The Dutch House(82)
The two of them looked at each other, my mother and my sister, and laughed.
I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn’t miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away. “Danny!” she would call up to me. “Breakfast. Move yourself.” She wore her coat in the house on winter mornings because it was so cold, because she was so tall and thin and every ounce of her energy had been given over to growth rather than warmth. “You always look like you’re leaving,” my father would say when he passed her, as if even her coat annoyed him.
“Danny!” she shouted. “It’s not coming up on a tray.”
The bed where I slept was heaped with blankets, the very weight of which pinned me into place. There never was a winter morning in the Dutch House when my first thought was anything other than What would it be like to spend the entire day in bed? But my sister’s voice from the bottom of the staircase pulled me up, along with the smell of coffee I was too young to drink. “Stunts your growth,” Jocelyn would say. “Don’t you want to be as tall as your sister?” I found my slippers on the floor, my wool bathrobe at the foot of the bed. I stumbled out onto the landing, freezing.
“There’s the prince!” Maeve called, her face tilted up in the light. “Come on, we’ve got pancakes. Don’t make me wait.”
The joy of my childhood ended not when my mother left, but when Maeve left, the year Andrea and my father were married.
Where had our mother been all this time? I didn’t care. She and Maeve sat in Maeve’s bed together once Maeve was home, their four long legs stretched out side by side. I would hear sentences, words, as I moved through the house: India, orphanage, San Francisco, 1966. I had graduated from Choate in ’66, started Columbia, while our mother chaperoned the children of a wealthy Indian family on a ship to San Francisco in exchange for a large donation to the orphanage where she worked. Or was that the leper colony? She never went back to India. She stayed in San Francisco. She went to Los Angeles and then Durango and then Mississippi. The poor, she discovered, were everywhere. I went out to the garage and found Maeve’s lawn mower. I had to drive to the gas station to get a can of gas, and then I cut the grass. I felt such tremendous satisfaction in the job that when I finished I got out the weed-eater and edged the flower beds and the sidewalk. A building owner in Manhattan never cuts grass.
I gave up my hotel room and spent a single sleepless night on Maeve’s couch once she was out of the hospital. I had wanted to be there in case her heart stopped but I couldn’t stand it, not any part of it. The next morning I moved to Celeste’s old bedroom at the Norcrosses’. Fluffy had gone home but my mother was always there. Maeve’s friends left casseroles on her front porch, along with roasted chickens and bags of apples and zucchini bread, so much food that Sandy and Jocelyn had to take half of it home with them. Maeve and my mother ate like wrens—I watched them share a single scrambled egg. Maeve was happy and tired and utterly unlike herself. She didn’t talk about her work at Otterson’s, or what she needed to do for me, or any of the things that had been neglected in her absence. She sat on the couch and let our mother bring her toast. There was no distance between them, no recrimination. They were living together in their own paradise of memory.
“Leave them alone,” Celeste said to me on the phone. “They’ve got it covered. People are beating down the door to be helpful, and anyway, what Maeve needs is rest. Isn’t that what the doctors always say? She doesn’t need more company.”
I told her I didn’t think of myself as company, but as soon as I said it I could see that’s exactly what I was. They were waiting for me to go.
“Sooner or later you have to come back to New York. I have a list of good reasons.”
“I’ll be back soon enough,” I told my wife. “I just want to make sure everything’s okay.”
“Is it okay?” Celeste asked. Celeste had never met my mother but her natural distrust exceeded even my own.
I was standing in Maeve’s kitchen. My mother had affixed the doctor’s order sheet to the refrigerator with a magnet. She kept the plastic medicine bottles in a neat row in front of the canisters and wrote down what time every pill was given. She was careful to limit the visitors and to nudge them towards the door when their time was up, except, of course, for Mr. Otterson, who was treated with deference. Mr. Otterson never outstayed his welcome, and if the weather was nice he would walk with Maeve down the street and back. Otherwise, my mother got Maeve to walk two circles around the backyard every couple of hours. They were in the living room now, talking about some novel they’d both read called Housekeeping which each of them claimed had been her favorite book.
“What?” Celeste asked, and then she said, “No. Wait a minute. It’s your father. Here.” She was talking to me again. “Say hello to your daughter.”
“Hi, Daddy,” May said. “If you don’t come home soon I’m going to get a hypoallergenic dog. I’m thinking about a standard poodle. I’m going to call her Stella. I’d settle for a cat but Mom says there is no such thing as a hypoallergenic cat. She says Kevin is allergic to cats but how would she even know? He’s never around cats.”