The Dutch House(85)
“I was in love with Frenchy Bordagaray,” my mother said, thinking that a story about a baseball player named Frenchy would speak to the interests of both my daughter and my son. “My father got tickets for the two of us at Ebbets Field just before I went to the convent. I don’t know where he found the money but the seats were right behind third base, right behind Frenchy. The whole time my father kept saying to me, ‘Take a good look around, Elna. You don’t see any nuns out here.’”
“You were a nun?” Kevin asked, unable to square what he knew about nuns with what he knew about grandmothers.
My mother shook her head. “I was more like a tourist. I didn’t even stay two months.”
“Pourquoi es-tu parti?” May asked.
“Why did you leave?” Maeve said.
My mother wore a permanent expression of surprise in those days, forever amazed by all we did not know. “Cyril came and got me. He’d gone to Tennessee to work for the TVA, he’d been gone for years, and when he was home again he saw my brother. He and James had always been friends. James told him where I was. James didn’t like the idea of me being a nun. Cyril walked all the way to the convent from Brooklyn. When he finally got there, he told the sister at the door that he was my brother and he had some very bad news for me, tragic news, he said. She went to get me even though we weren’t allowed to have any visitors then.”
“What did he say?” For a moment Kevin had lost all interest in baseball.
“Cyril said, ‘Elna, this is not for you.’”
We all looked at one another, my son and my sister and my daughter with her half-braided hair, until finally Maeve said, “That’s it?”
“I know it doesn’t sound like much now,” my mother said, “but it changed everything. It’s the reason the four of you are here, I’ll tell you that. He said he’d wait for me outside and I went and got my little bag, told everyone goodbye. Young people were different in those days. We weren’t as big on thinking things through. There was a war coming, everybody knew it. We walked from the convent, way up on the West Side, all the way through Manhattan. We stopped and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich just before going over the bridge, and by the time we were back in Brooklyn we’d worked the whole thing out. We were going to get married and have a family, and that’s what we did.”
“Did you love him?” May asked Maeve, and Maeve said, “L’aimais-tu.”
“L’aimais-tu?” May asked my mother, because some questions are best posed in French.
“Of course I did,” she said, “or I did by the time we got back to Brooklyn.”
Before we left that night, May brought out a bottle of iridescent pink polish from her purse and painted her grandmother’s fingernails, and then her aunt’s, and then her own, taking pains to concentrate on the application of each coat. When she was finished, my mother could not stop admiring the work. “They’re like little shells,” she said, and together they turned their hands back and forth in the light.
“You never painted your fingernails?” May asked.
My mother shook her head.
“Not even when you were rich?”
My mother took May’s hand and put it on top of Maeve’s and her own so as to see all those glistening shells together. “Not even then,” she said.
Celeste was there, too, over the course of the summer. She would come to see her parents. She would drop Kevin off or pick May up, and in doing so met my mother many times, but even when they were in the room together Celeste figured out a way to avoid her. “I have to get back to my parents’ house,” she would say as soon as she walked in the door. “I promised my mother I’d help her with dinner.”
“Of course!” my mother said, and Maeve went out to the yard to cut a bunch of purple hollyhocks for Celeste to take home, neither of them seeming to notice that Celeste was already backing towards the door. In the wake of the heart attack and our mother’s return, the bright torch of anger Maeve had carried for my wife had been extinguished, forgotten. She would have been perfectly happy to have Celeste at the table, as she was perfectly happy to let her go. I was sitting on the kitchen floor, screwing a series of shallow wooden trays I’d made onto runners in the bottom of each cupboard so the pots and pans would be easier to pull out. Kevin sat beside me and handed me the screws as I needed them, and Celeste, who was forever in motion that summer, stopped for a minute and watched me, her hands full of flowers.
“I’ve always wanted those,” she said, as if in wonder that I had even known such things existed.
I put down the power drill. “Really? Did I know that?”
She shook her head, looked at her watch, and told the children it was time to go.
So went the days. Maeve returned to Otterson’s on her same irregular schedule. I would have said she worried less about her job but I don’t think she’d ever worried about it. Kevin and May started back to school. The space between my trips to Jenkintown grew wider and then wider still. Our mother stayed. She threw away the dark-green sweater that had unraveled at the cuffs and Maeve bought her new clothes and a new bedspread and curtains for the guest room that they no longer referred to as the guest room. They drove into Philadelphia for the orchestra. They went to the Philadelphia Free Library for readings. My mother volunteered with a food pantry run by Catholic Charities, and within a couple of weeks she was meeting with the director. There was a larger need in the community, she said. She could come up with a plan to meet it.