The Dutch House(73)

There was plenty wrong with it, but I didn’t know what else we could have done. While everyone was off at May’s dinner, before the mouse-shaped cake that Celeste had taken over to the restaurant had been served, Maeve and I took a taxi back to the house. I knew that May would be disappointed and Celeste would be furious, but I also knew how sick Maeve had been, how exhausted she was. I knew that she alone in all the world would have done the same for me. Maeve sat on a little bench we kept by the front door for pulling boots off and on in the winter, and I ran upstairs, packed a bag and left a note.

Maeve slept in the car most of the way home. It was early December and the days were short and cold. I drove to Jenkintown in the dark, thinking all the time about the dinner I was missing, about May dancing in the mouse head. I called as soon as we got to Maeve’s house but no one answered. “Celeste, Celeste, Celeste,” I said into the machine. I pictured her in the kitchen, looking at the phone and turning away. Maeve had gone straight in to take a bath. I made us eggs and toast and we ate at her little kitchen table. When we went to bed it wasn’t even eight o’clock.

“At least we each have our own bedroom now,” I said. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

“I never minded sleeping on the couch,” she said.

We said goodnight in the hallway. Maeve’s second bedroom doubled as her office, and I looked at the bookshelf full of binders that said conroy on the spine. I meant to pull one down for kicks, to take my mind off the disasters of the day, but then decided to close my eyes for just a minute and that was that.

When Maeve knocked on my door, she woke me from a dream in which I was trying to swim to Kevin. Every stroke I took towards him seemed to push him farther out, until I was struggling to see his head above the water’s chop. I kept calling for him to swim back but he was too far away to hear me. I sat straight up, gasping, trying to make sense of where I was. Then I remembered. I had never been so happy to be awake.

Maeve opened the door a crack. “Too early?”

Now that it was morning, yesterday’s plan seemed utterly sensible, necessary. Maeve in the kitchen was her own bright self, making coffee, telling me how fine she felt, like none of it had happened. (“I just needed a bath and a good night’s sleep,” she said.) I could see that I would be home early enough to make amends. We were outside in the dark again just past four o’clock, Maeve locking the back door of her little house. We were ahead of the schedule we had laid out for ourselves. Nothing would be lost.

“Let’s go to the house,” Maeve said once we were back in my car.

“Really?”

“We’ve never gone over there this time of day.”

“We’ve never done anything this time of day.”

“It’s not like we’re going to be late.” She had so much energy. I had forgotten the way she was in the morning, like each new day came in on a wave she had managed to catch. The Dutch House wasn’t far from where Maeve lived, and since it was in the general direction of where we were going, and since we had gotten out so early, I didn’t see how there was any harm in it. The neighborhoods were dark, the street lights on. It wouldn’t be light until after seven. I had left New York in the dark and I would get home before it was light again. That wasn’t too bad.

The houses on VanHoebeek Street were never entirely dark. People left their porch lights on all night, as if they were always waiting for someone to come home. Gas lights flickered at the ends of driveways, a lamp in the front window of a living room stayed on through the night, but even with all these small bursts of illumination there was a stillness about the place that made it clear the inhabitants were all in their beds, even the dogs of Elkins Park were asleep. I pulled the car into our spot and turned off the engine. The moon in the west was bright enough to drown out any stars. It poured over everything equally: the leafless trees and the driveway, the wide lawn scattered with leaves and the wide stone stairs. Moonlight poured across the house and into the car where Maeve and I sat. When would I have seen this as a boy, up hours before dawn on the clear, cold winter night? I would have been like everyone else in the neighborhood, sound asleep in my bed.

“You’ll tell May and Kevin I’m sorry,” Maeve said.

We were in the car together, each of us deep in our separate thoughts. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the ballet and the dinner after. “They won’t be upset.”

“I don’t want to think I ruined it for her.”

I couldn’t focus myself on May when everything around me was shimmering frost and moonlight. Maybe I was still half asleep. “Do you ever come over here in the morning, early like this?”

Maeve shook her head. I don’t think she was even looking at the house, how beautiful it was rising up out of the darkness. For the most part I had stopped seeing it a long time ago, but every now and then something would happen, something like this, and my eyes would open again and I would see it there—enormous, preposterous, spectacular. A brigade of nutcrackers could come pouring out of the dark hedges at any minute and be met by a battalion of mice. The lawn was sugared with ice. The stage at Lincoln Center hadn’t been made to look like the Dutch House, it was that the Dutch House was the setting for a ridiculous fairy tale ballet. Was it possible our father had turned into the driveway that first time and been struck by the revelation that this was where he wanted to raise his family? Was that what it meant to be a poor man, newly rich?