The Dutch House(9)
After Maeve came home from the hospital things got worse. Logic said our mother’s absence had made her sick, and so logic concluded that further talk of our mother could kill her. The Dutch House grew quiet. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy devoted themselves to my sister, the needles, the insulin. They were terrified of the way every injection changed her. Our father would have nothing to do with it. Fluffy, who in those weeks slept in the bed with Maeve, ended up taking her back to the hospital in the middle of the night. Again, they worked to stabilize her, again they sent her home. Maeve would cry and cry until my father would come into her room and tell her to stop. They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale. He was now a hundred years old. “Stop,” he would say, as if he could barely make the words. “You have to stop.”
And finally, she did.
Chapter 3
Nearly two years into her irregular tenure, Andrea walked in the house one Saturday afternoon with two small girls. Say what you will for Andrea, she had a knack for making the impossible seem natural. I wasn’t clear about whether it was only Maeve and I who were meeting her daughters for the first time, or if the existence of Norma and Bright Smith was news to our father as well. No, he must have known. The very fact that he didn’t look at them meant they were already familiar. They were much younger than me. Bright, the smaller of the two, looked like she should have been on a Christmas card, fair like her mother with flushed cheeks and blue eyes, a big smile for everyone. Norma had light-brown hair and green eyes. She was no match for her shining sister, if only because she was so serious. Her lips stayed pressed together in a straight line. Clearly it was Norma’s job to look after things.
“Girls,” their mother said, “this is Danny, and this is his sister Maeve.”
We were shocked, of course, but in our heart of hearts we were happy too, certain that the Smith girls would spell the end of Andrea for good. Our father wasn’t about to put up with two more children in the house, especially not two more girls. Who had been taking care of them on all those Saturday nights she’d come to dinner, never once mentioning she needed to get home? This would not be forgiven. When we stood at the door and said goodbye to the three of them after what had been a comparatively brief visit, we thought that we were saying goodbye for good.
“Sayonara, Mrs. Smith,” Maeve said that night in the bathroom as she put the toothpaste on my toothbrush and then hers. I was perfectly capable of handling a tube of toothpaste but this was our ritual. We brushed our teeth together then said our prayers.
“Buenas noches, Bright and Norma,” I said. Maeve looked at me for a second, not believing I’d come up with that, then she started laughing so hard she barked like a seal.
Maeve and I were forever under the impression that we were moments away from cracking the code on our life, and that soon we would understand the impenetrable mystery that was our father, but we’d misread the appearance of Andrea’s daughters completely. It was not some half-baked introduction. The final disclosure that Andrea came as a package deal was proof that she had fully assimilated, and we, somehow, had missed it. Soon the girls were regulars, sitting with us at the dinner table or taking off their socks to splash their feet in the swimming pool—neither of them knew how to swim. It felt strange to have other children around. Maeve and I both had friends at school but we went to their houses for parties and studying and sleep-overs. No one ever came to the Dutch House. Maybe it was because we didn’t want to draw attention to our motherless state, or we feared the house would subject us to ridicule, but really, I think we understood that our father didn’t like children, which was why it made no sense that he’d let these two in.
One night the girls showed up with their mother who was wearing a very fancy blue silk dress. Bright kept running her hands across the full skirt to make it rustle like blowing leaves, while Norma made a game out of trying to step only on the small black squares of marble in the foyer. Andrea announced to the four of us that she and my father were going out for the evening. With no warning at all she planned to leave the girls for Maeve and me to mind.
“What are we supposed to do with them?” Maeve asked, because truly, we didn’t know. They weren’t our responsibility. We had never been alone with them before.
Andrea waved her question away. She was ebullient in those days, as if everything had been decided. Maybe it had. “You’ll do nothing,” she said to Maeve, and then gave a great smile to her girls. “You take care of yourselves, don’t you girls? Do you have books? Norma, ask Maeve to get you a book.”
Maeve had a stack of Henry James novels on her bedside table. The Turn of the Screw? Was that what they wanted? Our father came down the wide stairs in his best suit, eyes straight ahead. He was holding onto the banister, which meant his knee was hurting him, which meant he was in a bad mood. Would Andrea know that? “Time to get going,” he said to her, but he didn’t have a word for the rest of us, not a thank you or goodnight. He went straight for the door. I think he was ashamed of himself.
“You be perfect,” Andrea sang over her shoulder and followed our father out. He wasn’t waiting for her. The two little girls looked stricken until they could no longer see the top of their mother’s hat, and then they started to cry.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Maeve said, and went off in search of Kleenex. In fairness to the girls, it wasn’t as if they were wailing. In fact I think they were making their best effort not to cry, but it overtook them all the same. They sat down together in a single French chair. Bright dropped her head onto her sister’s chest and Norma buried her face in her hands like they’d just gotten news of the Apocalypse. I asked them if they really did want a book or if they wanted to watch television or if they wanted ice cream. They wouldn’t look at me. But then Maeve came back, handed each of them a tissue, and, speaking as if no one were crying at all, asked if they would like to see the house.