The Dutch House(24)
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.