The Dutch House(79)

Of course it wasn’t just my mother who was expected to provide the conversation on those long days. We were all looking to pass the time. Jocelyn had retired but Sandy kept working. She talked about her employer who wanted the carpet vacuumed in a single direction. Fluffy talked about the Dutch House before the Conroys had come, about taking care of Mrs. VanHoebeek after the money was gone, and how she took the train into New York with pieces of jewelry to sell. It seemed to me an astonishing act of bravery for a young woman at the time.

“You couldn’t sell them in Philadelphia?” I asked her.

“Sure I could,” she said, “but whoever I sold a ring to in Philadelphia would have just taken it into Manhattan and sold it again for double the price.”

Fluffy sold a triple strand of pearls to cover the hospital bill when Mrs. VanHoebeek broke her hip, and when the old woman died, Fluffy sold a brooch for the funeral, a small gold bird with an emerald pinched in its beak.

“There were still things left,” Fluffy said. “Nothing like what had been there to start, but the Missus and I paced ourselves. We didn’t know how long she was going to last. Those bankers who sold the house? Absolute idiots. They asked me to make a list of everything of value so that they could have it appraised. I left most of it alone, but there were things I took.” She held up her hand to show us a diamond ring in an old-fashioned setting, a little ruby on either side. For as long as I’d known Fluffy she’d worn that ring.

I suppose it was a stark confession, seeing as how the contents of the house had been purchased by my father in their entirety. After the ring had belonged to Mrs. VanHoebeek it would have belonged to him, along with everything else, and maybe he would have given it to my mother, who might have passed it on to Maeve when she was older, or given it to me to give to Celeste. But that idea was predicated on my father being the sort of man who would look through a jewelry box, which he was not, or my mother being the sort of person who would stick around. More likely, the ring would have sat where it was until Andrea arrived. Andrea would not have overlooked any jewelry the house had to offer.

Fluffy would have turned the ring over to either of us had we asked, but instead my mother leaned forward, peering at Fluffy’s hand with her cloudy eyes. “So pretty,” she said, and gave her hand a kiss. “Good for you.”

*

The first time I made it back to Jenkintown after starting medical school must have been the Thanksgiving of 1970. The work had come down on me in an avalanche that first semester, just as Dr. Able predicted, and I scrambled to keep up. Add to that the fact that Celeste and I were putting the apartment to good use and I had neither the time nor the inclination to go home on the weekends. This was before there had been any talk of marriage, so Maeve and Celeste were still pals. Celeste and I had come to Philadelphia together on the train the night before Thanksgiving. Maeve picked us up and we dropped Celeste off at home, then the next day Maeve and I went back to have our dinner with the Norcrosses. The men and the boys played touched football in the yard—in honor of the Kennedys, we said—while the women and the girls peeled potatoes and made the gravy and did whatever last-minute things needed to be done. They sent Maeve out to set the table once they understood she really wasn’t kidding about not being able to cook.

The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room. There were aunts and uncles and cousins, plus a large assortment of strays who had nowhere else to go, the category in which Maeve and I were included. Celeste’s mother always did a spectacular job with the holidays, and after months in which dinner had meant grabbing something in the hospital cafeteria or picking rolls off of patient trays, I was especially grateful. At every table, hands were held and heads were bowed while Bill Norcross recited his tidy benediction, “For these and all His mercies may the Lord make us truly thankful.” No sooner had we lifted our eyes than the bowls of green beans with pearl onions and the mountains of stuffing and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and platters of sliced turkey followed by boats of gravy began to make their clockwise march around the table.

“And what do you do?” the woman on my left asked me. She was one of Celeste’s many aunts. I couldn’t remember her name, though I knew we’d been introduced at the door.

“Danny’s in medical school at Columbia,” Mrs. Norcross said from across the table, on the off chance this was information I’d be unwilling to share myself.

“Medical school?” the aunt said, and then, remarkably, she looked at Celeste. “You didn’t tell me he was in medical school.”

The middle section of the long table fell silent and Celeste shrugged her pretty shoulders. “You didn’t ask.”

“What kind of medicine do you plan to practice?” one of the uncles asked. I had just that minute become interesting. I didn’t know if he was the uncle who was matched to this particular aunt.

I envisioned all the empty buildings I’d seen up in Washington Heights, and for a minute I thought it would really be something to tell them the truth: I was planning on practicing real estate. From the end of the table I saw Maeve flash me a wild smile, confirming that she alone understood how insane this was. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Do you have to cut people up?” Celeste’s younger brother asked me. I had been told this was his first year in the dining room. He was the youngest person at the table.