The Dutch House(57)

“I never would have done anything against your mother. I liked your father fine, I did. He was handsome and sad and all those nonsense things girls think are so important at that age, but Elna Conroy was my heart. I never saw myself filling her shoes, no one could have done that, but I meant to take care of you and your sister and your father the way she would have wanted. She was so worried about you before she left. She loved the three of you so much.”

Before there was a chance to formulate all the questions there were to be asked, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. “Danny! You got a day off.” Dr. Able was beaming. “I should be seeing more of you now that your residency has finished, not less. I’ve been hearing rumors.”

Fluffy and I were sitting at a four-top. There were two empty places set with silverware and napkins that I hoped he had the sense to overlook. “Dr. Able,” I said. “This is my friend, Fiona.”

“Morey.” Dr. Able leaned across the table to shake her hand.

“Fluffy.”

Morey Able smiled and nodded. “Well, I can see you two are busy. Danny, you won’t make me have to track you down, will you?”

“I won’t. Say hello to Mrs. Able for me.”

“Mrs. Able knows who owned those parking lots,” he said and laughed. “You may not get an invitation to Thanksgiving this year.”

“Good,” Fluffy said to him. “Then Danny can come and have Thanksgiving with us.”

When he walked away from the table, Fluffy seemed to understand that our time at the Hungarian Pastry Shop was not infinite. She decided to get to the point. “You know your mother’s here,” she said. “I’ve seen her.”

Lizzy sailed past, tipping her coffee pot in my direction. I shook my head while Fluffy held up her cup for more. “What?” It was a cold wind coming in the door. She’s dead I wanted to say, Surely she’s dead by now.

“I couldn’t tell your sister. I couldn’t make her diabetes worse.”

“Knowing where your mother is doesn’t make diabetes worse,” I said, trying to apply logic to a conversation where no logic existed.

Fluffy shook her head. “It certainly can. You don’t remember how sick she was. You were too young. Your mother would come and go and come and go, and when she finally left for good, Maeve nearly died. That’s just a fact. After that, your father told her she could never come home again. He wrote her a letter when Maeve was in the hospital. I know that. He told her she’d all but killed the two of you.”

“The two of us?”

“Well,” she said, “not you. He only threw you in to make her feel worse. If you ask me, he was trying to get her to come back. He just went about it wrong.”

Had anyone asked me an hour before this meeting how I felt about my mother I would have sworn I had no feelings on the subject, which made it difficult to understand the enormity of my rage. I held up my hand to stop Fluffy from talking for a second, just to give my brain the chance to catch up, and she raised her hand and touched her palm lightly to mine as if we were measuring the length of our fingers. Maybe because he was sitting with a student two tables away, a boy around the age I must have been when we first met, I saw myself standing in the door of Morey Able’s office.

No parents? he asked.

“Where is she now?” I was suddenly struck by the possibility that my mother was going to walk in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and pull up a chair, that this entire reunion was a setup for some horrific surprise.

“I don’t know where she is now. I saw her more than a year ago, maybe two. I’m bad with time. I’m sure it was in the Bowery though. I looked out the window of a bus and there she was, Elna Conroy, just standing there like she was waiting for me. It about stopped my heart.”

I exhaled, my own heart starting again. “You mean you saw someone who looked like my mother when you were on a bus?” The idea of seeing anyone you knew out the window of a bus seemed far-fetched, but I never took the bus, and when I did, I don’t suppose I looked out the window.

Fluffy rolled her eyes. “Jesus, I’m not an idiot, Danny. I got off the bus. I went back and found her.”

“And it was her?” Elna Conroy, who had run off to India in the night, leaving her husband and two sleeping children, was in the Bowery?

“She was just the same, I swear it. Her hair’s gone gray and she wears it in a braid now, the way Maeve used to. They both have that ridiculous hair.”

“Did she remember you?”

“I haven’t changed that much,” Fluffy said.

I was the one who had changed.

Fluffy dumped her coffee into her water glass and let the ice melt. “The first thing she asked about was you and Maeve, and since I didn’t know there was nothing I could tell her. I didn’t even know where you lived. The shame of it all came back on me like the whole thing had happened yesterday. I’ll never get over it. To think I’d been fired, to think why I’d been fired, and that I hadn’t stayed to look after you the way I’d promised her I would.” Her grief hung between us.

“We were her children. It’s seems like she should have stayed and looked after us herself.”

“She’s a wonderful woman, Danny. She had a terrible time of it.”

“A terrible time of it living in the Dutch House?”