The Dutch House(60)
Had it not been for Maeve, every aspect of the wedding, all the costs and decisions, would have fallen to the Norcross family. Maeve believed we Conroys should not begin the alliance of families in such a state of inequality. After all, when you added in uncles and aunts and all the various degrees of cousins both by marriage and blood, there were more Norcrosses than there were stars in the sky, and there were only the two of us Conroys. I understood that someone from our side needed to show up, and since our side consisted of Maeve and me, it fell to Maeve. I was meeting with electricians in those days and learning the surprisingly difficult skill of repairing drywall. I was too busy to participate in the details, and so I sent my sister, who lived a scant fifteen minutes from Celeste’s parents, as my emissary.
In this spirit of division of labor, Maeve volunteered to write our engagement announcement for the paper. Mary Celeste Norcross, daughter of William and Julie Norcross, will marry Daniel James Conroy, son of Elna Conroy and the late Cyril Conroy, on Saturday, the 23rd of July.
But Celeste didn’t like the word “late.” She thought it was a downer in light of the happy occasion.
“And your mother?” Maeve said to me over the phone, doing an uncanny imitation of Celeste’s voice. “Do you seriously want your mother’s name in the engagement announcement?”
“Ah,” I said.
“I told her you do in fact have a mother. A missing mother and a dead father. That’s what we’ve got. Then she asked if we could just leave them out altogether, seeing as how they’re not here? It’s not as if we’d be hurting their feelings.”
“Well?” It didn’t strike me as an outrageous proposal.
“We’d be hurting my feelings,” Maeve said. “You’re not a mushroom who popped up after a rain. You have parents.”
Julie Norcross, my ever-rational future mother-in-law, broke the tie in Maeve’s favor. “That’s the way it’s done,” she said to her daughter. The proposed compromise, to which Maeve finally capitulated after much grousing, was that our parents’ names would not appear on the wedding invitation.
And through all of this, I never told my sister that our mother was out there, circling. I put it off not because I thought it would harm Maeve’s health, but because we were better off without her. That was what Fluffy’s news had made me realize. After so many years of chaos and exile, our lives had finally settled. Now that it was no longer my job to draw down the trust, we rarely spoke of Andrea at all. We didn’t think about her. I wasn’t practicing medicine. I owned three buildings. I was getting married. Maeve, for whatever reasons of her own, continued on at Otterson’s without complaint. She seemed happier than I had ever known her to be, even if she didn’t want me to marry Celeste. After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow become miraculously unstuck, moving forward in time just like everyone else. To tell Maeve our mother was out there, to tell her I wasn’t sure if our parents had ever divorced, meant reigniting the fire I’d spent my life stamping out. Why should we go looking for her? She’d never come looking for us.
I don’t mean that Maeve didn’t deserve to know, or that I would never tell her. I just didn’t think this was the time.
Celeste and I were married on a sweltering day in late July at St. Hilary’s in Rydal. A fall wedding would have been more comfortable, but Celeste said she wanted to have everything settled and done before school started in September. Maeve said Celeste didn’t want to give me time to back out. The Norcrosses rented a tent for the reception, and Celeste and Maeve put aside their considerable differences for the occasion. Morey Able stood up as my best man. He found my defection from science to be hilarious. “I wasted half of my professional career on you,” he said, his arm around my shoulder like any proud father. Years later, I would buy a building on Riverside Drive, a pre-war jewel box with an Art Deco lobby and green glass inlays on the elevator doors. I gave the Ables half of the top floor and a key to the roof for what they would have paid for an efficiency. They would stay there for the rest of their lives.
Celeste flung her diaphragm into the Atlantic on our honeymoon. In the early morning hours we watched it catch a gentle wave and bob away from the coast of Maine.
“That’s a little disgusting,” I said.
“People will think it’s a jellyfish.” She snapped shut the empty pink case and dropped it in her purse. We had tried to get in the water the day before but even in late July we found it impossible to go past our knees, so we went back to the hotel and Celeste put her swimsuit on so that I could take it off again. She thought we had very nearly waited too long as it was. At twenty-nine, she wasn’t going to put nature off another cycle. Our daughter was born nine months later. Over protests, I named the baby for my sister, and as a compromise we called her May.
Everything about May was easy. I told Celeste we could throw a tarp over the bed and I could deliver her myself if she felt like staying home, but she didn’t. We took a taxi to Columbia-Presbyterian in the middle of the night, and six hours later our daughter was delivered by one of my former classmates. Celeste’s mother came up for a week and Maeve came for a day. Maeve and Julie Norcross had grown fond of each other through the wedding preparations, and Maeve had found that things between her and Celeste were better when Celeste’s mother was around. She planned her brief visits accordingly. Celeste quit her teaching job at the Columbia school and five months later she was pregnant again. She was good at having babies, she liked to say. She was going to play to her strength.