The Dutch House(78)

“So what was India like?” Jocelyn asked one afternoon, as if my mother had just returned from vacation. Jocelyn remained the most suspicious of our mother, or, I should say, the second-most suspicious.

I noticed the dark circles under my mother’s eyes had diminished somewhat. She must have been the only person in human history to have been improved by a waiting room. Jocelyn and I were there with Fluffy. Sandy was working. Sooner or later Elna was going to have to tell us something.

“India was a mistake,” she said finally.

“But you wanted to help,” Fluffy said. “You helped people.”

“Why India?” I had meant to sit through the conversation in silence but on this point my curiosity got the better of me.

My mother picked at a piece of yarn that dangled from the cuff of her dark green sweater, the same sweater she wore every day. “I read an article in a magazine about Mother Teresa, how she asked the sisters to send her to Calcutta to help the destitutes. I can’t even remember what magazine it was now. Something your father subscribed to.”

That wasn’t a connection I would have made, my mother sitting in the kitchen of the Dutch House, circa 1950, reading about Mother Teresa in Newsweek or Life while the other women on VanHoebeek street took leadership positions in the garden club and went to summer dances.

“She’s a great lady, Mother Teresa,” Fluffy said.

My mother nodded. “Of course she wasn’t Mother Teresa then.”

“You worked with Mother Teresa?” Jocelyn asked.

At this point anything seemed possible, including my mother in a white cotton sari holding the dying in her arms. There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns. Or maybe I was reading too much into the bony contours of her face. The long, thin hands she kept folded in her lap made me think of kindling. The fingers of her right hand kept finding their way back to the ring she wore on her left.

“I meant to, but the ship went to Bombay. I don’t think I even looked at a map before I left. I ended up on the wrong side of the country.” She said it by way of acknowledging that everyone made mistakes. “They told me I’d have to take a train, and I was going to, I was going to go to Calcutta, but once you’ve spent a couple of days in Bombay—” She finished the sentence there.

“What?” Fluffy prompted.

“There was plenty to do in Bombay,” my mother said quietly.

“There’s plenty to do in Brooklyn.” I picked up the Styrofoam cup at my feet but the coffee was cold. Gone were the days I’d drink cold coffee in a hospital.

“Danny,” Fluffy said, warning me of what I do not know.

“No, he’s right,” my mother said. “That’s what I should have done. I could have served the poor of Philadelphia and come home at night but I didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. That house—”

“The house?” Jocelyn said, as if she had no business blaming the Dutch House for her neglect.

“It took away all sense of proportion.”

“It was huge,” Fluffy said.

A television set that hung from a high corner near the ceiling of the waiting room was playing a show about tearing apart an old house. There was no remote, but on my first day there I stood on a chair and muted the sound. Four days later, the people on the television walked silently through empty rooms, pointing out the walls they were going to knock through.

“I could never understand why your father wanted it and he could never understand why I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” Surely there were worse hells than a beautiful house.

“We were poor people,” my mother said. I hadn’t known she was capable of inflection. “I had no business in a place like that, all those fireplaces and staircases, all those people waiting on me.”

Fluffy let out a small snort. “That’s ridiculous. We never waited on you. You made my breakfast every morning.”

My mother shook her head. “I was so ashamed of myself.”

“Not of Dad?” I would have thought my father was the obvious choice. After all, he had bought the house.

“Your father wasn’t ashamed,” she said, misunderstanding. “He was thrilled. Ten times a day he’d find something to show me. ‘Elna, would you look at this banister?’ ‘Elna, come outside and see this garage.’”

“He loved the garage,” Fluffy said.

“He never understood how anyone could have been miserable in that house.”

“The VanHoebeeks were miserable,” Fluffy said. “At least they were in the end.”

“You went to India to get away from the house?” Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.

My mother’s pale eyes were clouded by cataracts and I wondered how much she could see. “What else could it have been?”

“I guess I just assumed it was Dad.”

“I loved your father,” she said. The words were right there. She didn’t have to reach for them at all. I loved your father.

That was Fluffy’s cue to stand. She stretched onto the balls of her feet, lifting her arms over her head. She said, as if responding to some unspoken request, that she would walk down the block and bring us back some decent coffee, at which point my mother stood as well, saying she was going to the third floor to look at the new babies, and I said I was going to the pay phone to call Celeste, and Jocelyn said if that was the case, then she’d be heading home. We had talked until we couldn’t stand it another second, and then we stopped.