The Dutch House(63)
“How did the boys die?” Celeste pulled the blanket up around Kevin’s neck. Even with the fire going the room was cold. I needed to work on the windows.
“Are you counting all of them? Linus had leukemia. He went young, couldn’t have been twelve. The older boys, Pieter and Maarten, they both died in France. They said if the US wouldn’t take them they’d go back to Holland to fight. We got the word that one of them was gone and it wasn’t a month later we had news about the other. They were beautiful men, like princes from a picture book. I could never decide which one I was more in love with.”
“And Mr. VanHoebeek?” I sat down in the big chair near the fireplace. The clock ticked out the minutes of the night. I hadn’t meant to stay with them and yet I stayed. The living room wrapped around us in the flickering light. I could hear the cars racing up and down Broadway a block away. I could hear the rain.
“Emphysema. That’s why I never did smoke. Old Mr. VanHoebeek smoked enough for every member of the family. It’s a terrible death,” Fluffy said, looking at me.
Celeste pulled her feet up beneath her. “So Mrs. VanHoebeek?” She wanted a story. May babbled for a minute in Fluffy’s lap and then settled as if to listen.
“I called the ambulance and they came and picked her up out of the garden and carted her off. I drove over behind them in the last car we had. My father had been the chauffeur, you know, so I knew how to drive. I asked them at the hospital if I could sleep in the old lady’s room, keep an eye on her, and the nurse told me no. She said they were going to have to put a pin in her hip and that she’d need to rest. My parents had found a job together in Virginia, all the other servants had been let go through the Depression. I was the only one left in the house back then. I was more than twenty and I’d never spent the night alone in my life.” Fluffy shook her head at the thought. “I was petrified. I kept thinking I could hear people talking. Then at some point after it got dark I realized that I was the one who was there to keep the Missus safe, not the other way around. Did I think this tiny old woman had been protecting me?”
May yawned and flopped her head onto the shelf of Fluffy’s breasts, looking up at her one last time to confirm that she was really there before letting her eyes drift closed.
“Did she die in the hospital?” I asked. I didn’t think the outcome for pinning hips would have been very good in the forties.
“Oh, no. She came through fine. I went to see her every day, and at the end of two weeks the ambulance men brought her back. This was what my story was about in the first place, why I hated the stairs. They carried her up the stairs on a stretcher and laid her out in her bed and I got her pillows all fixed. She was so happy to be home. She thanked the men, said she was sorry to be so heavy, when the fact was she weighed about as much as a hen. She slept in the big front bedroom where your parents slept. After the men had gone I asked her if she wanted tea and she said yes so I ran downstairs to fix it, and from there on out it never stopped. There was one thing and one thing and one more thing. I was up and down those stairs every five minutes, and that was fine, I was young, but after about a week or so I realized what a mistake I’d made. I should have set her up downstairs, right there in the foyer where she would have had the view. Downstairs she could have looked at the grass and the trees and the birds, everything that was still hers. Where she was upstairs, all she had to look at was the fireplace. She couldn’t see anything out the window from where she was but the sky. She never complained but it made me so sad for her. I knew she wasn’t going to get better. There wasn’t any reason for her to. She was such a sweet old bird. Every time I needed to go to the store or get her medicine, I’d have to give her an extra pill and knock her out, otherwise she’d get confused if I wasn’t right there and she’d try to get out of bed by herself. She couldn’t remember that her hip was broken, that was the problem. She was always trying to get up. I’d tell her to hold still and then I’d fly down the stairs to get what she needed and come right back up and half the time she’d be crawling out, one foot touching the floor, so then I started pulling her over to the middle of the bed and making a wall of pillows around her like you’d do with a baby, then I’d go down the stairs twice as fast. I could have run a marathon but I don’t think they had marathons back then.” She looked down at May and swept her hand over the baby’s fine black hair. “There wasn’t a soft spot on me.”
There were times, early on, when Celeste would have something to say about Maeve, but Fluffy wouldn’t hear it. “I love my children,” she’d say, “and Maeve was my first. I saved her life, you know. When she came down with diabetes, I was the one who took her to the hospital. Imagine little May growing up and someone wanting me to listen to bad things about her.” She gave May a few bounces on her hip and made her laugh. “Isn’t. Gonna. Happen,” she said to the baby.
Celeste quickly fell in line. The central adult relationship in her life was with Fluffy now, and she lived in terror of the day when the children would be deemed old enough for her to manage on her own. Not only was it necessary to have an extra set of hands for two children so close in age, but Fluffy knew what to do for an earache, a rash, boredom. She knew better than I did when a call to the pediatrician was in order. Fluffy was a genius as far as babies were concerned, but she had a keen sense for mothers as well. She took care of Celeste as much as she did of Kevin and May, praising her for every good decision, telling her when to rest, teaching her how to make stew. And when it rained or was dark or was simply too cold to go out, there was the endless trove of VanHoebeek stories to open again. Celeste had fallen in love with those too.