The Dutch House(96)

“She sees you!” my mother said. “Look at that.”

Andrea was smiling, if such a thing could be called a smile. She was glad to see my father again. I leaned over and kissed them both on the forehead, one and then the other. It cost me nothing.

After Andrea was full of pudding, she curled in her arms and legs and went to sleep. My mother and I sat in the chairs in front of the empty fireplace.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked, and she pointed to the bed behind me, the one she had slept in with my father, the one where Mrs. VanHoebeek had lain with her broken hip, waiting to die.

“She gets confused in the night sometimes. She tries to get up. It helps to be in here with her.” She shook her head. “I have to tell you, Danny, I wake up in here, and I can feel it—the room and the house—even before I open my eyes. Every morning I’m twenty-eight, just for a second, and Maeve is in her room across the hall, and you’re a baby in the bassinet beside me, and when I turn over I expect to see your father there. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“You don’t mind the house?”

She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes.”

“She doesn’t look like she’s going to last out the week.”

“I know. We’ve been saying that for years. She keeps surprising us.”

“How’s Norma?”

My mother smiled. “Norma’s golden. She works so hard, all those sick children, then she comes home to take care of her mother. She never complains. I don’t think her mother made things easy for her when she was growing up.”

“She certainly isn’t making things easy for her now.”

“Well,” my mother said, looking at me with great kindness. “You know the way mothers are.”

I realized how little time I’d spent in this room. I rarely came in when it was just my father’s, and never came in, even once, during the years he’d shared it with Andrea. It was larger than Maeve’s bedroom, and the fireplace with its huge delft mantel was a masterpiece, but still, Andrea was right—the room with the window seat was nicer. The way it faced the back gardens, the kinder light. “Here’s a question,” I said, because when had I ever asked her anything? When had we been alone together other than those few awkward encounters in hospital waiting rooms all those years ago?

“Anything,” she said.

“Why didn’t you take us with you?”

“To India?”

“To India, sure, or anywhere. If you thought this house was such a terrible place for you, did you wonder if it might have been a terrible place for us?”

She sat with it for awhile. Maybe she was trying to remember how she’d felt. It had all happened such a long time ago. “I thought it was a wonderful place for you,” she said finally. “There are so many children in the world who have nothing at all, and you and your sister had everything—your father and Fluffy and Sandy and Jocelyn. You had this house. I loved you so much, but I knew you were going to be fine.”

Maybe Sandy was right, and she was a saint, and saints were universally despised by their families. I couldn’t have said which life would have been better, the one we had with Andrea or the one in which we trailed after our mother through the streets of Bombay. Chances were it would have been six of one, half-dozen of the other.

“And anyway,” she said as an afterthought, “your father never would have let you go.”

Things changed again after that, change being the one constant. I found myself going back to Elkins Park. There was no one to tell me not to. The rage I had carried for my mother exhaled and died. There was no place for it anymore. What I was left with was never love but it was something—familiarity, maybe. We took a certain amount of comfort in each other. Sometimes May would come with me on those visits, even though she was so busy then. May was at NYU. She had her whole life mapped out. Kevin was at Dartmouth and so we saw less of him. He was a year behind her and twenty years behind her, as we all were. By going to Elkins Park, May could see all of her grandparents, and she was obsessed with the house. She went over the entire place like a forensic detective. She might as well have used a metal detector and a stethoscope. She started in the basement and worked up. I could never believe the things she found: Christmas ornaments and report cards and a shoebox full of lipstick. She found the tiny door in the back of the third-floor closet that led into the eave space. I had forgotten about that. The boxes of Maeve’s books were still there, half of them in French, her notebooks full of math equations, dolls I had never seen, the letters I had written to her when she was in college. May did an impromptu reading of one of them over dinner.

“Dear Maeve, Last night Andrea announced she didn’t like the apple cake. The apple cake is everybody’s favorite but now Jocelyn isn’t supposed to make it anymore. Jocelyn said it doesn’t matter, and that she’d make me one at her house and smuggle it in in pieces.” Somehow May knew exactly what I had sounded like at eleven. “Last Saturday we made thirty-seven stops for rent and collected $28.50 in quarters from the washing machines in the basements.”