The Dutch House(51)
“All of them are dead,” I said on my father’s behalf, “and I bought their house from the bank and we get to keep all their stuff.” Was everything still there? Were the clothes hanging in the closets? I didn’t even know my mother but I was feeling sick for her when I thought about it that way.
“It took a while for Dad to get up the stairs. We went through all the bedrooms. Everything was there: their beds and their pillows and the towels in their bathrooms. I remember there was a silver hairbrush on the dresser in the master bedroom that had hair in it. When we got to my room, Dad said, ‘Maeve, I thought that you might like it here.’ What kind of a kid wouldn’t like that room? Do you remember that night we showed it to Norma and Bright?”
“I do, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, that was exactly what I was like. I went straight to the window seat and Dad pulled the drapes shut. Shangri-la. I lost my mind, and then Mommy lost her mind because she was still thinking that this whole thing was going to be resolved and I was going to be crushed to not have my own princess suite. She said, ‘Maeve, get out of there. That doesn’t belong to you.’ But it did. I knew it did.”
“You knew it at the time?” I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.
She gave me a tired smile and ran her hand once over the back of my head. My hair was short, shaved at the neck. That’s the way things were at Choate, even in the mid-sixties. “I understood parts of it, but no, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really understand the whole thing until Norma and Bright did their reenactment of my childhood. I think that’s why I felt sorry for them, because in some way I was just feeling sorry for myself.”
“That was the night for it. I was certainly feeling sorry for myself.”
Maeve let that go. For once it was her story and not mine. “After the bedroom fiasco we went up to the third floor. Dad wanted to show us everything. He knew the tour was getting worse but he couldn’t stop himself. The third floor just about did him in. He wore a brace on his knee back then that didn’t fit right and he had to straight-leg it up the stairs. The stairs were hell for him. He was okay to do one set but not two. He hadn’t gone to the third floor when he bought the place, and when we finally got up there it turned out part of the ceiling in the ballroom had fallen in. It looked like a bomb had gone off, big chunks of plaster smashed all over the floor. Raccoons had eaten their way into the house, the ones with the fleas. They had ripped apart the mattress from the little bedroom to make their nest, ripped into the pillows and the spread, and there was fluff and feathers everywhere. There was this horrible, feral smell, like a wild animal and the shit of that animal and the dead cousin of that animal all at the same time.” She made a face at the memory. “If he was looking to make a good first impression he would not have taken us to the third floor.”
I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country. There was a neat little boxwood hedge that had been trained to grow up and over the mailbox, and I wanted to get out of the car and go across the street and run my hand over it like I used to do whenever Sandy sent me out to get the mail, like it was my house even then. “Please tell me you left after that.”
“Oh, darling, no, we were just getting started.” She turned her back on the house so that she was facing me. She was wearing the T-shirt I’d brought her home from Choate and an old pair of shorts, and she pulled her long, tan legs into the seat. “Dad’s leg was killing him but he went out to the car and got the sack lunch, then he got plates from the kitchen and filled glasses with water from the tap and set us up in the dining room while Mommy sat on one of those awful French chairs in the foyer, shaking. He put the sandwiches on the plates and called us in. To the dining room! I mean, if he’d ever even looked at her to see what was going on he would have let us eat in the kitchen or in the car or someplace that didn’t have a blue and gold ceiling. The dining room was intolerable in the very best of times. He led her to the table like she was blind. She kept picking up her sandwich and putting it down while Dad went on chirping about acreage and when the place was built and how the VanHoebeeks had made their money in cigarettes during the last war.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and stubbed it into the ashtray in the car. “Thank you, VanHoebeeks.”
There was a clap of thunder and all at once the rain came, an explosion of enormous drops that swept the windshield clean. Neither of us moved to roll up our window. “But you didn’t sleep there.” I said it as if I knew because I could not bear it to be otherwise.
She shook her head. The rain made such a pounding on the roof that she had to raise her voice a little. Our backs were getting soaked. “No. He took us around outside for a minute but the grounds were a mess. The pool was full of leaves. I wanted to take off my shoes and socks and put my feet in the water anyway but Mommy said no. I thought she was holding my hand because she was afraid I was going to run away, but she was holding on to me because, you know, she needed to hold on. Then Dad clapped his hands together and said we should probably be heading home. He had borrowed the car from the banker for the day and he had to give it back. Can you imagine? He buys this house but he doesn’t own a car? We went back inside and he picks up all the sandwiches and wraps them and puts them back in the bag. None of us had really eaten anything so of course we were going to take the sandwiches home and have them for dinner. He wasn’t going to waste the sandwiches. Mommy started to pick up the plates, and Dad, I remember this most of all, he touched her wrist and he said, ‘Leave those. The girl will get them.’”