The Dutch House(69)

“Fluffy told me Mommy had wanted to be a nun,” Maeve said. “Don’t you think that would have come up at some point? She was already a novice when Dad came and pulled her out of the convent to marry her. Fluffy said they’d grown up in the same neighborhood. He was friends with her brother James. I told her we knew that, that we’d been out to Brooklyn when we were kids and found the apartment buildings where they lived. Fluffy said that Dad had gone to visit her before she took her vows and that was that. All those times she used to go away before she left for good? She was going back to the convent. The nuns loved her. I mean, everybody loved her but the nuns loved her especially. They were always calling Dad and telling him to let her stay a few more days. ‘She just needs some rest.’ That’s what they’d say.”

“That must have gone over well.”

The two lawnmowers were coming down the driveway and then out into the street. A man motioned to Maeve to back up so they could pull onto the trailer. “I have to say, I don’t even care about it now,” she said. “But if I’d known that when I was growing up, I swear I would have joined the convent just to irritate him.”

I smiled at the sudden picture in my mind of Maeve, tall and stern in her navy-blue habit. I wondered if our mother was still out there, working in a soup kitchen somewhere, and if that was the part of her that had wanted to be a nun. I should have told Maeve that story years ago, when it happened, but I never had. The problem was compounded by the realization that I had waited too long. “I’m sure that would have gotten his attention.”

“Yeah.” Maeve started the car and put it in reverse. “That probably would have been the thing to do.”

*

“Jesus,” Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”

I would go through long periods of my life in which I took a private vow to tell my wife nothing about my sister, to comment only on the weather in Jenkintown or the train ride home and leave it at that. But that strategy enraged Celeste, who said I was shutting her out. So then I would reverse myself, deciding she was right. Married couples told each other what was going on. No good came of secrets. In those periods I answered her honestly when she asked me how my trip to Jenkintown was or what was going on with my sister.

It never made any difference what I said. My answers, however benign, ignited her. “She’s nearly fifty years old! Is she really still thinking she’s going to get her mother back, she’s going to get her house back?”

“That’s not what I said. I said she told me our mother had wanted to join the convent when she was young. I thought it was an interesting story. Period.”

Celeste wasn’t listening. Where Maeve was concerned she didn’t listen. “At what point do you say to her, Okay, it was an awful childhood, it’s a terrible thing to be rich and then not be rich, but now everybody has to grow up?”

I refrained from pointing out the things Celeste already knew: that her own parents were alive and well, still in the Norcross foursquare in Rydal, still nursing the pain of having lost a succession of noble Labrador retrievers over the course of their long marriage, one of whom, years before, had darted out the front gate and was hit by a car in the springtime of her youth. They were good people, Celeste’s people, and good things had happened to them. I wouldn’t have wished it any other way.

What I didn’t appreciate was that Celeste took such issue with Maeve not coming into the city, when Maeve coming to be with us was the last thing she wanted. “She’s too busy with her important job in frozen vegetables to come here for the day? She expects you to drop everything—your business, your family—and run to her when she calls?”

“I’m not going out there to cut her lawn. She does all this work that she doesn’t charge us for. Going out there seems like the least I could do.”

“Every single time?”

What was never said but was perfectly clear was that Maeve had no husband, no children, and so her time was less valuable. “You should be careful what you wish for,” I said. “I can’t imagine you’d be happier if Maeve came here once a month.”

And while I was sure we were careening towards a full-on argument, this sentence stopped Celeste cold. She put her face in her hands and then she started to laugh. “My god, my god,” she said. “You’re right. Go to Jenkintown. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Maeve didn’t have to give me a reason why she hated New York: traffic, garbage, crowding, incessant noise, the omnipresent visible poverty, she could have her pick. When I finally asked her, after many years of wondering, she looked at me like she couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

“What?”

“Celeste,” she said.

“You gave up the entire city of New York to avoid Celeste?”

“What other reason would there be?”

Whatever injustices Maeve and Celeste had committed against each other years before had become abstractions. Their dislike for each other was a habit now. I could never help but think that had they met on their own, two women who had nothing to do with me, they would have liked each other very much; certainly they had at first. They were smart and funny and fiercely loyal, my sister and my wife. They claimed to love me above all others, while never acknowledging the toll it took on me to watch them pick each other apart. I blamed them both. They could have avoided it now. The grudge could be set aside if they made the choice. But they didn’t. They clung to their bitterness, both of them.