The Dutch House(56)
“I am.” There was no point getting into that one.
“Well, that’s good. I’m glad. Your parents would have been proud of that. And can I say something else? I’m sitting here looking at you, and your face is perfectly fine. I don’t know what I was expecting but there isn’t a mark on you.”
I considered pointing out the small scar by my eyebrow but thought better of it. A waitress I knew named Lizzy who wore her black curls pulled onto the top of her head with a rubber band came to the table and put a coffee and a poppy-seed muffin down in front of me. “Fresh,” she said, and walked away.
Fluffy watched her retreat with wonder. “They know you here?”
“I live close by.”
“And you’re handsome,” she said. “A woman’s going to remember a handsome man like you. Maeve says you’ve got a girl though, and she doesn’t think much of her, in case you didn’t know. That’s not my business. I’m just glad I didn’t wreck your face. The last time I laid eyes on you, you were covered in blood and screaming, then Jocelyn runs in to take you to the hospital. I thought for sure I’d killed you, all that blood, but you turned out fine.”
“I’m fine.”
She pressed her lips into an approximation of a smile. “Sandy told me you were fine but I didn’t believe her. What else was she going to say? I carried it around with me for years and years. I felt so awful. I didn’t stay in touch with any of them, you know. Once I moved to the city that was it—no looking back. Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.”
“Sure.”
“Which brings me to your father.” She took down the rest of her water. “Maeve told me he died. I’m sorry about that. You know you look an awful lot like him, right? My kids are mutts, all three of them. They don’t look like me or my husband, either one. Bobby’s Italian, DiCamillo. Fiona DiCamillo is a mutt name if ever there was one. Bobby never knew about me and your father.” She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck. This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn. Emotions stormed across her face with a flag. “Maeve told you that, didn’t she? About your father and me?”
“She did.”
Fluffy exhaled, shook her head. “My god, I thought I just put my foot in it. Bobby doesn’t need to know about that. You probably don’t need to know about it either but there you go. I was just a kid then, and I was stupid. I thought your father was going to marry me. I slept right there on the second floor in the room next to you and your sister, and I thought it was only a matter of me moving across the hall. Well, hah!”
The waitresses at the Hungarian Pastry Shop had to turn sideways to get between the tables, holding their coffee pots high. Everyone was jostled and the light poured in across the Formica tables and the silverware and the thick white china cups and I saw none of it. I was back in the kitchen of the Dutch House, and Fluffy was there.
“That morning,” she said, and nodded to make sure I understood which morning we were talking about, “your father and I had a fight and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m not saying it wasn’t my fault, but I’m saying I wasn’t myself.”
“A fight about what?” I let my eyes wander over to the pastry case, the pies and cakes all twice as tall as pies and cakes were meant to be.
“About our not getting married. He’d never come right out and said he was going to marry me but what year was it then, 1950, ’51? It never crossed my mind that we weren’t getting married. I was right there in his bed, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and he got up to get dressed and I was feeling so happy about things that I said I thought we should start making plans. And he said, ‘Making plans for what?’”
“Oh,” I said, feeling the discomfort of familiarity.
Fluffy raised her eyebrows, making her green eyes appear all the larger. “If it was just that he wasn’t going to marry me, well, that would have been bad enough, but the reason—” She stopped and took a bite of her Danish with a fork. Then, bite by bite, she proceeded to eat the entire thing. That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel. I waited well past the point of prudence for her to pick her story up again.
“Are you going to tell me?”
She nodded, her tremendous energy having deserted her. “I have a lot to tell you,” she said.
“All ears.”
She gave me a stern look, the look of a governess to a smart-mouthed child. “Your father said he couldn’t marry me because he was still married to your mother.”
That was something I never considered. “They were still married?”
“I was willing to be immoral, I think I’ve established that. I was sleeping with a man I wasn’t married to—okay, fine, my mistake, I’ll live with it. But I thought your father was divorced. I never would have gone to bed with a married man. You believe that, don’t you?”
I told her I did, absolutely. What I didn’t tell her was that a man who wants to sleep with the pretty young nanny across the hall never has any intention of marrying her. What better lie than to tell her he’s still married? My father wasn’t much more of a Catholic than I was, but he was too Catholic to be a bigamist, and Andrea was too smart to marry a bigamist, and Lawyer Gooch was too thorough to have overlooked such a detail.