The Dutch House(68)

“I don’t care how rich you are, you can only use one bathroom at a time,” Maeve said.

“Well, I’m here sometimes.” Though it was the case I very rarely slept over anymore. Maeve would have been the first to point this out.

“How many years did we share a bathroom?”

I offered to buy her a house in lieu of a salary but she refused that as well. She said no one was ever going to tell her where she could and could not live again, not even me. “It’s taken me five years to get a decent crop of raspberries,” she said.

So I went to her landlord and bought the house she lived in. In my history of buying and selling property it was doubtlessly the worst deal I ever made. Once it had been established that I wanted something that wasn’t for sale, the owner was free to set an obscene price, and he did. It didn’t matter. I dropped the deed in the weekly folder of bills and receipts and mailed it to her. Maeve, who was rarely excited and never surprised, was both.

“I’ve been walking around this place all afternoon,” she said when she got me on the phone. “A house looks different when you own it. I never knew that before. It looks better. No one’s ever going to get me out of here now. I’m going to be like old Mrs. VanHoebeek. I’m going out feet first.”

*

I was heading back to the city and on a lark we stopped by the Dutch House for just a minute. This way we could miss the worst part of the late afternoon traffic on our way to the train. Behind the linden trees, two men on giant riding mowers were driving straight lines back and forth across the wide lawn, and we rolled down our windows to let in the smell of cut grass.

We were both in our forties then, me near the beginning and Maeve near the end. My trips to Jenkintown had long become routine: I took the train down in the morning on the first Friday of every month and came back the same night, using my commute to get in order the paperwork I was taking to Maeve. As much as the company was expanding, I could have easily gone every week to sift through bills and contracts with my sister, and I definitely should have gone twice a month, but every departure meant a struggle with Celeste. She said that this was the time to be with our children. “Kevin and May still like us,” Celeste would say. “That’s not always going to be the case.” She wasn’t wrong, but still, I couldn’t stop going home, and I didn’t want to. The compromise I made was heavily tilted in Celeste’s favor, even if Celeste never saw it that way.

Maeve and I had so much work to do when we were together that months would go by when the Dutch House scarcely crossed our minds. The fact that we were parked there now was really just an act of nostalgia, not for the people we’d been when we lived in the house, but for the people we’d been when we parked on VanHoebeek Street for hours, smoking cigarettes.

“Do you ever wish you could get back in the house?” Maeve asked.

The mowing made me think of plows and mules. “Would I go in if the house were on the market? Probably. Would I go up and ring the doorbell? No.”

Maeve’s hair was going gray and it made her look older than she was. “No, what I’m talking about is more like a dream: would you go in by yourself if you could? Just to look around and see what had happened to the place?”

Sandy and Jocelyn in the kitchen laughing while I sat at the blue table doing homework, my father with his coffee and cigarette in the morning in the dining room, a folded newspaper in his hand, Andrea tapping across the marble floor of the foyer, Norma and Bright laughing as they ran up the stairs, Maeve a schoolgirl, her black hair like a blanket down her back. I shook my head. “No. No way. What about you?”

Maeve tilted her head back against the headrest. “Not for anything. I think it would kill me if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, I’m glad you won’t be invited back then.” The light painted every blade of grass, turning the lawn into stripes the width of a lawnmower—dark green, light green, dark green.

Maeve turned her head towards the view. “I wonder when we changed.”

We had changed at whatever point the old homestead had become the car: the Oldsmobile, the Volkswagen, the two Volvos. Our memories were stored on VanHoebeek Street, but they weren’t in the Dutch House anymore. If someone had asked me to tell them very specifically where I was from, I would have to say I was from that strip of asphalt in front of what had been the Buchsbaums’ house, which had then become the Schultzes’ house, and was now the house of people whose names I didn’t know. I was irritated by the landscapers’ truck, the lengthy metal trailer cutting into our spot. I wouldn’t have bought a house on that street, but if the street itself was for sale, it would have been mine. I said none of that. All I said in answer to her question was that I didn’t know.

“You really should have gone into psychiatry,” she said. “It would have been so helpful. Fluffy says the same thing, you know. She says she wouldn’t go back either. She says for years she had dreams where she was walking from room to room in the Dutch House and we were there: her parents and Sandy and Jocelyn and all the VanHoebeeks, and everyone was having a fabulous time—one of those big, Gatsbyesque parties they used to have when she was a kid. She said for so long all she wanted was to get back in the house, and now she doesn’t think she could go in there if the door were open.”

Fluffy had long been repatriated back into the fold. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy and my sister were all together again: the staff of the Dutch House and their duchess, going out for quarterly lunches and taking apart the past with a flea comb. Maeve believed in the veracity of Fluffy’s memories over Sandy’s or Jocelyn’s, or even her own, because Fluffy had walked away with her facts. Sandy and Jocelyn talked endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of our collective history along with my sister, but not Fluffy. After my father sent her to the end of the driveway with her suitcase, who could she have talked to? Her new employers? Her boyfriend? Even when she worked in our house, she told the stories Celeste liked to hear, the ones about the VanHoebeeks, the parties and the clothes. Celeste’s attention wandered once the Conroy family took possession of the property, I think because Maeve was too firmly at the center of those chapters, but that was all for the better. Fluffy’s stories had stayed fresh because she had kept them to herself. Fluffy still knew what she knew.