The Dutch House(97)
“Are you making this up?” I asked.
She waved the letter. “Swear to God, you really were that boring. It goes on for another page.”
Norma laughed. The four of us were in the kitchen: me and Norma and May and my mother squeezed around the blue table. Suddenly I remembered my father always put the quarters he’d collected from the washers and dryers in a secret drawer in the dining room table, and whenever anyone needed a little money, we would go and help ourselves to a handful. “Come here a minute,” I said, and the four of us went to the dreaded dining-room. I ran my hand beneath the table’s lip until I found it. The drawer had warped and when I finally pried it open it was full of quarters. A treasure chest.
“I never knew about this!” Norma said. “Bright and I would have cleaned it out.”
“He didn’t do that when I lived here,” my mother said.
May dragged the tips of her fingers through the coins. Maybe he hadn’t left them there for everyone to take. Maybe they had just been for Maeve and me.
In the morning, I looked out the window and saw my daughter floating in the pool on a yellow raft, her black hair trailing behind her like strands of kelp, one long leg reaching out from time to time to push off from the wall. I went outside and asked her how she’d slept.
“I’m still sleeping,” she said, and draped a wet arm across her eyes. “I love it here. I’m going to buy the house.”
Andrea had finally died a few months before, and the conversations about what should be done with the Dutch House were ongoing. Bright, who hadn’t come home for the funeral, told Norma that the house could burn to the ground for all she cared. There was plenty of money. The way the neighborhood was zoned, the land was sure to be redeveloped when they sold. The house would most likely be torn down and sold for parts: mantels, banisters, carved panels, the wreaths of golden leaves on the dining-room ceiling were each worth a Picasso. To take it all apart and then sell the land, or develop the land ourselves, would double and maybe even triple what the place could be had for.
“But then we’d have to kill the house,” Norma had said, and none of us knew if that was a good thing or a bad thing except May.
“It’s not exactly a starter home,” I told my daughter.
May reached up and pushed herself off from the diving board. “I asked Norma to wait for me, just a couple of years. I have a spiritual connection to the place.” May had an agent now. She’d done some commercials. She’d had small parts in two films, one of which had gotten attention. May, as she would be the first to tell you, was going places. “She said she’d hold onto it for a while.”
Neither Norma nor Bright had children. Norma said that childhood wasn’t something she could imagine inflicting on another person, especially not a person she loved. I imagined pediatric oncology only reinforced her position. “I’d just as soon it went to May or Kevin,” she said to me. “It’s your house.”
“Not my house,” I said.
We found time to talk about all of it, Norma and I: childhood, our parents, the inheritance, medical school, the trust. Norma had decided to return to Palo Alto. She got her job back and gave notice to the people who had rented her house for years. She said she was starting to realize how much she missed her life. One night, after a couple glasses of wine, she suggested that maybe she could be my sister. “Not Maeve,” she said, “never Maeve, but some other, lesser sister, like a half sister from a second marriage.”
“I thought you were my half sister from a second marriage.”
She shook her head. “I’m your stepsister.”
My mother stayed on at the Dutch House. She said she was the caretaker of sorts, making sure no raccoons were setting up camp in the ballroom. She got Sandy to move over to stay with her. Sandy, who had bursitis in her hip, bemoaned all the stairs. My mother had started to travel again after Andrea died. She was never gone for very long but she said there was still plenty for her to do. That was around the time she started telling me stories about when she lived in India, or I started to listen. She said all she had wanted was to serve the poor, but the nuns who ran the orphanage were always dressing her up in clean saris and sending her off to parties to beg. “It was 1951. The British were gone, and Americans were considered very exotic then. I went to every party I was invited to. It turned out my special talent was asking rich people for money.” And so she continued, relieving the rich of their burdens on behalf of the poor. She did that work for the rest of her life.
Fluffy had moved to Santa Barbara to live with her daughter but she came back for visits, and whenever she did, she wanted to sleep in her old room over the garage.
Norma had promised to hold onto the Dutch House until May fulfilled her destiny, which May did on her fourth film. She met the tidal wave of her success with a startling level of self-assurance. May had always told us this was the way it would happen, but we found ourselves stunned all the same. She was still so young. There was nothing to do but brace ourselves.
On the advice of her agent, May had a high black metal fence installed behind the linden trees, and there was now a gate at the end of the driveway and a box you had to talk into if you didn’t know the code or the guard. I couldn’t help but think how much Andrea would have loved it.
May brought Maeve’s painting back from New York and returned it to the empty spot where it had hung before. She didn’t have much time to spend in Elkins Park, but when she was there, she threw parties that were the stuff of legend, or that’s what she told me.