ready: dressed, fed, in the car in plenty of time. After she had gone to college, it would have been so easy for my father and me to put the whole enterprise to bed. But then there was Andrea to consider. She despised Catholicism, thought it was a cult of lunatics who worshiped idols and claimed to eat flesh. My father could go to the office before first light Monday through Friday and find excuses to stay out through dinner. He could eat up Saturdays in the car collecting rent or visiting various construction projects. But Sunday was a tricky day to occupy. Church was all he had to work with if he wanted to get away from his young wife. My father talked to Father Brewer about my becoming an altar boy, then signed me up without consultation. The altar boys had to be at church a half hour early to help prepare the sacraments and assist Father Brewer with his vestments. And while I was slated for eight o’clock Mass, there were plenty of times I worked the ten-thirty as well. Someone was always calling in sick or going on vacation or simply refusing to get out of bed, luxuries I had never been afforded. Since I was an altar boy, my father thought it was important for me to attend Sunday school as well, to be a good example he said, even though Sunday school was for public school kids who weren’t already getting some brand of religious indoctrination five days a week. But there was no place in the conversation to tell my father he was being ridiculous. After Mass, he sat in the car with his cigarettes and newspaper and waited for me, and when all the work was done, every last prayer recited and chalice washed, he would take me to lunch. We had never gone out to lunch when Maeve was at home. Thus our single hour of Mass stretched to cover half of Sunday, protecting us from family obligations and giving us at least some time together between the lighting of the candles and the blowing out. For this I will always be grateful, though not grateful enough to get out of bed. But on Monday morning Coach Martin called me into his office and reiterated his sorrow for my circumstances. Then he said I needed to be at Mass to pray for my father. “All the varsity players at Bishop McDevitt go to Mass,” he told me. “Every single one of them.” I would be included in that number for a little while longer. A week later the lawyer’s office called to set up our appointment. He could meet with us at three o’clock, once school was out, though it still meant I would miss practice and Maeve would have to take half a personal day from work. The three of us sat around a table in a small conference room, and there he told us that the one thing our father had put in place for us was an educational trust. “For both of us?” I asked. My sister was sitting in the chair beside me wearing the same navy dress she’d worn to the funeral. I was wearing a tie. “The trust is for you, and for Andrea’s daughters.” “Norma and Bright?” Maeve almost went across the table. “She gets everything and we have to pay for their education?” “You don’t pay for anything. The trust pays for it.” “But not for Maeve?” I asked. That was the travesty, the part he didn’t bother to mention. “Since Maeve’s already finished college, your father felt her education was complete,” Lawyer Gooch said. Aside from that single lunch in the Italian restaurant in New York, our father had never talked to Maeve about her education, nor had he listened when she talked about it. He thought if she went to graduate school she’d only get married halfway through and quit what she’d started. “The trust will pay for college?” Maeve asked. The way she said it made me realize it was one more thing she’d been worried about, how she was going to send me to college. “The trust pays for education,” Lawyer Gooch said, enunciating the word education very clearly. Maeve leaned forward. “All education?” They may as well have been alone in the room. “All of it.” “For all three of them.” “Yes, but Danny of course will go first, being the oldest. I think there’s very little chance it’s going to run out. Norma and Bernice should be able to get through school just fine.” Bright, I wanted to say and did not say. No one called her Bernice. “And what happens to the money that’s left, if there’s any left?” “Any money still in the trust when all three children have completed their education will be divided equally among the four of you.” He might as well have said that half the money went back in Andrea’s handbag. “And you administer the trust?” Maeve asked. “Andrea’s lawyer set it up. She told your father she wanted to ensure the children’s education and from there—” He tipped his head from side to side. “‘As long as we’re in the lawyer’s office, why not go ahead and put my name on everything you own?’” Maeve was giving it her best guess. “More or less.” “Then Danny needs to think about graduate school,” Maeve said. Lawyer Gooch tapped his pen thoughtfully against a yellow legal pad. “That’s a long way off, but yes, were Danny interested in graduate education, the cost would be covered. The trust stipulates that he maintain a minimum grade point average of 3.0 and that the education be contiguous. Your father felt strongly that school was not to be a vacation.” “My father never had to worry about Danny’s grades.” I would have liked to have said something for myself on this point but I didn’t think either of them would have listened. My father cared nothing about my grades, though maybe he would have if there had been a problem. He didn’t care about my free throw as long as I sank it. What he cared about was how fast and straight I could hammer a nail, and that I understood the timing involved in pouring cement. We cared about the same things. “Did you know I went to Choate?” the lawyer asked, as if his high school years were suddenly relevant to the conversation. Maeve sat with this for a minute, and then told him no, she hadn’t known that. Her voice was surprisingly soft, as if the thought of Lawyer Gooch being shipped off to boarding school made her sad. “Was it very expensive?” “Almost as much as college.” She nodded and looked at her hands. “I could make some phone calls. They don’t usually accept students in the middle of the year but given the circumstances I imagine they’d want to take a look at a basketball player with excellent grades.” The two of them decided I would start Choate in January. “Do you know what kind of kids go to boarding school?” I said to Maeve in the car after we left the office. My tone was full of accusation when in fact I’d never known anyone who’d gone to boarding school. I’d only known kids whose parents had threatened to send them after they’d been caught smoking weed or failing Algebra II. When Andrea complained to my father that I didn’t put my dirty clothes in the hamper, that I seemed to think Sandy was there to pick my clothes off the floor and wash them and fold them and take them back to my room, he would say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to send him to boarding school then.” That’s what boarding school was—a threat, or a joke about a threat. Maeve had other ideas. “Smart rich kids go to boarding school, and then they go to Columbia.” I slumped down in my seat and felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t need to lose my school and my friends and my sister on top of everything else. “Why don’t you cut to the chase and send me to an orphanage?” “You don’t qualify,” she said. “I don’t have parents.” It wasn’t a topic we discussed. “You have me,” she said. “Disqualified.” * * * “What are you doing now?” Maeve asked. “I know I should know this but I can never remember. I think they move you around too much.” “Pulmonology.” “The study of trains?” I smiled. It was spring again. In fact, it was Easter, and I was back in Elkins Park for two whole nights. The cherry trees that lined the Buchsbaums’ side of the street were pink and trembling, exhausted by the burden of so many petals. They turned the light pink and gold. This was the cherry trees’ day, their very hour, and I, who never saw anything outside of the hospital, was there to witness it. “The trains are almost finished. Orthopedics starts next week.” “Strong as a mule and twice as smart.” Maeve dangled her arm out the window of her parked car, her fingers reenacting the memory of bygone cigarettes. “What?” “Haven’t you heard that? I guess it isn’t a joke orthopedists make. Dad used to say it all the time.” “Dad had something against orthopedists?” “No, Dad had something against cauliflower. He hated orthopedists.” “Why?” “They put his knee on backwards. You remember that.” “Someone put his knee on backwards?” I shook my head. “That must have been before my time.” Maeve thought about it for a minute. I could see her scrolling through the years in her mind. “Maybe so. He meant it to be funny but I have to say when I was a kid I thought it was true. His knee really did bend the wrong way. He used to go to orthopedists all the time, trying to get it to bend the other way I guess. When I think of it now it’s kind of horrifying.” There would never be an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder. “Even if the surgeon put the knee on backwards, which, of course, isn’t possible, we should probably be grateful he didn’t amputate the leg. That happens all the time in war, you know. It takes a lot more time to save something than it does to cut it off.” Maeve made a face. “It wasn’t the Civil War,” she said, as if amputation had been abandoned after Appomattox. “I don’t think they even did surgery on his knee. He said in France the doctors were in such a hurry that they didn’t always pay attention. Things got turned around. Really, it’s kind of touching that he could even make a joke about it.” “He must have had surgery when it happened. If you get shot in the knee then somebody is going to have to operate.” Maeve looked at me like I had just opened the car door and taken the seat beside her, a complete stranger. “He wasn’t shot.” “Of course he was.” “He broke his shoulder in a parachute jump and he tore something in his knee, or he jammed the knee. He landed on his left leg and then he fell over and broke his left shoulder.” There was the Dutch House right behind her, the backdrop to everything. I wondered if we had grown up in the same house. “How have I always thought he was shot in the war?” “I have no idea.” “But he was in a hospital in France?” “For his shoulder. The problem was no one paid attention to his knee when it happened. I guess the shoulder really was a mess. Then the knee hyperextended over time. He wore a brace for years and then the leg got stiff. They called it artho—” She stopped mid-syllable. “Arthrofibrosis.” “Exactly.” I remembered the brace as being the source of the pain: heavy and ill-fitting. He complained about the brace, not the knee. “What about his shoulder?” She shrugged. “I guess it turned out okay. I don’t know, he never mentioned his shoulder.” All through medical school, and for at least a decade after, I had dreams in which I was in grand rounds, presenting a patient I had never examined, which was how I felt that Easter morning. Cyril Conroy is an American paratrooper, thirty-three years of age. He was not shot . . . “I’ll tell you something,” Maeve said. “When he had his heart attack, I always thought it was the stairs. I couldn’t imagine him trying to make it to the sixth floor of anything. He must have been mighty pissed off at someone to walk up a stairwell in that kind of heat to look at window sealing. As far as I know he only went to the third floor of the Dutch House twice in his life: the day he brought Mommy and me to see the place for the first time, and the day I came home for Thanksgiving and Andrea announced my exile. Remember that? He carried my bag upstairs. And then when we got up there he had to lie down on the bed. His leg was killing him. I put my suitcase under his foot to elevate it. I should have been screaming mad about Andrea but all I could think was that I was never going to get him down the stairs again. We were going to have to live in the two little bedrooms off the ballroom, me and Dad. It’s sort of a sweet thought, really. I wish we had. He said, ‘It’s a nice-looking house but it’s too damn tall.’ I told him he should sell it then and buy a ranch house. I told him that would solve every problem he had, and we both laughed. That really was something,” she said, looking out the windows at the Buchsbaums’ cherry trees, “getting Dad to laugh about anything in those days.” * * * There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. It was an almost unbearably vivid present I found myself in that winter when Maeve drove me to Connecticut in the Oldsmobile. She kept meaning to get rid of it but we had so little from the past. The sky was a piercing blue and the sun doubled back on the snow and all but blinded us. In spite of everything we’d lost, we’d been happy together that fall we spent in her little apartment. Andrea had sold the company lock, stock, and barrel. Every last building our father had owned was gone. I couldn’t even imagine how much money it must have come to. I wanted to tell Maeve that wringing some spare change out of Norma and Bright’s future, when I probably wasn’t even capable of staying in school long enough to do that, wasn’t reason enough for us to be separated. I’d go to college, of course I’d go to college, but for now I still wanted to play basketball with my friends and sit with her at the kitchen table over eggs and toast and talk about our days. But the world was in motion and it felt like there was nothing we could do to stop it. Maeve had made up her mind that I was going to Choate. She had also made up her mind that I would go to medical school. When she added in a sub-specialty it was the longest and most expensive education she could piece together. “Does it even matter to you that I don’t want to be a doctor?” I asked. “Does what I want to do with my life factor into this?” “Well, what do you want to do?” I wanted to work with my father, to buy and sell buildings. I wanted to build them from scratch, but that was gone. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play basketball.” I sounded petulant even to myself. Maeve would have loved to have had my problems, to explore the limits of how extensively and expensively she could be educated. “Play all you want when you get off work at the hospital,” she said, and followed the signs to Connecticut. Part Two Chapter 8 The snow was coming down heavy and wet in New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Penn Station looked like a feedlot and we, the anxious travelers, were the cows standing in pools of melting slush, bundled up and pressed together in the overheated terminal. We couldn’t take off our coats and hats and scarves because our arms were full of suitcases and bags and books we didn’t want to put on the disgusting floor. We stared at the departures board, awaiting instruction. The sooner we could get to the train, the better our chances of claiming a seat that was forward facing and not too close to the toilet. A kid with a backpack full of bricks kept turning to say something to his girlfriend, and every time he did he clocked me with the full weight of his possessions. I wanted to be back in my dorm room at Columbia. I wanted to be on the train. I wanted to be out of my coat. I wanted to learn the layout of the periodic table. Maeve could have saved me from all of this had she troubled herself to come to New York. Now that she had overseen the delivery of who knew how many tons of frozen vegetables to grocery stores for the holiday, Otterson’s was closed until Monday. My roommate was having Thanksgiving with his parents in Greenwich, so Maeve could have slept in his bed and we could have eaten Chinese and maybe seen a play. But Maeve would come to New York City only if circumstances demanded it—say, when my appendix ruptured the first semester of my freshman year of college. I rode to Columbia-Presbyterian with the hall proctor in an ambulance. When I woke up from surgery, Maeve was there asleep, her chair pulled next to the bed, her head on the mattress beside my arm. The dark mess of her hair spread out across me like a second blanket. I had no memory of calling her, but maybe someone else had. She was my emergency contact after all, my next of kin. I was still floating in and out of the anesthesia, watching her dream, thinking, Maeve came to New York. Maeve hates coming to New York. It had something to do with how much she had loved Barnard and all the potential she had seen in herself then. New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault, or at least that’s what I was thinking. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again she was sitting up in that same chair, holding my hand. “There you are,” she said, and smiled at me. “How are you feeling?” It would be years before I understood the very real danger of what had happened to me. At the time I saw the surgery as something between a nuisance and an embarrassment. I started to make a joke but she was looking at me with such tenderness I stopped myself. “I’m okay,” I said. My mouth was sticky and dry. “Listen,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s me first, then you. Do you understand?” I gave her a loopy smile but she shook her head. “Me first.” The spinners started clicking a jumble of letters and numbers and when they stopped, the sign read HARRISBURG: 4:05, TRACK 15, ON TIME. Basketball had taught me how to move through a crowd. Most of the poor cows came to Penn Station just once a year and were easily confused. In the collective shuffling, very few turned in the right direction. By the time they’d puzzled out which way they were supposed to go, I was already on the train. On the plus side, the trip would give me more than an hour to study, time that was necessary to my continuing redemption in Organic Chemistry. My professor, the aptly named Dr. Able, had called me to his office in early October to tell me I was on track to fail. It was 1968 and Columbia was burning. The students rioted, marched, occupied. We were a microcosm of a country at war, and every day we held up the mirror to show the country what we saw. The idea that anyone took note of a junior failing chemistry was preposterous, but there I was. I had already missed several classes and he had a stack of my quizzes in front of him so I don’t suppose it took an act of clairvoyance to figure out I was in trouble. Dr. Able’s third-floor office was crammed with books and a smallish blackboard that featured an incomprehensible synthesis I was afraid he would ask me to explain. “You’re listed as pre-med,” he began, looking at his notes. “Is that right?” I told him that was right. “It’s still early in the semester. I’ll get things back on track.” He tapped his pencil on the pile of my disappointing work. “They take chemistry seriously in medical school. If you don’t pass, they don’t let you in. That’s why it’s best we talk now. If we wait any longer you won’t catch up.” I nodded, feeling an aching twist in my lower intestines. One of the reasons I’d always worked hard in school and gotten good grades was an effort to preclude this exact conversation. Dr. Able said he’d been teaching chemistry long enough to have seen plenty of boys like me, and that my problem wasn’t a lack of ability, but the apparent failure to put in the necessary time. He was right, of course, I’d been distracted since the beginning of the semester, but he was also wrong, because I didn’t think he’d seen plenty of boys like me. He was a thin man with a badly cut thatch of thick brown hair. I couldn’t have guessed how old he was, only that in his tie and jacket he resided in what I thought of as the other side. “Chemistry is a beautiful system,” Dr. Able said. “Every block builds on the previous block. If you don’t understand chapter 1, there’s no point in going on to chapter 2. Chapter 1 provides the keys to chapter 2, and chapters 1 and 2 together provide the keys to chapter 3. We’re on chapter 4 now. It isn’t possible to suddenly start working hard on chapter 4 and catch up to the rest of the class. You have no keys.” I said it had felt that way. Dr. Able told me to go back to the beginning of the textbook and read the first chapter, answer every question at the end of that chapter, throw them out, wake up the next morning, and answer them again. Only when I had answered all of the questions correctly on both tries could I proceed to the next chapter. I wanted to ask him if he knew there were students sleeping on the floor of the president’s office. What I said instead was, “I still have to keep up in my other classes,” making it sound like we were in negotiation for how much of my valuable time he was entitled to. The class had never been asked to answer all the chapter questions, much less to answer them twice. He gave me a long, flat look. “Then this might not be your year for chemistry.” I could not fail Organic Chemistry, could not fail anything. The draft was looming, and without academic deferment I’d be sleeping in a ditch in Khe Sanh. Still, what my sister would have done to me had I lost my academic standing would have far exceeded anything the government was capable of meting out. This wasn’t a joke. This was falling asleep at the wheel while driving through a blizzard on the New Jersey Turnpike at midnight. Dr. Able had shaken me just in time to see headlights barreling straight towards my windshield, and now I had a split second to jerk the car back into my own lane. The distance between me and annihilation was the width of a snowflake. I took an aisle seat on the train. There was nothing I needed to see between Manhattan and Philadelphia. Under normal circumstances, I would have put my bag on the seat beside me and tried to make myself look over large, but this was Thanksgiving week and no one was getting away with two seats. Instead, I opened my text book and hoped to project exactly what I was: a serious student of chemistry who could not be drawn into a conversation about the weather or Thanksgiving or the war. The Harrisburg contingent of the Penn Station cows had been pressed through a turnstile and shaped into a single-file line that came down the platform and into the car, each of them whacking their bags into every seat they passed. I kept my eyes on my book until a woman tapped her freezing fingers against the side of my neck. Not my shoulder, like anyone would have done, my neck. “Young man,” she said, and then looked down at the suitcase by her feet. She was somebody’s grandmother who wondered how she had found herself in a world in which men allowed women to wrestle their own bags onto trains in the name of equality. The cows behind her kept pushing, unable to understand the temporary blockage. They were too afraid the train might leave without them. I got up and hoisted her luggage—a sad suitcase of brown plaid wool cinched at the middle with a belt because the zipper could not be trusted—onto the overhead rack. With this single act of civility, I advertised my services as a porter, and women up and down the length of the car began to call. Several had Macy’s and Wanamaker’s bags full of wrapped Christmas presents in addition to their suitcases, and I wondered what it would be like to think so far in advance. Bag after bag, I worked to cram items onto the metal bars above the seats where they could not possibly fit. The universe might have been expanding but the luggage rack was not. “Gentle,” one woman said to me, raising her hands to pantomime how she would have done it were she a foot taller. When finally I looked in both directions and decided there was nothing more that could be done, I turned against the tide and pushed my way back to my seat. There I found a girl with loopy blond curls sitting at the window, reading my chemistry book. “I saved your place,” she said as the train lurched forward. I didn’t know if she meant in the book or on the train, and I didn’t ask because neither had required saving. I was on chapter 9, chemistry having presented me with the keys at last. I sat down on my coat because I’d missed the chance to put it overhead. “I took chemistry in high school,” the blonde said, turning the page. “Other girls took typing but an A in chemistry is worth more than an A in typing.” “Worth more how?” Chemistry had a better chance to serve the greater good, but certainly many more people would need to know how to type. “Your grade point average.” Her face was a confluence of circles: round eyes, rounded cheeks, round mouth, a small rounded nose. I had no intention of talking to her but I also didn’t know what choice I had as long as she was holding my book. When I asked her if she’d gotten an A in the class she kept reading. She’d stumbled onto a point of interest and in response to my question gave an absentminded nod. She found the chemistry more compelling than the fact that she had once gotten an A in chemistry, and that, I will admit, was winning. I waited all of two minutes before telling her I was going to need the book back. “Sure,” she said, and handed it over, one finger marking the second section of chapter 9. “It’s funny to see it again, sort of like running into somebody you used to spend a lot of time with.” “I spend a lot of time with chemistry.” “It doesn’t change,” she said. I looked at the page while she rifled through her bag, pulling out a slim volume of poetry by Adrienne Rich called Necessities of Life. I wondered if she was reading it for a class or if she was just one of those girls who read poetry on trains. I didn’t ask, and so we sat in companionable silence all the way to Newark. When the train stopped and the doors opened, she took a stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack in her pocket and stuck it into her book, then she looked at me again with unbearable seriousness. “We should talk,” she said. My girlfriend Susan had said We should talk at the end of our freshman year before telling me we were breaking up. “We should?” “Unless you want to take down the luggage for all the women getting off in Newark and then put up the luggage for all the women getting on.” She was right, of course. There were women glowering in my direction and then looking pointedly up at their bags. There were other able-bodied men on the train, but they were used to me. “So you’re going home,” my seatmate said, leaning forward, smiling. She had put something on her lips to make them shiny. From a distance a person would have thought we were engaged in meaningful conversation, or that we were engaged. I was close enough to smell the vestiges of her shampoo. “For Thanksgiving,” I said. “Nice.” She nodded slightly, holding my gaze in a lock so that I could plainly see the slight droop in her left eyelid, a defect that would have passed unnoticed had it not been for an episode of intense staring. “Harrisburg?” “Philadelphia,” I said, and because we were for that moment very close, I added my suburb. “Elkins Park.” I forgot for a minute that I didn’t live in Elkins Park anymore. I lived in Jenkintown, inasmuch as I lived anywhere. Maeve lived in Jenkintown. At the mention of Elkins Park a light of familiarity sparked in her eyes. “Rydal.” She touched the blue wool scarf that covered her sternum. Elkins Park was one town over from Rydal, which meant that we were practically neighbors. A woman leaned over us to say something but my seatmate waved her away. “Buzzy Carter,” I said, because his was the name to drop when speaking of Rydal. Buzzy and I had been in Scouts together and later played on opposing church league basketball teams. He was born popular, and by the time we got to high school he had good grades, good teeth, and a knack for racking up forty points a game, not including assists. He was playing at Penn now on a full ride. “He was a year ahead of me,” she said with a look on her face that girls got when thinking of Buzz. “He took my cousin to junior prom though I never knew why. You were at Cheltenham?” “Bishop McDevitt,” I said, not wanting to get into anything complicated, “but the last two years I went to boarding school.” She smiled. “Your parents couldn’t stand you?” I liked this girl. She had good timing. “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.” When the train left the station again, we resumed our commitment to be strangers, she with her poetry book, me with my chemistry. In our peaceful coexistence, we very nearly forgot about the other altogether. When the train pulled into 30th Street Station, the woman with the plaid suitcase, the one who’d started it all, shot straight to my side and dragged me down the aisle to get her bag. It really was stuck up there, jammed between all the other bags. Even if she’d stood on the armrest she couldn’t have reached it. Then another woman needed help, and another and another, and soon I started worrying that the doors were going to close and I’d have to ride the train to Paoli and double back. I saw the blond head of my seatmate going towards the door. Maybe she’d waited as long as felt prudent, or maybe she hadn’t waited at all. I told myself it didn’t matter. I tugged down one last bag for a woman who seriously seemed to think I was supposed to carry it to the platform for her, then I shook myself loose, grabbed my coat and suitcase, my textbook, and slipped off the train just ahead of the closing doors. My sister was never hard to find. For one thing, I could pretty much count on her being taller than everyone else, and for another she was always on time. If I was coming in on a train, Maeve would be front and center in the waiting crowd. She was there on this particular Wednesday before Thanksgiving across the terminal, wearing jeans and a red wool sweater of mine I thought I’d lost. She waved to me and I lifted my hand to wave back but my seatmate grabbed my wrist. “Goodbye!” she said, all blond and smiling. “Good luck with the chemistry.” She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder. I guess she’d put it down to wait for me. “Thanks.” I had some strange inclination to hide her or to shoo her away, but there was my sister, striding towards us. Maeve wrapped me in her arms, lifted me an inch or so off the ground, and shook me. The first time she’d done that was the first Easter I’d come home from Choate, and she’d kept up the tradition just to prove she could. “Did you meet someone on the train?” Maeve said, looking at me instead of her. I turned to the girl. She was a perfectly average size, though everyone looked small when they stood between me and my sister. I remembered then that I hadn’t asked her name. “Celeste,” the girl said, and held out her hand, so we all shook hands. “Maeve,” said Maeve, and I said, “Danny,” and then we all wished one another a happy Thanksgiving, said goodbye, and walked away. “You cut off your hair!” I said once we were out of earshot. Maeve reached up and touched her neck just below the place where her dark hair ended in an abrupt bob. “Do you like it? I thought it made me look more like an adult.” I laughed. “I would have thought you’d be sick of always looking like the adult.” She linked her arm through mine and dipped her head sideways to touch my shoulder. Her hair fell forward and covered her face for an instant, so she tossed her head back. Like a girl, I thought, and then remembered Maeve was a girl. “These will be the best four days of the year,” she said. “The best four days until you come home for Christmas.” “Maybe for Christmas you’ll come see me. I came to see you for Easter when you were in college.” “I don’t like the train,” Maeve said, as if that were the end of that. “You could drive.” “To Manhattan?” She stared at me to underscore the stupidity of the suggestion. “It’s so much easier to take the train.” “The train was a nightmare,” I said. “Was the girl a nightmare?” “No, the girl was fine. She was a big help, actually.” “Did you like her?” We were nearly to the door that led out to the parking lot. Maeve had insisted on driving in to get me. “I liked her as well as you like the person you sit next to on the train.” “Where’s she from?” “Why do you care where she’s from?” “Because she’s still standing there waiting and no one’s come to meet her. If you like her then we could offer her a ride.” I stopped and looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t watching us. She was looking in the other direction. “Now you have eyes in the back of your head?” I had always thought it was possible. Celeste, who had seemed so competent on the train, looked decidedly lost in the station. She had saved me from a lot of luggage handling. “She’s from Rydal.” “We could spare the extra ten minutes to drive to Rydal.” My sister was more aware of her surroundings than I was. She was also a nicer person. She waited with my bags and sent me back to ask Celeste if she needed a ride. After taking a few more minutes to scan the station for some member of her family—it had never been made clear which one of them was supposed to pick her up—she asked me again if she wasn’t going to be a huge imposition. I said she was no trouble at all. The three of us walked to the parking lot together while Celeste continued to apologize. Then she crawled into the back of my sister’s Volkswagen and we drove her home. * * * “You were the one who said we should give her a ride,” Maeve said. “My memory on this is perfectly clear. We were going to the Gooches’ for Thanksgiving and I needed to get home and make the pie, then you said you’d met this girl on the train and promised that I’d drive her home.” “Utter bullshit. You’ve never made a pie in your life.” “I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.” I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.” “Would you stop? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.” We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow. But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing. The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark. This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up. Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister. On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family. Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown. We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made. We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table. My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth. I told her she had no idea what she was talking about. “I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.” “Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.” Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.” I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t. “What?” “That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said. “What does Celeste always say about me?” “That you think no one would have been good enough for me.” “I’ve never said no one was good enough for you. I’ve said you could have found someone better than her.” “Ah,” I said, and held up my hand. “Easy.” My wife made disparaging remarks about my sister and my sister made disparaging remarks about my wife, and I listened to both of them because it was impossible not to. For years I worked to break them of their habits, to defend the honor of one to the other, and I had given up. Still, there were limits to how far they could go and they both knew it. Maeve looked back out the window to the house. “Celeste has beautiful children,” Maeve said. “Thank you.” “They look nothing like her.” Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films. I would have loved to have evidence more irrefutable than my own memory, since neither my sister nor my wife would back me on this: it was Maeve who had picked out Celeste, and it was Maeve that Celeste first loved. I was there on that snowy car ride between 30th Street Station and Celeste’s parents’ house in Rydal in 1968, and Maeve was warm enough to clear the ice off the roads. Celeste was in the back seat, wedged between our suitcases, her knees pulled up because there was no room in the back of the little Beetle. Maeve’s eyes kept drifting to the rearview mirror as she piled on the questions: Where was she in school? Celeste was a sophomore at Thomas More College. “I tell myself it’s Fordham.” “That’s where I would have gone. I had wanted to study with the Jesuits.” “Where did you go to school?” Celeste asked. Maeve sighed. “Barnard. They came through with a scholarship so that was that.” As far as I knew nothing in this story was true. Maeve certainly hadn’t been a scholarship student. “What are you studying?” Maeve asked her. “I’m an English major,” Celeste said. “I’m taking Twentieth Century American Poetry this semester.” “Poetry was my favorite class!” Maeve’s eyebrows raised in amazement. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.” “When did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked my sister. “Home is so sad,” Maeve said. “It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft.” Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice. “And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.” “Larkin,” the two cried out together. They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment. I looked at Maeve in astonishment. “How did you know that?” “I didn’t clear my curriculum with him.” Maeve laughed, tilting her head in my direction, and so Celeste laughed too. “What was your major?” Celeste asked. When I turned around to look at her now she was utterly mysterious to me. They both were. “Accounting.” Maeve downshifted with a smack of her open palm as we gently slid down a snowy hill. Over the river and through the woods. “Very dull, very practical. I needed to make a living.” “Oh, sure,” Celeste nodded. But Maeve hadn’t majored in accounting. There was no such thing as an accounting major at Barnard. She’d majored in math. And she was first in her class. Accounting was what she did, not what she’d studied. Accounting was what she could do in her sleep. “There’s that cute little Episcopal church.” Maeve slowed down on Homestead Road. “I went to a wedding there once. When I was growing up the nuns about had a fit if they heard we’d even set foot in a Protestant church.” Celeste nodded, having no idea she’d been asked a question. Thomas More was a Jesuit school but that didn’t necessarily mean the girl in the back of the car was a Catholic. “We go to St. Hilary.” She was Catholic. The house, when we pulled up in front of it, proved to be considerably less grand than the Dutch House and considerably grander than the third floor walk-up where Maeve still lived in those days. Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood, though in Celeste’s case those assumptions proved true. “You’ve been so nice,” Celeste started, but Maeve cut her off. “We’ll take you in.” “But you don’t—” “We’ve made it this far,” Maeve said, putting the car in park. “The least we can do is see you to the door.” I had to get out anyway. I folded my seat forward and leaned back in to help Celeste out, then I took her bag. Her father was still at his dental practice filling cavities, staying late because the office would be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. People came home for the holidays with toothaches they’d been putting off. Her two younger brothers were watching television with friends and shouted to Celeste but didn’t trouble themselves to leave their program. There was a much warmer greeting from a black Lab named Lumpy. “His name was Larry when he was a puppy but he’s gotten sort of lumpy,” Celeste said. Celeste’s mother was friendly and harried, cooking a sit-down dinner for twenty-two relatives who would descend the next day at noon. Small wonder she’d forgotten to pick up her third child at the train station. (There were five Norcross children in total.) After introductions had been made, Maeve got Celeste to write her phone number on a scrap of paper, saying that she drove into the city every now and then and could give her a ride, could even promise her the front seat next time. Celeste was grateful and her mother was grateful, stirring a pot of cranberries on the stove. “You two should stay for dinner. I owe you such a favor!” Celeste’s mother said to us, and then she realized her mistake. “What am I saying? You’re just home yourself. Columbia! Your parents must be dying to see you.” Maeve thanked her for the invitation and accepted a small hug from Celeste, who shook my hand. My sister and I went down the snowy front walk. It seemed that every light in every house was on, up and down the block, on both sides of the street. Everyone in Rydal had come home for Thanksgiving. “Since when did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked once we had climbed back in the car. “Since I saw her shove a book of poetry in her bag.” Maeve cranked up the car’s useless heater. “So what?” Maeve never tried to impress anyone, not even Lawyer Gooch, whom I believed she was secretly in love with. “Why would you care if Celeste of Rydal thinks you read poetry?” “Because sooner or later you’ll find someone, and I’d rather you found a Catholic from Rydal than a Buddhist from, I don’t know, Morocco.” “Are you serious? You’re trying to find me a girlfriend?” “I’m trying to protect my own interests, that’s all. Don’t give it too much thought.” I didn’t.