The Dutch House(88)

Yet another thing I’d discovered about our mother: she liked to talk. “Still,” I said, “two days is fast.”

“That was the way your father did things.”

“That was the way he did things,” Maeve said.

“I was never as grateful for anything as I was that car. I didn’t even feel bad about the money it cost. It was a Studebaker Champion. The good old Champion. Back then, all of this was farmland. Right over there”—she pointed to a long block of shop fronts and apartments—“that was a field of cows. I’d never lived in the country before and the quiet made me so nervous. You’d started school,” she said to Maeve, “and all I did was sit there in that huge house all day waiting for you to come home. If it wasn’t for Fluffy and Sandy I would have gone out of my mind, though they drove me out of my mind a little bit, too. Don’t tell them I said that.”

“Of course not,” Maeve said, leaning forward so that her head was more or less between the two front seats.

“I loved them so much, but they wouldn’t let me do anything. They were always running just in front of me so that they could wash something or pick something up. I hired Jocelyn because I was so afraid Sandy wouldn’t stay without her sister, and then Jocelyn started doing all the cooking. The one thing I was good at was cooking and they wouldn’t even let me make dinner. But once I got the Champion, things really did get better for a while. After I took you to school in the mornings, I’d drive into Philadelphia and see our friends on the base, or I’d drive to Immaculate Conception and make myself useful until school let out. That’s when I got to be friends with the Mercy nuns. They were great fun. We started a clothing drive and the nuns and I would drive around picking up things people didn’t need, then I would take the clothes home and get everything washed and mended and drive it all back to the church. There was a lot of clothing in the house when we first moved in, things that had been the VanHoebeeks’. A lot of it was hopeless but there were other things Sandy and I fixed up. We made all the coats work—cashmere, furs. You wouldn’t have believed what we found.”

I thought of Fluffy’s diamond.

“I always wondered what happened to the clothes,” Maeve said.

“Your father used to say I lived in that car,” my mother said, undeterred from her original point. “He used to let me drive him around to collect the rent. You know he never liked to drive. I’d pack up the back seat with jars of stew. So many of those people had nothing. One day there was a family we called on, five little children in two rooms, the mother was crying. I said to her, ‘You don’t ever have to pay us rent! You should see the house we live in.’ And that was that.” My mother laughed. “He was so mad he never took me with him again. Then every week he’d come home and say people were asking where I was. He said they wanted their stew.”

In my memory, my father loved to drive. Not that it mattered.

Our mother came to a stop sign, looked in one direction and then the other. “Look at this street, all full up. There used to be three houses on this street.”

Two blocks later she turned left, and then turned left again. I had paid so much attention to how she was driving, I hadn’t noticed where she was driving. We were in Elkins Park. She was heading towards VanHoebeek Street.

“Have you come back here since you’ve been home?” I asked, but really, I meant the question for Maeve. Do you bring her here? We had avoided the Dutch House for years and I could feel the strangeness of being in the neighborhood again, as if we’d been caught someplace we weren’t supposed to be.

Our mother shook her head. “I don’t know anyone over here anymore. Do you still know the neighbors?”

Maeve looked out the window. “I used to. Not anymore. Danny and I used to come over and park in front of the house sometimes.” It sounded like a confession, but of what? Sometimes we sat in the car and we talked.

“You went back to the house?”

“We went back to the street,” Maeve said. “We’d drive by. Why did we do that?” she asked me, the very soul of innocence. “Old times’ sake?”

“Did you ever go see your stepmother?” our mother asked.

Had we been to see Andrea? Had we paid a social call? I had not been part of the conversations Maeve and my mother had about Andrea. I didn’t want to be. Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present. I understood there was no way our mother could have foreseen Andrea’s coming, but leaving your children meant leaving them to chance.

“Never once,” Maeve said absently.

“But why, if you came over here, if you wanted to see the house?” Our mother slowed the car down and then pulled over. She was in the wrong place, still a block away from where the Buchsbaums had lived.

“We weren’t—” I was looking for the word, but Maeve finished my sentence for me.

“Welcome.”

“As adults?” Our mother took off her sunglasses. She looked at me and then my sister. The places the cancers had been cut away were puckered and red.

Maeve thought about it, shook her head. “No.”

It was late spring, the prettiest time of year on VanHoebeek Street unless you counted the fall. I rolled down the window and the scent of petals and new leaves and grass swam into the car, making us dizzy. Was that what made us dizzy? I wondered if there was any chance Maeve still kept cigarettes in the glove compartment.