The Dutch House(65)
Chapter 14
I sold the building we’d lived in when we were first married for a good price, and I sold those first two brownstones, and with the profit I bought a mixed-use building on Broadway six blocks from where we lived. It had thirty rental units and an Italian restaurant downstairs. I could have been in that building every waking hour, every day of the year, and still not made all the necessary repairs: uncontrollable steam heat, illegal garbage disposals, one tenant whose daughter flushed an orange down the toilet to see if it would go, another who left her door open so her cat could shit in the hall, and the terrier two doors down who would always find the shit and gobble it up and vomit on the hall floor. With every crisis I learned how to fix something else, and I learned how to soothe the people whose problems were not mine to solve.
I made money. I hired a super and started a management company. The surest way to know if a building was worth buying was to manage it first, or to manage a building on a block where another building went up for sale. Pretty much everything in New York was for sale in those days if you knew who to ask. I knew the councilmen, the cops. I went in and out of basements. Maeve kept my books and did the taxes for the corporation, as well as our personal taxes. It drove Celeste to distraction.
“Your sister has no right to have her nose in every corner of our lives,” she said.
“Sure she does, if I’m the one asking her to do it.”
Celeste had a habit of overthinking things now that she was home with the kids by herself. Fluffy was a baby nurse again, working for friends of ours ten blocks south who had adopted twins. She had stayed with us years past her original promise, and she still came over once a week to see us, to make us soup, to waltz Kevin around the kitchen in her arms. Celeste alone did the laundry now, and arranged for playdates at the park and read The Carrot Seed a million times in a voice of animated engagement: “‘A little boy planted a carrot seed. His mother said, “I’m afraid it won’t come up.”’” She gave her best effort to everything but still, her big, wandering brain was underutilized, and would often turn itself against my sister.
“You can’t have someone in your family do the books. You need to find a professional.”
“Maeve is a professional. What do you think she does at Otterson’s?” Both of the kids were sleeping, and even though a fire truck could come wailing down Broadway and not disturb their dreams, the sound of their parents arguing could pull them straight up from a coma.
“Jesus, Danny, she ships vegetables. We have a real business. There’s money at stake.”
As for my business, Celeste had no idea what was at stake. She knew nothing about the strength of our holdings or the size of our debt. She didn’t ask. Had she understood the outrageous financial risk I’d put us in, she wouldn’t have slept another night. All she could be sure of was that she didn’t want Maeve close, even though in many ways Maeve, with her understanding of tax codes and mortgages, was the one who steered the ship. “Okay, first, Otterson’s is a real business.” Maeve had told me the profits, though she probably shouldn’t have.
Celeste held up her hands. “Please don’t lecture me about lima beans.”
“Second, look at me, I’m serious. Second, Maeve is completely ethical, which is more than you could say about some accountants who deal with New York real estate. She has nothing but our best interest at heart.”
“Your best interest,” she said in a flat whisper. “She could care less about mine.”
“It’s in your best interest for our business to succeed.”
“Why don’t you just invite her to live with us? Wouldn’t she like that? She could sleep in our bedroom. We have no secrets.”
“Your father cleans our teeth.”
Celeste shook her head. “Not the same.”
“Your teeth, my teeth, the kids’ teeth. And you know what? I like it. I’m grateful to your father. He does a good job so I go to Rydal for a filling. I trust him.”
“I guess that proves what we’ve both long suspected.”
“Which is what?”
“You’re a better person than I am.” Then Celeste left the bedroom to go and make sure the children hadn’t heard the things we’d said.
Everything Celeste didn’t like about me was Maeve’s fault, because being mad at your husband’s sister was infinitely easier than being mad at your husband. She might have packed her original disappointments away in a box, but she carried the box with her wherever she went. It would never be completely forgotten that I hadn’t married her when she graduated from Thomas More, and had been the cause of her return to Rydal, a failure. Nor was it lost on her that the deeper I got into real estate, the happier I became. Celeste had misjudged me. She had planned on giving me the freedom to realize the error of my ways, but medicine never crossed my mind unless I was having lunch with Morey Able, or ran into one of my classmates who applied pressure to gunshot wounds in some emergency room for a living. When May was old enough to ask for a Monopoly set for Christmas, I sat beside the tree and we played. I couldn’t imagine my father playing a board game but this one was genius: the houses and hotels, the deeds and the rent, the windfalls and taxes. Monopoly was the world. May always chose the Scottie dog. Kevin wasn’t quite old enough to stick with the game in those days but he ran the sports car along the edge of the board and made pyramids out of the tiny green houses. Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house. I wasn’t spending my days in a box-like room telling somebody’s father he had pancreatic cancer, telling somebody’s mother I felt a lump in her breast, telling the parents we had done everything we knew how to do.