The Dutch House(64)
“The garage was way over to the side of the house, but if I stood on the toilet seat and opened the window I could see the guests coming in for the parties. Nothing exists like the parties they had back then, nothing in the world. All the windows would be open and the guests would walk in through the windows from the terrace. When the weather was cold they danced upstairs in the ballroom, but when it was nice outside there were workmen who would come out during the day and put down a dance floor made out of pieces of polished wood that all snapped together. That way the guests could dance on the lawn. There was a little orchestra, and everyone was laughing and laughing. My mother used to say the silkiest sound on earth was a rich woman’s laugh. She would work in the kitchen all day to get things ready, then she served until two or three in the morning, then she cleaned it all up. There were plenty of people there to help but it was my mother’s kitchen. My father would take all the cars away and bring them back for the guests when they were ready to leave. I’d be fast asleep on the couch when they came in, no matter how hard I’d tried to stay awake, I was a just a tiny thing, and my mother would wake me up and give me a glass of flat champagne, whatever little bit was left in the bottle. She’d wake me up and say, ‘Fiona, look what I brought you!’ And I’d drink it up and go right back to sleep. I couldn’t have been more than five. That champagne was the most wonderful thing in the world.”
“How do you think my father got the money to buy the house?” I asked Fluffy late one night in an almost sacred moment of silence, both of the children asleep in their cribs, Celeste asleep on the little bed in the nursery where she had lain down just for a minute and then was lost. Fluffy and I were standing side by side, she washing the dishes while I dried.
“It was the boy in the hospital when your father was in France.”
I turned to her, a dinner plate in my hands. “You know this?” I wasn’t even sure what had made me ask her but I had never considered that she might know the answer.
Fluffy nodded. “He fell out of the plane and broke his shoulder. I guess he was in that hospital forever, and there were lots of people coming and going all the time. For a few days there was a boy on the cot next to his who’d been shot in the chest. I try not to think too much about that. The boy wasn’t awake very often but when he was he talked to your father. This boy said if he had money he’d buy up land in Horsham. No doubt about it, he said, and so your father asked him why. I imagine it must have been nice to have someone to talk to. The boy told him that what with the war and all he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that Cyril should remember those two words: Horsham, Pennsylvania. Your father remembered.”
I took another plate from her soapy fingers, then a glass. The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My father told you this?”
“Your father? Lord, no. Your father wouldn’t have told me the time if I’d asked him. Your mother told me. We were thick as thieves, your mother and I. You have to remember, when they showed up at the Dutch House that first day she believed they were poor people. She made him tell her how he got the money. She made him. She was sure he’d done something illegal. Nobody had money like that back then.”
I thought of myself as an undergraduate, finding that first building in foreclosure, wondering how my father had struck it rich. “What happened?”
“Well, the poor boy died, of course, leaving your father plenty of time to think about him. He stayed in that cot for another three months before there was a spot on a transport ship to send him home. After that he was put on a desk job at the shipyard in Philadelphia. He had never been to Philadelphia a day in his life. After he and your mother were settled he got out a map and what does he see but Horsham, not an hour away. He decided to go out there, I guess to be respectful to the boy. I have no idea how your father got there but the place was nothing but farmland. He made some inquiries, just to see if anything was for sale, and he found a man who had ten acres he’d part with, dirt cheap. That’s where the expression came from, you know. Cheap dirt was dirt cheap.”
“But where did he get the money to buy the land?” Things can be cheap but if you didn’t have money it hardly mattered. I knew that from experience.
“He’d saved up from the TVA. He worked on the dams for three years before the war. They paid him next to nothing, but your father was a man who hadn’t parted with his first nickel. Now mind you, your mother didn’t know about any of this, and they were married then. She didn’t know about the savings or the boy or Horsham, none of it. Six months later the Navy was calling him up, saying that’s just where they meant to build a base.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Fluffy nodded, her cheeks red, her hands red in the water. “And it would have been a good story if that was all there was to it, but he took the money from the sale and put it down on a big industrial building on the river, and when he sold that he started buying up tracts of land, and all that time your mother was soaking pinto beans for supper and he was working for the Navy ordering supplies and they were living on the base with your sister. Then one day he says, ‘Hey, Elna, I borrowed a car. I’ve got a big surprise to show you.’ It really was a wonder she didn’t kill him.”
As we stood there shoulder to shoulder, the dishes done and the most frustrating mystery of my life resolved, I remembered that this was the woman who had hit me once when I was a child. She had slept with my father and wanted to marry him. I thought of what a better life it would have been had Fluffy gotten her way.