The Dutch House(90)

My mother put her hand on Andrea’s back. “Mrs. Conroy?” she said.

Maeve stayed very close to me. “What the fuck?”

The Hispanic woman, who clearly had a bad knee, came limping down the stairs towards us. “Missus,” she said to Andrea. “Missus, you need to be inside.”

“Can you get her off of him?” Maeve asked, her voice bright with rage, her hand on my shoulder. Only the two of us were there.

“You,” Andrea said, and then gasped to find her breath. She was crying like the end of all the earth. “You, you.”

“Missus,” the woman said again when she reached us, her stiff knee making me think of our father. He went down the stairs like that. “Why are you crying? Your friends have come to say hello.” She looked at me to confirm this but I had no idea what we were doing there.

“I’m Elna Conroy,” my mother said finally. “These are my children, Danny and Maeve. Mrs. Conroy was their stepmother.”

At this news, the woman broke into a wide smile. “Missus, look. Family! Your family has come to see you.”

Andrea ground her forehead into the space beneath my sternum as if she could crawl inside of me.

“Missus,” the woman said, petting Andrea’s head. “Come inside now with your family. Come inside and sit.”

Getting Andrea back in the house was no small feat. She had the will of a barnacle. I lifted her up one step and then another. She wasn’t heavy but her clinging made her nearly impossible to maneuver. Her shoes slipped off her stocking feet and my mother bent down to retrieve them.

“I had this dream once,” Maeve said to me, and I started to laugh.

“My mother wanted to visit,” I told the woman over Andrea’s head. She was a housekeeper, a nurse, a warden, I didn’t know.

The woman rushed ahead of us into the house, as much as her knee allowed for it. “Doctor!” she shouted up the stairs.

“Don’t,” Andrea said into my shirt, and I knew exactly what she was saying, Don’t shout, don’t run.

I lifted her up the last step. I had to keep my arm around her back in order to do it. I had not been born with an imagination large enough to encompass this moment.

“She thinks your father’s come back,” my mother said, lifting her empty hand to shade her eyes from the reflection of the late afternoon sun. “She thinks you’re Cyril.” Then she walked into the foyer, past the round marble-topped table, the two French chairs, the mirror framed by the arms of a golden octopus, the grandfather clock where the ship rocked between two rows of painted metal waves.

In my dreams, the intervening years were never kind to the Dutch House. I was certain it would have become something shabby in my absence, the peeling and threadbare remains of grandeur, when in fact nothing of the sort had happened. The house looked the same as it did when we walked out thirty years before. I came into the drawing room with Andrea firmly affixed, the dark, wet smear of mascara and tears spreading across my shirt. Maybe a few pieces of furniture had been rearranged, reupholstered, replaced, who could remember? There were the silk drapes, the yellow silk chairs, the Dutch books still in the glass-fronted secretary reaching up and up towards the ceiling, forever unread. Even the silver cigarette boxes were there, polished and waiting on the end tables, just as they had been when the VanHoebeeks walked the earth. By folding Andrea onto the sofa with me I managed to sit. She pushed herself beneath my arm so as to nestle her small weight against my rib cage. She had stopped crying and was making quiet smacking noises instead. She was no one I had ever known.

Maeve and my mother floated into the room in silence, both of them looking at things they had never planned on seeing again: the tapestry ottoman, the Chinese lamp, the heavy tasseled ropes of twisted silk, blue and green, that held the draperies back. If I had ever seen the two of them in this room before it was in a time before memory. I was able to reach into my pocket and hand Andrea a handkerchief, remembering that it had been Andrea, not Maeve or Sandy, who had taught me to carry one. She wiped at her face and then pressed her ear to my chest to listen to my heart. My mother and sister went to the fireplace to stand beneath the VanHoebeeks.

“I hated them,” my mother said quietly, still holding Andrea’s shoes.

Maeve nodded, her eyes on those eyes that had followed us through our youth. “I loved them.”

That was when Norma came running down the stairs saying, “Inez! I’m sorry, sorry. I was on the phone with the hospital. What happened?” She ran through the foyer. Norma was always running and her mother was always telling her to stop. What stopped her now? My mother and sister in front of the blue delft mantel? Me on the couch wearing her mother like a vine? Inez beamed. The family had come to visit.

I wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d seen her on the street, and maybe I had seen her on the street, but in this room there was no question. Norma was considerably taller than her mother, infinitely sturdier. She wore small gold-rimmed glasses that spoke of a fondness for John Lennon or Teddy Roosevelt, her thick brown hair pulled back in an artless ponytail. It had been thirty years since we left but I knew her. She had woken me from a sound sleep on so many nights, wanting to tell me her dreams. “Norma, this is our mother, Elna Conroy,” I said, and then I looked at my mother. “Norma was our sister-in-law.”

“I was your stepsister,” Norma said. She was staring at the room, the entire tableau of us, but her eyes kept going back to Maeve. “My god,” she said. “I am so sorry.”